A Trip to the Barber

And so I embark on another post. I feel I am getting behind as some of my companions in the Affiliate System are surging ahead with their blogs. However Dean Holland’s wise words help to bring me back to reality and don’t worry about getting behind. Just as long as you do something, albeit slowly, you’ll get there in the end. As he says, it’s not a race.

I had an interesting conversation with the lady who was cutting my hair the other day. She was asking what I did for a living to which I replied that I was retired. I told her that I had taken up a few hobbies since retirement and that I was so busy these days that I was amazed how I had found the time to work a full time job before. In addition to keeping up ten-pin-bowling, I had also taken up lawn bowls. I joked with her that there is a law in Queensland where I live, that states that as soon as you reach the age of sixty-five you must join a lawn bowls club. It’s in the constitution apparently. I remember going into the clubhouse for the first time and seeing all these old folks. Then I realised, hang on, I’m the same age as these people!

Just before retiring, I said to my wife “What the heck am I going to do when I retire?”. She said that I’ve got a great singing voice so why not do something with it. Next thing I did was to Google “choirs near me” and found just what I was looking for. A community choir made up of everyday people from all walks of life. There were no auditions; the only prerequisite was a love of singing. So I’ve been a member of this choir for nearly three years and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I’ve performed in three shows with them and this year did my first solo, albeit for only twenty seconds.

My last new hobby is attempting to learn the piano again. I had lessons when I was a kid and always regretted not keeping it up. Anyway, I purchased an electric keyboard (hoping to get a real piano one day) and I’m butchering some classical numbers e.g. Moonlight Sonata, Fur Elise, that kind of thing, much to the annoyance of the neighbours although it does come with headphones. (I must remember to use them.)

Back to the conversation with the hairdresser lady, she remarked that she was most impressed with my post retirement activity list and hoped that when she retires she would also attempt to keep herself busy and not just waste away. Imagine her surprise when I told her that I was embarking on an affiliate marketing business as well. She was so impressed she said she would visit my blog and check it out.

This week in the coaching program I have –

• added my email sending domain in Affiliate System. This was done by adding a sub-domain to the existing domain name, in my case, ajacobs-affiliates.com. The sub-domain is just adding m. to the domain name, i.e. m.ajacobs-affiliates.com. To this can be added a further identifier, e.g. info@m.ajacobs-affiliates.com and, low and behold, I now have an email address registered with Affiliate System that will be used to send all my emails to my audience.
• created and added my DMARC record. This was done in CloudFlare using a third party piece of software to generate the DMARC DNS setting record. Sounds scary but the coaching program shows you exactly what to do.
• added my email address to “custom value” and workflows. There is a very smart facility in Affiliate System that allows the use of “custom values”. A custom value is essentially a place holder that represents a particular phrase, e.g. an email address. With this feature you can store an actual email address in the “email address” custom value so that any where that custom value is referenced, it will automatically contain the address that you stored. The next step was to add the email address custom value into all of the workflows that make up the various sales funnels in Affiliate System.

That’s it for this week, please join me again next time to learn about lead magnets amongst other scary sounding things. Hmmm, sounds interesting.

Please feel free to leave a comment. Stay safe!