Rob Bell's Notes from a Yorkshire Internet Megalomaniac

Funny short clip of my good friend Dave, who’s 71, creating some hot electro beats via my iPhone.

I hope it brightens your day as much as it did mine

I taught him how to build and maintain his own website, which now has hundreds of pages, and gets thousands of visits each month – proving you can learn to use computers and the Internet at any age.

The Sunday Times called him ‘the greatest Surrealist since Salvador Dali’, so make sure you check out his artwork in the Grand Gallery.

Have a look at Dave’s site. You’ll be mystified to say the least…

Rob Bell

This post is a direct copy of a page I just uploaded to my personal website, Rob-Bell.com – so the bit about ‘coming soon’ applies to that site, not this I thought the page worth sharing with you, my dear blog readers, so here it is, in all its’ glory including what I now consider to be quite an embarrassing video from a couple of years ago!

Beware the Newbie Trap – Watch That Wallet!

After 4 years of being disabled, I no longer had any savings and found myself living hand to mouth on incapacity and disability benefit, unable to afford to do much, rotting away quietly at home. Some days I couldn’t even afford to eat – but once I caught the internet marketing bug, I found myself forgoing meals to invest in courses I’d been recommended… as a Newbie (Complete Beginner) I didn’t know what was good or not, and I bought quite a few courses that were no use other than taking up space on my hard drive. I’m lucky that I have a degree in Business Management and Marketing, so already knew the rules, many tricks of the trade, and had a good eye for spotting what can only described as BS! I bet you’re just like me – you want to fill that knowledge gap, but you’re just not buying the right stuff…

If you’re new to making money online, it’s really easy to get sucked into spending lots of money on courses far too complex for the new or faint-hearted, which leave you frustrated, skint and feeling overwhelmed – resulting in an early exit before your new activities come to fruition.

The gurus all tell you to spend all your money on their course – which is always the best and fastest way for you to get millions, a massive house, a brand-new shiny Ferrari in your garage, and your own private jet to fly to your own private Island!

You and me both know that the only things that can really give you the lifestyle you dream of are free – Determination, Focus, and Effort.

If you’re just getting started and you’ve never done any marketing before, what you need is a way of learning the principles so you can build a long-term business that provides for you and your family for years to come. The best way of doing this generally is not to buy a thousand dollar web-based program and then convince others to buy the same program to make some money.

Some people are good at this, but most are not which is why network marketing and internet marketing have such high failure rates – I read it’s something like 97% of people who fail in these markets, probably because they find out the truth, which is:-

Even though you were told you would get rich quickly and easily by simply buying these programs, the truth is they will not make you rich on their own. Unless you are good at promotion, sales, and forming relationships with potential buyers, chances are you will struggle until you begin to understand better ways of marketing and promoting your cause. Your first sale is perhaps the hardest, especially if you don’t know how. I have a degree in marketing, but I still struggled at first, so I know and feel your pain, believe me!

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You would be far better off to join a low cost, even free, programme where you’re given the right training to get you started properly – where a community of your peers and experts come together to help each other learn the right techniques to generate a full-time income online. I joined Affiliate Funnel for those reasons, and 2 years on I’m still a member – and always recommend the program to friends and business contacts who want to learn about Internet Marketing, without spending their hard-earned money.

You can join and use Affiliate Funnel for free, or there’s a paid option which I have that costs me £4 ($6) each month -it’s easily worth every penny, although I don’t pay myself anymore – the program more than pays for itself every month.

Things don’t have to be complicated – anyone can generate income online, at whatever age. Several highly successful online business people are in their teens, and many are way past retirement age – the Internet shows no favours to any age. People of all skill levels and abilities just like you are able to find a system that’s right for them, and launch their new online career. No matter what you are doing now, you can start to earn money online – a lot of people I know never studied a day’s marketing in their lives before they took up internet marketing, and started applying it to their businesses and personal money-making ventures.

I’m teaching my Mum, who’s in her late 60s how to achieve stuff online, and have already taught a 71 year old who now writes and publishes a website with hundreds of, maybe even a thousand, pages about ancient history, numerology, and ancient wisdoms. It also features a selection of his artwork – the Sunday Times called him the ‘greatest Surrealist since Salvador Dali’.

Affiliate Funnel Will Get You Started, Quickly and Easily

My personal recommendation for this first stage of your online business career is Affiliate Funnel. It’s easy to get started, and the regular training will provide you with the essential information you need during this first stage. Affiliate Funnel helps you develop your online brand and begin to generate money from the Internet, and you don’t need to have sold or marketed or been a business whiz before.

You can ask questions of experts at the weekly saturday and monday night (and often other nights too) seminars, and they often give away industry secrets that will help you increase your income.

Give Affiliate Funnel a try-out today – it doesn’t cost you anything to join, and it could make you a lot of money.

Traffic Exchanges – The Easiest Way for You to Get People to View Your Offers

Traffic Exchanges are one of the easiest ways for newbie Internet Marketers to start to generate visitors to their websites, product pages and affiliate offers. They work on a simple basis – you earn credits by viewing other marketers pages, which you then use to get your own pages seen. So all you have to be able to do is look at a screen and click on a mouse – simples!

I still use Traffic Exchanges as one of the best sources of signups to my email lists, by providing quality materials in return for a name and email address – this is called permission-based marketing, and makes sure you’re never accused of spam, because every person on your list requested to be there, then confirmed this desire by clicking the confirmation link your autoresponder sends them when they sign up.

The reason I still use Traffic Exchanges two years later? Easy – most of my subscribers come from them.

You get laser targeted access to Internet Marketers – everyone there is one, so you know who you’re talking to, and what motivates them. They are also the simplest promotion method online – once you have a page to promote, you just click other sites to get people to view yours. Don’t tell anyone, but I often surf traffic exchanges while I’m watching TV or listening to a Webinar or watching an online video… the hours can fly by and you find yourself with thousands of credits to spend!

I use Traffic Splash, Dragon Surf, I Love Hits and SWAT as my main traffic exchanges, although I sometimes use others. SWAT in particular is good because they also provide private weekly training where big hitters teach you the things that enabled them to become big hitters in the first place.

Here’s a video I did a couple of years ago showing you how to use a traffic exchange, the link doesn’t work anymore (don’t try going to jointrafficsplash.info, it doesn’t work anymore – I didn’t keep the domain name!) To visit Traffic Splash <—- simply click on this name.

Coming Soon

I’ll be building up this section of the site over the next few months, when I get time between client jobs. I aim to provide information and resources to help individuals and businesses build successful brands and revenues online. Ironically, because I can only do it between client jobs, the more successful I become the longer this will take to build, so you really should be hoping for my failure… Although if I were to fail, why would you want to learn from me?!?!? Aaaah blessed irony!

If you want to receive my daily email series, 35 Free Websites, Applications and Tools to Help You Make Money Online, sign up here now – I’ll throw in a free copy of a book that can help you get started online when you confirm the confirmation email you’ll receive when you sign up. If it doesn’t arrive in under 2 minutes, check your spam folder – sometimes Gmail and Yahoo are overzealous in their filtering – heck the other day my Mum sent me an email and they spam foldered that!

Here’s to your success,

Rob

Yes, it’s true – the Internet Police have been round and arrested me for neglecting my blog once again. They said I had been blogging with undue care and attention, leaving my blog unattended for many days, even weeks at a time.

Oh blog, what can I say? I neglect you so, yet you sit there showing the world my words 24/7/365 unaffected by my ignoring you. They say I haven’t been feeding you properly, or dressing you appropriately. It’s not that I’ve lost interest, I still care for you – but I’m sorry, I’ve been seeing other Web platforms and activities. Yes, I have been spending increasingly more time with my Web Design business, and I’ve been seen a lot around Twitter and Facebook – I have also been spending a lot time with new clients, or on courses, webinars, or my other business, Ex Ignibus.

It’s not that I don’t love you, I’m just not sure that I’m in love with you – you’re not the blog I met almost 4 years ago (actually that’s true, you’re not that blog but you look and sound just like she did). You’ve got kinda bloated with all those plugins and applications I so love to feed you with, and your dress sense is so out of date compared to my other sites, who all got updated a couple of months ago. Your style just doesn’t fit in with the rest of the pack anymore…. but I don’t want to lose you.

There’s so much we should be doing together, and I know we have a bright future together – we just need to work better as a team, show a united front, and do what we do best together – giving useful information to novices and experts alike, on how to market ethically and effectively online, all about the latest trends online, and how best to use networks like Twitter. We need to up our game, dear blog, so here’s what has to happen.

Nothing much is going to happen here over the next week, because I am absolutely busied up with client work – and no matter what you say, you’ll always come second to my beloved clients.

After that, you and me are going to be spending some quiet time together, working on cleaning you up, getting you into optimised shape, thinning down your plugins, and completely redesigning your style and layout to turn you into one cool, sexy, intelligent blog that people are going to want to hang around with once again.

So get ready, because October is going to go down in history as the month you grew up and left your chrysalid to become a beautiful butterfly, rippling waves of positive effect across the blogosphere.

I’m sorry for the way I’ve treated you – I’ll do better, I promise.

Your Naughty Owner,

Rob x

p.s. I got away with a caution from the Internet police, but they said they’d be keeping an eye on me in the future – and they’ll be back if I treat you bad ever again!

According to this article in Computerworld Twitter traffic has shot up, not due to the teen age group who grew MySpace but rather older people – 45-54 years olds, followed by my generation – the 25-34 year olds. OK you got me, I’m 37 but that’s only on the outside! A ComScore survey found that 18-24 year olds, the ‘traditional’ social media early adopters, were actually 12% less likely to use Twitter than the average. They also found that older users spend more time on the site each visit.

Now I’m not going to repeat the facts in the article verbatim, you only have to click the link above to read it for yourself, but it did get me thinking about why older users might like Twitter much more than other networks. I struggle to believe that I’m now in the 35-54 age group for many surveys, but believe that my generation may be seriously affecting surveys who class us with those almost 20 years older. We were the first generation to grow up with computers available at home – ok they were 1k ZX80s and 48k ZX Spectrums in the early 80s, but we still had them at home,and I’ve now been a computer user for some 29 years (eek!) and an Internet user since 1991, 18 fun filled years (actually 5-10 fun filled years, the days before broadband were awful, we’d wait all night downloading a rubbish picture of a topless girl – that’s right – a picture, just one cos it took that long… You broadband pervs have no idea how lucky you are!) I think people my age have started to skew the survey results where we’re listed with people 20 years older – but that’s beside the point because the article and report don’t use that age grouping – they do it by 10 year gaps, much more accurate and representative, so let’s just get to the point!

I think this metric could have something to do with the ease of use of Twitter in comparison to the other social networks – somewhere like Facebook/MySpace where you have profiles, upload photos and videos, make use of applications you have to install and so forth can be daunting to older people with less computing/internet experience. Maintaining your profile and keeping it updated can take up lots of time, and it’s all very daunting to lots of people. Twitter on the other hand is a beautiful piece of simplicity for the user, and not at all threatening for the inexperienced computer user. You can be up and running in minutes, and there’s always something to read about. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t picked it up and been able to use it straightaway.

Young people easily understand technology, having grown up with it – it’s hard to think we’ve only had computers in the home for about 30 years because they’re everywhere now. My Dad used to stare at my screen in bemusement when he came round because he didn’t believe the people talking directly to me via the computer screen could possibly be real – how were they getting there, and how was text appearing on my screen when I wasn’t typing?!?! Bless him, he was from a generation that grew up before television – he even used a horse and cart for his coal round in his younger days before vans and lorries became the medium of transport for commerce.

How things have changed in such a relatively short space of time in the greater scheme of things.

I think it’s a great positive that Twitter’s attracting an older generation, and many people in their later years find this massive world of information, entertainment, discussion and communication to be as useful and involving as I do. When I broke my back and had to lay down at home for a long time, I couldn’t have survived without the Net – I’d never have escaped my 4 walled virtual prison without it. I see the Net giving those with less mobility wings through which to set themselves free online. I also see it as giving voice to the voiceless and community to the lonely and isolated (although the isolated may struggle to get decent speed broadband in rural areas so they’ll have to stay away from streaming video!)

As the older generation starts to welcome the tech savvy teens of the 80s like myself into their throng via the ‘excuse’ that “we’re not old, we’re only just heading into middle aged”, I’d like to say to each and every one of you silver surfers, “Welcome, it’s a mad place and you’ll fit right in!”

Rob

p.s. I have no excuse for not posting very often today, beyond ‘Twitter ate my homework’

I’ve been near bed-ridden for the past 3 days because my back injury has been playing up – if you don’t know all about it, here’s a quick summary.

In 2001 I took a tabletop jump too fast on a BMX course, lost the Go-ped I was on from underneath me, and dropped 12 foot straight onto my bum – compressing my T8 vertebra to the point 78% was destroyed, and smashing my mobile phone in my back pocket so hard against my leg that I had a white mobile phone-shape-centred awful black bruise for about 2 weeks! Oddly, the hospital completely ignored my back, and dealt with my resultant breathing problems – treating me for Asthma for 3 months as my breathing got more and more laboured – I was lucky that a locum spotted my back injury, through an x-ray of my chest… and after 3 months, I finally started treatment for a broken back, which was…. nothing! This first injury didn’t really slow me down that much, but the second in 2004 was less serious but far more damaging – and means I have to walk with a stick now!

I really loved Kiteboarding, on land not sea, and spent 2 summers happily flying across the local heath powered by my 3.5m Blade Kite and my trusty mountain board. If you get going fast enough on the board, and the wind is strong enough, taking off is a fairly regular event… this one time my take off was great, but my landing more or less stank! I came down on my hip, rupturing my sacroiliac joint, damaging my leg and hip and damaged another 2 vertebrae and their relative discs.

Since then, as you might imagine I haven’t done a lot of sports – in fact I’m banned medically from trying any of the extreme ones anymore! I can’t really walk distances – even short walks often cause disproportionate pain. Some days I’m completely bed ridden, unable to do much at all – not even sit up in bed, or I’d be able to get stuff done on my laptop!

Pain days, as I lovingly refer to such events, aren’t days when lots gets done in this dojo. It’s hard to sit at my computer desk, near impossible to concentrate, and I find myself incredibly frustrated when such days take place – especially at the moment, while we’re busy setting up Ex Ignibus – I can’t afford bed days – although I do work for myself so that I can work around my disability, so I should stop being grumpy and give thanks that the business works well like that!

I’m at the desk writing this, but if I’m honest I’m in a position to wrote little more tonight.

Normal service will resume soon!

Rob