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I hope that you all had a great Christmas and made the most of the holiday season to catch up with loved ones and share the celebrations with them all.

I had a fantastic Christmas with my wife and children and then Boxing day I had my mum and two of my brothers around for a good ol’ feed and some festive fun. Which I thought topped off my year nicely, but how wrong was I….

In my last post I detailed how this year has been my best year since coming online and all that I had won and achieved this year. Now it’s all well and good me saying about my progress but when other bloggers mention it the feeling is simply fantastic.

Could this year end any better?

I didn’t think it could but am so very pleased to tell you that it has ended on the highest point I could imagine.

We’re approaching that time of year again, when we sit and reflect on the past 12 months and everything that has happened.

This time last year I was busy making plans for 2011 but they didn’t come off as I put them on hold to be by my mothers side during another health scare.

My mum had another bleed to her brain, this time leaving her with vascular dementia, and was in a bad way. Being both deaf and partially sighted communication was extremely difficult for the staff around her so I was by her side nearly all day every day for the first few months of the year.

As you can imagine the whole experience was extremely stressful and left me quite numb and unable to focus on anything constructive.

I tried keeping my blog up dated and started inviting guest posts, which really helped.

As my mums situation settled down a bit I was able to start spending less time with her so I continued with my blog hopping as best I could. Through leaving comments on other peoples blogs I was lucky enough to win a few prizes.

As many of you know earlier this year I won a place on the Learn With Sally coaching, and what a win it was The coaching is absolutely fantastic and went a lot deeper and further than I could ever of imagined it would go.

Sadly last week was the end of the live call webinar’s and the completion of the course. Not that I’ve completed it yet There’s so much to the course that I’ve been busy learning and applying, making notes then learning and applying some more but I still need to go over some areas and to make sure I’m getting it right and that it has all sunk in correctly

Regular visitors to my blog would have seen the transformation in my blog and the way I now apply myself and my new found skills.

My blog has gone from this….

…..to what you see around you now.

As I’ve been going through the course work, learning and applying, I’ve used some of my new found skills in my posts to demonstrate them as well as creating my videos and showing you how the journey has been progressing, and what a journey it has been.

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Regular visitors to my blog will remember that two weeks ago I published a post about Interviewing Adrienne Smith. Once I had published the post and completed the bookmarking and setting up the Twitterfeed it was time to go blog hopping.

The first blog I visited was Adrienne’s, where to my delight I found that Adrienne had nominated me for The 7 Link Challenge. You can use that link to read the rules but basically I have to find 7 of my posts that I feel fit the categories that are pre-selected in the challenge rules. I then have to nominate 5 further bloggers to pass it on to

Now anyone that knows me knows that I’m not one to shy away from a challenge, time permitting, so here are the seven posts that I’m entering.

Most Beautiful post:

This one was easy, not because of the post itself but because of what lead me to write it. I was having some issues with my blog and found that Ian Ieba was also having the exact same issues. For over a week Ian and I were talking over Skype, emailing and Facebook messaging each other late into the night trying to resolve this problem and an additional one I had found on my blog. Through all of the drama our online friendship blossomed into a real friendship that I know we both value very much.

Hi all, thanks for stopping by.

Many of you already know that I am currently taking part in the Learn With Sally coaching and regular visitors to my blog would have noticed plenty of changes to my blog since I started the coaching, proof of which you’ll find at the bottom of the post

As the coaching got under way Sally told us that she would be holding a competition to see who could generate the most traffic to their blogs for the last few weeks of August.

So I brought forward my plans for the Video blog challenge and held it…… during August

On my part there were 3 posts to the challenge:

The first was to announce it, explain the guidelines and invite everyone to take part, as well as explaining the Two posts that would follow.

The second post, Challenge Takers: Experts, 2nd Timers, Video Virgins and A Dark Horse, detailed and linked to all of the entries, with some fantastic tutorials, and the third post to detail my Top Ten Traffic Sources for the challenge period.

Hi all, thanks for stopping by.

As part of the Learn With Sally coaching we have to conduct an interview with an expert and then create a product from the interview. There are a variety of product types to choose from but the most important part to start with is choosing the expert and getting them to agree to an interview.

As I’ve been blogging over the last couple of years I’ve come across plenty of experts that are really advanced on their subject so choosing one to interview could have been a difficult task on it’s own.

However, choosing my expert wasn’t difficult as someone has really stood out to me for a long time. Nearly every blog I visit has also been visited by this person who always leaves exceptional comments adding value to the original post and offering advice and encouragement where fitting.

So I got in touch with this person and asked if they would allow me to interview them over Skype. Thankfully she agreed and was actually thrilled to have been asked

Hi all, thanks for stopping by.

Everyone working online knows how important it is to start building an email list and having an opt-in form available for people to subscribe to our lists.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, I see so many blog owners using the wrong method of applying their opt-in forms to their blogs. One of my pet hates is getting to blog, start reading the content and then 60 seconds later up comes a pop up that covers the screen and stops me reading.

Now I know that it’s their blog and they can apply what they want to it. But isn’t the point of a blog to allow people to read our content?

So why would we want to interrupt our visitors when they’re reading?

I don’t like pop ups on a blog or those ones that slide up from the bottom and I know I’m not alone in this. Personally if I get to a blog, start reading the content and a pop up then stops me reading I’m going to leave the blog altogether, unless those few lines that I’ve read have really grabbed my attention.