That was not my last post to 21st Century Affiliate Marketing

August 20, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 9 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Facebook, John Dilbeck, Musings 

Surprise! I’m back. (grin)

Apparently, the reports of my death were greatly exaggerated, and it looks like that applies to this blog, too.

I came close to dying back in March, and things weren’t looking too good in May, either.

I’m happy to tell you that I’m getting better. I have a long way to go before I’m fully recovered, but I’m making substantial progress.

I wrote what I thought would be the last post to this blog in the middle of May, 2010. Since then, there have been some significant events in my life.

On April 1, 2010, my friend and surgeon resected my intestines, removed my gall bladder, and removed an 8-lb colon cancer. He was surprised to find the tumor in one large contained mass, rather than spread throughout my abdomen. That was a very lucky break.

Other, relatively minor surgeries followed.

A PET scan showed that I had suspicious spots in both thyroid glands and in the right lobe of my liver.

A biopsy of each thryoid gland showed that the growths were benign, not cancer. Happy dance!

A biopsy of the tumor in my liver showed it was benign. Happy dance!

However, a radiologist on the oncology team that would be doing the procedure on my liver called me at home from his vacation and said the biopsy report on my liver had to be wrong. He had seen the scans (two of them) and knew from the look and the growth that it was cancer. He didn’t want to rain on my parade, but he said — emphatically — that I should get the biopsy redone, and he would do it himself, if I wanted. I talked it over with my daughter and decided to have the biopsy redone. Dr. Moore did it using a slightly different technique and was right. It was colon cancer that had metastasized to my liver. At least, we knew it was something that had to be dealt with, as soon as possible.

In July, 2010, I went to Mission Hospital in Asheville, NC, and Dr. Moore performed a radio frequency ablation of the tumor in my liver. It is good that I was a good candidate for this, because traditional surgery on the right lobe of the liver is a very serious operation. Basically, what he did was this: insert three needles (that are connected to a radio frequency generator) into my liver so that they surround the tumor. Turn on the generator to cook the tumor (think of this as a microwave oven).

Because of the size of the tumor, he had to use three needles and the results looked good on the ultrasound right after the procedure.

I went for a CT scan and checkup with Dr. Moore earlier this week and got the good news. There is no sign of cancer in my liver, the “cooked” portion completely enveloped the tumor and some surrounding tissue, and there are no signs of bleeding complications. Very good news, indeed.

So, now the surgical interventions are all done and I’m on my second round (of 24 total) of chemotherapy treatments.

Now, instead of expecting to die from this (as it looked back in March), we’re working together to cure it. That’s a huge change in expectations and perspective in only three months.

I’m a long way from being my old self. I’m tired all the time and have trouble thinking straight, but I’m definitely improving.

So, instead of closing this blog, I’ve updated it to the latest version of WordPress, changed the theme, and spruced it up for another few years of talking about affiliate marketing.

I will not be posting as often as I did previously, but this blog is not going to just sit here, either. I will definitely be putting more effort into building evergreen, content-rich, hierarchically-organized websites than I will into blogging, but both have a part to play in my marketing plans.

I want to thank everyone who sent me their encouragement and support in the comments here, on my Facebook profile, and in email and phone calls. It meant a lot, and still does. I think your outpouring of support, encouragement, and prayers is one of the major reasons that I’m looking forward to conquering this cancer, instead of being its victim.

So, that’s enough about me. Let’s get back to talking about affiliate marketing.

(Now, I have to remember how I added that subscribe via email form on this blog. Scratching head…)

Act on your dream!

JD

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This is my last post to 21st Century Affiliate Marketing

May 14, 2010 by John Dilbeck · 17 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, John Dilbeck, Marketing, Success and Failure 

Before I say anything else, I want to thank all of you who have been regular readers and who have made this blog better by sharing your thoughts and comments with all of us. You know who you are.

This is the last post to this blog and I will be shutting it down in the next few days or weeks, as I have the time and energy. I’m closing my marketing business and I’m out of affiliate marketing.

It’s amazing how much of a difference two months can make in one’s life.

Two months ago, I went to the emergency room because I could not get out of bed. After 7 units of blood, I felt a bit stronger, but that lead to the discovery of colon cancer, which was followed shortly after with intestinal surgery, gall bladder removal, and today I learned that I need surgery for cancer in my liver and a biopsy for possible cancer in one of my thyroid glands.

For the foreseeable future, I’ll be putting my energy into kicking these cancers’ butts. I don’t intend to let them beat me, but you never know.

I don’t know for sure what will happen to this domain name. If you’re a regular reader and contributor to this blog, I’m willing to listen to your ideas.

It’s been a wild ride for the last several years, and I’m sad to see the ride coming to an end.

I plan to continue posting (now and then) to JohnDilbeckAndFriends.com and to my Facebook account at facebook.com/johndilbeck .

Thanks for reading, contributing, and making affiliate marketing just a bit more interesting as we shared ideas and thoughts about the subject.

Continued success to you.

All the best,

JD

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I now have three primary blogs

February 10, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 4 Comments
Filed under: Blogging, John Dilbeck, Western North Carolina 

If you’ve been reading this blog for any time, you know that I’ve been struggling with my blogs and websites and how I’m going to focus my efforts more in 2009.

You’ve also noted, I suspect, that some of the posts I have here don’t really relate to affiliate marketing.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve created a new blog and resurrected another one, and now I have my three primary blogs set up for real work. There are a few more things I need to do, but they are ready to go.

21st Century Affiliate Marketing

This blog will be focused more tightly on affiliate marketing. I won’t be talking as much about Twitter tools, social networking, and similar topics, unless they can be tied directly to being a more effective affiliate marketer.

John Dilbeck And Friends

I’ve moved my John Dilbeck And Friends blog from it’s former home at johndilbeck.editthispage.com to it’s new home at JohnDilbeckAndFriends.com and now it is powered by WordPress.

This is the blog where I’ll be talking about social networking and other things in which I’m interested. It will be a general purpose blog, but I don’t plan on talking about politics or what I had for breakfast! ;)

Murphy, NC 28906

Finally, I’ve resurrected my Murphy NC 28906 blog, updated it to WordPress version 2.7, changed the theme, and added some bells and whistles. It will be used exclusively for talking about people, events, organizations, businesses, and things related specifically to Murphy, NC.

Because of more pressing issues, I neglected that blog for most of 2008, but it will be much more important to me in 2009 and in future years.

Before too long, I’ll be reintroducing my Murphy NC community and a announcing a brand-new website for promoting local businesses on the Internet.

More focused on my two primary goals in 2009

With these changes, I think I’ll be able to segment my efforts and focus on my two primary goals for 2009:

1. Continuing to build my affiliate marketing business and making it more profitable.

2. Promoting local brick and mortar businesses in Murphy, NC. I’ll also be doing much more offline marketing consulting with local business owners.

I hope this will make this blog more interesting to those of you who are interested in affiliate marketing.

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Did you know you can syndicate your SquidCasts by RSS and email?

December 22, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 6 Comments
Filed under: John Dilbeck, Lenses, RSS Syndication, Squidoo Lenses, email marketing 

As I’ve written previously on this blog, you can treat your Squidoo lenses as a sort of mini-blog by sending a SquidCast whenever you create a new lens or make significant updates to an existing lens.

The SquidCast is a very limited posting (500 characters maximum) about the lens. This is added to the RSS feed for that lens.

For example, the following URL is the RSS feed for my John Dilbeck lensography lens:

http://www.squidoo.com/xml/syndicate_lens/John-Dilbeck

Each lens has a similar RSS feed.

In order to make use of this, you must remember to send a SquidCast whenever appropriate. Fortunately, we are reminded to do this whenever we publish a lens.

You can treat this RSS feed as you would any other. It can be added to feed readers, syndicated using RSS modules on other lenses or your blog, and it can be syndicated via email, if you want.

I got to thinking about this because I read a post by Linda Martin on her blog: Offer Email Subscriptions to Your SquidCasts

She has created a new lens, Offer Email Subscriptions to Your SquidCasts, that explains the process of offering updates via email for your SquidCasts for all your lenses.

Essentially, her method uses the RSS feed for all a lensmaster’s Squidcasts, provided by thefluffanutta’s SquidUtils.com, and syndicates it using the free services of FeedBurner.com.

Each lensmaster can get an RSS feed through SquidUtils.com that includes the SquidCasts you’ve made for all your lenses, combined. The URL for my feed is:

http://squidutils.com/squidcasts/from/johndilbeck.rss

Feedburner.com provides tools for publicizing your RSS feeds, including syndication via email. It is a free service, and you can syndicate as many RSS or Atom feeds as you want.

Using the method Linda describes on her lens, anyone who subscribes to the email updates will be notified whenever a lensmaster updates any of his or her lenses. This may be a very good way to keep your fans updated if your lenses are about similar topics.

However, if you have a lot of very different types of lenses, it may not be the best approach, necessarily.

Linda provides a caution on her lenses reminding the subscriber that they’ll receive updates on all her lenses, not just the one they’re subscribing from.

On the other hand, you may want to restrict updates to just the lens that’s being read.

You can do this by syndicating just that lens’ RSS feed via Feedburner, instead of the combined SquidCasts feed provided by SquidUtils.

That way, your readers will not be surprised by updates totally unrelated to the lens from which they subscribed.

So, which is better?

Do you want an easy way for your readers to subscribe to your SquidCasts for all your lenses combined?

…or…

Do you want an easy way for your readers to subscribe to just the SquidCasts about the lens they are currently reading?

I think syndicating the SquidCasts for all your lenses may be more useful, unless you have a lens that will be updated frequently. There’s not much point to subscribing to updates to a lens if it is only updated every few months or so, is there?

Fortunately, you can do either – or both – depending upon what you think is best for your readers and the particular lens they are visiting.

Thanks for the reminder, Linda, and for providing clear instructions on providing our fans with another easy way to be informed when we make changes to our lenses.

If you set this up, don’t forget to offer it to your fans on your lensmasters’ page, too.

So, what do you think about this? Is it something you would want to offer to the readers of your Squidoo lenses and to your fans?

Act on your dream!

JD

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In Memory of Mattie Lee Dilbeck

November 25, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 36 Comments
Filed under: Friends and Family, John Dilbeck, Musings 

Today, instead of affiliate marketing, I’m going to talk about Mattie Lee Dilbeck, my Mom.


In memory of Mattie Lee Dilbeck

Mom died on Friday evening, November 21, 2008, and it was a difficult day for several reasons.

Before I talk about her death, I want to talk about her life.

I am one generation from the farm. Mom and Dad both grew up on farms and worked very hard when they were young, and that’s something that probably made them stronger when they were old.

I don’t know how many stories I’ve heard about plowing fields behind horses and mules under the hot summer sun or picking crops when their fingers were so cold they could hardly move early in the fall mornings.

My Mom was the oldest in her family and Dad was the youngest in his.

Mom and her younger brother, Floyd, used to work together to plow the fields when they were young because it took both of them to manage a plow. Mom collected arrowheads they found in the fields and I still have a few of them, now.

Mom was born on November 6, 1920, and was a child of the Great Depression. As a result, she recycled and reused everything. She was a master at getting full use out of something and discarded it only when it was completely used up.

She was a master at getting the full value of coupons and spent years clipping and passing them around to her friends and relatives, easily saving several hundred dollars per month in foods and household goods, which was a useful skill when money is tight, and it has always been tight in our family.

Mom had to drop out of school before finishing high school to help on the farm. It was only when she was in her mid-20s that she learned of the Berry school in Rome, Georgia. Even though she was about ten years older than her schoolmates, she went back to high school at Berry Academy.

For the next few years, she worked her way through the school and one of the things she loved was baking for her fellow students.

While there, she saw Henry Ford when he visited the school and – if memory serves – she made a short speech for him and his friends.

When she graduated, she was Valedictorian of her class and this was a great accomplishment for her and is something she valued her whole life.

After Berry, she moved to Chattanooga and started studying nursing at Erlanger Hospital.

In those days, nursing students could not be married (for whatever strange reason) and she was less than a year from graduating when she met Bill Dilbeck. Mom’s sister Geneva told me that it was a love that could not be denied.

Mom was an honest person her entire life. She told the truth, even when it was inconvenient. Some of her classmates told her to get married and just lie about it. That was what a few of them had already done. Mom would not do that. She quit nursing school and was married in December 1950.

Mom and Dad moved to the Atlanta area. My grandmother, Cornelia Godfrey, was sick and I think Mom helped care for her. My memory is vague about some of this.

Cornelia died shortly before I was born, so I never knew her. I’ve been told that I missed a very good person.

I was born in 1952 and my brother, David, in 1957.

While going through Mom’s papers yesterday, I found a two page receipt for the hospital stay and services when I was born at Georgia Baptist Hospital. For delivery, doctor’s fees, anesthesiologist, surgical, miscellaneous, and a room for three days, the grand total for my birth was $74.20, paid in cash on July 4, 1952, when they brought me home.

Dad wanted to call me Firecracker, but Mom put a stop to that. It’s a shame, because I like being called Firecracker.

I won’t go into a lot of detail. The highpoints…

David was born in December 1957. I don’t know what he cost.

We moved to Vero Beach, Florida in 1960, because of Dad’s arthritis. He worked hard managing several thousand acres of citrus crops during the early 60s.

We were close enough to Cape Canaveral that we could watch the rockets of the space program launch on TV and then rush outside to see them streak upwards into the sky. When the first Saturn V launched, we were amazed to be able to read “USA” on the rocket from about 70 miles away without even using binoculars.

After going through a hurricane in 1965, Dad decided that was going to be his first, and last, experience with those storms and we moved back to the Atlanta, Georgia, area.

Dad was hired back at his old job at Mullins Brothers Paving Contractors in East Point when we happened to run into his old boss in a restaurant while looking for a place to live. Dad never even had to look for a job. How’s that for a sign?

They bought a house in southern Fulton County and Dad worked at Mullins Brothers until he retired in the early 1970s. Mom worked as a power machine operator at several factories and worked even harder raising a couple of cantankerous sons.

Dad had been raised in eastern Tennessee and Mom in north Georgia. When he retired, they split the difference and bought a house – the one I’m in this morning – in Murphy, NC. That way, they’d be able to visit both branches of the family fairly easily.

Dad was about seven years older than Mom, so she had to work when they got here. She worked as a power machine operator for several years and then was hired on the Older Americans project by the USDA, where she worked in a tree orchard for several years.

By this time, I had moved to Murphy to help them out because Dad’s health had started to decline. Even so, he could outwork me any time he wanted. I taught computer programming at the local community college.

When Mom retired, she signed up for college, because it had always bothered her that she never was able to finish college and dropping out of nursing school had been one of the big disappointments of her life. A couple of years later, Mom graduated with an Associates degree in Business Administration, and then she retired.

Life went pretty well for both of them for the next few years.

In the summer of 1991, just a few days after going to watch the Independence Day fireworks, Dad died in his favorite chair of a massive heart attack. One minute, he was getting ready to go work in the garden and the next minute he was gone.

For the next 17 years, Mom continued to live here. She was an active gardener and loved flowers and herbs. She could tell you more than I ever wanted to know about any flower or plant in her garden and around the property.

Mom spent over 30 years studying our family history and easily knew more about the Godfreys and Dilbecks (our direct branches, at least) than anyone else on the planet. Much of this research was done before the Internet, and it required writing many letters and visiting many places to find the information she needed. I’ve put a small portion of what she learned on my Genealogy page or Genealogy Overview page.

I have boxes of records – mostly hand-written – that Mom collected during her genealogy research and we’re lucky that she compiled a good bit of it into a couple of books that she had printed for our family. Several of us have copies of those books.

We lost a great family historian when Mom declined to the point she could no longer do the genealogy research she loved so much.

Mom was always learning something. She has dozens of books about birds (she loved hummingbirds), flowers, gardening, cooking, and many topics related to her religion.

Mom was friendly and could talk to anyone.

She was a loving parent, loyal friend, devout Christian, and would do anything she could to help someone in need.

Mom was always scrupulously honest, even when it was not convenient for her.

She taught me how to read several years before I entered first grade and encouraged my education throughout my life.

In 2001, on Halloween, she started bleeding and couldn’t get it to stop. I took her to the emergency room. A few days later, on her birthday, she was diagnosed with colon cancer.

Weeks of radiation and chemo preceded surgery in Asheville, NC. What was expected to be a stay of a few days turned into over six weeks in two hospitals. The cancer surgery was successful, but she suffered nerve damage that left her in constant pain, and unable to walk or care for herself.

They wanted to put her in a nursing home in Asheville, but after talking it over with Mom, I said, “No.”

My daughter and I brought Mom home and I cared for her – where she wanted to be – until August 2008. It was a lot of work, but I would make the same choice today. She helped me when I needed it, and I have been happy to return the favor when she needed my help.

In August, her health suddenly declined and she had to be hospitalized. A week later she was moved to the nursing home attached to the hospital. Her health continued to decline and she found it harder to communicate as the weeks went by.

The last couple of weeks were frustrating. She was losing weight and strength. After her birthday, it was difficult to communicate with her. It seemed that she understood what she was hearing, but could not complete a sentence.

On Thursday, November 20, 2008, I started running a fever and throwing up. All the yucky side-effects of getting sick. I was planning to visit her Friday afternoon, but was sick enough I had to call the nursing home and ask them to tell her I would not be able to make it.

Late Friday afternoon, Mom’s doctor called and told me that Mom’s systems were failing and he didn’t think she’d live longer than a day, if that.

I called my brother, daughter, and ex-wife and told them. David would not be able to get there before Saturday morning, but Dena (my daughter) and Kathy (my ex-wife) went to the nursing home to be with her. Of course, I was too sick and they would not have let me in, anyway.

Dena called later Friday evening and said Mom was asking about me. She held the phone to Mom’s ear and I was able to tell her I love her and told her that everything would be alright.

Later I learned that David and my cousin Jacque also had a chance to talk to her.

Unfortunately, we could not understand what Mom was trying to say, but Dena said she smiled when listening to us, and we can only hope she understood what we told her.

I fell back asleep.

Sometime Friday evening, November 21, 2008, I’m still not exactly sure what time, Kathy called and told me that Mom had died.

It has been a very sad weekend and I’m sure today and tomorrow will be sad, too. Mom’s funeral will be this evening, and we’ll go down to Coal Mountain, Georgia, tomorrow to bury her with Dad and her family.

She’s better off than she was. She has always been an active, friendly, and talkative person, but it was very difficult to understand what she was trying to say the last 10 days, or so. Most visits consisted of talking to her, helping her sip some Sprite or juice, and holding her hand. Now and then, I could understand what she was trying to say, but it was getting more difficult.

I posted some photos of Mom on my Facebook account yesterday so Dena could try to make a CD that we can show at the viewing. We don’t have many photos of Mom, and I lost many when a harddisk crashed a couple of years ago. But we do have a few.

This should be the link to the public gallery, if you are interested:

Mattie Lee Dilbeck Photo Album

One of my favorite photos of Mom should be visible at:

Mattie Lee Dilbeck – this is the same photo that is shown at the top of this post.

There is much more that could be said about Mom, but I’m going to stop here. I’m still feeling bad and I think I’m going back to sleep for awhile.

Some of the details here may not be entirely accurate. My memory is not completely reliable on some of these details, and I’m still really foggy about what has happened over the last weekend. At least I’ll be well enough to attend her funeral and burial.

I’ll be getting back to work later this week, but the next few days will be family time.

Townson-Rose Funeral Home created a memorial page for Mattie Lee Dilbeck, should you wish to visit it.

In lieu of flowers or gifts, try to help someone or a family who is hungry this holiday season.

All the best,

JD

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