The major activities that I’ve been involved with have centered around information from a pair of excellent membership sites I’ve recently become members of:

• Campaign Blasts
• Earn $1K A Day

The difference between these membership sites and, for instance, Digital Point is that I’m actually paying to be members of both of these. Compared to the value of the information I’m gaining (and the boost in earnings I’m getting), it’s really a pittance. But that pittance is just the extra motivation that kicks me into taking more action, which is what it’s all about. After all, if I’m shelling out my hard earned money, I better be getting something in return!

And what have I been doing with myself based on the info from those sites? Well, that’s a subject for a couple future posts…

photo credit: kozumel

In a way, I’m itching to get back into the IM world, but tax season has been fun so far. (Yes, I’m probably odd, but hey, what can I say…) We’re around a third of the way through our main portion of tax season, and I’m amazed I don’t dream in numbers or depreciation schedules at this point…

One thing I haven’t been doing much of is checking my stats. I’ll admit I do much more of that than is necessary. Once a day is probably fine - heck, once a week is OK as far as that goes - but I used to find myself checking every few hours. But with my mind occupied with other people’s numbers, I haven’t bothered to check my accounts for quite some time. Relatively speaking, of course! And what do you know, while I’ve been otherwise occupied, I find myself doing almost as well this month as far as commissions as I did last month. Which was my best month of IM income ever.

Passive income is a wonderful thing…

All of five days passed since the last purchase before I had to pick up another domain: Get Snorkeling. With this one, I thought I’d have a little fun with it and see how quickly I could do a site. From initial idea through keyword checking through domain search (yeah, I know, quite the shocker of a name from me) through registration to fully populated site: 22 minutes and change. At that pace, it would be a long weekend to get those theoretical 100 domains up and going. But I definitely see some room to tweak the process, mostly involved with the layout of the various customizations each site needs in my minisite script. A little time spent massaging the layout of those items, and I think I could easily get it down to <15 minutes a site... maybe even 10.

I keep catching myself looking up new domains whenever an idea pops into my head, so it is definitely time to start developing what I already have before I get buried in them! The parked minisite are doing alright - .05 here, .60 there - but the developed sites are doing so much better so much more consistently.

I did spend a bit of time this evening working on one of my Build A Niche Store sites, trying to get the look and feel of the site into what I have in mind for it. I’m not going to bother linking to the work in progress, as the search engine bots seem to like BANS sites too well, and they’d just index all the nonsense that is in it right now if they’d stumble upon it. I still get a fair number of random kitchen item searches that got indexed from when I let my sushi site sit undeveloped over a weekend. Not that I don’t appreciate the traffic; it’s just that I don’t expect any of it to convert into a sale, so really, outside of cluttering my stats, what’s the point?

OK, so I lied. Despite my stated desire to get back to BANS building, I didn’t quite get there. In fact, the only thing I got accomplished as far as my standard niche store creation is concerned was catching up on the Build A Niche Store members’ forum and chatting with a few other BANSers about some professional SEO services.

Instead, I maintained the focus I talked of in the last post, and went out and re-purposed an existing domain, plus picked up a couple new ones while I was at it. All now using my ever-evolving mashup parking script:

• Guest Goods was a practically abandoned, hand-edited blog that occassionally tracked a few of the late nite talkshows’ guests (and, of course, the goods they were pushing). Now, it automagically picks up who those guests are supposed to be, and lists even more of their offerings. If you were a follower of the previous iteration of that site, you must have been a comment spammer, because a couple hundred comment spams a day (according to my daily Spam Karma report) was all that it ever generated for me!
• In a further attempt to beat an idea into the ground, another ‘GetAX.com‘ domain - Get A PDA - joins my growing stable. Though I really can’t imagine exactly what I’ll be focusing on at that site…
• Finally, Llandró Collector makes its way onto the list of Domains Needing Development™. Classic (and classy) collectibles plus a ton of listings all over the place gives this one some real potential.

So I had a little practice in rapidly deploying a few domains during some downtime. A couple hundred sites over a weekend - from the initial idea research to a complete living and breathing site with everything in place - may be a bit of a stretch. But if I could streamline the process, not necessarily an impossible one!

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…

• Start a project.
• Somewhere in the process, need to do research to continue that project.
• While finding the info needed, stumble across something really interesting that triggers another potential in my mind.
• That something becomes a whole other project.
• Rinse. Repeat.

Right now, too many domains waiting for development, too many half-finished ideas involved in those developments, too many potentials to possibly meet all of them. Especially when more of all three find their way into my head regularly. Too many choices is leading to decision paralysis, and nothing is getting completely done.

The simplest solution? I’m just going to have to resign myself to the fact that every domain doesn’t need development tomorrow, or that every idea doesn’t need to come to fruition. And that potentials are just that.

Resolved: Tomorrow, one thing, any one thing, is getting completely done…

Yep, I’m still around, just not posting here. No overreaching topic here, other than myself. Which, being generally an introvert, I have problems coming up with particularly interesting things to comment about.

I’ve been busy trying to make a killing by building a bunch o’ niche stores. No, I haven’t made a killing (yet), but I’m definitely seeing a little action. Also, doing a bit of domain tasting and minisite building just to play around. No real dollars flying around on that front, but I’ve just started to play in that domain, so who knows.

Anyway, just trying to put a little something down in order to make myself write a bit every day. Hi again….

If you’re curious, here’s a few of my niche sites:

• Get A Pellet Stove
• Homegrown Sushi
• College Ticket Finder
• TMX Friends

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?

• Some football player I’ve never heard of (because, you see, I don’t watch football) purportedly tried to kill himself.
• A new RSS advertising service has launched.
• Anna Nicole Smith got knocked up by Howard Stern. Howard K. Stern. Her lawyer.
• The White House released part of a national intelligence assessment on terrorism, but is getting flack for not releasing the whole thing.
• New York City is trying to ban trans fats in its restaurants.
• Steve ‘The Crocodile Hunter’ Irwin’s family is still mourning.

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!