A Must Read for every Aspiring Internet Marketer/Blogger. Rob Benwell’s “Blogging to the Bank” has been the blogging Bible for thousands of IM bloggers and his latest 2010 edition has received countless positive reviews from the world’s most successful and renown Bloggers.

Over the past few weeks since I set out on this venture which is ultimately to learn how to be a baby boomer internet marketer, I’ve come across quite a few unexpected hurdles. When I use the word ‘unexpected’, I do so with tongue in cheek because I knew from the onset that there would be hurdles. However I hadn’t realized that some of these hurdles would take so much time to clear.

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that so many of the free tutorials available on the net through places like U-Tube etc, are often out of date soon after they come online because the software they refer to is being constantly updated.

Such is the case with blogging. I think I also mentioned that in building this blog, I’m using wordpress which is a prime example of software being constantly updated.

As a baby boomer with no experience whatsoever with computers until well into my 50’s, getting my head around even the simplest of concepts was initially (and please excuse the pun), a real headache. I didn’t know for example that when a computer is shut down, it should always be done from the start menu, and not just by pulling the plug or using the on/off switch. It’s the simple things like that which kids have been learning at school for the past 20 years that makes new technology for some baby boomers so difficult to grasp. Read the rest of this entry

Someone sent this to me today in an email.

Considering the topic of my blog I thought I’d include it here as part of a post for those old enough to remember:

“Someone asked the other day, ‘What was your favorite ‘fast food’ when you were growing up?’
‘We didn’t have fast food when I was growing up,’ I informed him.
‘All the food was slow.’

‘C’mon, seriously. Where did you eat?’
‘It was a place called ‘home,” I explained !

‘Mum cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn’t like what she put on my plate, I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.’ Read the rest of this entry

One of the things I’ve learned over the past few days while picking up some tricks and tips on blogging, is that there is almost an endless supply of free information available on the net…….if you know where to look for it.

The problem I found is that the most common and most popular blogging platform “wordpress” is constantly upgrading and just a few days ago, WordPress updates yet again.

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It seems like just a couple of weeks ago, everyone was using version 2.8. However like all computer nerds, they are always finding better and easier ways to do things. Great for the new user when just venturing into the blogging world, as they know nothing else, but WordPress in it’s infinite wisdom decided to not only introduce version 2.9, but within a couple of weeks after finding a number of cliches, upgraded to version 2.9.1.

Even better and even more user friendly! However, all the free tutorial stuff I mentioned earlier on places like UTube etc. all becomes almost redundant if the new user is learning copycat style as I think most of us baby boomers do.

So, since I started learning to blog just a few weeks ago, I’ve actually used 3 versions of wordpress. Unfortunately it would appear, the only way around that is to actually buy the latest tutorial information.
But, all is not lost!

A fellow student of mine and “The WordPress Guru” Matt Wolfe, has recently produced some great tutorial videos and is constantly updating and adding to them.

Matt has quite a remarkable story to tell as well. As a matter fact is was Matt who put me on the road I’m on now and I can honestly say I wouldn’t be writing this post if it wasn’t for him.

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An Introduction

Note: Click here for part 2. Perceptions of the Aged

While it’s a debatable point, many believe that life and therefore aging begins at the moment of conception. What is not debatable however, is that the aging process continues over a lifetime. Each individual experiences the process in different ways depending on variables such as gender, culture, education geographical location environment and of course the culmination of life’s events and circumstances.

Improvements in public health care, living conditions, income, and the control of infectious diseases during the first half of the 20th century were important factors in determining life expectancy, while the second half yielded an increase in health technology leading to the development of antibiotics and wide spread immunization. As a result, people are now more likely to die of diseases associated with living longer such as stroke or heart disease rather than the infectious diseases of childhood. Read the rest of this entry

WIKTIONARY’S DEFINITION OF WHAT IS A WIDGET?

1.    An unnamed, unspecified, or hypothetical manufactured good or product.
2.    (graphical user interface) A component of a graphical user interface that the user interacts with.
3.    Portable code that can be easily installed and executed by an end user.
4.    A floating widget or other device inside a beer can, meant to create foam when opened
5.    A small scraping tool consisting of a blade and a handle, commonly used to remove paint from glass and other smooth surfaces.

From this baby boomer’s perspective, the above definitions meant absolutely nothing to me in that they define a widget as being not only a tangible item, but something quite intangible as well but it didn’t provide me with an acceptable answer to what is a widget? on a web page. Read the rest of this entry

A Blog is a What?

When I first heard the term blog around 5 years ago, I had no idea what a blog is. All I knew was that people were creating them and others were reading them. That dispelled the idea that a blog was something your car got stuck in, in the mud or sand with a slip of the tongue or a couple too many beers.

As a matter of fact it wasn’t until fairly recently that I learned what a blog is and that the word “blog” is sort of a one word abbreviation for a log on the World Wide Web. Hence…. web-log = blog.

Having learned what a blog is and according to all the experts, how effective they are in being so popular with the search engines, I realized that although I’d actually used the very popular blogging platform WordPress to create a static web site under my studies with Mark Ling’s AffiloBluePrint, I really needed to learn how to blog in the true sense of what blogging is all about.

So, this is what I did…..

Read the rest of this entry

Now that I have the previous post off my chest which I really needed to do I’m just going to provide a fairly brief account of what I’ve done so far.

Like many budding internet entrepreneurs, when I first looked into the idea of internet marketing, I fell for yet another ploy which I can’t really condemn as being a scam but the only thing I got from it was the realization that I was wasting my time and money with it.

It was one of those “ready made” web sites you see so often in the search engines and fluttering around social media sites such as twitter etc. Read the rest of this entry

I’m sure that 99% of the folks reading this will be familiar with what should really come next  to finish the quote. So without hammering it too much, I thought I’d just give a brief history of how and and where I started to develop an interest in Internet Marketing.

It all started when I fell for a scam.

Being a complete newbie to the internet I answered an add I found in an online version of a English written local newspaper printed in Pattaya Thailand. It was advertising for investors to start an MLM system supposedly to provide a nutritious supplementary food drink to the under nourished and under privileged children of the world, beginning with those in Northern Thailand.

The supplementary drink was that of a well known MLM herb all life product. which is as safe as I think I can come to naming it without having to worry too much about law suits. He simply replaced the labels on the canisters with his own and claimed it as his own product.

He then went to a couple of villages in the hills of  Northern Thailand and the Phillipines where he took photos and videos. The whole point of the exercise was to use the photos and videos of the product being given to children for the sake of making the website look genuine. I unwittingly personally attended one of these sessions in Northern Thailand.

At the time I had no idea of what MLM even meant but I saw it as being able to provide to a good cause with a promised return on my investment of $25,000.000
Read the rest of this entry

I created this site as an on going journal and personal record of my travels down the highways of the budding baby boomer entrepreneur internet marketer.

Apart from that being one hell of a mouthful, firstly it’s important for me to remember that one of the first things I learned is that although there is much hype about it being easy to break into this field……It’s not.

I’ve read that the cold hard facts are that 90% of people who try to make money through internet marketing….fail.

But, among the other things I’ve learned, is that if you are willing to work hard and adhere to a set plan, there is every possibility that you can make a good living as a baby boomer internet marketer.

I found that the main problem I faced (and I believe is faced by most of us baby boomers), is a lack of education in computer use and indeed the Internet and its burgeoning Internet Marketing industry.

The vast majority of us had no formal internet or computer related education at school or university simply because the technology was so new that those who did have the opportunity to learn were indeed the developers of the same technology.

My Introduction to Internet Marketing for Baby Boomers

I remember when I was about 16 years old, walking down a street in Newcastle NSW where I grew up…. with my older brother and a couple of friends who were also brothers to each other…. when we walked past a building where a couple of attractive young girls were standing out the front handing out Read the rest of this entry