Is the Web dead? Of course not.

August 19, 2010 by JD · 2 Comments
Filed under: Internet, Musings 

Have you read the article in Wired magazine about the Web being dead?

How much hype is that? The Internet (and all it’s protocols) and the World Wide Web are growing at a prodigious rate and Wired has the audacity to say that the Web is dead. I don’t understand it. They’re usually much better at presenting the facts than this suggests.

What am I talking about? Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff wrote this article: The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

Normally, I really like reading what Anderson has to say, but this time, I think he’s (they’re) missing the point when he tries to make a distinction between using a web browser versus a specialized app to retrieve information. How does having more options for accessing data mean that the Web is dead?

It may be true that the use of a general-purpose web browser — for some people, especially those who use their mobile devices all the time — is declining. For myself, about a tenth of the time when I’m at home and most of the time when I’m out somewhere else, I use apps on my iPod Touch to read and reply on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites. I check the weather forecast and view the local radar on it.

Those are options I use in addition to my normal Web use. If I didn’t have the iPod, or I were stuck in a doctor’s office with no Wi-Fi, I would not be accessing the net during those times, I’d probably have my nose stuck in a book.

At least in my particular case, using apps on my iPod doesn’t mean I’m using the Web less, it simply means that I have an additional option to interact online when I’m away from one of my main computers.

But, what Anderson and Wolff fail to point out is that most of the content they say is leaving the Web and moving onto apps is still being served by the Web. Other protocols may be used by some people to interact with the data, but most of it still lives on the Web. It’s a technical distinction, but it’s an important one.

Even though I can follow Twitter and Facebook on an iPod/iPhone app, I’m still limited in what I can do. If I want to take full advantage of Facebook, for example, then I have to go there using a Web browser. The app just doesn’t offer the full experience, nor full access to the data.

Is FTP part of the web? No. It’s a different protocol, but it does allow us to upload information that can be served on the web.

Is DNS part of the Web? No, but it’s an essential part of the Internet. Without the domain name service protocols, data packets would not go hither and yon over the network using TCP/IP and we would not be able to access data easily. DNS is a protocol for finding servers and IP addresses and is part of the process used to direct info packets. It is absolutely necessary for the World Wide Web, as we know it today, yet it isn’t really part of the Web. It is one of the ancillary, underlying protocols that make the Web work when we click a link, type in a Web address, or call up a bookmark.

Is email part of the web? No, and yes. If you’re using an email application to send and retrieve email using protocols like IMAP and POP3, it’s not being done on the World Wide Web. However, a great deal of people, possibly a majority, use their browser to read and send email, and that’s definitely part of the Web.

(If you’re interested in knowing more about this subject, Wikipedia has an article about Internet Protocol Suite that links to lots of technical data and explanations. It’ll get you started, but you’ll have to learn a whole lot more to understand how the Internet works.)

Now, do we really care if the information we want to access is being served on the World Wide Web or through some other protocol? For most people, the answer, most likely, is “no.”

But don’t we hold technical writers at a technical magazine up to a higher standard? I know that I do. I go to Wired to get straight information about technical subjects and this time, I believe, they let me down.

I’m one of those people who wants technical subjects to be covered accurately (and I sure hope I am doing that properly here — I hate the way my foot tastes when I get caught with it crammed in my mouth!).

All the stats that I’ve seen show that the Internet is growing at a huge rate. And I am assuming that the use of most of the major application protocols (ftp, telnet, IMAP, POP3, http, etc) is growing too. In absolute numbers in terms of bandwidth, I’m sure that’s a true statement.

However, when looked at from a percentage of bandwidth perspective, then protocols that are very low bandwidth, such as http: and DNS surely fade away when compared to video and audio.

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, because I don’t want to start making distinctions that aren’t important to most people, but even video and audio are accessed via the Web, using http: protocols. The server may hand off the information from Apache (or another web server) to a different server and stream the data using a non-web-based protocol, but without a Web browser being able to access the information being presented by a Web server, there would not be as much of it being served.

(Does that make sense, or should I just go back to sleep?)

I remember when information was much harder to find than it is now. There were no Web browsers and search engines. We used things like the Gopher protocol and applications like Archie to find and retrieve information. Those were not the good old days. Sometimes it would take hours to find information we knew existed, whereas, now, we can find just about anything in a few seconds by searching on Google.

Web browsers (Mosaic, Navigator, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and all the others) made it so much easier to read (and interact with) information when we found it.

Search engines and directories made it easier to find, but not nearly as easy as it is today. We tend to take Google for granted and not recognize how much easier it is to find and retrieve information than it has ever been before in history. I don’t use Bing on a regular basis, so I’m not qualified to have an opinion on their service.

Does it make a real difference if I’m accessing Facebook through an API with a specialized app on an iPod as compared to accessing it through Safari, my browser of choice for most things?

Anderson and Wolff say it does make a difference. I’m not so sure.

For another take on this article, Ken Evoy wrote about it on the Sitesell blog, Is The Web Really Dead?, and he approaches the deficiencies of the Anderson/Wolff article from their use of statistics and misleading graphics.

If this article was designed to stir up controversy and bring more readers to Wired’s magazine and website, it was a success. But, does that justify being technically inaccurate?

What do you think?

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

At Sitesell, all employees tweet to the corporate Twitter account

August 18, 2010 by JD · 4 Comments
Filed under: Dilbeck Marketing, Musings, Site Build It, Twitter 

If you’ve read anything I’ve written over the last decade or so, you’ll most likely already know that I’m a huge fan of Ken Evoy, Sitesell, and their products and services — especially Site Build It.

By learning from, and following, the advice Ken wrote in his Make Your Site Sell! ebook, I was able to build an affiliate marketing business and earn 100% of my income working in the comfort of my home in the mountains of western North Carolina. I love living here. I love setting my own schedule. This is my dream job.

Apparently, being a Sitesell employee is also a dream job. There are about 300 of them and they’re located all around the world. The great majority work from home and have no daily commute to work, other than getting a refreshing beverage and turning on their computers.

This year, Sitesell became the first corporation to empower all their employees to tweet to the corporate Twitter account: Sitesell on Twitter.

They tweet about both business and personal topics. Each employee is identified with a hashtag that includes their name and department in which they work.

Ken Evoy is #KenFounder, and other employees work in departments such as Education, Training, Support, Mgmt, Content, Mod (forum moderator), QA, Mktg, Coach, Tech, AffMgr, and others.

Before they started tweeting regularly to this Twitter account, I knew only a handful of them by name and had rare contact with them, and I’ve been a happy customer for over 10 years and have bought quite a few products from them.

(I’ve also been a very happy affiliate for the company over the years. It has been a profitable relationship for me. I’ve earned commissions when people buy Sitesell’s products through my links, I’ve found quality businesses to associate with and earned commissions from them, and I’ve enjoyed all the tools that SBI offers to build my own sites — and there’s more to come in the future.)

Still, with all my experience as a customer and affiliate, I only knew a handful of Sitesell employees by name.

Now, I’m getting to know them better.

During the last year while I’m working mainly to get through this health crisis, I haven’t been doing much with Twitter, and I used to spend an hour or more per day there. There are a handful of Twitter accounts I read on a regular basis and Sitesell’s is one of them.

I think it’s a really cool deal that one of my favorite companies was the first to enable all their employees to tweet (or not to tweet) to the corporate account. Just one more example of all the innovation we’ve come to expect from them and their flagship product, Site Build It.

See their latest Twitter tweets. Click the image below.

SBI! Case Studies

If you’re looking for some good, free advice that can help you with building and promoting your business online, I’d like to recommend Sitesell’s Blog to you. I’ve always found the advice to be helpful, free of hype, and based on real experience.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , , , ,

Another reason for simple two-column websites

July 20, 2010 by JD · 1 Comment
Filed under: Blogging, Internet Marketing, Musings, Site Build It 

I spent the night in the hospital following a procedure that is helping me kick this cancer’s butt and did not bring my MacBook Pro with me. I’ve been on Facebook and browsing the web using Safari on my iPod Touch.

I’m able to view most sites (except those that rely on Flash) on my iPod, and I assume that they are viewable on other mobile devices, too.

One thing I really noticed was that sites with three or more columns are significantly harder to read on my iPod than simpler two-column sites.

Most of my sites have been simple two-column sites with the navigation in the left column (and maybe some money-making links) and the main content in the wider right column.

Most of my income is generated by in-context text links in the content column.

A lot of people think those sites are old-fashioned and, as one critic said, “so 20th century.”

It’s true that sites like MurphyGold.com and AYearFromNow.com are plain and look like they are wasting real estate on large monitors. I have been encouraged, repeatedly, to make them wider and add another column.

I don’t intend to do either.

Why?

It’s true that I prefer three columns for my blogs, but that isn’t for your benefit, dear reader. It’s for the search engines and me. By visiting one of my blogs, I can scan the various RSS feeds in the left and right columns and see if I need to visit another site and do something there.

There is some evidence in my site stats that those links bring in more readers through the search engines.

However, my three column sites are not moneymakers. It doesn’t work for me, even though others have reported good results.

When I have tested moving Google Adsense ads from the content column into a third column on the right, income has always dropped dramatically. The same is true for both text- and graphic-links. Both perform better in the content column in a two-column format.

I don’t know if that’s because most people ignore the right-most column or if they have more ad blindness in a column that normally contains mostly ads.

My best sites for generating income have always been rather plain sites that are easy to navigate and have few, if any, distractions. They don’t have the eye candy that lots of people like, but those aren’t the people who click my links and help me pay the bills.

(Thank you to those of you who do!)

For many sites, perhaps the bells and whistles, multiple images and photos, and a plethora of ads do generate more income for them. I assume that some of them have tested the results they get from the changes they make.

For me and the products I recommend, simpler is demonstrably better. I have proof based on research into visitor numbers, bounce rates, conversion rates, and income to back this up.

So, returning to my initial idea, I think the simple sites will do better for me for people who visit my sites using cellphones and other mobile devices, and will continue to perform well for people browsing on their larger computers. I’ll be tracking this as well as I can in the next few months.

Anecdotally, I know that there are sites to which I won’t return when I’m using my iPod, because they are simply too hard to navigate.

Perhaps some of those sites have mobile feeds, but, unless they make it immediately obvious early in their navigation menu, I won’t go digging for it. I’ll just go to a different site that presents comparable information in a way I want to see it.

I’m perfectly willing for people who don’t like my old-fashioned, two-column, plain sites to do the same. Thanks for dropping in. Not for you? Okay, see ya.

I might change my mind if more eye candy ever starts generating more income. (Yes, I’ll probably test it again one of these days.)

For now, however, simpler performs better for me.

I run a business. Performance doesn’t mean more visitors, more comments, or longer conversations. It means more money in my bank account.

I greatly enjoy the social interactions on my blogs, online communities, and Facebook. Making money on those sites is not their primary purpose, but they have to at least break even and pay their own costs, excluding Facebook, which is free.

You may have different purposes, definitions, and priorities for your sites.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Do you want to start an online business?

June 29, 2010 by JD · 6 Comments
Filed under: Business, Musings, Personal, Site Build It, Success and Failure 

I haven’t been posting to this blog nearly as much as I would like, and you may already know the reason. If you don’t, the short story is that I’m battling cancer and lots of days I don’t feel like doing much of anything. However, the good news is that I’m stronger than I was for the last six months and I believe I’m making progress every day. Hopefully, in the near future, I’ll be able to resume blogging on a regular basis.

I was thinking about the topic of having an online business earlier this morning.

For the last year, I haven’t really been able to do much work, but I continue to get enough income through past efforts to keep my various websites and communities moving along while I concentrate mostly on kicking this cancer’s butt. It really is true that I earn money in my sleep and on days when all I feel like doing is sitting on the porch and listening to the birds and watching the wind rustle the leaves on all the trees that surround my home.

Over the last ten years, I’ve earned a living through my marketing business, even though there have been lots of ups and downs.

It allowed me to work from home and care for my elderly mother for about seven years, and it has kept me afloat for the last couple of years as my health problems took over the majority of my attention.

On Thursday, July 1, I’ll turn 58 years old and I always contemplate what I want to do differently during the next year of my life as my birthday approaches.

Interestingly enough, I find that there isn’t much I want to change other than getting healthy, again. As soon as I’m strong enough and able to think straight, again, I want to resume my marketing business, doing pretty much what I’ve done for the last decade.

That’s pretty remarkable for me. I rarely go that long without becoming disinterested in what I’ve been doing and wanting to try something new.

I love living here in the mountains and working from home. I love it that hundreds of people view my websites every day and enough of them purchase from my recommendations that I still generate some income, even when I’m unable to work.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not generating a lot of income and the last few months I’ve been mostly breaking even, but that still keeps all my websites alive and prevents the loss of all the hard work I put in the last few years.

If I were able to really work on the sites as I did a few years ago, my income would be rising every month and I look forward to doing that again within the next year or so.

If I had been working on a job the last few years and got this sick, I think I would be quite a bit worse off than I am now.

I love being self-employed and I love earning revenue for work I did months or years ago.

What about you?

If something unexpected happened in your life, would you have anything helping you economically? Even if things are going great (and I hope they continue that way!), do you ever wonder what it would be like to work from home and do something you love every day?

I know hundreds of people who are doing just that. Most of them are doing a few similar things in terms of promoting their businesses, but almost all of them are doing something that is interesting to each of them. In other words, they’re not a bunch of lemmings trying to follow the herd and eek out a few dollars here and there. They’ve identified something about which they’re very interested, even passionate, and they’re working to build an online business around that topic (or those topics).

Some are approaching their online business from one direction and others are coming from a different direction, but they all share some common traits: intelligence, a vision of where they want to go, a plan on how to get there, motivation to accomplish what is important to them, the willingness to study and learn what they need to know, and an unflagging belief that they will succeed in reaching their goal, eventually.

That belief is very important.

Life almost never goes in straight lines. We have a series of highs and lows and often have to retrace our steps to find a new path to take us where we want to go when we encounter the detours that life throws at us.

Many years ago, Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich said, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”

That has been my motto for almost 40 years, since I first read that book in my late teens.

I’ve proven to myself over and over that I can achieve what I want as long as I can clearly see it in my imagination, can develop a plan to achieve it, and then take action to accomplish each step in that plan.

In fact, I’m dealing with my cancer in the same way. I intend to kick this cancer’s butt and regain my health within the next year. I intend to resume working in my marketing business and doing the things I love.

What do you want to accomplish during the next year of your life?

Another of my mottoes is, “A year from now, I will be better than I am today.”

Sometimes I don’t achieve that goal, but, so far, I’ve always bounced back when life knocks me down a peg or two.

You can do the same thing.

I hear many of my friends and people with whom I come into contact say that they want their own business so they don’t have to commute to work and be subject to someone else’s dictates.

Yet, over and over, year in and year out, relatively few of them ever take the steps to achieve that goal. They don’t analyze what they want to do or make a plan on how to get there. They don’t identify the milestones and take the steps every day to reach those goals.

The next year, they are no closer to their goal than they were the last.

Does that describe you?

What steps have you taken in the last year to get you closer to what you want out of life?

Have you done all that you could to get there?

Why not?

What is stopping you from making your dream a reality?

Is it lack of money? That’s just an excuse. Lots of people with no money have worked hard and made their dreams real.

Is it lack of knowledge? That’s also an excuse. The entire world’s knowledge is available to you through your computer.

The same is true for just about any excuse you can throw up to explain why you are no closer to your goal than you were a year ago.

Do you really want to do what you think you do?

It’s a hard question to face. Perhaps you’re more interested in the fantasy than the reality.

Maybe you think that owning your own business and working from home is like living in paradise.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.

When you own your own business, you, alone, are responsible for everything that gets done and everything that doesn’t. The hours can be longer than working a job, especially in the first few years of starting it. The pay can be less than working a job, but sometimes the lack of commuting, buying business clothing, eating lunch in a restaurant, and all the other expenses related to working for someone else can be reduced when you work at home so the resulting net loss may not be as much as you might think.

I’ve worked many long hours planning and building my online business and I’ve had successes and failures along the way.

Most of my income came through affiliate marketing and that was drastically reduced when North Carolina’s legislature passed new tax laws and some of the major businesses with which I was affiliated canceled my relationship to them. For example, for years I received income from Amazon.com for recommending products that I knew to be useful and a good value. When people would click on the link to the product and purchase it, I would earn a small commission.

When the tax law was passed, Amazon and others canceled these affiliate relations with me (and all their other affiliates in NC) and *poof* there went one of my major sources of income.

Did I quit?

No.

Did I wallow in self-pity?

Yes, I did, but only for a few days.

Then I turned my attention to developing a new plan for earning an income and it was working well until I became too sick to continue with it. But, I haven’t thrown out this plan, it’s still in place and I’ll pick it back up as soon as I can.

That’s one of the major reasons that I need to keep my existing websites online until the day I can resume marketing them.

I know people who are blind or deaf or handicapped in other ways who are still able to build a business and work at home. Some are making ends meet, others are supplementing their other incomes, and a few are doing very well and earning more than they ever earned working for someone else.

On the other hand, some people I know learned that being self-employed really wasn’t what they wanted to do. They found that they liked working at a job, despite some of the things they didn’t like about it. This helped them to understand what they really wanted from their lives and now they don’t waste as much time daydreaming about the “grass is greener” aspects of being self-employed.

Before I ramble on much longer, I want to come to the point of all this.

Having your own online business may be a very good thing for you, or it may be a disaster in the making. It all depends upon you. Can you identify what you want to do? Can you develop a plan to achieve it? Can you learn all the technical things you need to know to make it work? Can you avoid the distractions that abound when you look for ways to make money online? Are you self-directed and motivated to achieve something, even if the rewards may follow only after two or three years of hard work?

Can you work to build something for the future, or do you want your rewards right now?

It all depends upon you, and I can’t offer you any advice if you really don’t want to do what’s necessary to build your business. I don’t know any shortcuts that work, and the whole idea that it’s easy to make a fortune on the Internet is just a big lie some people tell you to get your money.

Ten years ago, I didn’t know who to listen to and who to avoid. I didn’t know what advice was sound and what was just thrown out there to separate me from my hard-earned money. I didn’t know who genuinely cared whether I did well and how to tell them apart from the sharks that are always circling the online marketing newbie.

So, I tested the teachings of lots of people. I spent money and time learning their techniques and following their advice. Most of those experiments were big fat flops. Only a few really proved to be worthwhile and one stood out head and shoulders above all the rest.

You’ve heard me say this many times before, but I’m going to say it again, Ken Evoy, founder of Sitesell, is the real deal. He cares for his customers and works very hard to help each of us build our individual businesses online.

He wrote best selling ebooks to help us build our online businesses and now he gives them away for free. For example, here’s where you can get a free copy of his best-selling ebook, Make Your Site Sell!

(If you collect ebooks and never read them or put into practice what you learn, then don’t bother downloading Make Your Site Sell!, because having it on your harddrive and not doing anything with it is a waste of your time.)

For the last few years, he’s concentrated on making Site Build It! the best system for building online businesses and tens of thousands of real people are following his guidelines and most of them are building successful businesses in niches they love.

Does everyone succeed with SBI? No. I don’t believe everyone succeeds using any set of tools, but more people do well when they follow his advice than they do following anyone else I know and I’ve been researching this topic for over ten years.

Of course, I don’t know everything, so there may be others out there, too, but I don’t know who they are.

So, as my next birthday quickly approaches, I’m happy to see that I don’t intend to do much differently in my business other than dropping a number of experiments that did not succeed (and which were not recommended by Ken Evoy, by the way).

I’m going to concentrate more on my SBI sites and much less on the others, including my blogs, like this one.

What am I going to do for my birthday?

I’m going to stay home and celebrate it in peace and quiet, and then the next day, I’m going 100 miles to have a liver biopsy and radio frequency ablation performed on the spot in my liver that may be a result of my colon cancer, and may not be.

I’m taking the next step in the process to regain my health, and that’s at the top of my to-do list this year. I intend to get healthier and stronger so I can continue to work from home.

What am I going to do for YOU for my birthday?

I’m going to tell you how you can download Ken’s ebooks for free (you don’t even have to give your email address). Yes, those books are a few years old, but the information and advice in them is still valuable.

Even better, I’m going to give you access to the SBI Action Guide.

This is the same guide we follow when we subscribe to SBI 2.0, and you can learn the same things we do. However, unless you subscribe to SBI 2.0, you don’t get all the tools, support, articles, tips, and help from the members-only forum.

You do get a step-by-step guide in what to do to identify your niche, compare it to others, choose the one that’s right for you, and information on how to research and build your business.

You don’t get access to the keyword brainstorming tool, the keyword database functions, nor the sitebuilding tools.

For one or two percent of the people reading this, the information you’ll get from reading the Action Guide and watching the video version of it will be enough for you to use any tools you want to build a successful business.

For a few more percent, you’ll be able to adapt what you learn and use something like WordPress to build a site. Before you invest the time and effort in doing this, have you read Sitesell’s page comparing blogging versus building a hierarchically-organized website?

The rest of you would be better off, deciding if this is something you really want to do, and if it is, then purchase an annual subscription to SBI and give yourself one year to start building the online business you dream of owning. Work on it some every day and you may be amazed at what you can accomplish in as little as a year from now.

Is it free?

Of course not.

Is it affordable?

Absolutely. An annual subscription to SBI costs $300 and that’s less than a dollar a day. Most of you waste more than that and don’t get any nearer your dream.

Is it the only way to succeed.

Of course, it is not.

Is it the way for you?

I don’t know. You’ll have to decide that for yourself.

I know that I’m a satisfied customer and host two sites using SBI. In a few minutes, after I publish this post, I’m going to renew my annual subscription to Murphy Gold so it will be ready for me to continue promoting select small businesses in Murphy, NC, a place I love living, as soon as I’m strong enough to do it.

I started Murphy Gold last year on my birthday after identifying a new direction I wanted to take following being canceled as an affiliate for Amazon and others.

If this cancer hadn’t interfered, I be much further along with the site, but I’ll get back to it as soon as we finish kicking this cancer’s butt to the curb.

It was my birthday gift to myself last year and will be my birthday gift to myself, again, this year.

As I said before, my birthday gift to you is access to the SBI Action Guide.

If you really want to do it yourself, and not make use of the tools that SBI offers, at least give yourself the advantage of the free Sitesell ebook downloads. Learn what you need to do, before you go searching for the tools to do it yourself.

I know I’d like to have back all those months I wasted trying other ways to build successful websites. My SBI sites may not be the prettiest, nor the flashiest, nor have the latest three-column designs, but they work. They attract thousands of visitors and they are easy to navigate. The only thing they lack is all the extra pages I have in my head and don’t have the energy to create right now, but that will be coming in the next few months as I continue to get stronger.

Now, it’s up to you.

Do you want to start an online business?

Tags: , , , , , ,

Do you need a job?

June 19, 2010 by JD · 2 Comments
Filed under: Business, Musings, Twitter 

I have been self-employed for most of my adult life. I like being in charge of what I do and responsible for what gets done, and what doesn’t.

During much of this time, I had a full- and/or part-time job, as well.

What can I say? I like working.

Over the years, I’ve talked to lots of people, both self-employed and folks with jobs. I find those who are self-employed are more in control of their lives and live under their own set of rules.

I’m like that.

If I want to take some time off in the afternoon and catch a movie matinee, I don’t have to ask an employer.

If I’m tired and want a nap, it’s okay.

If I want to play loud music and work all night, I can do it.

I really like being self-employed.

Yes, there are some down sides, too.

If something has to be done, I’m the one who has to do it, even if I don’t enjoy that particular task.

If something goes wrong, I can only look in the mirror and point a finger at myself.

The bills get paid first and if there’s any left over, then I get to spend some of it.

It’s hard to get and afford health insurance if you’re self-employed.

It can be harder to get a loan.

I think in a lot of ways, it’s a personality thing.

Some of us would chafe from living in the workforce harness all day for years on end. I just can’t imagine working in the same job, for the same company, for years or decades.

I admit it. I’m not the best employee in the world, and I like doing things my way.

I just don’t think I could ever work 20 years doing the same job, even with promotions. It’s just not how I’m wired.

There are some upsides to being self-employed.

I got to thinking about this when I saw a Sitesell tweet from Kevin that links to a blog post titled, “27 Reasons Why You Should Never Have a Job.”

I agree with most of those reasons and resonate with some of them.

Act on your dream!

JD

Tags: , ,

How to deal with distractions

January 28, 2010 by JD · 7 Comments
Filed under: Business, Family, Internet Marketing, Musings 

On another of my blogs, I recently wrote about how broadband makes a huge difference in online marketing.

In that post, I concentrated on the benefits of fast Internet access and how it helps to get more work done.

In this post, I’m going to look at the other side of the coin and how broadband Internet access throws up so many shiny red balls that tend to catch my attention and pull me from my work.

To be fair, life is not all about work and there should be a good balance between work and play, business and family, and even being at home and getting out in the world. I know those things.

What brings this all up is that I’ve been spending much of my time with my daughter and her family this month and I’ve encountered some things that have made it more difficult to focus on my work and to ignore the distractions.

1. Television – the great time waster.

For years, I could only see 3.5 channels on TV – NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS. I say 3.5 channels because I could only receive PBS part of the time.

When TV switched from analog to digital, I could see exactly 0 (yep, zero) channels. No TV!

For many people that would have been a disaster, but for me it helped to make more time to focus on my work.

Now, I don’t know how many channels are available here. There are channels I’ve never seen before and some of them catch my interest in ways I never would have imagined.

I was watching a show about rebuilding Stonehenge on the National Geographic channel. It was a fascinating story of how some folks built replicas of the Stonehenge monolithic rocks using foam and rebuilt what they think is a good replica of the original Stonehenge. I found that fascinating. *Poof* there goes an hour of my life. Was it educational? I think so. Did it help me get closer to reaching my goals? Not at all.

My daughter introduced me to a show called Cake Boss about some folks in New Jersey that have a bakery and specialize in some rather awesome cakes. Never in a million years would I have thought I’d find that interesting, but I did. The next thing I knew, I’d watched three episodes and another hour and a half had evaporated. Entertaining? Yes. Closer to achieving my dream? No.

I could go on and on. I bet I’ve wasted 30 or 40 hours this month, just watching TV. I’ve been watching old reruns of NCIS, Becker, Cheers, and lots of other old favorites. Why? I’m not really sure.

2. Internet video – both useful and an incredible time waster.

I have really mixed feelings about this one.

Now that I have access to broadband, I’ve discovered that I both like and loathe online videos, and I haven’t been good at separating the two.

I recently learned about Hulu.com and while I enjoy some of what it has to offer, it has cost me quite a few hours of productive work time.

For instance, I have watched six or seven episodes from season one of The A-Team and enjoyed all of them. Entertaining? You betcha. Helps me get closer to reaching my goals? Quite the opposite.

I have been a big fan of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis for several years. Since I didn’t have cable TV, the only way I could watch them was to rent them on Netflix.

While playing around on Hulu.com, I discovered that Amanda Tapping, who had been one of the co-stars in both Stargate series had a show of her own called Sanctuary. Three episodes were available on Hulu and I watched all of them. I liked the show so much that I added all of the episodes from season one of the series to my Netflix queue and eventually they’ll show up in my mailbox.

With broadband, I don’t have access to just three DVDs at a time, I can watch shows online from NetFlix and that’s a huge temptation.

Until this month, I had much less temptation to watch movies and TV episodes because I had made it a habit to do all my work first and would reward myself with a little TV (by watching DVDs from Netflix) while eating dinner.

Now, however, there is a huge number of shows and movies I’d love to watch and I don’t even have to wait the two days it normally takes to mail a DVD back and get the next one in my queue.

So, I’ve had to think about ways to deal with these distractions.

I realize that watching old reruns at random is a waste of my time and energy. I don’t think I’m going to have a difficult time tuning them out.

On the other hand, I’ve also discovered the lure of YouTube.

I will never get hooked on the mindless entertainment that is available on YouTube. I have no doubt about that.

However, I’ve discovered that YouTube has some interesting and useful content that I will watch and some of it may even be helpful in my business.

For example, I’m a huge fan of Napoleon Hill and his books Think and Grow Rich and Law of Success. But, until last week, I’d never seen a video of him. Quite by accident, I stumbled across a video of Mr. Hill talking about his initial meeting with Andrew Carnegie and how that launched his career devising and publicizing his personal success courses and philosophy.

Since I have some pages on my sites about Napoleon Hill, I added this video to a couple of them. For example, you can see that video on this page: Napoleon Hill – Think and Grow Rich – Law of Success.

I think that video actually adds something to the information about Mr. Hill.

So, while I’ll never waste any time watching videos of squirrels surfing or idiots doing stupid things, I do find value in some of the videos available on YouTube and I’ll be making use of some of them in the future.

One of the things I plan to do is create short videos of some of the business owners on Murphy Gold where they can talk about why they enjoy owning and operating the businesses they do. I think that will provide good information that some of their customers and prospects will enjoy learning.

I still have to learn how to create and edit these videos, but that’s going to be pretty easy since one of my granddaughters has a photography business and can take good videos with one of her cameras.

I have video editing software on my computer that I’ve never used, so it will be interesting to learn if this will be another distraction or a way to help promote my business and my client’s businesses.

So, perhaps I needed to get caught up in some of these distractions this month in able to sort out the useful from the shiny red balls that just lead me off track.

I can see how someone who doesn’t have a plan or goals to achieve could be dragged into hours and hours of wasted time.

It’s easy to do. Just veg out in front of the tube and let it feed nonsense into your receptors.

On the other hand, when I find something that matches the goals I have set for myself, I’m discovering a whole new world of information that can really be useful.

The hard part is to separate the two and not let myself be distracted by things that will never lead me one step closer to achieving my goals.

What about you?

How do you deal with distractions? Do you have plans and goals you want to achieve? Do they help you stay focused?

All the best,

JD

Tags: ,

Why does tomato soup taste better in winter?

December 11, 2009 by JD · Comments Off
Filed under: Musings 

And now, for something totally different than what I’ve been writing about lately.

I like soup.

I prefer to drink soup from a cup rather than eat it from a bowl using a spoon, unless it is full of big chunks of meat.

When I’m eating soup with a spoon, I enjoy the slurping sound I make when I’m trying to eat it before it’s really cooled down. I like my soup hot and I’ve been known to microwave it half through to heat it back up.

I don’t like cold or even cool soup.

My taste for soup changes depending upon the weather. When it’s warm outside, I prefer chicken noodle soup or cream of chicken.

However, when the temperature drops outside and my fingers and toes start to ache from the cold, there is only one soup I crave and that is tomato soup. I love tomato soup in the cold of winter, but can’t stand it the rest of the year.

I wonder why that is.

I don’t really like tomatoes.

I don’t like raw tomatoes, except when they’re on a hamburger or chicken sandwich. I will eat them in a salad, sometimes.

I like lasagna and spaghetti, but don’t eat either of them more than once or twice a year.

Tomatoes just don’t play an important part in my diet.

I’m craving tomato soup.

But, even so, yesterday and today I’ve been craving a hot cup of tomato soup. Yesterday, I treated myself to tomato soup and a baked chicken sandwich for lunch and enjoyed every bit of it.

I don’t normally eat lunch. Usually, I try for a good breakfast and then a good dinner, but lunch tends to leave me sleepy and non-productive for the next couple of hours.

That’s what happened yesterday. I worked for five or six hours and ate my delicious lunch. Then, I didn’t feel like doing anything and took a long nap for almost three hours.

Today, like yesterday and the day before, I feel like I’m running a low-grade fever with the itchy eyes, runny nose, and lack of energy. It doesn’t seem to be getting any worse and I don’t really feel sick, just not quite up to par.

So, can you guess what’s on my mind? That’s right. I’m looking forward to a hot cup, or maybe even two cups, of tomato soup this evening. I don’t know what I’ll have with it, but that doesn’t seem to be all that important. I’m looking forward to hot tomato soup on a cold day.

I wonder why that is.

What about you?

Does your taste in soup change with the season and the outside temperature?

Whatever you like during this time of the year wherever you live, enjoy some soup today!

;)

All the best,

JD

Tags: , ,

I am very grateful for all that I have – even in a bad year

November 28, 2009 by JD · 3 Comments
Filed under: Family, Friends, Holidays, Murphy NC 28906, Murphy North Carolina, Musings, Personal 

I’m not going to lie about it.

2009 has been a very difficult year for me, but it could have been much worse.

My home is not the home of my dreams, but it gives me a place to live until I can earn enough to buy or build the home I dream of.

This old house is where my parents retired in the early 1970s. They left Atlanta and moved to Murphy, NC. They loved living here, even when times were tough.

Pop died in the summer of 1991 and Mom died last year, just before Thanksgiving.

Both of them have been on my mind a lot this month.

Mom’s birthday was November 6; their anniversary was November 25; Thanksgiving was a couple of days ago. It’s been a month of memories and being thoughtful about what is important in life.

Both of them worked hard all their lives and were quite a bit healthier and stronger in their latter years than I am now. It gives me something to work towards – better health.

Both of them had serious health problems earlier in their lives and they still managed to mostly overcome them over time.

Pop broke his back when he fell off a crane onto a truck’s roof. For years he could do very little. Still, many years later, he could easily outwork me.

Mom had trouble with her legs for most of her life, but that didn’t stop her from doing what she wanted, until her cancer surgery caused nerve damage and she was no longer able to walk unassisted.

So, I can look back on my illness earlier this year and think “poor me” all I want, or I can continue to do what I can to get around and rebuild my strength.

Sometimes life just isn’t easy. It’s the challenges that make us stronger and help us develop real character.

So, maybe that’s what I’m working on now – character.

Money is tight, but I’ve managed to find something to eat for over 57 years while fending off everything that tried to eat me, so I guess that’s some measure of success.

(I’m not sure who said that originally, but I read it some time back and liked it enough to paraphrase it for myself.)

I love living here in Murphy. Sometimes it’s hard to earn a living here, but other people in other areas have had it tough, too. We do what we have to do to survive.

I’ve decided that I want to help others as I help myself and that’s why I’ve dedicated myself to building the best marketing system for locally-owned small businesses in Murphy, NC. You can see the start of it at Murphy Gold and Murphy Connections. Over time, it will get better and better and I look forward to helping small business owners in our little mountain town market their businesses to a wider audience.

While I may not have all I need right now, I do have a plan and I’m working on that plan every day. It gives me something to work towards and that’s important.

Thanksgiving was an interesting day. I spent the day alone, but I still had contact with family and friends online and over the phone.

Several friends called to see how I was doing and to wish me a happy holiday.

I was in touch with family even though I didn’t see them in person.

I was alone, but not lonely. Memories of past holidays gave me good feelings and I smiled quite a bit during the day.

Even though I may not be able to visit my brother and his family this year, I’ll think of them often.

I’m looking forward to Christmas breakfast at my daughter’s house and spending time with that branch of my family. Christmas will be here before we have a chance to turn around a few times.

Would I have enjoyed a house full of people and a table loaded with traditional Thanksgiving food this year? Of course, I would.

But, I’ve done that many times over the last few decades, so missing it now and then really isn’t such a big deal.

I’m grateful for all I have and I intend to redouble my efforts to rebuild my marketing business to where I’ll be enjoying prosperity instead of mere survival.

As we enter into this major winter holiday season, I hope you’ll reflect on all that you have and all the good memories of times and people who have helped shape your life.

We all have a lot to be thankful for.

All the best,

JD

Tags: ,

Handling interrupts when priorities change

October 28, 2009 by JD · 6 Comments
Filed under: Musings 

It’s been awhile since I’ve done any blogging, but I’m back and, hopefully, I’m going to have the time and energy to get lots done over the coming weeks.

I’m finally feeling better now that I’m past all my fall allergies. It’s amazing how much more I can get done when my head doesn’t feel like it’s going to explode!

So, what’s with the title of this blog post?

Sometimes life intervenes and we have to adjust our priorities to handle them. That’s why I’ve been mostly offline for the last week or two.

A few months ago, I received a notice from the NC government that they wanted to recoup all the money they spent last year for the few months Mom was in the nursing home before she died.

If that happens, I don’t know what I’m going to do. It looks like the only option will be to sell the house and land and find a new place to live.

The trouble is that I’ve been living here since the mid-1990s, ever since I was divorced.

I planned to stay for a few weeks and help Mom do some things around the house and property and then I was seriously considering moving back to Arizona.

That didn’t work out.

The longer I stayed here, the more I realized that Mom needed more help than I was aware of. That really got serious in 2002 following her cancer surgery. She was no longer able to care for herself and I made the decision to bring her back home and care for her.

So, I did that for over six years. She lived at home and I cared for her 24/7.

Last July, her health declined rapidly and there was no choice but to move her into the nursing home. I still don’t like it, but I had no choice.

She was there for a few months and died just before Thanksgiving, nearly a year ago.

Ever since, I’ve been trying to settle her estate and deal with lots of unexpected issues including some serious health problems of my own this year, a decline in my business income, increase in expenses, and one problem after another.

Sigh.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working around the clock to respond to a letter I received in early September from the NC Department of Health and Human Services.

I finally responded to that letter a couple of days ago and now we’ll see if they will give me a waiver on the thousands of dollars they want from Mom’s estate or if I’ll have to sell everything and leave.

If I had the money, I’d write a check and send it to them. I never wanted the state to pay for Mom’s care in a nursing home. In fact, I believe that I’ve saved the state of NC hundreds of thousands of dollars because I cared for Mom myself.

But, I don’t have the money.

During the years I cared for Mom, I fell farther and farther behind in my profession and I don’t think I’ll ever again be able to do professional computer consulting and database work. My health has declined to the point where I could not hold down a full-time job, even if I could find one around here.

So, I’ve done all I can do. Now, it’s just a matter of waiting to see what happens.

If they grant the waiver, I’ll be able to turn my full attention back to trying to earn a living. If not, I’ll disappear from all my online haunts for a few weeks while I throw out everything here and try to find a place to live and a way to pay for it.

If they insist on payment, maybe they’ll give me some kind of payment option and maybe they won’t.

I never expected that I’d ever be facing the possibility of the Sheriff selling Mom’s home on the courthouse steps, but that’s a distinct possibility in November.

Am I worried.

No. I’m scared.

But, it’s one of the things that life throws at us and we have to deal with them.

I’m hoping that 2010 will be a much better year than 2009. This has been the most difficult 12 months of my life and I’m hoping that things will turn around, soon.

I’m trying to keep a good attitude and continue to work, but it’s a struggle sometimes.

I hope your year is going better than mine!

All the best,

JD

Tags: ,

The Moving Wall is a moving experience

October 10, 2009 by JD · 4 Comments
Filed under: Murphy NC 28906, Murphy North Carolina, Musings 

I’m going to preface this by saying that since I was a teenager in high school I was very opposed to the war in Vietnam. I still hold that view.

Even so, I’ve never been one of those people who took it out on the people who served in the military in Vietnam.

It has been a long time since I really thought about the Vietnam War and that all changed this week.

The Cherokee Scout ran a series of articles about local people who served in the war and I was moved enough by one of them that I called him and thanked him for what he did. We had a pleasant conversation for the next 20 minutes. I already respected him a lot, but, now, even more.

(I won’t mention any names. This was between him and me.)

I was never in the military, but I worried about the draft all through high school.

Unlike many of my friends, I was not drafted, but they were and quite a few of them went to Vietnam.

On Friday, October 9, 2009, I went to see The Moving Wall in Murphy, NC.

(I uploaded some photos of The Moving Wall in Murphy, NC on MurphyConnections.com.)

Every volunteer I saw was friendly and helpful.

After walking down the flag-bedecked path to the Wall, located right next to the River Walk, we arrived at the booth where all guests were asked to sign the register.

I think one of my cousins was killed in the war, but he was not a close cousin and I didn’t know his name. When one of the volunteers asked if I was looking for anyone in particular, I told him my cousin’s last name. He looked in the huge book and found a number of people with that same name, but none of them were from the Atlanta area. So, I wasn’t going to look for a particular name on the wall.

(After talking with my brother this afternoon, I realized I was thinking of the wrong branch of the family. He told me the name of our cousin who died in Vietnam. I’m going to try to get back to the Moving Wall before they leave and see if I can find his name.)

I spent a few minutes just standing there looking at it.

The Moving Wall is longer than I thought, but only half as long as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.

I started walking down the Wall and looking at the names. At first, there are only a few names on each panel, but as you approach the center of the memorial, there are more and more names until the panels are full.

It affected me more than I thought it would. Even though I didn’t know anyone whose name was on that memorial, I had to stop along the way and read a few of the names and realize that these were real people who served and died in Vietnam.

Every now and then, someone would leave something stuck between two of the panels or something at the foot of the monument. There were photos of the people who had died, a few flowers, and even a pair of boots.

By the time I reached the end of The Moving Wall, I had tears in my eyes. I had to sit on one of the River Walk benches and let it all sink in.

At that moment, I had an entirely new way to look at the Vietnam War, and this time it was personalized by the names I read on that wall. Now, I understand the photos I’ve seen of people who visited the actual memorial in Washington.

I don’t know anyone on that wall, but others have friends, relatives, and people they served with memorialized there.

I felt a level of empathy for not just the names on the wall, but for the real people those names represent and for all the people who knew them.

It’s not just 58,000+ names, it’s hundreds of thousands of people who were personally affected by the war and the tragedy of so many lives cut short.

As I left, I stopped and thanked each volunteer I saw for helping to bring The Moving Wall to Murphy.

I realized that I was lucky and so were my friends. Of all the people I know who served in the Vietnam War, all of them came home alive. Some were radically changed and others were seriously wounded, but none of them died there.

Not everyone was that fortunate.

These words do not really represent how deeply I was moved by visiting the memorial, but they’re the best I can do.

I want to thank the Marine Corps League #1011, all the volunteers, and the sponsors, individuals, and businesses that contributed to bring The Moving Wall to Murphy.

If you haven’t visited, yet, you still have a couple more days.

All the best,

JD

Tags: , ,

Next Page »