Rob Bell's Notes from a Yorkshire Internet Megalomaniac

Since November last year, my natural sleep pattern – always a source of great annoyance, because I don’t appear to have one – has gone downhill again. The current time zone I’m living in has the following characteristics:

Wake up mid afternoon, and go back to sleep until dark. Wake at 6pm noticed it’s dark and 6 so it must be morning time – too early to get up…. then spot the 24 hour clock and realise you’ve actually slept all the way through daylight, except for that bit you saw streaming through your window just before you went to bed.

Swear lots because that’s another day you’ve missed and most things that involve people have to be done between 9am & 5.30pm – the traditional time for work, yet not the one used by this dojo!

After an evening meal as breakfast, sit at the computer and start the day’s business… continue until 2.30am then contemplate going to bed to start getting bodyclock back to normal times. Then sit back down at PC, end up really getting into something that could wait until morning, and end up staying up until 9-10am (it was 9.23 this morning!) before going to bed and struggling to sleep before mask is applied that keeps light from your eyes. Sleep very heavily, with phone unable to wake me up – doorbell has a better chance, but it’s still not guaranteed!

Wake up at 3, but feel it’s cold so sleep again until 6 – go through exactly the same as yesterday!

That routine is fine when you don’t need to be to do anything, but this week I’m attending 5 lectures and an employment discussion – all starting at 9.30 in the morning – which has been my bedtime for some weeks… It’s really snowy so that could be a great excuse if I miss it, but it’s only 1/2 mile on foot, which may take some time and be a little painful thanks to my cripple’s hip, but at least I’d be there…

If I get off the computer now and go to bed I could get 7 and be up at 8…. although lets face it I have only been up for 5-7 hours today so I’m not exactly tired. Solution – popped a sleeping tablet, and will be sleeping after all!

So I have to attend lots of daytime events this week for which I must become a daywalker once again! This means I won’t be around as late on the US conferences and seminars I tend to follow – most don’t even start until 1 or 2 am here.

Working online can be great fun, but once you adjust to the later nights (due to our being 5 hours ahead of
Easstern Time) it’s hard to get back without pulling at least one all-nighter-and-next-day-too, where you stay up until 10 pm then go catch up on 2 days of sleep. Unfortunately, that night’s sleep oftens lasts 14-16 hours so you lose the next day and are still on nightwalker duty!!!

Last week was increasingly frantic as we finished all the server moves to their new all-singing, all dancing and full-featured new home at RobBellHosting

Just a few problems with transferring the .co.uk domains away fron Lycos and onto 123-reg – Lycos have promised me twice to update the data that’s stopping the transfer, and they STILL haven’t done it having had over a month and 9 letters requesting they get a move on. Lycos have ruined their relationship with me over this – they were always a good company, with an, albeit limited, grip on customer service. Now I won’t use any of their products henceforth – the profitable ones they haven’t closed down, that is.

At least the data’s all moved though – and everyone’s running off the new ips. Yay, glad that’s over – too many all-nighters pulled in 1 week, IMO!

Can’t believe the snow outside – good few inches on the ground everywhere, it looks great – might take my camera out in it if I get the chance tomorrow… between the 2 courses I’m taking. I’ll show you some of the sights in Wintery Wakefield, many of which are truly beautiful – the city always looks lots better with snow covering it!!!

I’ve been using a lot of Traffic Exchanges this week to build subscribers up for my mailing list – go to Rob-Bell.com’s About Rob page to subscribe if you’d like to get my fifty favourite free sites and tools for making money online too. I don’t generally finding TE work to be the most exciting, but it’s fine if there’s something on TV – yes I do both at once! Seen considerable increase to the subscriber numbers – it’s doubled, then that doubled, now we have a nice number!

My first Traffic Exchange recommendations are:
Traffic Splash
Royal Surf
Dragon Surf
I Love Hits
Start XChange and
Advertising KnowHow

I use all these regular and see great results. They’re all free to join, but you can upgrade to increase the rate you generate credits and the number of sites you advertise. I’m going to write more on Traffic Exchanges in the near future, but those 6 are great to get you started. 5 of them offer what is called “SuperSurfing” – if you surf all 5 exchanges at once (using a tabbed internet browser) you get extra credits for each site you view.

I an upgraded member in all of the above exchanges – over a year 1/2 in some of them.

Traffic Exchanges are a very cheap(free) alternative to expensive advertising yet the targeted users on there make them perfect when your product needs the Internet Marketer marketplace. Find out the things they need, and offer them – use sales to pay for exchange monthly upgrades so you get more credits to spend getting your site seen.

Eeek it’s 2.15 am, I haven’t actually had an early night after all – bugger!

To Your Success,

Rob Bell

Tomorrow I’ll be telling you all about the 2 Business Link courses I’m going on – exciting stuff eh?!?!

Well, it had to happen eventually – After a long lie in this morning to catch up on the lack of sleep yesterday, this evening I got my first experience of Wii Rock Band, – the game where you either sing, play guitar/bass, or drum to a number of well-known and some not so well-known songs. It’s serious fun – especially when there’s a group of you. 5 of us took it in turns to sing badly, ‘strum’ tunelessly, and mostly miss the beat through artists like Black Sabbath, Weezer, Faith No More, The Beastie Boys and even Die Toten Hosen – a german punk band I first encountered last year in Ibiza courtesy of mein host at a bar I often visited, Tom – a former East German punk.

One of my friends used to drum in bands so he put us to shame once he’s stopped drumming twice as many notes as were on screen, but I discovered my left hand to right foot (kick pedal foot) co-ordination was severely lacking – it soon improved though. Funny how throughout my teens we were told how computer games were making us all unfit, then the advent of the Wii has meant that games can be quite a physical challenge – Wii Boxing is exhausting, one round and I’m drenched with sweat! Heck if Wii’s had been around when we were kids, you might have had more chance of seeing me in the Olympics – the ZX Spectrum was hardly a workout, although typing in the games out of computer magazines certainly improved my typing – anyone else remember spending hours typing in line after line of Hexadecimal code only to discover on completing it that it didn’t work because somewhere in the machine code you’d made a mistake? The only way of solving it was to go through it digit by digit comparing your input to the magazine – many was the time the Spectrum got switched off in disgust after this happening! Ah to have games on tape that took 20 minutes to load, and a thermal printer with shiny silver paper again!

I’ve been busying myself today getting into the $100 Million Challenge – starting the video courses and getting on to my first assignment. So far, I’m really impressed at how well the course is delivered – it’s very easy to get into, and Russell Brunson appears to be way ahead of the curve when it comes to presenting his product – the whole package is very polished.

Although I’ve studied and worked in Marketing since I was 18, I love learning and adding to my knowledge at any opportunity – you never know when one of those things may subsequently skyrocket your achievements and earnings.

Online learning was a lifesaver for me when I was immobilised with a broken back – it helped me get over what was a very difficult time in my life – going from being very sporty to being completely immobile was a sudden and very frustrating change I wouldn’t want anyone to have to go through. Still, I had a fantastic time doing the sports that eventually crippled me and I wouldn’t change anything – except for the 2 specific landings that did the most damage – one in 1999, the latter in 2004!

Just done some Traffic Exchange surfing for the first time in ages, it’s a great way of seeing what people are promoting at the moment, and 10 seconds is a very short time to make someone interested in your product/service so you have to be good to do it well – there are lots of great people in the TE community who are always prepared to help people make money for themselves. I often attend Saturday training at Affiliate Funnel where I’ve learned so much about list building, developing splash pages, landing pages and the world of traffic exchanges from fantastic teachers like Jon Olson, Mike Paetzold and Paul Kinder.

Rob

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