Moving Blogs

I am been hearing about how much better Wordpress is to use for blogging for sometime and decided to investigate. I discovered that you have a lot more flexibility in the themes you can choose for your displays and content. Most of the people that I read on the internet use wordpress and promote it. As a result I too am moving over to wordpress for my blogs.

You do NOT have to use wordpress.com for your site but your host must be able to support wordpress and be hosted on a linux or unix platform. I will be using bluehost.com as my host for my wordpress blogs. The link is http://www.storesbychuckytrader.com/articles. I have already moved my previous posts over to it.

See you at my new site http://www.storesbychuckytrader.com/articles.

iPhone Apps

It seems that I am a sucker for anything new that comes along right now. On the other side of the coin, I am learning something new from each adventure. So what is the latest?

One of my associates emailed me about this offer to sell iPhone Apps and make money from it. I took the plunge and signed up for it. Haven't made any money so far but I did learn about cross linking websites. This is something that is discussed in Weathy Affiliates but I just didn't quite get the connection. In essence, it is when you place a banner of your website on their website and place their banner on your website. So you will start see more and more banners on chuckytrader.com. Anything to drive traffic to my website.

The other thing it has forced me to learn is how to create my own banners. However, I am still in the learning phase on this one. I have one that I made from a free banner website but am not happy with it. I want some graphics and animation in it.

This is also making me learn Paint Shop Pro. It appears one of the easiest ways to create banners is through the use of Paint Shop Pro (or something similiar) and a GIF Animation compiler. I purchased Paint Shop Pro several years ago, but never used it. When going through the tutorials on making banners, using Paint Shop Pro was suggested. Wha, la, dig out the old box, load it, apply upgrades and we are off and running. My creative juices for graphics is not the best but am trying to come up a design for a banner anyway. Will see what happens.

Till next time.

50th Class Reunion

I took a break from the computer for that last two weeks and attended my high school 50th year class reunion. For me, this was a very pleasant experience seeing and talking to my former classmates and am very glad that I went.

I attended Upper Columbia Academy (UCA) in Spangle, Washington the years of 1958 and 1959. It was probably one of the best experiences for a teenager growing up. Like a lot of the students, I pushed the boundaries, mostly my junior year, got caught and got to do some free labor as a result. (UCA is a co-ed boarding high-school school operated by the Seventh Day Adventists and is 16 miles south of Spokane.)

We had a graduating class of 74 with about half attending. (Over the years 16 have passed away.) After 50 years, I found it very difficult to recognize anyone. We all wore name tags and I still had to ask names. The life stories were very intriguing and age has a tendency to smooth out teenager differences. After a time, you could start seeing the earlier person in just about everyone. The one thing that did not change in most was their voice and speech. That was usually my first connection to recognizing the individual.

Sandy, class vice-present, did a super job in organizing the event and many thanks goes to her for the time and dollars spent in preparing for this event.

Now I need to get back to business and continue with my marketing education and web site improvements. I still have so much to learn and do.

Having A Stroke

The Stroke

Having a stroke is not a pleasant experience. I don't care if it is a transient, mini, or whatever you want to call it. Here is briefly my experience two weeks ago.

4 am Easter morning, I woke up to a tingling feeling in the face and decided to go the bathroom. I got as far as my wife's dresser and noticed my right arm was feeling funny and thought I was going to fall down. So stupid me, I just went back to bed. After about 30 minutes of tossing, my wife asked me what was wrong. I guess my answer scared her because she immediately said you are going to the doctor. I got dressed, took an aspirin, and got into the car, and she was at the hospital in about 3-4 minutes. After tests, etc., they determined that I had had a stroke and started treatment.

During a seizure I could hear and understand perfectly but could not talk coherently, focus my eyes, or move my arms or legs on the right side of the body. The seizures lasted about 20 minutes in duration and came and went for about 6 hours. After that was over I was admitted to the hospital for 2 days of observation and discharged.

After two weeks I do not have any disabilities that I am aware of. I am sure this is because we got to the hospital quickly and I am fairly good physical shape.

Symptoms of a Stroke

• Sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm, or leg (especially on one side of the body)
• Sudden confusion, trouble speaking or understanding speech
• Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes
• Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance or coordination
• Sudden severe headache with no known cause

If you even think you are having a stroke get to a hospital immediately. For more information on strokes, search the internet for "stroke symptoms".

Finding My Niche

In my sessions with Wealthy Affiliates, the Week 2, class has a section on finding your direction. Here I have been struggling. I guess that is common difficulty. When I first joined with them, I set my Niche to be Stocks/Online trading. Over time I have sort of drifted away from that but now am coming back.

As of today, I plan to start concentrating more on the forex market. I started my education in currency trading in 2004 and have dabbled in it ever since. (I must confess, not very successfully.) I have currency platforms for manual trading and autotrading from GlobalTec Solutions and over the years have used both. Most of my currencies trade now are done via the autotrader called CommandTRADE FX. I like this autotrader but there is a lot to know before you consistly make money with it.

Yesterday I purchased another autotrader called Forex MEGADROID. They claim a trade accuracy of 95.82%. This product uses a trading platform called MetaTrader and then they embed a module into it to support the autotrading. The installation was fairly straight forward for both the MetaTrader (trading station) and MegaDroid modules. One key piece of information, when you purchase the product is that they use ClickBank to process the order and use ClickBank's order receipt number as the authenication code for the MegaDroid module. I must of entered an incorrect email address as I have never received my receipt from ClickBank and don't have the ClickBank receipt. (My mistake) I will report more on this product later after I have my receipt number. Most of the internet reviews are positive.

On actual trading, I mostly trade the following: GBP/JYP, EUR/JPY, USD/JPY, AUD/USD, and EUR/USD. For some reason I seem to like the Japanese (yen) pairs.

If you are interested in trading currencies there are a lot of articles on the internet that explain currency trading. How much you need, etc.

Last night was a very good night for trading. Currency selloff was consistent all night and out of 21 trades, I took 1 loss which I manually took. Boy do I like it when this happens. This doesn't happen that often. My trading started at 8:30 pm and I closed out of everything at 7:57 am with over 500 pips. (A pip is the smallest price increment in forex trading. It actually stands for "percentage in point".)

No, I haven't forgotten about ChuckyTrader.com. If you haven't checked it out lately, do so...

Back to my studies. I am now learning more about article writing and Squidoo, and Hubpages, GoArticles.com and USFreeAds.com.

Later...

First Article Continued, Etc.

I finished my first article and submitted to Ezine. Like I expected, it was returned for corrections. I put too many links in the first submission. You are allowed one... I have resubmitted and am waiting for the results. The article is about a Beginner - Internet Marketing. I will post a link to it if it becomes available.

I updated my web site http://chuckytrader.com rearranging the home page some and adding a page for DVDs, Kindles, and a banner to eBay.

Do you know what a Kindle is? (I didn't) Kindle is a product from Amazon.com that is a book reader device that allows you to read books via a 6" display screen. These books are downloaded with a wireless connection that connects directly to the Amazon.com Kindle Store with over 90,000 titles.

On my web site you can find best selling books, magazines, movies, and music plus some other items.

The best selling book, Liberty and Tryanny by Mark R. Levin and is a great read. Other must reads are: Put Your Dream to the Test by John C. Maxwell, Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer, The Twilight Saga Collection by Stephenie Meyer and Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer.

Some of the best selling music DVDs are: Quiet Night - by Diana Krall, No line On The Horizon - by U2, Twilight Soundtrack - Various Artists, Chris Botti in Boston - by Chris Botti, All I Every Wanted - Kelly Clarkson.

Some of the best selling movie DVDs are: Slumdog Millionaire, Wall-E, Marle and Me, Doubt, Stargate Altantis.

Have a great day...

My First Article

My current assignment with Wealthy Affiliates is to write and submit an article to Ezine or one of the article directories. This morning at 2:30 am, I was laying in bed wide-a-wake and thought why not get up and get some work done. On my to do list was fixing some links in ChuckyTrader.com and writing my first article. After fixing the links I started on the article.

What to write about? One reason I started my blogs, besides be told to, was to capture my activities as I started this new adventure of internet marketing. So I went back to them and started reviewing what I had written. My first blogs were posted under the label of "beginner" and I thought, that is exactly what you are, so my title "The Beginner -- Internet marketing". This article is basically my background, the move to Internet Marketing, and what I have learned so far.

In my family, my wife is the one that understands the English language and phasing so I had her review it. My draft is now a red draft of corrections for me to make before submission. I am first going to submit to Ezine and see what happens. I have tried to follow their guidelines, but as beginner probably will have some corrections to make. We will see... Maybe on the next blog I will have the results and a link to the document.

Later...

Trying to maintain direction

As of the 10th blog, I am dropping the blog number. Will stay with date and title.

As I get into week 2 of the Wealthy Affiliate lessons the more I realize what I don't know in internet marketing. If you look at Thursday's blog you will see the outcome "Learn the inner workings of Internet marketing & Affiliate marketing". This goes through the basics of internet marketing and a video on how internet marketing works. This section is fairly straight forward.

Then you get into the affiliate networks. If you are going to sell as the middle man, these are the type of companies that you need to sign up with. The top affiliate networks are: Clickbank.com Linkshare.com, CJ.com, Shareasale.com, and Performics.com. Also in this section you learn about "Pay-Per_Sale" (most common these days), "Pay-Per-Lead", and "Pay-Per-Click" (least common). I studied up on Clickbank.com, signed up with them, and spent some time going over the products. Wealthy Affiliates has a Clickbank tool that makes looking at the different products for sale much easier. One of the affiliate links that you get with Wealthy Affliates is a link to themselves for new members to sign up where you get credit for the sign up.

I am now getting into one of the more difficult parts of the lessons, for me, and that is article writing. First I worried about what do you write about. Then I worried about how to imbed the appropriate keywords. I guess it is just the negatism of the personality showing through. My wife says for the first article to write about myself. I guess that makes sense. So I believe that is the approach I will take. Wealthy Affiliates gives you a checklist to follow and I have another document that also goes over it so should be ok. I am still a little confused on the requirements when it comes to imbedding links, etc., in the articles. I am sure this will clear up as I try to submit. Like anything else, sometimes it is best to forge ahead and see what happens. I need the article to reference keywords in the ChuckyTrader web site so may have to make some changes there.

Blog9 - Wealthy Associates Blog, Etc.

In the 8th blog I mentioned that I came across a forum where they are starting a new campaign from scratch. I joined the forum and today they are voting on what product(s) they want build a campaign around. They were 29 suggestions with suggestions mostly for home owner products. One of the stand outs was "Pets - pet health, pet tips, pet care, etc". This is the one I voted for and I believe is leading in the count. We are to know the outcome on Monday.

I am now on week 2 of my training with WealthyAffiliates. Here is the list of what you are to learn during this period:

Learn the inner workings of Internet marketing & Affiliate marketing
What are Affiliate Networks, and how can you leverage them?
The different "types" of Internet marketing
Choosing your direction
How to become an expert, not a generalist
Choosing an industry and product to sell online
Begin understanding consumers
Setting up a Pay-Per-Click advertising account
Squidoo.com

It says in the intro to week 2, that this is the week where some of the big decisions will have to be made. I expect that is why "Choosing your direction" is highlighted.

I was reviewing Ivana's document http://affiliate-niche-stores.com and she commented about a video site on wordpress blogs http://www.internetmarketingcourse.com . I discovered that this site also had a lot of how to videos where Tim Gross leads you step by step through what process you are attempting to do. Optaining a new domain for instance. You might want to take a peak at it.

8th Blog - ChuckyTrader.com and Wealthy Affiliates

I have not been comfortable with my landing page (1st page) on ChuckyTrader.com for some time so today I decided to do something about it. The content has been changed to include more pictures and each picture now contains a link to its referenced page. I use Thrive Learning as the web site host and they have been creating a new builder. (Must say that it is much better than the old one.) Of course of with anything new you have to learn how to use it, and, they still have some glitches that you have to work around but I am getting there. They do have a nice feature for lining items up however and that is a table where you can add pictures and the text below it with all of the general formatting tools. I also added supplies for contractors and magazines.

Today while reviewing my homework in Wealthy Affiliates, in the General Marketing forum, I came across a group of users that are starting a campaign from scratch so I joined them. (A campaign is where you are selling a product on the internet.) They are at the stage of trying to select their niche and what product to sell. One of the users is leading out in this endeavor and its appears to me to be a good way to learn. After reading some of the posts, I really feel like a novice. Half the time I don't know what they are talking about. Oh well, that is why I am doing this... To learn. More on this later.

Yesterday I mentioned about the Stock & Online Trading niche. I am still thinking about that one. To persue it will probably required a new website dedictated to that. May put this idea on hold for a bit.

One of my associates (Pat) has been using Craiglists to drive users to his website by offering give-a-ways. He has been getting a lot of hits in doing this and may have come something that could be profitable. He has included a link back to chucky.com for the Free Web Site but at this time the reponse has been low.

7th Blog - Stock & Online Trading

In my last post I mentioned that Wealthy Affiliates likes you to post on their forum. This morning when I signed in they reminded me that I needed to select a niche that I would concentrate my sales around. I discovered that one of the niches was "Stock & Online Trading" so I thought why not, this is what I have been doing for last 5 years.

Here is a little background. In 2004 I spent almost a year taking classes from Invest Tools, and became a Master Options traders. In 2005 I switched over to products from Global Tec Solutions just because I liked their charts better. (Invest Tools uses technical charts and Global Tec uses pressure charts.) I had done OK as a trader until this last year where I couldn't accept the fact that we were in a bear market (I am a positive person by nature) and got burned along with a lot of other investors. I have traded most aspects of the market; stocks, options, option spreads, commodities, and forex at one time or another. I am currently actively trading forex on paper and plan to go back live in the new future. As for the other markets, I am not currently trading them. I noticed in reading some of their forum posts there were numerous comments on how to produce income from the links back to trading houses. I plan to peruse this.

If it seems that I am jumping around a little in my endeavors to make money, you would be correct. I have discovered in my readings that this is very common but you will eventually settle on your niche. That is one of the aspects that Wealthy Affiliates helps you with.

Don't forget to visit http://chuckytrade.com. We have the best sellers and new releases from Amazon.com. If you know of contractors needing supplies, have them visit my site under Contractors.

Blog6 - Wealthy Affiliates

In my 4th blog, I mentioned that I had signed up with the Wealthy Affiliate program. This is a progress note and more...

Wealthy Affiliates starts you off on a 8-week training program that has 50 outcomes of knowledge that you are expected to have learned by the end of the program. These cover every aspect of internet sales from setting up websites, marketing your products, getting paid for clicks on your website, communication, setting up business campaigns, etc. By the end-of-week1 you should know the following:

What is Internet marketing and how does Wealthy Affiliate fit into the mix?
How WA can help
How to earn money with the WA Affiliate Program – Refer a friend only
Using your time wisely, understanding why WE (Kyle & Carson) create resources
Benefits of WA Spaces, Jobs, and taking full advantage of the Forum
How to get help (using help, site map, and contacting us…rules)

They really push communication and in the 1st week, you supposed to sign up for their forum and make at least 3 posts, one being an introduction of yourself. The rest of the week you are expected get your personal information entered and become familiar with their website and how to use it. I have most of my assignments done for week 1. Setups are done and I have made 2 posts and plan a 3rd one today. I have already discovered that as a newby, you aren't really sure of what you should post about so my first two posts were about myself. I expect today I will post about how I got to Wealthy Affiliates.

My initial impressions with the Wealthy Affiliates is positive especially the price. I am in group of 4 who started off using another organization, Thrive Learning, and we signed up for $4000. After our introductory sessions, etc., they wanted $10,000 to teach us everything that I see Wealthy Affiliates teaches. Do not get me wrong about Thrive Learning. I learned a lot from them in a very short and wouldn't be were I am today if it was not for them. One of the big things was how to buy and sell on eBay. Prior to Thrive Learning, I did not know how to buy or sell on eBay and how PayPal worked etc. I now have my own websites ainsworthetc.com and chuckytrader.com and an eBay account that uses PayPal for payments.

Blog5 - Electronics

This morning when I opened up my email, the 1st email was from Amazon.com about their latest hot electronics gadgets. That got me to thinking that www.chucktrader.com did not have electronics listed in it. So I set out to remedy that.

When working with Amazon.com and their affliliate stores you have to add product categories. What I didn't realize is, this is done when you adding a new category (duh) from a button on that screen. I spent probably an hour trying to find the "Add Products" from the main aStore screen. After sending email to Amazon asking for help I thought I would try one more time from scratch. Guess what, this time I found it right in front of my face (kinda embarrassing). So I quickly sent another email to Amazon telling them to forget my first email, but suggest that they put something on the main screen for new users.

Anyway www.chuckytrader.com now has an electronics store. Please be sure and check it out.

4th Blog - WealthyAffiliates

After I started reading the document "Build a Successful eBay Niche Stores" by Ivana Bosnjak a little closer, I discovered that I knew next to nothing about marketing and what to and how to sell on the internet. I was perusing her blogging website http://affiliate-niche-stores.com and found another article she had written called "Simple Affiliate Sale Guide" so asked for it. In one of her emails was a link to an article on how she got started. In a nutshell, she signed up with a company called "The Wealthy Affiliate University". I just signed up with them myself. Initially they appear to have a very good online training program that is reasonably priced. It is $39.95 monthly or $359.00 yearly. If you would like to check them out, here is a referral link.
http://www.wealthyaffiliate.com/?a_aid=9RyyusSZ

The following link is to her document on how she got started.
http://www.my-linker.com/hop/LearnAffMarketing

If you decide to do anything like this, you will discover that you will make many mistakes in the learning process. That is ok, because it is those mistakes that you learn by. WealthyAffiliates starts off with a 8-week educational program so I will probably slow down on my web development until I have a better understanding on how it all works. Anyway, more on this later.

3rd Blog

One of the biggest problems that you run into when you have made the decision to create web sites for income is what to sell or how to use the web site to create money. I have decided to have multiple websites. My previous blog mentions two that I have already set up. I have in my long plans, a plan to create an eBay store and at least one other web site, which at this time the content is unknown. The goal is to create multiple streams of income. At this time I am mainly concentrating on the content for http://chuckytrader.com.

I have decided that http://chuckytrader.com will become a collection of stores. This will be accomplished through setting up affiliates. There is a very good article on the internet on how to do this by Ivana Bosnajak "Build a Successful eBay Niche Stores!" that takes you through the steps. I started reading this document and took a break to followup on some of her suggestions. In thumbing through I have noticed many good nuggets of information.

At this time http://chuckytrader.com has stores for books, teachers and students for grades K-12. I am just now working on adding eBay affiliates to this site.

Just a word on affiliates. In order to sell through affiliates you must first sign up with the organization and then sign up for their affiliate or association plan. There are agreements and guidelines that you must adhere to or they may dis-associate you. This does take some time to get up and running but the setup costs are negligible. For the how to, see Ivana's document.

2nd Blog

Well this blogging business is interesting. After fumbling around and clicking the various buttons, updating my profile, and restarting my browser, I finally found out how to do a new post.

Today I have been busy updating one of my websites. Last post I said that I had two, they are http://ainsworthetc.com and http://chuckytrader.com. http://ainsworthetc.com is and will be primarily for health care. Currently it is a site where physicians can buy calipers for measurements regarding EKG strips, etc. http://chuckytrader.com is a stores site where customers can come and look through the various stores for products. It currently supports books and supplies for students.

First Blog

As you can see by the title, this is my first blog.

You may wonder where I came up with the name "ChuckyTrader". In high school, my fellow students called me Charlie (my mother called me Charles). After high school I did a stint in the Army and started going by the name of Chuck. Then I started trading on the stock market and our local trading group started using yahoo!messenger for IM. Therefore, I needed an ID. Throughout my adult life, I would sometimes get called Chucky (usually women), so I married stock Trader to Chucky and come up with ChuckyTrader.

I am involved with eBay, promoting Free Web sites, and have a web site for Physician Calipers. I will get more into these more later.