User:Glenn Leader

My name is Glenn Leader and until recently I lived in East London, about 15 minutes walk from the Olympic Park for the London 2012 Summer Games. I've now moved back to my beloved Orpington in Kent. I was born in 1956, so at this time of writing, I’m 57 years old. I’m a single dad to two wonderful grownup children. I’m also a grandfather to three fantastic (and very cute) Grandchildren. Sadly they live about 200 miles away with my daughter Judi, and her partner, so I hardly ever get to see them all. My son Marc lives at home with me.

A bit about me: I discovered a few years ago that all my jobs where I got job satisfaction is helping people solve their technical problems. Why it took over twenty five years to realise that, I’ll never know. I was a Senior Laboratory Technician specialising in Physics, Technology and computer control for 14 years for the local Education Department. I went on to be a Senior ICT Support Engineer for the same Authority for a further 10 years. I was forced me to re-evaluate my life in 2004 when my job was made redundant. I decided never to work for another jerk again. The only way I can guarantee that is to work for myself (although I do sometimes wonder about that :D)

I’ve developed six products in the past few years, with one more in the pipeline. My first efforts to develop a product resulted in Keyword Evolution Pro. This is a keyword manipulation tool, many of my users who own lots of keyword tools now only use KEPro for almost every project. I’m considering developing an online version of Keyword Evolution Pro, which might become a bonus for Star Chamber members.

My second product is SLOBS – Super Lazy Organic Blogging System. This is a very simple system for organically posting complete fresh new articles to blogs.

Then ArtiFact was born. It’s a content rewriting system. This outputs high quality articles (provided you enter high quality information) with millions of unique variations. Tests have shown that ArtiFact produces upwards of 70% unique human readable articles. In some cases, there was 100% uniqueness.

Then I developed SAW because I wanted a very simple and easy way to create websites out of text articles. Since I can use ArtiFact to create all the Keyword Rich Content I’ll ever need, this seemed like a natural tool to use. Of course, it’ll use PLR articles too.

Then I developed the desktop version of ArtiFact. This is easier to use than the online version, but not quite as powerful. Most people couldn’t use the extra power that the online version provided anyway.

GLACÉ (Gla-say) is my latest product to date. It was originally developed to add content/value to Traffic Equalizer output. It has since started to develop to be a very powerful content manipulation system in its own right.

No Guts, No Glory

I’ve earned very good money out of my systems. And if I didn’t live in East London, my money would go a lot further. In some countries I could live happily off the organic sales of my products. All my products have something in common, and here’s a lesson for those who dream, but never act. All of these products evolved from the problems I was reading in forums that people had, and that I knew how to solve.

If you know how to do something that people badly need (i.e.. lots of similar questions in lots of forums), get off your backside, and create it. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but it does have to be good enough. Then let user feedback guide the future development of your product. I’m not saying you should produce crap, far from it, but it should be good enough to fit it’s intended purpose. If you waited for perfection, you’ll never get out of the starting blocks.

Don’t let the lack of your resources stop you from succeeding. Beg, steal, or borrow what you need. If you need to create videos, then download the 30 day trial of Camtasia. If you want to create a report, but your English isn’t good enough, write it as best you can and ask for critiques in the right forums.

There are always ways to overcome hurdles, if you can’t jump over them, run round them instead. You will find a way to jump over the hurdles at some time in the future, you never know, somebody might take you aside and show you how to jump over them.

As Nike says… Just Do It!