2009 has been the absolute best year of my life, both professionally and personally.

I set some goals for myself back in July of this year and I crushed every single one of them. I don’t want this post to come off as me bragging but I really am proud of what I have managed to accomplish.

I’m not sure how many people have read my original story. I will give a quick summary.

My family owned are own business that made window coverings. We ran the business for about 12 years. The economy hit the business hard and, instead of filing for bankruptcy, we opted to sell the company. The new owner kept most of my family on board but he was an insanely mean and abusive boss. From the day he took over, I knew that I needed to find a way out.

I was engaged to be married in May, I had just recently purchased my own home in November of 2008, and I absolutely hated my job. It seemed like the worst time in the world to leave.

In May of 2009, about 3 days before my wedding day, I decided that I was never going back. I would quit my job, go on my honeymoon, and come back to a fresh start. That’s exactly what I did.

It was scary for a little while. I applied for jobs all over town with no replies back and I was denied unemployment because I quit my job. I hunted all over the internet for answers to how I could make money online. I had been blogging for years and was making some income off of that but it was not nearly enough to cover all of my expenses. I had to figure something out.

I came across a coaching program in July of ’09 put on by Alex Jeffreys. I thought that this was the answer to what I was looking for. I put the $1,000 coaching course on a credit card and prayed that this guy could teach me how to make an income online.

The class was hugely beneficial but maybe not for the reasons you might assume. I did learn a lot from his coaching but most of it I already knew. He just helped reinforce what my goals and what my focus should be. The absolute biggest thing that I got out of this coaching was connections. A forum opened up and I made contact with some brilliant minds. These people helped me strategize what my focuses should be and how I should build my business. They made all the difference in the world. Josh Bartlett, David Chamberlain, David Walker, and Joe Fier (My inner circle), you guys are amazing and I appreciate everything you have done for me this year!

In August of ’09, I launched the WordPress Classroom. I didn’t expect a whole lot from it. I basically created it because I had so many people ask me questions about WordPress. Instead of explaining it over and over again, I just recorded videos and shot the videos over to people. Before I knew it, I had over 50 videos recorded. Josh (Bartlett) told me that I should try to sell the videos.

I put the offer up on the Warrior Forum as a WSO and I e-mailed my small list (about 150 at the time) with the details of the product launch.

I couldn’t believe it… It sold nearly 100 copies in the first week that I opened it up. It still continues to sell about 4 copies per day like clockwork.

While selling this product, I managed to build a mailing from close to 0 subscribers to close to 5,000 subscribers.

The last couple of months have been spent putting time in to creating a new product. It’s a combination of an ebook and a ton of videos. I really want to over-deliver on this and make a huge launch out of it. It should be a great way to kick off the new year.

Here’s a quick recap of 2009

May ’09 – Quit My Job

May ’09 – Married my beautiful girlfriend of 6 years.

June ’09 – Discovered Alex Jeffrey’s Coaching and signed up

July ’09 – Started this blog that you are reading

July ’09 – Started learning from the coaching modules

July ’09 – Met my “inner circle” (Josh, Joe, David, & David)

Aug. ’09 – Launched the WordPress Classroom

Aug. ’09 – Created my MTV Cribs Style Video

Sept. ’09 – Won a video contest for my Cribs video ($1,000 prize)

Sept. ’09 – My mailing list broke that 1,000 subscriber barrier

Oct. ’09 – Began working on new product (Tentatively called List Building Classroom)

Oct. ’09 – Mailing list broke 1,500 subscribers

Nov. ’09 – Mailing list passed both the 2,000 mark then the 3,000 mark

Nov. ’09 – WordPress Classroom accepted by Clickbank. Affiliates Jump on Board.

Dec. ’09 – Promote the launch of Mike Filsaime’s 7 Figure Code

Dec. ’09 – Came in 10th place in an early lead contest for the 7FC

Dec. ’09 – Broke 4,000 subscribers then broke 4,500 subscribers

Dec. ’09 – Wrote a long blog post about my year in review

So, as you can see, it’s been a pretty eventful year. I married my wife, broke free from my oppressive job, and built a small business that has managed to top the income of my previous job.

All that’s left to do now is to set some new goals to smash in 2010…

Goals for 2010

Here’s a list of the goals that I’m setting for myself by the end of the 2010. I’m going to analyze these goals closer and set deadlines, as well as rank them in order of importance. I’ll fill you in on all that in a later post.

Business Goals:

• Launch my new product (6 figures in sales) February Launch
• Build my list to over 20,000 subscribers
• Create at least one blog post per week (I’ve been slacking)
• Promote more product launches
• Rank #1 in at least one launch lead contest
• Round up an army of affiliates to promote current and future products
• Launch a monthly membership site to build a recurring income
• Set up a coaching program with a partner
• Attend at least 4 internet marketing related seminars

Personal Goals

• Finish remodel of master bathroom (It’s currently gutted)
• Remodel guest bathroom
• Cut back on the sweets and the junk food
• Exercise at least 4 times per week
• Purchase a netbook
• Purchase a Jacuzzi
• Make enough income that wife is comfortable leaving her job

As you can see, my goals haven’t changed dramatically from before. I still want to create a six figure and then a seven figure business. I still want my wife to quit her job. 2010 is the year I make it all happen.

What are your goals for 2010? Please comment. I’d love to hear from you. Maybe I can help you make them possible. We’ll never know unless you make yourself heard!

Here’s to an amazing 2010!

Matt Wolfe

I don’t promote many products to my mailing list. I usually just promote free stuff that will give my subscribers value. It’s usually free eBooks, free videos tutorials, free apps, and things like that. Well Mike Filsaime is relaunching his amazing product called The 7 Figure Code. He’s actually giving it away for free.

I decided that I would try my hand at promoting a launch. This is the first time I’ve ever done it before. I had no idea how my list would respond. I figured it would be good because Mike is giving away a free video to check out immediately. I never imagined that I would end up in the top 10 for generating leads!

He posted today the leaders that are promoting the product… I managed to top a bunch of really big name players. I’m really excited about this. I had no idea that my list was capable of actually being a “player” in the launch game.

Anyway, just wanted to make a quick post because I’m excited.

So one question that I get asked frequently is how I learned what I know about online marketing. Well, I didn’t go at it alone. I had a mentor. I owe a lot of what I know to a guy named Alex Jeffreys. He was the guy who I was able to talk to, get advice from, and ask questions from. He really helped me get to where I am today.

I just learned yesterday that Alex is giving away a free internet marketing course. I thought he was crazy (Especially since I paid him over $1,000 to learn from him). The stuff he teaches is pretty damn good. You can really learn a lot from him.

Check Out The Course Here

One thing Alex is going to tell you is that you need to have a blog in place. I pretty much consider myself an expert on blogging and I thought that, as a bonus, if you sign up and pay to be coached by Alex, I’ll give you free access to the WordPress Classroom for life. It has helped so many people get a blog up and running and profitable, I guarantee it will help you get your blog to where it needs to be. In fact, many of the people that are currently coached by him refer to the WordPress tutorials that I created to get their blog off the ground.

Within his coaching, You will also learn that you need to build a mailing list. He gives you some great coaching on exactly how to do this and he even gives out some products that you can give away to build your list. These products have earned him and some of his students thousands of dollars! If you sign up to be coached by him, I’ll throw in free access to my upcoming program, The List Building Classroom. This is a $47 per month program that is going to walk you through a whole bunch of little known list building tricks. Get coaching from Alex, and it’s yours free as a bonus. This is set to launch in the coming weeks and you will be one of the first to get access before it even launches.

Check out his program. You won’t regret it. I know I didn’t! AND if you buy coaching from him, you’ll get lifetime access to the WordPress Classroom AND lifetime access to the upcoming membership site, The List Building Classroom. You can’t lose! You are getting hundreds of dollars worth of bonuses for jumping on board right away. Spots are limited though. I can only offer this crazy bonus package to the first 20 people who take me up on this offer. So sign up, shoot me an e-mail, and I will take care of the rest.

Grab your spot (and your bonuses) now!

So I have stumbled across quite a few amazing blog posts lately that have been really helpful. I thought it would be a good idea to round them up and point them out. Have a look at some of these links. I guarantee that you won’t be disappointed and that you will learn a lot!

Probably The Most Comprehensive List of Traffic Sources – This is a massive blog post with 21 places to generate boatloads of traffic. I thought I knew about most of the traffic generation techniques that were out there… Man, this article really proved me wrong. There is a ton of great stuff here!

59 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t – This blog post is well over a year old but it is a great round up of all of the things you should be doing in your internet marketing business but probably aren’t. There is some amazing advice here!

Here are 3 plugins to boost your WordPress SEO – Phil Morgan put together a short and sweet list of WordPress plugins that will help your blog get to the top of the search engines.

12 Essential Security Tips For WordPress – Well this sort of ties in with my little mishap from last week. Here is a list of things that you should be doing to make sure that your blog is safe and secure.

How To Position Yourself as an Expert – This is very relevant if you are in to blogs or mailing lists. You need to give people a reason to want to listen to you.

That’s my round up of awesome blog posts. I’ll be doing these periodically. What do you think? Do you like the idea of me pointing out some great posts?

So I woke up this morning and jumped over to my blog. I noticed that my theme was still installed and that I could still log in to my dashboard but that there were no posts on my front page. All I saw was a “Page Not Found” error. I logged in to my dashboard and saw that every single post and page that I have ever created had been deleted. I have no idea how this happened but everything was gone. The database that held all of the information on my blog had apparently crashed. I freaked out a little bit and then remembered that I had taken some actions to safeguard against situations like this. I spent about 5 minutes reloading my last backup and everything was back to normal again. I may have lost one or two comments that may have come in over night but, for the most part, it’s like it had never happened.

It is scary because if I hadn’t have taken a few certain actions a few weeks ago, I would have been unable to recover my blog. I figured that there are probably a lot of bloggers out there that may not know how to backup their blog or how to recover their blog from a backup. It is really scary because your blog CAN go down at any time for no apparent reason whatsoever! Read this post and maybe you can put yourself in a situation where a database crash is nothing more than a 5 minute fix.

The very first thing that you should do is download and install the WP-DB-Backup plugin for wordpress. It’s a free plugin and can usually be searched for and installed from directly inside your WordPress Dashboard. Get that installed today. Once it’s installed set it up to backup daily and send you an e-mail with the backup. By doing this, you can jump back to any point in time and recover all the information that crashed. If you don’t update very frequently, you can also opt to backup weekly. I prefer daily because I know I can restore comments from the previous day as well.

Now… If your blog ever goes down and you have been doing a good job of backing it up, here is how you restore your blog.

1. Login in to your CPanel account and scroll down until you find phpMyAdmin

2. Find the database that your blog is installed on. The backup files that are sent to you from WP-DB-Backup will share the same name as the database you need to recover. So if you are unsure of which database to open, refer to the filename of your backup file.

3. Click on the tab that says import at the top of the new screen that just opened.

4. Click on “choose file” and find the backup file that you are going to use to restore your blog.

That should do it. Your blog should be back in all of its glory. Having a database failure can be extremely scary! Fortunately, if you take the right precautions from the beginning, it can be a very quick and painless fix. If you only have one plugin installed for your blog, make sure that it is a backup plugin. It will save you someday!

Please feel free to make comments. Have you had your blog crash? Do you have any questions about making sure you are protected against your blog crashing?