TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

Tying Up Loose Ends

I apologize for not posting in a while. I’ve been working during this whole time, just not on my blog.

A month ago, I published a post called Getting To The Next Level in Affiliate Marketing in which I outline and describe the various roadblocks that are stopping me from getting to the next level in affiliate marketing.

I really took that post to heart and have constantly been thinking about how I need to shift my focus and energy away from my various side projects, and more into affiliate marketing, as that is where I’ve seen the greatest success in terms of monthly income so far.

And so that is what I’ve been working on lately – reducing side distractions and projects so that I can get back to work on affiliate marketing and focus more on it.

The ironic thing is that in trying to reduce side distractions, I’ve actually done very little work on my campaigns over the past few weeks aside from general optimization and maintenance.

Once I finish reducing most of these side distractions and projects, I’ll be able to focus on affiliate marketing a lot better.

Here’s some of what I’ve done over the past few weeks:

New Phone

Right before I got to my desk in the morning, about to sit down and work, I dropped my phone which broke the display.

I bought a new phone the same day, but had to spend time learning how to use it (still am) and customize it, as I’m a long-time Blackberry user. I also had to transfer old stuff over and all that jazz.

Offline Errands

I took care of some offline errands such as renewing my passport, signing my corporation’s annual report and giving that to my lawyer’s office, finished preparing my personal taxes, etc.

One thing that I’m not looking forward to that I still need to do is preparing my corporate taxes. Personal taxes are pretty easy as it’s not that much stuff that I need to pass onto my accountant, but corporate taxes are a MASSIVE pain in the ass, as I basically have to go back through the entire year and grab and organize all of my stuff. Thank God I just have to pull all the paperwork and not do the actual taxes myself.

Website Sold

I managed to sell another website (GymnasticsForums.com)! That’s one more website off my hands.

Getting rid of my network of websites is the best thing I can do if I want to focus on affiliate marketing, so this was great.

Unfortunately, I didn’t make any money on the site. In fact, I lost money, but I just wanted to get rid of it. I am very determined to get rid of most of my websites, so I actually put it on auction with no reserve.

I hope to sell another site within the next 30 days. If you’re interested in grabbing one of the sites seen here, shoot me an offer via e-mail. Most get little-to-no traffic or income.

Spring Cleaning

I’ve sold a number of websites over the past few years, but never got around to cleaning them up from my server and all that, so I removed all traces of them from my servers, e-mail redirects, files from my computer, backup CRON tasks, etc.

I also updated Merendi.com with a current list of most of my websites as well as some other updates.

Replaced Failed Hard Drive

One of the headaches I had a couple of weeks ago was my dying hard drive. It was failing bad and while I have a backup solution in place, it is not a live RAID system.

I installed a new HD and spent a long time trying to salvage the data on the old one. Fortunately, I was able to successfully transfer all of the data on it, transferring it to the new hard drive, but just barely. I was about to resort to the "freezer trick", which gives you an idea of how bad a shape the hard drive was in.

I should probably buy another hard drive now so that I can set up a RAID system, to use in conjunction with my external hard drive backup solution, since I don’t back up regularly enough.

Excel-lent

In addition to my hard drive woes, I had a lot of issues with getting Microsoft Office to work. I ran into some "licensing" issues which caused a lot of frustration, but after a lot of attempts, I finally got Office working perfectly again.

I use Excel every single day multiple times, especially for affiliate marketing, so it was very important that I get it to work. Excel-like clones such as OpenOffice’s Calc and other freeware solutions just don’t cut it for me (they don’t support proper macro usage, for example).

Server Migration

One of my dedicated servers was migrated over to a newer and upgraded machine, which required a bit of adjusting of things here and there. A bit of a pain, but now I’m on a much more powerful machine.

Tackled E-mail

6 weeks ago, my e-mail inbox sat at 1,825 unread e-mails – a massive pile of work that I desperately needed to tend to.

I’ve been working hard on trying to get caught up with them, and am currently down to 898 unread e-mails.

I’ve been tending to them all in descending order, leaving only the most complicated and time-consuming ones to handle when I have more time.

Hired a New Programmer

I hired a new programmer as the past company I used to use had many of their past employees leave the company, and now they aren’t as good as they used to be.

Outsourcing work on freelance sites can be very frustrating as shortlisting can take forever due to the millions (literally!) of providers trying to win your project, as well as the fact that everyone will promise the world, but quality is usually very poor.

I was lucky in that the first guy I hired this time around has so far been excellent! He never complains, he works hard and long hours – sometimes until 4am, and won’t nickle and dime me for unexpected surprises that pop up – he’ll just tackle them.

I’ve already paid him for 2 projects (he’s almost done the 2nd one now), and will definitely be hiring him for more. I have an extremely difficult project that I need doing that I might pass onto him… I’m still thinking about it… I might give him another easy/medium project first.

Patched, Upgraded, and Cleaned

One of my websites was neglected by me for a long time. So long, in fact, that a couple areas of the site were exploited by severe spambots and hackers.

I had the site upgraded and patched up (this was one of the projects for my new programmer), as well as some new features put in. I also had everything cleaned up, as well as a bunch of server settings optimized and fixed so that this site won’t cause any more issues. It was actually so bogged down with issues that it was taking down my server, and thus all my other sites were suffering as well.

I’m glad this is now all fixed, and actually being improved upon.

Back to Work!

So, that’s basically what I’ve been up to lately.

As I stated before, I’ve still been working on my affiliate marketing campaigns, but my focus lately has been to try to tackle and reduce my side distractions so that I can focus more on affiliate marketing.

I got a decent amount done, but have a lot more to go.

Again, sorry for the lack of posting, but I’ll have a new post for you guys in a few days when I publish my monthly affiliate marketing income report.