The Worlds Scariest Footpath

Nothing to do with Internet Marketing, or Christmas, or the New Year. But I stumbled upon what I think is a very cool Youtube video, so I thought I’d share it with you all. If any of you know of any scarier footpaths just let me know 😉

2009 – The Year In Review

It’s December 14th, and I’ve decided that this is going to be my last blog post of 2009. I’ve got quite a lot of things to finish off before now and the end of the year, so I thought I’d get the blog post in early before I forget about it.

I’m afraid I’m going to do one of those corny “look back at the past year” posts, but I’ll try and sneak some useful information in there as well.

The year started off in January, and……okay, I don’t think this format is going to work. Can any of you actually remember what you did in January, because I don’t have a clue?!?

Instead of going month by month, and making things up. I’ll just write about everything that comes to mind, no matter what part of the year it happened in.

And the first thing I’m going to write about is the growth of D9 Hosting. I wont go into immense detail, but D9 Hosting was started back in 2007 by myself, and my business partner, Paula Brett. We started out with the intention of hosting a small number of our marketing friends and clients on a reseller hosting account, but since then things have snowballed.

2009 was certainly the year D9 Hosting came to the forefront, in previous years my main source of online income was from my other projects, and D9 Hosting was there as a nice little earner in the background. But in 2009 this changed, D9 Hosting has gone from a small 25 GB reseller account, to a multi server network (another server has just been added today!), responsible for hosting thousands of websites, for individuals and businesses all over the world.

In April of this year we formed D9 Solutions Ltd. which is the holding company for D9 Hosting, and other “secretive” D9 projects 😉

We are delighted that D9 has become a six figure business in 2009, and we couldn’t have done it without all of our clients. I know a lot of you reading this are customers, so I want to say a big, personal thank you, to each and every one of you for making it possible, we couldn’t have done it without you.

We look forward to working with you in 2010 and beyond!

So that’s D9 off the checklist, what next?

Next up, I’ll focus on some of the big launches that I worked on in 2009.

If memory serves me correctly, which it probably doesn’t, I think the first major launch I got on board with in 2009 was Resell Rights Fortune by Socrates Socratous.

This wasn’t just a product I was promoting as an affiliate, Socrates used my Boomerang List Builder software in the pre-launch. During the launch period you could get my BLB software for free, in return for an opt-in. So that clever piece of integration marketing grew my mailing list by thousands, and continues to get me new subscribers every day.

The actual launch was a big success, and I did quite well in the JV contest, winning plenty of prizes and bonus items.

The next big launch I covered was quite recent – Multi Profit Websites. (MPW)

This was created by John Thornhill and Dave Nicholson (who I met in person for the first time back in April), I first heard about MPW a couple of years ago, but since then it had morphed into the mother of all plug ‘n play websites, and it was finally ready to launch at the end of October.

The launch was one of the biggest I’ve ever seen, from memory I think it must have been the most successful launch I’ve been involved in as an affiliate from an earnings, and customer satisfaction point of view. I think a lot of my success with that one, and subsequent promotions, was due to the influx of subscribers I received from the Resell Rights Fortune pre-launch…thing.

I’d strongly urge any of you looking to build a mailing list to try something similar, it did wonders for me!

Come to think of it, I can’t actually remember any other “big” launches that I was involved in, that’s not to say there wasn’t any, just that I can’t remember them right now. Other products worth a mention include:

Internet Selling For Newbies
Guru Bypass
Auction Income Formula (Just released)

There were also some great little items from Aaron Danker that I can’t for the life of me remember the name of, sorry Aaron!

Apologies if I’ve missed anything off the list, but as you may have noticed. I have the memory of a goldfish….what happens if a goldfish suffers from short term memory loss?

Those (D9, affiliate marketing) were my 2 main sources of income for 2009. I did have my own product in the pipeline, and it still is, but D9 really has taken up almost all of my time over the past 12 months so my product has been put on the side for now, but one day, I’m sure it will be released….maybe 😉

Before I sign off for the year, I’m going to have a mini rant on something I’ve seen appearing more and more towards the end of this year – WordPress Spam Blogs!

For me as a web host, and a regular blog reader, I can’t stress how much these types of blogs get on my nerves, there are no redeeming factors for them!

The sort of “Spam blogs” I’m referring to are the “auto-content post” blogs. You can download/buy plugins that allow the blog owner to specify subjects that they’d like the posts to be on, how often they’d like new content posted, and they’ll then pull content from a number of other websites and stick it on the blog.

You can also get plugins that add posts based on the keywords visitors used when finding your blog. So if someone found my blog on Google by searching for “Dan Thompson’s magical circus of dancing bananas”, the script would automatically make a number of posts about Bananas – it’s pointless!

Not only is it pointless, but it puts a massive strain on the server load with all the crazy auto-posting going on, but that’s my problem, not yours, so I wont go into that aspect of them 🙂

Think of it as if you were the visitor, what would you do when you landed on a blog with content that you can clearly see is spam – you’ll leave. If you want people to visit, and most importantly, read the content on your site – give them good content! Don’t be lazy and rely on some script to post crap to your blog, you’re wasting your time, if you are really that bad at writing, hire a ghost writer.

End of rant 🙂

Also before I go, a special thanks to all the following people who’ve helped me, or worked with me in some way in 2009:

Paula Brett, John Thornhill, Dave Nicholson, Dan Sumner, Omar Martin, Dan Howard, Socrates Socratous, Aaron Danker, Pat Graham, Collete Jones, My Dog, Alex the designer, Bach the programmer, Elmer Hurlston, and many, many more!

I’d also like to say a big “No Thanks” to Natwest/Streamline who have been beyond useless in the past year, no Christmas gifts for them!

And i think that brings to an end my reflections on 2009, do feel free to share any of your own experiences/achievements/annoyances about things that have happened over the past year in the comments section!

And I wish each and every one of you, a very, very, happy festive season and new year, and I’ll back back in 2010!

Regards,
Dan