Vacation Is Over – Time to Work

So it’s been a while since I posted here, or anywhere for that matter. I haven’t been posting on the PAL Forums, or on any site really. I’ve been getting a lot of messages on skype recently, most of them start with, “dude, where have you been”? So I thought I would update everyone here. Oh also, slight brag, this site has gotten over 100,000 visits in the last 12 months. So thanks to all the reader who check out my ramblings. I promise I’ll try and post more in the coming week. For now, I’ll just make a quick post to let everyone know what I’ve been up to.

Massive Change – Big Gamble

I left my corporate job almost a year ago now. I became a full time affiliate marketer, and most importantly I went back to being a full time Father of 6. Over the last decade, I’ve been forced to miss so many ball games, choir concerts, etc – It sucked, and part of the reason I left was to spend more time with the family. We have to sons graduating and leaving for college this year. So it’s been time well spent.

In January, I sold all of my major websites and affiliate accounts. I cannot disclose the exact numbers, but I was happy with the final deal and so was the buyers. This has slowed me and the wife to pay off our debts, do some thing we’ve been wanting to do for years, and most of all relax for a while. for years I’ve been working a full time job, and running a large network of sites, and occasionally taking on SEO clients. Without such a large network of sites, we have been able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor so to speak. It’s also given us a chance to plan out our next projects, and do it right.

Like many webmaster/affiliates, when we started into this game, we did it because we needed more income and stability. One of the major hurdles we had to get through was developing websites in a super competitive markets, on a very very small budget. It wasn’t easy, and at time I thought it was almost hopeless. But after some breakthroughs and some help from mentors, we finally started making money, which allowed us to re-invest, and make more money. But there was always an issue of balancing the income and deciding how much to re-invest. Like most people, some things worked out, and some didn’t. But with each failure, we learned lessons that proved priceless.

New Markets and New Plans

So since we have money int he bank, and we have taken our dream vacation. We have been gearing up and preparing for a lot of long days and a lot of hard work. This doesn’t scare us, and honestly we have been getting sorta bored just doing w/e we want with no real goals. Also as I mentioned above, we now have the resources to tackle any project and any market we want. So after a lot of discussions and a lot of research, we settled on our next few projects.

Here are a few of the things we have going on, some of them I cannot get into detail about, but as soon as I can, I’ll be posting about it here.

1. We bought a company  – We have acquired a medium sized company that specializes in digital products. We mostly just wanted the assets of the company, and I’m super excited about the foundation which the former owners built. We are sorta tearing everything apart, and putting it back together again. The final product(s) should be amazing. These are almost all digital products, with the potential to be used by other webmasters and especially affiliates.

2. Ebooks and Video – I finally finished several ebooks which I have been working on for over 2 years. I never had time, or at least I never took the time to finish these books and video, but it was one of the first projects I wanted to complete. We have been using independent focus groups to review all of these, and the feedback was great, and assured me I was going in the right direction. These books and video’s will cover a wide range of topics, and they include usable data, and examples which I always find extremely valuable.I’ll be making these available on my site SEO Playbook – 75% of the things will be free, and the rest which are much more advanced will be available to buy – The topics range from learning to setup good Email Campaigns, to Advance PPC Tactics.

3. New Gaming Projects – Gambling is in my blood, and Gambling has made me wealthy. So I’m sure it’s not a surprise that we already have a few poker and casino projects going. We actually already had a Casino site, but as I said we sold all the poker sites. The casino site we have been very very lucky with, as I’m not a big casino guy, but thankfully my wife is a gambling addict (jk honey) – Again, now that we have the resources and experience, we have taken out time to plan out the design, and framework like we have never been able to do before. We found an excellent designer (two actually) and a great programmer to help us create my dream affiliate website backed using wordpress. We are working on adding a ton of options no other company that I know of has, all of which are essential to an affiliate that knows what they are doing.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great affiliate templates out there. But having a designer/programmer make a nice pretty template is cool and all, but it takes an affiliate to take it over the top IMO. We will be giving copies of this out soon for beta testing, but as I said it’s by far the most advanced and flexible backend I’ve ever seen. It will also allow each webmaster to easily customize their front end design, so you don’t have 50 other websites looking like yours. To me this is a huge issue, and one I can;t understand why companies don’t seem to get.

Anyway, let me know if you want to help us in the beta launch, just leave me a comment and hit me on Skype.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. the wife also had my new office finished, and it is AWESOME! Has a nice big HDTV, Satellite, and we added a very comfy futon a few weeks ago. It is easily the coolest office I’ve ever had. It also gives us a nice quiet place to brainstorm and work.

Also, one more thing. I finally got my kids interested in doing some type of web work. My son Lance, has created his very own site w/ very little help from me. So I have to show it off, the site is Endless Playlist – the site is all about the latest Indie Music scene bands and albums. So I’m super proud of him.