Firstly, just over a week ago John Cow announced the results of his Cowpetition, and guess what? I won first prize! Woo Hoo! A copy of David Cavanagh’s 52 Week “Getting Started On The Internet” Program – including 52 weeks of live conference calls, 1 on 1 coaching and membership site. Also includes 4 day live workshop in Pattaya Beach Thailand ($9,997 Value). I got started in the Internet quite a while ago now, but I’m really looking forward to David’s coaching as there is always something new to learn and different perspectives to see.

About 7 hours after this was announced I logged into Twitter and saw Jason Moffatt (http://twitter.com/jasonmoffatt) make a Tweet offering a free subscription to Easy Video Sales to the first person who Twittered back. I sent a Tweet and, lo and behold, I won! Thanks Jason. Again looking forward to this as Jason is doing great stuff with video online.

Well, deciding I was on a roll, I bought a Euro Millions ticket that day (a very rare occurrence for me as I don’t usually go in for lotteries) and guess what? Yes, I won again! OK, it wasn’t the £34 million jackpot, but £22.50 isn’t to be sniffed at (that’s about half a tank of petrol at the moment).

I started a new Twitter survey (if you aren’t following me on Twitter yet, you can find me at http://twitter.com/Lisa Hartwell) to find out what people would most like to know about creating and using audio online. PollDaddy.com offer a free service to create polls on Twitter and you can also add that poll to your website/blog. If you haven’t taken the survey yet, please add your preference to the right of this post. At the moment, most people seem to want to know more about the technical stuff, so I will definitely be dealing with that in future posts (I feel some videos coming on).

I’ve left this a bit late, but Yanik Silver has released the latest Underground Online Seminar DVDs. You only have until tomorrow to get your hands on them (sorry for the late notice). I have attended 2 of Yanik’s seminars and bought the DVDs/CDs for all of them because he manages to find some of the best and most successful people in the Internet world (and usually people who do not speak at conferences as a rule). Much of the information divulged at these conferences is groundbreaking and stuff you can run with straight away (not just lofty ideals but concrete methods). Yanik is an excellent copywriter too, so check out what he has done with the sales pages for this launch (and when Yanik says that something is limited, he means it).

And finally, we are well into Pre-Season over at the Thirty Day Challenge but there is still time to get onboard. The pre-season videos so far have covered loads of flocking good advice on using the Flock browser and how to use Google Reader to save a huge amount of time out of your day. The actual challenge starts August 1st so there is plenty of time to get involved and catch up with the pre-season training, but it is best to do it NOW while it’s fresh in your mind. I’ve already used the word groundbreaking in this post but I am going to use it again – the (free) teaching over at the Thirty Day Challenge is almost always groundbreaking and worth checking out even if you’ve been working online for a long time, or you have an offline business and want to see how the power of the Internet can be harnessed to improve business.

Don’t forget you can add any thoughts and comments here on the blog or feel free to Twitter me (just add @audiomarketing to your Tweet and I will see it).

But the main reason for this post is that another challenge is happening online at the moment that you might want to catch up on, especially if you are into blogging and/or selling websites. John Cow and Garry Conn are going head-to-head (in fact they have already started) to see who can set up a brand new blog and then sell it for the most money within a month.

I love this sort of challenge, because they promise full disclosure of what they are doing and they are letting you watch for free. It’s one of those win-win situations. They have to succeed (or at least come close) otherwise they look stupid, and in the meantime you get to learn heaps from them.

Dan Raine did a similar thing with his $15k challenge and although he missed the mark by a few hundred dollars (and has been paying for it ever since with the pink thong video), he proved his credentials as an excellent marketer. That made a helluva lot more people want to learn from him and take part in the Thirty Day Challenge and/or Immediate Edge.

I suspect that John Cow and Garry Conn are using this as an opportunity to raise their blog readerships and with a huge prize giveaway as well, they should succeed. If you want to learn more about the challenge and all the prizes (and there’s some lovely stuff there including courses from Ed ‘Mankini’ Dale, Stompernet, Frank Kern, Jeff Walker…) then check out the Cowpetition (see what he did there?).

Especially if you are starting out online at the moment I highly recommend you grab all these free offers whenever you can – whether it be a fly-on-the-wall moment like this one where you can learn by watching others or a participatory challenge like 30DC. As someone pointed out in reference to last year’s Thirty Day Challenge – they learnt more from doing that free training than they ever did from the $1500 course they had just bought..and it made the difference between throwing in the towel with their business and becoming successful and profitable. You can start buying the high-priced courses once you have some basics and cash flow behind you.

Blogged with the Flock Browser