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Micro Preemie Baby TJ - Update and Thanks
I am going off topic here but it is important, and the easiest way for me to reach everyone who may wish to read it.
Both Nikki and I wanted to express publicly our thanks to everyone who has sent words of encouragement and prayers for Baby TJ. The last three months have been a rollercoaster ride for me and Nikki and although the ordeal is far from over, we do not have the words to express our appreciation to countless people who have been there for us in innumerable ways.
So many kind and generous folks have offered up prayers and support that it is almost impossible to know where to begin. We owe huge debts of gratitude to the people of the Cayman Islands for their fundraising efforts on TJ's behalf - particularly to Geraldine Morgan and Steve Byars of the Morgan gallery for their tireless and selfless work in organizing TJ's raffle and the upcoming art show fundraiser. Also to Luigi for his amazing contributions by way of the sunset cruise and his unstinting support of TJ's cause. To Nassaria, Randy and all our friends who have been there for us all the way, to all the artists in Cayman who are contributing work, time and effort to the show and to the amazingly generous response of all the good people of the Cayman Islands. To the Cayman press and television stations who have rallied round and broadcast news of our story to such a wide audience and to every single person back home who has offered a prayer or even a passing thought to our son's struggle.
Thanks to all of our family members who have shown such love and concern for our welfare and that of our baby. The gifts, both small and large have been beacons of happiness as we continue on this unexpected journey. The phone calls, letters, emails and messages on Facebook etc. have given us cause for much joy and we feel truly blessed to know you all.
Our thoughts are with everyone back home on the island in the face of approaching tropical storm or hurricane Gustav - you are now in our prayers too and we are hoping that everyone will come through safe and without loss of any kind. Please stay safe.
We also owe a debt of thanks to the Cayman Islands government, the medical and administrative staff at George Town hospital, the air ambulance pilots and doctors, the staff at Canadian Insrance Company CINICO and the wonderful help and advice we received from Child and Family services on the island.
In Florida we cannot praise highly enough the doctors and nurses at both Mount Sinai Medical Center and Miami Children's hospital for their expertise, their care and their love. We could not have asked for more wonderful or caring people to be looking after our son'e every need, as well as those of the frazzled parents. Also the administrative staff at both hospitals for all the fighting you have done in our corner and all that you continue to do to ensure that TJ thrives and grows. To Doctor Ramon Ferra who delivered TJ, to doctors Adams and Zabbaletta in the NICU at Mount Sinai and to the nursing staff - thank you all so much for everything - your caring goes way beyond a job.
the staff at Dollar Rent A Car in Miami Beach have been hugely accommodating, going way beyond the call of duty and customer care to ensure that we have stayed mobile throughout our ongoing stay and managed to show the caring face of car rental :-)
We are hugely indebted to the United States of America and its people and care systems, without which our micro preemie baby could simply not have survived. Also to the people of Florida who have shown us such a welcome wherever we go.
Special thanks are also due to Ernie and Nanlin who took us in over three months ago and have allowed us to live under their roof for so long. Without their help we simply could not have stayed in the US and been in a position to visit our baby every single day. These are the acts of kindnes that can never be repaid or forgotten.
The list of names, people and places is long but we believe that every act, small and large, has contributed to the survival of baby TJ as well as going a long way to maintaining our own sanity and sense of perspective. The birth ofd any child is a life altering event, and yet we feel that our little miracle, conceived and born against such insurmountable odds, has been the catalyst of so any blessings for so many people, and has shown us a side of the human spirit that leaves us speechless.
As you can guess, we feel humbled by the experiences of the past three months and we have seen so much evidence of the goodness in the hearts of so many. God bless you all. We cannot wait for the day that TJ can come home to Cayman and take his place in such a great country and community of generous and kind people.
If I have forgotten to mention any individuals or entities in this post, please excuse my ommission, as you can tell, we owe so much to so many: family, friends and strangers alike.
And so to the star of the show......baby TJ (Terrence James) who was born at just one pound and four ounces on 31st May. After three months, heart surgery and huge medical bills, the little fighter now weighs 3 pounds and 6 ounces. Last Saturday he took it upon himself to remove the tube from his ventilator and is now breathing for himself with the benefit of extra oxygen. He continues to grow and has become loved by the staff who have nurtured him in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit. Our dream of taking him home comes closer with the passing of each and every day, and although he still has mountains to climb, our faith and hope sustain us in the belief that he was meant to be here all along.
For anyone who has gone through anything similar, or indeed is going through it right now, we hope our story so far will inspire you, and that this small measure of thanks will get to the people who so richly deserve our praise and appreciation. The road long and the worries and concerns sometimes seem insurmountable, but we view the rewards as priceless and the lessons learned have lifted us in spirits and filled our lives beyond measure.
So, thanks from the bottom of our hearts to everyone who has seen fit to bless our little family.
Much Love, Bless
Mo, Nickola and TJ
FOOTNOTE - You can also read The Caymanian Compass article on Baby TJ's story recently published online.
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Promoting Clickbank As An Affiliate?
In my last post I mentioned that I was going to talk about the methods I use online to promote some of my affiliate programs. As many marketers start out with Clickbank's range of digital products I am going to reveal the systems and tools I use to earn regular commissions through this well known network.
I do not claim to be a master of Clickbank and don't earn thousands of dollars a day/week/month through their affiliate program, but I do make regular sales of their digital information products. With around 10,000 products on offer, the Clickbank marketplace does offer a huge range of downloads on a wide variety of subjects and yet many people struggle to make any inroads with the program. Some people will tell you that as a beginner, there are better affiliate programs to try than Clickbank and I would agree that it is not as easy to make money as a CB affiliate as some would have you believe.
The following tips may help you to start making some inroads. I have used and still use all of these resources with varying levels of success, many are free although some offer paid upgrade options.
OTO Goldmine - it was this program that quickly started producing some successful results for me, simply by using the free membership option. OTO Goldmine allows you to use a variety of methods to promote packaged software and digital info products sold through the Clickbank network. I use this system for a number of one time offer pages through internet giveaway sites as well as to my mailing list subscribers. (if you want to see it in action you can sign up to any of my newsletters through the free products in the right hand sidebar or check out my post on free listbuilding) You can also incorporate a wide range of offers into your own site's error pages. The system is free and very flexible and there is also a paid upgrade option giving you even more ways to earn Clickbank commissions.
SearchFeast is a Clickbank search engine and as the name implies allows users to incorporate a Clickbank Search feature on any site just by adding a line of code. There is a pop under feature available which enables webmasters to insert a line of code onto any site and provides one more way of directing visitors to the Clickbank marketplace. This will not work for web surfers who disable pop ups in their browsers but is not too intrusive for those who don't and will only appear once in any browser session. i have not been using this for very long so if anyone else has any feedback please speak up.
CBPro Ads is an excellent Clickbank storefront and contectual advertising system. There are both free and paid options and even if you don't have a website of your own you can still use your own storefront as a way to generate more Clickbank sales. The upgraded option offers a host of advertising options for bloggers and webmasters including scrolling and image ads as well as the traditional text ads. A good alternative to PPC ads such as Adsense and can generate regular commissions for those with steady traffic. You can also use category specific storefront pages on a large number of topics from Adsense Tools right through the alphabet to Women's Health so no matter what you blog about there is something for you and your readers. At the time of writing you can see CBPro running ads on this very blog. I am an upgraded member of the site and happy to put my money where my mouth is :-) but is is very inexpensive for a year's pro membership.
CB Globe is another Clickbank portal and is free to join. The site will give you a free ClickBank portal (see demo CB portal here) to install on any webpage and also offeres a generic Clickbank storefront for those without sites of their own. There are several free Clickbank storefronts but this is about the best I have found in terms of functionality and features at zero cost. You can also ad Clickbank text ads to your sites and choose to display by product category and customize the ads appearance to suit your pages.
I have written several posts on Clickbank since this blog began - just do a search in the right hand sidebar for more Clickbank related posts. There are also some more useful free tools on offer in my sidebar including viral tools to help you grow your own Clickbank footprint. Things like the UltimateSupertip are another way to improve your Clickbank sales virally and with very little cost.The brainchild of Clickbank Expert Harvey Segal, you can rely on it being packed with valuable information.
I have not mentioned PPC campaigns for the simple reason that it is a whole topic on its own. I have run a few moderately successful PPC ads using Clickbank products but competition is often fierce and PPC is not for the fainthearted or inexperienced (I include myself in that category). These ideas may not catapult you to Clickbank riches but they should definitely help you to make some decent additional money. Like everything else you will need to do some promotion but things like OTO Goldmine and the contextual advertising systems are pretty much set and forget.
Visit the store for even more Clickbank related software and programs
If you have used any of these before please let me have your feedback and if you decide to give any a go your thoughts and experiences are always welcomed.
TCH
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Top Secret Magic Code Review
I don't often write reviews of products like the Top Secret Magic Code but decided to make a rare exception for this particular ebook. (I have not included an affiliate link in view of my comments).
Sold through Clickbank the book has been swamping inboxes and online ads for the past few weeks and by all accounts is selling well. So, is it worth your money?
I would have to say that depends on a number of things. The book has been produced by the author of the (in)famous "Get Google Ads Free" and the sales material follows the same well worn path of fantastical claims and hype. I bought the book through my own link, purely for research reasons because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
The book is short and to the point which works in its favor, but does it really reveal anything new? Sadly, for anyone familiar with selling advertising space online, not really. After a bit of fluff and filler about Google Adsense, the author goes on to recommend alternatives and provides a list of companies offering to sell advertising space on your blogs/websites on your behalf, complete with his referral links for each.
In short, that's about it as far as the secret magic code goes. If you are completely new to the web and have never before heard of selling ad space on your sites, I guess the ebook could save you some research time but beyond that it doesn't live up to the sales copy.
Does this make it a bad deal?
Well, it wouldn't be the first internet marketing product to make claims that stretch the boundaries a little. There is nothing dishonest about the ebook, it will tell you how and where you can sell ad space and set your own prices for those ads. To suggest that it will make you rich may be stretching things a little - sure if you are Alexa you may be able to sell an ad space on your front page for $15K a month, but as a smaller webmaster or blogger, you cannot command such lofty figures. However, selling adspace is always a good way to bring in some extra cash from even a smaller site and you can often quite legitimately use these services in conjunction with Adsense if you are a publisher.
There is a little more to the content of the book, a section on "arbitrage" is what it really amounts to; offsetting PPC costs by selling advertising space and directing traffic to specific landing pages, an idea which some will already be familiar with.
All in all, it's a short and to the point ebook which will definitely teach some people people something. The author claims to have made a lot of money using his techniques but whether you will be able to duplicate his alleged success is impossible to predict.
This is where the sales copy outstrips the content of the book IMHO. Let's just say that you will need to invest time and money to produce the claimed results, not just add a line of code to your site - and that is no real secret!
TCH
Search The Entire Clickbank Product Inventory Here
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Internet Marketing Tips - FREE
One of the biggest problems that most people encounter when trying to market something online is promotion. A great product or service will never make you any money unless you can get the word out to a large number of people. In the weeks ahead, once I have returned to a more solid working environment, I am planning to talk a great deal more about how I promote a wide range of things on the internet and what has or hasn't worked for me in the past.
However, not wanting to let the blog get too stale while I am sitting in Miami Beach, I've decided to share a few very useful digital products with my readers, most of whom are here because they want to make money online.
Today's offering is an entirely free ebook entitled 101 Supertips. This is not the same as the incomparable Ultimate Supertip, although it comes from the same author, marketing expert Harvey Segal, and to get your copy you will need to register with your name and email address. The book is available in both PDF and .exe format and contains, as the title suggests, 101 Internet Marketing Tips.
If you have never read any of Harvey's ebooks, I cannot recommend them highly enough and over the years his advice has helped me to make a success of several of my own marketing efforts. Everybody can learn something from this book, and, to make it even more appealing, you will be able to rebrand your copy and use it for whatever purpose you wish - listbuilding, a free gift for blog subscribers, or just as a worthy title for anyone you want to help out.
The book offers a lot of information on subjects including
# Newbies
# Affiliate Programs
# Web design and content
# Website promotion
# Merchant selling
# Ebook publishing
# Theme sites
# Ezine Publishing
# Security and recovery
# Experts
# Productivity Ideas
and much more. As internet marketing ebooks go, you will be very pleased to have this one in your collection, no matter what your level of experience. Click on the cover image above to get your free copy of 101 Supertips and please give me your feedback once you have had a chance to read it - I guarantee you will learn something new.
Other free books in the series can be downloaded from the links below and include:-
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Best Wordpress Plugins - Psychic Search
As my regular readers know, this is not a Wordpress blog but I do run others and am always keen to try out new Wordpress Plugins.
Psychic Search is a recent discovery and has been delivered by the people over at Max Blog Press who have already designed some really useful plugins for Wordpress users.
The idea behind Psychic Search is to help bloggers know what people are looking for when their visitors drop by. We can all look at out server stats or Google Analytics to see what searches have brought people to our blogs, but what about once they are there? If you have a search box on your blog, as you should have, wouldn't it be great to know what searches people are making directly from your pages? Wouldn't it be a great help to tailor some content to the most popular searches people are making on your site?
Well, now you can with the new Psychic Search Wordpress Plugin. It's simple to install and use and works like a charm. As with most WP plugins it is free to download and you can't say fairer than that. Very useful and highly recommended - way to go Max Blog Press!
TCH
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