Work

Clearing the backlog of work

Over the past month or so i’d just gotten involved in too much. It was a nightmare and i couldn’t really enjoy myself as i was bogged down with work. Here’s what was on my mind;

Skydive Competition

• Gathering and organizing results, sorting out how i’d draw winners, doing screencast etc…

College

• I’m trying to get off to a good start this year in college so ideally, i’d like to spend a few hours at home not ’studying’, but trying to develop what i’d already learned.

Video

• I’m doing a video production for a college project… i needed to get familiar with Premier Pro and After Effects plus read up on tonnes of tutorials and videos.

BeerChief

• BeerChief always requires work even if i don’t work on it. It’s a daily pressure on me but a nice one as i know it will be very sweet once it’s actually ‘complete’.

Listlunatic

• Last month i was involved in developing listlunatic.com - that involved talking with 4 people regularly and coming up with some posts…

Paid Reviews

• I had one paid review (will be posted this month) and although it’s only one, it still requires research and thought… more so than a standard blog post.

Whilst that may not seem like much, it is…. 3 of those 6 have been ‘cleared’ and it’s a nice weight off my shoulders. I now am free from listlunatic work, my skydive competition (a real time eater) plus that paid review.

Of course i still have mountains of work to be getting through and i will, slowly but surely. Ultimately, i’ll be happy to scale things back to just this blog, BeerChief and one or two little side projects - that’s the goal and that in itself is more than enough

My blog suffered last month (in terms of blog post volume) as a direct result of the above and that’s not something i want to see too often. It’s extremely easy to surround myself with work and take on more projects and challenges, but it’s very difficult to actually get through them all on time.

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all going to plan in college

I’ve been back at college 3 weeks now and you’ll have noticed a real drop in my work ethic online. Whilst some of that was due to slow connection speeds and none at all at times most of it has been down to the fact i’m using much more of my brainpower at college and burnout in the evenings.

There’s a mountain of stuff i’ve learned but some of the more interesting stuff includes;

• OSI layer model
• basics in javascript
• how to form questionnaires and get accurate results
• pings / ip’s / subnet masks
• routers / hubs / switches
• how memory works

Then i pick up on some nuggets of unrelated stuff like why airplanes turn off all lights when coming in to land, how/why a CPU is powered by a quartz crystal, how electricity is made, what you need to become a lecturer…

That’s just the stuff i can recall off the top of my head and i’m fairly well up on it all now. You could give me an exam in any of that i’d pass. So i am much more focused on college this year… i set my stall out to get an average of above 70% and so far so good. 9am or 4.30pm, it doesn’t matter - i’m alive, alert and absorbing information. Last year, i’d be done by 2pm (mentally), and i’d be thinking ahead of what i’d be doing that evening when i got home.

Online, i’ll be glad to get this skydive competition done and dusted. It doesn’t look like i’ll hit the $1k mark this month, but i’m sure i’ll come up with more creative ways of raising some cash

This ALWAYS happens, but ironically, this month has been pretty good for me in terms of revenue online. Although i haven’t done much and it’s probably been my worst month in terms of work rate this year, i’ve made $60 in affiliate earnings and another $150 in ads on this blog (some of which was put in to the charity skydive fund).

Typical So if you want to make money online, you just gotta stop working and focus your attention on offline stuff - worked for me this month

Maxed Out

For the first time ever online, i feel like i’m actually working at full throttle. I’ve so much on my plate right now, it’s not even funny. Going back to college next month is gonna be tough - i’ll have to make some major cutbacks to my online work.

Anyway, I’ve agreed to join a 5 person team to enter a blog flipping challenge. The goal is simple… the blog that sells for the highest amount after 45 days wins.

The team get to keep all the cash, plus they get 10% of what all the other teams blogs sold for. So let’s say we sell a blog for $5000 and 10 other teams sell blogs at $1000, it would mean we’d get $6000 in total split 5 ways.

Although the money will be nice (assuming the blog will sell for over $1k, i should get about $150 minimum for my troubles), the other big advantage is getting some more contacts and hopefully forming future partnerships out of it all…

That’s just the tip of the iceberg though… i have a whole tonne of work to get through. I’ll be a relieved man once this skydive is over - not because i fear jumping out of a plane, but i’ll be relieved simply to have the competition work over with I’ve got some cool prizes so far from some pretty big names and sites around the blogosphere, so i’m hoping that continues ($2k worth of prizes thus far).

Moving on from that, i have several sites i want and need to flip in order to take in some cash and i also have my jackpot network of sites which need to be filled with content.

BeerChief is always on my mind i’m well aware i need to keep the boot down on it. It’s always easy to say just focus on one thing at time but i like to keep myself flat out - i feel it makes me more creative as i’m always thinking and don’t have time to slack off and play games or watch TV

playing games to study maths

I’ve said before one of the major benefits of doing an IT course is that everything you need is online. It’s just a case of finding it or taking the time to find it.

As you’ll all know i started studying for maths last week… i ended up playing games online but fear not - they’re games which help me learn about maths

I hadn’t a clue what a ‘planer’ graph was before today. After playing this game - it all made it so clear… none of the lines or ‘edges’ can overlap. That’s it. So simple. One problem cleared up by playing a game for 3 minutes.

Forget two or three paragraphs of boring text, show us the damn games!!

Anyway, it’s very much a case of getting down to business now. Despite the fact it’s only one exam, there’s more pressure now than there was on any of the other 11 modules i’d passed first time.

That’s good. It means i know what i have to do and i only have one chance to do it - that’s when i work best. I also think the experience of a repeat is a good thing for me, especially so early on in college (with 2/3 years left).

It means i’ll be more pumped up for exams from now on… any exams i do this year and next, actually mean something… it’s not just about passing or failing, it’s about honors / ordinary / fail

Honors require a 70%+ average. That’s not easy, no matter who you are… it takes time and a lot of dedication…

It doesn’t bother me too much though if i end up with an ordinary degree, as i know the difference between ordinary and honors will be my online work.

Nobody can question my dedication to my online work I’m 2 years doing this now, but i’m slowly starting to see how things work online. College stills comes 2nd and always will until someone can show me how an honors degree outclasses and ordinary degree + bags of experience.

This week however, college comes first (until thursday at about 5pm!)

who needs 9-5 work?

If i was to work in a supermarket or a hotel etc… i’d be on minimum wage. I’d also be hating every minute of it as it’s something i’ve no interest in. The beauty of creating sites is that i’m constantly getting better at it, enhancing my skills as i go along and gaining some useful tips and links for future work.

So last week, i took on a challenge trying to prove i could equal if not better minimum wage employment by working online. Apart from the obvious perks of setting my own hours and actually enjoying ‘work’, it would also force me in to gaining more experience plus put some more cash in my pocket.

So i created 4 sites last week. 2 sold, 2 didn’t (imagehostme sold at the BIN of $100). They took a total of 12.5 hours to complete. The two that sold earned $130. The two that didn’t are worth a minimum of $25 each.

But even if we take that $130, subtract $22 (domains and listing costs) it leaves $108 profit working out at $8.64 per hour. Not bad. Add another $50 profit assuming i sell the other two sites and bump the hourly rate up to $12.64 - very close to the $13.53 minimum wage.

Remember, i’m only starting out in design and selling sites… i’ve a lot more to learn So it’s looking good so far - i *could* theoretically work as many hours as i want, but i don’t want to bore myself, so i’ll probably continue to put in about 3/4 hours a day - 20 hours a week tops.

If i can get my earnings up to $20/hour i’ll be sorted

Today’s site is ajaximagehost.com - that’s right, up and running in under 2 hours I’ll be putting it up for sale later on digital point forums.