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So as I mentioned in my first post on this blog, I am in the middle of a marketing masterclass, specifically John Thornhill's marketing masterclass. For the uninitiated, John Thorhill is what is known as an "internet marketer." He makes his living selling information products online, and he's damn good at it. He's also a truly wonderful guy and really enjoys helping people. His course is a 36 week course that walks you through setting up your first online business step by step.

Ok, so I had a different post in mind to write today, but a number of things derailed today when my computer gave me the deadly blue screen in early afternoon...

While working on music at a friend's house, I decided to open my computer and check on a couple of things (My section of the song we were working on was still about 15 minutes away at that point). Hit the power button and....

"Your computer has suffered a major error and will now shut-down"

Now in many people this is a terrifying moment in the day. For me, however, well I've had more than my fair share of computer blue-screens in the past 5 years alone. Although not pleased, I set about a system restore. As it turned out, I was missing one of my restore disks. Without all 3 disks, the computer could not properly reset to the factory defaults, and I couldn't access anything on my computer at all.

Last night, I got to be a part of an amazingly life changing experience.

As I've mentioned before, I work for a theater company in Columbus, OH called Shadowbox. We perform live sketch comedy (written in house) and we have a live house band that plays rock music between each sketch. This is our basic formula during the year. We also perform musicals, and the past year we've been doing a show called Back to the Garden, an original script about the Woodsock Musical Festival. And to date, it's been our most succesful show ever. It premiered in September of 09, was revived in Feburary of this year, extended by 4 weeks thorugh May of this year, and is returning to our stage in September of this year.

So before joining John Thornhill's Marketing Masterclass, I started a blog. Now after working online for over 3 years, this isn't a big feat in itself. But there was something about this site that got me jazzed. It was a motivational site, aptly named The Gift of Motivation. It was a site that offered motivational posts and a link to a Zazzle store that I started to build offering motivational gifts.

Now it all sounded good from a keywords standpoint. I even got a separate site started strictly to host my squeeze page, offering a free membership for motivational wallpapers.

I was stoked out of my mind for this site. I got posts moving on it, got my free membership site setup, got my first set of wallpapers uploaded and branded, even got a pretty large linking campaign going to build my backlinks. And for a while I got a pretty decent traffic list going.

First of all, I have to say a huge thank you to everyone that has commented on my last post (you can read it here); it truly is amazing the wonderful people you can meet on the internet.

So after thinking about what everyone's said, I began to really count my blessings and accomplishments. One of the biggest one's is this blog. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I've been online for quite a while now, and over the years I've built countless blogs and websites. But a) I never really stuck with them long enough to see anything happen with them and b) they weren't necessarily sites that I was proud to have myself associated with them.

Obviously this isn't the case with this one. I mean my name is the site - I have to make it something I can be proud of! The fact that I have almost 15 posts of my own original content on here is an accomplishment in it's self.

Well, first off, it's been over a week since my last post, and as a member of John Thornhill's Marketing Masterclass, this is a big no-no. I let "life" get in the way of accomplishing what I've started here, and I just can't do that.

Additionally, anyone that's been here before might have seen my post about my raw food challenge. Well, as you might be able to guess, I didn't get that started either. I have the instructions, but failed to plan out my budget to get the food. Additionally, I didn't look at my schedule to see what I had coming on the horizon. The past two weeks have probably been the busiest ever for my job, and I had a great fear of setting myself for failure during a truly stressful time.