Vacation Time and Next Steps

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.

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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

75px-EBay_Logo.svg[1] 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

IMG_3359But 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.

Time to get Serious

I think that I have reached the point in my life that I think it is time to get serious about becoming self-sufficient. There are aspects in my day job that I like, including the security, however there is not a lot of potential for movement both within the corporate ladder or around the world on work.

A couple of things that I want to do is move around. I want to have the ability to move around on work or move to one place to live for a year and just work there.

I have a few current websites that I am going to become VERY serious about in the coming months. There are exactly 4 including this one. A couple are sites that I have started worked on, let die, then worked on again. I am planning on getting them to the point where they are going strong and making me a steady income. The first target is my forum. I currently have a lot of members that are not active. My plan is to change the front page into a blog targeted on the theme of the forum and build traffic to that. From there I hope to build a readership base that I can then convert to the forum and have community traffic build content for the site.

The next site on my list is the same idea, but it has not been established at all and has very little traffic. It is in a completely different niche and is related to my day-job. My plan here is to build a professional position on the web and work on becoming an EXPERT in particular niches within my profession. From there I hope to be able to gain some consulting work on the side.

Then finially I have this site. I plan on doing more work on this site by the time that summer comes with better articles and status reports on how my experiments are going and give some fancy graphs using Analytics.

I will also be recommending some of the resources that I have used to get my ideas. This is something that is huge, I am going on a trip in a couple of weeks and will be taking a number of books with me that I hope to gain some inspiration from, I will point them your way when I get them