Doing the work changed me.  Three month ago, when I started this blog – I knew a lot less about  marketing or business.  And – I’ve never undertaken such an in-depth course of self-study.

Where I’m at now.

These few months have been awesome.  I rewrote sales pages for the great guys over at Global Garden Friends.  And wrote a sales video script for them.

Then, I helped this guy, an antique photo restoration master, bring his skills and knowledge to the world via an information product.  Check out the sales page – I wrote it after interviewing the site’s creator – Dan West.

Beyond that, two good friends of mine are in the process of writing ebooks and setting up blogs around their areas of expertise.  The first is a cybersecurity guru – and he’s going to be publishing a great DIY guide to securing your data.  Reading and editing the drafts of that book inspired me to change ALL my passwords, update all my programs, and start getting serious about securing my data.  Paranoia is contagious.  More on this as the book gets closer to completion and we start putting together our marketing for it.

The second ebook is from a good friend involved in the Fine Wine Investment Community.  It’s a great guide to that lightly regulated investment market.  Just reading the draft of it before writing the sales copy taught me tons.  More on that as we get closer to launching it.

Finally, I helped this girl get more than 500 responses to her in-depth fitness survey.  So much of writing sales copy transferred over to writing survey requests.  Getting people to take their time and fill out a survey may even be more difficult than getting them to hand over their money.  Maria wants to more narrowly tailor her video-blogging to her viewer’s needs, desires, and habits in 2012.  Definitely check out Fitness Reloaded, it’s a great site about fitness minimalism.

Beyond the work I’ve been doing, I’ve read more than 15 books on marketing, creativity, and business in the last three months.  It’s true that the only education is self-education.

Where I’m going in 2012.

I’m in the process of putting together a large direct mail campaign.  I’ll definitely be doing a long post on the intricacies of split-testing, creating compelling envelopes, and writing a good long-form sales letter.  This project has been taking up a lot of my time at the moment.  It will be very interesting to work in snail-mail instead of online – I’m excited for the challenge and I think I’ll learn a lot.

Then – I can’t wait to put together the marketing campaign for the two eBooks mentioned above.  In my humble opinion, both books have the potential to add enormous amounts of value to their niche – and it will be fun writing the copy, reaching out to affiliates, and setting up the overall marketing campaign.

Finally, a very old and great friend of mine is a Division I Baseball Coach.  The guy has an absurd amount of knowledge about pitching and he’s putting together an extremely exciting product – but I promised him I’d keep mum.  I’ll write more as the product develops and we begin the marketing campaign.

All in all – this has been the three most educational months of my life.  Win or lose the contest, this blog is here to stay and I can’t wait to keep learning, building, and writing in 2012.  My sincerest thanks to Michael Ellsburg for lighting a fire under me.  And thanks to Tim Ferriss for publishing that great post.  Here’s to an awesome 2012.