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My 3 favorite Internet Marketing Resources

On June 13, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Hailey Rene
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1. Steve Scott Site
Despite that I can’t say this one’s awesomely alternative title more then once without getting my tongue tied in knots, I love reading this site’s awesome content. If you want to see truly epic content, check out any of the monday posts on this site, which could be made into small ebooks. Steve Scott is really great at giving away awesome material! The site is about living an internet lifestyle and discusses all sorts of methods of making money on the internet and working at home. One of my favorite posts: Master Document

2. Smart Passive Income
If you want a great example of a very successful and professional blog, check out this one. Pat Flynn, the blogger behind the site and its accompanying podcast, gives you all sort of great information on making a living online with passive income. My favorite post: His productivity podcast

3. Copyblogger
Lets face it, as bloggers we are also copywriters. We must know how to write content that is irresistible. This site will show you how to do that and more. I consider this one a must read for bloggers. One of my favorite posts: Work for 3 hours a day and get more done.

What are your must read blogs?

 

Jailbreak Disaster – TCP Internet Connection

On March 29, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Hailey Rene
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So I have an old iphone that is no longer being used as a phone (I now use a combo of Google Voice and Go Phone, but that is another post all together). Being a programmer (nerd!), I decided that I would try to jailbreak it. I have always wondered what went into jailbreaking and what you can do with a jailbroken phone, but never had the courage to jailbreak a live phone. But now, if I end up bricking the device, I wouldn’t care so much.

The first step was to do a bit of research. The advice of a couple sites said to update my phone to 4.2 then use green poisen to jailbreak. So I update the phone (which took a while) and downloaded Green Poisen. So far so good.

Then I tried to Jailbreak. I didn’t read the instructions quite right and the jailbreak failed. So I did a phone restore, which also took a while. Then I tried the jailbreak again and it still didn’t work. Grr. Back to instructions. I start the new restore and then hit youTube to figure out what is going wrong. But soon after starting the restore, my computer froze. Frozen Solid. The mouse wouldn’t even move. What happen to the days when Macs didn’t freeze?

I turn the computer off and back on again. It loads and I pull up itunes and restart the restore. But I get an error about my internet not connecting. It looked connected, but I couldn’t pull up a web page. Thinking that it was a firewall issue, I turn off both my incoming and outgoing firewalls. Still no connection. Can I ping out? Yes. Telnet? No. WTF?

Something I did broke my internet connection. So much for the worst being that my iphone is bricked. I plan to take it to the apple store soon to see if they can get it working again. In the meantime, Dell Mini 9 it is.

Note: The missing step in the instructions was to turn off my phone before starting the jailbreak process. You are apparently suppose to turn it on in a particular way.

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Revisiting Random Task

On March 19, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Hailey Rene
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So I’ve been using my random task chooser for a few days now. (In fact, it just told me write this.) It has evolved over the course of the week to become an actual to do list manager. Here is its evolution:

  • It started as just a list of tasks and the ability to view them all or choose one randomly. I put in my core tasks and it told me what to do. No thinking.
  • Then I wanted to temporarily not work on one of the tasks that I had in the list. I wanted to complete a different task first since they were related. This led me to add a On Hold feature which removes that task from the random selection.
  • Later I actually finished a task. Originally I was just going to delete completed tasks, but I decided it would be good to keep a record of them. This led to “Mark as Complete” and “View Completed” features being added.
  • So at this point, working was nice, but planning wasn’t since I just had a long list of tasks. I ended up adding a tagging feature so I can see a subset of the list. Much easier to plan and make sure I am not missing any tasks from the list.
  • These features lasted me a couple days until I realised that on some days I wasn’t getting to things that I need to do every day. I decided that there needed to be a way to guarentee that I do a few specific tasks at the beginning of my day before I start the random task method of working. Therefore I added a function that would loop through all of the tasks tags with ‘daily’.
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Removing Choice

On March 16, 2011, in Life, by Hailey Rene
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I have been experimenting with a new productivity method that uses random selection to improve productivity. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get stuck in the “What should I do now?” phase and avoid working by avoiding selection. To combat this, I wrote a simple command line utility where I can add in all of my regular repeating tasks and a priority and then it will select one for me to do. The rule that I have set for myself is that whatever it chooses, I have to work on unless there is some reason that I can’t.

The result so far has been good. This morning, I got up and made a list of the must do asap tasks, such as returning calls and a task that had a deadline today. I did these first. Then I opened up my task selector and started pounding away on my regular tasks. It has worked very well.

I still have a few finishing touches to put on my utility, then I will post it so that others can try it out. I also hope to make it into an actual app so that the non-techies can try it to.

Do you ever have procrastination by non-choice?

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Ubuntu Unity

On March 14, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Hailey Rene
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So after a disaster with attempting to Jailbreak my phone, which somehow managed to kill the internet connection on my mac, I decided to revive my Ubuntu machine. I had been running 10.4, but got crazy one day and decided to try Kubuntu. Well Kubuntu and my Dell mini 9 didn’t get along. It was the first release of Kubuntu Netbook so I think there were a few bugs that needed to be worked out of the system.

Anyway, yesterday I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my little computer. For those who don’t know, 10.10 introduced a new interface called Unity to the Netbook version of Ubuntu. Well, it’s not very good at this point. I really need to stop trying first generation features.

Here are a couple issues I have had:

  • The Unity Lancher can’t be hidden. – Come on people. It’s a netbook. We need to save screen real estate.
  • The Application Launcher is super slow. – I mean really slow. It also doesn’t update the apps reliably. I have to do a search for newly installed apps. And some apps just refuse to launch.
  • The launcher uses tons of CPU – There is a memory leak that causes this, according to a bug ticket I found. I can temporarily fix this by typing ‘pkill mutter’ in the terminal.
  • Where did applets go? – I miss my Hamster time tracker and googly eyes!

I have yet to decide whether I’m just going to tough it out till 11.4 in april or go back to the long term support version which doesn’t have Unity. According to various reports, many of the issues above will be fixed in 11.4, so maybe I’ll wait the month out and upgrade to 11.4. I still won’t have my googly eyes though.

On the up side, I am enjoying Ubuntu again. I’m pretty upset with Apple right now after the jailbreak fiasco. I love the fact that in Ubuntu all of the software is open source. If an app doesn’t have a feature I need, I can just add it (well, if that app is python, since that is the language I actually know. ) I’ve already started working on my own branch of Getting Things Gnome, hopefully I can submit a patch soon.

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Be Thankful

On February 2, 2011, in Mental, by Hailey Rene
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This post was originally published in Jan 2010 on my old blog. I still like it so I decide to move it over to this one.

Look around you. Look at your life and everything in it. What do you love? What are you thankful for? Really think about this question for a minute.

Actually stop reading this blog entry and write a list of everything that comes to mind that you are thankful for.

Seriously… do it now.

Done? Great. How do you feel? Got a smile on your face? Feel a little bit happier?

Remember that no matter where you are in life or what is going on around you, there is always something for you to be thankful for. You’re breathing, right? That’s a good place to start.

Here are a few that I came up with to be thankful for:

  • I have someone special in my life.
  • I have family who will always support me.
  • I make a decent living and can afford to live comfortably.
  • I have a wonderful opportunity to learn more about a topic that interests me.
  • I just ate a good meal.
  • I own a nice comfy blanket on a cold day.
  • I have chocolate pudding to eat for dessert :)
  • and yes, I’m breathing.

I’d love to hear what you came up with.

 

Pipe Dream?

On February 2, 2011, in Life, by Hailey Rene
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This post was originally posted on my old blog in Jan 2010. I’m posting it here as a tribute to how far I’ve come and how far you can come in a year.

So One thing that I am really struggling with is coming to terms with the idea of making a living. The ‘what’ is simple. Making a Living is making enough money so that you can afford a house of a given size, food, and the lifestyle that you want.

Okay. Great. But how?

The traditional way (and the one that I am currently partaking in) is to get a job and spend X number of hours a day doing work for other people. Most of the time this is work that you really don’t care about. On top of that, unless you get a raise you pretty much know what you will be making for the year. There is no room for extra (unless you work for a commission).

The other way is to work for yourself. You can either start a company and hire the people who take the traditional way. Or you can do something even more non-traditional, such as be an internet marketer or a performance artist.

For me, working for myself sounds super appealing. Here is why:

  1. I don’t like sitting in the same place every day. If you work for yourself, you can move around and work from different locations. This might be a silly reason to put as number one, but it really is important to me. My current job would be 10 times better if I could choose where I did it.
  2. You could do something that interests you. If you work for yourself, you more than likely won’t start a company that you hate. Yes, there may be work that you don’t like to do, but you will at least be interested in the topic. That will help drive you forward.
  3. I don’t want to worry about money. If I am successful in creating my own company, I won’t have to worry about things like being fired. (Well, usually. Steve Jobs may disagree).
  4. You have the flexibility to take time off and travel more than you do in a traditional job.

Here is the situation that I would like. I work all year creating something of value. Then I launch it. I make my year’s income in a week. Hopefully I can make more than a year’s income. Then I take some time off and travel. I may learn something new. Then I go back to work creating the next thing. Rinse and repeat. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Don’t think that it could happen? Lets look at the numbers.

I currently make $40,000 a year as a computer programmer working 4 days a week. I will use that as my base salary in doing these calculations.

If I have a $1000 product, I would need to sell 40 of them.
If I have a $500 product, I would need to sell 80 of them.
If I have a $250 product, I would need to sell 160 of them.
If I have a $100 product, I would need to sell 400 of them.

Do you think those numbers are unreasonable? For a year? If you have a really good product, selling 400 of them for $100 each would not be that hard. The key is that you need a really good product.

Now take a different approach. Sell a monthly subscription service. Maybe that is a membership site where you provide weekly teaching on a topic that you are knowledgeable in. It could be a subscription to a product that you sell (think ‘Wine of the Month Club’ style). It might be a website that is a really good tool that people really find useful.

Okay, now say that you charge $20 a month for it. That is $240 a year. Can you get 167 people to buy this product or service? Plus, if it is a super good product people will keep using it. You won’t have to worry about making $40,000 in new sales the next year because some will follow over from the previous year. Your income can grow.

I pay for a NetFlix membership, a World of Warcraft subscription, an email newsletter service, an announce-my-blog-post service, a membership forum, and probably some other things that I am not thinking about right now. People do actually buy that type of thing.

Well there is a lot that I need to do and learn before I get there. But no.. its not a pipe dream. I just need an idea for a great product or service. Working on that one…