You may have heard of Michelle MacPhearson, fellow internet marketer and mastermind of Crowd Mountain. If you haven’t, I recommend you at least check out her blog at michellemacphearson.com sometime.

I’ve learned a lot about internet marketing from various sources, but the quality of her information is exceptional and she’s very responsive to comments or questions. I’ve gotten replies back from her within minutes. She also seems to be a very positive person on top of being good at what she does.

I had heard of her internet marketing training program before, but being a member of Wealthy Affiliate University I’m already paying $39/month for internet marketing training. I didn’t join until months after I had heard of it and it took a $1 7-day trial to convince me. I’ve been a member ever since and have gotten an amazing education there.

History has repeated itself, and I took the bait on a $1 12-day trial to Crowd Mountain that I received today. I haven’t completely devoured the site yet, but the first impressions are good. If you like video training, there seems to be a lot of it here. There are niches already cut out for you too if you don’t know how to do niche research yet or just don’t have any good ideas.

Michelle calls them “Niche Trailheads.” I haven’t dug into them yet, but I’ll be sure to make a follow-up post on what I find very soon. I played with the Crowd Mountain Task Manager which gives you a pre-populated list of “Master Tasks” for starting any new site. So if you don’t know what to do with your new .com you can just plug it into the task manager and hit the ground running. Of course you can also assemble your own task lists, too.

Another thing that is striking about Crowd Mountain is how aesthetically pleasing it is without being slow. The graphics are very nice and clean, but it doesn’t distract from the content. I did catch a glitch on one page where the background image came into the foreground and covered part of the content. But then again I’m using Google Chrome where most people seem to be using Mozilla Firefox.

The video training seems to be very thorough thus far, though I’m only in the 1st of 6 training modules in the Crowd Mountain BootCamp. I did have a problem playing the video until I upgraded QuickTime to the latest version. After that it was smooth sailing. Michelle highly recommends Market Samurai throughout her training and incorporates it heavily into the videos on keyword research.

Market Samurai is not a free program, but I think it’s worth the one-time cost. It’s a huge time-saver and in any semi-competitive niche market if you’re not using something like it you’re at a great disadvantage.

There are other features to the program that will easily connect you to other Crowd Mountain members and stay informed on the latest in internet marketing. In many ways I’d say this looks edgier and more high-tech than Wealthy Affiliate University, but this write-up is only a first impression, not a full-blown review.

If you can get in on the $1 trial at Crowd Mountain I’d go for it. I didn’t end up staying a member after my trial was up, but I’m still a regular member of Wealthy Affiliate University. Michelle has been putting a lot of work into it lately though so it’s probably much improved over the last few months. If anyone can share their own experience from Crowd Mountain I’d like to hear about it in the comments.

I purchased a copy of Josh Spaulding’s Article Marketing Domination a couple of days ago since I’ve become very serious about article marketing again.

I’m more interested in saving time at this point than I am saving money. Because in my opinion time is far more valuable than money.

I’m going to break it down into a list of pros and cons for easy consumption, and speak briefly about aspects of each. At the end I’ll give my final opinion and then you can decide for yourself.

We’ll start with the cons…

Cons of Article Marketing Domination

- Poor grammar caused it to lose some credibility. On the very first page there were a couple of glaring mistakes, e.g. “some things needed clarified,” and “it just needed updated.” It didn’t read too professionally but improved with only a few minor mistakes later on.

- The author admitted there were probably grammatical errors and that he wasn’t a professional writer. This could be part of Josh’s strategy to help the reader identify with him, but if so it didn’t really work for me. If I were to release an eBook I’d try my best to be sure it was error-free. Plus the book is only 30 pages. How hard can it be to proofread a 30 page book?

- There are some affiliate link upsells later in the book. However, it was mentioned plainly at the end that the links were affiliate links. So it’s not much of a con at all.

Pros of Article Marketing Domination

- The price is very low at only $27.

- There is no fluff in the book at all. Everything serves to illustrate or clarify the ideas presented.

- It’s a very easy read and can be done in a single sitting while still being easy to understand.

- Very good keyword research ideas included that don’t cost any money to implement.

- There’s an excellent free strategy & formula included to find out if a keyword is too competitive that only takes a minute or so.

- Includes an excellent article submission and backlinking strategy that can be done for free but would be much quicker with the $97 upsell.

- The eBook can be promoted for a 50% commission, and it’s actually worth promoting.

Final Thoughts

I’ve bought a few eBooks and programs in my career as an internet marketer but I did my homework first and am happy to say I got what I paid for. Actually I’m promoting the product because I feel the price point is just about right for this kind of information. Sure, you may be able to find all of the information for free out there, but like I said: my time is far more valuable than a few bucks here and there. I hope you enjoyed the review.

If you buy it through my affiliate link be sure to let me know what you think in the comments.

Purchase Article Marketing Domination with my affiliate link!

I don’t always deal with change very well. Changing jobs, changing relationships, changing pants, it’s all pretty annoying at first. You’ve heard it before that we’re creatures of habit, but looking deeper than that we just like having control over things. We’re all mad for POWER! At least in the context of what happens in our own personal lives, and that’s a good thing. Why shouldn’t we want to control our destiny?

Recently I quit my job cold turkey. I know that most people wouldn’t do something like that, especially what from the outside might appear to be a “good job.” I was completely miserable, and there was no sign of it getting better so instead of deliberating on it and possibly changing my mind, I made a decision and stuck to it. I figure that in the grand scheme of things a job should never hold so much control over a person’s life.

Not my life anyway, maybe someone else’s. I imagined myself as an old man retelling my story to children. What would I want to say? That I worked my fingers to the bone and have nothing to show for it after all these decades? Forget about it. The unknown may be one of the scariest things to face in life, but let’s not be cowards. Not now.

Am I telling you to follow my footsteps? If you feel it in your guts, then yes. Make a decision. If that decision is to stay where you’re at, then at least recognize that it was your choice. I chose to leave the place I felt I didn’t belong anymore. The change isn’t completely easy and simple, but I’m up for new challenges. New changes.

I read through a short book not too long ago entitled “The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong” by Laurence J. Peter.  The basis of the book is the principle that in a hierarchy (e.g. your company) an employee will rise to his level of incompetence.  Given enough time people tend to float to the top like…. you know what.

When they do make it up there and are no longer worthy of promotion they will perform their latest job with incompetence.  They stop improving in any remarkable way and settle into a mediocre position.  I’ve seen this happen in various retail jobs I’ve held over the years, but now that I’m working in IT it’s worse than I could’ve imagined.  It seems as if incompetence itself is the defining factor in an individual’s ability to earn a promotion.

Now before you think I’m exaggerating please listen to this very short story.  I worked with a consultant, let’s just call him Irwin for the heck of it.  Well, Irwin was not what you’d call a model employee.  He was rude, and often left computer systems set up incomplete or misconfigured.  I’ve spent many hours correcting things that were supposed to be set up properly the first time by Irwin.  A lot of times he would have to return to the client to “fix” the mess that he made!  Fast forward a year or so to a company party where an award valued at about $1,000 would be given to the consultant that earned the most billable hours.

Guess who won?! Well, considering I haven’t given you any other options to choose from I’ll congratulate you for figuring it out.  I couldn’t really believe it, and  I wondered if anyone else saw the irony.  That’s not important.  What is important is this: working in a hierarchy that rewards incompetence is a sure fire way to become very dissatisfied with your position, or it may lead you to incompetence in your job role.  Now tell me, is that what you really want for yourself?

If you have any work horror stories please share them in the comments!

I was browsing the web at work while thinking about how much I hate my job and found this little nugget: http://www.workrant.com. Nothing is held back here so you can expect the most creative profanity imaginable.

After reading through a few rants I realized it’s actually possible there are people out there who hate their jobs more than I do! I was tempted to spam the site with my blog’s link post a link to my blog on the site but decided against it for now. Because I’m a bit scatter-brained I haven’t truly focused the content of this blog too much to actually help anyone get out of their dead-end job. I’m going to work on changing that going forward.

It’s my mission first to QUIT MY JOB and then to focus on helping you quit yours! It’s only natural that I think of myself first, but I don’t mean to say I don’t care about you. I care about strangers a lot more than I probably should. But as I haven’t completely gotten it figured out yet, it would be foolish to pretend I’m an expert. What I do know is there are two words you should get familiar with if you’re really interested in working on your own: internet marketing.

I can’t stress this enough! There are so many ways to make money legally and legitimately using the internet. You may scrape by with a few dollars a month, or like some people make several thousand every day. This is not a joke or a trick. I’m not selling anything today. I’m just going on a little rant. So if you take anything away from this post it’s this: get your education in internet marketing, it can more than pay for itself.

I posted awhile back about the “Bureau of Workplace Interruptions,” and how they will supposedly provide sporadic interruptions in your regular work day. Like any good bureau, they turned out to be highly incompetent in their efforts. Some things are just too good to be true.

But this does make me curious of whether or not there is a legitimate organization or person out there willing to do this service. I think it could be a hit. I want to get interrupted at work, and I want everyone to be completely unaware of what’s actually going down when it happens. Just like that time I ordered Chinese food from my work phone and instead got a friend of mine to deliver the goods so he could take a look inside the fortress.

So if you have a job and are interested in getting interrupted from that job, speak up in the comments here. I just might be bored enough to do it.

I posted before about how to avoid annoying interruptions at work. Well, now I’m posting on how to hopefully do nearly the opposite. It’s an experiment with a web site I found earlier today, the “Bureau of Workplace Interruptions.”

According to the scant information provided on the web site, the “bureau” will take your information and schedule an interruption at your place of work. This interruption can come in the form of an email, snail mail, phone call, maybe even a physical visit! I believe this is a joke web site to tell you honestly, but boy am I hopeful that it could actually be used to interrupt the daily grind. It really gets boring, not to mention tedious.

I submitted my request for an interruption just moments ago. I can’t wait to see if something comes of this. And to answer your question of why this blog post has an image of a frog on it, it’s really very simple: because it has nothing to do with the topic!

Do you see what I did there?

Just a quick post to share a couple of gems that I think anyone who is truly interested in learning to work on their own should see. The first is Thirty Day Challenge or 30DC for short. It’s completely free and “awesome” as they unabashedly claim themselves.

I don’t disagree with that statement. I’ve actually bought one of the tools that they suggest, and it’s called Market Samurai. I have barely begun internet marketing and I can’t imagine seriously trying to do this without it. Without giving a full review of the product, which would be redundant, I suggest simply going to the dojo at www.noblesamurai.com and viewing the video training for yourself.

Even if you don’t know the first thing about internet marketing that should get you a little bit excited at the possibilities. Anyone can do this! Some people will have an easier time than others, but all you need is a computer, internet, and a little determination to learn and do this.

That’s all I’ve got for now, and by the way none of the links I’ve posted in today’s blog are bringing me any money. I just want to get the word out! I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching this stuff. This is the best I’ve found!

Occasionally I will make posts about products or membership sites that I myself use. So there’s no confusion, I’m stating it outright. This shouldn’t be surprising, but I want to make it perfectly clear to anyone who visits this site that yes, I do receive compensation for signups that result here. I’m not trying to hide anything! I stand by everything that I promote.

For future reference, I’ve also posted a Disclosure Policy for your viewing pleasure. It was actually very easy to set up, I went to disclosurepolicy.org and used their wizard.

The FTC is effecting serious changes for bloggers so having one of these is a good insurance policy against any unwanted attention from them.

Does this Happen to You?

Do you hate being interrupted at the office by supervisors or colleagues that seek to take up your time or use you to help them complete the tasks they should be doing themselves? I know exactly what it’s like and there’s nothing more obnoxious than being told to do something you’re already doing or even better, being told to do something you’ve already done. How do you solve this problem? It may be easier than you think so read on.

Keep an Ace Up Your Sleeve

First, don’t be a know-it-all. If you create an image of being an all-knowing deity at the office people will look to you for answers when they don’t know what they’re doing. Do them and Google a favor and get in the habit of telling them you don’t know but you’re sure that the information shouldn’t be hard to find on the Internet. This can benefit you in two ways: either they’ll think you’re incompetent (this is good) or they’ll think you aren’t interested in helping them.

Defend Yourself

Whether or not you’re a nice and friendly person is irrelevant to you, they’re stealing your time and energy, just like vampires! Arm yourself with the holy cross of ignorance and the pungent aroma of indifference. Unknowingly they’ll be trained not to bother you with things that they can do themselves. If you think about it you’re actually doing them a solid, good for you!

What Did You Say?

Another way to avoid these annoying interruptions at work is to be constantly busy. If you can wear headphones like the kind you put in your ears I suggest having them on whenever you’re not on the phone. You can listen to music or just dead air, they won’t know the difference. I suggest a good pair of comfortable in-ear headphones. Don’t go cheap because you may find yourself wearing them constantly.

Hold On Someone’s Bothering Me…

The other option you have is to wear your phone’s headset, if you have one. I don’t prefer this method but it will work if you don’t have headphones. If you know you’re on the verge of being interrupted grab the phone and pretend you’re on an important call. If the interrupter wants to wait around until you’re off the phone don’t let them. Tell your imaginary client to hold for a moment and hurriedly ask the offender to spit out what they want. Insist that they get it all out now or they’ll just end up bothering you again later.

Use Your Brain!

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Get creative in your quest to attain peace of mind at work. These are just a few of the ways that I get more done and enjoy more peace of mind at the office. You can do the same as me and depending on your own unique situation you may choose to implement more elaborate strategies!