Brian Vickers Crashes at the 2008 Las Vegas NASCAR race. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Wow, 2012 is one third gone and not slowing down! What have you done so far this year? Anyone stuck with their proposed goals and actions and made progress?

Without getting into the details, looking back, initially I was afraid of perhaps finding out that I didn’t do jack sh*t and that I’ve wasted this first third of the year.

But as I thought through the goals I had set in the beginning of the year and looked at what I’m currently doing, I’m happy to report that I have indeed made progress in a few of those areas. Perhaps not exactly the way I had envisioned, but progress is progress!

First of all, as for waking up earlier on a regular basis, that had been achieved by taking morning real estate classes this past month. With classes at 9am, it has really forced me to go to bed earlier and waking up earlier. Now even though I don’t always go to classes on time (imperfect execution), nevertheless the goal has been achieved and I’m happy with that. We don’t need to be perfect. Being better and on the right track is much more realistic and attainable of a goal.

Second part of the personal goal was to detect red flags in the girls I might be interested in dating. I think I’ve been more careful about that too and so far, I haven’t gotten into trouble in that department. =)

As for business goals, the first one which was revamping the ecommerce site is under way. It is far from done but I’ve at least started playing with a couple of open source platforms like zencart, opencart, and prestashop to see which one I will eventually use to rebuild the site. Not bad, but could be better.

The second business goal was to build on the adsense blogs that are generating income and dumping the ones that aren’t. I’ve definitely let expire the ones that are stale and keeping the money makers running, but besides that, I haven’t really done much due to having a fear that I could put in all this effort and not reap the rewards because with google algo changes all that work (on 20-50 sites!) would be in vain so I’m just letting them run longer and will wait and see what I should do with them.

The third business goal which is that of networking more with people and forming mutually beneficial partnerships. That is what I’m most proud of and excited about. So far I have three projects (perhaps a bit ambitious, but they’re all good!) cooking.

The first venture here is with two other partners in a new LLC dealing with business services, one with with two international partners, involving in importing a niche computer peripheral and distributing them in the states, and the other one is real estate and finance related partnering up with one other person here in Las Vegas. These three ventures have kept me busy. Even though these aren’t generating income just yet, I can see the potential and cannot wait to get everything up and running. All of these will involve the use of internet marketing extensively along with local networking and marketing.

The forth business goal of launching a profitable CPA (even CPS) campaign is underway. I’m still testing with a new $100 google adwords account and while not profitable yet, I’m getting decent CTRs with a few of the big KWs and I will continue to tweak them to see where we end up. I’ll report more as I progress.

Feel free to share in the comments anything relating to your own progress or something relating to mine. Until next time. Have a good one, folks!

I know this is a bit late for a new year’s post, but better late than never, right? Actually, since it’s lunar new year, or Chinese new year yesterday, I think it’s still appropriate.

So, with every new year there are new goals, new beginnings. Sometimes it means perhaps an end to certain things that we want to get rid of or curb, such as a bad habit, or even bad people in our lives.

I would have to say I would separate my goals in to two categories. Professional/business and personal. So let me share some of mine.

Personal Goals:
1) To wake up earlier and sleep earlier in general – Since my flexible internet lifestyle came to be, I had been going to bed around 4am and waking up around noon. While I get plenty of sleep and people tell me that if I can do it, why not? I’d rather not. I don’t like feeling my days are short and see the sun go down just hours after I get my day going!

2) To detect red flags in girls I date early on rather than ignoring them and hoping that they won’t be problematic – Seems like I’ve done plenty of that and I’m not particularly proud of it. The pros are that it’s fun and exciting for a while, as these type of people may have traits that are enjoyable, especially if they are easy on the eyes! But the cons are that once things get a little more serious and settles down a bit, those red flags will begin to do what they were meant to do, and ignoring them will no longer cut it. I won’t get into what some of those red flags are, but I’m sure we all have things we consider red flags, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Business/Professional Goals:
1) To revamp my ecommerce site – The site has been stale for some time and not only it’s not good for SEO, it’s starting to lack some newer items which competitors carry. The looks are also a bit outdated and unexciting. All this came about when during a recent shopping cart upgrade something went wrong, and now products are missing and it’s just not fully functional anymore! I will need to use this opportunity to rebuild it with the new software, from the ground up. And while I’m at it, I’ll have to add new items I already should have already been carrying. Also to remain competitive, prices will have to be adjusted/lowered accordingly on just about everything. Yes this might take a while! The down side is that the store will be closed for a few days. Loss of income? Definitely. But it will definitely be worth it in the long run.

2) Continue to promote my Adsense blogs – I had up to about 100 of these blogs as of last year, some did ok off the bat and some didn’t. Now that it’s a year late, I can see what sites are worth keeping and which sites are worth letting expire. Now these roughly 50 sites are collectively building an income for me. Slowly but surely. But even 50 is a whole lot to deal with and I still cannot keep focused. Therefore my goal here in 2012 is to hand pick the best ones to work on, and build more links, add more content, so that they will start to reach their potentials. Then once they are on track, I can move on to the next batch of hopefuls.

3) To actively network with people for brick and mortar business ventures – Besides internet marketing, there are many opportunities out there that can be viable. Keeping an eye open for them and actively seek out worthwhile partners would be a great thing for me.

4) To Get one profitable CPA campaign – I’ve tested a bunch last year and spent some money but could not get any of them to be profitable. However, there’s one that I’ve been working on so far this year that seems to have potential. So far, even though I’m still running a bunch of keywords just to test them, I can already tell that if I just keep the profitable KWs for now it would be a profitable campaign. The problem is, just with those few keywords alone, with the traffic they pull in, it’s not really much money. So the goal is to test more and extract more profitable KWs, and also figure out how to ramp up the traffic on all the profitable KWs.

Those are the main goals of 2012 I can come up with in one setting. What do you think? What are some of your goals? Let’s discuss and share. Once again, happy new year and happy lunar new year!