A cou­ple of new things to tell you about today.

First off, I’m try­ing a new exper­i­ment. I’ve decided to close and remove com­ments on this blog. Just to see what hap­pens. Why? Here’s the thing…

When I post a new blog post, it will be cross­posted to a few social net­works. Some, by design with the help of a few tools and plu­g­ins. Oth­ers, by sub­scribers and read­ers who retweet, reblog, or track­back to my posts.

What I’ve noticed is, on these social net­works — Twit­ter, Face­book, Friend­Feed, Digg, and now with the new Google Buzz — my posts seem to incite dis­cus­sions on these loca­tions. Dis­cus­sions I love to par­tic­i­pate in, too, when I have a chance.

I want to har­ness that social media power and divest myself of the con­stant mod­er­a­tion of this blog. I feel that, since there are so many dis­cus­sions tak­ing place else­where, why not take advan­tage of social media and bring the dis­cus­sions to the pub­lic instead?

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If you ever won­dered how to out­source your work using new and cre­ative ways that get it done faster, cheaper, bet­ter, and eth­i­cally, too, then you need to watch this video.

Called “crowd­sourc­ing,” this rel­a­tively new out­sourc­ing tech­nique — I say “rel­a­tively,” as the term may be new but the tech­nique is as old as out­sourc­ing itself — enables you to cull spe­cific skills from the pub­lic at large.

Often, for lit­tle to no cost.

Whether you’re out­sourc­ing already, plan­ning on doing so, or just want to save time and money, this is for you. Crowd­sourc­ing also allows you to bypass free­lance bid­ding sites that can turn out to be expen­sive and risky, often with less than desir­able results.

This two-​​hour train­ing video is com­pletely free.

In it, Sylvie exposes some of the best-​​kept secrets to get stuff done. Some of which have never been revealed until now. It was orig­i­nally recorded from a pri­vate online webi­nar to our Suc­cess Chef stu­dents, but we’re mak­ing it avail­able for the first time.

The video might be free, but you must reg­is­ter to watch it, as we high­light Suc­cess Chef Uni­ver­sity in the back­end because that’s where the video comes from. How­ever, you get imme­di­ate access to this video on the next page. You can unsub­scribe eas­ily, anytime.

Click here to watch this amaz­ing video.

A few weeks ago, we wanted to update our fam­ily pho­tos since all our kids have grown up, and we wanted some­thing more recent.

So we had a com­plete fam­ily pho­tog­ra­phy ses­sion done by a local exec­u­tive pho­tog­ra­pher, Luc St-​​Amour.

“Isn’t our fam­ily beau­ti­ful?” Says the proud dad.

(When you com­pare these to the pho­tos from our wed­ding, you can see how much they’ve grown. Now I really feel old!)

There’s my wife, Sylvie Fortin. The blond is my daugh­ter Megan Malette (24 years old). The red­head is my daugh­ter Céleste Coley Fortin (20). The brunette is my daugh­ter Paige Coley Fortin (17). Last but not least there’s my son, Tyler Coley Fortin (16).

(By the way, did you know Sylvie’s birth­day is on Hal­loween? Don’t tell her I told you, but this year she’s turn­ing the big 4–0! But no mat­ter what age, she’s as beau­ti­ful as ever.)

Obvi­ously, I couldn’t wait to share these with the world. I hope you don’t mind this lit­tle sneak peek into the per­sonal life of “Michel Fortin.” Click the pho­tos to enlarge.

A dis­grun­tled, aspir­ing copy­writer wrote me demand­ing clar­i­fi­ca­tions. He believes most copy­writ­ers lie and exag­ger­ate their claims of wealth. Let’s call him “Chuck.”

I under­stand where Chuck is com­ing from. Because I’ve been where he is. So I responded, not because I wanted to acqui­esce to his demands but because I wanted to give him hope, ideas, and, dare I say it, a million-​​dollar education.

He says he will be ask­ing other copy­writ­ers the same ques­tion, and even threat­ened (although, that may be too harsh of a word) to pub­lish my reply. I’ve decided to take the lead myself, and pub­lish it here.

For all I know, this copy­writer may be gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion to cre­ate his own prod­uct. Who knows? If he is, I must say that his strat­egy is bril­liant. A tad decep­tive, but bril­liant. Regard­less, if he does cre­ate a prod­uct out of this, good for him!

But I’m reprint­ing the con­ver­sa­tion here not just to take the lead but also because I believe it will help a lot of other strug­gling copy­writ­ers out there. Also, I’m open­ing myself a lit­tle more than usual. I guess you can say that I’m expos­ing the real “Michel Fortin.”

My answer might sur­prise you…

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I often get requests from peo­ple ask­ing me what plu­g­ins do I use on this blog. Or, what are my favorite plu­g­ins. Some­times, I post about them. But these lists usu­ally become stale fast, because I test new plu­g­ins and change them all the time.

So I wanted to post an update and list some of my favorite plu­g­ins. How­ever, it was cum­ber­some to pick and choose which ones I wanted to post about because there are so many. So I’ve decided to do some­thing dif­fer­ent this year.

Using a plu­gin that lists all the plu­g­ins in use on a par­tic­u­lar blog (I’ll share that one with you in a moment), I man­aged to print a list of all my plu­g­ins in a sin­gle post.

How­ever, the descrip­tions you will read are those of the plu­gin authors. Some of them are poor and insuf­fi­cient. Oth­ers don’t explain how I use them specif­i­cally on this blog.

So I’ve also added a mini-​​description with addi­tional com­ments to each plu­gin to explain why, how, or where I’ve used it on this blog. I sin­cerely hope this list is use­ful to you. If it is, con­sider it a Christ­mas gift from me.

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I recently merged my library with my blog. I had mul­ti­ple resources, books and tele­sem­i­nar record­ings on var­i­ous sites, but decided to con­sol­i­date them all and add them to my blog.

Rea­son? The fact that these resources are no longer as scat­tered makes them eas­ier to find and fol­low. If you want to book­mark these pages or even tell oth­ers about them, please do!

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The 10 Com­mand­ments of Power Posi­tion­ing: Mag­i­cal Mar­ket­ing Strate­gies for Cre­at­ing an End­less Stream of New, Repeat, and Refer­ral Busi­ness is Michel Fortin’s ebook that brings together the art of posi­tion­ing with the sci­ence of direct response.

This ver­sion is the 3rd edi­tion with over 140,000 copies dis­trib­uted to date! This is includes third party dis­tri­b­u­tion since peo­ple are invited to freely pass the ebook around. In fact, the esti­mate is in excess of 140,000 copies in all. (It’s prob­a­bly closer to 300,000 copies if not more.)

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