Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

As most of you noticed, I haven’t really been blogging on any of my blogs for the past 2 years.  I’ve been consumed by my 9-5 which hasn’t allowed me to write, link, promote, or stay in the web too much.  Back when I was going strong, blogging daily, linking daily, and build my blog network, I was net about $600 per month.  Not too bad considering I was still working full-time and would do all my blogging in the evening and mornings.

But, even with the dry spell, not doing much of anything, all blogs losing pagerank completely, I’ve still managed to make money.  Every month I get a little bit in my paypal account and bank account via various advertising agencies.  So how much am I making still…

I’m happy to report that I’m still netting about $300 a month!  That’s right, doing nothing, still making about $300 a month.  Not too bad, and it shows you that even if you’re spending all this time on building an online presence, it can still provide you with much needed income.

This is just another reason that I’m giving it another go.  Hopefully smarter and wiser by hiring and editor to help me manage freelance bloggers. As well as focusing my efforts on one blog. I’m hoping this new focus will allow the figure to grow, at much more rapid pace, and with less effor than I put into it before I took my break.

As most of you know that have followed me over the years, I’ve gone off and on hiring writers to write on one ore many of my multiple blogs.  Over the year and a half however, I’ve basically done nothing on my blogs focusing most, if not all of my energy on my 9-5 (I’ll talk about what I’ve been up to in later posts).  But recently, I’ve been pulled, dragged, yanked, whatever, back into blogging.

I’ve hopped back in for several reasons. My blogs continue to get traffic, continue to get linked to, and continue to make money.  That and it was requested by one of the writers I hired a while ago to start my ideas back up and really give it a go.

This time however, I decided to be smarter than I had in the past. Previously I’ve payed generic writers to generate content for posts I’ve titled. This worked but produced kind of bland posts and didn’t last long. Next I hired bloggers, as freelancers, but had a hard time organizing and managing their writing. [Head over here to read about these and a few other ways to generate content for multiple blogs.

Other than having enough time to manage these writers, I spread their work and over multiple blogs about different subjects. None of the writers could feed off of what the other writer was doing and soon everyone became bored with the blog network.

So this time I needed a different strategy. I decided to put to use what I learned from doing things wrong and also what I learned from listening and reading what others had to say about the matter.

First, I decided I was going to focus on one blog. I wasn’t going to write on all my blogs and continue to spread my resources thin.  I live in Hawaii and was told by several people, once from Yaro Starak on a trip through Hawaii, that I should focus on this interesting niche. Done.

Next, I don’t have enough time to manage the site, build links, find advertisers, manage writers, edit, write, and develop a posting schedule. Instead I would need to bring on someone to take some of the day to day tasks off my list. It just so happened that I had someone looking and willing to do some of these task.  The person who wanted to get Aloha Update going again wanted to come on as an editor to manage writers, edit, write, and develop a posting schedule. Done.

Next, we would need to find writers interested in the topics and willing to help build a blog as freelance writers and not full-time bloggers. First task of my new editor, find writers. Over the course of a month she was able to find 10 writers wanting to write about the islands on a per post basis. Done.

While it’s only been a few weeks so I can’t say with certainty that this method will work down the road, we’ve been able to  generate at least two posts per day, keeping content fresh and building an audience.  Aloha Update now has regularly scheduled posts, writers comment on each others posts, and a genuine feel of community.

All this and I haven’t needed to make it a full-time job.

This past year I have flown a lot, I mean a lot. Over 115,000 payed miles one United alone, 3 free flights on United, and a couple random flights on Northwest and Hawaiian. All in all about 150,000 miles spent in the air. And the year isn’t over yet!

During that year in the air there have been a lot of changes to the industry due to every single airline except Southwest loosing money because of high fuel prices. Airlines are going out of business. Airlines are charging for baggage. Most airlines have done away with free food, although that was mostly last year, this year a lot of airlines have cut out the free bag of mixed pretzel things. And, although I’m not sure on other airlines, United has cutout Champagne in first class.

On top of all these changes, routes are getting cut to reduce capacity which means crowded flights full of extremely grumpy people and long standby lists.

While these changes might be necessary to cut costs and stay in business I for one think they were poorly implemented, but that’s another story. What this article is about is why airlines aren’t doing more to produce more revenue rather than cutting costs?

Why aren’t they selling me things in the air?

First, accept credit cards, you have the persons name with more security than any other place on earth, its not a security thing, figure out how to do it. Hawaiian only accepts credit card by the way….

Next, why not sell better snack selections? I as recently on a flight that instead of $6 snack packs they sold huge pringles stacks and trail mix for $3. How about a candy bar, healthy snacks, better food choices?

Next, why not get rid of some storage that weighs 200 pounds, gotta be able to cut that out of something, and bring on board 50 personal video players all loaded with 20 movies each, charge $10 per flight to rent them.

How about you sell headphones, noise canceling. Offer for people to try some on the plane, accept credit cards, then sell them a pair.

How about other things to rent? (and that doesn’t mean pillows and blankets, what a dumb idea that was whichever airline it was)

Best idea of all to sell to this captive audience….. Don’t know yet, but be innovative, think of something, and make more revenue. Don’t cut costs to make your service worse.

I writer this while I sit on the runway waiting for our gate to open.

Many reporters, economists, and wanna be economists are comparing the recent stock market crash to the famous crash of 1929. The crash that marked the start of the Great Depression. The crash that changed America. But is it really the same?

Knowing little about the 1929 crash I haven’t really been able to make the parallel myself. I’ve been stuck listening when I’d love to offer my own opinions. So a few weeks back when I was, surprise surprise, waiting in an airport I stumbled across a used book with a title staring back at me. Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929.

I decided to buy the book and begin to read it on my 14 hour journey back to Hawaii from the mainland. The back cover seemed to have rave reviews (which rarely happens on a book cover) and the thought of finally figuring out what caused the stock market crash was intriguing enough.

Turns out it was an amazing book. It reads like a story rather than restating facts in dry collegiate language. It kept me reading and interested in something that most would find a boring subject were it not strikingly similar to todays events.

The author, Maury Klein, writes Rainbow’s End not focusing on the events right around 1929, but rather, builds up to the crash. Starting at the turn of the century. He talks about how the automobile transformed American way of life more than any other invention ever had. Klein focuses on the effects the automobile had on how people traveled and interacted with people, the status symbol a car made, the drive by manufacturers to reduce the cost making it more of an minorly-expensive commodity than a luxury item. And most importantly he talks about how automakers begin to shape how companies did business.

He focuses on one big player, with big ideas, Billy Durant who helped create holding companies like GM to brand different cars and build huge conglomerates. Durant lived the American dream and Klein captures the most pivotal moments of that dream.

He goes on to talk about how banks began to transform. He talks about how America used to be a country of men and women who saved, and worked hard to save some more, but began to turn to country that used credit to purchase things. (sound familiar) Fueled by the automobile, large appliances, and other luxuries, America began to buy things now on want rather than on necessity.

He talks about how banking giant of the time National City began to offer trading of securities all over the US, not just to the wealthy in New York and Chicago. How citizens were talked into buying on margin, and that the market would always go up. How the government sat by as banks were allowed to offer whatever they wanted to customers, manipulate stock as they saw fit, and get away with a lot that today would land you in jail.

The parallels, as you can read from above, are amazingly similar to today. The 20’s built into an enormous bubble of lavish spending that burst in late 1929. While Klein doesn’t go into detail much after the crash, he does talk about Hoovers unfortunate taking over of a market on the verge of disaster and his real inability to use the government to overcome a widespread depression.

If you have any interest in the stock market of today, and wish to learn from the past, read this book. Maybe you’ll be able to read the market better and see why the government is so scared of banks collapsing and people losing all of their credit.

In a year when most stock portfolios are down at least 30% some much more than that you find that most people are adjusting their spending and work habits accordingly. Reports are coming in of shoppers preparing to spend less this year on holiday shopping. Travelers are planning to travel closer to home. And investors are looking to savings accounts and CDs before the Fed lowers rates so low banks practically can give money away for free.

Even with all that, has the economy affected your day to day patterns?

For me, I can say that my wallet hasn’t been affected yet. My wife and I don’t pull income from our stock portfolio which is good, it’s down almost 50% on the year, and we’re still able to get student loans for her and my paycheck is still getting signed. However, psychologically we’re both looking for ways, just like those people I mentioned above, to save money “just in case.”

Save money on gas, which, although it’s coming down in price, still has us trying to plan our routes better to conserve gas. We’re eating in rather than going out. We’re putting more money away in savings every month for a rainy day. And lastly, I’m starting to blog again.

That’s right, I’ve been away for so long I almost didn’t remember how to float images, or transfer blogs between servers, or… But the major difference between last year and this year is that I’ve decided to spend a little more time building content on my many blogs to see if I can increase traffic and get a little extra cash every month for those just in case moments.

It’s not that I have much more time to do so. My 9 - 5 is still a 24/7 job, meaning I’m always thinking about, answering phone calls, or emails (from my phone too), for work. But now I’m trying to make time to blog a little more and get back into the internet thang.

This means blogging early in the morning when I wake up, or blogging late at night before I go to bed. At these times I may read a regulatory document here and there for work just for fun, or gasp… even try to spend some quality time away from work. But, now I can fill that time with creating content that will build my blog network and hopefully increase traffic and earnings as I’ve done in the past.

I think this change will ultimately be good for America. Rather than people expecting to get things now or feel entitled to high salaries, bonuses, and stock options, credit that can buy them whatever they want NOW!, they’ll see that working hard, saving and then getting your reward is how you get ahead and feel success.

So, How has the Economy Affected You?

From time to time I’ve discussed on this blog managing multiple writers for my blog network, Blogtown Press. Mainly I’ve dealt with the odds and ends of finding, organizing, and paying bloggers to writer on one or many of my various blogs. Those articles are helpful but they haven’t really given tips on helping with the task of managing these writers through Wordpress.

Managing writers, even with wordpress can be a big task. While there are plugins that help you it’s always tough to sort through them all and find the plugins that help you the most. Well, I recently began to rekindle my interest with the internet, blogging, and building a business by paying freelance writers to build content and thought I’d begin to share some tips with my readers about how this process is going.

I’ll jump into the business side of things more a little later (recently I created an LLC for one of my blogs and hope to expand that blog into a full business with possible full-time employees.) But first let me pass along some information on a plugin I happened across. The plugin is Role Manager which allows you to set specific rules for the roles inherent in Wordpress and change how they act. While the codex for role management does a little bit to help you understand the roles capability, it doesn’t really give you full control over what these various roles can do. They’re predefined.

Well the Role Manager plugin lets you change that by providing an interface to manage the inherent roles. Also, which is probably the best part of the plugin, is that it allows you to create new roles and set options for them. For example, let’s say you have most of your writers setup as contributors but you want one of them to have the added ability to upload files, like images. You don’t want to give everyone the chance to upload files, because you might not trust everyone as much as this person to upload non-malicious files, so what do you do?

You can create a new role and set it to a contributor upload role, or whatever name you choose obviously. You can then have everything the same as the settings for a contributor but the new role will allow this special subset of contributors to upload files.

This is just one example but you can see how this wordpress plugin allows you to customize and better manage your writers and members of your wordpress site to be able to have more features than the defaults. This allows you, as an employer of freelance writers to give your writers more options without giving away all the accessibility of say, an Editor.

Why the question mark you might ask. Because if you’ve traveled on an airline lately you’ll know that most people aren’t happy. The workers or the travelers. This is something that I’ve come to know too well. Traveling for work (my 9-5) I’ve gained 1K status on United Airlines. For those of you that don’t know that’s flying 100,000 miles in one calendar year. And I made it in the first week of October.

For some this may seem cool or great, traveling for work, going to different places and I must admit, at the beginning of the year I thought is was too. But 3 months into it I was over it and now after a solid year of traveling at the rate up almost 2 weeks a month I’m getting over it. I live in Hawaii with my wonderful wife, and enjoy playing outdoors.

To top it off, all of my flights are at least 6 hours long!

That’s why I was surprised and relieved when I took part of my last trip and it seemed as though the airlines were full of joy? Every work was kind and approached me with a smile, the plane staff was extremely friendly, behind the counter, same thing! And better yet, on both of my flights I received a pilot card with a little note written on it thanking me for being an elite member. Both legs!

Now the pilot cards are nothing new, every once in a while the stewardess’ will hand them out. But two in one day, plus the happy flight staff, unreal? Maybe there was a company wide meeting at United saying we have to actually care about the people that pay our salaries. I’m not sure. But whatever it is it was great to fly with them.

I just hope it wasn’t a fluke and these people are nice all the time.

By the way, the flight was LAX to IAD and IAD to MIA.

Once again Barack Obama is showing signs of change. This one I can definitely get on board with. Fireside chats, something that every president does once a week since FDR, and have since been put on the radio, has said that he will put his firesides on YouTube.

What a great idea! Informing and leading the general public from a medium that most Americans have access to. I always wondered why previous presidents didn’t put their weekly address, on the television. I’m not talking about press conferences. I’m talking about some sort of weekly address that speaks honestly to the nation.

Maybe they have previously done this on tv. But I haven’t noticed it. YouTube is such a brilliant idea. I’m not sure how it’s comment feature for such showings will go. I can only imagine the comment battles that will go on. Maybe you’ll be limited or maybe they’ll close the comments.

Either way, it’s great to see government coming into the new age. Maybe he can spread the thoughts to other forms of government and we can stop wasting so much money…

In such a crazy investment envrionment one can either forget about the stock market completely or become glued to its every move. I for one have chose the latter. Following the markets volatility has become a daily thing for me. Not because I day trade or have large sums of money riding on these movements, but because its drama filled.

I of course check my google finance to see what the market as a whole is doing but while I move around I also check the news. While CNN Money is a nice one to browse I recently (yes I’m out of the llop) discovered that while the online version of the Wall Street Journal has mostly paid access, the mobile version is free.

Although the articles are more limited than the online version you can’t beat free from a great in the know investing resource.

So as I sit from my mobile phone writing this let me direct you to http://m.wsj.com.

I’m always a fan when a company comes out with a new idea rather than creating a commodity out of a design that’s already out there. Or maybe that’s what these guys are doing?

Either way, I stumbled across this new company in a small article in wired magazine that combined t-shirts, social networking and you cell phone. Although the idea is still growing on me and I can’t see it getting much more than a cult following, the concept is great! Take something that’s been around forever, the t-shirt, and make the message it delivers fluid.

I’m not talking about creating a digital screen print on a t-shirt that changes. I’m talking about a new company called W-41. It’s a new company out of the Netherlands that’s decided to take your t-shirt to the next level.

W-41 places a design on the back of their designer t-shirts. The design looks like a futuristic barcode. Then while you’re out at a club, the supermarket, or walking your dog, anyone with a phone and their free application can snap a photo of your barcode and up pops what you’d like. A message, your website, your facebook info, your myspace, or anything you choose.

While the idea in this application seems a little hard to get widespread popularity (unless of course it becomes standard on every t-shirt design) the concept is great. I’ve heard of applications for cell phones that have barcode readers and pop up info of products right in stores but this goes even further. It marries the photo recognition software with useful applications, right on your cell phone.

Think of all the possibilities: A cell phone app that takes pictures of products or barcodes and up pops Google Shopping Search to tell you how cheap you can get it online, or amazon reviews to tell you how bad the product is.

Portable apps are tying together every aspect of our life and if you can get even a small cult following, you’re doing something right.