by Kevin Fleming on April 8, 2010
Mobile blogging has always been something that I have avoided. I couldn’t even picture myself attempting to write a blog post on my iPhone, considering that I have problems with 140 character tweets and text messages. The iPad however, for me and many others is a complete game changer.
I’ve had 6 days now to play with the iPad and I find that I use it more and become more productive with it every day. Although this isn’t going to replace my desktop, or even my laptop immediately, there are plenty of things that I’ve found the iPad to be very useful for.
- Idea visualization with apps like Adobe ideas, Sketchpad HD and Keynote.
- GTD and daily organization.
- Blogging (I wrote this post on my iPad)
- Emailing (much easier to write comprehensive emails then on the iPhone)
Although I do have a MacBook Pro, I don’t really consider that a truly mobile device considering it is probably 5 times heavier than the iPad and much more of a hassle to lug around. I was pretty skeptical of the iPad from it’s conception but after nearly a week of use – I’m sold.
by Kevin Fleming on December 28, 2009
Every year I make a few fairly modest New Year’s Resolutions. I try to keep them pretty reasonable and have seemed to be able to follow through for the most part in previous years. When I look back on 2009, I’m pretty proud because it was somewhat of a transformational year for myself and my business.
At the beginning of 2009 my business wasn’t very diversified I was mainly making money from one TV / entertainment related site and two different advertisers. This was a big problem however because if one of these companies pulled their advertising I would have lost 50% of my revenue overnight. After quite a few sleepless nights, I forced myself to start 3 new sites / blogs in different niches in the hope of diversifying my business. Now going into 2010 I’m in a much better position than during the beginning of 2009 and now I can focus on expanding (getting an actual office) and bringing on some full time employees.
[click to continue…]
by Kevin Fleming on November 2, 2009
Today Ford reported a nearly 1 billion dollar profit for the third quarter of 2009, something that I’ve seen coming for months mainly because they were the only company out of the big three that refused to take the poisonous TARP money. Without getting too political I think the whole “it’s too big to fail classification” is a joke in a free market economy. Ironically many of the large companies we have today were started in a recession, because failing companies during a recession pave the way for innovation.
Not only did Ford not take government money, they have a phenomenal product line up, and great marketing, something that the other two “American” car companies lack. You can really tell that Ford genuinely believes in the products they make, and their website clearly demonstrates that. Ford’s website delivers a clear message – American cars are back, more fun and more fuel efficient than ever. The site has big, bold and exciting images of their product line up, and plays on simplicity, as seen below:
[click to continue…]
by Kevin Fleming on October 29, 2009
I keep trying to get this site going, only to find myself completely indulged and overwhelmed with a new project, which leaves me wondering… how do all of these “make money online gurus” that are apparently making so much money, ever have to time share their expertise with you on a daily basis?
The truth is that most of them are just teaching you from “theory” and haven’t ever made any real money online, or at least not a full time income. They are making most of their money off of YOU by creating false hope and unrealistic expectations. One of the main reasons I started my this site was out of frustration of all of these other sites I kept seeing telling people how easy it is to make money online.
It’s not easy to build a legitimate online business! PERIOD.
I’ve never made an easy dime in my life and even if it seems like your making easy money when you actually go and look back you’ve probably done a ton of work over time to get to that point.
[click to continue…]
by Kevin Fleming on September 25, 2009
One of the first, and most important things I figured out when I started blogging full time is that hiring a team to write for you can be much more profitable than doing all of the writing yourself. Two or three writers can manage to crank out way more content than I could flying solo. The best part is that the writers begin to pay for themselves very quickly, here’s why:
- Having multiple writers allows me to increase the content of my sites at 2 – 5x the rate that I could when writing articles myself (depending on how many writers I hire). More content and more frequent updates equals more traffic which leads to more revenue.
- I now have more time to spend on marketing and promotion. Many successful bloggers will tell you that when first starting a new site, 70% or more of your time should be spent on marketing and promotion.
Many people decide not to hire writers because they worry about the quality of the writing. My philosophy has always been that if I can do it myself, I can probably hire someone to do it better than I can, for less than the cost of my time. The trick is to give the people that work for you all of your expectations up front, and not to settle with anything less than what you outlined initially. If the writer ends up writing on the wrong topic, make them rewrite it. If the article isn’t formatted correctly, make them reformat it etc.. There are always going to be bad hires out there but most people do just fine with clear instructions.
[click to continue…]
by Kevin Fleming on September 23, 2009
It's important that your site stays up when you get a large influx of visitors.
When starting a new website or blog the one thing you want to get right the first time around is hosting. One of the biggest headaches I had when my sites started to take off was finding quality hosting that had good support and could keep my sites up with a growing number of visitors every day.
This could have been completely avoided however I didn’t do the proper research and paid for it dearly.
I signed up with a really bad host called MindOnTheNet (I’m not even going to link to them) which I’m convinced is run by some guy out of his moms basement. My sites would be down for an hour or two almost daily and support was almost non-existent.
During the downtime, one of my sites was being featured on the front page of Digg and even got picked up by Slashdot. Needless to say the host couldn’t handle that kind of traffic (he couldn’t keep my site up with no traffic at all, let alone 40,000 visitors a day.) and I lost a ton of free publicity. I then spent the next 2 months trying to find a quality host. I must have switched hosts about 4 times before I found a decent one.
[click to continue…]
by Kevin Fleming on September 22, 2009
Your mindset is the most important driving
force or engine behind your business.
For those of you that are friends with me on Facebook, you may have noticed I have a little saying under my profile picture:
“Every morning I wake up with guns blazing, ready to take on the world – if need be.”
I’m a firm believer in keeping yourself motivated and believe that to be successful with whatever venture in life you’re perusing you first need to have the right mindset. When you’re an entrepreneur you need to be ready to fail (possibly many times) before you succeed. You need to expect to fail, and have to continually be persistent, which requires a different mindset then you would have at the standard 9-5 job.
What The Right Mindset Has Done For Me
I guess I should start out by sharing what having the right mindset has done for me, since this is my first post for the site and some of you don’t know me personally. I attribute most of my success to my mindset. Right now I’m 22 years old and I have enough money in the bank to go wherever I want and really do whatever I want (within reason). I have a supportive family but wasn’t given anything from a financial perspective, besides a computer from my grandfather when I was 12 years old – which changed my life (but that’s another post).
[click to continue…]
