goals Archives - The At Home Couple

Swimming Upstream Is The Hardest Part

Hi All!

Here I am . . . resurfacing again!

I’ve been working my (now littler) butt off. I know it’s not over yet, but this year has been especially grueling. I’ve immersed myself in a career and I’m afraid that I’ve lost sight of my goals. In fact, I’m in a place right now where they are changing on a daily basis. I am pulled between what I want and what I have been taught to want. Teetering between creating my rules and following already set ones. Don’t get me wrong, I really like my job and I feel extremely fortunate to be working directly in my field, pretty much on the front lines. And it’s not like the rules I have to follow now are as restrictive as others I’ve encountered. It’s because of this that I struggle with what to do next. I feel like decisions are going to be thrown at me in the near future and they are going to be life changing. You know, the ones that fork the road and require the “what if” reminiscing later on in life.

And then, in a weird twist of life, I came across a manifesto and movement today on one of my favourite blogs, princesslasertron.com.

Chris Guillebeau is the author of The Art of Non Conformity. A book for “for unconventional people who want to do remarkable things.” He is living his dream and has made a commitment to visit every country in the world and so far, has been very successful. In addition to making your passion your work, he emphasizes helping people and giving back. So simple. Pretty impressive.

After reading his manifesto, A Brief Guide to World Domination, I feel better. Even though going against the grain of the mainstream and doing things a little differently is harder and takes longer to reveal success, it is necessary for change. If you think about it, our entire world consists of products and services that were created by people who had the cahones to do things differently and succeed. I think this book is just what I need to re-strategize where I want to take my life, what I want to be doing and how I want to be doing it.

I’ll let you know how it goes. ü

Cheers,

Veronica

Less Talk, Less Love, More Money!

So the other day I felt the urge to leave a little “cheap shot” remark on SuiteJ’s most recent post. It went something along the lines of “you bastards don’t comment anymore” and I was openly speaking to all my previous regulars who haven’t given me the light of day, but had no problem showing ol Big Head some love – even though he posts less than I do! It’s all good though – I’m not bitter at all. But you guys definitely know I’m the type who is quick to hit the “potty mouth” button in the middle of a investment bankers conference if that means I’ll get some attention and a free portfolio analysis. I cleverly made a statement, and it paid off because I got both SuiteJ and Neal from Nota Bene Consulting to hop on over and increase the comment count on my last post to beyond 4.

Updates and stuff…

Since 2009 has started, I’ve been battling this invisible force of poor task management. I find I’m getting easily distracted, and I can’t blame it on blogging this time. Despite my distractions, I’ve managed to make some great progress this month, especially in the networking and site flipping departments. Here are a few goals that I set which I have accomplished thus far:

I wanted to flip 8 sites this month, and as it stands now I’ve sold one, with two auctions currently live, and two more auctions going live before the end of the weekend. Providing they all sell (which they will) I have to develop 3 more sites in the next 15 days. Easy peasy.
I wanted to have an exclusive partnership with an uber-talented freelance writer to outsource my content for site flips and various other niche projects I have lined up this year. After a few emails to my Big Headed mentor, I’ve now been working side by side with one of the coolest, most talented writers I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. His name is Chris. He is 26, and has been making a full-time living online for the last 5 years via freelance writing, affiliate marketing and blogging. If you would like to learn more about how to make a living as a freelance writer, he’s got a pretty sweet course available over at ChrisBlogging.com. This guy is a fucking machine when it comes to cranking out keyword rich, unique articles – I love it!
I obviously set some goals regarding marketing and networking in the popular Internet marketing forums, and I’ve successfully stuck to a regiment, slowly increasing my presence and thread count. On the networking end, I read a really cool thread by this cat named AJ who’s been making a killing with affiliate marketing blah blah blah… but let me tell you something, this dude is the real deal! What led me towards him was his focus on presenting value to the buyer, and how important of a role that plays – as well as how so many people over look it when trying to get the sale. Anyways, rather than linking to the thread, we ended up connecting and I’m going to have him do a guest post, as well as he agreed to become my next “20 questions with…” victim! I’m definitely keeping an eye on this dude – he’s got a new membership site coming out that looks sick! I’ll keep you guys posted.
I’ve started my first ebook, and yes, it will be on site flipping. I’m so sick of all these garbage-ass site flip products that keep coming out.. for real, 90% of them only cover the basics, and to be honest, it’s not enough to help a complete newbie make $3000/month as they claim. Not even close. My ebook is going to be dead simple. I am basically writing from start to finish my exact process of creating a site within 8-12 hours and cashing out between $200-$300 profit. I learned this process from a crackhead with a lap top who sleeps behind a Jewish church by my apartment – and I’m going to be sharing it with the world. Quality, not quantity – that is how you make real money of flipping websites.

Anyways, I think that’s about it for today. I hope nobody comments on this so I can prove my point that once you stop commenting on other peoples blogs, they stop caring about you. And once you stop posting, they stop reading. And once you start making money, people start hating you.

IM KIDDING!! Man, you guys haven’t learned yet! I absolutely dig each and every one of you people.. and It’s a good thing that I’m not seeing you guys around as much because that can only mean one thing – you’re being productive elsewhere! And that right there makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside – kind of like when I stick my hand down my pants.

Cheers,

Elijah

Monthly Goals For August 2008

When we started this blog in mid July we knew it wouldn’t be easy. There are so many people out there selling products and systems that will teach you how to make money blogging – and all you have to do is press a magic button and watch the cash pour in while you sleep! It couldn’t be farther from the truth. It has never been easier to make money from home whether it’s via affiliate marketing, consulting, or creating and selling websites due to the current state of technology – combined with persistence, the ability to adapt, and HARD WORK – not because of some secret system. Without goals to strive towards you can say goodbye to your dreams of working while sipping espresso at a cafe in Italy, or checking your email from a Mayan jungle resort. As young adults, or adults in general, it’s crucial that we have ambition and a constant motion forward to promote personal growth and accomplishment. Having both long and short term goals will increase your odds of staying on course, which in turn will maximize your success rate and enable you to fulfill your dreams.

Here are my monthly goals for August 2008:

1-3 Posts per day Monday through Friday – The more frequent a new site is updated with fresh content, the more often Google and the rest of the search engines will stop by and visit us which will lead to an increase in organic search engine traffic and indexing.
Begin to increase online presence via social networking and social bookmarking sites. Social networking can bring loads of targeted traffic to a blog and increase the participaction and subscribers. I will be focusing on 6 main sites: StumbleUpon, Digg, Myspace, YouTube, Friend Feed, and Twitter.
Commenting on niche related blogs is also a great way to increase your online presence and establish yourself as a trustworthy resource. I am currently a top commentator on 3 high traffic blogs and would like to increase the number of blogs I frequent to 10. If I can write solid, helpful comments on 10 blogs per day for the next 30 days I will definitely start to see more activity here in a very short amount of time. I loves me some free traffic!
Write at least 3-5 keyword rich articles and submit them to all the major high traffic article directories like ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. By using Wordtracker to conduct my keyword research and putting those low competition, high search volume key phrases in the article headings I will not only get indexed into the search engines, but I will also have an external guage on what topics are hot based on the performance of each article. Tip: high traffic article directories usually rank very high in the search engines, so writing some good articles could get you top spot for niche related keywords and phrases.
Continue to expand and diversify my WordPress skills. This is my first self-hosted blog using WordPress through my Hostgator hosting account. I currently run between 10-15 sites – some of them only partially optimized for the occasional affiliate sale or adsense click – the others are just sitting on a domain waiting for some TLC from myself or Veronica. I have found WordPress to be the ultimate management system for setting up, optimizing, and maintaining a blog or niche website. The amount of power behind it is incomparable and having the ease of 1 click set up through Fantastico on my Hostgator account makes it that much more efficient. I will be spending a significant amount of time brushing up on HTML, CSS, and hopefully getting a custom header done.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that my goals for August are strongly focused on building content, and generating traffic. When I first started getting into SEO and keyword research I got so excited that I started building blogs, putting up 5-10 posts, and then promoting the hell out of them. The problem with this mindset is if you only have 10 posts on your blog your traffic will come, browse, and move on. If you’re just getting into blogging like my friend T. Edwards over at Poverty101.net make sure you have a minimum 20-30 posts before you start to heavily promote and get backlinks – because if you so happen to make the front page of StumbleUpon you better have some content to keep your visitors interested! Nobody wants to stop by a blog with 1 good article and 5 pieces of crap.

Maybe Veronica will read this and compile a list of goals of her own, we’ll just have to wait and see. What are some goals you guys have for this month?

Cheers,

Elijah