The Moronic Graduate

Okay, quick story about this picture. This is me on graduation day from the University of Texas (Master’s Sport Management) in 2006. After let’s just say a bit of a rough night (finally stumbled home as the sun was coming up), I shot out of bed at 8:35am realizing that I was supposed to be graduating…in 25 MINUTES! I grabbed my graduation gown which was still in the bag and I was just coherent enough to get it out of said bag when I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to put my arms through the sleeves. Seriously. I slipped my arms through the sleeves only to find them sewn shut at the ends.

So, like any enterprising individual who is so hung over it doesn’t yet hurt, I grabbed the scissors and began to cut open some hand holes. It wasn’t until after I caused a mini-uproar on stage in front of my closest 3,000 friends and their families that I realized the arm slots were already cut…in the SIDES of the gown. Everybody else had nice, flowing sleeves and I looked like I was wearing Larry the Cable Guy’s graduation gown. To this day, my family likes to call me the “dumbest grad school graduate of all-time” (all in good fun, of course). Okay, now back to the review.

It has been a little over a month since my first ever blog post, “I Have Yet to Make a Single Dollar Online and I Just Quit My Job.” Over the course of this last month, I have…moved to a different city (again), moved in with a girl for the first time (it’s okay, she has a ring. It’s not my ring but…just kidding), left a job most people would kill for, and started my own online business with absolutely no past experience or realistic expectations of success. I have also been planning a destination wedding in Jamaica, a co-bachelor party in Vegas, and have been enrolled in two separate mentor / coaching programs. To say the last month has been a whirlwind is a bit of an understatement…

Sometimes, especially in the midst of turbulent change, we get lost in the minutiae of the day-to-day grind without acknowledging our successes and just how far we have really come. Taking a step back to reflect on and gauge my progression has always been a helpful tool for me to (1) acknowledge I am further along than I had given myself credit for (usually) and (2) to re-evaluate, recharge, and re-focus from a different perspective. With that in mind, I wanted to share my first month’s experiences as a full-time blogger with all of you. So, without further ado…here’s the progression of PaulNorwine.com over the last month:

Posts / Videos:
Not including this post today, I have written six articles and have even posted one cheesy 30-second video in the “About Paul” section. My posts have ranged from 122 words (I included a movie clip) to 1775 words (average of 1100) and I have touched on topics ranging from simplifying goal-setting methods and online business strategies to football, heat-seeking missiles, and even guys puking on my garage floor. I used to hate writing…but now it’s almost cathartic and I have come to realize I DO have a voice that I want to share (though you may wish I’d go back to being silent ).

Visitors:
Since my first post on August 10th, I have had 481 visits, 275 unique visitors, and 1282 page views of my blog. Considering I haven’t truly dedicated myself to driving traffic yet, I am relatively excited by these numbers. Last week alone I had 162 visitors (109 of which were unique) with over 371 page views. I have just recently begun to play around with twitter, StumbleUpon, and other traffic driving techniques so I am definitely looking to continue the upward swing.

Comments:
With 80+ comments spread over my first six posts I am definitely feeling the love. I know a ton of people struggle with getting comments in the beginning so I feel pretty blessed that people seem to be resonating with my articles (my first post alone has 30+). I have even started to get a few pingbacks with each of my posts (I didn’t even know what these were a couple of weeks ago). But I also know a lot of this has to do with the comments I have been leaving on others’ blogs. I always strive to provide relevant comments that add value when I write on others’ posts. I will never become “THAT GUY” who just copies and pastes generic comments on every blog he comes across in order to get backlinks to his site…those guys suck – the copy and paste comment method is not only shady, but it’s also easily identifiable and these people will not get very far in the long-run. But I digress, back to the review.

Subscribers:
I currently have 11 people on my mailing list and about 5-8 feedburner subscribers depending on what day it is. Not as high as I would like but it is still early, after all. And, I didn’t even have feedburner set up until last week so I can’t be too disappointed (but if  you would like to help out then by all means click here to receive my updated posts via email – yes, it’s a shameless plug but what the hell, we’re all friends). I have a few ideas that will hopefully increase my numbers in this regard and they all involve offering the best free stuff I can find so keep an eye out!

SEO / Google Rankings / Alexa Rankings:
It took me a while to figure out (aka, last Wednesday) that I not only needed to learn HOW to use the All-in-One SEO Pack on Wordpress but that I also needed to ACTIVATE the damn plugin. In fact, my pages have yet to be indexed correctly but they ARE starting to return organic results – I’m even getting a little bit of traffic from Google which is surprising considering (1) I only have 6 posts and (2) none of my pages have made it to page one yet (at least not that I am aware of).

But, despite not ranking too high yet, I have seen a dramatic jump in my Alexa ranking. After previously being unranked, last week I made it to the 2.43 millionth “most important” website only to LEAPFROG ALL THE WAY TO…1,896,583. Talk about ballin’! Okay, okay – this is nothing to get excited over but it’s still fun to think I increased my ranking by 500,000+ spots in one week. I have a ways to go to make it into the coveted top 100,000 but my Alexa ranking is something tangible that will always help me to track and evaluate my progression over time.

Alright, I have turned an 800-word post into a post of 1,300+ (what’s new?) so I am going to stop right NOW…or after this:

This exercise of looking back and evaluating my progress has shown that even though it has been crazy month, I have come further along than I had given myself credit for and it motivates me to push ahead even further this next month. I hope you will continue to follow me on my journey and I sincerely appreciate all the support and advice you have showered me with from day one. As always, I would love to hear your feedback – either on this post or my blog in general – so please leave a comment below or hit me up on twitter (paulnorwine). I also urge you (seriously, this time) to subscribe to receive post updates via email. I know that I will only reach my goals if I help enough people reach their own…and that’s exactly what I intend to do. Until next time…

Paul

There’s just one small problem…I haven’t made a single penny online and I don’t know what I am doing.

More on that in a bit – for now let me tell you how I got to this point. I am originally from California near Santa Barbara. I did my undergrad years at UCDavis and grad school at the University of Texas, Austin. I spent quite a bit of time in the realm of professional and collegiate sports and was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to run my own sports participation-based business. I had an amazing time building the business from the ground up…but then we exploded and I spent more time working IN my business than working ON my business. Every day was spent putting out a new fire and it was tough just to keep my head (and the organization) above water let alone focus on continual growth.

There was one more problem – I was building someone else’s business. My figurative blood, sweat, and tears were making someone else money…a lot of money. I was stuck in a situation that I always told myself I would avoid.

I made a promise at a very early age that I would never settle for a “conventional” life stuck in the rat race. Fighting my way up the corporate ladder by playing the good soldier for 50-65 hours a week for 51 weeks out of the year hoping for a promotion that may or may not come is NOT my idea of living the good life. In fact, I equate the corporate cubicle lifestyle with a slow and particularly boring death. That may seem a little melodramatic but I am determined not to settle for a life I don’t want to lead.

I have just one life to live…and I want to squeeze as much out of it as I possibly can. It’s not just about the money. It’s about having the freedom to go after the life of my dreams.  I won’t go into exactly what those dreams are in this post but suffice it to say that I crave the freedom of working how I want, when I want, where I want so I can do what I want, when I want, where I want. And I can’t possibly live this type of life if I were to stay stuck in the “corporate world.” I knew there had to be a better way.

Ever since I read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss my perception of “work” and making money was irrevocably altered. For those of you who haven’t yet read this book do yourself a favor and grab a copy…you will be glad you did.

So, like most of you who are reading this can relate, I began researching “home-based” and online business opportunities. I bought into a number of “fail-proof” systems that guaranteed to make me tens of thousands of dollars virtually overnight. I read sales letter after sales letter, ebook after ebook. I tried data entry and survey systems. I tried MLMs and Network Marketing and affiliate programs. I even tried a “roulette system” for God’s sake (I’m pretty embarrassed I fell for that one – I knew it was a scam but went after it anyway). And, as you can guess, none of it made me a penny. It honestly started to feel like a search for the holy grail…sacrificing and searching for something I didn’t even know for sure existed.

I knew that if I were to have any chance of succeeding in this industry I would have to find mentors. I would have to find people who were already successful at doing what I wanted to do. I needed to find these people to not only prove to myself that making money online is possible but that it is a process that can be learned and that I CAN actually do it!

In my search I stumbled across Eric Farewell and Alex Jeffreys. For those of you who do not know who Eric is, he is a product-launch genius and niche marketing specialist who spends his free time flying, racing, skydiving, traveling and pretty much doing anything that he wants when he wants to do it. He is also a damned good photographer (lucky for me he may be photographing my summer wedding in Jamaica ). He hates the moniker of “guru” but he has achieved that status and has made lots and lots of moolah on the internet – I don’t want to put his earnings on the spot but let’s just say there are a lot of zeroes on the checks he gets in the mail. Oh yeah, he’s also only 24 years old!

I met Eric at Pat O’Bryan’s Unseminar 6 at the end of May, 2009. His outlook on living life to the fullest and financing your own freedom resonated deeply with me and I became one of his students. One major set back, however, is that I was (and still am) a complete novice when it comes to the world of internet marketing. Until that seminar in May I didn’t even know what a squeeze page was. I didn’t know what was implied by the word “copy.” I didn’t even have a twitter account. So though I completely understood Eric’s coursework from a conceptual standpoint, I was far from being able to actually implement any action steps. I knew I needed a mentor that would help me start from the absolute beginning.

Eric actually recommended a guy by the name of Alex Jeffreys. I did a little research on Alex and what I found amazed me. Here was a guy who sounded as though he was exactly the type of mentor that I was looking for. And it wasn’t his own hype that I was reading – it was the words, praise, and testimonials from his past students! Instead of empty promises and conceptualizations, Alex walks his students step-by-step through the process himself – and he refuses to let his students NOT become successful.

At first it sounded too good to be true and I was hesitant to join Alex’s coaching program based on the price tag. But I knew I needed a mentor so I ponied up the money and hoped for the best. And now I am beyond grateful that I signed up for the course! I can honestly tell you that I am light years ahead of where I would have been had I not joined this program a month and a half ago. It would have taken me months of struggling via personal trial and error to figure out what I learned in the first two weeks of Alex’s Coaching program alone. Alex genuinely cares about his students’ success and does everything he can to facilitate that success. I can’t say enough about Alex Jeffreys and the community that he has created.

This brings me to the purpose of this blog. I know there are a ton of you out there that want to develop a profitable online business but don’t know where to begin. Or you have an online business but it’s not going quite the way that you want. You are sick and tired of being bombarded by all the hype without results, or sick of falling for the next “sure thing”, or at the end of the rope and thinking it’s impossible to make money online. I’ve been there. I almost gave up before I even started. But now I have mentors and am part of a highly motivated community of individuals who are successfully making money on the internet. And now I KNOW I am going to be successful online.

This blog will serve two purposes: First, I will be writing about what I learn from the training provided by my uber-successful mentors Alex Jeffreys and Eric Farewell. I will be writing about what is working (or not working) for me and I will be learning from the best of the best. This training will serve to help you, the reader, effectively implement the same strategies that two of the industry’s biggest success stories used to build their own online empires. Second, keep in mind that as of this first blog post I have yet to make a single dollar online. This blog will (hopefully) provide documented proof that someone who is completely new to the realm of Internet Marketing CAN build a profitable online business!

Some people think I am absolutely nuts for leaving a “good job” for something I really know nothing about. Some people are nicer in their assessment and believe me to be naive or that I am just chasing a pipe dream. All I know is that this is the right decision for me.

So why should you care who I am? Why should you come back to read my posts and add your name to my list? Because I am starting from nothing (like most of you) and I am going to show you that it’s possible. I am going to build a successful online business from the ground up. And I am going to help YOU build YOUR business. I have burned my J.O.B. bridge. I have put all of my eggs in one basket and it’s put up or shut up time for me.

Again, it’s not just about the money. It’s about the freedom to pursue the life of my dreams…and this is the first step towards me actualizing those dreams. I look forward to the journey and hope to help as many of you as possible.

But I am also asking for YOUR help. I would love your feedback – if you have any questions about any of my posts please don’t hesitate to leave a comment. Or if you have your own suggestions or advice, stop by and drop a line. Or even if you just want to swing by to introduce yourself. My goal is to foster discussions within a community of readers to help each of us build more profitable online businesses. Here’s to all of our future successes online!

Paul Norwine (8/10/09)