Here’s an excellent talk about time management from a Randy Pausch. Randy gained fame for his “Last Lecture” but here he shares time management tips from the perspective of someone with less than 3 months left to live.
Below you’ll find the notes that I made while watching the video. And here are the powerpoint and pdfs of the slides from the lecture.
This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.
This guy who I haven’t heard of before today, was on all the top economic TV shows, stating EXACTLY what was wrong with the economy and what the results would be.
The experts mocked him and laughed at him.
And if you’re like me, after you watch that, you’ll be thinking, “so what’s he saying now?”
Part 1 of Peter Schiff on BLOOMBERG 28 Oct 2008
Part 2 of Peter Schiff on BLOOMBERG 28 Oct 2008
Politicians and people in general all go for solutions that try and minimize pain, but feeling pain is an inevitable part of the healing process, and without feeling it, you don’t see the critical mistakes, and you don’t learn.
As an investor, I am thinking that a way of shorting the US dollar long term could make someone very rich in the next few years. Gold is one way to play that angle, but a form of leverage would really accelerate the potential gains.
This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.
I’m writing this primarily as a reminder to myself, but if you’re trying to make money with an online business, you may enjoy it as well. It was taken from Shoemoney’s latest Q & A session:
Marty asks:
When you first got started, how long did it take you to start earning significant money online? Significant meaning when you started earning let’s say at least $1,000 a month.
Thank you,
MartyShoeMoney: 7 years
7 YEARS!!!!!!!!! Not 7 days, or 7 months.
I guess the take away is that it takes time, there is a lot to learn an assimilate. The other thing is to favor the long term in all your techniques and methods, if you go short term, you’ll likely have to redo most of the work.
This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.
WordPress Blogger’s (and My Sanity) Survival Guide
As someone who sold videos that taught people how to install their own blogs, and now operating my blog installation service, I get A LOT of questions about WordPress and blogging in general.
Quite frankly being a typical computer geek, these questions mostly drive me nuts, but I know that they are a part of learning a new and complex skill/art like blogging. So rather than resent everyone who asks me a question, I decided to compile them and the best answers I can come up with into a guide and give it away as a promotional tool for my service.
Very experienced bloggers will probably know most of this stuff, but newer and non-technically inclined folks will likely find some useful reference material in The Ultimate WordPress Blogger’s Survival Guide.
It has 2 main sections. Part 1 is errors and problems and what to do about them and part 2 is “how to” for almost all common problems or situations that a blogger may encounter.
Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Course is Closing it’s Doors
My friend Yaro’s very successful Blog Mastermind Course is closing it’s doors on December 10th and Yaro is doing a last push to bring in new members.
As an enticement he has released a free lesson called Blog Marketing Through Conversations, which I understand is one of the most popular lessons. Even though I’m a member of the course, I haven’t made it that far 
I especially like the section on building traffic that applies to blogs or any other sites:
I’m going to cut to the chase, there are only four ways you can get traffic to your blog -
- You can buy it
- You can get it from search engines
- You can take other people’s traffic
- You can do or create something that generates attention and word of mouth
We will cover all four methods through the upcoming lessons. Note that you don’t have to use every single method, in fact many people focus on becoming proficient at one method only. Obviously the more you diversify, the less dependence you have on any one source, which is important because no technique remains effective forever and the environment constantly changes…
As with all the lessons it ends with a set of clear action steps that you can take to immediately improve your marketing efforts. Check out this valuable free blog marketing resource and if you haven’t already, download Yaro’s extensive Blog Profit Blueprint (also free).
This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.
A while ago I posted my 7 Reasons to Use Domains for Affiliate Links and reason number three was “they can get listed in search engines.”
Today I was going over my affiliate stats for the University 20/20 affiliate program and noticed quite a bit of traffic coming from Yahoo.
I investigated a bit further and discovered that my affiliate link (the domain name BuildingProfitableWebsites.com) was ranking number one on Yahoo for the term, you guessed it Building Profitable Websites.
I’ve seen this type of thing before and it amazes me that it happens, but I’m not complaining. Yahoo has picked up the title and meta description for University 20/20 site and listed my link (which doesn’t even have a website of it’s own) as it’s top search engine result, for this phrase.
Granted it isn’t a high traffic phrase, but this certainly is a way to add value to your affiliate marketing efforts. Not only do I get more traffic to my affiliate link, but the value of my domain name is increasing as well. If I was going to build a site about making money on a website, this domain name is very well primed.
You may want to read the other 6 reasons to Domains for Affiliate Links.
This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.
Yes, I’m still alive and I have been resisting the “why I haven’t been posting lately” post, but I guess it’s only polite to provide an update.
A couple weeks ago I realized that the current trend that my online business was on, just couldn’t continue. The central problem was the I was spending more and more time doing maintenance tasks rather than moving forward. Yes, income was increasing but way too slowly.
A quick inventory revealed that I had something like 35 websites, 100 domain names, 15 email accounts, 6 hosting accounts and 7 places where I had domains registered. I began to feel sick, but more importantly I realized that I was not on the road to wealth and success.
I don’t know what the long term solution is, but short term I know that I need to reduce the number of pieces of online debris that I am attempting to juggle. I’ve begun to sell websites. I’m on my third auction at SitePoint and the current offering is my Real Blog Videos (see auction in progress).
I’m not sure how deep I will continue to cut, but I am VERY tempted to sell everything and start over completely. I’m fairly confident that it would only take me a couple months to replace a full time income starting from scratch, especially with a decent whack of cash in reserve to use to hire out tasks, and a complete lack of distractions.
There are some other reasons why I haven’t been blogging. The idea of just taking a break seems to have developed out of a growing resistance to writing on a regular basis on this site. If I was ProBlogger or CopyBlogger, I’d work these into a well thought out thesis about the life of a blogger, but I’m far too busy selling stuff.
Blogs Promote Clutter
It has occurred to me that blogging promotes Internet clutter. I’m not a newsy blogger, so I really only produce articles with my idea on a certain topic. While a lot of bloggers seem to be able to cover the same topic over and over again (hopefully from a unique angle each time) I can’t.
I can’t help thinking that if blogs had better information architecture, I could just write one article on market research and I wouldn’t have to talk about that any more. Possibly add to it, but not a constant re-inspection. With this format a good niche blog would thoroughly cover a topic with about 25 to 50 high quality articles, rather than an endless parade of tepid posts.
Blogging is a Treadmill Activity
I don’t like treadmills and blogging can feel like posting just for posting sake. Who says you need to have 5 articles a week, or that you can’t just take a week or 3 off? Does a blogger inherently make a promise to ride the treadmill for his/her readers?
I began to question the need for constant new stories, better to disappoint the treadmill watchers and write only when I was really moved to it.
It’s Good to Step Back & Reflect
My blog was lacking in direction and this is partially caused by riding the treadmill and not taking the time and space to reflect on bigger picture stuff.
Despite larger than ever economic pressure, that’s what I’m doing now.
I Don’t Like The Blogging Clock
Related to the treadmill is the “blogging clock”… you know the one. It gets re-set every time you post a story and begins to ring loader and loader the longer there hasn’t been a new post on your site.
I think I began to enjoy defying that voice in my head saying “IT’S BEEN 4 DAYS AND YOU HAVEN’T POSTED.”
Now, after a couple weeks of not posting, I seem to have broken the blogging clock’s grip on me. It doesn’t mean that I will magically want to post daily again but it does mean more quiet in my head.
In some ways this de-connect from blogging was in-evitable, I never really have had the right personality type for a blogger. I’m erratic, inconsistent and not particularly social.
I do value the readers of this blog, and so I do hope that you don’t feel disrespected by what I’ve just spoken of above, it was certainly not intended. Hopefully you’ll stick around or drop in once and while to see if I’ve come out of hibernation.
In the meantime, I’m going to try and line up some “best of” posts. Like I mentioned above, blogs suck at information architecture and the best posts are almost always buried in the archives, so I’ll pull out some of my favorites (and yours) and highlight them in case you missed them the first time.
All the best & feel free to leave a comment or question,
Jon Symons
This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.
Here’s a little tip for you, for when you’re doing market research of if someone is trying to tell you how fantastic they or their product is for search engine rankings.
Haven’t we all heard people say, my ABC SEO killer product is so great, “I’m the number one site in Google for the term blankety blank out of 1,630,000,000 possible results”?
Here’s how to debunk this one, preferably in the face of the braggart.
That’s it, not 1.6 billion, but actually Google only considers there to be 930 results for the term internet business. Scroll down to the bottom of the page again, and notice that there are no numbers or “next” after 10.
It doesn’t mean that it is easy to rank in the top 10 for internet business, but just to take a little air out the balloon of the SEO hype-sters.
Another way to use this information is in market research. You will get a much more accurate picture of the amount of effort required to compete in a market by looking at the “real” number of results rather than the giant inflated numbers.
Where do the BIG numbers come from?
In the earlier days of search, when Google and AltaVista were going head to head there was a “my penis is bigger than yours” type competition based on the number of pages each search engine was indexing. The numbers eventually became so silly that they were dropped from the home pages of the search engines, but I suspect these silly “…of 1,600,000,000 results” are a throw-back to that testosterone war.
This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.
I went to my bank today to deposit two Clickbank cheques and for the first time since I was a kid, the Canadian dollar was worth more than the US dollars that my cheques were issued in. Which meant that I had to pay a subsidy to be able to deposit them into my Canadian dollar account.
Same thing goes for my AdSense earnings, and every other source of funds in my online business; they all come from US dollar banks which I’m beginning to see is becoming a serious risk and expense in my business.
Check out the graph of the US dollar verses the Canadian dollar for the last 3 years that I have been earning money online.
This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.
My prediction is that Blog Rush will be just another form of Internet gentrification. It benefits the biggest and best blogs the most. Which means that the more you, the little guy, use it, the poorer you will be.
Since ProBlogger, John Chow and ShoeMoney are all better bloggers than you and I, our traffic will eventually end up with them the more we use Blog Rush.
They write better headlines, offer more actionable and higher quality content, and know how to make more money from their visitors than you do. By participating in any type of traffic sharing program with them, you are only going to lose market share.
The more you use it, the more traffic will be funneled away from smaller blogs and towards larger blogs. Is this bad? No, it will happen eventually anyway, Blog Rush just speeds up the process. Can you see where they got the name from?
Blog Rush, in terms of its affects on the Blogosphere will function similar to AdSense. It becomes a massive Hoover that will go out to all the smaller blogs and dredge traffic up to the better and larger blogs.
The real question isn’t “How can I get more traffic?” but rather, “Do I deserve more traffic?” and the closely related, “Do I know what to do with the traffic I already have?”
For Blog Rush to not function as leverage tool benefiting bigger bloggers, more of the larger bloggers would have to be more generous as ShoeMoney is with his offer to rotate people who sign up under him into the impressions on his site. In the long run, he’ll still steal your traffic, but at least you’ll have a chance to improve while you get a temporary boost in visitors.
Hopefully this explanation will help you understand why all the big guys are SO FAST to jump on board with this (any any other pyramid style) promotional tools. The bigger you are, and closer to the top you get in, the more you are licensed to steal $$$ from the rest of the users.
[LOL...if you just got the a version of this post with BoguS rather than Blog Rush in it; honest it was the spellchecker ]
This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.
My WordPress Upgrade Tip
On my WordPress installation service site, I linked to an amazing plugin and created a video to show you how to make WordPress upgrades a snap.
My Link Building Notes
On my SEO notes blog I have some notes from the latest University 20/20 course about link building. And I also posted about a very cool market research tool that is based on Wikipedia (worth checking out).
Shout Outs
One Man’s Goal and SlyVisions for linking to my WordPress hosting page and for the One Man’s Goal review of my Ninja Blog Setup service.
I’m a Winner
I won, thanks to Random.org, a free copy of the Street Smart Internet Marketing book over at Blogtrepreneur. I will let you know more once I receive the book.
Guest Blogging
I took a spin as a guest blogger on the very popular E-moms At Home site. I shared my best tip ever for making WordPress theme changes easier by putting you counter and stats code into a widget rather than in the footer.
Blog Pulse Rush…wtf?
Can anyone explain to me what’s so great about it? Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon like it is the latest, greatest Internet market product to flog, but there isn’t even any money in it…peculiar to me. Seems like most people are a lot more interested in promoting it than actually using it…which I take as a very bad sign. When I have seen it in action, it looks like it is full of commercial or spam sites. Is there something going on here that Mr. Reese isn’t telling us?
This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.
