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I haven’t posted recently because I just got done with 3 days full of jam-packed fun. So if you’re looking for a post about blogging, ideas for success online or ways to make more money this post won’t contain it but I thought you might like to know where I’ve been

Day 1:

On Thursday of last week I went to a work party to play Whirly Ball. Whirly Ball is a combination basketball, bumper car and lacrosse game. I had played the game before for a friends birthday and it cost me about $20 for two twenty minute games, but the Thursday session was for three hours with plenty of food to eat and beer to drink and was completely paid for by Adobe. That’s one of the great things about working in sales. We all sell thousands and thousands of dollars worth of IT products every month and companies are always vying for our attention. So a $2,000 night (my estimate as to how much it cost them to rent the place out) is chump change when they’re competing for the attention of sales people that can potentially bring in thousands of dollars each for their company.

Day 2:

Another great thing about working in sales, or at least at the company I work at, is that they bring in beer and food every Friday at 3:00 PM. Most people, myself included, then just relax for the rest of the day while some people pregame (get started drinking) befor a night out on the town. Friday was different though, because it was one of my good friend’s 25th birthday. So we ate and drank our fill at work then continued over to his new place in Seattle for more food and drinks. The party was a ton of fun and I had a chance to catch up with a lot of friends I haven’t seen for a few months (one of the downsides to living outside the city).

Day 3:

Saturday was one of my best friend’s bachelor party. He gets married next Saturday and I’ll be a groomsmen in his wedding. The day started with eating some snacks before we headed out to play disk golf for a couple hours. On the second hole someone lost their favorite driver in the brush and we spent forty minutes looking for it before giving up. I can throw a standard sized frisbee alright, but I can never seem to throw the smaller disks very well. After we finished up disk golf we continued onto eat at Chinooks in Seattle a popular sea food restaurant. I had the salmon fish and chips along with a cup of clam chouder and it was superb. Then we moved onto The Garage (again in Seattle) where we bowled three games and started having some drinks. We headed back to his place where we continued to eat, drink, play poker and play video games.

Overall that was the most fun I’ve had in a 3 day span in a long time.

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I’ve posted on numerous occassions that I run this blog, along with the rest of my websites as a part time job on the side. It has always been my goal to do it as a full time living, but I’m still not there yet. Obviously the benefits to working for yourself on a full time basis are numerous but what sticks out in my mind as the best part is the extra time you have in the day to work on your projects. You can see why by reading what a typical day looks like for me:

1. Get up at 6:04 AM and get ready for work
2. Leave at 6:20 AM and head to the train station
3. Get on the train at 6:35 AM that heads north
4. Try to get work done on the terrible train internet connection
- I turn my computer on and bring up my feed reader before I leave my place because most days I never get a connection. I usually just read my RSS feed, but when I have an internet connection I tend to get a lot more done.
5. Arrive in Seattle by 7:20 AM and walk to the bus
6. Get on the bus at 7:28 AM that heads down the Seattle waterfront
7. Get off the bus at 7:42 AM and start walking to work (Enjoy the Seattle waterfront view)
8. Arrive in the office at 7:51 AM and “start the day”
9. Take lunch at noon until 1:00 PM play a couple games of foosball
10. Finish up work by 5:07 PM
11. Leave the building and walk to the bus
12. Get on the bus by 5:18 PM that travels south along the Seattle waterfront
13. Get off the bus at 5:32 PM and walk to the train station
14. Wait ten to fifteen minutes for the southbound train to arrive
15. Log onto the internet as the train departs at 5:55 PM (The internet is better on this train)
- Check email, read RSS feeds, write posts for this blog, do minor administrative tasks for other websites
16. Reach my train stop at 6:40 PM
17. Walk to my truck and head back home
18. Set foot in the door at 6:50 PM
19. Make some food / hang out with my wife Ann
20. Get onto Halo 3 and start doing Halo Lessons at 8:00 PM
21. Turn off my Xbox 360 at around 11:00 PM
22. Finish out the day by doing a few of the following things:
Update the Excel spreadsheet that contains all of the Halo lessons that have been paid for, make lunch for tomorrow, upload any files to my websites, post on various forums (mostly my own)
23. Get into bed by midnight
24. Repeat cycle

So as you can tell by this schedule, I’m either at work or traveling to it for nearly 13 hours every day. Fortunately I am able to use the internet on the train; however, it’s not very good connection especially on the way up. I’m probably going to buy a Verizon wireless card for my laptop so I can get more work done and feel more comfortable logging onto secure websites (rather than using an unsecured wireless connection), but I just haven’t spent the time to research it.

The Halo Lessons portion of my day will probably drop down to about one hour a day soon, but I’ve basically been doing about two to three hours of lessons a day for Halo 3 because of a recent donation to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society for $500. My wife is running a marathon in June and has been tasked with raising $4,000 for Leukemia and Lymphoma research as a part of the process. In the month of March I donated all of the money earned from lessons to the cause and a friend of a friend found out about what I was doing. He is a successful guy with a desire to improve his Halo skills so he donated $500 (which was actually doubled because his wife works for Microsoft that has a matching donation program). So I’ve been doing a couple hours a day with him.

/sidetrack

So on average when I’m not doing a lot of Halo lessons I have around three hours a day to hang out with my wife, do more intensive web work, watch movies, be lazy etc. Pretty busy huh?

What’s your work schedule look like? I’d love to read about your day so let me know if you write a post by using the contact form above. Or better yet link back to this post as your inspiration for the post idea

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I wrote about the SEOBook Training program a few months ago and have been a member for 3 months now. The training program usually costs me $50 a month (it is now up to $100 a month) and I think it’s worth this price however, I don’t think it’s worth $167.63 a month. Let me explain:

The subscription to the training program automatically deducts $50 a month from my Paypal account every month on the same day. So when I did a withdrawl from my Paypal account for most of my balance I made a mistake and only left about $10 in the account. I thought the $50 had already been removed for the month, but unfortunately it wasn’t. I received an insufficient funds message from Paypal when they tried to remove the funds from my backup bank account.

The next day after I received that insufficient funds message from Paypal I received $50 from some Halo 3 Lessons I sold (I’ll save that for another post). So I assumed that because more money was put into my Paypal account they would just pull the funds from my Paypal balance and not my bank account. I even sent in a ticket requesting that they do that. So time went on and I thought nothing of it.

A few weeks passed by and my stack of mail continued to grow. I’ve never been a fan of receiving mail unless it is in electronic form. I understand that some things need to be physically mailed but why so much? Not only is it a waste of paper, but it’s so annoying to open envelopes when if it was an email you could simply delete it or better yet not even open it. In any case, last weekend I decided that it was time to pull out the paper shredder and go through my stack of mail. One of the first items I came upon what I thought to be my typical pointless Timberland Bank account statements that have shown the same balance for the past three years; however, I soon discovered these letters were much different. Instead, the first letter I opened was an overdraft statement and apparently the bank’s third attempt and getting me to deposit funds into my overdrawn bank account. After I finished going through my mail I counted a total of seven requests to put money into my bank account that dated back to early April. Each request was the same and mentioned that I was being charged $5 a day every day my account was overdrawn.

Now before you respond with, “You’re an idiot why didn’t you open your mail?” Well because of my distaste for opening mail and love for lazyness, I have set up every single bill, credit card, car payment and anything else you can think of to be done electronically except my Timberland Bank account statements. I previously made several requests to this bank to receive electronic bank statements instead of paper statements but they never bothered to do it for me. So when I take the time to go through my mail I know that everything is just pointless junk mail accompanied by several pointless Timberland Bank account statements.

So I called the bank on Monday morning and tried to explain the situation. I even told them, that if my bank account was overdrawn why didn’t you try an alternative form of communication? We’re not living in the Middle Ages so why didn’t you call me or send me an email? lol, I said if you mailed 7 letters and I did nothing in response to them than why not try and get in touch with me another way? First the employee said they do make one phone call (which I knew to be a lie unless they didn’t leave a message.) Then the employee let me know that it’s actually against the law to email someone that their account is overdrawn! I thought this was ridiculous. It seems like a pointless antiquated law that if I had the time I’d try to contact my legislators about the process of actually changing it lol. Anyway, after talking with the employee some more she told me that unfortunately earlier that morning my account was already put into collections and there was nothing that I could do except pay the collections agency $167.63. Now fortunately I paid off the bill before it affected my credit rating but needless to say overall it was a funny yet costly situation.

Now I do still recommend that you sign up for the SEOBook training program but I don’t recommend having a small balance in your paypal account when your backup funding source is a bank account created for you when you were five that you don’t use anymore lol.

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For those of you working any significant amount of time on the web I urge you to purchase a second monitor. I’ve been doing most of the work for my blog on my laptop while I ride the train, but I have several other projects I’ve wanted to start that will take much more than the time I have on my daily commute. With that in mind, I finally purchased a second monitor that is basically the same as my old monitor (i.e. same screen size and max resolution) but a newer model number.

I never really bothered purchasing the second monitor before this because I wasn’t really focused on starting any new projects but I have several ideas lined up that I couldn’t put off any longer. So although I should have purchased the second monitor long ago I’m looking forward to the increased efficiency that it will bring to the table. In fact, part of what kept me lazy was the fact that at my 9-5 job I have two monitors and it’s frustrating to come home with only one to work on. Again, yes it’s that stupid that I never purchased this long ago but either way check out the new set up:

Before:

After:

By the way, they’re two 19 inch monitors. The next time I’ll upgrade is when I get a bigger desk. Then I’ll go with two 24 inch monitors.

Are you dual wielding?

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Hello everyone, if you were wondering why I haven’t posted in a while it’s because I’ve been working with my great designer over at Weborithm on this new custom theme. Sergio over at SOSfactory did the character design, but the rest was done by weborithm.

I’m still working on a few modifications on my end here, but overall it’s finished.

What do you think of the design?

And yes - I am a Seahawks fan, but that wasn’t the reason for the choice in colors.

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I mentioned in an earlier post that I was selling one of my smaller forums AdobeChat.com and I’m happy to say that it sold for earlier this week for $600. I don’t think the sale price is too bad considering it wasn’t really an active community. The site was making about $30 a month though, so the sale pretty much ended up being for a little over 12 months of earnings (because I’m also transferring the vBulletin license over to him). While I was looking to get a little more for the site I’m still pleased with the result. I haven’t finished the transfer yet but it should be done by the end of the week.

My guest post went live on JohnCow.com where I wrote about why you should make sure you spend enough time to milk your cash cows before focusing your attention on new ventures. I believe that it’s really important to strike a balance between the time you spend managing your current portfolio of websites and the time you spend on launching new websites. I think it’s a good read (although I may be a little bias), but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Lastly, on an unrelated note to what I usually write about I finally sold off a portion of my personal NES collection. I sold my rare Top Loader NES which was the second version of the Nintendo Entertainment System that was only produced for about one year until the Super Nintendo came out. The Top Loader was produced with a different type of metal connection so that you wouldn’t have to blow on your games to get them to work (Yah we all had to do it and it worked differently on everyone’s NES). For those of you that haven’t read my about me page, I got my start making money off of buying bulk lots of NES games and reselling them individually on eBay years ago. In the process I gradually kept specific games for my own collection and I finally decided to start getting rid of them. I feel like this is an end of an era, but alas I have a Wii now and will just download the ones I really want there.

Do you share your site sales experiences with your readers? Do you think I would have had better luck at SitePoint or do you think the site wasn’t worth enough to post it for sale there?

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It’s that time of the year and everyone’s making their New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals for the next year. I never made a concerted effort to make goals in the past, so my New Year’s Resolution is to focus on hitting the goals I set out in this post ;). In fact, I didn’t make any goals in 2007 for this blog or the other websites in my company. I came to the realization a month ago that I must set goals and check up on them otherwise I’ll just go along without a plan or a focus on where I need to be. So I’m starting this year off with my specific and measurable goals for 2008 as a part time web publisher and blogger that I will revist on a quarterly basis:

Blog Specific Goals:

a. Get the custom blog design paid for and implemented Achieved March 18th
b. Make $1000 a month from my blog (All income from my blog will be disclosed)
c. Break the four digit RSS mark by getting to 1,000+ RSS subscribers
d. Hit the front page of Digg at least once
e Break the top 10,000 Technorati mark
f. Improve and maintain my posting frequency and by the last quarter of 2008 I want to look back at Q4 and see at least 92 posts.
g. Do a quick blogging tip every Sunday for the entire year of 2008.

For the other websites and forums I run:

a. Increase my online income to $2,000 a month (Blogging goal not included.)
b. Have at least one forum hit the 1,000,000+ page views a month mark
c. Be mentioned on a major video game related website (i.e. GameSpot.com)
d. Only launch two more forums (So that I will focus my time on growing the sites I have)

I know I took a while to post my goals for 2008, but I really wanted to spend some time thinking about what I can reasonably do while at the same time providing a significant challenge. I know that I can reach the goals I’ve set out for 2008 and am really excited to mark off goals and provide quarterly updates with recaps on all the goals.

If you haven’t set any goals for 2008 I urge you to try it. Make sure you write specific and measurable goals so that it’s easy to keep track of how you’re doing.

What do you think of my goals?

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