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 know that one of the biggest problems when it comes to online websites and business in general is ideas.  More importantly good ideas.  Well the only way that you can come up with good ideas is to start with simply coming up with ideas.  From there you can go through them and filter out what you think are the good ones and then maybe talk to some people that you trust to come up with the really good ones.

But how do you come up with the ideas to start with?

One of the ways that I come up with them is when I am searching for something online and no matter how far back I go in the SERPs I can’t find what I am looking for.  There is an opportunity to fill a gap in the potential market. 

Another good way is evaluating a service that you are currently using.  Are there things in that service that is not serving all of your needs or simply don’t work very well, there may be a venue for you to improve on the service by making your own.  However, this is much harder to do in smaller niches since you are going to have to work in a market that already has a foothold, and sometimes if they see you taking away users they will adapt by improving.

And finally talk to your friends about what they look for online and especially ask them what they can’t find.  Probe them because sometimes you will find that once they can’t find something they completely forget about it.  This sometimes is a better source since markets that are not necessarily technical or web based are much more easily infiltrated since they tend not to be saturated.

Don’t forget to let me what you think by commenting, I look forward to hearing about the ways that you come up with ideas.

As the readers here know, I was planning on having a contest on ThePartyLive, however that has changed, I have more work to do before I do that. 

When I was sitting around with a few friends on Thursday I asked them about my site and why they don’t post.  I told them that there were lots of topics and I am sure that they would enjoy at least one.  Well it turns out that the reason they didn’t click the link in my sig or MSN was because they couldn’t get a feel about what the site was about from the URL.  www.thepartylive.com doesn’t really describe Canadian discussion. 

So following that I feel that the reason I can’t get refferals into members may be that they either don’t know what the site is, or get a different impression from the link, and then when they find the site they decide to turn away.  That is why I am going to get a new URL (done) and start a change over.  I am going to do it slowly, over a couple of months and 301 everything from thepartylive.com to the new site.

When the new site is running and everything is active again I will start the contest, maybe get it rolling in August and then have the draw end of Sept.  By then I hope to have 6 VERY active members and some more people using TPLNews

I will annouce the new Name when I have the domain parked and new logo up.

I have always had a problem with time-management.  I always work on things that I enjoy first, I check my email, adsense, affiliate earnings, and forums WAY too much, and then in no time I realize that I had nothing accomplished and it is time for bed, or to go to the day job.

So I started to track the time I spend on various tasks online on a task/website basis.  This is done in a simple Excel spreadsheet.  The problem that I am finding with this is that I am not always working on the same computer, so that sheet is not always with me and therefore it is not updated.

I am in the process now of finding a good online tracking script with a MySQL backend.  When I find one I am going to install it here and maybe even write a small widget so that you can see the time I have spent on various tasks on a weekly basis in the sidebar.  Then next time I try to figure out why I am not getting anything done, you guys can scream and say it was because I was spending 20hours a week browsing a forum for the last month

Maybe when I can SEE exactly where all of my time is being spent I will be able to tweak my schedules and get more done in the time that I allow myself, rather than spending more time and getting nothing done.

::EDIT::

Well I think that I have changed my mind.  The long weekend is coming up so I am going to make my own tracking script.  It is not going to be much but if I do make it into something I will release it to the world

Like I was saying before I am getting really busy at work, and as always that means less time spending on my sites.

To make this all work I am doing more focus on specific tasks.  First off I am going to make sure that I have all of the scripts that I am using up to date.  I found out yesterday that someone had hacked into one of my sites, changed the PP email and has been getting my sales for the last little while.  Since the site is not very busy this probably went on longer than was necessary, but it still meant lost revenue, and maybe even lost content.  So that makes #1

#2 is that I am going to be spending more and more time working on developing the sites that I have right now.  I have a few ideas for the sites that are making money now on how to make even more money from them.  My goals like I said before is to make $10 for every hour that I spend working online.  To do that and still be able to work on new projects I am going to have to start making more passive income from my existing sites.  I don’t think that this should be too hard, but it is still something that I am going to have to spend time on.

#3 is to ensure that I am enjoying the process.  I am going to cut as much of the stuff that I don’t like doing and either farm it out or find NEW and improved ways of doing the same thing.  This is a hobby afterall and therefore I should enjoy it