Sean Oelkers » Personal Development

Gaining Focus, MiniSite Edition

Sean Oelkers — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 07:50:24 +0000

I’m not going to call it a raging success, since I did catch myself off on sidetracks now and then, but I did reach my goal and got myself to focus on a singular task until the end: fully cleaning up my site parking script. That’s not to say that the script is done by any means, as perfection is an impossibility. In fact, I came up with more than a handful of possible additions, tweaks, or mashups that I will most definitely be looking into sometime in the not too distant future. But the cleanup of that script, which was going to become harder and harder the longer I tacked more on, is done. It’s a lean mean fighting machine now…

What has me especially amazed about this little script is it’s success. Not necessarily monetarily - I’m definitely not bringing it in hand over fist yet. But the traffic it’s bringing in on each of the sites I have it running on is impressing me. For instance, my ugg shoe site is pulling in just shy of 40 uniques a day, from a high of 2 prior to the new script being installed a week ago. Too early to tell on commissions from the eBay/Amazon items, but enough AdSense/Chitika earnings to essentially pay for the domain registration in that short period.

If I could pull off similar results fairly consistently, considering the minimal effort invested in the site - outside of the initial script development itself, of course - I could see putting up a couple hundred comparable sites in no time. Like, say, over a weekend. The potential is a mind-boggling!

The next couple days has me wanting to spend a little time back in BANS development mode. While the parks have potential for a trickling income (having flood potential with enough trickles), I still believe the more developed niche stores have much greater potential for real single-site passive income. Plus, I like building them…

Anyone Else Tired of the Latest Round of Autoresponder Whoring?

Sean Oelkers — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 21:34:54 +0000

Over the last few months, I’ve been looking at various ways of supplementing my income by making a buck or two from a few site I have online. So far I’ve taken a little action, and even made a few dollars. But mostly, I’ve just been digging up all the info I can reasonably find.

Needless to say, I’ve found myself subscribed to quite a number of internet marketers’ ‘newsletters’ AKA their sales pitch autoresponders. I’ve bought very little of this stuff so far - actually taken advantage of all of two offers for a total cost of less than $50 - but the informational freebies they throw my way attempting to convince me to buy their latest and greatest have kept my education cheap so far. I’ve been tempted by several offers; even have a few on my list that I’m considering and, very likely, will purchase in the not-so-distant future. But generally I reach the end of the pitch and the price chases me off. I consider myself a lot too green to really consider paying $297 or $497 or $xx7 for an information product right now.

But now that I’ve been subscribed to many of these marketers autoresponders for awhile, it gets a little annoying when one of the big guns is about to release a new product. Suddenly, everyone is pushing the same product, and because the product is a guru’s, it’s pretty much guaranteed the price will be through the roof. At least for anyone still within sight of being a newbie like myself.

The last week or two has seen a veritable email explosion, with just about every marketer out there almost tripping over themselves to be the last one to get you to click through their pitch, and thus grab what must be quite the golden ring of an affiliate commision, to get you to sign up for Brad Fallon & Andy Jenkins’ StomperNet. At just shy of $800, per month, I immediately priced myself out of that offer! I was tired of the pitch a week ago, but they just kept coming and coming.

As a result, a whole slew of those pitchers received an unsubscribe from this newbie, and a few of those ‘going-to-buy’ products got removed from my list as well. But, at least it’s helped me clean up my subscription list - should help that little information overload problem I’m working on anyway…

Time to Work on That News, err, RSS, err, Information Overload

Sean Oelkers — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 19:25:57 +0000

Feeddemon tells me ‘You have a total of 9 folders, 373 feeds, 9239 items, 431 unread items, and 287 flagged items‘. And it tells me this after I spend more time than I care to share trying to purge it of sources I haven’t actually visited for some time.

My ‘Read These‘ folder in Gmail has 68 unread items in it. These are links to articles I run into that look extremely interesting or useful, but whose content is long enough that I choose to set them aside for now, thinking ‘I just don’t have the time to read the whole thing right now, not with the other 50 smaller posts I have to look through; I’ll get back to them later!‘

My homepage is set to news.google.com.

I’ve got more than a touch of news addiction. Hi. My name is Sean Oelkers, and I’ve got a full-fledged case of information overload.

And what golden nuggets of information have I gleaned from the ridiculous amount of time I spent perusing all this so far today? Well, let’s see, what pops into the ol’ noggin first?

As you can see, time well spent.

Meanwhile, I’ve got 13 items waiting on my To-Do list. Things generally end up on my To-Do list when I’ve forgotten about them once or twice, and their not-being-done has come back to smack me in the back of the head. So you can imagine there are many more things swimming around that should be on that list, but aren’t.

Plus, I’ve also got an ‘Ideas!‘ folder jam packed with all sorts of topics I’d like to delve into furthur, several of which could even make a dollar or $10,000 on if I spent a bit of time developing them. If I could just find the time…

Admitting you’ve got a problem is half the battle. Methinks it may just be time to try something new!