Well, business wise, did my bit — another 20 landing pages created, advertising campaigns set up, blasts put out there live to the world, blah blah blah. So did make an entirely appropriate level of progress on that front. But it certainly wasn’t the big news of the week.

That particular seat was taken by my chance to welcome another soul to the world. My son and I decided, at almost the last minute, to accompany my wife on her trip down to KC for my sis’ baby shower. Thought it’d be good to go down, check out her & her hubby’s new place. And, of course, poke a little fun at her very pregnant state as I wouldn’t see her gigantic self (not really sis, if you happen to stumble on this… ) before her due date late this month.

Instead, sis decided to skip the baby shower altogether and just go ahead and have the baby the day after we arrive! Just a little early, but the new mommy & baby are doing just fine. Best of all, everyone arrived home yesterday.

And things like this, really, are the true kick in the ass.

Money. Work. Business. No doubt, all necessary things.

But having the opportunity to be there to greet a new life shortly after it make its grand appearance in this world puts those things in their right place, a few spots back.

Welcome to the world little Lea!

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?]

Oops, another bout of this winter’s crazy weather has me trapped at home, and my days all messed up. And I let this out initially unadulterated. Despite what it might have said a few hours ago, as a matter of fact, I did accomplish a thing or two towards my goal this week!

1. Blasted away with another six new mini sites while trapped here in the countryside.
2. Quite a bit of stats trolling, ending up with me killing off a handful of fairly high traffic, low-converting mini sites. Already seeing a pretty substantial uptick in per-click earnings from those changes!
3. Continuing my nanoblogging projects. I still overthink this process, but I’m getting better. Plus, I’m learning a fair amount on a few niches I’m interested in anyway!

Not altogether bad for suffering through the continuing doldrums of Winter 2010 with a massive head cold! ‘cept for that losing-track-of-a-day thing…

[What is this all about?]

Unless you’ve been living under a particularly remote rock, you have been following news concerning the ongoing tragedy in Haiti. Even with my general distaste for the major 24-hour news channels, I’ve found myself watching as the disaster unfolds, trying to decide what I can do. Like all things I focus my attention on, I’ve over-analyzed the whole thing. As my skill set doesn’t encompass anything that I could do on the ground there, I’ve instead been trying to find that perfect charity.

The thing is, there are no perfect charity for this situation. Instead, there are likely dozens of efficient ones doing what they can. So I finally broke the mental stalemate and picked these three:

• UNICEF USA
• Doctors Without Borders
• AmeriCares

CNN set up a page where you can find a ton more…

Really, no need to over think this folks. Just do what you can.

This year I have set a single, fairly aggressive goal to accomplish before I roll into another decade. The decade that starts with the number four. While it is only tangentially related to a particular amount of money, there definitely is a financial component to it. In order to comfortably accomplish what I want, I look to increase my current side income in the neighborhood of three-fold before I’m 40, exactly 39 weeks from today. Certainly not impossible — after all, nothing truly is with appropriate motivation — but certainly not achievable merely by coasting.

The problem is, almost three weeks into the new year I have taken, at best, minor steps forward. Certainly continuing to earn — the system I use is by design as passive as possible — but not really expanding. In other words, I am coasting. Like I said, coasting won’t get me there. And just to make it fun, if I don’t get there, not only will I not reach my goal, I set up a trigger that will cost me a not insubstantial chunk o’ cash should I not accomplish it.

So I thought, why not go a little medieval, use what little traffic I have here as my public square, and put myself in virtual stocks for some public humiliation should I continue to slack off. Every Monday until then, a new Weekly Kick in the Ass post is set to automagically get posted with a brief rundown of any progress towards my goal done during the week. Or, should I continue coasting, a post that instead read:

Sean didn’t accomplish a damn thing towards meeting his goal this week. Feel free to berate him…

If the mood strikes you, go right ahead! =)

And once again:

Reminder: If you can read this message, almost by default you are wealthier and better off than most of the world. The recent earthquake in Haiti is a glaring example of how little you have to complain about. Please consider donating some of your bounty to those far less fortunate than yourself!

I’m in the process of replacing my computer at the office, and am going through it to find where I hid all my good stuff so I can transfer them over. Amazing the amount of digital bits we collect over the years.

Stumbled across a little program called SilkQuit that I installed around five years ago at the end of the year my son was born and my father had a stroke. Running it today, this is spit out to me:

You haven’t had a cigarette for four years, ten months, one week, six days, 1 hour, 15 minutes and 50 seconds. 44,451 cigarettes not smoked, saving you $11,112.57. Life saved: 22 weeks, 8 hours, 15 minutes.

A habit I had for over half my life at the time, that I rarely consciously even think about anymore. Nevertheless, I still catch myself, about once a month, driving down the road, reaching into my pocket to grab that long gone smoke.

Habits are an incredibly powerful thing. Develop a few good ones!

If you recall, I set a pair of rather hefty goals to be met on September 1st:

1. A health goal of losing 20+ pounds
2. A financial goal of paying off the remainder of the mortgage

So, how’d I do? Am I now a flyweight with no debts in the world?

Well, no, not quite. Actually, neither goal was met.

I’m still 10+ pounds away from my health goal. But I’m well on the way, and just reset my sticky to read 195 by 12/1. Most days I am successful in keeping 30-60+ minutes of some form of exercise in my routine. I’m also fairly addicted to the tracking provided by my Polar F11 Heart Rate Monitor, which I picked up to allow me to track my progress. I now do goofy crap like seeing how many calories I burn while mowing the lawn or assembling a swing or playing a few rounds of Wii Sports Tennis… So while I didn’t meet that goal, I must say I’m feeling a ton better. And have absolutely no doubt about that number being reached!

As for the mortgage, it’s still there, but we’ve been throwing fairly big chunks at it to kill it off rapidly. Honestly, we now have more than enough sitting in our savings account that I could write that check and be done with it if the mood struck me. But a healthy chunk of that account is our emergency fund, and another chunk is quasi-allocated for next year’s taxes. I haven’t taken the time to research exactly what we will be owing tax-wise come next April, so emptying it would come too close to cleaning out that account for my personal risk tolerance. That, and being a Dave Ramsey acolyte, I don’t believe zeroing the mortgage quite qualifies as an emergency! But, that said, once I do hash out what will be going to the taxman, everything above that emergency fund is earmarked for the mortgage. So sometime early next spring may see a mortgage burning party yet. Look for your invitation…

So, do I feel like a failure because I met neither goal? Absolutely not. I’m well on my way to both, and purposely picked timelines that were going to be very difficult to reach in order to stretch myself. Like I’ve said, the trip is often more important than the destination!

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

I suggest you check out almost anything with Scroobius Pip…

First, my age. Second, my weight. Third, my BMI. Those three numbers just don’t belong together.

Most of my day to day existence is far too sedentary for a healthy lifestyle. It’s high time to tweak the day a bit, start paying better attention before I cross that fine line between overweight & obese.

I’m going to follow the same tact that I’ve used with my side business, and put goal reminders in front of myself – as well as here in front of the world – where they are right in front of my face as often as possible.

So what’s will my health sticky say?

200 by 9/1

Maybe I’ll tack on a pic of those jelly rolls I’ve developed over the years. Think I’ll pass on sharing that, though… I’m in complete agreement with Tony Robbins on change: you must be disgusted with the current state of affairs to make a change, and I’m disgusted.

While that goal doesn’t get me quite into the healthy BMI range, it gets me well on that path. Wish me luck, and anyone with some tips, feel free to share!