Bush Mackel

Today should stand to be a fun day for me in good ol’ Maryland.

I feel pretty good, I’ve had a strong breakfast, and it looks like we’re even getting a touch of snow today. PLUS I finally got the processor for the new rig I’m building so I should have more than enough things to keep me busy today.

But outside of all of the above, one of the big things I’m focusing on today my Adwords account that is promoting my Affiliate Marketing efforts!

You May Remember…
That back in the day I tried affiliate marketing for all of a second. Now after I did the Pepperjam review yesterday, I’m really committed to trying to learn how to turn a buck in this industry. The only problem is that I really don’t know what I’m doing. (#):(

And So I Come To You for Help
I figure through the law of averages, that there has got to be SOMEONE out there who will read this who has had more experience with affiliate marketing (and especially PPC) affiliate marketing than I. If you wanted to volunteer some knowledge it’d be much appreciated or if you could point me in the direction of some good resources on the web - It’d also be welcomed.

So far, the best place I’ve found on the web has been Zac Johnson - The Super Affiliate. He has a couple of posts that are really good to get you started but I still feel like there are some steps in the middle that I’m just missing somehow… To be specific, I’m targeting two affiliate offers right now and using AdWords to get people there. Unfortunately, my CTR sucks and I think my impressions are low too. (Currently I’m only targeting the content network).

So again, I’d be very thankful for a little help on all this stuff and I’m sure other readers would be too!

Do you remember my post on the great book, The 4 Hour Workweek?

If you don’t, the book was a how to guide of sorts on how you can quit your 9-5, live anywhere, and live the dream of the “new rich”. (I think I might’ve nailed it’s tagline perfectly!)

Well one of the things that the book was a big advocate of was out sourcing that is - Getting others to do those small little tasks so you could worry yourself with things of much more importance (like living life).

Introducing 1-800 We Answer Answering Service
If you have a small business (like myself) that you’re trying to get off the ground, it may make sense to look into an Answering Service like 1-800 We Answer Answering Service. The reason being that obviously, businesses need to look legit. And part of that is being able to have someone answer a phone call during business hours while (I dunno) you’re still at your 9-5!!!

What They Can Do for You
It’s always hard to try and build something up when you don’t quite have the time and this service can certainly help out no matter what size your business. The feature I would be most interested in is their Virtual Office Answering Service, which has them answering calls in my business name for $49.95 per month which I think is all I would need to start out. But of course they offer many more including medical telephone answering services, call centers, and voicemail to name a few.

So if you have a business, why not take a little strain off of yourself while adding a little more professionalism to boot? Check out 1-800 We Answer Answering Service for yourself. (#):)

The preceding was a sponsored post.

I don’t remember exactly when, but sometime recently I said that one of things I wanted to do was get myself from point A to point B with my online endeavors.

Obviously, most of us want to do the same in that we all start with projects at point A, and we want them to succeed (get them to point B).

Up until now I’ve been talking a good game on here, but I think it’s high time to take things to the next level.

“What in the Devil Are You Talking About?”
Like most of us out there, I have my hands in a couple different pots. And also like most of us, I’m not doing enough to get myself and these projects to where I want them and need them to be so that I can declare them successful. So what I’m proposing here and now is a magical mystery tour of sorts… You, me and my projects. From point A to point B.

I want to share with you everything that I’m thinking with all of them, set some concrete goals, and work hard as sin to get my sites/projects to “that point” as quickly and intelligently as I can.

Coming Up
In the next couple of days, I’m hoping to share with you all the projects that I have and furthermore discuss them all in detail in terms of :

• What they are : Currently and My Original Vision
• Where they are now : Stats/Income
• Where I want them to be : Income
• How I see them getting there : Plans

And of course since I’m hoping you’ll all come along for the ride, I hope you will also take this whole thing as an opportunity to discuss in detail all the things that go into these kinds of online businesses… Web development, marketing, seo, link building, affiliate marketing, and anything else that comes up. I’ve never claimed that I was an expert on any of this, but hopefully at the “end” we’ll all be much more knowledgeable in these kinds of things.

So will you join me?

Hey everyone! I really appreciate all the feedback I received yesterday on my How Am I Doing post!

It’s really interesting for me to hear from all of you what brings you to my site and obviously what brings you back.

So thanks again! It’s always nice to receive such lofty compliments, and I’m going to continue to do what I do in order to bring a bigger and better site to your doorstep.

What Does All This Mean?
As far as content, I hope it means that I’ll start delivering some really good posts and series again that will help us all out in our web and blogging endeavors. As far as everything else, I really think I need to get more proactive with this site…

Gettin’ it Done
As it relates to blogging, I always keep the following notion in the back of my mind, “What’s the point of writing super content for your site, if there’s no one around to read it?” Now relative to when I first started this thing, I’ve come along way. But if I’m going to get the “next level”, I really need to push the envelope.

And I’m not talking about any black hat seo, but I’m talking about

• increasing readership
• increasing revenue
• increasing traffic

Now a lot of things go into upping the preceding and I’m not going to go into that now, but in the next month or so I really want to start doing the things that I need to to elevate this site to the position it ought to be. And if you hadn’t already figured out, I want to take you along for the ride!

Other Projects
Recently, I’ve been doing a ton of thought into my Learn Stuff Online site. It’s a project I started a while back but never quite got my footing with. But I think through things I’ve learned here with my blog, I’m ready to dive back into it and finally knock it out of the park.

Stay Tuned!
I think up ’till now with my site we’ve all said “this is how you do this, and this is how you do that”, but now it’s time to put my money where I mouth is and really step up to the bat. I’m going to post a lot of details on this site about those projects and hopefully in the process get them to where they need to be plus share with you all how we go about doing it.

Sound good? As we go forward, I hope you’ll all chime in with any questions about things going forward. We’re all on different pages which means we can all give and take a lot from each other. Are you as excited as I am?

Always interested in different methods to make money online, I decided to check out a phone card affiliate program offered by E-Trepreneur.

So far I’ve had few dealings with affiliate marketing in my “online career”, so I was pretty eager to see what E-Trepreneur could offer.

Here’s what I’ve been able to gather from the website. Judge for yourself if this is for you!

First Impressions
Upon first glance, the site looks a bit thrown together. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen worse but if this company is serious about attracting affiliates, I would get a graphic designer on the job STAT! But what am I saying? Who cares about the look…What about the program?

The Details
Now even though I’ve had limited experience with affiliate programs, the following excerpt from the site worried me…

When signing up, you will be charged a $74.95 one-time set up fee. We accept Visa, Master Card, Amex or Discover as payment methods. Please do not forget that there is a monthly charge of $19.95.

Now I’ve never heard of an affiliate program charging you to join, (since you’re the one helping them out), but what do I know? And I wish at this point I could say you only need X sales a month to cover the $19.95 montly charge but I really couldn’t find any information about how much the phone cards would be.

Conclusion
Hm. Uh…I’m not really sure what to say. Other affiliate programs I’ve dealt with have been very forthcoming with information and details about the product and unfortunately in this case, the information about the actual phone card(s) just aren’t there. And even though the rates for “membership” seem high (imho), until we know more about the actual products, I guess I can’t say one way or another if this affiliate program is worth our time.

Yesterday in Cut the Fat (Part 1) I talked at great length about how I have personally come to a much better place in my life (both professionally and personally) by cutting out all the stuff in my life that I absolutely couldn’t stand.

I’m obviusly not talking about dentist appointments and eating healthy, but all the things that made me lose sleep at night and had me wearing a frown when I got up in the mornings.

Realizing What You Hate
This may sound like an easy question to answer, but there are some who are no longer really bothered by their current fat filled life. They’ve endured it for X amount of years, they’ve learned how to deal with it, how to get through it, and changing it requires a lot of work compared to not doing anything at all. So if this is you, how do you get through the forest and see the trees?

• Listen to What You Have to Say - When we’re with friends and family, (those we’re comfortable with), we often say how we really feel about things. If you’re complaining about something, you’re probably going to say or have probably said it before. Listen up!
• Go Back to Happier Times - Think about when you’ve been the most happiest in your life. Were you happy because of what you were doing or maybe it was because of who you were with. In any event, take these things and compare them with your present days. Is their absence in your life sucking the life out of you?
• Take a Vacation - Take a day off or away from whatever it is that makes up your current day to day life. And have a great day! Figure out what has made that day so good relative to your usual fare and then consequently take notice of the fat in your present life.

And there you have it. At this point you should have a good idea of what you like, and more importantly what you don’t. Of course knowing it and doing something about it are two different things so tomorrow we’ll take a look at Action Plans, a great way to cut the fat.

For some reason last night, I was thinking to myself about how much my life has changed in the last 5 years.

Of course there are the “big” things like getting married and having a kid, but there are also the “smaller” things like changing professions and starting this blog.

And I know for a fact that by “cutting the fat”, I’m the happiest now that I have been in quite sometime.

“If it hurts when you do that, don’t do that.”
You know that old thing right? Where the person goes into the doctor’s office and says it hurts everytime they lift their arm. The doctor then replies, “Well if hurts when you do that, don’t do that.” Simple advice that I think personally I wasn’t following for a long time.

When I look back over the past couple of years, I realize now that I used to do a bunch of stuff that I really hated. Stuff that I did because I thought that I had to.

• Stuff like working at a job I absolutely couldn’t tolerate.
• Stuff like pursuing academic goals that didn’t mean much to me, goals I didn’t need for my profession anyway and in the end would’ve lead me somewhere I didn’t want to go.
• Stuff that basically got me away from where I ultimately wanted to be and clouded things up so badly that I forgot where I truthfully wanted to be.

What Changed?
Personally for myself, I stand back and take a good look at “how things are” every 2 and a half years. I don’t know why I use that time frame, but it works for me. The last time I did that, I took a good look at myself and what I was doing and just concluded that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. So I did what I think anybody should do. I cut the fat.

“Cut That Meat!”
What exactly did I do? I basically changed everything I didn’t like.

• Academically - I’m always a student. I think everyone in the computer/internet medium is I mean, the industry changes too fast to not be. For me, I was killing myself burning too many late hours writing essays and studying Chem formulas… But the bigger thing was, I had finally concluded that I didn’t want to go where a degree would end up taking me. I believe for a large part degrees serve to show that you’re qualified to be hired to work for someone else. I didn’t want to work for someone else though and I already had the computer skills employer wanted. Thus the school fat was cut.
• Professionally - I was working at Best Buy, a retail giant in the US. It sucked. I love helping people, but unfortunately the policies of that job prevented me from doing that. In end, I hated going to work, and wasn’t making nearly enough money to justify me going anymore so I stopped. A week later after I polished up my résumé on Monster I had a cushy office job.
• Personally - I have so many passions that are important to me, and it used to be that I wasn’t spending anytime developing them. No more. I got back to what was important to me and it made all the difference in the world.

Conclusion
I’m not yet where I want to be, but I’m a whole lot closer than where I was and consequently a whole lot happier. Don’t spend too long doing things you don’t like, it’s really not worth it.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at how you figure out WHAT fat you need to cut!

Sometimes when responding to a comment, I tend to get a bit long winded and try to reign it in.

Other times when responding to a comment I find that I need more “space” to adequately address a certain topic. Yesterday, Apex left a comment on Saturday Speedlinkin IV talking about one of Courtney’s posts I had linked to.

I needed more space to adequately address this one.

Apex’s Assertion

I’d like to talk about Court’s post. It’s informative, and I am not trying to say that it’s not good, but seriously, isn’t that common sense? I mean shouldn’t everybody have those traits?

My Response
First, don’t think that I’m disagreeing with you whole heartedly because I think you may be right in some sense. I think a lot if not the majority of us bloggers are in it because we want it to be our job. We don’t want to work in our 9-5s anymore, and we’re willing to make our blog our business to make it happen.

In this sense, serious bloggers and business owners have a lot in common.

Mindset of a Business Owner
When you ask successful business owners how they did it, I think the majority of them would boil it down to what Courtney said, persistence, vision, self-belief, creativity, consistency, passion. Without those things, you’re just not going to make it. Now is that common sense to most of us? Yes. Is that common sense to most everyone else? No.

And I think that’s why so many people “don’t make it”. And I’m not talking about just bloggers. I’m talking about most of the people in mainstream society. If you go up to 5 of them and ask, “Do you want to be doing what you’re doing today or would you rather forge your own path and work for yourself?” Most I think would say they’d like to work for themselves. But because they lack one of those 6 things, they won’t make it.

Audience Targeting
To end this little rant of mine, I don’t think that a lot of people in main stream society know this stuff as common sense. That’s what makes business owners different than everyone else. It’s the mindset and I think often it’s vision and self-belief. Business owners know that to make it, they need the vision and self-belief to see that they WILL make it when others don’t and tell them they won’t. The people who don’t know how to make it think that FIRST other people have to see them able to succeed and others have to believe in what they’re doing.

So maybe this whole discussion should be limited to scope. Even though its unlikely that non bloggers look much at Courtney’s blog, if one does - Maybe they’ll learn something about mindsets if they read that post. *shrugs* I dunno.

Sure the title of this post is borrowed from the ill fated Saved By the Bell: The College Years but hey - Do you ever feel like you’re standing on the edge of tomorrow?

Well, I feel like that right now. With all the stuff I have going on right now (computer wise), I just have a feeling that very soon it’s going to all come together.

Do you agree?

What’s Really Good
You regular readers know that I’m working very hard to get myself out of the rat race. Before I knew about blogs I thought that “traditional” websites were the way to go. But the fact of the matter is (and this is coming from a web developer’s position) blogs make a lot of things a lot easier including traffic, content creation (using a CMS like Wordpress), search engine love and ultimately monetization. And something that shouldn’t go unsaid is the fact that I love blogging and connecting with other people.

Other Stuff that’s Good
What most of you don’t know is in addition to the blogging I also offer web design/dev services locally where I live. I’m not making much from it right now, but it’s certainly enough to cover hosting costs and then some.

Edge of Tomorrow
This month has kinda been eh eh. My posts have been ok, I’ve gotten back on track with my frequency but unless the PR update hits soon, I don’t think that I’m going to have anything momentus happen this month. But that’s ok. Next month hopefully I’ll have some PR and that will certainly mean some more revenue on this site, and maybe some on my other site too. Furthermore, if I can get my a$$ in gear, hopefully I can get another client or two for my web design services and will really be able to contribute some nice side money back to the family.

So yeah, even though the ultimate goal is to live off my net doings, if I could accomplish $1000/mo from webdesign + blogging, I would be super super happy. And I just have this feeling that it’s going to happen sooner than I once thought it would. (#):)

I’ve made a couple references here and there about a great new book I was listening to on Audio CD, but now it’s time to share the gem of The 4 Hour Workweek with you! (Oh, and this isn’t a sponsored review).

In a nutshell, the book written by Timothy Ferriss shows how anyone can go from a 9-5 office slave to somebody who only works 4 hours a week, and remotely at that - From any location they desire!

My First Impressions
After getting into the book a little bit, I realized that I wasn’t reading what I thought I would be. I originally thought I’d be reading something on the order of Rich Dad Poor Dad that tells you that working for someone one else is the wrong way to go and all that good stuff. 4 Hour Workweek instead does something really interesting, in that it doesn’t out and out say that working for someone else is the worst thing in the world. What it really tries to convey is working for someone else on their terms isn’t where it’s at. “Their terms” btw, mainly includes their schedule and their location.

A Different Approach
I’ve always told people who have cared to ask what my professional goals are, that I really don’t need to be uber rich but just well enough off to get my time back. In The 4 Hour Workweek, Ferris explains this notion by discussing something like the following example… If one person makes $100,000/yr but works 80 hour workweeks in a cube, and a second person makes $40,000/yr working wherever and whenever they want, who is the richer person? My vote (as well as Ferriss’) is for the latter. Making less money but having the time to be able to develop and chase your passions is something that most people reserve for their retirements. But as Ferriss says, “[Why should you wait to your retirement to enjoy life while you waste your best years toiling under 'the man'?]”

Practical Advice
One of the best things (imho) about The 4 Hour Workweek is that unlike other books (as good as they are), you’re given some great things to do that can make a difference in your life today. From turning off the “automatically send/receive” function in Outlook to save you time responding to every last pointless e-mail, to getting your co-workers to stop wasting your time at work by not clearly conveying their needs in various projects, and getting out of your shyness box (*ahem*), you’ll undoubtedly pick up some priceless tips regardless (or iregardless (#);D ) of your lot in life.

My Favorite Part - How to Work From Home
Without a doubt, the part of the book that spoke to me the most was when Ferriss instructs you on how to start working from home. As he explains, this is the first step in working the 4 hour workweek. And his attention to detail in this section is really welcomed. He covers what you should be doing in your job before you get to this point, how to lay the groundwork for “the talk” and finally how to go about discussing this with your boss. The last part is really where this section shines as Ferriss shows several ways the conversation could go and how to adequately handle all the objections that will undoubtedly come up.

Conclusion
As you can tell, I really enjoyed 4 Hour WorkWeek. It’s filled with some great examples, exceptional humor and really discusses working and entrepreneurship from a perspective not often explored. Only thing I would change is getting it on Audio CD. I didn’t mean to get it on Audio CD in the first place and looking back, there are a lot of things in the book I want to go back to and revisit but I have no idea where they are on the CD.