Bruce Wayne by Day, Batman at Night

February 3, 2011 by

The key to success with any business is to put in the hours. Anyone who claims you can work 2 hours a day online and build a successful business is full of bs. If you get really lucky you can make a “living” but that is far from running a successful business in my book at least. If you really want to make it big, you need to be Bruce Wayne during the day, and Batman at night.

I still manage to maintain a very comfortable work / life balance following this routine, take lots of vacations and avoid working on weekends.

However – my philosophy has always been, if you’re going to take the time to do something, do it right – don’t waste your time giving it any less than 110% of what you have to give.

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I’ll Be Home For Christmas (But Until Then I’m Off To The Florida Keys!)

December 17, 2010 by

As many of you know I live in the northeast, and this winter has been off to a brutal start.

People often ask me why I live in the northeast when I could run my business from anywhere in the world. There are a few factors that keep me here, mainly my family but I also love the variety of seasons. I’ve had the privilege of traveling to many parts of the country but have yet to find somewhere with a better balance of all four seasons. I’m not opposed to having a vacation house somewhere else but I for now I’m fairly content with where I spend most of the year.

However every now and then I need a break from the cold and a few days my girlfriend sent me a text saying that she wished we could go somewhere warm for her winter break (she’s still in college). Sounded to me like the perfect excuse to get away for a few days and I think I managed to pull it off. I made reservations at a beautiful resort in Key West, literally 1000 feet from the southern most part of the continental United States. Hopefully this gives us the best chance to escape the cold without leaving the country.

So I’ll be home for Christmas – but until then I’m off to the Keys!

Why I’m Removing Twitter From All of My Sites

December 14, 2010 by

A few days ago I decided to take some time and focus on increasing the speed and load time of my sites. To accomplish this I used the popular Firebug addon for Firefox alongside of the Google Page Speed addon which analyzes every element of a webpage and gives you performance recommendations.

Even though my sites are on dedicated hosting and I have spent a lot of time on optimization after I ran the test my pages would only score 75 / 100 at BEST.

This bothered me because my competitors were scoring much higher than that, and Google is now factoring in site speed to some degree so it’s more important than ever to have a quick site.

After adding W3 Total Cache and doing more optimization I raised my score 7 points to 82/100, however this was still lower than many of my competitors so I decided to dig a little deeper. I noticed that the “tweet this” button at the top of each post (you can see an example at the top of this post because I haven’t removed it on this site yet) was having a fairly dramatic impact on my sites speed so I wanted to see what would happen if I removed it.

Once I removed the tweet button from the equation my score jumped from 82/100 to 89/100 and my pages loaded 25% faster!

Going forward I’m just going to have a self hosted static Twitter button on all of my sites, so technically I’m removing Twitter but still linking out to it. Hopefully one day, when the fail whale is an endangered species the fully functioning Twitter button and widgets can return – but until then – good riddance.

Has Twitter (or other third party services) impacted your site’s performance? If so what have you done about it?

Affiliate Summit West – Vegas 2011

December 10, 2010 by

This morning I finally booked my flight to Vegas for Affiliate Summit West 2011. What’s really incredible is just how much Affiliate Summit has grown since I first attended in 2007 and it seems like now it almost always sells out.

I’m going to have to make attending more of these conferences a New Years Resolution for 2011 because the networking opportunities alone are invaluable.

I’m staying at the Palazzo, which was recommended by quite a few people, and it turns out the conference is right across the street. I’m arriving on the 9th of January and heading out on the 12th. If you want to meet up, let me know!

Also – I was interviewed on JonathanVolk.com today so I want to welcome everyone coming in from that.

Stop Playing T-Ball With Your Business and Shoot For The Major Leagues

November 2, 2010 by

If you’ve ever read a book on how to start a successful business you’ve probably been told to “set realistic goals that you know you can accomplish”. Well that’s great – for those who aren’t entrepreneurial. Many entrepreneurs (including myself) aren’t satisfied with being mediocre at something and in my book “realistic” and “mediocre” essentially mean the same thing.

Here’s the problem – realistic goals don’t get you to the big leagues. In baseball if you set realistic goals you play little league and that is about it – you never pursue it any further because hitting the majors just isn’t realistic.

Don’t Nickel and Dime Yourself.

I used to set realistic goals, and I accomplished them. One day I started setting ridiculously high goals, and guess what? I accomplished those as well. Then it all seemed to click. I realized that what seemed “realistic” to me was simply what I already knew how to achieve. My unrealistically high goals weren’t really unrealistic at all I just simply didn’t know how to achieve them and had to make myself work harder along the way to figure it out.

Why waste time focusing on increasing your revenue by 10% over a 3 month span when you can shoot for 100% and push yourself to really innovate – many brick and mortar business rules don’t apply on the internet and this starts with scalability.

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Become a Master At Monetizing Your Existing Traffic

October 8, 2010 by

Some of you may already be sitting on a gold mine, you just don’t know it yet.

Most people are constantly trying to build traffic to their site because in general more traffic equals more revenue. I think that many of us get caught up in this endless process and don’t even realize that it’s possible to dramatically increase a sites revenue without any increase in traffic, simply by optimizing pages and testing various ads, new products, and new affiliate offers.

John Chow (who I enjoyed hanging out with on the beach a few weeks ago, great guy) is probably the most well known master of monetization and claims to make over $40,000 a month from his blog simply by continuing to better optimize ads and affiliate offers for his existing traffic. This may seem like a lot, especially when you look at his traffic numbers however I actually know a few people who are making more than that per month with half of the traffic.

Let me show you how you can start optimizing your site. By using these methods you will generate more revenue almost overnight. This method works really well with blogs, but you can easily see how it could be applied to an e-commerce site as well.

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