Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

About 6 months ago I signed up for and was accepted by Text-Link-Ads. Within a month someone bought a link from me. I thought “Nice! this is going to be the easiest cash ever!”

It’s 5 months later and I still have one link sold per month. I would think this is OK because I only receive between 40 and 60 uniques a day and my PR is 5 with an Alexa rank in the 140K range, with over 700 pages indexed in Google and about 170 links showing up in Google.

Wait a Second! I see blogs that are PR 3, Alexa (which really can be shifted by a lot of factors) in the 500K and 100 pages indexed in Google, with less frequent updates than my few a week with 3-7 links sold in text-link-ads. What gives? My stats are crazy better and my placement of the links sold is primo in my eyes.

This sparked me to look into why this could be? I’ve already tried changing my category once or twice to try and boost my link sales but that didn’t help (once or twice in 6 months so I don’t think doing that has hurt me). Then I started digging around the text-link-ad categories to see if I could figure out what the issue was.

Doing this got me even more confused, I saw more and more blogs and sites that don’t have near the traffic stats and index stats, ad placement, etc, as I do nearly selling out their link-ads. Is it my domain name, my look, my layout, what the heck!

The only thing I could come up with is that my blog ranges a ton of topics and isn’t focused in on one specific topic. (But then again some of the ones I found weren’t really on any topic at all and still were able to sell a ton) But this was the closest thing I could come up with. That my visitors aren’t Niche Specific enough.

However, if you look at some of the links sold on different blogs you’ll see that a lot of the link-ads have nothing to do with their niche so that may blow my theory right out of the water. I’m also listed in TLA with my Aloha Update site which receives about 50 uniques a day and would be a great travel site to link on, PR4 300+ indexed, nothing.

Am I Text-Link-Ad Cursed? I’ll keep searching the web for answers but I’m puzzled. Is it the blog focus or what gives? Can you help me figure it out?

I’ve been tidying up the blog a bit in the recent days because I’m looking to make each category more focused on what I feel this blog can provide.

I recently contact David over at Mind Petals to let him know that I thought it was really interesting that he sold candy on the bus as his first business back in the day, and I just wrote about doing the same thing. It wasn’t my first business (I sold lemonade, and tried to open up a trading card shop out of my garage) but it was interesting to see others with similar ideas. I also mentioned that I was going to check out Mind Petals and might be interested in the entrepreneurial group he has over there.

Before I could even say, “Looks interesting, I want to be considered in the network,” he wrote back and said that my blog wasn’t entrepreneurial focused enough. Which was a great observation! It wasn’t started as a entrepreneurial blog but him mentioning that I only had the one category about it made me look at my categories and realize that my blog is pretty scatter-brained. (Don’t worry David, no offense taking, I’m a big fan of criticism good or bad, it helps me learn and build things better!)

This blog was originally started because I saw Steve P. doing so well with personal development I thought it would be great if I could list all the goals I’ve wanted to accomplish and see how I do. Since then I’ve been majorly side tracked by blogging and building businesses on-line and have strayed from a pure personal development blog. I’ve also begun to shift towards the name Why Rest?.

The name comes from the fact that I really can’t sit still and I have a need to always be doing something. I’m making the shift in my blog towards providing a great resource and list of things people can do if they need to always be active or are looking for information on the subjects that I keep myself busy with. I’m keeping it related to personal accounts and my experiences because I think these help people the most. It’s not just some schmo that says you should do this without giving any credible background or experience in the subject. I’ll try my best to explain what I’ve done and learned.

So be prepared for this blog to make a continuous shift until January towards a more organized and much more helpful setup. It should be nice for all those that try and follow my scatterness.

It would appear I’m two days late reporting this, which in the blogosphere makes it really  old news, but I thought it to be relevant because I’ve been utilizing patent searches quite a bit lately. I can’t tell you why, that would be just silly, but I’ve been hunting around the USPTO quite a bit and found the following Google release pretty interesting. 

They’ll decided to help inventors and investors really, search patents the Google way. Easy.

They now offer a full text patent search where they’ve indexed all that the USPTO has to offer.

Now if you’ve ever done a patent search before you’ll know that getting the full-text, with images is a task. They have their own viewer which if you can get it to work you should patent the method and license it to the USPTO. I choose the method of searching patents through the USPTO site, their search isn’t all that bad, and then getting the patent as a PDF from Free Patents Online, whose search stinks but they’ve got images and text.

It’s a painful process and one that I hope I’ll never have to go through now that Google has jumped into the patent realm.

You may all be thinking about what your new year’s resolution is going to be. Blogging more, getting links, building a better business system. But what about the things you still need to accomplish before the clock strikes midnight on December 31st, 2006.

As I try and form my companies and build business systems, I’m beginning to see a lot of things that would just make sense to get done before the new year starts. This way I won’t have to go back with books and see where my finances deviate, where I should have bought a domain name under a DBA account, or where I should have set up that checking account before I decided to buy the computer.

I happened upon a list of 15 things and Entrepreneur should do before Years End over at Entrepreneur.com and thought I should come up with my own list. There list is great and some may apply to you, some may not. Like overhauling your website. Wouldn’t a new look for the new year be a great kickoff to jump start your traffic. Or how about their number 1 thing to do which is review your business systems.  Building a business that is self-sufficient is only as good as it’s worst system. How do your systems stack up?

These were all great and definitely extended my to-do list, but I have a little list of my own if you’re a budding entrepreneur that spent 2006 building assets (or liabilities) and wants to set yourself up right for 2007.

1. Form and LLC, S-Corp, or at least a DBA - One of the biggest organizational tasks that you can undertake while starting your own business is allowing the business to be a separate entity. This way you can look on as an outsider and see where your bucket is leaking because you’re spending too much money, or where you could increase revenues.

Having a separate bank account, entity name, and all that goes with it can help you be forced to organize better and keep your spending separate. You’ll never build a good business system if you look at your books and say, well I have enough to pay for that because I got payed today. Having a different account for each business will force you to at least recognize when your leaking money into a business that should be fixed.

Also setting up and LLC or S-Corp right at the beginning of the new year will allow all your tax filings to line up and you won’t have to think back about what you used to buy what. If you have a company account, that’s the only account you should use to do company business. Especially if you’re an LLC, or S-corp and not a sole proprietorship.

2. Get a P.O. Box - This stems from the first one that you want to keep your business separate from yourself. Setting up a P.O. Box at your local post office will help you distance yourself from your company. There only about $5-$10 a month depending on where you live, it’s cheap and it might be what your business needs to make it look official.

3. Update your books - It’s almost tax season and why would you want to start your new year off having to organize last years books! If you spend the end of the year organizing your accounting you’ll have momentum going into the new year and hopefully start it out on the right foot. You’ll be organized and ready to go.

I’m working on this right now and it’s helping me to decide where I want to split my “assets” up into different companies. I’m thinking of forming 1-3 companies for the coming year and knowing where my money went this previous year will be a big help.

4. Appreciate what you did - If you can’t appreciate what you did this past year, maybe you’re in the wrong business. I’m so psyched about all the sites that I’ve setup and the things I’ve learned in the process that I can’t wait to see what the new year brings.

If you’re stuck wondering what you did, reorganize and try and decide where you should focus your efforts. Not appreciating your accomplishments, big or small, will only make the task of creating a business that much harder.

Hope you like the list, and I hope I can get them done in time, only 19 more days! Feel free to add to the list in the comments.

Since using a unique link baiting idea for my Blog Network Launch I’ve been on the lookout for other interesting ways to gain links without coming right out and asking for them. I was checking through my stats today and stumbled across an article from JCcommerce.com that was directing a fair amount of traffic my way requesting that I list 5 things people might not know about me.

An interesting idea, a link baiting chain letter of sorts, that was started down the way by someone, got to Jason and was passed on to me. I’ll give it a try…..

1. I don’t think I finished a book from 6th grade until 10th

Although I’m not 100% sure if this is the truth, I can’t remember a single book I read all the way through from the start of middle school, until I was a sophomore in high school. I can remember a bunch that I didn’t finish and had to still write book reports on.

I kick myself often for not reading some of the books we were required to read. I’m going back these days and reading them now. I try and read a lot now, but never read much growing up. I was always moving around being active, socializing, or yes, watching TV claiming to have read all those other books. I must have been a good BS’er.

2. I once wrote a letter to Kathy Ireland

Honest, she was a babe, probably still is although I haven’t seen pictures of her. I got a post card back from her, but I think either someone in my family was playing a trick on me or it was one of those generic cards that a fan club sends or something. It wasn’t even a bikini shot.

3. I once was 5.5% Body Fat, Freshman Year of College

So Freshman year of college I was a runner and ran about 40-70 miles a week and lifted 3 times a week. I was measure at 5.5% Body fat with those caliper thingies.

Now I’m not that, and that’s where I’ll leave it.

4. I once sold candy on the Bus

OK so I was in 4th grade, but a budding entrepreneur if I do say so myself. I was at Sam’s Club with my mother and noticed that you could buy a candy jar of 100 pieces of individually wrapped hard candy (Sour Balls, Fire Balls, etc) for $8 but you could easily sell these same things to your friends for $0.25 a piece if you had an extra one from the dime store.

Bingo, I sold these every morning and every evening on the bus for two years, if only I new about investing at that age.

5. I know how to Sew

My mom had two boys, and taught us both how to sew. It’s come in handy often, and I never have to worry when a button pops off. I can sew it back on.

There you go now to pass it on…..

Tim Roth over at Democracy CPR
Anthony Yang over at Rambling News
Steve at Adventure Money
Mark Cuban at Blog Maverick - gotta try, right?
Steve Pavlina - Cause I don’t think anyone tried him yet

Although I don’t currently have a use for a store checkout system I couldn’t pass on sharing this interesting tid-bit. Google Checkout has announced that it will be offered as a free service through December 31, 2007!

That’s right, Inside Google just reported that Google doesn’t plan on making any money from it’s checkout service offering it for free, no processing fees, no nothing. No credit card fees, that’s right, Google will eat it’s credit card fees. That’s one smart way to ensure everyone in the world comes around to at least try your service out.

Paypal, which is the dominant online paying fixture, charges the normal processing fees to those using business accounts and those people accepting payments via paypal with credit card. It’s a pain and you’d think with all the automation that fee would be phased from a percentage to a standard, of something small like 10 cents.

Good for you Google, if I find a need for some type of checkout, I’ll for sure find a way to add this killer Google product in.

Well, it’s that time again. It’s time to report on earnings and see what others made over the last month. Mine were decent last month. I increased earnings in all categories. I’ve also decided to start a blog network which has taken a lot of time off my hands from building my internet groupings monetarily. I hope to use this month to reorganize and start building earnings in the new year, at a much faster pace.

AdSense              $36.75
Affiliates/Reviews  $30
Text-Links           $8.55
Namedrive           $129.55

Total                   $204.85

Also around the earnings world:

$806.48 over at one-dollar-a-day.com
$206.19 for buildingmyempire.com
$56.94 at Nothing-ventured.org
$504 for 45n5.com
$430.23 over at theinternetcashflowguy.com

So I wouldn’t consider myself a great coder by any means. I pretty much hack away and piece together from others code and build something that’s useful and works for the task at hand. Nothing elegant, nothing from pure memory or knowledge that I have stored away. I just chop and hack until I make it work.

That may seem like a good plan but it’s a big problem I have. Now I was never big into coding classes in college and only took the few I needed to. Why code a bunch of made for “Hello World” programs. Boring. But for some reason, I really get into coding at certain times.

This happens to be one of those times. And when I say I get into coding, I mean it. When I have a problem that needs to be solved via coding a computer or in works case, a microchip. I get consumed by it. I hate it when things don’t work. It ends up being all I think about. When I’m driving to work, washing my hair, talking to my fiance. It’s all I do, is think about what little solution I’ve missed.

I’ll end up reading through a hundred different tutorials just to figure out how to fun a for loop. It just eats at me, and right now, the Paypal IPN system is eating at me. I’m working on implementing it having the hardest time figuring out which route I want to take. (Plus I figured out that it will also solve another problem I was having. Crazy)

So right now I’m back to learning about PHP, HTML forms, javascript, MySQL, and Paypal IPN. I hope to have a few php scripts written and testing by the end of the week but we’ll see how far I get. I’m a bit fried and just realized that I’m also trying to run a blog network, Youch!

Do you get consumed by coding, or is it just me. Am I a geek because I think it’s fun?

When I purchase domain names, they tend to be on a whim and I’m unsure how long I’ll want the domain name. Therefor, I usually only opt to register them for a year, and uncheck the auto-renew box. I don’t want to be stuck with a name a year from now that I bought because one night I thought it was going to make the next golden Blog.

I also buy typos and type-in names that I park. Most of these names have completely arbitrary renewal dates that I don’t even look at after I decide whether or not the renewal fee + purchase price makes the purchase a smart buy. I just add it to my Go Daddy account, change the name servers and forget about it.

Then every once in a while I’ll get an email from Go Daddy that says 90 days renewal notice, or 60, or 30, or 15, or 10, or 5,4,3,2,1, they never end. So I just delete and forget, knowing that I’ll eventually make it back to Go Daddy to check on the names and renew.

Well, the other day I remembered that a name I currently own throw Air Depth had sent me an email that I promptly deleted or filed away. Only problem was, I remembered that the notice said 5 days to renew and that was 20 days ago. Ug! It was a $80 domain name! Now that’s chump change to these big wig domainers but to small peanuts McGee over hear that’s a good portion of money that I could pay bloggers with.

So I quickly called AirDepth to see if I could recover the name. Low and behold it turns out they hold it for 30 days and allow me to renew within that time period. (probably if no one else wants it, who knows)

I renewed the name but learned a valuable lesson. The second you realize a domain is worth something to you, renew it for a couple of years. Worse that happens is you can fact in the cost when you sell the domain name.

So the big controversy in Sports Nation right now is who will play Ohio State in the BCS Championship Game, Michigan or Florida?

Both of these teams are one loss teams. Michigan lost to number one Ohio State by 3 points, Florida to not in the top ten Auburn by 10 points. Michigan didn’t win it’s conference, Florida did. Michigan didn’t win it’s conference, they lost to number 1 Ohio State by three points.

So who gets in? According to a ESPN.com poll 51% are in favor of Florida, so that means Michigan right? (Ha Ha political humor) But why not have a playoff. Everyone wants it, if it’s that close, why not have a playoff to decide.

Now I’m not just saying that because I’m a Michigan fan and Florida has somehow moved slightly ahead of them in the AP and Coaches poll, I’m saying this as a fan of sports and college football. Why let people who don’t want a rematch, or computers decide. Wouldn’t it be great to have a playoff!

Well why the hell can’t we. Because some stupid contract with the BCS says they can’t. Is the BCS that stupid that they could make junk loads more money on a playoff and a BCS title game.

I for one am in favor of a playoff. Why all this talk of we should install one, why the hell can’t we just do it now. What’s stopping the powers that decide this stuff. Just do it! For God’s sake this is America!