Tonight I watched the movie Captain Ron again (for about the 10th time in the last 12 months) — and let my daughter Chelsea watch it for the first time. I decided the story made up for the language and the slightly inappropriate shower scene. Partly because Chelsea’s now 14, and partly because the shower scene is just darn good comedy.

The story of Captain Ron is so freaking awesome: the Harvey family of Chicago inherits an old sailboat and decides to throw caution to the wind and sail it from somewhere in the Caribbean to Miami where they will sell it. Since they’re not sailors, they hire “Captain Ron” to sail the boat and teach them how along the way.

The movie stars Martin Short as Mr. Harvey and Kurt Russell (in a Speedo) as Captain Ron. It’s a funny movie with a great moral: Get out of your rut and go DO something as a family!

When my family started this whole “living on the road thing” I hoped to be in a trailer for about a year and then graduate to a sailboat. Due to business slowing down the sailboat piggy bank hasn’t filled up yet, but I’m still working toward that.

I’m starting to feel more than a little pressure because my son Tom turned 16 last February and while I don’t know that he’ll take off as soon as he turns 18, I want to get us on a boat for a while before he is eligible to escape my clutches.

Why? Because I think people who have “typical” upbringings are at a disadvantage in life. They see things in a very narrow way which limits their choices. After all, how can you make a sharp left when everybody else is veering right if you don’t even know that left is an option?

When we started this journey we didn’t have enough money saved up. But if we had waited until things were “better” we’d never have hit the road and experienced new things…

Places

We played on the beach in Santa Cruz.

Picked oranges outside our trailer in Bakersfield.

Walked the rim of the Grand Canyon (and got some great photos).

Watched the moon rise over the Superstition Mountains (and talked about the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine hidden there).

Wandered the streets of Tombstone where the Gunfight at the OK Corral took place.

Cheered Tom as he followed in his Uncle Nick’s footsteps and chased down an armadillo (it was catch and release, folks).

Saw the Alamo where so many American heroes lost their lives.

Visited the UFO Museum in Roswell. (“UFOs aren’t real, Dad.” Five minutes later, “Are UFOs real, Dad?”)

Drove across the London Bridge (brought brick by brick from London to Arizona).

People

And we met some wonderful people on the trip, including the Sauers family in Santa Nella. We ended up parked next to each other in an RV park and while there was a pretty big age gap between their kids and ours, they were still all kids and got along pretty well. After we left we continued following their travels via their blog.

And we met — and juggled with — both members of the Raspyni Brothers. Barry invited us to his house for the day to meet his family and play and Dan let us stop by his place for some juggling and an impromptu piano concert. I’d been fans of the Raspyni Bros for-freakin’-ever, so the chance to actually spend some time with them was the coolness.

Plus many more people — the families in Bastrop, the gunfighters near Tombstone, the jugglers in Austin, etc.

When you live in a house, and go to the same job every day, and see the same people all the time, you don’t have adventures. You just skate through life. And at age 47 I’m realizing life’s too short for that kind of skating — I regret the time I didn’t spend seeing new things and meeting new people.

Which is why if we had the opportunity to move onto a sailboat tomorrow, I’d do it — even though none of us know how to sail. We’d stay anchored (mostly) until we could figure out how to work the thing, but at least we’d be on the way.

I don’t see any reason to “settle down” at this point — there are too many things to see, places to visit and people to meet. How could you trade those things for a house fastened to the ground?

Discover how to use Instant Video Web Pages to create promo pages. Promo pages can be used to sell your own product or service, or you can promote a product as an affiliate. Using promo pages is a great way to monetize IVWP!  The webinar is 30 minutes and there will be a Q&A time.

Click here for Webinar Registration

The webinar is free, but limited to 100 participants – first come, first served.

If you aren’t a member of IVWP you’re still invited – whether you use the service or not video promo pages can be used to make more money online.

In less than a month the LinkNGruven.com domain name will expire and I won’t be renewing it. And, seven of the most common spellings for LinkNGruven will also expire. (Most common spellings???)

LNG was a product that was born too early. It was a social networking application that was created before anybody knew that social networking was something to look at.

It was kind of a cross between Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon. Alas, it was not to be. And after 6 years of the domains renewing automatically, I *finally* remembered to turn off that flag. I have better things to do with that $80.

*sniff* Bye, LinkNGruven!

I’m just about done reading a book called, The Instant Millionaire. One concept in it is that as far as a job goes, you really must do something you love.

I’ve heard that before, and I can understand it completely — if you love something, it ceases to be “work.” You’d do it even if you had all the money you needed.

While I enjoy everything that I do, I started thinking about what it is that I *love* to do. If I won a $250 million Powerball Lottery what would I do each day (after the obligatory whirlwind of celebrations and meetings with financial types)? If I could do anything, what would I do?

That is a freaking hard question.

While there are aspects of each that drive me up the wall, I love:

Performing – I haven’t done this as a professional in about 20 years, but I actually dropped out of school after the 8th grade so I could perform full time. In my early 20s I got burned out because it was such a struggle to make ends meet — I had no idea at the time that MARKETING was so important.

Writing – I’ve had dozens of nonfiction articles published (and no, I don’t mean online) but I’m still a virgin as far as fiction goes. I’d *love* to write stories for people all the time.

Programming – Mainly I think it’s the ability to start with NOTHING and end up with something that other people like and use.

Marketing – This is actually similar to programming in that you can create something (sales) out of nothing. Well, you need some raw materials (product, traffic, etc.) but I think in some ways they parallel each other.

I’ve done a few other things here and there, but those are the main categories that you could fit my career path into. There have been overlaps in all of them, and some going back and forth, but that list above is in mostly chronological order.

But there are a couple other things that don’t fit into a normal career that I love doing:

Being A Dad – If money were no object I can imagine being a Dad every day, all day. I love teaching my kids new things, exposing them to new experiences, and showing them sides of life that most people just don’t see. I was thinking this isn’t a “career” but a lot of parents (mostly Moms) do it and it’s more time-consuming (and I think more rewarding) than a normal job.

Acting – This kind of fits in with performing above, but to me it’s a completely different beast. I’ve done community theatre several times and think that acting professionally (TV, movies, or stage) would be a continual blast.

Switching Isn’t Easy

As someone who sold the house and almost all belongings and moved his family into a travel trailer to see the USA, I can testify that making big moves isn’t easy — but it can be done.

However, I think switching careers is harder because you usually have to “start at the bottom” when you start a new career so your income takes a dive for a while.

In my case, the biggest reason (at this point) why I can’t switch careers is…

…I have no idea what to switch it to. =:)

I’ve been happy doing those first 4 things up there. The 5th thing (being a Dad) isn’t something that’s easy to monetize, and the last one is something that, unless you are incredibly lucky, is not something that will pay the bills very soon.

So my options for “doing what I love” means doing something I’ve already done — or coming up with something completely new.

And I’m not sure there is anything new, because if I loved doing it, wouldn’t I already be doing it?

(The last time I wrote something like this I fielded a ton of questions asking why I was thinking of quitting internet marketing. That’s not what this is about — it’s about trying to figure out who I am vs who I should be. Maybe they already match, I’m not sure. =:) )

Are you doing what you love? Let me know about it in the comments below.

It’s not public knowledge yet, but I’m partnering with someone (who you’ve heard of) to bring Instant Video Web Pages into a more visible position online.

This is a true Joint Venture — we’re combining his proven marketing expertise and my development skills and IVWP is going to be so much better as a result.

The partnership announcement will come within a week or two, I think, but until then…

…guess who it is and if you’re correct I’ll give you a 50% off coupon code for any of my other products. No limit on winners — even if multiple people guess the right guy. There’s a clue — it’s a he. =:)

You can only guess once, but if you want to change your guess that’s cool — I’ll just look at your last guess.

And, just for guessing I’ll give you a 20% off coupon code — because I’m freakin’ nice, that’s why. =:)

A landing page is a page on a web site where someone “lands” after clicking a link. In some cases it might be the main page (or home page) of the site, but in many cases a landing page is used as part of a marketing campaign and the desired action is for the person who clicked the link to sign up to an email list.

In the distant past it was enough to say you’d send the prospect more information if they signed up for the list, but that approach doesn’t work as well today. People are more wary about giving out their contact information unless they’re getting something of value in return.

One way to accomplish that is to offer some kind of “ethical bribe” if the person signs up to the list. That could be a special report or white paper with information that’s useful to the prospect. And, of course, you’ll include more information on your product or service to try and convince the prospect to buy.

So now you have a reason for the person to sign-up, but you’ll still find far more people just go away rather than giving you their email address. You need to build some trust before they’re willing to go that far.

And that’s where video comes in.

Adding video to a landing or opt-in page not only gives the prospect information in a visual manner, but hearing a real person (and seeing them, in live videos) increases the trust factor. And the more trust that’s built, the higher conversion rate you’ll have on your landing page.

In a test that just finished running I went from a 31% opt-in rate on a landing page, to a 40% opt-in rate simply by adding a short video.

There’s no guarantee that adding video to your landing page will increase your conversion rate as much as I saw — but there’s nothing saying you won’t do even better, either.

I read a blog post recently from a well-known marketer and one of the comments was from someone who shall remain nameless.

That person started a list of what new people need, and it included something that…

• automatically puts the correct keywords in a web page with the right density
• automatically submits all pages to the right search engines
• automatically creates lots of backlinks
• automatically submits videos so you can get traffic, etc., etc.

My first thought was, “Oh, and what will YOU do, just go cash the checks that come rolling in?”

My second thought isn’t fit for publication.

Hey, I’m a big believer in tools and automation; developing stuff like that is how I make my living. But reading that comment I got the impression that person had NEVER done any of that stuff before. They weren’t looking for a way to cut down the time spent on their business, they were looking for magic beans.

Should people use tools that help streamline a process? Oh, heck yeah! But not until you freaking know what the actual process is! Not until you can do the process by hand. Until then you’re basing everything on theory and not practice. You don’t have a core understanding of what’s really going on.

My kids are homeschooled and we don’t follow a specific curriculum — we’re very eclectic in our approach and don’t usually use actual school books. But I just went by the “school store” today and bought a couple workbooks for the kids to work through over the next couple months.

One of them is math. Word problems. Oh, most people hate those. But here’s how we’re working them.

After the first page or two I don’t care if they give me the answer to the problem — all I want is the correct problem broken down into an equation. For example…

“Patty’s new car can go 135 mph. If she drives two and a half hours at an average speed of 64 mph, how far will she drive?”

A correct answer as far as I’m concerned is: 2.5 X 64 =

If the kids want to give me the answer to that equation that’s fine, but after I know they have the ability to do that, all I want is the actual problem. Because that’s the point of a word problem — to be able to figure out what is needed to get the answer.

I’m okay with shortcuts — as long as the person knows how to get there using the long way.

But over and over again I see “internet marketers” who don’t have an understanding of the basics of the business and think they should be able to jump right to the head of the line.

Sidebar: If you’re getting into internet marketing by starting a company and throwing a bunch of money at the problem, I’m not talking about you. This is directed at those of us who are bootstrapping our way into the business, working on it evenings and weekends while we hold down a (for now) day job.

How Long Should It Take?

Another commenter on that same blog mentioned he’s frustrated because after 8 months he still doesn’t know how to make his web site.

Eight months? Okay, there are two options for that guy that make sense:

1. Stop banging your head against the wall and give up. Dancing with the Stars is starting in a minute, why don’t you go settle down in front of that and give it your focus.

Or…

2. Stop looking for a stinking shortcut and get to WORK.

There’s absolutely no way a typical person can’t get decent at making web sites in just a few weeks — if you stop hopping around and poking at every shiny thing out there. HTML isn’t even close to being rocket science. You can find free tutorials on the web or run down to any bookstore and buy a book on how to make a web page with HTML.

And then start working through it. As nice as it would be to gain the knowledge through osmosis, just buying the book won’t do anything for you. Now you *must* make the time to start going through the book — and actually doing the examples, etc.

Most people could go through a book like that in a month or less, even if they have a job, family, etc. And once that’s done you have a solid foundation for the rest of your online life.

If you still can’t put together an opt-in page, a down load page, etc., why don’t you do that? Maybe you’re too lazy? (Note: That fits for 99% of the cases. Maybe you’re the exception.)

If you’re not willing to put in some WORK then please stop telling people you’re an internet marketer and are building an online business. TANSTAAFL – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. If you want to reap, you’d better be prepared to sow.

“But There’s Just So Much To Do”

I’ll give you that one — kind of. There are a billion and a half things you CAN do, but not that many that you really must do.

1. You need a product to promote (either one you’ve created or as an affiliate)
2. You need a way to promote the product (typically a website)
3. You need to get traffic to that website

That’s it, you don’t NEED anything else. Yes, you should be building a list. Yes, you should tweak and test your website to make it convert better. Yes you should be doing everything else.

Later. Not now.

If you don’t have those three things SOLID, then stop flailing around at everything else and just DO THOSE THREE THINGS until you have those things firmed up.

Each of those steps will be the subject of an upcoming article and we’ll go in depth on each.

Hey, there’s no way I’d suggest I have all the answers, but I have some of them and I don’t mind telling on myself when I’ve made bonehead moves — there’s no sense in you falling into the potholes if I can steer you around them.

Internet marketing, and business in general, isn’t a “one size fits all” endeavor, but there are certain foundational aspects that will serve you well into the future. At the same time, if you don’t have that foundation, anything you build is not going to be stable enough to keep growing and making more money.

Have you decided to stop darting off in every direction at once and work on building a real business? If you’re not willing to do that, do yourself and your family/friends a favor — stop poking at this internet marketing and free up your time for other things that everyone will enjoy more than watching your blood pressure spike.

It might sound kind of weird because I created the product, but Instant Video Web Pages is the tool I’ve been waiting for. As I was playing around with the Template Editor this afternoon I realized a lot of the other tools I’ve created were just practice for IVWP.

Here’s why…

While the primary purpose of Instant Video Web Pages is to create video sales letters and video opt-in pages, with the addition of the Template Editor I can now very quickly create pages without video. So all those other pages that we need — thank you pages, download pages, etc., can quickly be generated with IVWP.

Honestly, I’m not a stranger to creating web pages — I’ve been doing it since somewhere around 1994. Give me a nickel for every web page I’ve created over the years and I’ll send you a postcard from my yacht in the Caribbean.

But just because I do it doesn’t mean I like spending the time. And that’s why IVWP is such a killer product.

I made it easy enough for nontechnical people to put up video web pages — but it’s also for technical people who don’t have enough time to do everything from scratch.

The official launch of Instant Video Web Pages is coming up around the first of May. Until then I’m upgrading people from the Standard to the Plus plan at no extra charge. But when it launches, that special deal is over.

I just spent the last 8-10 days working too many hours every day, but I added three VERY cool features to Instant Video Web Pages, plus…

…I gave it a complete makeover. Before, it was functional and okay. Now it’s functional and COOL!

Here’s a very quick video that will show you what it looks like on the inside…

Video marketing isn’t the practice of trying to market and sell videos, it’s using video to promote a product or service. Just like article marketing has you writing an article that’s designed to sell a product, video marketing works the same way.

You record a video on a given topic and if people want more information, you give them a web page link where they can find out more, or purchase the product.

Most people think it’s easier to write a blurb about a product than to shoot some video, but there are some big reasons why video marketing should be a much used tool in your marketing efforts. Let’s look at just two of them:

1. It’s quickly becoming a world of video. While audio and print aren’t going away, more and more people are turning to video, not only for entertainment, but also for information. In fact, more and more online retailers are using video to help sell items, and studies show those people who watch the videos are more likely to buy.

While video isn’t a requirement, folks are starting to expect video on a site and if it’s not there, they may wonder why.

2. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth? There are many cases where a 1-2 minute video can cover more ground than a full page article. If you’re thinking of buying something, would you rather see a video of what it looks like and does, or read a description of it?

The same goes for tutorial, or informational videos. Tying to teach someone to hold a tennis racket correctly can be done using video far faster than trying to explain it using text.

Okay, if video is so good, why isn’t everybody using it? While there are many reasons, I think it usually boils down to one of these two:

1. Making videos requires _______. You can fill in that blank with many things, from “expensive equipment,” to “specialized training,” to “too much time.” But all of those are just excuses, none of them are true. You can create screencast videos (recordings of your computer screen) using free software. You can learn how to do that in a couple evenings, and once you’ve demolished that learning curve, you can crank out a good video in less time than it takes to write a decent article.

2. Putting video online is too hard – I’m not technical. While it’s true that being a technical geek can be helpful, there are copy-and-paste templates available that make putting video online very quick and easy. And once again, after you learn it one time, you’re set for life.

Video marketing has been proven to increase sales and sign-ups and if you’re not using it for your internet marketing business, you’re losing out on profits that could be going into your pockets.