My Take On Windows 8 For Business Use
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Windows 8 simulation
It’s been a long hard journey for me finding a PC set-up for business that I’m happy with and I can’t believe that it has ended up with a Microsoft PC!
Many years ago,we used to have a big PC stuck on a desk in the corner of the living room.
It was a family PC, powered by a dial-up connection (read about them in the history books kids!) and we all used to take turns to use it and cram what we wanted to do into our allocated hour.
When I started up a business as a sole trader in 2008, I did a local business course and as part of that we got a small start-up fund … £750 if my memory serves me correctly.
At the time, laptops were just becoming affordable (read about expensive laptops in the history books again kids!) so I bought a Windows XP Dell laptop (pictured below as it used to appear on my blog header) which cost around £500 at that time.
The biggest advantages at that time were that it was:
1) Portable
2) Mine
3) Pretty powerful (at that time) with plenty of storage (500 GB sounds about right)
PaulTeague.com old blog header immortalising my XP machine which has now been recycled by a charity.
Also, please bear in mind that in the context of operating systems, XP was pretty excellent post-Service Pack 2, we’d all had the life frightened out of us by Vista, and our confidence had therefore been shaken in whatever Microsoft was going to come up with next.
So for a long time I was happy with my XP laptop and it served me faithfully as I blundered my way through trying to learn internet marketing.
However, in 2010 when I left work to start running my business seriously, I really should have taken that as the prompt to upgrade.
My Love Affair With Windows XP
My MacBook Air … now passed on to my wife, who loves it.
Instead, because I was just too busy at the time to even consider changing my PC, I tolerated a slowing, unresponsive XP system which had seen better days … my laptop actually took about 10 minutes to boot up … seriously!
And it weighed so much compared to the slimline units that had since become available.
In December 2011, wishing the original XP could be upgraded to ‘XP 2011′ , and with old Photoshop and Dreamweaver software that desperately needed replacing, I decided to buy into the hype and invest in a Mac.
You can read about the whole sorry experience here
My dislike of Macs resulted in lots of defensive comments from Mac lovers – and my wife absolutely loves that laptop – but in fairness, the error was mine, it was not suitable for the hammering I gave it.
By the way, I also won an iPad in that period in an affiliate contest – but I hated that too and gave it to my wife … who has now given it to my daughter. We believe in recycling in our family 
My Fatal Error (Maybe Fatal Is Too Strong A Word!)
At this stage I should have bought a twin screen desktop PC.
My Windows 7 Ultrabook
Because in the way that laptops had come down in price in 2008, desktop PCs in comparison to laptops were now souped-up super computers and amazingly cheap into the bargain.
I loved the speed and lightness of the Mac, so I took the things that I loved about that machine and went back to Windows 7, in the form of a new Ultrabook.
And having used the Mac operating system, Windows 7 suddenly made great sense … and I fell in love with Microsoft all over again.
I happily used my Ultrabook as my main machine for several months, until I went laptop shopping with (and for) my son and finally – after all that time away from desktop PCs – realised that I could get a beast of a machine for £1000 or thereabouts, much less than I’d paid for that Mac two years previously.
And now, I love my new machine – even though I was nervous about embracing Windows 8 so early (experience has taught me to wait for Service Pack 1 or beyond!)
My Final PC Configuration For My Business
So, after 5-6 years working away – most of it part time – on my internet business, I finally have what I consider to be the ideal tech set-up for my business.
This is what it looks like:
Main machine: A Dell XPS 8500 with 12288MB memory, Intel® Core™ i7-3770 Processor (3.40GHz, 8MB) and 2TB (7,200rpm) SATA Hard Drive with Windows 8
Travel machine: Samsung NP530U3B Ultrabook with Windows 7
Phone: Samsung Galaxy S3 (which replaced my low battery life HTC Desire … don’t get me started on that!)
So, with that kit, I am finally happy … it does everything I want, when and where I want and using cloud storage for everything as I now do, multi-device working is simple.
Phew! It only took me 5 years to get there
Windows 8 Is The New XP (and Windows 98 Before That!)
My new Windows 8 PC at my desk – I was a bit worried it wasn’t going to fit for a while!
So, what do I love about Windows 8 … and why am I so surprised that I love it?
Well, for starters, I love that animated panel (see top image), it really works for me.
It’s intuitive, informative and easy to use.
However, the first thing I did was to make my toolbar look like Windows XP and Windows 7 … getting rid of that start button is fine for mobiles and tablets but a big ‘no,no’ for devices which are largely not used on a ‘touchscreen’ basis.
I believe that Microsoft are putting the start button back in the first service pack, but in the meantime I have used the rather excellent http://startisback.com/
Speed and performance, as well as storage space are more than adequate, installation is so easy these days (remember doing it via a CD/DVD?) and I love, love, love having everything on Dropbox, so I just download my whole life in the background while I got on with something else.
And that takes me to the other important move that Microsoft has now made, and that’s moving everything into the Cloud with Skydrive and its suite of Office tools.
I love having a family licence that extends across all of my machines, that really works for me
So this sorry tale of laptop loving and loathing does have a happy ending at last … I now have kit that it well up to the job … and the job of being an internet marketer has become considerably easier as a consequence.
Just don’t get me started on the battery life of an HTC Desire!
New Social And Digital Marketing Service At Clixeo.com!
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I started this blog as a bit of an experiment in 2008, not really sure if I’d keep it up!
In these pages I charted the first money I ever made online, a few dollars from a Pay-Per-Click advert.
The interested reader will be able to chart my online journey from Website-Academy.com – my first ever web frontage as a sole trader straight out of a local ‘set up your own business’ course.
A Site Build It! website followed and I still recommend that product for complete beginners with no technical or web knowledge whatsoever, it’s a great place to start.
That Web-Work-At-Home.com website still generates an income for me, even though I haven’t created new content on it for a couple of years now.
Using SiteBuildIt! I learned all the basic principals of working online – things like keyword research, which keywords to select and use, how to SEO a page – and lots more, learning that I still use most days.
But it was when I discovered Joint Venture Giveaways that things really took off for me.
I started to participate in them, then create digital products for them, then I started hosting events.
Not only did I start to make more money than I’d ever been able to generate online before, I also started to build my list of subscribers into the thousands.
I signed up to Chris Freville’s Mastermind Group and we ended up collaborating on a Clickbank launch with Auto Cash Funnel – that launch made thousands of sales (I stopped watching the emails at 8500 sales or thereabouts!).
Chris and I did a couple of launches together – notably 7 Figure Success Formula which is a really great product of which I’m very proud – we put some great coaching in there – and Limitless Profits, in which is concealed an amazing software product.
Chris and I still work together – you won’t really see my name splashed everywhere these days – but that has continued to be a productive working relationship for us both.
After I launched Auto Cash Funnel – and having worked as a broadcaster for the past 20 years – it bothered me that although I was able to generate income on the web, I wasn’t building a business for myself.
There’s a big difference between earning money in one-off situations, and building a vehicle that can pay you time and time again and which you may also be able to sell on eventually.
When I started work on my Fast Fan Pages software product, that was an attempt to build a residual income and a high quality product that would get me out of the ‘crash and burn’ of continual online launches.
That software has become quite a beast now and it is around that investment and innovation that I plan to take my business forward now and build a real business, a corporate business that specifically targets business customers.
So, Clixeo.com is that business, and this project is a collaboration between me and Patrick Lodder who codes this amazing software.
Clixeo.com is not IM … it’s me throwing my hat on the ground and saying ‘I want to build a proper business’ … and this is where I’m now heading to achieve that goal.
Our first customer has been Chris Farrell who is using the white label software as ‘Fan Page Daddy’ … you won’t see my name anywhere near that product, it’s all Chris’s, but it’s Clixeo that’s powering the product in the background.
So for that reason, much of my personal blogging and posting effort will now be diverted to The Clixeo Notebook where I won’t be blogging – as such – but posting snippets of useful digital and social marketing information.
So if you want to stay up to date with that content, information and updates, please subscribe to the Clixeo RSS feed and I’ll be happy to share the latest news in social and digital marketing with you.
However, if you’re stumbling across this blog and taking the first steps in your own journey online, everything is in these pages … from my first $7 earned via Pay-Per-Click, through to my JV Giveaway experiences, my Clickbank launch and software products … you can chart the entire journey to date here.
Start To Make Money Online FOR FREE Starting TODAY!
By · CommentsI know that headline sounds like a bold claim, but it’s true!
I have read two articles over the past 24 hours which got my brain chugging away … and I actually realised that it’s possible nowadays to launch an internet business with all the things that you need to make money online at no cost whatsoever.
Now before I tell you how, I want to add an essential disclaimer to this, because as with all things in life, it’s not quite that simple.
What I’m not saying here is that you can grab these free tools and you’ll be a millionaire overnight.
Business plans do not work unless we do!
Nor can you do this with zero skills … if you’ve never worked online before, you will need to learn some basic skills, either by getting a mentor, or teaching yourself via readily available online resources.
The key points that I do want to want to stress here though are:
1) You really can get started for free (so stop buying expensive products that you don’t need!)
2) These free resources really are good enough for you to start to make money online (you can upgrade when you’re generating an income!)
3) You have no excuse not to give this a try if you need to generate an extra income source … all you need to add is time and effort and commitment for it to work.
So how do you make money online for free?
Here are the two posts that I just read that got me thinking about this.
The first was called Here’s How To Start A Business For $100 and you’ll see that I even added a comment at the end of that post.
The second item you can see on the left … it was a Facebook post by a UK marketer who I’ve followed for several years now, Lee McIntyre.
Lee boils the online process down to three steps:
1) Create an offer
2) Build a system to sell that offer
3) Drive web traffic to that offer
So how do we put Lee’s 3-point system together with Natalie Sisson’s in her article about getting started for only $100 … and is it really possible to reduce that $100 budget even further?
Make money online from today with these FREE tools
The first thing on Lee’s list is to create an offer.
How do you do that for free?
Well, there are two resources that I recommend to ‘beginners’ time and time again – because they’re free and because they work.
Not in a ‘press a button and you’ll be a millionaire at the end of the week’ kind of way – please don’t continue reading if you think that can be done, because it can’t!
So, to create an offer, use these free resources:
1) Resell Rights Weekly … monthly updates and ready-made e-books which you can give away for free or charge a small fee. Go for items labelled ‘Master Resale/Giveaway Rights!
2) Instant Squeeze Page Generator … generates an opt-in page for you (example here created in 2 minutes) and automatically generates the download link to add to the first email that your new subscribers receive (example here).
You’ll notice that before you get your hands on your free e-book, you’re sent via an upsell offer … if your prospect goes on to buy, you take a commission.
See why I recommend that product now 
By the way, all of these offers will make what are called upsells …. you don’t need them (not yet anyway!) just scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the ‘No Thanks!’ buttons to claim your valuable free access.
Next, we need to build a system to sell that offer … and this is where we move on more to Natalie’s blog post about getting started online for $100.
Step 1: We need a Paypal account … that’s free of course and an essential item for any online marketer.
Once you have a Paypal account, also check out Payspree.com and JVZoo.com because on those two sites you’ll find great offers which you can promote for high commissions.
Step 2: You need an auto responder to capture the names and email addresses of people who buy from you or visit your web pages.
If you capture this information it means that you can market to them time and time again, potentially making more money from repeat buyers.
The best free autoresponder which allows you to send up to 12,000 free emails per month to up to 2000 people is Mailchimp.
Now remember what I said about business plans not working unless we do?
Well, you are going to have to do some learning about auto responders, but guess what?
That’s free too!
Just access Mailchimp’s learning resources here and the academy here.
Step 3: Now here’s where you need to build up a circle of online web sites, as these will feed very much into Lee’s final point about driving traffic to your online offers.
So, to get started, you need at the very least:
A blog (see below)
A Twitter account – get one free here
A GooglePlus account – get one free here
A Facebook Fan Page – get one free here
You’ll need to build a blog as you develop your online business – my own blog has been running since 2008, when I first started to work online with a view to generating income from it.
So can you really get started for free?
Yes you can … you really should buy a domain name for your blog (it should be your own name, or the name of your business) but I’m assuming zero cost in this blog post – because I’m trying to make a point here – so here’s how you get around that!
000WebHost.com gives you free hosting with no adverts – perfect!
Even better though, and it’s the only hosting service I know that does this (please leave a comment below if you know of any others!) it also allows you to create a free web site with a blogging facility built in with no technical skills required – it’s all ‘drag and drop’ and WYSIWYG … and no adverts.
I created a quick example in 2 minutes here
So we now have our free system in place, with which we can:
1) Create free and engaging content and information (on our web site, via our Twitter/Facebook/GooglePlus accounts)
2) Capture email addresses and send follow up emails and offers to people who engage with us (via Mailchimp)
3) Create multiple monetised offers (via Instant Sales Page Generator and Resell Rights Weekly)
4) Accept payments (via Paypal, JVZoo and Payspree)
So finally, we have the big problem of driving web traffic … it’s alright having all this in place, how do we send traffic to those offers?
This is Lee’s ‘drive web traffic to that offer’ comment, and it’s the single thing that floors most new online marketers.
My number one tip driving free web traffic, building a list of subscribers, making money fast and getting your hands on a load of free learning materials is to take part in Joint Venture Giveaways.
NewJVGiveaways.com is the best resource for getting details of the latest JV Giveawayevents.
This is how I got started and this is how I built my own list of subscribers to over 5000 … it gave me the momentum I needed to start building my online business.
Use this technique in conjunction with your social media outlets and your blog/web site and it will get things going very fast.
By the way, you can enter JV Giveaways for free, but you will always be made upsell offers.
It’s better to upgrade in these events, but you don’t have to.
I would advise making money in a JV Giveaway then re-investing in an upgrade next time around if money is tight.
In addition, I cover lots of other free traffic generating techniques in my webinar series ‘Newbie Headaches Terminated‘ …. and yes, that’s free too
Is it really that easy to make money online?
Business plans do not work unless we do! That’s the bottom line here really, there is no push-button solution, you’ve go to do the work.
Use those techniques and apply them, and it will work … slowly, steadily, you will see it building.
Now, this is not the ideal way to start an online business … I can still undercut Natalie’s $100 budget, but there are some things that you really ought to do from the very beginning.
The first is to get a proper WordPress blog and a domain name.
You really do need to master WordPress and there are plenty of free resources online to show you how like http://websitedesignmojo.com/ for instance, and don’t forget all the lovely tutorials on YouTube that are just sitting there waiting for you to consume them.
The cheapest place to get a domain name is Namecheap.com and the best place for paid hosting is Hostgator.com, go for the Hatchling Plan in the first instance.
You’re literally talking a few dollars to get started with those services, and I’d have to say, even though I’ve shown you how to do it all for free, I really would consider buying the domain name and the proper WordPress blog, you’ll never regret it as your business builds.
By the way, a little known service in Internet Marketing circles is Siteground.com.
The reason I’m recommending this service is because their training and support for WordPress is excellent (see http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/wordpress/) and also, they’ll actually install the WordPress blog for you.
So how’s that, you really can start to make money online for free – it won’t make you a millionaire, but it will begin to build the foundations of a career that could pay you thousands of dollars – the principals and techniques are always the same, Lee McIntyre boiled it down to three things and he’s absolutely right about that process.
What I hope I’ve shown you in this post is that you really can start an online business, you can do it with no money whatsoever (even though I don’t recommend that!) and all the resources are out there to enable you to get started quickly.
If you have any great, genuinely free resources that you can recommend please let me know about them below!
4 Great Time Saving Tools
By · CommentsTime saving tools and tips – we all need them!
Here are 4 tools that I use nearly every day … they’re all free (though they come with upgrade options of course) and all are extremely easy to use.
If you use any others, please feel free to add them with a few comments at the bottom of the page.
Hope they’re useful!
Bonus time management resource
Here’s one that I’ve literally just discovered … but I upgraded straight away and I love it already
Bananatag.com is wonderful … it allows me to monitor when clients, prospects and customers have opened my emails so I can time my follow up communication based on that data … when I know they’ve seen and consumed my message.
It also monitors their clicks … so I can see if they’re checking out my sales pages or social media links.
Now we’ve been able to do this with auto responders for a long time, but with Gmail accounts it’s been virtually impossible … until now that is
Please remember to add your own essential time management tools below – thanks!
I have just finished the final proof-reading of my first ever physical book, which I have co-written with Phill Turner … and it served as a very timely reminder to me of the most important thing that anybody can do in internet marketing.
Now before you start looking out for me among the likes of Lee Child and JK Rowling in the bestsellers lists, let me tell you a little bit about the book project first.
And in true copywriting fashion, I’m going to keep you hanging on to the end until I give you the number 1 nugget of wisdom that I’m going to be taking with me into the New Year … and that I hope you will too.
And no, it doesn’t culminate in a ‘Buy Now’ button … this is a single internet marketing jewel which I’m guilty of forgetting this year … and I’ll bet you have too!
Total Market Success by Paul Teague and Phill Turner (cover graphic)
First though, to this new book, ‘Total Marketing Success’.
This is the first time that I’ve created a book which you can actually hold, having written many e-books in my 3-4 years of ‘serious’ online marketing.
Phill Turner and I have collaborated on a big project and we figured that we should make a high quality book available to our new customers.
So we set about looking at the resources at our disposal and realised that over the years we have both been lucky enough to talk to some of the world’s most successful marketers… and that their joint wisdom combined in book form would be a very powerful tool for our own customers.
Now Phill has produced a number of physical books in the past, but it’s a new skill for me, so I’ve been learning from him big time on this project.
One of my jobs though was to proof read the text … and it’s here where I found the golden nuggets just waiting to be gathered.
Golden nuggets
You see, for the past two years, since I had my first big Clickbank launch with Auto Cash Funnel, I’ve been learning lots of new tricks, reading many books, breaking new territory … but I’ve forgotten a few basics.
And it was only when I was reading the interviews from our experts that I realised the one thing that every interview had in common.
However the marketers were making their money online – and they were all doing it through a variety of ways – PPC, SEO, Facebook, Affiliate Marketing, Amazon affiliates and so on - but to a man and woman, they all said one thing with absolute consistency.
And when I’d finished reading the couple of hundred pages that make up our new book it hit me like a Homer Simpson ‘doh!’ moment …
This basic piece of advice, which I followed consistently when I made my first breakthrough online, is the one essential thing that I’ve not really done since that time.
And to be honest, I’ve known it all along – only when I read it in the pages of my own book I could not ignore it any longer.
And that one piece of advice?
Whatever you choose to do online, make sure that you stick to one thing and do it consistently.
It’s so simple isn’t it?
So why don’t we all do it?
Every single online marketer interviewed in ‘Total Marketing Success’ says it … choose what you want to do and stick to it, become great at it, become known for it … but do not chop and change.
It doesn’t matter what it is – online marketing, offline marketing, local marketing, SEO. PPC, Twitter, Facebook, webinars (they all work when done properly!) – just select your ‘weapon’ of choice and stick with it.
In the past two years – ever since I made my online breakthrough by taking part in and marketing JV Giveaways consistently I have been doing too many different things.
Now don’t get me wrong, the last two years have gone very well for me and I’ve had my fair share of 6 figure launches and number 1 ‘hits’ in online marketplaces … but I haven’t been doing one thing consistently.
So, in 2013 that changes.
One of the things that has been bothering me for some time now is that I created an amazing Facebook platform with my software partner Patrick Lodder and I have never really exploited that as fully as I should have.
We’ve now turned it into an amazing white label platform and we’re in ‘hush, hush’ discussions with some great partners about using it in some very high profile businesses.
Phill and I have created a brilliant product called Social Marketing Success (I’m very proud of it, it’s going to help a lot of people set up and run their own online businesses) which we’re going to be marketing properly from the New Year and this is based around the same Facebook platform.
New Year’s Resolutions
So my one thing in 2013 … the single thing I will be focusing on in 2013 – will be Facebook Marketing.
And I’ll do that with one of the most amazing Facebook platforms behind me that you could hope to have as well as a quite incredible and totally unique FB list building tool that we’ve created which we will be launching as a new product in that marketplace.
Feeding into all of that work will be all the key principles of what we all do online – list building, relationship building, networking and so on – but it will all be done under the single umbrella of ‘Facebook marketing’.
So when people ask ‘what do you do’ I’ll be working on one single thing, consistently, to create the UK’s most comprehensive Facebook training and marketing package, backed up with my unique software platform which has taken two years to develop and build.
So, my question to you as we head for a brand new year of online marketing is ‘what is the single thing that you do in your business?’.
We diversify and spread ourselves too thinly at our peril … and 9 experts in my book say it … and I’ve known it myself for 2-3 years now, even though I’ve been ignoring it of late.
When you’re writing out your aims for the year ahead, think about what you enjoy most, where you’ve experienced most success … and focus on that one thing, that one area of marketing – and become great at it.
Your results and success will all flow from that.
A note about ‘Total Marketing Success’
The book that Phill and I have written together will be available on Amazon and Kindle in the New Year – as you’ve just read, the proof reading has now been done – and boy did I procrastinate over that job
I’ll post more about it on this blog when it’s ‘ready to rock’ and divulge more about the production then too, as it’s a job that most online marketers find themselves doing sooner or later.
