While nowhere near back to functioning at 100%, I’m at least slowly starting to feel human once again. My major health complaint of the day: ‘Why does everything taste like burnt coffee?‘ Nonetheless, sure beats ‘Where in jeebus’s name does all this nasty multi-hued phlegm come from, and when will it stop?‘ any day. Apologies for that mental image!

Since I’m feeling marginally better the last couple days, I decided to at the very least catch up with my stats collection for my blasting income. While doing so, I let the ol’ mind drift for awhile, and made a few observations.

Owning a Job

Doing tax work this time of the year, as well as via relationships with people in the little rural communities around me, I personally know more than a few who call themselves business owners who really aren’t. What they’ve done is created for themselves a job. Yes, indeed, occasionally a very well paying job. More often than not, a very demanding job. Sometimes even going so far as to surround themselves with an extensive support staff that they consider their employees. Nevertheless, it isn’t truly a business in my mind; it’s a job that is heavily dependent on the owner being there day in, day out, month in, month out, for the ‘business’ to run smoothly. Oftentimes, for it to run at all.

I’ve got one of those ‘businesses.’ In addition to tax work and the online biz, I do a fair bit of PC tech work a good chunk of the year. And a day I don’t walk into the office and get my hands dirty inside a computer is a day when that business makes precisely zero dollars. Just about the farthest thing from passive income as one can get. Honestly, there are plenty of days that I’d be just thrilled to never crack open a case again. And soon enough, I won’t, unless the mood strikes me to add another petabyte to my next PC.

The graveyards are full of indispensable men. — Charles de Gaulle

In a scarier position yet are those employed in one of these ‘businesses’. The day the owner decides to call it quits, or the vagaries of life i.e. death forces that decision on the owner, so goes the business. The owner was the business, and now that s/he’s gone, time for the employees to find a new line of work. Or take on the task of recreating the owner’s job for themselves. Methinks a rather precarious position.

Owning a Business

But while pulling in my stats and massaging them into the desired format, the part about this online income gig that just rocks my world became abundantly clear: While I accomplished almost nothing over the last week+, my online business continued to chug merrily along in my absence, almost as if that fact didn’t really matter. Because, in all honesty, at least on a continual basis, my being present working in the business doesn’t. By design. I have taken great pains to make it so.

It, like any well-designed business, doesn’t need its owner aka me sitting at a desk continually micromanaging every little thing going on within it. What I do isn’t rocket science. And even if it was, to do that well takes a similar process.

Namely, I have systems in place that explain, in often excruciating detail, most of what I do. And what isn’t explicitly explained today gets written down and added to my system as I further optimize what I’m doing. Truthfully, I see that process a more vital part of the business than the actual business of the business.

And why bother? Because, if I can systemize my business, I can do something like hire or outsource to complete those parts of my business that I’ve tired of doing personally. Or, for that matter, all of it. Or multiply my efforts for the price of an employee or two or freelancer or two. Or, pull my system together, pretty it up, put a bow on it, and sell the system itself. Or if I’m tired of all that passive income, sell the whole thing off.

So, I’m left waiting for the bugs to get killed off so I can get back to working on my business. Can’t wait!

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.

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!

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…

It’s been almost a week since attending the Earn $1k A Day Summit down in sunny Orlando. Almost every local Orlandoan I chatted with kept apologizing for the unseasonably cold weather. considering I left Nebraska at 5 below zero, 60 felt almost warm enough to hit that outdoor pool at the hotel…

But what does this have to do with sleep deprivation? Well, I didn’t want to miss a single thing at the summit, so I set my return flight for Monday morning rather than risking having to leave early by taking a Sunday evening flight out. 6:15am Monday morning, in particular. Which meant my prepaid shuttle company guaranteeing catching my flight only if I took a 3:15am or earlier ride. For a night owl like myself, the first thing that popped into my head was ouch!

Nevertheless, my mind was fried from all that information thrown at me over the weekend, and I thought I was tired enough to actually get a few hours of sleep after everything wound down. Only to find my mind racing. And racing. And racing. And looking over and seeing 1:42am on the clock. And then the alarm waking me about 40 minutes later.

A half hour sleep + the piss poor rest you can get in economy airline seats doesn’t really cut it!

The rest of the week? Kind of a blur.

More on the summit later…

As a freshman in college in 1989, I participated in one of the many rites of passage for those leaving home for the first time: I applied for my first credit card. I received the card shortly before Christmas that year, if I remember correctly. To go along with that awesome feat, I went almost immediately into debt. For whatever reason, I can even tell you what my first purchase was:

• Beet by Eleventh Dream Day
• Earth, Sun, Moon by Love & Rockets

And if I went back to Iowa City, I could probably even point out the building that the music store those CDs were purchased was in. Hell, it’s a college town, the store may just still be there. About the only place an independent store like that could still survive.

But that’s neither here nor there. My point is, the day prior to that purchase, over nineteen years ago, was the last day I was free of credit card debt. Sometimes it was only a small amount. Often it was not. But it was always there.

Until today.

Thanks Matt! Thanks Dennis! And thanks eBay for the big ol’ direct deposit!

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.
— Jim Rohn

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

Well, it’s more than theory now. Looks like I’m pending no more…

With half a foot of fresh snow on the ground — and more annoyingly to me, a bit of ice — to drive upon, I’m anxious to see how this all pans out in the coming non-holiday months. It sure would be nice when the snow goes flying to be comfortable saying to myself

Hey, why don’t you put a pot on the stove, make a few hot chocolates for you and the family, and not head into the office this morning?

Because the office is wherever I would happen to be that day…

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!