Hello,
Have you ever heard of Jason Pereira from The University Kid? I expect so. Well I have been in contact with him so asked him for an interview. I hope you all like it!

Firstly, hello and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview Jason.

Could you please give us some information about your life and who you are?

My name is Jason Pereira, I am 17, I was born in India but currently I am living in Dubai. I am a university student and my favourite hobby is internet marketing. I started using Internet Messaging in 2007.
How did you start in this online career? Who gave you your inspiration?
I started during the summer of 2007 because I had five months off studying and was bored so I looked for ways to pass time online which is when I found out about paypal etcetera. I started by freelancing at $2 per article and soon moved on to domaining and website flipping. My inspiration was people on forums that were doing very well.

Did you believe back then that you would be as successful as you are now?

I had absolutely no idea! At the time I was just looking to make an extra $500 per month to use as spending money for parties and such.

Did you at any point have any “failures” which you then managed to learn from to become successful?

My biggest problem was that I wasted time on many projects that ultimately didn’t convert. I was also scammed quite a bit due to being naive early on – including over $650 for a site sale. This taught me a lot and from then on I have been much more careful about what I do with my money.

What advice do you have for those that are currently in the position you were in then?

Make friends early on with those that are more experienced than you, you’ll learn quicker and get scammed less as they have a lot to teach you. Also remember, joint ventures save time and make more money. As for best advice, probably creating sales pages for products… this saved me a ton of time and made me thousands.

Do you have any plans for the future?

Not really, no. I am currently very busy with exams then I am going on holiday in the next couple months. I will see about Internet Marketing after that.

Ok, thank you very much Jason.

I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did! Do you have any opinions or questions that you would like to ask Jason?

Thank you,
Shane

I have had many people email and twitter me asking how can I subscribe to so many blogs? It is simple! Do you use Firefox 3? If not then you should. If you do, you should know of this feature already but many do not.

Live Bookmarks

It is as simple as that. Instead of bookmarking a website, you are able to bookmark a feed. This creates a menu in your bookmarks for each rss feed. I find this a massive problem, as it is no different than having loads of feeds in my email inbox! So instead, I have created a folder that lets me only view the feeds when I want to. I find this very useful, hopefully you will too once you have watched this very quick video (The video is fairly low quality as I have a very slow connection to the internet. It should however provide the information you need. I will try to update the video when I can).

1. Choose a feed, for this video I chose CopyBlogger.com
2. Create a folder, I called it “RSS Feeds”
3. Click Add.

It really is a simple as that and it is so much neater than your inbox isn’t it? Have you used this method before? If not try it, I recommend it.

Thank you for reading,

Shane Hudson

Today I have an interesting subject for you! As you know, I am very interested in phrases and quotations. So today I would like to introduce you to a phrase of my own.

“Neat Niche”

What is a ‘Neat Niche’?

Simple yet catchy. Some of you may be able to easily figure out what it means, some of you will not be able to. I will start off by giving you a definition of the word ‘Niche’.

“A niche market is a focused targetable portion (subset) of a market.”

www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_(industry)

Most business and website owners understand the word niche and use it very often. One of the biggest blog niches is “Make Money Online”, which is no suprise considering the state of the world’s current economy.

Now I am going to try to explain the phrase ‘Neat Niche’ if you can think of better words for it, please let me know!

Neat Niche – A website or business that is apt for it’s niche.

How close to your guess was that? Probably fairly close indeed. This is all well and good but what is the point of the phrase?

Why Do We Need Neat Niche?

Sorry, it is not meant to sound like I am selling anything! I am not. The reason I use the term Neat Niche is because so many people create websites that are just not correct for the niche they are in. I was extremely guilty of this when I ran Lonely Designs and many people think I am guilty of it with Success Circuit. My niche is fairly wide as it includes everybody that are wanting to be successful in life or business. So in theory, everybody!

There are some sites that promise a certain niche but tend to go off subject often. This is not only common in blogs but also in websites, business and life itself. I often look through blogs and straight away come up with my opinion as to whether it is a Neat Niche or not. I also find this term very useful for reviewing websites, though I do not often actually write that it is a Neat Niche but it is always going around in my head.

I believe that I am the only user of this term up until now, but if you have heard of it before… let me know! Also, I know I have been doing quite a few of small posts so the next few will be fairly large.

Thank you for reading,

Shane

Time and time again I hear people say, and say myself, “Oh dear, I cannot think of any ideas for my next post!” or “I am trying to paint a picture but cannot find any inspiration!” Well, my advice is simple, look around. If you do not understand then do not worry, I shall explain it. What do these pictures all have in common?

That should give you enough of a clue to what this article is about. Inspiration. Nature. Take a look at anything that nature produced, does it look special? If not look harder, because everything is different and should be able to inspire you.

Now for the game. I have shown you that nature is special and should be able to inspire you. Unfortunately, nature is so inspirational that it is extremely hard to decide in what way to use it. So I devised a method, inspired by a game we often play with my brother (aged 5).

Word Association

Many of you may have realised what I am trying to get at. Basically, you start with an element of nature and write down words than spring to mind. A good way to do this is in a mind map. I shall give you a few examples, although I shall not upload any mind maps. I shall probably be using these sort of mind maps in another articles, so shall leave them for now. Instead I shall use simple text diagrams.

Spider – Spider Web – Climb – Ladder – Success

Yellow – Sand – Grain – Wood – Forest – Wildlife

Water – Droplets – Rain – Flood – Disaster – Poor

There are hundreds of thousands of different combinations you could choose, and I recommend you take them as far as you have time to. As you should be able to see, the choices you choose are almost infinite. The further you take each line, or mind map, the easier the writing will become.

Have any of you tried this before? Do you find it works well? Please discuss it as I am very interested in your opinions.

Thank you for reading,

Shane

Hello everybody,

I could not find a video clip that does justice to this film. Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium is an amazing film which I personally found extraordinary inspirational and motivational. If you have not watched it, then you need to! I shall not give too much away so I shall just say, the main character if exactly what I meant when I said Be Strange Be Successful.

Now I have another film. Have you seen Dead Poet’s Society? Even if you have, did you think about what it meant? Watch this scene and listen specifically to the speech Robin Williams makes starting around 1:05. Then tell me what it means. I am sure you will soon realise why I am showing it to you.

Thank you for watching them. Please let me know if you have any favourite videos that would be good for this post.

Shane Hudson

And we all know it.

So why don’t we listen to ourselves and actually do something about it? It is not just something that beginners get wrong, everybody does at some point. I am going to delve into how we can all start writing better content and why it matters.

What is BAD content?

Okay, so we all know not to write bad content. But how can we without knowing what bad content is? I do not like to make people feel bad so rather than looking through my feeds and finding a bad post, I will write examples.

1.

I was looking outside this morning and saw a big elephant and i thought wow a elephant in england that is impossible i must take a photo but i could not find my camera because it was in the shed which was near the elephant so i went to find my phone but that was out of battery so i went to find my phone charger but that was in the shed so i went next doors to borrow theirs…

This is obviously a made up story from the top of my imagination, but it shows many common errors. It has no punctuation and no grammar. I know this sounds like a teacher telling a student off, but who would read through a whole post that does not have any punctuation? I would not, I would close the site and not go back to it.

2.

The people next door had already seen the elepant, and they had a camera! So we took turns on the elephant and were smiling to the camera and shouting “CHEESE!!” It was a very fun day but we should have made it more profitable.

This one has the punctuation correct and the grammar is fairly good too. The problems with this one are harder to see, but there are there. The most obvious problem is the spelling mistake of “elephant”. Also, if you read it carefully you can see the the tone of the writing is very childish which is often a very bad sign for readers, even if you are young! Lastly, it says “we should have made it more profitable”. If you ever write something like this, it must be justified, otherwise it is no use at all to the reader. How can it be more profitable? Why do you want it to be more profitable?

3.

There are many ways the elephant could have been profitable. Firstly, we could have charged people to have their photo taken. Alternatively we could have taken people for trips. This would have been a good idea because the elephant was a Bursera microphylla which is very rare.

Nothing wrong with that one? Yes there is! If you ever write something, you need to know what you are talking about. A Bursera microphylla is a type of elephant tree. Which means although it is well written, it is completely wrong! This is a sure way to make sure your blog, or what ever you are writing, turns off as many people as possible. Who would want to waste their time learning things that are false?

What is Good Content?

Well there is not really any point me going through these factors with you, as it is just the opposite of what is shown above! So instead, I shall point you to some very good places to read as the best way to learn is to examine. These do not have to be other blog owners, there is no reason why you cannot learn from reading a newspaper!

• ProBlogger.net – Darren and his friends are all amazing writers, the purpose of the site is to be able to write and run a high quality blog. So rather than just reading what he has to say, examine how he says it.
• BBC History – Everyone in the UK knows about BBC, which is our biggest news network, however there are thousands of amazing articles on there such as the ones in the BBC History Section. So read through them and see how they are written. I have one hint for you, they know what they are talking about!
• John Chow – One of the most well known bloggers. You may be one of those people that do not like him, but take a look through some of his posts. They have a very unique style!
• Just Creative Design – Now here is somebody who writes carefully! Whenever you are writing, there needs to be a reason to do it. Jacob has this reason and it shows through his writing.
• Skelliewag – This is one of my favourite blogs about writing blogs. Every post is sure to help you, they all helped me! But remember, don’t just read it… examine it.
  
• Wikipedia.org – We all seem to take this site for granted. Have you actually looked at how well written most of the articles are? No wonder it is the top of it’s niche! Study the writing styles, can you tell which parts are done by different people? No? Look harder! Everyone has their own writing styles but Wikipedia is written by so many people it is very hard to tell.

Why Does It Matter?

I hear this question far too often. “Why does it matter how I write?” Well I shall be very blunt with you. If you do not write well, no one will bother to read what you write. There are also many other reasons to write well.

1. Content is King – Yes we hear it all the time. What does it mean? It does not matter what your design is like, it does not matter what your SEO is like.. if you do not write what the audience want then you will not have any readers.
2. More Backlinks – You have all seen my weekly posts on Sundays which link to my favourite posts of the week. I am not the only person who does this. If you write a good post, someone will pick up on it and will give you more backlinks. This means more readers!
3. You Are a Good Writer – You may not think this is very important, but surely it does something to your self-esteem if you are always called a bad writer? Astound the crowd! Make them see you can write well. Otherwise, why would you write?

I purposely wrote this in a way that it is not obvious how it is related to the “niche” of this blog. Think about it. It focuses on Inspiration, Motivation and Success.. how could content be related?

I shall leave it as that for now. But please keep it in mind that you need to be careful whenever you write. I shall also be remembering this and hopefully my posts will become much higher quality. Please discuss this; I would like to know you take on it and perhaps your preferred style of writing?

Thank you for reading,

Shane

Hello everybody,

These weeks are going so fast! It is time for me to start thinking of very unique content, we don’t want you to get bored do we?

Success Circuit’s Posts

Monday Organisation is Important

Tuesday What can I Watch? Edition 3

Wednesday Recession is Trendy

Thursday I Want to do Something with My Life

Friday Be Strange, Be Successful

Saturday Interview with John Meloche

Favourite Posts from Elsewhere

Monday GetBlogIdeas.Com – Hold a Conversation with Your Inner Child

Tuesday InfectedByBugs.Com – Video Blogging Basics, How To Get Started!

Wednesday G2I.Org – 2009 – the year of the Entrepreneur?

Thursday FitzVillaFuerte.Ccom-How To Build An Emergency Fund And Why It Is Important

Friday GetBlogIdeas.Com – Why Your Blog Sucks Sewer Water

Saturday ChargedAudio.Com – How important is Self-Esteem for success

Sunday ProBlogger.Net – Crawl before you walk: 6 Step-by-step Instructions for Starting your First Blog

Once again some very good posts. Please let me know if you have a new post during the week that I might like to see. Also please can I have your opinions on the new RSS style on the sidebar?

Thanks,
Shane

Hello,
Today I have another interview for you, what else would you expect on a Saturday?! This interview is with John Meloche. I shall let John explain to you what he does!

Hello John,
Thank you for agreeing to this interview.

Firstly, could you please tell us who you are?

I specialize in websites, marketing and branding consultancy. I also do custom application and software development. From my office in Toronto Canada, I design and market highly-effective websites and marketing strategies both online and offline for corporate and business clients all over the world. I currently full owner of 3 registered incorporated companies and partner of 2 other incorporated companies. My title as I like to be referred in most of my business with any of these is “Vice President of Marketing” as typically I am the point man for the companies I work with for all marketing strategies and campaigns of building business. I have been at it since 1995, when Yahoo had only just launched, most websites were text-based and Amazon, Google and eBay had yet to appear. My clients have been featured in Forbes, The New York Times, The Toronto Sun, and People magazine, Playboy Online, Up-Close Magazine, Home & Garden Television, Culinary Thymes, ABC News, The Salt Lake Tribune, Houston 11, The Washington Post, The Honolulu Star & more. My motto is “You cannot imitate what everyone else is doing and stand head and shoulders above the competition at the same time. The timid shall remain forever invisible. You must look at the competition to see what they’re not doing, instead of emulating what they do.” www.johnmeloche.com

How did you start your career? Who was your inspiration?

I have been in business since January 26th, 1995 marketing, design, copywriting and business consulting. I developed my first website in 1995. I had an entire portfolio of clients built only in GeoCities by 1997. For those who remember who GeoCities is… we probably have a few things in common such as our hatred now for GeoCities. Lol…

Did you believe you would be as successful as you are now? What were your goals to begin with?

I didn’t actually start taking my business to seriously until I started making money with it. It was only a hobby, something to make my own little projects like www.wasarrested.com and a few other hobby sites not to mention. Up until that time I used to do everything in my power to do and get everything for free hoping the next free job I do will lead to bigger and better things. Unfortunately free work never pays off. What I learned is that “barter” does. I started hosting my websites with someone I met on the internet through Yahoo chat room and I started working with him on his own website www.rebelnetworks.com. I made a few friends www.ebuddy.com and www.iloveim.com along with a few other successful website owners used every resource available to me to promote myself and my services while at the same time gaining excellent experience. If I had to choose an inspiration for what I do, I would have to say “Benjamin Franklin”. I mean the guy has his face on money! Lol… But really, I would say my inspiration would be my good friend Jason Liddard who pushed me to stop working as an electricians apprentice and pursue what I am very good at in business and marketing. My goal has always been to be the most successful person I can be. To provide myself with the lifestyle that I never knew as a kid.

At any point in your career, have you thought yourself or your company as a “failure” or had any major problems? If so how did you manage to get through this and what did you learn?

I can’t say I ever considered myself or my company a failure. I mean I am still in business and the word failure would describe an ultimate ending no? I can tell you about situations that made me think I was going to fail. Back in 1998 when I had a flourishing cache of website clients hosted on my first dedicated server I believe I was safe. Things were going great and I was gaining more clients every week. By that time I had designed about 50 websites and been paid for them accordingly. Mid December 1998 my hard-drive on my server failed. This caused me to lose everything on my server. Having the experience I do now; I have all kinds of processes in place to ensure I never go through that again. The damage of all my projects being lost, clients losing their online businesses, it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. I almost gave up the industry all together. However I realized that because of my lack of education in the industry and the fact that most of what I did was self taught, It was only my own fault for not educating myself properly how to do what I do the best i can do. I started making calls to all my clients explaining to them what the real problem was and that i wanted a chance to earn their business again with my new found understanding. Some went with me, some didn’t, but the experience itself was a very trying time for me. I would love to say that is the only time I have ever messed up, but in my industry it is bound to happen. Trials and tribulations are an everyday thing in the life of an entrepreneur. That which doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.

How did/do you go about promoting your websites?

Well… back in the day I would just barter with a website owner to post some ads for me on their websites. But then I got smart and started to use my abilities to create my own traffic friendly websites like www.wasarrested.com and back in the day when I had www.johnmeloche.com used for all sorts of silly comics a fan club and games that brought visitors every day! I would use those resources. Now, things have changed, I am much more experienced and can use the resources that make more sense. Targeted and relevant website traffic. I started to play with Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords. Although Yahoo flat out sucked. Google made me some money. I would choose only the best words, not so much a range. But I learned that it’s good to have the most key words possible. As I advanced in my experience, now I generate Organic traffic by search engine optimizing my websites. This has proven to be the most cost effective way of attaining traffic. I do however still use Google Adwords to promote some marketing campaigns; it is no longer primary source of my traffic. Now I promote most of my websites and marketing campaigns through many avenues. I do trade-shows, mailout campaigns, telemarketing, search marketing and I also do occasional advertisements directly within a relevant website.

Do you ever find that with all of your websites, you run out of time and are not able to provide for them and your other commitments as much as you should?

There is never enough time in the day for an entrepreneur. I only recently hired an assistant to work with me to help me accomplish not designing websites, but managing the projects. Now I don’t really get my hands dirty anymore. My experience now is typically best spent directing others. Making adjustments and changes is better to be done by those who are focus only on that. I work now with so many companies unrelated to websites design that i now have a staff of programmers and designers who work on my projects under my direction.

Have you any advice to give to those currently in the position you were in?

Focus on diversification and think about the big scheme of things. That which you believe the best way to be is not always that way. Think about the visitor experience. How will your visitors interpret your content? Will it be relevant? You can send 1,000,000 people to your website that sells gold rings. But if someone’s looking to adopt a pet, it’s unlikely they will buy a ring. By diversification, I mean learn a little about everything. If you do html, learn JavaScript. If you do JavaScript learn PHP, if you learn PHP learn Ajax and MYSQL, how servers work and so much so you always see the big picture!

Do you have any plans for the future?

Years ago I would have told you I wanted to retire at 21, but now I am having so much fun. My immediate goals are to continue to build on my businesses and do even more! Eventually, I want to have everything I ever dreamed of having. One day…

Thank you John, and happy birthday for the 26th!

So what do you think of that? Do you have any questions for John?

I hope you liked this interview, I know I did!

Shane

Hi,

I am not too bad on the internet, but in real life I am a very mental person. Many people think this is a bad trait. I don’t. I am 15 years of age, I do not have to be completely serious at all times! I have never liked to be normal, and you will notice that within the next few months. How could you possibly be successful, depending on which definition of it you are using, if you just follow the crowd?

Do you follow the crowd? If so… why?! If not, what do you do differently?

Now I am going to give you a few ideas that make you, well.. me, stand out from the crowd. Some will not be to do with business, blogging or even success, you will need to adapt these methods to your career.

• Imagine you are walking down town, or perhaps around your office, everyone is acting completely normal. Jump. Yes, you heard me.. jump! Sure people will look around and think your barmy but so what? You would, and I do it often, do something different to what people normally do. Some may even like the idea of getting the attention, in business that is actually a very good thing… though of course in normal life it is often frowned upon. Other funny things like this is to try shouting, in finding nemo style, “BUBBLES!!”. Methods like this do actually work as it gives you more creativity.
• Go to your favourite Social Networking site and tell the world about other peoples websites. They will recognise and appreciate you more. Also, it will probably lead to future references from them. Whether or not you believe in karma, or anything like it, this surely must be worth a go? Be nice to other people and they will be nice back!
• Be charitable. I know, sounds silly doesn’t it.. spend money to make money. But it works! Remember, charity is giving but it does not have to be money. For example, you just had a drink but you pass by a young child selling lemonade but have no customers. Instead of just passing by, you buy a lemonade and give the child advice about how to be better in business. This idea is very heavily inspired by Shannon Lilly’s post which you can find here.
• Never have a rival. In business people say that everyone has rivals. This does not have to be true, in my opinion there is no reason why you cannot help other people in your niche. Of course some people are dead set against it, but if you try hard enough the rivalry can turn to friendship fairly easily. You just need to be willing to help people, even if they are trying to beat you at something.
• Create wacky things. Are you a blogger? If so then I can almost guarantee your theme looks very similar to many I have seen before, probably even this one. As I have said, do not expect this blog to look normal for it’s whole life. Oh no. It will probably be a few months before I tell you anything more than that, but just remember… normal is not good enough.

What ideas do you have?

Thank you for reading this and please don’t leave because you have figured out that I am crazy!

Shane

Hello,

You have probably heard this saying before. I say it most days! Hopefully by now you have all read Cited Success: Learn from the masters (First Edition) which our own ebook about quotations and how they can be used in all aspects of business and life. One of the quotations in there is by a good friend of mine, James Murphy. I would like to talk about that quotation in more depth here today.

“In the world everyone has chains around their wrists and in life, you’re either a slave to somebody else or you’re strong enough to follow dreams and take control of the chains and become a master.”

James Murphy

Basically this just means you need to do something and take charge of your life rather than just letting it run it’s course. Now you should be able to understand the title. Just today (well.. yesterday for you!) I was walking around the school and thinking to myself “I want to do something with my life, not just be stuck in here”. It was not for a few more hours until I realised something that I already knew and have spoken about before… to do something with your life you need to DO something and not moan about not being able to. Of course I already knew about James’ quote and what it meant but I have realised that I need to keep it fresh in my mind at all times.

So how can I do this?

Wait a minute.. I already am doing it! I am running this blog, which hopefully will not always be classed as just a blog. So now I need to figure out how I can improve this so that it is not just another statistic. I need to take control of the chain and I need your help! This is a community, so I cannot even think about trying to do it all on my own.

Have you ever felt like this? What have you done to change it?

I would love to know your opinions on this.

Shane