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We are getting ready to go on vacation again.  We are going to the magnificent San Francisco.  I say again but it really has been a long time since I got out of town for fun.

I was supposed to give everyone an update regarding my foray into the Ebay Affiliate Network, unfortunately I was extremely busy with other commitments and was not able to actively pursue it.  However on the advice of a friend, I was told not to stop the adwords campaigns that I was using to drive traffic, but to limit them to something like a dollar.

SIDETHOUGHT

When you go to change the budget on your adwords campaign, don’t do it when you are in a rush and when you do take the time to do it check it twice before and after hitting submit.

When I went to change everything to $1, I accidently changed it to $100 daily, luckily I checked it the next day and only screwed myself one day. 

/SIDETHOUGHT

Even with that blunder however I should end the month by breaking even over the start of the year.  I am starting to convert the traffic that I am receiving which really looks nice on the graph.

Next Step

When I get back from my extended time offline I have a few things in mind that I want to pursue.  One is to expand my network of ebay affiliate sites.  I have a few horizontal niches that I want to test out.

I am also playing with ideas surrounding my profession and have started developing training programs.  With these I hope to have a product that I can actively sell while enhancing my professional brand.  This is something that I will take my time developing as it is more important at this stage to maintain the brand that I have developed than to tarnish it.

When the Time Comes

But really that all is going to have to wait till my rest is over.  I only have one more week before I am back at the grind.  Today we go to Alcatraz and see if we could have figured out a way to escape.

The kicker is that I am failing, not miserably mind you, but I am not getting the return on the investment that I am looking for.  Not so much on the money side as that is doing fine, it is more the time versus profit investment, and to make the matters worse I don’t see that it will get better over time.

So what does that say, well try something else.

Might seem weird that I am switching gears again after not even 2 months of trying out the whole Ebay Affiliate marketing thing, but it just doesn’t seem to be working for me at the moment. 

I recently read The Dip by Seth Godin, and an interview of him by the CEO of seesmic.com (cool idea but not quite there yet) and Seth Godin mentioned that the reason that he is not on Twitter is that he couldn’t be the best at it so he decided not to try it out.  In The Dip he mentions a similar thing about the importance of being the BEST in the world at whatever you do.  This world is not necessarily the Earth, but what ever niche that you are involved in.  For example, if you have $500 to spend on a camera, you are going to go out and find the best camera that you can for $500.  You are not going to go out and buy the 3rd best, that would not make sense.

So what do that mean to me, well it means that I have to put more emphasis on the niches that I am going to be interested in for the long term and that will allow me to become the best purveyor of whatever that I want.

I am still going to be involved in my recently made ebay affiliate sites and try to make them profitable, but that will be played out as more of a diversion rather than a main study.  I already have ideas of what my new site and content that I am going to build into my new business.

I am not sure why I’m not doing it, but I am sure that I should be.  Then a buddy pointed me towards this older post, Do it Fucking Now from SEOBlackHat and was thinking.  I really should be doing  a lot more than I am, but I feel like I am spinning my wheels.  I have made very little progress in the month of January, and I am not exactly sure where I should be moving on from there.

So now what am I going to do?

Well I am just going to do IT!!   What am I going to do?  Well that is a question that I can’t really answer that, but I am going to do SOMETHING every day.  No matter what it is, I am going to do something that will bring me a step closer to my $5000 / month before tax profit.  It may be just researching a niche, getting some ideas on content, sites, maintenance, etc. 

The point is to do something.

If you are spinning your wheels, then try changing gears.  Every little step makes a difference.

So what is it, that you are going to be doing to reach your goals no matter what it is.  Let me know in the comments.

 

 

 

There should be a lot more to this, but I am busy doing stuff.  If you are on Twitter you should be using Tweepler.

What can I do with Tweepler?
Tweepler acts as a Twitter utility to process new Followers quickly and easily. The application consists of 3 areas that we call “Buckets” The first “Bucket” is the Unprocessed Followers “Bucket”. This shows you a listing of all the new people that have started Following you that you have not currently categorized. The other two “Buckets” are the Follow “Bucket” and the Ignore “Bucket”. The Follow “Bucket” is where you put Unprocessed Followers that you have decided you wish to Follow back. The Ignore “Bucket” is where you put the Unprocessed Followers that you do not wish to Follow back. We have found that by creating this Ignore “Bucket” organizing your Twitter followers becomes a much more painless task than if you do this through the Twitter.com website.

 

Check out @JessyO and @CorySchop on Twitter, they are the awesomeness that are behind @Tweepler.