Now it looks as though there’s been some more interest in our first project – A LED matrix display! – Again, we had lots of fun deciding what features it would have.
To display a message, you used a five finger keypad, or connect it via a serial interface to a PC and use a proper keyboard.
There were various fonts and styles to use, and picture graphics, as well as different ways to display the message. Built into an EPROM were various fixed messages.
This could be built at the time for less than £100, which seemed quite cheap, but of course you had to solder in 448 LED’s by hand as well as all the other components!
It seems that Julian and I have had a brief resurgeance of interest in one of our projects we did for ‘Everyday With Practical Electronics’ back in 1994.
The ‘EPE’ Fruit Machine was very popular at the time and Julian and I enjoyed writing software for all the ‘features’ the machine had, as well as designing the look and feel of it as well.
The machine accepted only 5p coins (as it was the smallest coin, there was no need for a ‘reject’ coin machanism), and had a jackpot of £1, which was paid out using a coin stack and slider arrangement.
The software was available only from the authors (us), in the form of a pre-programmed PIC Microcontroller chip.
However, we have recently given away the software code for others to use and play with!
I have recently moved house and enjoyably went through all the ‘stuff’ that I’ve amassed in the past four years and decide whether I really wanted it.
The mantra was quite simply – ‘Is it easily replaceable’
The amount of stuff I got rid of was unbelieveable! – Look at my other post about the ‘two year rule’ and it becomes quite obvious how it is so easy to become attached to ‘stuff’, sometimes for no reason at all.
The excuse of ‘My Aun’t Flo gave it to me as present’ just doesn’t work in todays changing society. What does a particular ‘thing’ really mean to you, and can you do without it?
Remember, you will certainly feel better when you have taken some of that old ‘stuff’ down to the tip and cleared a lovely space somewhere!
Happy clearing…and the saving money in storage solutions!
I thought I’d promote my book again as I’ve restarted trading the Foreign Exchange markets after moving house and as I make a little income from it, I thought you would like to too!
It is a collection of a lot of my own experiences as a trader and simply sums the individual experiences in snapshots of ‘Do I do this or Don’t I do this’ when placing trades.
Some of the sections in the book are obvious, some not, but as I always say, are you doing them? (or not doing them).
If you were to follow even a few of the ideas in this book, It would improve your results no end. A lot of amateur traders make very basic mistakes and you just need to focus a little bit more on those mistakes – this is what this book will do for you.
There, that’s it, I’ll stop going on about it now!
click the link or the picture above to see more: FOREX dos and donts
Well, it happens to all of us at some point in our lives – we have to store stuff away in one of those very popular companies who provide storage units.
Now then, how many of those things you have stored have been there for a year or more? – The simple conclusion here is – YOU DON’T NEED THEM! – get rid of them and also save yourself a wad of cash in the process, even more cash if you decide to sell the items on auction sites such as eBay.
As an outside, I give anything I own two years – If it hasn’t seen the light of day, it goes!
The other question you may ask yourself is ‘Is it easily replaceable?’ – In this modern consumerist world, a lot of our ‘stuff’ can so easily be replaced at low cost, so why store old versions of it at cost?
I’ve just booked my tickets to go to this years World Internet Summit in London – This is a not to be missed event that spans four days at a hotel near Heathrow in London – www.heathrow.parkinn.co.uk
I went last year and was bowled over with the sheer amount of useful information to set you up as an internet marketer, or to get you selling on the internet.
Everything from Facebook stuff to You Tube, Social networking on a grand scale, ebay, ClickBank all the top names.
Many speakers talked in depth about just about everything – you will not get bored!
This year however, I’ve noticed that they are asking for a refundable $100 registration fee – I suppose this is to prevent wasted seats from those who apply and then don’t turn up.
Still, it’s well worth the free attendance. See you there!
It’s the ‘Thank You Page’ that your prospect will be sent back to once they have bought your product. If you use a merchant service such as ‘PayPal’ or ‘ClickBank’ to process your payments, you will be able to put a link to your ‘Thank You’ Page somewhere in their setup.
Now is the ideal time to ‘Upsell’ to your prospect by offering more of your product, at a reduced price – perhaps an audio version of your e-book, or a collection of related products?
Be careful not to ‘push’ too much at this stage, as there is a fine line between offering a good deal and putting customers off!
Obviously, The ‘Thank You’ Page should have all the required links to download your product, or take your prospect to any required website.
Be sure to make the ‘Thank You’ Page short and simple and always have an email address link so that they can contact you if there is a problem downloading material, or if they just want to contact you!
In addition to trading using a regular broker’s platform, I thought it would be a good idea to supplement my income with a few ‘binary bets’.
This is just another way of trading, with the proviso that you decide how much you are going to win if the trade works out!
You can place a calculated (by the broker) amount of money (your bet), on whether a FOREX pair reaches (or doesn’t reach) a certain price by a certain time, and can win an amount that you decide, or lose the amount of the bet.
I use ‘Bet on Markets’ as my broker at http://www.betonmarkets.co.uk
although there are many other binary betting companies.
It’s good fun, because you still use your skills as a FOREX trader, but use them in a different ‘vehicle’ to trade. Give it a go!
After having read many articles on the importance of the Headline (The first sentence on your Sales Page) in your copy, I’m intrigued by this little experiment!
Believe it or not, I’ve discovered that just by changing a word, putting quotes around a word, underlining it, or just even bolding a word can make all the difference.
I tried this out and had an amazing positive result – The amount of visits to my Sales Page suddendly shot up!
Yes, I know that this may be due to the re-indexing of webpages that search engines do – they see a change to a webpage and re-index it. If the number of visits suddenly drops off, that’s probably all that it is, but I often found that the number of visitors would, in most cases, increase slightly.
You can nearly always improve a headline, it’s just knowing what to do!
I don’t want to put you off, but it took me a lot of effort to set up my first website and get it working to sell my first product, which was an e-book.
I did it all by myself, rather than getting somebody at e.g. ‘eLance’ to make the product for me and someone to create the website for me, so it took longer than I thought.
However, when I got round to my second website, things happened much more quickly. As I knew the procedure for setting up the website, I just copied it (even parts of the website) and I was now selling a second product on a second website within a few days.
From there it got even quicker!
Although selling an e-book is only the first step in the ‘marketing funnel’ of a product, I found it easy to set up.
My strategy was to make lots of websites that may only sell a handful of e-books per week, and being a ‘scaleable’ strategy, I just added another website with ease whenever I wanted, increasing that small income until it slowly grew into a bigger passive income.
Sometimes, I suffer from not trading enough – ie. not putting on enough trades!
You can be too cautious and end up waiting too long for the best trades. Unfortunately, these are ocurring about once per week, rather than the once per day – a trading frequency that I would really like.
I should push myself to put on more trades that score a 7 or 8 out of ten on my scoring system, rather than waiting for the 9 and 10 out of ten trades.
I know that I will lose some of these trades, but if I take all the opportunities that come up, I should gain more than I lose, which after all, is a positive strategy.
Now I’ve admitted this to myself, how about admitting it to yourself?
I’ve just been reading some of Robert Kiyosaki’s ‘Rich Dad,Poor Dad’ series of books. The overall ‘story’ of having two dads with different financial aims, is itself interesting, without all the valuable concepts that go with it.
‘Rich Dad’ belived in Passive Income and I certainly do.
If you can get a few sales with just one e-book, on one website and repeat the formula on another website, your ‘passive’ income slowly grows. It’s the perfect ‘scalable’ business!
Basically, passive income is income that you did not work for. It drops into your bank account from thin air! Obviously you needed to ‘work’ to set the money generating concept in the first place, but the idea is that it works for ever, generating money without your continued input.
Eventually, the idea is that your passive income becomes bigger than your ‘earned’ income – i.e. that which you would get from a job. Now you can leave your job and still pay the bills – A wonderful feeling!
At this point you are considered ‘financially free’ in that you don’t need to ‘earn’ money.
Building up your passive income online is a great way to achieve this.
Today I found myself reading one of those thin ‘Personal Development’ paperbacks (Which I managed to read in a day or so – quite fast for me!) and one of the ‘exercises’ was the ‘wheel of life’ which is a common theme in these sort of books.
Pick eight facets of your life eg. health; wealth; money; relationship; friendship etc. and score them 0 to 10. I thought this would be a good exercise for a trader, to list eight trading related facets and see where any improvements could be made.
The idea is that you will like to improve the ones which already have a high score, but you should concentrate more on those that have lower scores, for an all-round ‘healthy’ life as a trader.
Some of the areas I thought of were: record keeping/Admin; entry/exit strategies, trading plan, goals, routine etc. To be a good trader, you need to be good in all areas of trading, so this exercise can only be tremendously useful – give it a go!
This has always been my passion – To be able to travel from city to city and spend a few days in each (or until you feel like a change!) – and supplement your travelling by trading the currency markets.
I’ve just been away on a long holiday over the summer period for my two months per year break and actually appreciated ‘not trading’ for a while.
I was still eager to get back into it when I got back though. It seems like the ultimate freedom, as all you need is a laptop with an internet connection!
The only thing you would need to be careful of is what time zone you are in and so what would be the best currency pairs to trade. You might need to get up early, or stay up late to catch the best, most liquid trading.
I haven’t yet made the first move of taking the laptop on holiday with me, although it could easily be done!
Just been doing some niche research – Checking out Amazon and Ebaypulse give you many ideas on what are the most searched for items or products.
Both of these sites have a ‘Top 100′ sales list and should provide many ideas on what you adapt as your niche product to use on your website.
Niches number in the millions and increase every day with new fashions and products appearing all the time, so there is always plenty left to check out!
It is just about finding something that is not too popular, or there will be too much competition. Also, it must not be too obscure, such that nobody is looking for it either.
It needs to be in a Goldilocks popularity that is ‘Just right’.
They say that writing articles and submitting them to as many of the article directory search engines, will get you lots of exposure. Because each article directory will also have your website links and a ‘bio’ of you.
They ideally need to be 300 to 700 words and contain lots of content, but no obvious sales promotion. You may get away with including links for enhancing your article, but beware! – It does put readers off! – aim for 400 or so words
Don’t forget to try to give the reader what they want and don’t make it too heavy reading. An article should be light, humerous and informative, the latter being the most important.
Category: SEO – Tags: SEO, Traffic – Brett Gossage 12:29 pm
we’ve always known about SEO or Search Engine Optimisation, but never really paid much attention to it. How wrong this can be!
You should regularly check your website details and check the ‘meta tags’ at the top of each webpage ‘source’ file (html file),to make sure you have good ‘optimisation’
Let’s do the basics:
Your webpage should have a ‘Title’ – Check the ‘title’ tag near the top of the page details, which in a few words, tells any search engine what your webpage is about.
These page ‘details’ can be found by simply right clicking in the blank background area on any webpage and selecting ‘view source’.
Then, make sure the ‘meta name’ description tells people a bit more about your site in a short sentence.
Also, the most important, the meta name ‘keywords’ are short phrases which you think people will search for in Google (and other search engines) to get to your page. Have about 4 or 5 of these phrases and don’t use just one word for any of them. Most ‘searchers’ will search using three or four words.
Every page of your website should have differences in these three categories.
I will have more posts on this as I get to grips with them myself!
