MikeFolan.com

I found this article and it makes some
very good points for anyone that is just starting out in blogging. I
have been blogging for a good few months I have to admit that I fall
into the category of not being patient with my blog. It does take
time to build your blog and after reading this article I have decided
that I will stick with the blogging for a bit longer and become more
involved in the blogging world.

At one stage I was making good progress
and was up to about 10 or 12 visits per day after 3 months, not a lot
you might think but it is a start and something to build on. Since my
lack of concentration and determination for this blog started over
the last few months I have noticed that my daily visitors have
decreased. This is simply down to the fact that I haven’t been as
active in the blogosphere as I once was. Have a read of the article
below and hopefully you will learn from it.

Mike

My
Blog Is A Failure
By John
T Pratt

I
think I’ll just go somewhere and put myself out of my misery…having
similar thoughts? Maybe I can help.

I’ve
been working at this blogging thing for more than a year and I
haven’t really made any money and I don’t get many visitors and I
am a miserable failure. My blog is a failure and I think I’ll just
go somewhere and put myself out of my misery…
Have you ever read a blog post like that? I have, and I’ve seen
very similar ones all over (not quite as bad) from people that were
certainly discouraged by their lack of blogging success. That one was
about one of the most extreme posts I’ve read, and that person has
pretty much just given up. Have you ever been at the end of your rope
with your blog? You’re not getting any comments, you don’t get
many visits, you’re not making any money, you don’t know what to
post about, you’re not meeting your goals - maybe you don’t even
have any goals yet! You are thinking about the success you once
dreamed of as a blogger and you’re now thinking of yourself as a
failure.

That
post I read resonated with me because I’ve been at crossroads like
this before myself. Time and time again I was ready to quite because
I didn’t think I was getting anywhere. In the back of my head I
always remembered something Shoemoney wrote on his blog. It was about
people having the perception that he was some kind of “overnight
sensation” raking in tens of thousands on his site with ringtones.
He pointed out that the first two years he tried to make money online
me made nothing. Not a single penny. He even got fired from his day
job for working on his ringtone site at work (that wasn’t making
any money yet).

Success
is never overnight. Success is a learning process, and with blogging
it’s “learn as you go”. I think of Stevie Ray Vaughan who rose
to fame in 1981 with his first album and hit single “Pride and
Joy”. His success seemed overnight. Most had no idea he was born in
1954 and had been playing since the age of twelve. From 1970-1980 he
played, and played, and played, and played on stage some more
perfecting his craft. It’s not to say that he didn’t have true
natural talent. But his incessant passion for music and refusal to
give up on his dreams and goals drove him to never give up and press
on. The fact that he did nothing but eat, sleep, and breathe his
craft for more than a decade while practically living as a vagrant
made him into the talent that he was.

I’m
not saying you need to blog for 10 years without making money or
being successful in any way, but you need to be realistic about what
it is that you expect. I put this blog online in June 2007. I am
thankful for the growth I’ve had so far in the last 10 months and
look forward to the next year. I by no means think that I’m a huge
blogger (yet). I do think I’m in a position to tell you about what
I’ve experienced so far, and maybe it will help you.

What
to Expect Your First Month of Blogging

If
you’re brand new to this “blogging” think the first month is
where you will have your first challenging time. I think it’s
honestly where most people quit. They quit because they don’t have
a plan for blog success. The first challenge you actually have is
setting your blog up the first time, getting a theme you like, and
learning your way around your blog. The next issue you have is
posting content, and create quality consistent content that people
will read. My answer to “what to expect” your first month
blogging is “a lot of work”! Whatever you get, you get, but don’t
expect much of anything your first month of blogging in terms of
visits or money. Think of it as the first month on the job or first
term at school. You’re still trying to get acclimated to how things
work.

Here’s
a (very) short list of things to think about the first month:

• Does
  your blog have a (topic) theme?

• Did you ask a few friend
  or fellow bloggers to test it and give you feedback?

• Is your blog sluggish,
  or do the pages load fast?

• Did you post a least 2-3
  times per week each and every week?

• Do you have a contact
  page and about page?

• Are you tracking stats
  somehow, like Google analytics?

• When you type your
  domain name in Google - do you get results yet?

What
to Expect Your First 90 Days of Blogging

After
your first 3 months of blogging you should feel like you have a bit
of a routine. You should be regularly posting, and even have a few
ideas for posts stacked up. If you don’t (like I didn’t) you need
to get more organized. Keep a pen and paper handy and write down all
of your ideas as you get them for later use. Also read lots and lots
and lots of other blogs - and you will get all sorts of ideas to
write about. Make sure spending quality time blogging and not wasting
time. Now that you have some content (after the first month), get
your blog registered with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Also learn to
track your search engine rankings to figure out where (and if) people
are finding your site in search engines. Signup for some of the
social blogging networks and reach out to other bloggers. Check out
myBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Bumpzee, entreCard, or one of the many other
ones out there. You can do this by messaging people, commenting on
their blogs, offering to guest post, or advertising on blogs. The
more you interact with other bloggers the more exposure you will get.

Explore
new wordpress plugins (if you use Wordpress), or figure out ways to
creatively expand your site and make it more useful for your visitors
with plugins and modules. Regularly vivew your blog stats and learn
which Google analytics are most important. You should be learning How
to do Basic Keyword Research, and How to Build Links. If you’re
using Wordpress Learn How to Manage Wordpress More Effectively, if
you’re using another blogging platform - learn more about it, how
to hack it, and customize it more to your liking. Also begin to learn
How to Monetize Your Blog if you haven’t already. Learning how to
convert your traffic into a monthly income is possibly one of the
most important things you can do - and may (in the future) be the
only thing that keeps you from quitting. Nobody wants to blog for
free forever.

At the
90 day mark you can expect to have some kind of regular traffic,
whether it’s 15 visits a day or 100. You should be on a regular
posting schedule and have posting ideas backed up. You should know
the ins and outs of your blogging software and be comfortable making
some customizations. You should have some type of monetization, and
be constantly learning how to promote your site in as many ways as
possible. You may or may not be getting regular comments on your
posts at this point, and your traffic may not be that great. You
might not even have a Google pagerank yet or good search engine
results, but you are in “build mode” at this point. You should be
both reading and writing a lot. Think of this phase as your “blog
internship”.

The
6 Month Blogging Milestone

This
should just about be the turning point for your blog. If you’ve
been posting 2-3 times per week (at least) you should now have more
than 50 posts. For me, it just seems like that’s the point where
things start to get a bit easier. It’s like being on the job a year
or two or getting halfway through high school or college. You know
what to expect, you know what’s going on - you seem to have a
pretty good handle on things. If you did everything I said to do for
the previous two milestones than you should have 50+ articles with a
few “pillar” articles being the attraction and the rest
contributing a little bit each day. Hopefully you’ve got 50-100
comments on your posts at least, and 100-300 visitor’s per day.
You’re somewhere “in the mix” out in the blogging community and
you have some followers in your own blog community, and other
bloggers may know you as part of theirs. You should be used to
posting and writing, so it’s time to do a few additional things to
give you an extra push.

Check
Your Sitemap against your SERP’s to ensure indexing in the search
engines is going well. You should have enough posts now to think
about going back and making previous posts more profitable. Now that
you have lots of posts stacked up, think about organizing your site
using pages. Monetize your Search Results with products or Create
your own theme. You could even add content by creating an entire
affiliate store from a data feed. Now that you have enough articles
you can seriously consider submitting your best content by learning
how to do article directory promotion.

Create
Your Own Blogging Milestones

If you
haven’t already realized it, everything you do as a blogger is just
a building block. Like a lawyer building a reputation, a pastor
building a congregation, a mechanic building a customer base, or a
doctor building a base of patients - YOU as a blogger are creating
your own milestones. You should be making goals and plans to reach
them. Analyze where you are now and where you want to be. What will
it take to get there? Make a short, medium, and long term goal. If
you have 100 visitors per day now what would it take to get 200? If
you make nothing on your blog now, what would it take to make enough
to pay for your hosting bill? How many posts and comments do you want
by the end of the year? Goals that you achieve will be your own
milestones. Do what I did awhile back and analyze what are the habits
of successful bloggers.

Your
blog is not a failure. It’s 5,000 mistakes from success…

John
Pratt writes free guides and blog help at JTPratt’s
Blogging Mistakes. Additional
help and resources for this article can be found at My
Blog is a Failure. John also
reviews gadgets at Used
Cell Phone Bargains.

Article
Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_T_Pratt
http://EzineArticles.com/?My-Blog-Is-A-Failure&id=1105051

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I took the last two months as a break from blogging and try to sort out other things in my life and to enjoy myself in the mean time. It was an eventful two months and won’t be forgotten anytime soon. It had its highs and its lows. Although I did miss blogging to a certain extent it was nice to have time away from the laptop and get other things sorted. Most are sorted and others are not, but as is life, there will always be new issues popping up that need sorting.

My last post was over two months ago, on the 6^th of June. It was only a few days before this that I had started a new fitness regime to get myself back into shape. I had discovered a new gym just a five minute drive from the city where I live. It involved a very strict diet and workout sessions like none I’ve ever experienced before. I stuck to the diet and the exercise sessions and I could not only see the results but feel them too. In the first two weeks I had lost a stone in weight (14lbs) and I felt better about myself and I was building muscle mass at the same time. Now you might think a whole stone in just two weeks?! Madness, I agree, much too fast, but it was working for me and I was determined to stick to it as I was seeing and feeling the results.

At the end of the first two weeks I became very ill, now I know what you might be thinking, but no it had nothing to do with the diet or the exercise regime. It was an illness that I had fallen victim to back in March, which I wrote about here. According to the doctor, the bug, virus or whatever it was, had never completely left my system and it decided that it would surface at the worst time. I was doing well on my new fitness fix and really did not want to stop, but I was confined to my bed, off work and had no energy levels what so ever.

It took nearly two weeks before I felt right again and even then I still felt a bit weak. At the end those two weeks I was due to go on holidays to Berlin, Germany, on the 29^th of June. I went on the holiday feeling much better but was still wary of what I consumed. After the first 2 days of the holidays I felt great and enjoyed my holidays. I was able to eat and drink properly again.

We went to Berlin for 10 nights. Berlin is one of the most beautiful and amazing cities that I have ever been in and I would go back again tomorrow if I could. There is so much to see and do in Berlin that we had just about enough time to do them. There is a lot of shopping areas in Berlin to keep the shoppers amongst the group happy but also there where so many tours of the city. There is a lot of history in Berlin, as you can imagine, we went on walking tours of the city and saw sights such as the Brandenburg gate, the victory monument, the Reichstag, Hitlers bunker and lots more. If you are wondering where to go on holidays and haven’t already been there, then book it now, it was a great holiday and one of the best that I ever had.

Once the holidays where over it was festival time here in Galway city. Galway has two very famous festivals that run one after the other. The first being the Galway Arts Festival. The festival includes a great number shows, plays and concerts. One of the main highlights of the Arts Festival is the Macnas parade. This year it was a night parade, with lots of pyrotechnics that really kept the crowd entertained. Afterwards there was fireworks display that was amazing.

The next festival after the Arts Festival is the Galway Races. The Galway races attracts hundreds of thousands of people to the city each year. The city is alive with the buzz of the races, streets are jam packed with people enjoying themselves and having a good time that it is very hard not to get caught up in the excitement. Going to the racecourse itself is another experience that is not to be missed. I have been to the races every year of my life. My parents use to bring me up when I was younger I have been going ever since. Again the crowds that are at the races make it what it is and the excitement when the horses are approaching the finish line and you think that you might be in with a chance of winning, and when your horse does win!!

Now things are back to normal, I’m back to my fitness regime and have already lost a few lbs since I started only a week ago. I am looking forward to getting back into my blogging habits again and making some new friends out there. I know I may have rambled on, but if I was blogging over the last two months you would have probably got the same spiel, but in bursts.

Mike

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I spent all of last week doing up a few
plans for the June bank holiday weekend that has just gone. I had
done my research for them, took my time writing them, proof reading
them, and finding anything else that I could that would add to the
posts, and I have to say that I was fairly happy with the out comes
of the posts. I saved them onto a USB disk drive as my Wordpress
install has a few errors and will not allow me to publish posts
unless I use a stand alone application or an extension like scribe
fire, which I have on my own laptop, but I was on a different PC at
the time, so I saved it and went happily on my way, knowing that I
had a few posts completed for the following few days.

Come Thursday evening when I went to my
laptop to load them onto the site, the files had vanished!! I don’t
know how. There were only a few files left on it that I had saved. It
really pi**ed me off to say the least. I had put a lot of work into
and was looking forward to having a busy weekend with what I had
outlined in them. So I will start again this week and make new posts
to replace the lost ones.

It just goes to show that you should
always backup your data!!

Mike

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I finally got my car back!! But don?t get too excited yet. It has to go back. The dealer had the car for two weeks and two days. When I went to collect it they showed me what work they had done, and what issues where outstanding. When highlighting these things to me I noticed that they hadn?t fixed one of the problems that I had previously reported prior to leaving the car with them. This got me really mad. I then went over the car with a fine tooth comb to see what other problems that I could find that they could fix when they take my car back the next time. They are waiting for parts to come in now. They car is booked in for Wednesday the 4^th of June, the Wednesday after the bank holiday. Really frustrating!!

?

Mike

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I have been making a few changes here
to the website and in doing so I have noticed that there are quite a
few errors on the site. These errors can be quite annoying. I am
therefore going to take the site down for a few hours and get things
sorted out.

I am going to do a review of the
plug-ins that I have for the site as I have noticed that some of them
don’t work and others I don’t even have made active. So I will
review them and get rid of the clutter and hopefully this will result
in a more smooth and efficient website. Also if you have any plug-ins
that you use on your website and find that they are very useful and
make the running of your site a lot easier, then please let me know
what they are and where I can get them.

I am also going to look for a new theme
for the site, if you know where there are any that you think that I
may like please let me know in the comments below, as the contact
page is not working, another fix that needs taking care of.

So if you happen to come to my site
over the next few days and find that it is down then you will know
why.

Thanks for your patience and help on
this,

Mike

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Thank God that week is over!! It was a
good week and a bad week. The weather for the week was great. The bit
of time that I got to spend outdoors I got to work on my tan
I had the last two weeks off from work as study leave and spent most
of it studying. I had a maths exam, a physics exam and a chemistry
exam. I felt that I did good in both the chemistry and the physics
exams. Not certain about the Maths, but I think that I did enough to
pass it. I am not all that worried, as long as I get a pass. It
doesn’t really make a difference if I get 40% or 100% as longer as
its 40 or over, to count as a pass. Now that the exams and all of the
study are over I can finally get started with my projects. Yahoo!!

But now that the study is over and the
exams are complete, it also means back to the normal routine, work,
work, work!!! I don’t hate my job, in fact I have a very easy job
most of the times, I just don’t like having to be somewhere and not
have the choice if I want to go or not, if you understand what I
mean. Anyways that’s enough of that rant.

So, onto my projects for the summer. I
don’t have them listed as of yet. I will sit down later this week
and review what I have in mind and decide which of them that I really
want to concentrate on. I need to make a good bit of money before the
summer is out and I need to sit down and concentrate on what I have
to get done in order to achieve this.

I want to be able to pay off my car
loan early so that I can apply for a mortgage as the mortgage
companies will not give one as long as I have the car loan.
So if I concentrate on generating more money then I will have a great
chance of paying the loan off early. As it is I am paying nearly €400
a month on the car loan. I am also saving an extra €1200 a month on
top of this, so I should have the car paid off by the end of the
year. As things stand I owe €14000 on the loan itself and have over
€3000 saved towards this goal. According to my calculations it will
take me nearly a year to pay this off. So I need to generate as much
income as I can to reach my goal of the end of this year.

Wish me luck and also, donations are
accepted

Mike

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Tell me why I don’t like Mondays! Still waiting for my car back they will have it a week tomorrow!! They are “waiting for a part” to be delievered. I am praying that it is ready for tomorrow evening. It is getting annoying now.

Spent a bit of time this morning studying and am not half as worried about the maths 3hr maths exam tomorrow night as I was. We had an extra class for maths last Friday night and the tutor went over the topics that will be coming up in the exam. Will get more study done tomorrow before the exam. Then I have a physics and a chemistry exam on Thursday, so I will spend Wednesday and Thursday studying for them exams.

I am looking forward to getting them over and done with as I am looking forward to starting into some of my projects. So head down noe and hit the books.

Mike

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Back at in Sept of 06 I bought a brand new Grande Punto 1.4 16v Sporting. I loved the car at the time and I still do. It has many great features such as Blue&Me, handsfree wireless bluetooth technology for the phone. A 6 gear box, sporty features such as spoilers, side skirting, sporty exhaust, leather steering and handbrake covers and lots more besides. It is just in the last few months that it has taken a wrong turn for me somewhere. It is sarting to look like Fiat are living up to there name that they are trying so hard to shake, Fix It Again Tom!!

So what has brought me to this? I got my car serviced, the second time, first time with the dealer two weeks ago yesterday, Tuesday, and already I have been back to them four times!! Before the service I spent 4 months waiting for a part to be ordered from Turin. They get that part in, a steering rack, and fit it, along with a switch that I need replacing, for the wipers. I take the car out the day that it is “fixed” and drive out the gate of the garage just to find that they have broken the switch on the other side, for the indicators! I turned right around and back into them. They couldn’t fix it there and then and I had to bring it back to them again the next week so that they could fix that, and that was only the begining.

Last Thursday evening I was leaving a local shopping centre which exits onto a round -about and as I was approaching the round about, my brakes decided that they wouldn’t work! I was lucky that the oncoming car was going slow as I was able to get back onto the accelerator and get out of the way. I brought the car back to them the following morning and they had the car for the day and found nothing wrong!! They wanted me to drive it for the weekend and see if I had any problems, i.e. see if I kill myself!!. I didn’t do much driving that weekend. I didn’t experience it over the weekend again, thankfully.
They found an issue with the clutch and it had to brought in yesterday morning to get the nesscary work done.

Over the weekend the car developed more issues grinding and buzzing noise in the steering column and a knocking noise from the suspension. I got a phone call from them that evening saying that they car would not be available for me until Thursday as they had to order a part for it and that they would not release the car to me in it’s current condition. What I got from that is the fact that they let me drive a car that is potentelly dangerous for the weekend and now decide that I can have it for that reason.

I have a four year warranty on the car and it is fast approaching the end of its second year. I wonder what route I can take from this? As with any other product that you purchase that is under warranty, if you have a problem with it you can get a replacment. Is it the same for cars? I know it would be for a certain lenght of time, but after nearly 2 years of ownership does this still apply?

I love my car still and don’t really want to get rid of it, but it is going to keep causing me this much trouble it is not worth keeping, what happens when my warranty runs out, it will cost me a fortune to keep getting things fixed on it.

I’m at a loss really.

Mike

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The Future Of Blogging.

Blogging for me is a past time and I do enjoy it. Although sometimes it may take time that I don’t have or I don’t get time to blog about some thing. That’s why I have decided that I am no longer going to go out of my way to blog everyday, not that I have for a while now, keep reading to find out why.

I want to keep it to posting every second day, failing that I will post as often as I can. These next few weeks are going to be busy for me. I have assignments and exams in college over the next weeks and I need to concentrate on them as they are the end of the year exams and will dictate weither I will be able to go to onto a course that I want to do in Sept.

Once the exams are done I want to get going with some projects that I have in mind, both offline and online. I am looking forward to this summer as I will have a lot more time to dedicate to things that I want to do. I want to blog more, but not at the expense of my other projects. I will be posting about what I am at and I will still post the odd post about blogging, internet marketing and other usefull things that you may want to read about. For the moment I am concetrating on other stuff.

One of the things that I want to concentrate on more is internet marketing. I did orginally start this blog to try and make money online, and I have, be it a small amount. When I started blogging, as I suspect a lot of bloggers out there may have also thought, that blogging was the easy way to make money online. How wrong we all where. There are other ways that I need to spend more of my time concentrating on, as I need to increase my income and get all of my loans paid off.

So for now, keep checking back if you are interested in how I am getting on. I will be posting regularly about how my projects are going.

Mike

The Future Of Blogging.

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Overcoming Problems

After my recent experience of viruses, changing host and updating some essential software or maybe better put as, “IT Failure” I thought that it would be a good idea to write a post on what steps I took and just how I managed to survive.

The first thing that people are most likely to do when something goes wrong is panic and think, “oh shit”! A few words of advice, don’t panic! It may seem like a bad terrible thing has happened to you and that your world has come to an end and things will never again be the same as they once where. Not true. All problems have a solution. Be they short and sweet or long and arduous.

Fixing the PC.

When I first encountered the problem with PC, the first thing that I did was a reboot. 9 out of 10 times that is all that you need to do. You might have left something on the keyboard that was pressing the button or a disk left in the disk drive. Just clear all debris from around your PC, remove any disks and simply restart your PC. Sometimes just restarting for a few seconds may not be enough, leave it for five minutes then come back to it as some things take time to reset.

Failing this read what error is being displayed on the screen. This is the computers way of telling you what is wrong. Not always will you get an error message, but when you do, read it and see if there is any thing in the message that makes sense to you. The message that I received was “X300 SE 128MB BIOS P/N 113-A33406-100″. That may look like double Dutch to you, and indeed it did to me. But if you see something in it that you may have seen somewhere before or recognize some or the terms used, you are half way there. The parts that I recognized were X300, 128Mb and Bios. Some parts are specific to each computer and may appear different on your error message. Below I have outlined what parts I recognized and how they helped my to solve the problem. You could follow the same method.

X300

This part I recognized from my graphics card. This is part of the model number of my graphics card. This was one avenue that I could have explored but thankfully I didn’t have to as it could have been expensive. You may not see X300, if your graphics card has a different part number.

128Mb

This made me think that it could be my RAM. My PC has 512 Mb of RAM and each stick of RAM has 128Mb. It turned out to be my RAM, which is not too bad as my PC can still function without the stick of RAM, although at a slower pace. I explain more later on how I discovered that it was the RAM

BIOS

As far as I’m concerned it is never good to see BIOS in an error message, as for me I don’t have a great lot of experience with the BIOS and this could have gotten messy.

Trouble Shooting.

One thing I always do before I work on any PC is to try and see if there is anywhere online that can help me. I agree with Tesco’s “Every little helps”. If you can find somewhere on the net, or even in a book, that somebody has experienced the same issue or similar before, you could follow their steps. I usually go to forums.techguy.org and can find an answer there. If not, I post a thread outlining my problem. This I did do and it helped me solve the problem. I both, posted a thread and found another thread where someone had a similar issue.

The Solution.

In these threads it was highlighted that it was my RAM or my graphics card that was the issue. I decided that I would trouble shoot the RAM first as this was probably the easier option to go with and I didn’t have another graphics card to use as a replacement. I took out each stick of RAM at a time and tried to reboot the PC. I removed the first stick and left the other three there and rebooted. The PC started. I though that I had the problem solved. I reinserted the first stick and removed the 2nd stick and left the others where they were. The PC started each time I removed one. I decided that I would remove all the sticks of RAM and only have one in at a time. The first 2 worked fine, the third one came to a grinding halt! I had sorted the problem. Reinserted the rest of the sticks of RAM and the PC works perfectly now. I didn’t have to go down the graphics card route.

What it all boils down to is to keeping a cool head and don’t panic. Sit back, have a good think and look at the problem. Sometimes just opening the case can really help, you may see a cable or a card has come loose, problem solved. If you can’t find the solution, don’t be afraid to look for help. There is plenty out there. Now I know some of you may not have the luxury of a back up such as laptop. Pay for an hour or so in an internet café or find a friend that is willing to let you use theirs. There is always a way.

I think that I have gone on enough here about the PC and I was hoping to cover the virus, software issues and the changing hosting with you also but I think that I will post on them another day. I want to outline to you what software you could use and how to prevent an attack from hackers, viruses, spy ware, malware and any other un-wantables. In another post I will probably go through the steps need to change hosting.

Mike

Overcoming Problems

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