I had a GREAT learning lesson today.

I had to go to Western Union earlier this afternoon. I just found out a friend had been robbed and I wanted to transfer some money to him.

When I got there, the lady running the counter didn’t know exactly what she was doing. She was flipping around her screen and asking ME what she should type in for different things that I had no idea about.

I gave her my best guesses, and it seemed to work…. but when I went to pay with my PayPal card, it came up declined.

I KNEW I had money in there, and even double checked my balance on my cell phone to make sure.

The lady told me my PayPal card was a “pay as you go” card, so it wouldn’t work.

I told her (in a VERY nice way) that the card works as a debit all the time, and asked if she could please try again.

She became very agitated and told me, “Ugh, fine”.

When she did it, it came up denied again.

At this point she became VERY hostile with me and rude. I told her I was concerned because I had no other debit card, reminded her that my friend was robbed, and told her I was just trying to think of something because he had no money. I was still VERY nice about it.

Maybe she wrote me off because she thought I didn’t have funds or something, but she was so rude. She basically told me I was out of luck, reiterated that PayPal will never work because it’s “pay as you go”, walked away from me, and was really unfriendly.

When I left, I was pretty mad. I don’t know if I’m explaining well enough how rude she was, but she was extremely nasty for no reason.

I left the building seething, thinking about how I would go to another store, have it work, and then have my assistant call Western Union and the Safeway she worked at to tell them how rude and unhelpful she was.

(I NEVER complain about people, especially since people have bad days and I’ve worked retail, but she was so mean!)

I went to Fred Meyer, another grocery store, and as I figured, the PayPal card worked fine. The cashier at Safeway did something wrong.

Something in me decided to call the first cashier and tell her what happened.

When I called her, I was very nice about it. I said, “Hey, this is Rachel. You were just helping me with my Western Union. I went to Fred Meyer and it worked. I think what happened was that the other cashier put in my friend’s middle name, just so you know for next time!”

She was VERY nice and sincerely thanked me for helping her.

What did I learn out of this?

1. After I called her, I felt like the situation was resolved. Any residue of anger I had just dissipated. It was magical.

2. I stood up for myself in a “confrontational” yet kind way, which felt nice. (Normally I’d probably do nothing and just “eat” the anger, which would never REALLY go away….)

3. I actually got to help that cashier! She seemed very grateful for me telling her what happened.

All in all, it was a great learning lesson. I’m really proud to have stood up for myself and to lift the situation to something where we both left much happier.

Hey everyone! I’m on my honeymoon right now, but had this auto-scheduled to go out June 7th

This blog post is another one that I tried to make on the plane, but unfortunately, it was WAY too loud.

Someone recently asked me about my SEO strategy and what I do to get ranked.

Truth be told, I am NOT a big SEO person. I don’t know very much about SEO and I don’t really care to. I do know enough to get top 10 rankings for niche sites though, and that’s the main thing I use it for.

If you’re interested in how to get ratings for competitive sites, I think the best resource out there, from what I’m told, is Bring The Fresh. A lot of SEO products will tell you not to try to rank for super-competitive terms, but the guys at BTF not only did it… but they ranked for it very quickly. They say most people make SEO look a LOT harder than it is, and I think that’s the case too. And the guys at BTF teach SEO in a way that’s not overwhelming at all.

Anyway, what I do, that works pretty well, is:

1. I use Angela‘s and Paul‘s backlinks. If you’re not familiar with them, here’s how it works: these places are basically services that show you where you can post links that Google thinks highly of. For example, maybe they find an NBC article that has a high page rank. They’ll tell you about it, you can post on there with a link to your website, and then Google sees your link associated with NBC. Google sees you as more of an authority site and thus rank you higher in the search engines.

I use an amazing guy named Shaon to post links for me. He happens to have more availability, so if you want to hire him, scoop him up! The guy is INCREDIBLE and was Bangladesh’ top freelancer of the year. His email is shaon@privateoutsourcing.com (I get nothing for sharing that).

2. SENuke is a GREAT tool I have my traffic outsourcer do. I don’t know a lot of the details but I know whenever he uses it, our rankings go WAY up.

3. We convert all of our articles into Powerpoints, read them out loud and make videos of them, and then post them to video sharing sites. This helps us leverage the same content in many different formats. (You could also post them as podcasts, which I *think* we’re doing but am honestly not sure).

This alone works pretty decently, especially in small niches.

Honestly though, we do a LOT better with our affiliate program than SEO. If you missed the (free) post I created on how we got 2,536 affiliates, you can check it out here.

And if you have any other internet marketing questions, please feel free to ask them! I’m happy to answer (almost) anything!

Thanks for coming here A couple things:

1. I lost ALL contacts on my phone. If you’d like me to have your number, please message me on Facebook. My VA is going to compile one big list and give it to me. That’s because…

2. I’m overwhelmed with Facebook messages! I’ve been getting so many messages for things I do NOT use Facebook for (people wanting me to promote their products, random event invites, support tickets, etc)… and I end up getting so many that I miss the good ones.

My VA will be checking all messages. If they’re personal to me, she’ll forward them on.

I hope this doesn’t offend anyone, but I don’t know what else to do. The alternative for me has been ignoring everything which is probably way more offensive.

I just don’t have an extra hour per day to sort through messages (or more correctly, I’m not willing to create that hour, because it’s my highest choice to be OFF the computer).

If anyone happens to have any other ideas of how to best handle this, please let me know.

I’ll still be responding to all comments/wall posts… those are much easier to navigate and I quickly de-friend anyone who spams on my wall.

Thank you for understanding!

Someone recently asked me how I stay organized with internet marketing. She wanted to know what tools, websites, and other things to use.

I was overdue on this question, and VERY busy, so I made a video while on the airplane to answer it. (Talk about maximizing time! ) However, I just listened to it and realized it’s much noisier than I anticipated… so I had it transcribed. Here’s the main gist of everything:

#1: Calendar. I put everything that’s going on in a main calendar that syncs to my phone. At one glance I can see all upcoming appointments, due dates for projects, and anything that I need to remember. It’s a GREAT way to have an overall big picture look at what’s happening.

#2: I use a 3 subject notebook method that you may have heard me mention before. Here’s how it works: the last section of the notebook is where I list out my yearly goals (like making $10,000 a month). In the second section I break down how I can achieve those goals in 3-6 month increments (like having 500 people pay $20/month). The first section is daily to-do items where I break down the second section even more. This helps me keep my eye on the end goal. If you want to learn more about this, I recommend Time Management Tricks, where I outline this (and a lot more) in more detail.

#3: 30/60/90 day plans are also great. You can outline what you want to get done in 30, 60, and 90 day increments if you’re not yet willing to go a year out.

#4: Outsourcers are a highlight of my life! One of my VAs is just amazing. I spit out any random thought that I have for her onto a Jing video, and she’ll make a list out of it, and then an action plan. You can hire someone like that too.

#5: I have a different folder for every single project. It’s MUCH easier to organize things that way.

#6: I ONLY put things on my desktop if I’m working on them at the moment. If I get more than 5 icons on my Desktop I start to get uncomfortable. I literally feel repulsed when I look at some other people’s desktops and see a computer littered with icons. How can you NOT feel overwhelmed by opening up your computer and seeing that every day?!??

#7: Mindmaps are VERY awesome. You can use them to brain-dump a bunch of thoughts and not worry about them fitting in any kind of order. There’s also something about them that make even the most daunting tasks NOT seem like they’re too much to bear.

#8: I LOVE Google Docs. I share a lot of spreadsheets and files in Google Docs with outsourcers. I find it easier to use than Base Camp, and it’s free!

#9: Dropbox is another FANTASTIC tool that I love collaborating with people on. Here’s one way I use it: I put a file in Dropbox for my VA, she downloaded it, edited the file and designed it, and then uploaded the finished PDF in there. It was so easy!

#10: Use Action Enforcer or a timer. When you set amounts of time that you’re going to allot to certain tasks, it helps you get them done a LOT faster. I won’t go into this too in too much detail since this blog post is about organization, not productivity, but I think it needed to at least be mentioned.

I hope this helps! If you have any other internet marketing questions, simply reply to this page and let me know. I’ll be happy to make follow-up videos or blog posts!