You may have heard of Marlon Sanders, a very well known and long established Internet marketer. Marlon specializes in teaching others how to succeed in Internet marketing using his proven formulas. I’ve purchased a number of Marlon’s products and have found them to be high quality and full of good information.

I mention the above because as a result of having purchased from him, I’m on Marlon’s mailing list. Every week or so I get an email from him containing marketing tips, promos for his latest products, etc. Until recently, these emails were in plain text. A couple of weeks ago, the email arrived in HTML format.

Being a savvy marketer, Marlon is always trying new things and this latest experiment with HTML email was just that: an experiment. To be frank, the email was very poorly done. Marlon asked for feedback and boy, did he get it! When I skimmed the comments on his blog, they were almost universally negative.

Being a smart marketer, Marlon took the feedback to heart and this week send out another HTML email with a new and different format. To say that it is a major improvement is an understatement! This time, the layout is clean, easy to read, and uses pictures in such a way that they add to the content instead of just looking fancy.

I took several lessons out of this experiment and wanted to share them with you. First, don’t be afraid to try something new. Granted, HTML email isn’t all that new, but if you haven’t used it before, it’s new to you! Plain text is fine up to a point, but if you need to provide a picture to better explain what you’re writing about, HTML is the only way to do it. For that reason, it pays to learn how to use HTML email.

The second lesson is to ask for opinions from your readers and customers. If you don’t ask, most people will never give you their opinion. If they hate what you’re doing, they’ll just move on and you’ll never know why. Even if they love what you’re doing, unless they have an opportunity to say so, they generally won’t. So, if you want to know what your customers are thinking, ask them!

The third lesson is that HTML email has to be done right. Marlon’s first try was poor because he tried to get too cute with it, putting a background image on it and using a font that looked like it was typewritten, among other things. HTML email is a primary example of the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid! Keep the graphics to a minimum. Use them primarily to enhance the content. If you have any doubt about whether a graphic belongs in the email, leave it out. Keep the font easy on the eyes. Use a font that is large enough and very readable. There’s a reason why Arial and Times Roman are the default fonts!

Finally, Marlon noted that sales of the featured products were higher for the original HTML attempt than previous emails. It will be interesting to see if that trend continues with this week’s effort. It could very well have been a coincidence, so it will take a few more emails in the new format to determine its effect on sales. Who knows? The crappy HTML format may prove to be a sales winner for some unknown reason. I’ll be interested to see how that plays out.

If you’d like to get on Marlon’s mailing list, here’s a free ebook he offers that has a lot of great tips for marketers:

The Best of Marlon Sanders

Marlon’s mailing list is a weekly source of excellent marketing information and well worth the read. He’s got his own unique style that’s fun to read as well as informative.

John The Geek

I’ve written before about the Action Machine, a productivity application that brings the tried and true “time boxing” technique into the 21st century. I was one of the early users of the Action Machine and have found it to be an excellent tool for task and time management.

The latest version of the Action Machine has been relabeled as the Action Enforcer and is being sold by Dennis Becker of Earn1KaDay fame. Dennis is known as The Five Buck Guy for his now famous 5 Bucks A Day system. The Action Enforcer is ideally suited to the 5 Bucks A Day system as it helps the user focus on a single task for a given period of time by reducing distractions. In addition, the time boxing strategy at the heart of the Action Enforcer compels the user to plan a set of tasks, prioritize them and work through them one at a time.

As you can tell, I’m a fan of the Action Enforcer. As I said earlier, I own the desktop version (currently available for Windows only). Despite its many virtues, the desktop version has a couple of drawbacks. First, it’s only available for Windows platforms, so Mac users couldn’t take advantage of it. It also doesn’t work very well on netbooks due to resource constraints in those mini-machines.

Well, the good news is that both of those issues have been addressed! The Action Enforcer is now available in an online version so any machine that can run a browser can get the benefits of the Action Enforcer’s time boxing techniques. Even better, the online version is free! Check it out here:

http://johnthegeek.us/proaction

Download the user’s guide from the site and read it over, then give the online Action Enforcer a test drive. I think you’ll be as impressed with this tool as I am. The online version does have a few limitations compared to the desktop version, but is still a very powerful time and task management tool that will make you more productive.

So, the question now is: what will you do with the extra hour or two you’ll have each day?

John The Geek

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

One of my favorite Firefox add-ons is FireFTP. I use it all the time because it’s very convenient to FTP from my browser rather than firing up a separate application. That and FireFTP just works really well for me.

I went to transfer some files last evening and as soon as the transfer started, Firefox crashed. This isn’t something that happens on a regular basis, but I figured it was a glitch and restarted Firefox. Started FireFTP, connected to the web site, initiated the transfer and…another shower of sparks and the dreaded “Firefox has crashed” dialog.

Everything had worked fine last week, so I started taking inventory of what had changed since then. After a bit of thought, I realized I had installed an application called Surfboard Technologies Tracking Application on my system as part of a survey I was taking.

Step 1: get rid of the Tracking Application! I like my system setup the way it is and won’t go back to using a separate FTP application in order to accomodate badly behaved software. So, I brought up Control Panel, clicked on Programs and Features (yes, this system runs Vista ) and looked for “Surfboard”. I found the entry, clicked on it and clicked Uninstall.

Some 30 minutes later, the dialog was still there saying “Please wait while Windows configures Surfboard…blah, blah, blah”. The hard drive activity light was showing a lot of activity, so I started to wonder what the uninstall process was actually doing. I clicked the Cancel button. The dialog sat there pretty much as before.

I decided to find the process and kill it, so I ran SysInternals’ very handy Process Explorer and searched for “Surfboard” among the running processes. I found a number of entries which told me that the actual executable name is PanelApp.exe. I also got the process ID so with that I went back to Task Manager and found the ID matched up with msiexec.exe. I killed the process and the dialog went away.

The Surfboard app was still showing in Programs and Features, so I knew it hadn’t completed the uninstall process. To keep it from starting up again, I found the directory where PanelApp.exe lived (c:\users\name\AppData\Local\ of all places!) and renamed it to PanelApp.old. I also started up msconfig, found PanelApp in the list of startup programs and disabled it there. I then rebooted the machine.

Now that the Surfboard Tracking Application wasn’t running any more, I tried Firefox again and it crashed again when FireFTP started a file transfer. Firefox immediately crashed. I ran Process Explorer again to see if there was something running that I’d missed. Sure enough, I found that Surfboard had added an add-on to Firefox called PanelApp BHO. I clicked the add-on and was given the option to Disable, but the Uninstall button was greyed out. I clicked Disable, restarted Firefox and tried FireFTP again.

This time I was able to get a clean file transfer so the problem obviously was the PanelApp BHO add-on. So, with that out of the way, I tried the uninstall again from the Control Panel.

I started the uninstall and let it run while I did some other things. Finally, I went to bed and left the system running. The dialog was still there in the morning “configuring…”! I went into Task Manager, killed the process and noticed that the dialog flashed a message of some kind just before it closed.

I checked Programs and Features and the Surfboard entry is gone, so the uninstall process at least got that far. The add-on still shows up in the Firefox add-on list, but I’ll get rid of that, too.

Needless to say, I’m not a big fan of Surfboard Technologies right about now. Just a word of warning if you’re presented with the opportunity to install it on your machine. My advice is don’t!

John The Geek

Our mail server at work goes through a Barracuda spam firewall. We’ve had this setup for years and it’s always been fascinating to see what ends up in the spam filter and what gets through. Despite whitelisting valid emails from the same senders numerous times, they continue to go to the spam inbox instead of being delivered as they should.

This morning I was processing the spam inbox and noticed that in addition to a Whitelist button, there is another button that reads “Whitelist + Not Spam”. I had to take a second look at that one to be sure I was reading it correctly.

My eyes were not deceiving me, which brings up the question of the day:

Why would I whitelist spam?

Seems to me that if I whitelist something then it’s not spam by definition. Apparently, Barracuda disagrees.

I really wish the people who design user interfaces would send along some of whatever they’re smoking so that it makes sense to the rest of us, too!

John The Geek

You may have heard by now that the Microsofties have installed a Firefox add-on along with the .Net 3.5 update distributed some time ago. I was not aware of it until I checked this weekend and found that all my machines have the Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant 1.0 listed in the Add-ons in Firefox.

I’m not quite as bent out of shape about it as others are, but it is annoying that Microsoft took it upon themselves to add something to Firefox that I didn’t request. Even more obnoxious is that the Uninstall button is grayed out and not usable. Worst of all, installing this add-on opens up Firefox and my PC to security vulnerabilities of the .Net framework! See the latest edition of Windows Secrets newsletter for more details on that little bonus.

I keep wondering when Microsoft is going to learn. If you go ahead and do something without giving the user the option, it simply pisses people off. If you give them the option to install and the option to uninstall, many people will be okay with it. The whole key is to allow users to retain control of their PCs, or at least the illusion of control.

I’m not going to add to the general ranting about the arrogance of Microsoft. That’s already well documented. The good news is that there is an update to the .Net update that enables the Uninstall button and allows the Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant to be uninstalled. You can download the fix from Microsoft’s web site.

If you’re a Firefox user, my recommendation is to check your Add-on list to determine whether the Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant is installed. If it is and the Uninstall button works, uninstall it. If the Uninstall button is greyed out, download the update and run it, then Uninstall the add-on.

John The Geek

As I mentioned about 8 months ago, I purchased an HP MediaSmart Server with the intention of making it the hub of my home network. It’s been a bit of an interesting ride, so I thought I’d bring you up to date on that project.

The box came with 512MB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive. I knew 500GB wasn’t going to be enough to backup my existing computers, much less provide any additional storage, so I bought a 1TB internal drive along with the machine and installed that right after the initial setup, giving me a total of 1.5TB of storage.

I moved my music files and some other archives to the home server to free up some space on my main desktop machine, but otherwise, just set up that machine, my laptop, netbook, and my wife’s laptop to be backed up to the home server nightly. I’ve since replaced the desktop machine, but not before copying its data to the home server.

As a storage platform and automatic backup system, the home server works pretty well. I created shares on the server for music, photos, software installs, and user data then mapped drives on each of the machines to those shares. Windows Explorer simply sees them as drives and file transfers are quick and easy via the network.

I’ve learned a few things along the way, some of which were surprising. The big surprise was learning that if you let Windows automatically update on the home server it will spontaneously reboot itself when the update calls for it. I’ve since told it to download the updates and let me know they’re ready. I had hoped to be able to work on documents directly on the server, but this little “feature” makes it necessary to have a copy on the local machine and update the server as changes are made.

The first time I encountered this one I was, of course, in the middle of editing a document that was stored on the server. I was able to recover without a major data loss, but it was not one of the fonder memories I have of the home server! I had thought perhaps setting the Windows updates to notify instead of automatic would eliminate the problem, but no such luck. It still reboots occasionally, although it’s always around midnight so if I’m paying attention I can anticipate it.

Another thing I learned was that the server is a real worry wart! There are three status levels: normal/healthy (green), needs attention (yellow) and “Omigod the sky is falling!” (red). The latter is accompanied by dire messages like “your network health is critical!” Not only that, the normally blue status LED on the front of the box (which stays blue in “condition yellow”, go figure) changes to red, apparently to get your attention.

There are all kinds of things that trigger a yellow alert. If a machine known to the server hasn’t been backed up in 7 days or more, warning messages begin displaying saying “[name of machine] hasn’t been backed up since [date of last backup]. Your network health is at risk!” Since my machines aren’t all turned on and connected to the network 24/7, this happens a lot.

When this situation occurs, I have three choices: ignore the incessant warning messages, connect the designated machine to the network and back it up, or go into the Home Server Console and tell it to ignore the situation. If a machine isn’t likely to be used for a while, I’ll do the latter just to shut the server up and hopefully turn the yellow tray status icon back to green, at least for a while.

It becomes a sort of game to see how long you can keep the status icon green. You have to become resigned to the fact that it will be yellow quite often. There’s almost always something the thing isn’t happy about!

There’s apparently something a little flakey about my 1TB server hard drive. The past couple of months I’ve been getting “File conflicts” messages. These are yellow alerts, too. File conflicts are not a good thing, and in my case have been indicating that there’s an error on the hard drive. Maybe it’s a bad sector, maybe something else, I’m not sure and I haven’t had the time to dig into it and diagnose it properly.

I’ll occasionally get a red alert that the drive is “unhealthy” which tells me to “repair” it. Back to the Windows Home Server Console to run the Repair function on the drive. This is very likely good old CHKDSK, but it does seem to repair the problems which warning about possible data loss. A successful repair will turn the status icon green…until it discovers that the file conflicts are still there.

This last time, it was a set of four files which apparently were listed in the directory but didn’t really exist. I went in to the share on a connected machine and deleted them. That wasn’t good enough, the file conflict messages continue. The drive reports healthy, however, so there’s no option to run Repair again. –sigh–

I’ve mentioned the Windows Home Server Console. This bit of software until recently took performance to a new low. I’ve seen glaciers move faster!

Seriously, the login nearly always failed the first time (“Cannot connect to your server”). Clicking the OK button generally logged in, but it took several minutes for that to happen. Once in, clicking on any of the toolbar buttons required waiting another few minutes (not seconds, mind you, minutes!). Eventually, something would happen as a result of the mouse click, then the cycle would start over again if another mouse click was needed.

In trying to troubleshoot that phenomenon, I learned that you can access the server via Remote Desktop just like a “real” Windows machine! Doing so, however, is less productive than you might think. For one thing, when you log in, Internet Explorer pops up and delivers a dire warning that bypassing the WHS Console can have dire consequences (you could screw something up royally) and you really shouldn’t be doing this. Suffice to say that working directly in the server is not for the faint of heart and you’d better know what you’re doing to avoid catastrophe.

Within the past several weeks, the WHS Console has magically become fairly usable. Gone are the multi-minute reaction times. While performance is nowhere near snappy, it’s at least tolerable. You know that when you click something, you’ll see a response in this lifetime. The login even works the first time…usually. Whoever fixed this has my undying gratitude!

The MediaSmart Server isn’t really designed to be what I had in mind, but I’m adapting to it. If nothing else, the automatic backups are a major plus. Now I just have to implement a plan to backup the server itself!

John The Geek

In my last post on Twitter tools I mentioned that I’d tried Seesmic Desktop, but stayed with TweetDeck due to some issues with Seesmic Desktop. Shortly after that post appeared, an updated Seesmic Desktop was released that addressed many of the complaints I’d had with it.

I’m now using Seesmic Desktop as my primary Twitter interface. There are still a few things about it that could be improved, but overall, it’s working really well for me.

The big advantage of Seesmic Desktop over TweetDeck is its ability to handle multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously. TweetDeck can only display one account at a time. Although there is a way to use the Search function to monitor other accounts, you can only tweet or retweet from the account with which you’re logged in.

Seesmic Desktop, on the other hand, gives you the ability to not only monitor multiple accounts, displaying the account(s) to which a particular tweet was addressed, but to reply or retweet from any of your accounts without a separate login. IMO, this feature puts Seesmic Desktop ahead of TweetDeck by a long way.

I’d like to see Seesmic Desktop provide a means of synchronizing settings between multiple machines. I use a minimum of two different computers on any given day and regularly use up to four different machines. It would be wonderful to have a way to automatically synchronize the settings between all my machines and avoid the lame manual copying that has to happen now.

You can download Seesmic Desktop for free from here:

http://desktop.seesmic.com/

John The Geek

I completely understand the concept of making lemonade when life hands you lemons. More power to those who are creative enough to do that rather than sitting around whining about their problems. I saw an interesting example of that today that illustrates a couple of different types of creativity.

I got an email from a marketer to whose list I subscribe. This guy is pretty well known and I assume pretty successful. The email basically said he’d done something really dumb and he wanted to share the experience for the benefit of his readers.

He provided a link to a PDF which contained the tale of how he’d fallen for a fairly cleverly designed phishing email despite his sophistication and experience on the Internet. His bank caught the situation and returned his money and all turned out okay aside from this guy feeling like the complete idiot that he’d made of himself.

The final paragraph says basically “Hey, I’m telling you this out of the goodness of my heart despite being terminally embarassed. There are no links in this document, nothing being sold, and feel free to pass it around to everyone you think might benefit.”

What a guy, right? We can all relate to doing something dumb and wanting to help others avoid the same fate. So, I’m thinking here’s a guy who’s generating some good will by admitting his human foibles and warning others so they’ll be more careful than he was.

Then I read the PS. Seems he’s got himself fixed up with a way to handle this problem if it ever occurs again, and oh, by the way, I might just want to read about it and see if it’s something I can use, too. I just click this link right here.

The link is pretty obviously an affiliate link, albeit cloaked. Being the curious sort that I am, I copy the URL into my browser and go visit. Imagine my surprise! My altruistic friend just happens to be a business associate (read affiliate) of the outfit which will provide identity theft protection should I be interested in same.

So, now we’ve gone from “no links here and nothing for sale” to “I just happen to have a solution to the problem I’m trying to convince you that you have.” Sort of like those “free” CDs that you only have to pay shipping for (which means they’re NOT FREE) and oh-by-the-way you’ll be charged $29.95 a month for the whiz-bang monthly membership that goes with it unless you happen to remember to cancel it, assuming you can correctly guess the current population of New York City plus or minus 5 people, or whatever other arcane cancellation criteria they’ve devised.

Now, let’s get something clear here. I am in no way against affiliate marketing. I do it myself and it’s a perfectly legitimate way to run a business.

What’s not legitimate is telling my reader that there are no links when there clearly is one, and that there’s nothing for sale when the opposite is true. Let’s call it what it is: lying.

Call it a fib, call it an evasion of the truth, call it whatever you want, it’s still a lie. The thing that I don’t understand is: why lie when it’s so obvious that you’re lying?

Personally, I make a point not to lie if for no other reason than my memory’s not that good any more! I’ve known people who were expert liars. They would have been totally embarrassed to have made it that easy to catch them in a lie. I mean, if you’re going to make lying part of your profession, at least do it on a professional level!

Seriously, do these guys even know they’re lying? Obviously, they don’t care, at least not enough to even make the effort to lie well.

I don’t know about you, but when I encounter something like this, it immediately blows that marketer’s credibility right out of the water. It’s just as likely that his little phishing story is made-up BS than not. And, if that story’s made up, what about the rest of what he’s telling/selling me?

Trust is a very difficult thing to build. It’s way easier to lose. This guy has lost my trust, and for what? A few bucks in commissions? Well, he won’t be making even those few bucks off of me, nor will he be making anything else from me again. Sleep well, dude.

John The Geek

Unless you’re living in that cave in which my wife grew up (a little family humor), you’re aware that Twitter is the hottest thing on the planet and therefore the single greatest contributor to global warming at the moment. I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now and have come to a number of conclusions about it.

First, it’s an incredible time sink if you don’t take control of it quickly. Once you’re following a few hundred people, you could literally spend all day reading their tweets and get nothing else done. Unless you have nothing better to do with your time, that’s pretty obviously unproductive.

Second, the tweet-o-sphere is chaotic, to say the least. The word “twitter” is much more benign than the visual cacophony of tweets that come flying at you once your follower count starts to grow. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s not physically possible to follow a large number of people and A) read all their tweets and/or B) get anything else accomplished.

Third, Twitter is a marvelous source of information, if you can manage to filter out the wheat from the abundance of chaff. I’ve learned some useful things from tweeple and managed to do so without spending more than 20-30 minutes a day on Twitter.

After a fair amount of experimentation, I’ve come up with the following system that works pretty well for me. I use TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com) as my interface to Twitter. The Twitter website is a terrible user interface unless you sit there staring at it all day dealing with tweets as they come in. Its shortcomings are fertile ground for application developers, however, and there are a number of Twitter applications out there.

Admittedly, I haven’t tried most of them. So far, I’ve used TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop. I simply don’t have time to use and evaluate the rest.

Seesmic Desktop (http://desktop.seesmic.com) shows promise. What I like about it is that it can handle multiple accounts simultaneously. I have several Twitter accounts for specific purposes and one “main” one, so it’s nice to be able to aggregate all my accounts in one place. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with Seesmic Desktop that are annoying enough that I’ve given up on it for now. It’s still very much beta software, so hopefully, they’ll get it together eventually.

I’m using TweetDeck regularly. It took me a while to figure out how to configure it for the best results. My current configuration is based on this article, so I can’t take credit for coming up with this strategy all on my own.

Here’s what my current TweetDeck configuration looks like:

Note there are four columns. The column on the left is for all tweets from all those I follow. As you can imagine, that column fills up rather quickly!

The second column from the left contains tweets from those I have added to my one group. These are people I want to follow more closely.

The third column is a Search query. This is the key to keeping track of all my accounts. I have written the query to search for my main Twitter username: johnsawyer or any of the other of my accounts. This is accomplished by using the OR keyword. My query reads like this:

johnsawyer OR john_the_geek OR critterreiki OR rootsrocknblues

The results of this query include any tweets containing one or more of those user names. This includes tweets I make, re-tweets of any of my tweets, replies I make to other tweets and replies to my tweets. It would also include any arbitrary references to any of those user names in anyone else’s tweets.

The last column on the right is for Direct Messages to the account with which I’m currently logged in via TweetDeck (usually my main account).

You’re probably wondering why the screen shot shows three of the four columns empty. That is because I keep them empty to reduce the clutter. I leave the search column tweets because those are typically the ones I’m most interested in and may want to refer back to later. The other three columns are disposable.

I know this will likely bruise some egos, but the left column gets skimmed fairly quickly. I’m looking for pictures I haven’t seen before, or for keywords to jump out at me. If I don’t have time to get through the whole column (there are often several hundred tweets), I skim as far down as I can, then clear the entire column and let it start over.

If I find someone tweeting something interesting, I’ll add them to my group so that they show up in the second column. This is a small percentage of all the people I’m following, so I can keep up with them more easily. I can always remove people from the group is need be, and sometimes it needs be! The idea is to keep people in the group whose tweets are interesting and/or useful to me and remove those who aren’t. This column is read and cleared regularly after noting URLs or whatever other info I may find to be of value later on.

Again, the search column is never cleared, but it doesn’t tend to fill up that fast, either. I’m not one who tweets constantly, as many seem to do, so at any given moment there aren’t a zillion tweets out there containing my usernames.

Finally, the DM column is checked when TweetDeck starts up to see if there are any new DMs since the last session. If not, the column is cleared.

One other tool I use is TweetLater (http://tweetlater.com). I discovered TweetLater by way of a tweet that touted it as a way to eliminate many of the automated Direct Messages we get when we follow people. TweetLater can be configured to block any that come from its service (which is most of them, apparently). That alone is worth its weight in gold! I get far fewer DMs now that I’ve turned on that filter.

TweetLater has a number of other great features. The two I use regularly are the keyword reports and the auto-follow feature. The keyword reports are just that: reports of tweets containing specific keywords for the time since the previous report. This is very handy for keeping track of references to your username(s) and for references to topics in which you’re interested. These are automatically emailed to you at specified intervals.

The auto-follow feature saves me having to manually check out and follow (or not) anyone who follows me first. I’m very likely going to follow back most anyone who follows me, so I figure it takes less time for me to unfollow the few I find obnoxious than to manually visit the profiles of those who follow me. I don’t believe I can make an informed decision on whether to follow someone just from their profile, unless they’re obviously a mismatch. So far, few people have been an obvious mismatch.

Between TweetDeck and TweetLater, I find I can accomplish what I need to on Twitter in about 30 minutes a day. I’d be interested in other strategies you’ve used that worked for you. Please leave a comment about your favorite Twitter tool or strategy.

John The Geek

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been using Derek Franklin’s Action Machine software for a while now. The more I use it the more I like it. I keep finding things it does that not only help keep me focused and productive, but enhances other parts of my product creation system, too.

Here’s a good example: I’m in the middle of writing an e-book. The e-book is actually written, it just needs some editing and formatting to make it look nice. There is still a lot to do, however, before it can go live and start making sales. Among other things, I need to create the cover graphic, make two web sites, one for a free e-book that promotes the paid one, and the other for the paid e-book.

The first site needs to interact with AWeber to collect contact info, and the second site needs a sales page, order button, and the back end for payment processing, downloads, customer registration, etc.

Once all that’s done, I need to promote the sites, so there’s a whole list of things to do in that regard, too. The list of to-dos is pretty long and keeping track of what’s done and what needs to be done can be a real challenge without some kind of system.

To help me manage all these tasks, I bought Marlon Sanders’ Promo Dashboard last year. This is a great product that lays out step by step everything that needs to be done from product creation to promotion. Each step is explained and there is a ton of videos and other training tools on the Promo Dashboard site.

Knowing what the tasks are is great, but even better is having a way of staying focused on each task until it’s done. Still further, being able to track how much time you spend on each task is very valuable for future projects. If you know how long it takes to complete a particular step, you can accurately gauge how long it will take to complete a project from start to finish and plan accordingly.

The Action Machine allows you to create your own task lists and groups of timers. It dawned on me that I could simply take the steps in the Promo Dashboard, create a list of them in the Action Machine and set up groups of timers for each phase of the project.

Once I understand the task thoroughly from the training in the Promo Dashboard site, I can set to work on it and the Action Machine keeps me focused on it until it’s completed. Then, I move to the next task and repeat the process.

This is a perfect marriage of two separate, but complementary tools. Each by itself is a terrific tool. Used together they make a killer product creation system that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Check out the Action Machine here: http://johnthegeek.com/likes/action

Check out the Promo Dashboard here: http://johnthegeek.com/promodb

John The Geek