Online Marketing MBA Introduction: Catherine Ford

The road I have taken to get to this point is not a conventional one. I have been a freelance writer for nearly fourteen years. I began to write web content in about 1997, I had elderly octogenarian parents who were my responsibility and the situation got to the point I knew I could not leave them. At the same time I needed something for me as well, so I began to forge a career to work from home.

This went well until about two years ago when I moved back to the UK to finish a psychology degree with the Open University. By this time I was getting pretty sick of the concept of how writers were perceived as second class citizens. I decided that the time had come to branch out on my own and create my own products.

I have to say that bit the product creation was really easy for me, I loved the research, the execution everything about it. Then I realised that understanding the marketing process and carrying out were two different things. I came to understand that there was a fairly deep-rooted distrust of selling in me. That in itself was weird because as a psychologist I know that normally comes from your parents. My parents were self-employed they sold themselves every day of their life.

So now I am here to benefit from the Online Marketing MBA in many ways. The first way I would like to benefit is to understand how to increase my conversions. Secondly I love the idea of sharing my knowledge and teaching it after I have mastered it. I have been given the extraordinary opportunity to work through it and blog about my experiences.

So what else is important in my life other than work? Well my family is very important to me and they keep me on the straight and narrow. I met my husband in 1976 on a bus to Tibet, not that we were married then, but now we have known each other nearly forty years.

We both developed a passion for travel and we have taken over seven years out of our working lives to travel the world. That is one of the beauties of owning your own business. We used to buy an ailing business that did not make any money at all but it had something going for it, usually position, position and position, and then we flogged ourselves to death for three years, got it up and running and then sold it and travelled for a couple of years and then rinse and repeated the process.

Travelling opens your mind to many new ideas and experiences, things that you never quite forget, and things that change your life forever. Today I cannot throw food away uneaten, because I have watched a lady pick grains of rice out of an open sewer and eat them. I don’t care how much I am ridiculed for this I can’t stop doing it.

At the moment we are grounded as far as travelling is concerned because my husband looks after his father in law who is 96 this month, but that is o.k. His father looked after him unstintingly for years, now the boot is on the other foot. We have reached a stage in our lives that we can afford to travel, but that is not enough now.

I want to make a difference a real difference to other people’s lives. I would like to start a charity an Indian charity. You may well ask why I would start an Indian charity, as they say charity begins at home. Well for me my heart is in India, and it has been since the day I first stood on the border thirty-five years ago and saw the road to Amritsar and the Grand Trunk Road.

At the risk of boring my reader’s half to death that is how I got here. I will be documenting my journey on Tuesday. I welcome your questions about my experience on the Online marketing MBA course. If you are considering enrolling and want to know anything then please write a comment below and I will answer it to the best of my ability.

June the 1^ST IS Dee Day the day we start our serious online education, if you would like to follow our Online marketing MBA then bookmark this blog, it will change my life and hopefully it will change yours as well.