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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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As a part time webmaster, you only have a certain amount of hours you can spend on the web building your business so it’s really important to focus the time you have to work on your websites that have the most potential to pay off. Why start a bunch of little websites that take up your time and can ultimately lead to spreading yourself too thin? I asked myself this question when I took some time to look at the websites still hosted on my old shared account. Why did I even bother creating these websites?

Nearly a year ago when I got into buying domains and websites on NamePros.com I bought a little flash arcade site (I was making such terrible money at my previous job the $10 arcade was about all I could afford at the time. My thought behind the purchase was that I’d simply put little affiliate buttons on the side of all my video game based sites and use that traffic to make a little extra money off the arcade. Unfortunately, what I didn’t count on was the time it would take for me to set up the website, get it transferred from the seller and place all of the buttons on my websites. And when I transfer this arcade to the new owner the total work will probably come out to about 4 hours or more. All this work for only $8.25 via Adsense for the website’s 9 months of operation. Looking back, was it really worth the time to take the time to deal with transferring the site from the seller, learn how to use the new arcade script, apply and put arcade banner exchange buttons onto the site and now to transfer it to the new owner? It really wasn’t worth the time and so this is why I recently decided to liquidate some of my really small sites that have not made me any money and just sit there reminding me of the time I wasted on low priority items.

As a part time webmaster it’s important to focus on continually driving more traffic to your primary sites that are already set up and optimized and other sites that show great growth potential. Don’t spend your time working on sites that already have a preset limited potential cap like a sub par arcade script site that can be found anywhere else on the web. If you find yourself working on new websites and the extra work load prevents you from providing the same amount of focus required to maintain your primary websites you have a problem. This is a mistake that I am focused on avoiding in the future; however, I hope some of you bloggers, forum admins and website owners will learn from my mistake.

Have you ever spent a lot of time on a website that showed little promise for growth and success? Or allowed the time you spent on a new website to take too much focus away from your key moneymakers?

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Merry Christmas everyone. I’m stopping in to write a quick post on what stuff I got this Christmas. I never write a Christmas list because if I really want something I just buy it rather than wait several months for a birthday or Christmas to come along. However, I rarely buy stuff for myself so I figure it’s fine that I just buy things without waiting ;). In any case, it’s always interesting to see what my wife and family get me without having any ideas to go on.

So here’s what I got:

USB Rocket Launcher check it out here.
NorthFace Jackets and Fleeces (My brother has an REI discount :D)
Geometry Wars Galaxies for Wii
Mass Effect for Xbox 360
A Garmin for my car
Misc candies

And yes, I put the funniest thing on the top of my list hah hah. I’m probably going to bring it into work sometime and shoot at my co workers. What did you get for Christmas? Unfortunatley, the one thing I didn’t get for Christmas was an extra 100 RSS subscribers :(. So if you want to give me a Christmas present subscribe to my full RSS feed! Perhaps I’ll put that on my list next Christmas…

Technorati Profile

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