Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Since I started blogging I’ve gotten to know some great people involved with the online money making world. It all started when a co-worker pointed me towards Steve Pavlina’s Blog and all the money he makes from his pesonal development blog. This was shortly after I had started to play around with some web publishing of my own so the timing was great.

This co-worker then stopped working for the same company and became a freelance webdesigner along with creating other sites that employ writers, photographers, and bring him passive income. At least thats my guess since I haven’t been able to get a hold of him to find out how things are going ever since he decided to bike across America.

I also met some other great people around the blogosphere and had some great conversations and a dinner with a little more known internet entrepreneur, Yaro Starak. He was in Hawaii on his way back to Australia from Canada and I was able to have dinner at a local hot spot on the beach and discuss all things internet. He gave me some great advice, that, although he may not see me following it yet, I’m definitely working towards ideas raised in that conversation. Besides, who am I to go against a proven method that’s working for him.

Also in the mix is my brother. He’s started a clothing line, ASONE Clothing which has been doing well for small startup company. Also while doing that, he’s become somewhat of a wordpress guru. Couple that with his design abilities and he’s perfect for those wanting design work done. Right now his client list is pretty full and his ability to both code, not just CSS, full-on custom PHP and plugin integration as wel, is going to continue to bring him a lot of work. You can check out his budding portfolio over at PaperTree Design.

He also runs a few blogs on the side related to web design and creating buzz for product launches.

All in all, this online crowd is a great crowd to get into. I hope to develop my network more and more as I try and bring more information to the table. Some things I’m helping colleagues with are…

• Wordpress and PHP consulting, focused on custom wordpress applications and design
• SEO
• Starting and building blog networks
• Idea generation

As I recently wrote, I’m working to get back into the online site and business development world. With that I thought it time I redo how things look around here and maybe make it easier for readers to find content, and find related content.

So over the next few weeks, please excuse the look, rearranging of categories, and general disarray of things around here. I hope to continually organize and update the site to provide readers with a better experience but the drastic changes will most likely take place over the next few weeks.

Some good things you might notice…

• Categories are making more sense
• Easy navigation on the top and in the sidebar with post/category related options
• Each category, post, and tag page now have a main category they are subbed under
• Posts, series, and information is better grouped to allow those searching for help to find it better
• The overall “entrepreneurial feel” is elevated

Feel free to bounce some suggestions by me as well. Who knows, they might get incorporated into the site.

It’s been a little over a year since I spent much time paying attention to my internet “holdings.” Since the spring of 2007 my blogs have pretty much been on autopilot. Every once in a while I would write a blog post, check in om my earnings, make sure I didn’t forget a domain renewal, and a few odds and ends bookkeeping wise. But that’s about it.

Well, since that time a lot has happened besides gas prices doubling. I’ve become extremely busy at my 9-5 job getting a promotion, a lot more responsibility and managing a lot more. I’ve lost pretty much all page rank on my sites. I’ve lost three earning parked domain names due to non-action on renewal. I’ve lost a lot of regular readers to this blog and some other high traffic blogs I run.

And somehow, through all that, I’ve managed to keep my income steady?!?

Yeah, that’s not a typo, my earnings from blogs stayed about the same. The great part is, income from both passive sources, Text-Link-Ads and AdSense, have increased. My overall earnings have stayed the same because I’m not actively selling ad space or reivews on my blogs. If I had kept up where I left off, my earnings would no doubt have been much higher. But then again, it wouldn’t be passive income now would it.

The past year has been a good break from the internet. Blogging, domaining, and the prospect of making money working for yourself is a very big motivator towards spending entirely way too much time sitting in front of your computer. And rightfully so.

Before I took my break I had learned a lot about blogging, investing in domain names, and becomming part of the internet entrepreneur community. This blog has been featured on top name blogs such as problogger.net for a php hack I did to save your YPN account, and also featured on Entrepreneurs-Journey.com several times for various articles I’ve done as well as a post on my link-baiting technique to launch my blog network.

With all that great promotion and words of encouragement, you’d think I would have stuck around. But sometimes you just need a break. My plan is to return slowly and build my blogging, domain investments and other online income to a steady passive income stream competing with my salary from my 9-5.

So how did your blogs continue to earn money?

I know I’ll get this question from a lot of people right off the bat. And don’t worry. I plan to answer this question along with many more over the next few weeks with regular posts to this blog. But, since I’ve been away, my prolific writing skills just aren’t what they used to be.

Some things to look forward to.

• Income reports on the previous year
• Updates to my domain name investing series
• How to file a patent series
• How to start a corporation series
• More on Starting a Blog Network
• and many, many more…

Thanks for those who’ve kept me on their RSS Reader and are surprised to see some updates from me.

Aloha,
Erik

It’s been almost two months since I was hanging out in “The Matrix.” I’ve gotten married, had a blast of a honeymoon in New Zealand, and enjoyed a little bit of the summer months out here in Hawaii. But now it’s time to get back at it.

Since I’ve been gone I’ve had continued writing on only one blog, Aloha Update. All my other blogs and internet business ventures have been stagnant. However, I’m pleased to report that earnings have stayed at the same levels as they were in May and acutally went up on some blogs. This is very encouraging news, it shows that the system of writing a lot, or having others write for your sites, can pay off while you do nothing!

But this news has also been pulling at me to get back in the world of internet business building. Having the last two months to sit back and take stock of what I’ve created has allowed me to really look at what works, what makes me money. I’ve been able to learn which approaches have the biggest return and thus those that I should spend more time creating.

It’s also allowed me to plan a path to refocus on those sites and operations I feel have the highest potential to build into a real business and provide a stream of money to fund other ventures. This is my main focus over the next few months is to work off a plan and build a business system that can fund the next planned operation and so on and so forth.

We’ll see how it goes, but I wantd to let ya’ll know, I’m back in the matrix!

Some of you familiar with Microsoft Office Applications know of the flow chart and process mapping program called Microsoft Visio. It’s a great program that has a lot of standards, templates, and useability options that make it useful in a lot of situations.

I use it in my biotech position to map engineering processes and actual fluid flow. I’ve heard of others who use Visio in “mind mapping” and brainstorming processes to build ideas into projects and product development cycles.

The only problem is that Visio costs a bit of money. For those of you addicted to free web applications, forking over the money to buy a Microsoft product probably isn’t on your top priority. You need other solutions.

Well I did a little hunting around and found two free web applications for just those purposes, flow charts and brain storming.

The first one is called Gliffy and I really hope this application gets picked up by Google in the near future. It’d be a great addition to the Google Free Web Apps. (Although I really hope Google builds more connectivity into their apps and allows users to cut and paste their favorite portions from each app) Anyway, Gliffy is just like Visio and has a lot of built in capabilities to help you diagram flow processes. Try it out.

The next web app that I think you should try out is Bubbl.us. It’s a brainstorming web application, also free that gives users another interactive ability to create brainstorming on the fly, also would be a nice tool to add to Google and allow collaboration through Google Talk to have easy web conferences. Although I haven’t tried the sharing action in Bubbl.us I’m not sure it has real-time sharing like Google Documents does.

Either of these applications can be a big help to those of you who are visual planners and need to see the way things connect together to get a real sense for how they work. These two web applications should be in your toolbox if you’re making the switch to all online medium of communication.