While growing my online business over the last 10 years I have made a lot mistakes. These mistakes have ranged from those that can be considered very minor that had no real consequences to huge errors that ended up costin me considerable amounts of time, effort and money. Out of all the mistakes that I have made during this time period, the biggest one has to be the fact that a few years ago I became complacent with my success and neglected my affiliate network. This has led to a 70% decline in my income from this area of the business and made once great sites virtually useless. Here’s how it happened. Continue reading “How success and complacency killed my network of affiliate sites”
Redefining what I do – I’m an Internet Guy
I always struggle when it comes time to craft a response to the common question “So, what do you do for a living?” In reality I have a number of things on the go at any given time including site development, working with my various customers on a freelance basis, running my copyright enforcement business, working on an upcoming eBook and maintaining my network of affiliate blogs. To answer the question with complete honesty I would probably need a half hour to explain each of the different things that I do but instead I always fall back to an easy and familiar answer.
“I’m a freelance writer.”
There are a number of reasons for this. It’s not because I’m ashamed or embarrassed about the true answer because I’m actually quite proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish. While it was a struggle starting out, things have improved to the point where I’m comfortable in what I’m doing, have been able to hire a couple virtual assistants to help out and working on some new projects that I’m very excited about. Continue reading “Redefining what I do – I’m an Internet Guy”
How to transfer accounts from DirectAdmin from cPanel manually
I am in the process of shutting down one of my old dedicated servers to a series of VPS accounts and was having some difficulty in getting this completed. The old server has DirectAdmin while the new virtual private servers are powered by cPanel. Due to the fact that these sites are rather large, I kept getting an SSH timeout error when trying to use cPanel’s built in account transfer tools. This could also have been caused by a legitimate SSH connection error. Continue reading “How to transfer accounts from DirectAdmin from cPanel manually”
My near death experience with a so-called SEO expert
One of the things that I regularly help clients with is finding talented and qualified freelancers to assist them with projects on a part-time or full-time basis. For the most part I have been rather happy with the people I have helped find and have placed but during a recent project I learned a very valuable lesson; it makes more sense to spend more time during the interview process and reference check than it is to have to clean up the mess that someone else leaves behind. Continue reading “My near death experience with a so-called SEO expert”
Advice to the solopreneur – If you’re doing something that is making you money, stop it!
image courtesy of stock.xchng – mrtechc
The whole “solopreneur” thing is something that I’ve begun to embrace over the last couple of weeks after seeing it mentioned in a few articles and referred to in podcasts that I have been exploring. A solopreneur is essentially a one man or woman show who operates their business with no permanent staff. That perfectly describes what I do at this point in my life. I have a neat little setup where I do a variety of tasks for various clients including freelance writing, Internet marketing, copyright enforcement and SEO research in addition to a small network of affiliate blogs that I earn a small passive income from. Continue reading “Advice to the solopreneur – If you’re doing something that is making you money, stop it!”