Launch Day Deadline: Actually going to make it by day’s end…I think

This is the day I set as my deadline for launching Mind Body Spirit Journal. One major project to be completed today before I officially “launch” — which means basically that I begin announcing the site to the world and intentionally drawing traffic.

Think I’ll actually be able to launch by day’s end. (May truly be day’s end: 11:59 p.m.) I’m going to make the push today.

Amazed at how far I’ve come since April 21, when I began this effort on a self-imposed three-week countdown.

So pleased that I found Terry at Super Aff. She was able to help me understand, in first-grade language, some of the inner workings of WordPress so that I could truly customize Clemens’s 3-Column Relaxation Theme and get it to function the way I envisioned it would need to for Mind Body Spirit Bulletin. That was a welcome and radical left turn. I had decided to make the site work with the Regulus theme since I just couldn’t figure out how to customize Clemens’s theme.

(Now going to use Regulus on some other sites, since I got a chance to customize it some and see it in action before Terry helped me get the “Big Ahah” with 3-Column Relaxation.)

Before I take the site “live” — that is, begin announcing it to people who I believe will find it helpful and fun — I want to:

- Rework the terms, conditions, disclaimer so that I have a very accessible plain English summary up front, before openly dumping on readers the nearly indecipherable legal gobbledly-gook lingo that the lawyers say is necessary and that is supposed to cover our ass from here to Pluto in the event it needs such covering…

- Upload a Spirit of Wellness mini-course to my autoresponder.

- Design and write a prominent and hopefully enticing offer for the mini-course; offering it as a reward for subscribing to the Mind Body Spirit Journal weekly 30-second summary report and Holistic Living Project email list.

- Get the “I agree” click-through script loaded and functioning, with a cookie, so that visitors only have to see it on their first visit.

- Uploading a new email signature file that promotes the free mini-course offer and drives traffic to the Mind Body Spirit Journal sign-up. (Already written, but not ready to roll until the mini-course and offer and sign-up are uploaded .)

That’s a LOT to still get done today, but I think I’ll make it.

Then, beyond that, in days/weeks to come, there is more customizing and building that will be taking place, mostly behind the scenes and concurrent with other pressing Wellness U, Inc. projects.

Among items still on the must-do list:

- More customizing so that Section pages can each have unique headers and unique sidebars, on which I can put copy and advertising for Wellness U, Inc. products and carefully selected affiliate offers that are directly related to the subject matter of that Section. That is in addition to allowing AdSense to serve its own algorhythm-targeted ads on the pages. In the meantime, AdSense is the only profit model on the site and is not expected to offer any significant return in the short-term and is expected to be only a small part of the income stream in the longer run. But at least there is SOME income model up and working on launch day.

- Begin writing and uploading product sales pages on ExcitingSolution.com.

- Create and code an indented, haded sidebar-like format to use INSIDE articles. Going to model Seth Godin on this. Really like how does this in his reports. Will use those, as he does, to both deliver high-value information and direct readers to specific products.

- Reconnect with my far-too-long abandoned R&D Team, see if they want to play with this. Re-orient it slightly to the Holistic Living Project. Give all my wondeful oldtimers a heads-up and opportunity to unsubscribe from the mailing list — so that no one is irritated that I’m suddenly, out of nowhere, writing to them again regularly.

- Issue 30-Day or 45-Day Challenge to the Holistic Living Project Team — and more widely, to anyone interested in creating and launching, via e-commerce, a self-help product. The 45-Day Challenge will have its own Section and email list. I’m still calling it “The 45-Day Challenge” since that’s how I envisioned it a few weeks back. But since I’ve come SO FAR in three weeks with THIS Project, am wondering if compressing the challenge to 30 Days might force even more efficiency and momentum. Will have to look at the precise goal/challenge and see if I really think it can be mastered in 30 days of part-time daily attention.

- Begin pumping out my Spirit of Wellness and Holistic Living self-help products.

- Keep adding sections, posts, observations, reports, articles, questions to the site daily about anything that fascinates me in my areas of expertise and in the realms of holistic living, personal development, and personal and planetary healing. Report on anything I’m researching. This will evolve into a huge body of work quickly that will fascinate many and will draw the people and partners I enjoy associating with and working and playing with. We’ll have fun together on this journey. And we’ll be learning and growing together.

- Spend at least 15 minutes daily, work days, promoting the site to appropriate market segments and encouraging interaction (comments on posts). This becomes a much more interesting and useful service when lots of people are sharing their wisdom, questions and concerns. Build community. That’s a more right-livelihood-descriptive term for this process. Carries a better feeling charge for me. (Versus using — as I did earlier — the marketing jargon I learned to speak over the years when conversing with advertsing agency and direct-marketing colleagues.) Intentionally devote at least 15 minutes daily to building community.

- Create customized, stock keyword lists in an easy-grab cut-and-paste file for each Section and subject area I write about. So I don’t have to re-invent the wheel each time I post. Wish WordPress would allow you to set up keywords for Categories so it automatically inserts them into the metafile for each post in that category. Maybe it does. Will have to research that.

- Monitor my emailings to see how many are getting blocked by SpamCop and other blocking services that seem to have blacklisted my hosts. Even Google’s G-mail server was blacklisted last time I checked. Which means that anyone whose host uses these various spam policing services to filter incoming email can’t receive email from anyone sending email via the smtp’s of any of my longstanding hosts, including G-mail. Because of what Andy Wibbels calls the “spam bastards,” e-mail is pretty universally broken, unfortunately, as the “World-Wide Web” turns 12 or 13 years old. Who’d'a thunk it, just 11 years ago? Certainly not me when I started on the web. But all those Third-World attorneys and attaches who write me several times daily because they have inadvertently become caretakers of $25 million dollars they would like to split with me, and all those companies my ex must have reported me to who are convinced I could use some serious enlarging have pretty much killed the wonder and efficiency of email. May need to invest in a unique, fixed IP address in order to assure that Wellness U emails get through to most people who have requested them and even that may not solve the problem. Area of concern and further research. Currently it appears that about 10 percent of my emails don’t get through because of high-level IP blocking at internet service providers.

Major full plate. And there is, of course, always more. And surprises. Always surprises to muck with what Big Willie called “the best-laid plans of mice and men.” And changes.

But we’re rolling. And it’s onward, onward, onward from here.

It’s one of those oh-so-rare damp, gray, overcast and rainy days here in northern New Mexico. Which means my solar panels are not producing enough electricity to keep my batteries full and keep the computer purring and keep the boombox pumping out cool jazz and keep the full-spectrum light burning above my head (needed because the sky is a bit dark). So, at 10 a.m. I’ve fired up the generator. So we’re good to go. I’ll check battery levels and see if I can shut it down in a couple hours.

Normally I dislike gray, damp days. But right now it’s perfect for this big-push deadline day. Will keep me from being tempted to play outside.