Internet Business Blog

Long time no post! I’ve actually been on holiday in Hong Kong for the past few weeks, taking a break from everything including computers (well almost, but more on that later). Fortunately, whilst I was away all of the automated stuff did what it was supposed to so sales of products continued and consumers continued to click through my affiliate links. It’s always nice to know that the whole passive income thing works.

Hong Kong was fantastic. I’ve got some family and friends out there and I’ve been before so it wasn’t the usual sunbathing by the pool type of holiday. Quite a large group of us went including my wife’s parents (for the first time) so we visited many of the tourist hot spots as well as heading off the beaten track.

It was with this holiday that I decided it was time to reignite my interest in photography and purchased a Canon EOS 40D along with a trio of lenses (Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM, Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM, and Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0 L IS USM lenses for the buffs reading). I’ll test out the new WordPress 2.5 gallery feature and post a few pics.

As well as being a great place to visit, HK is also a great place to be a photographer as there are photo opportunities everywhere and you don’t necessarily have to stop once the sun goes down especially when you’ve got something as amazing as the Symphony of Lights - a daily light and music performance by some of the some of the buildings on the Hong Kong island (and Kowloon to some degree) waterfront.

I actually shot over 2,000 photos during our time in HK! Fortunately, I had a laptop computer with me and a portable external hard drive so a single storage card was sufficient. It also meant that I could look over my shots and keep an eye on things relating to my online businesses, but I promise I didn’t do any real work although I was inspired to contemplate starting a photography website.

Whilst HK was great, landing back at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 was nothing short of a farce. As well as our Heathrow to Manchester connecting flight being cancelled, our limited options for getting home resulted in us catching a coach to Birmingham and then getting picked up from there all the way back to Liverpool. It’s difficult to understand how such a massive project was so poorly planned and tested with little in the way of real contingency. Very unimpressed.

Now, back home, it’s time to get on with some work, start planning some photography trips and fleshing out my new photography website.

P.S. I tried to upload some photos into a WordPress gallery, but kept getting an error during ‘crunching’ so I’ll post them once it’s sorted.

Are you like me, wondering what happened to January? Actually, I’m not really wondering about it too much as I know the first part of it was spent pouring over receipts and statements as I prepared for my tax return. All I can say is that I’m really glad I have an accountant to worry about getting the tax return filled in accurately whilst I just get on with business.

The recent news about the “Tax doesn’t have to be taxing” advert man wishing taxes were simpler made me laugh and the news about the online tax filing website going titsup on the last submission day before automatic charges are applied should have come as a surprise, but surprisingly wasn’t!

Automated income-wise, January was a great month. Post-Christmas blues didn’t affect what I earnt online at all. Link sales saw a marked revival after a slight dip around the time when Google announced the latest slap on paid link publishers, sales of my latest product, Affiliate Link Tracker, did well and my affiliate earnings shot through the roof! The great thing is that other than answering a few support queries all of my earnings required no direct effort on my part.

Just when I’m ready to start focussing more on the automated side of Internet business, demand for my web design and SEO services ramps up as though everyone’s made a new year’s resolution to get their businesses online. Whilst passive income has its benefits, I must admit that it’s very rewarding to work directly with such a variety of different people and being able to have a positive impact on their businesses.

It’s a shame that these positive experiences weren’t reflected on the global stock markets as they continued to feel the effects of the credit crunch and all took a dive. Still, it must be a good time to buy!

As we’re already well into 2008, now would seem a good time to reflect on the past 12 months and to start thinking about the year ahead…

2007

Whilst this blog is intended to be primarily centred around the topic of making money online, it’s difficult to skirt around major life events that take up a significant amount of time and energy. 2007 was the year I got married and even though I spent a lot less effort working on my online endeavours around the big day, my automated income streams continued to work hard relentlessly whilst I was busy getting on with life.

At some point during 2007, I came to the realisation that running a small web design business where everything centres around me was continual hard work with no real exit route other than to sell the business. There’s an element of residual, recurring income that comes from hosting, but otherwise you’re basically paid for your time and that’s something that Rich Dad has really put me off.

I’d already started moving away from having such a big slice of my online portfolio dependent upon Google AdSense and concentrated on developing my own products instead. In a bid to free up more of my time, I hired several different freelancers.  2007 was the year when I got really fed up with useless freelancers wasting my time so product development ended up taking up quite a lot of my time.

To make my money work harder for me, I started having a real stab at investing in stocks and even buying into the behemoth we all know and love as Google.

Oh, and of course, I did some decorating!

2008

Whilst I don’t believe in making new year resolutions (if you’re going to do something just do it), there are a few things I’d like to accomplish this year.

The first is to focus more on completing individual projects. The problem, I find, with trying to work on lots of different things at once is that you lose a lot of time in the overhead that comes with re-focussing on distinct projects as you try to regain mental momentum.

In order to help me achieve this, I’m going to put more effort into planning. I’m going to map out my process flows and keep track of progress.

My second goal is to spend less time on Internet distractions. Feed readers, emails, blogs and forums all have their uses, but they also cause my train of thought to derail.

Thirdly, and this goes well together with my first goal, is to make use of the gigabytes of material I have at my disposal that can be monetised. This includes all of the software and info-products I’ve obtained with rights. One of the reasons why I haven’t been able to make use of a lot of it is because:

• I haven’t gotten around to reviewing it sufficiently to decide what to do with it or
• I’m not happy with the material and decided it needs work or
• it’s trash and would take more time to fix than starting from scratch.

One of the problems I face is that I can be very fussy. I like things done to a certain standard and that often means the only way I’m happy is to do things myself and there just isn’t enough time in the world to allow me to do this whilst achieving all that I want to achieve. Unfortunately, this has meant that, sometimes, there are too many possible channels for my effort and I end up getting distracted instead. I’m not one to procrastinate and I’ve no problem with taking action, but having too many open doors means spreading myself too thin as I try to do everything at once.

So, my plan for 2008 is to knuckle-down, plan and focus!

What are your goals for 2008?

If you celebrate Christmas in any way, I’d like to wish you a very merry one.

Merry Christmas!

One of the most common complaints from people today is not having enough time. We all have just 24-hours in a day and yet there are those who always seem to be able to get so much more done than the rest.

What’s their secret? After all, you work the same hours and so you should have the same amount of free time. It’s not as if you waste your time. Okay, you watch a bit of TV, but who doesn’t? Everyone needs to relax somehow…

In today’s modern world, there are more ways than ever to waste away time; the very thing most of us claim to not have enough of and yet we carelessly spend it like there’s always going to be a tomorrow.

Whether you’ve come to accept it or not, you only have a finite bucket of time in which you are going to be able to live your life. You may not realise it, but you’re probably leaking time. It may not be gushing out so you’d notice it, but like a bucket with dozens of tiny holes, it all adds up or rather it all leaks out.

It can be difficult to prevent time leaks. The world we live in is more competitive and more demanding than it ever was before. We’re asked to work longer hours and it’s easy to become overloaded with information whether it’s information you want or not.

We’re very rarely alone any more, with mobile phones and the Internet to deliver instant communication from around the globe 24-hours a day. There are many opportunities to be distracted too, whether it’s from advertising or messages from our social networks.

All of these distractions will drain away your bucket of time, but you don’t have to let them.

You only have 24-hours in a day. That’s 168 in a 7-day week and you probably already spend one-third of that unconscious leaving you with 112-hours. Let’s say you work 9-5, 5-days a week. There goes another 40-hours that aren’t yours. You’re left with 72-hours to spread across the week and that’s not including the time it takes to shower, cook, etc. Let’s take off another 3-hours a day for essential activities. You’ve got 51-hours left. 26 of those are Saturday and Sunday. The remaining 25 means you have 5-hours per week night. What do you do with those?

How many of the following distractions eat into your remaining hours?

1. Watching ‘Reality’ TV - Watching other people live their lives. It’s a strange concept or are we all just a bit more voyeuristic than we’d like to admit? And it’s not just this particular genre, but also includes many other ‘nutrient-free’ shows.
2. Surfing Web 2.0 - Digg, YouTube, flickr… If you’re not gaining anything from these websites besides the entertainment factor then what are you doing?
3. Checking emails - Just like your post, your emails are delivered to your inbox. How often do you check for new post coming through your door and how often do you check for new emails?
4. Checking stats - We love to know how popular our websites and blogs are so we’ll keep checking our stats to see how many hits we’ve had or how many AdSense clicks we’ve racked up in the last 20 minutes.
5. Commuting - Travelling to and from your place of work is usually unproductive time, but does it have to be? Learn a new language, plan your next holiday, read and reply to your emails. The same can be applied to other situations where you don’t need to give the activity 100% focus e.g. listen to an audio book whilst you’re taking a shower.
6. Trashy mags - What does it matter who’s going out with who or who’s gained/lost 20lbs? You may be on your lunch break or sat in the doctor’s waiting room, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be doing something more worthwhile.
7. Playing video games - Everyone loves a bit of fun, but why not play a real game with real people and combine fun with exercise? Not only would you be multi-tasking, but you’d probably be adding some water back into that bucket of yours.

Be honest with yourself. How much time are you wasting away on distractions rather than using that time to work on achieving what you want from your life or spending it with the real people in our lives?

The distractions will always be there. The opportunities and people we care about won’t.

What have you done with your life today?