Entries Tagged 'Clarkes Thoughts' ↓

Well I’ll be the first to say that I’ve definitely lost some of my focus on this blog this year.  I’m not sure when I’ll get back to some consistent posts on topics related to the web and much more, but I hope to be back posting regularly by the end of summer or early fall.

I’m currently spending most of my time researching various different internet marketing, seo, ppc, and email marketing techniques that I’m currently implementing on some of my own sites and pretty much all of the sites that I work with at my day job.  It’s a constant learning process as things are always changing but I honestly love doing it and learning all that I can.  In addition I’ve also been spending some type cranking out some Ebay affiliate sites with PHPBay an Ebay auction plugin for Wordpress that allows you to build your own niche Ebay Store with wordpress and the Ebay Affiliate program.  It’s an awesome plugin that I highly recommend considering that it’s only $49.95 for unlimited sites and it doesn’t take long to recoup that investment.  More information the phpBay pro wordpress plugin for Ebay.

Life Changing Events

Ok so here is the big news that I’m overly excited about.  I actually found out about 3 weeks ago that I’m going to be a father for the first time in my life!  My wife Amber and I are expecting to have our first child in early February.  It’s definitely going to be a huge addition in our lives, but we’re both so happy right now and the next 7 months should definitely be an exciting journey.  I’m already getting the question on if I’d rather have a boy or a girl and honestly it doesn’t matter to me because the only thing that I care about is that we have a healthy baby.  I’ll be blessed and honored to have a baby boy or a girl!

Expect more updates on this exciting time in my life over the next few months and be on the lookout for some quality posts on a variety of different topics as well.

Well it’s that time of the year again and I’m off to vacation with my wife Amber in the morning. Last year we went out to Los Angeles but this year we decided to switch it up and head to Florida. We’re actually going to Marco Island, Florida and we’ll be staying at the Hilton Marcos Island Beach Resort.

I’m really just excited to relax and hang out on the beach in some warm weather and enjoy some quality time with my wife. The last month for me has been a very long one as I’ve experienced some changes in my life that I wasn’t really expecting so I’m definitely looking forward to this time away on vacation.

I’ll be back in a week and I’ll definitely add a follow up post with some photos of the area down there. I’d better get to bed though as I’ve got to get up for a 6AM flight in a few hours.

On a side note I signed up with CX Digital this week and I’m very impressed with their affiliate network.  They’ve got an awesome interface and I’m really excited to work with them more once I get back from vacation.  So if your looking for another quality network, then I’d recommend them from my experience thus far and reviews from several others as well.

Have a good week because I know I am while I’m enjoying myself in Florida!

Well I’m getting ready to head to California in the morning, I’m looking forward to the warmer weather since it’s about 10 degrees right now in Kansas City.

Anyways today is the 9 year anniversary of my wife and I getting together on top of being married almost 4 years.  I’d just like to tell her that I love her very much and cannot imagine what my life would be like without her.  I’m definitely a lucky guy and I look forward to many more years together with her.

I’m looking forward to getting back to blogging regularly once I get back from my trip, until then have a good one.

Well now since it’s been about a month since the last time I posted here I figured that I should give an update of what’s going on with me. The bottom line is that I feel like I’ve got a lot of good content that I’d like to write here but time seems to be an issue for me right now.

I’m having a lot of fun working on my different affiliate campaigns and I’ve definitely learned quite a bit over the last few months about affiliate marketing. I’d also like to mention that NeverBlueAds is one of the best affiliate marketing programs around. I’m continuing to have great success with them. I’m also in the midst of trying to learn ASP.net for my day job as me and 2 other members of my team look to build an awesome web app that will hopefully be launched later this year. It’s definitely been a challenge, but I look forward to becoming fluent in Asp.net.

I’ve also been in the process of trying to do my own taxes and let me tell you that’s been a barrel of fun. If you’d like to know the secret to an exciting Friday night just buy the 2008 Ernst & Young Tax Guide and spend the night reading about tax laws and you’ll see what I mean. I don’t know how accountants do it day in and day out, but I know that’s definitely not a job that I’d ever want to do.

One recommendation that I do have to make though is for you to see the movie Juno. I saw it about 3 weeks ago and it’s by far one of the best movies that I’ve seen in the last few years. It’s definitely the complete package from the script, to the acting, and everything else in between. Next time you go to the movies go check it out and I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Well now that I’ve given a brief update on what has been going I’ll definitely get back to posting on a more frequent basis. That’ll probably be next week though as I’m heading to Los Angeles this weekend for a short vacation with my brother and parents to check out the Nascar race.

Well my wife somehow got me to agree to getting another dog. I’ve already got one named Ernie, but she thought that he needed a friend. So after a few days of convincing she came home from the pet store with Gracee.

So far she’s been a lot of work but luckily per the agreement with my wife she is doing most of the work with her although I try and help out as much as I can. She is a really sweet dog so far and I’m sure that her and Ernie will be the best of friends when she gets a little older. Overall I think it’ll be good for him to have another dog to play with and I’m sure they’ll have a lot of fun and possibly get into some trouble as well.

PepperJamNetwork Launches
In other news I’m still working pretty hard at my affiliate marketing efforts and I just joined the pepperjamNETWORK affiliate program and I just got activated today. So far my early impressions of the program are extremely positive and they definitely put together a great site to cater to their affiliates. Overall they’ve got a nice selection of programs to promote starting out and their site is extremely well thought out and has a ton of great features for affiliates to use. Since I’m pretty new to the network so far, I don’t have an extensive review, but I’m looking forward to writing one a few weeks down the road when I’ve got a little more experience with the program. So if you haven’t head on over and check out the PepperJamNetwork.

Well another year is over and a new one has begun with me reflecting on a lot of things in my life. It’s hard for me to believe that this time 10 years ago I was a junior in high school. Man it’s amazing how fast time flies by sometimes.

As I look back at 2007 I had a lot of great things happen to me and unfortunately some that I wish hadn’t. Back in August I put a list of goals on here that I wanted to reach by the end of the year. Well Here is how I came out on completing these.

• Increase My Affiliate Income - I did ok here, but I’m not going to tell you how much I made because that’s classified! This is going to be probably 80% of my focus this year, so I’m definitely going to invest a lot of time to really grow this into a success for myself.  As I progress throughout the year I’ll share more information and give some tips.  I still see a lot of doubt in people who think I can’t make a substantial additional income online and that drives me everyday to prove them wrong.  I don’t care what anyone thinks, I will be very successful this year, because I refuse to give up no matter what.

• Improve My Web Design Skills - Unfortunately I wasn’t able to spend alot of time improving my design skills, but I’ve been doing a lot of usability analysis on the web to find out what does and does not work. As I continue to do this this year I look for it to greatly increase my skills as to how effectively design and layout a site.

• Learn Some Application Development - I just haven’t had anytime to venture into this area yet and I really don’t see a great amount of time being dedicated this year. I do find it to be an interesting subject buy not nearly as much as internet marketing and pay per click. Most of my application development will be done at my day job as we are looking to build a great online travel application.

• Increase My Knowledge of SEO and PPC - I’ve put a ton of time into this over the last 6 months and it’s definitely starting to pay off. I’m becoming more and more efficient in quickly launching effective PPC campaigns that convert. Over the next year I plan on continuing to learn as much as I can about each because they both hold massive importance when it comes to internet marketing for years to come.

• Attract More Subscribers to My Blog - This hasn’t happened as I would have liked over the last few months. I’m going to try and come up with some ideas to truly make this an effective resource with my readers. I think this will go hand in hand with my increased knowledge as I focus on particular areas throughout the year. I’ll also probably launch a completely new design sometime in the summer, because this design could be so much better.

• Get Back Into Physical Shape - I did a little better during the last few months but I really need to do better. So starting this Monday I’m going back to working out hopefully up to 5 days a week. I’ve even started cutting Dr. Pepper out of my diet, although it’s been harder than expected I still may have one every now and then. Overall I do plan on getting myself into great shape this year because I’ve got to be ready for softball season. I used to be pretty fast and I’ve got to get that back because my wife seems to think that I lost a step from my younger days!

• Spend More Time with My Wife - I’m still not doing as good as I could here. I need to balance my time spent online and that spent with her. I learned the hard way last month that you need to not take your time with loved ones for granted. So this year I’m going to spend a lot of quality time with my wife doing all kinds of things and I’m really looking forward to it.

So I hope that you’ve got your goals ready for 2008, because if you don’t then you definitely need to make a list. I’ve got a whole year this time, so I plan on accomplishing everything that I set out to and I hope that you do as well.

I hope that you’ve had a Merry Christmas if you take part in celebrating the holiday. I just got home from visiting my family and overall I had a great Christmas in light of some unfortunate circumstances over the last few weeks.

Unfortunately a little over two weeks ago my grandpa passed away unexpectedly and it was definitely pretty tough for me. This was initially very hard for me for a couple of different reasons. I had a great relationship with my grandpa and I’ve got a ton of great memories that I’ll always hold dear to my heart. The hardest part though is the fact that I hadn’t been home in awhile to see him or my grandma and I think in a way that I took for granted that they would just be there the next time that I made it home. They last time I actually spoke to him was last August when he and my grandma called to wish me happy birthday. I spent the days after his passing feeling guilty for not keeping in touch more than I had been but finally I came to a realization. Even though I hadn’t seen him as much as I should have he knew that I loved him and we’ll always have numerous great memories of each other. Grandpa I miss you dearly and I look forward to seeing you again some day and I’ll cherish all of our memories until then.

Here are some best memories I have of my grandpa

1. My brother and I spending weeks at my grandparent’s house during the summer to go golfing with grandpa and our shopping trips for new school clothes.
2. He was at almost every organized sporting event that I participated in growing up to support me.
3. His funny stories - It didn’t matter if he had already told the story a 100 times he still told it each time with the enthusiasm of the first time.
4. The great vacation he and grandma took my brother and me on when we were young kids.
5. Going out to dinner with he and grandma. I could spend 2 or 3 hours just sitting and having a conversation with them after dinner.
6. The respect and appreciation that he should me each time the honor roll was released in school.
7. Seeing how proud both he and my grandma were at my wedding 3 years ago

So I guess my point is don’t ever take your loved ones for granted. Always take the time out to spend quality time with them. It doesn’t even matter what age because each of us never knows when their time will come. I know this has definitely changed my prospective on some things and I’m going to make a much stronger effort to spend more time with my loved ones and hopefully you will to.

I hope that everyone has a happy rest of the holiday season and I look forward to a great new year!

Last Saturday I went to 1 of the 9 Garth Brooks concerts in Kansas City with my wife Amber and brother Kyle. What can I say, the concert was an awesome time and its defintely something that I’ll always remember. I’ve been to several concerts in my life, but I can honestly say that none of them have compared to this. Overall the energy at the show was amazing and I don’t think I sat down in my seat one time over his set that lasted nearly two and a half hours. The only negative experience that I had was some moron drunk chick behind us kept spilling her beer on my wife. So here is little bit of advice, if you can’t consume alcohol in public without acting like a dumbass then just stay at home.

I hope that I get a chance to see him again someday, but if I don’t then this show definitely lived up to all my expectations. If you ever have the chance to see Garth live then I highly recommend it.

Well I guess that I’m a little late on this one, but yesterday when I got my issue Business 2.0 in the mail I was surprised to see it was the final issue. Apparently this was announced earlier this month, but I guess I somehow never heard about it.

Time Inc. decided to to close down the magazine due to dwindling advertising revenue for the magazine. This is actually very disappointing to me, as I’ve been a subscriber for the past 3 years and it was really nice to have a magazine that I was genuinely excited to read each month. It was a very unique magazine that was definitely on the cutting edge of reporting in the entrepreneurial/start-up side of the business/tech sector. In fact several articles from the magazine that I read over the last few years have inspired some of the web projects that I’m currently working on. It looks like a good portion of the staff are actually going to work at Fortune, but I think it will be tough to put out anything that compares to the uniqueness of the Business 2.0 brand.

My subscription currently runs through February, but I’m not sure what happens with the rest of that? Anyway now that I’m in search of another good tech business magazine to read, so give me some suggestions or recommendations on what you read.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately as I’ve been in the process of trying to build some profitable projects on the web to generate some passive income.  Over last year or so I’ve read several things that recommend that you find something that your’re good at and focus on it while building a business on the web.  Well I do agree with specialization to a point, but what about those those of us that are just starting out and don’t have the capital or resources to take care of the other aspects of the business they’re building?

No matter what your going to focus on, I still think that you must have a well rounded understanding of the other aspects of the business as well.  Unfortunately these are areas that you’re just going to have to spend some time learning initially.  Then once your projects begin to grow,  maybe you can afford to outsource some aspects of your business so that you can focus on the ones that you enjoy doing most.   Yes this does result in more things for you to learn initially, but if you think about it wouldn’t that be knowledge that your glad to have down the road?

So basically it’s all up to you and the amount of work that you want to put into your projects.   I don’t think that you can learn to much initially starting out, because in the end it’s ultimately what will separate you from those that didn’t put in the additional effort.  Just remember you get out of things what you put into them and you’re the only one you can really count on in the beginning.