Some of you may be aware that I live in Hong Kong, some of you may be aware that I have in fact lived here for 35 years, since arriving (aged 6) with my parents in August 1973.  Those of you that weren’t aware of those fact obviously now are.

Why is any of that important ?  Well it isn’t really, what is important is that aftwer 35 years in one place, I realised my life and career had stagnated.   What I needed was a major change, something to shake me out of the rut I had found myself in.  And guess what ?  Something happened to do just that.  I was offered the chance to apply for a job in Bangkok, Thailand.

Thailand has to be one of my favourite places in the world, I love Thai food, I like Thai people, I like the tropical weather, the beaches…. I could go on but you get the point.   I also know Bangkok pretty well as I had a girlfriend (English, not Thai) who lived and worked there, which mean’t I made regular trips over to see her and got to know Bangkok better than most (tourists).

So, back to the job offer.  After sending in my CV and having an interview over the phone, they invited me to visit them in Bangkok, where they told me they would like me to work for them.   The company is headquartered in Singapore, but I will be based in Bangkok. Yay !!

I’m going to be Web Development Manager, which basically entails managing a team of developers in the building and ongoing maintenance of their website.  One great thing about the job is that the developers are actually based in the Philippines so I’ll be making regular business trips down there too.   Added to that I have a Sister who lives with her partner and their two boys (my Nephews) in Singapore, and as we have a Singapore office I’ll be able to make regular trips there to see them too.

What does this have to do with Internet Marketing, Adsense, or anything ?  Well by shaking myself out of my comfort zone and moving to another country I’ve given myself a completely new lease on life, one which I plan to harness and use to make some major changes to the way I live my life.   No more going out every night and getting drunk (and spending the money I spend on alcohol), instead I plan to spend as much time as I can on getting fit and healthy; and equally importantly I plan to set aside time each day to working on various Internet Marketing projects.

I plan to be making at least US$100 a day within 6 months from my Internet endeavours.

And on a final note if you are in Bangkok let me know, it would be fun to meet anyone that has been reading my blog.

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 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:

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

Its been a tough few days, I’ve been ridiculously busy at my day job with a massive deadline and the stress I’ve been under has really been taking its toll.   As a result I’ve barely had the time or energy to do anything related to my own business efforts.  Thats not to say I’ve done nothing, I’ve tried to get at least a few things done everyday but it hasnt been easy.  

This evening I’ve installed Auto Social Poster on TheAdsenseIdiot so when I post something it automatically gets posted to various bookmarking sites.  The next task is to find more bookmarking sites to post to, at the moment its only posting to 2 sites and they are mine !! 

What you (and I) need to remember is that if you are trying to make money online and doing it in your spare time, then you need to try and keep working on your sites even when it seems like you just don’t have the time.  Whatever you do try to do something everyday, no matter how small just keep the momentum going, because once you stop its hard to get going again.

Now go do something on your own site(s).

I’m testing a new addon for FireFox called ScribeFire, that lets you post to your blog(s) whilst you are surfing.  This is the first time I’ve tried it so this is really only a quick test. I’ll write a review if I think its worth using.

Gotta say it seems pretty cool so far.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Changing this site from adsenseidiot.com to theadsenseidiot.com is progressing reasonably well, although I made a completely idiotic mistake last night when I tried to switch my feedburner feed and basically messed it up completely….  what it means is I’m not going to have a working feedburner feed for a month !!  Told you I was an Idiot !

I’ve been installing plugins and setting them up today - at some point I think I’ll write up a review of the plugins I use and how useful I think they are.  Watch out for that.

Of course the main job is still waiting to be done - transferring the content from the original blog to this new one…. Maybe later tonight, maybe tomorrow…..

During my regular daily surf of the web, reading other people’s blogs, looking for interesting things and generally keeping abreast of whats going, I started to think about how much impact there is to google banning this domain.  I’m not even completely sure why they banned it in the first place, although I can make an educated guess.  I’m not going to go into it here either, I’ll cover that in another post I’ve got planned.

Suffice to say I realised that whilst it may be possible to get the word out without google, it will always be an uphill battle and one which quite frankly I’m not prepared to fight.  

So I’ve given in and registered a new domain.  Luckily for me the domain ‘TheAdsenseIdiot.com’ was still available so I’m not going to lose any ‘branding’ in fact seeing as its exactly the same as the site title it might even be better.  

All I have to worry about now is configuring the new domain, switching the content over to the new domain and making sure my existing RSS Feed subscribers know to drop the old feed and *hopefully* pickup the new one.

I’ve asked my host to setup the domain and a database so I can install wordpress once they’ve done that I can begin the switch.

Its also going to give me an opportunity to show you exactly what I’m doing to promote the new domain so we can all see how long it takes to get a new domain indexed.

Tags: making money online, affiliate programs