Like I have mentioned before I have been playing some online poker in my spare time, and when I am getting bored.  Anyway, lately I have been doing pretty good, I invested in some tracking software and it has already paid for itself. 

So yesterday I sat down and figured out the hourly rate I have made playing poker for the last month, and I was surprised to see that it was higher than my effective hourly rate for all of my online business.  Hmm I thought to myself, if I just played poker then I would be able to buy that new computer that I want sooner.

That is when the guy on the other should spoke up and said, “Yes, but remember there is nothing passive about playing poker, online or otherwise.  You can’t go home and read a book AND make money, you actually have to be doing something.”

This is very true, and where the title comes from.  Sure I could decide to just play poker in my free time and spend NO time on my other endeavors, or I could even sell my remaining online real-estate, however I will never have a nice passive income when I stop playing.  The sites and services that I am spending my time on now are gaining speed, and on top of that they are making me money, as little as it may be, while I am at work, sleeping, etc.  That is something that I can’t say about poker.  If I go on vacation I make no money except for the money that my sites pull in via Adsense and affiliate offers. 

So my conclusion to that little internal conversation was this, keep doing what I am doing.  So I will continue to maintain and build my sites and if the mood strikes I will fire up the poker, or set up a home game (that I can’t seem to win, but that is another post)

I am not sure if it is the weather or work, but I have just not been posting enough here.  Sure I mentioned back in June that I was going to be offline for a bit, but a month is way too long.  So here I am.

Not a whole to talk about, I noticed that there was a HUGE pickup of paid submissions to BluenoserLinks recently.  Must be a rumor of a TBPR update in the near future.  I must say that I like it.  I was getting worried that I would have to put some more work into the site, but I guess that people just want to get in there for the update.  I find it strange that they wait so long.  I usually do all of my link grabbing right after the update.  There are two good reasons for this (you should take this time to grab a piece of paper and pen)

1. The links get cheaper.  I am not talking about the links on the pages that just jumped in price, but the new sites.  The sites that people are talking about NOW, or just recently.  Google is fast but they are not that fast.  If you see a site that everyone is talking about, but didn’t get a good jump this time around, buy up some long term links.  They are going to be bigger in the next update.
2. I don’t think that there is much point trying to get links in the last couple of days.  I doubt that Google uses its most recent information for the update, probably a couple of weeks old.  And the older the links and the older the pages the better.  So go out there and buy some links now, and have them there months for the next update.

Well I guess those two points weren’t really earth shattering, but I think that there are a lot of people out there that browse the forums, find out that a PR update is on the way and then try to buy as many links as they can.  For a better idea, always try to get links.  Work on getting a link a day minimum for your site.  That coupled with really good content that people will WANT to link to will get you farther then buying up links at the last minute.