Returned the middle of last week from a great couple of weeks wandering with the family through the Colorado wilderness, with more than a fair share of time spent recouping at the wonderful Cheyenne Mountain Resort between stops. If you ever make a trip to the Colorado Springs area, I have no hesitations recommending the resort — the cost may be a little steep, but the service was amazing. Plus, we got a hell of a deal when we booked through Expedia and ended up paying no more than we would have at a decent national chain hotel anyway.

So the last two weeks’ reports were right — I got absolutely nothing done towards my goal. Exactly as planned. Hell, even though I brought along my netbook, and free wifi is pretty much anywhere people congregate, I didn’t even bother to check my email for a week+. I was on vacation, damn it — we spend far too much time tethered to our tech as is!

Anyway, now that I’ve returned, it was time to get back on the saddle:

• Threw my hat into the ring for the next Blast Challenge. The latest challenge started while I was on vacation, so I missed out on the first week and a half, but I’m shooting for a full 100 blast by the end anyway. Because, as you may or may not know, THE holiday is coming much sooner than you realize, and I fully intend to take maximum advantage of the opportunities around. A ton of preliminary work was completed, but the first official blast of the challenge hasn’t went live as of yet.
• Since I missed out on the last Earn1kADay seminar because of scheduling conflicts, I’ve kept my eyes open for something similar that didn’t absolutely break the bank. I believe I found it with the Practical Profits seminar happening in a couple weeks. Looks like some great presenters, so signed up to attend and just have the hotel room left to finalize. Which I intend to do as soon as I finish this update!
• As I was gone for a couple weeks, I had a couple weeks worth of stats from the various programs I earn from to process. The system I have in place to aggregate it works pretty slick, but there is a little bit of effort involved in bringing all the pieces together. In the end, had some great days and some not so great days. But then, this time of the year has been all over the place earning-wise since I’ve been doing this, so no big surprise there. Plus, even those not so great days were at least profitable ones. You do recall I was on vacation and not even checking email during that time? Sounds like some pretty passive income to me…
• Oops, forgot about some homework for my class. Scrambled to squeak it in under the deadline!

Onward to week 30!

[What is this all about?]

Again, my weekly KITA arrives a day late, but I was more interested in spending a little quality time outdoors with the family on an almost perfect warm & sunny spring afternoon versus throwing up a post on Memorial Day. I don’t know what it was like in your neck of the woods, but here in Nebraska, just about the entire weekend just begged for outdoor activities, and I was more than willing to oblige. The sorely-needing-a-mow yard once again reveals the fact that, indeed, our place is not an abandoned chunk of ground. The freshly tilled and planted garden has me dreaming of fresh fruits & veggies in the not too distant future. And the various heads on spikes lining the compound attests to the fact that a variety of animals sacrificed themselves to the culinary gods this weekend.

OK, maybe exaggerating just a little with the last one… That said, the physical world wasn’t the only place seeing some attention this week:

• Another 20 landing page blasts went from brainstorm to fully live. My little kaizen chart shows me finally catching up with — and passing — where I want to be towards my goal so far. Must say that I am pleased with how May ended.
• My outsourcer is well on her way to doing her thing with my second batch of reports, and expect to see the final results sometime this week. Which means another 80 landing pages will be hot on the heels of those twenty finished last week. Even during the summer online buying slowdown, I’m pleased with my recent additions. No reason to scale back my efforts now, that’s for sure!
• Still working through the nanocontext report, and working out codifying my own flavor of a system to implement it. I really love a well thought out system…

On to this week…

[What is this all about?]

Ah, the holidays, gotta love ‘em. If you are anything like me, all that family time, all that tasty-but-awful-for-you food, all those two days at work followed by two off followed by one on followed by three off, etc. scrambles the old noggin’ a bit. Feels like I’m in a haze, and I didn’t have even a single drink over New Years Eve to blame that on!

photo credit: onkel_wart

Here’s what I’ve accomplished on my side adventure the last couple weeks: daily stats checking. Every day, I log in a time or two, see what was made from the affiliate programs I promote, make sure there is a large enough balance remaining in my Adwords account, and at the end of the day plug those reports into my tracking spreadsheet. That’s it.

Sounds like an important thing to do — after all, you wouldn’t want things caving in around you or anything. But in reality, it might take me a good 15 minutes to accomplish what I just described. Which leaves 23 hours and 45 minutes to, well, actually accomplish something.

I have this odd problem in that I’m almost entirely aimless right now. A month and a half ago I met what I thought was a ridiculous goal at the time. Only to blow right past it again in December without any real effort. I know, I know — such problems.

But it leaves me a without a heck of a lot of motivation to do anything but coast. I know what needs to be done — a revisit of my goals — but with the chaos of the holidays I just haven’t made the time.

Two weeks from now I plan to be enjoying myself in (hopefully) sunny Orlando meeting some of the people who have helped me along this path as well as getting my mind filled with more ideas. By then, a few new goals will be fleshed out and in place!

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are
something to do,
something to love,
and something to hope for.
– Joseph Addison

photo credit: S Migol

While November was an absolute mind blowing month for my latest endeavors, as of this morning it has been passed up by December. Seventeen days in, and I have already surpassed November’s total. I thought traffic would have at least started to slow down by now with the holidays rapidly approaching, but the last week showed two new record days up in the books (and those non-record ones couldn’t exactly be called bad either). Not quite time for a new sticky yet, but Monday sure made a good run at it!

Still waiting on good ol’ eBay to actually pay me instead of just telling me they are about to pay me, but I’m a reasonably patient man and can bide my time a little longer. But please step it up, can ya’? I’m itching to see a decent-sized deposit in my account. After all, I’ve got a credit card balance to wipe out as well as a Wii to go shop for…

photo credit: TangoPango

A big hairy audacious goal commission payment is now pending. I figured they would choose this month to stretch out the payment period as long as possible just to make me sweat — ’cause it’s all about Sean, don’t ya’ know — but no, eBay just flipped the switch on November’s commission payment.

I’m anxiously awaiting it to clear because a credit card company out there is in serious need of being told to take a flying leap, and that sure would make a nice Christmas gift to myself!

photo credit: ColKorn1982

Because my brother & sister are going to be in distant corners of the world come Christmas time, my side of the family celebrated the holiday a little early this year. A fine ol’ time was had by all!

But I think the most fun was had firing up my parents’ Wii (an earlier gift that probably hadn’t hardly been touched by my technophobic folks since it was given) and getting everyone involved in a bit of living room virtual — and real — exercise. Enough fun that I made a bit of a deal with the wife so that she wouldn’t give me too much crap if I went and bought one.

Now before you go off and call my pussy whipped, you’ve got to understand. We’ve been in fairly heavy debt killing mode the last couple years, and superfluous purchases like a Wii have been pretty much nonexistent for quite awhile. It feels weird to spend even $100 that hasn’t been specifically budgeted. But the deal I made seemed pretty harmless anyway: have a five-figure month in December with my side endeavor, and I get to be guilt-free in making the purchase. Seemed like a stretch to both of us.

And then November ended. And a few things fell into place. And I had a five-figure month in November. And so far, December is looking to be even better than last month.

So, even if I may be a little premature, I’ve been doing a little Wii shopping. And I’ve just gotta ask: WTF Nintendo? Every time I look around, I find yet another Wii bundle. Can you possibly throw together just a couple dozen more to make the selection even more difficult?

Looks like I picked a good time to be promoting UK items. eBay just sent me the following:

photo credit: vissago

Christmas is coming and it’s the busiest time of year for eBay.co.uk, as everyone rushes to buy their presents and stock up on festive goodies. The eBay UK Affiliate team want to encourage you to send even more quality traffic to eBay.co.uk across this period, so we’re giving you the chance to earn a 20% bonus and you could even win a Nintendo Wii!

How to earn your 20% bonus

We have set targets based on the Winning Bid and BIN Revenue you generated for eBay.co.uk in September and if you beat these targets, you will earn a 20% Rev Share bonus, which will be paid to you in January.

I have had an ultra tiny, UK-specific niche BANS site running for quite a while that I’ve done next to zero as far as promotion, so I do have a target to beat. And that target looks to be just over two bucks. Total. For the month.

Since the blasts to my UK-targeted mini money sites are averaging somewhere in the seventeen bucks a day range right now, I’m thinking I may just be able to top September and get in on this bonus…

Looking at my calendar, I see that that favorite time of year for just about anyone selling just about anything coming into sight. Which just serves as a reminder that it is time to get cracking again.

I did accomplish my big goal of 100 blast goal by my September 28th deadline. And am, quite honestly, thrilled to have gotten such massive action done. But I have also been mostly resting on my laurels since then. In that time, my main accomplishment has been putting together a spreadsheet that allows me to more easily track whether my blasts are profitable or not. Which surely is an important thing. But also surely not a four day job, even at the part time rate I’m devoting to this endeavor!

It would be nice to have maybe triple that number of blasts out there to greet those shoppers hitting the mall that is on their desk. And four day breaks ain’t going to get it done, now is it?

Let’s see if I can bust out another 50 by this time next week, shall we? It’s time to see how productive I can make October.