My friend Paul just let me know about a little tool called Hyperlink Maker When you are writing a comment on someone’s blog or you want to put a link into one of your squidoo lenses it’s very easy to miss a ” or write htpp instead of http or some other little mistake that makes the link not work. It seems Paul had a few emails from people who had made these mistake and so he had a small program made just to avoid these kinds of errors.

It’s free so go take a look at the video demo and download the tool if you think it could be useful.

Hi there, I’m back again.  I’ve just upgraded the backend (which you all know is Wordpress) to version 2.5 and its totally different to the previous versions.  I actually only dropped into the site to see how long its been since my last post, but there was a nice big update notice so I thought I’d get that done at least. 

Have you ever felt like you are going two steps forward, then three steps back and no matter what you do you never really get anywhere ??   Well thats how I’ve been feeling for quite a while.   Actually I’m at a bit of a crossroads (or whatever you want to call it) in my life at the moment…. Basically I need to find another source of income relatively quickly.   The reason being is that a situation has occurred at my place of work which is making me seriously reconsider whether I want to continue working here, if I do decide I’m going to leave then I need to be sure I’ve got an income from somewhere else (obviously).  

Now the question is what do I want to do long-term ?  Do I want to have to find another job ?  Or do I want to go back to working for myself ?   It would seem logical that I would rather work for myself and my immediate answer would be that…. but the problem I have is I have no income other than my fulltime job so I can’t leave here until I have built my outside income up to the point where it fully replaces my current income.    I need to be making US$2500.00 doing my own thing to replace my day job, which shouldn’t be that hard if you believe all the internet marketing gurus and sales letters out there….  The thing is I’ve never been able to make anything like that from internet marketing, then again I’ve never really tried….  but I’ve never tried because in all honesty I don’t really like doing it…  or maybe more truthfully I can’t decide which aspect of internet marketing I want to be involved in.   

So I’m kind of stuck…. I don’t like my job but I’m trapped here by needing money to live on, I want to do something else with my life but don’t know what….  

So I’m going to have a good hard think and get back to you in part 2 with my thoughts and hopefully some options for myself.

Till next time, hope your endeavours are going better than mine !!

I can’t believe it has been over 2 months since I last updated this site, it just goes to show how fast time goes by and how easy it is to waste time if you don’t make the effort to stay on top of things.

I do have some reasonably valid excuses…. but mostly the reason is just a lack of focus.

I’m one of those people that find it quite hard to focus on just one thing, I tend to start projects and then read about or see something else which makes me go off on a tangent trying something new.   This despite the fact that I know deep down that the only way to be successful at something is to keep at it.  

To give you an idea of how bad I am at launching new ideas, here is a list of some of the projects I am currently working on or I am thinking of working on (and by working on I mean I’ve started but haven’t really done much with beyond an initial flurry of activity).

A pizza delivery business, an online t-shirt business, an online cosmetics store, 2 social networking sites….  On top of that I’m creating sites for a friend’s TV production company, a website for another friend’s recycled shopping bag business and a website for an ex-girlfriend who wants to sell cheeky lingerie online.   All that on top of my regular day job developing and managing a large e-commerce site (which I’m pleased to say has done US$ 14,000 in sales since we launched it 36 days ago!!).     Its really no surprise that I’ve been neglecting this site !!

One reason I’m back and writing this is because of the excellent comments I received from John over at LifeSprocket 

You can read John’s comments Here. He has been struggling with many of the same issues I think we all share when first starting out. Why am I doing this ? When will it start to produce results ? Does anyone care if I write or not ? The answers will be different for everyone, but the one thing that is the same is that if you keep at it then your chances of success are 1000x more likely than if you give up. I know that is a bit obvious but its often the obvious that people ignore.

 So, back to me and my plans.  I really hadn’t noticed that so much time had gone by since my last update, it was actually John’s comment that roused me from my virtual slumber and it’s partially thanks to him that I’ve decided to keep on working on this site.   I’m not sure how often I’ll be updating, I’d like to say it will be at least a few times a week but I suspect that knowing myself quite well it’s more likely to be a little less frequently.   Perhaps I’ll use this blog to document all of my business ideas and not just my Adsense, Internet Marketing type stuff…. 

At the beginning of this year I wrote that I was excited about the opportunities ahead and I still am, once I organise myself a bit better then things can only look up.

Thank for reading, don’t forget to subscribe to my rss feed

 Idiot out !

Hello Dear Readers,

I know that at the moment there aren’t many of you and quite frankly I’m not surprised.   My attempts to make this blog into something interesting failed quite spectacularly, although to be honest watching me fail was part of the point, of course it would have been more interesting to watch me succeed but at least I proved what not to do.

Anyway, now that we are into 2008 its time for me to put the past behind us (whilst not forgetting the mistakes I made) and begin working on making this blog what I originally intended it to be.

My biggest mistake so far has been a failure to plan - yes its true, I thought I was planning but in reality all I did last year was post random stuff without thinking about what it was I was posting.  This year I plan to think before I post and actually write useful information.   

The question is what exactly is ‘useful information’ ?    The whole point of this blog was to document my attempts to make money online, which seems like quite a good topic for a blog.  Well yes it would be if I had actually done something to try and make some money, rather than just talking about it.  You see last year not only was I unfocused on this blog, but I was also unfocused in my attempts to make money.   It wasn’t always like that, there was a time about 18 months ago where I was quite focused and where I did actually make a little money.  Unfortunately I became a victim of laziness brought on by lack of planning and lack of focus.  Instead of picking an online business and doing it to the best of my ability, instead I kept reading about all manner of different ways to make money online and never got around to really implementing any of them beyond spending a few hours fiddling with each idea.   This year I plan to be a lot more disciplined.   I’m still trying to decide exactly where I’m going to concentrate my energy but I have a few ideas.

In the meantime, I hope you had a great Xmas and the New Year has started off well.   Making money online isn’t easy, but it can definitely be done, all you need is the desire and drive to work at it.  Last year I had the desire, but lacked the necessary drive…. this year I’ve got the drive I lacked and my desire is even stronger.

2008 is going to be OUR year !!

I discovered a great site SEOlogs.com which has some really good stuff to read, highly recommended. If you hurry over there now they are running a competition in conjunction with mybloglog.com and there are a load of prizes to be won.

You’ll find this site useful whether you go to enter the competition or just to read some great SEO information.

I should qualify the title by saying - seems to have failed for me.  When I first learn’t about Blogrush I thought it sounded like a great idea, a simple widget that would display headlines from other blogs whilst displaying yours on their blogs.   What a great way to expose your blog to a wider audience I thought.

Well it might be a great idea, but its not working for me.   My blog was approved and everything was great, then I changed my domain and now Blogrush is broken for me.   My repeated emails to support have gone unanswered so now it looks like I’m going to have to pull the code and forget about Blogrush.

Shame as it did seem to be quite good.

I keep having to remind myself that I need to *d0* something everyday for my business, no matter how small, just so long as I do something.   I’ve found that once I start working on things for my business then I get into the zone and its much easier to do the work.  The trick, for me at least, is getting started.  

Today I’ve been doing a few little things, little but important.  I’ve transferred a few more articles from the old adsenseidiot to this new site, there are still a few posts to go which I will try and finish today.   That then led me to figuring out where else I might need to switch the domain, things like technorati and various other places, so thats also on the list for things to do today.

Tomorrow the company I work for are treating us to a boat party, they’ve hired a boat and there are 27 of us going for a day out in the sun, with lots of drinks and food.  I’ve been on quite a few of these things with friends and they are always a blast, whether its as much fun with my colleagues (most of whom don’t drink) remains to be seen. 

Tags:

 Today I thought I’d tell you a little about a tool I’ve been using called Auto Social Poster, I’ve mentioned it before but never gone into much detail.  

 In a nutshell what Auto Social Poster (ASP) is a handy tool for automatically posting your wordpress posts to Social Bookmarking sites.   Note that I said your Wordpress posts, ASP is a plugin for Wordpress so only works if you are using Wordpress to run your blog. 

Once you have installed the plugin you can add multiple accounts at each of the many built-in social bookmarking sites.  The plugin comes pre-configured for most social bookmarking sites and the support is very good with regular updates when new sites appear or old ones change their login requirements.   Being able to add multiple logins is particularly handy.

You an configure the plugin to bookmark to all your accounts or to a random number of sites so your bookmarks are different across the various sites you bookmark at.   You can also set it up to add random tags, which allows you to almost completely automate your blog (if you are using an auto content posting sytem that is).

 Finally, the plugin will, if you tell it, send you an email status report after it finishes posting showing which bookmarking sites it posted to and the result.

Auto Social Poster is an excellent plugin if you are running a Wordpress blog and want to promote your articles through the many Social Bookmarking Sites. 

It definitely gets the Idiot’s thumbs up!

Time is a funny old thing, when I’m at work it seems to crawl along really slowly, then when I get home - wham! it seems to disappear before I’ve even blinked.   My last post was over a week ago, 8 days without posting is dreadful, but I don’t really have any excuses.  Actually I do but they are merely excuses.

Nothing I can do about it though, the time is gone so all that remains is to get back to the task at hand. 

On that note I’ve been doing a bit of work on the backend of the site.  You may have noticed that the BlogRush widget isnt displaying, its been broken basically since I switched the blog from adsenseidiot.com to theadsenseidiot.com   I’ve checked the code and its correct so I’m guessing its a problem on their end.  So I’m about to send them a support email.  I’ll report back when I have some news.

Tags: affiliate programs, blogging

When after sitting on 93 domains for a year you realise they are about to expire and you’ve NEVER used them!!    Yes folks that is what I’ve done (the observant amongst you may remember a month or so ago I mentioned this was about to happen).

This evening I’ve been busy deleting (yes deleting) the domains from my VPS server and with each deletion the pain associated with my obvious stupidity increased until I couldn’t take it any longer and decided to stop and write about it.

What makes it worse is that earlier this evening I decided to browse through an online job site to see if there are any better jobs out there that I could apply for… you see I’m not earning enough in my day job to get ahead… I’m just about living from pay check to pay check and although I don’t want to change jobs, it would be nice to earn a bit more until I start making my own money online. 

Unfortunately not only was there nothing remotely suitable but I realised that salaries in IT are pathetic, so much so that it appears I’m actually being overpaid (or at least being paid better than I thought).  That kinda sucks, but its also good in that it might motivate me to a) do a better job at work and b) get more of my own stuff done. (Then again I’ve been saying that for a while haven’t I).

Oh well I’ve still got a lot of domains to delete from the server, so its back to that and more guilt….

Tags: affiliate programs, making money online