Last week shows me PPC blasting, attending Practical Profits, finishing my class, and spending too much time in airports:

• First half of the week found me very busy campaign blasting. Haven’t broken through that 100 blast goal quite yet, but made some serious progress towards doing so. Another six days left in this round, so I’ll see if I can find enough focused time to get it done!

• Last half of the week found me in ridiculously hot Vegas for the Practical Profits conference. Luckily, spent the hottest part of the day inside with some of the smartest internet marketers out there! Made lots o’ notes, met lots of interesting people, drank lots of water… The mind is still reeling, but I’ve got at least another 50 different directions to try out if I’m ever in need of ideas! If you’ve never been to a conference like that, don’t hesitate. The cost was insignificant compared to what I learned. And I can say without a doubt that applying just a little of what was put out there would pay me back a hundred-fold. Give me a bit to tidy up my notes, and I may just pass along a tidbit or ten…
• Between checkout time and when I needed to catch my flight from Vegas, borrowed the hotel’s wifi and finished up the last of my entrepreneurship class. Definitely picked up a few pointers. Along with a renewed hatred for all things PowerPoint. Swear to god, PowerPoint is the death to anything deeper than surface knowledge, and being forced to use it to create something that would be much better conveyed via a few simple paragraphs worth of text just drives me nuts. Nevertheless, the bits of info picked up made the time invested in the course worth it in the end.

Anyway, must get back to blasting! So what did you do last week?

[What is this all about?]

Not that it is part of the goal other than this weeks distraction from it, but finalizing the pre-vacation to-do list and beginning to collect what we need was front and center last week. 10+ days wandering east to Iowa for a few, back through South Dakota & Nebraska, and quite a while wandering in the mountain country of Colorado before returning home will make for plenty of time to decompress. Just me traveling would involve a duffel bag containing few changes of clothes, a fully loaded iPod, a camera, my wallet, and maybe a book or two. But traveling with the wife and son? All of a sudden the back of the Jeep’ll be loaded down, I imagine…

But I did manage to get a few more things done this week despite that distraction:

• Finished up all my pre-blast work on the remainder of the 80 landing pages from last week, and started loading the keyword info into my handy dandy PPC campaign builder. I’ll finish that up sometime in the next day or two, and have everything chugging along before we leave on vacation this weekend.
• Set up a quick split test on an idea or three for my landing page templates.
• Spent a good chunk of my late night free time researching content for a couple Nanocontext sites. It definitely helps that I’m personally interested in the niches, so I find myself delving pretty deep into the topics. Should be a fun pair of sites to put together!
• Class. What can I say? It’s not a terrible class per se, but it definitely focuses too hard on the ol’ brick n’ mortar world than the direction I’m interested in working towards. Focusing right now on lots of complications that simply don’t matter, or often even exist, in a virtual world business. So I have a hard time putting in a ton of effort. A trait every entrepreneur needs is the ability to decide what needs your attention and what can do without it, and a big part of this week’s assignments found me in the latter camp…

As I’ll be who know where, next week will likely see this update MIA. Have a great one everyone!

[What is this all about?]

Took it a little easier than normal last week, spending quite a lot of my free time celebrating our independence by joining my son in blowing some things up and setting other things ablaze. The 4th definitely brings out the inner child in me! Nevertheless, I did manage to get some work done:

• Started doing what I do with the reports my outsourcer returned to me, and managed to set up 45 landing pages. The other 35 will be done this week, and then I will work to blast away at ‘em.
• Working ahead on my online class before we take off for vacation in a couple weeks. I still will probably have to do a little work on the road, but hoping I’ll be able to finish it up while riding through a bit of emptiness. If it takes much more than that, it just ain’t getting done, I’m on vacation. I’m at that point in life that what kind of grade I get in class really matters all that much anyway…
• Did some work building out a couple long neglected domains. I’ve been playing around with a trial of Market Samurai and the Nanocontext concept, and realized I have a couple domains with some pretty substantial Adsense potential.

Oh, and for a great bit of thought on independence, check out the inimitable Johnny B. Truant’s latest post! Hell, check out all of Johnny’s stuff — makes for some inspirational if irreverent reads. My favorite type…

[What is this all about?]

Another Monday arrives, which means another accounting of my time has come due. So, what have I managed to accomplish this week?

• Didn’t get done with ‘em by Wednesday as planned, but managed to get another 65 landing page blasts alive n’ kicking. Got distracted by a shiny metal thing — a lesson to not open your email when you have other things needing your attention — and so didn’t get them all finalized until Saturday.
• My outsourcer finally finished the eighty sales reports I expected, oh, four weeks ago. Lesson to take from this one: set a deadline. No big deal, really, as I have a ton on my plate anyway, but was beginning to worry the task would never get done. That said, the final product is always great from her, so going forward I’ll just make sure to have a tighter schedule in place. Plan to go through the reports over the next few days, and see what kind of progress I can make this week.
• Continue to plug away on my online class. The focus over the next few weeks appears to be writing up a business plan based around an actual idea we intend to implement. Decent idea, but far too in depth for how I work. Lots of focus on selling to business idea to investors or justifying to potential profit to lenders for my online endeavors. On of the main points of these mini businesses I am building is that they don’t require a heavy investment in capital. In my mind, if it take years or even months to see a positive return on the investment, my time is better spent exploring other ideas in my list.
• Set up the horseshoe set I received for Father’s Day, and spent a hot afternoon trying my luck. Let’s just say more practice is definitely in order…

Enjoy the 4th everyone, and try not to blow off too many fingers!

Ack, forgot about this, and this one got automagically let go with the ‘Feel Free to Berate Me’ message. But in reality, hey, I did get a few things done this week:

• A whole crapload of research on additional landing page topics. Spent a good chunk of this evening doing more work on them, but none are totally complete yet. Nevertheless, another 65 will by done by Wednesday!
• The online Entrepreneurship class I’m taking is eating up a chunk of time every night. Probably more than I need to spend on it. My experiences over these last couple years makes a lot of this early material almost laughable in its naivety, but I still sink too much time answering things the way I’m sure the professor want us to. The tendency of mine to perfect things before sending ‘em out sometimes drives me nuts! I mean really, what the hell, whatever grade I get in this class won’t change my life one iota…
• Continue working on my initial nanotext blog. Fun topic to me, so it doesn’t really feel much like work!

See, not a total waste…

[What is this all about?]

Just thought I’d share my latest post at the Campaign Blasts forum, entitled ‘Blasting – One Year Later‘:

So I noticed today that I’m a week past my one year anniversary as a member of Campaign Blasts. And it has started to sink in how much my life has changed since signing up here.

A year ago, in a good month I was clearing maybe 250 bucks with this side gig, despite playing around in it for years. And most of that was from several text link ads on a personal site I barely touch via advertisers who I still believe aren’t receiving anywhere near the value they are paying. Their continued patronage pays my hosting & domain registrations plus a few bucks more every month, but I really don’t think they have any idea what they are doing…

Most of my efforts — if you could call them that — in those years were really just research into the latest and greatest methods to make quick, easy cash. Or so the dozen or so daily emails that crossed my screen said. In actuality, I was just flopping from one thing to the next without actually finishing a damn thing.

Somewhere along the line, I stumbled across Dennis Becker’s 5BucksADay eBook. Which got me to Earn1KaDay. Which eventually got me here. A month or two after arriving, I actually did something with the info I gleaned here, and before I knew it began to make some actual money. Pay-off-all-our-bills-sans-the-mortgage money. Life changing money.

Oh, and did I mention, I enjoy the hell out of the process?

A year down the line, mid five-figures worth of stupid debt is gone, and just shy of the balance remaining on the mortgage is sitting in our savings account. And I’m trudging my way through a bit of mid life crisis because I can’t quite decide what direction I want to take my life versus the standard one concerning the path one has found themselves cornered into.

Here’s to the next 12 months…

If that brief little brain dump isn’t crystal clear, I’ll spell it out more explicitly. I seriously can’t recommend any of these three resources more highly:

• 5 Bucks A Day
• Earn 1K A Day
• Campaign Blasts

While deciding on the path I want to take with any marketing efforts via the big G following my latest slap, my Yahoo Search Marketing and MS AdCenter campaigns have been trucking along just fine. In fact, I can now see how well these two lowly competitors actually convert, and it has me thinking I should spend a little time focusing here rather than working too hard trying to appease the Adwords gods.

The last few days, I’ve been doing a fair amount of bid tweaking and setting up ad split tests, and while I really appreciate how well my Yahoo efforts are doing, someone over there needs to build a desktop editor to speed up this process! I probably could have tripled my adspend with them by now if I wasn’t so hamstrung by doing things in the web interface.

Anyone know of a third party app that interfaces with ‘em, preferably one that doesn’t cost a fortune?

…and I feel fine…

Lately I’ve been contemplating the direction to take this side gig that has shown such promise. Along with the future of my main gig, which carries the complications of certain obligations with it. And, well, lots o’ things.

What can I say — looking at the calendar it shows middle age creeping up on me. I seem to be having a touch of a midlife crisis here. I’m not looking at trading in the minivan for a Porsche, or trolling for Young Bombshell Wife 2.0, or anything that stereotypical.

Merely contemplating concepts like meaning and purpose and time and happiness and other such light topics. In other words, deciding what should be my next step.

So today I log in to my advertising account, and see that the big G has slapped me for the third time in this little adventure. Had a minor freak out for an hour or three. Not really because it kills my side biz or anything — though that is my first impulse even though all it really does is slow me down for a while — but because it means I have to rebuild.

I’m a lazy man, and would much prefer to add on to versus re-laying that foundation. Or, better yet (because I can be a truly lazy man at times) be able to just watch the earnings roll on in on those days or weeks I wanted to be doing other things.

The first time this happened, I panicked for a week+. This time, mildly for maybe an hour. Now, oddly, a certain peace has settled upon me as the day goes on. Yes, G is fucking with my business model. But that’s their prerogative. I’ve realized that I just have to build that reality into my model going forward. The key part of that last sentence: going forward.

I still haven’t decided where to take this side gig. Or what to do with my main one and it’s attachments. But this last year’s successes have opened up potential pathways I never would have imagined even five years ago. Or one, for that matter. Gilbert was certainly right in my latest read — we seriously underestimate the potential change that the future holds for us.

…begin the begin…

Ah, Tax Season 2009 has come to an end. Two days out, I’ve now spent most of two days playing a lot of LEGOs and Mario Kart with my son while the wife is out of town. (Shhh, don’t tell her — I know Mario Kart is essentially brain rot, but what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her! ) Should probably consider looking for something a bit more productive to do eventually, but right now I’d say spending time with my little five-year-old is just about the absolute right thing to do.

So in the last two months, what have I actually accomplished?

• A couple hundred tax returns.
• Completed somewhere in the range of half a Campaign Blast Challenge. The brain and time just wouldn’t cooperate to allow me to finish the whole thing. Outside of the challenge, I built next to nothing.
• A hard slap of my eBay AdWords campaigns by Google — twice. You know Google, if you don’t want my money, fine, I’ll move them and the substantial amount I was paying to advertise with you to…
• Yahoo & MSN. Transferred all my campaigns over. The traffic isn’t quite up to Google’s numbers, but they are slowly building. And the traffic appears to convert even better!
• I’ve got another side business that is in serious need of, well, going the hell away. I just have to come up with a means of making a clean break with it. Now that tax season has ended, I have no excuse in putting that off other than not wanting to deal with it.

OK, so I guess I did at least get a few things done on this side endeavor that I’d like to make my main one.

Immediately after the slaps, my earnings took a major nosedive to the tune of around 10% of my peak. I’m back to around 60% and steadily increasing. Now that I have time and available brain cells to focus, it’s time to get back to the game and see where I want to be and what I need to do in order to get there.

After all, I have a single monetary goal for the summer: September 1st, I plan to write a check for the remainder of our mortgage…

Why not make myself as busy as possible for a few weeks?

First off, I play tax preparer during this time of the year. And work at likely the busiest little accounting firm in Nebraska. It isn’t absolutely insane yet, but soon enough I’ll be knee deep in 1099s and W2s and calculator tape…

Then, one of my favorite membership decided it was about time to run a Blast Challenge.

What’s that, you ask? It’s a group effort to get you to ramp up your blasting business. I’ve participated in two of them so far, and they are responsible for most of the progress that has taken my side endeavor’s monthly earnings from the low three figures to what is now low five figures.

Could I skip out on this one? Well sure. Would it be the smart choice, based on it being tax season and the fact that I’ll soon be swamped? Nah. This little side trip has tripled my overall income in a matter of months. I don’t care how hard I would work, tax prep work just ain’t going to do that! Plus, a little sleep deprivation never hurt anyone!

And of course, I’ve been busy as hell mastering tennis on my new Wii…

Oh, and one last thing. That last sticky? Had to replace that as well, ’cause I hit it. Twice.

And who needs that holding me back? So, let’s try this one on for size: