No Name Blogger

Well, this is the last day of the month. Earlier I’d committed to doing one post each weekday for this month.

Interesting developments since then:

• Traffic to this blog has NOT increased at the same rate as the content on this blog (still getting just around 1 or 2 visitors a day). Clearly it takes more than just content to drive traffic. My next blogging project will likely be link development, but I’m not going to start that immediately.
• I have not grown to love blogging.  I’m going to take a break for a bit.

In other news, I’ve partially (yes, only partially) solved some of my website frustrations. I managed to get the hosting costs reduced from $150 per month to $75 per month.  So with $125 of ad revenue coming in, I’m now $50 in the black instead of $25 in the red - woohoo! Still got to eliminate the time factor though - I’m still doing the work myself which is not good.

Until next time,

NNB

Whoops, I posted Friday’s post on Thursday and thought the week was over (so consider this to be Thursday’s post)

There is a great book. You’ve got to read it. It is called “The Complete Guide to World Mysticism” by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy.

Well, at least the first two chapters are great. The rest of the book? Kind of dull. Each of the remaining chapters focuses on a particular brand of mysticism (i.e. Christian mysticism, Sufism, Zen Buddhism, etc). Those chapters are kind of interesting, but if you’re new to mysticism (as I was when I read the book), the first two chapters are the real paradigm-shifters.

A quote:

“There is a Hindu teaching story about a toad who lived in a well, who was one day visited by a toad who lived in the sea.  “How big is your well?” asked the first toad, “Is it as vast as mine?”.  The (sea) toad smiled and tried to explain, “My well is so huge that it has no edges.  It contains so much water that it could never run dry in a million hot summers.  It is so deep that perhaps it has no bottom.”  The (well) toad looked incredulous, “Your are either boasting or your imagination has run away with itself!” he complained.  “Come with me,” said the sea toad, “and I will show you.”

…and that’s what mysticism is all about - knowing the truth through DIRECT EXPERIENCE.

On his website, Timothy Freke does seem to be a bit of a “freak” (with an oversized ego, judging by the oversized pictures of himself flashing all over the place) which detracts from his credibility in my opinion, but it’s still a great book (the first two chapters, that is).  (On a related note, spiritual author Ken Wilber’s website gives him the appearance of an attention-hungry ego fanatic too.  Kind of disconcerting, although his books are great also)

You can find the book on Amazon HERE, but unforutunately it’s out of stock, and looks like it will be for a while.

You might think I write a post each weekday for this blog.

You might also think that I wrote this blog post on the date that it was posted.

This will be posted on Friday June 27, but right now, when I am writing this, it is Saturday June 21. Actually, I wrote all of this weeks posts in advance (on June 21).

I’m taking the advice of Darren Rowse and batching my work (dedicated extended periods of time to one task (such as blogging) instead of multitasking or jumping back and forth between tasks, which kills momentum and really slows down progress.

Try out batching work. You’ll love it.

Even just in the past week or two that I’ve been blogging more regularly, I’ve noticed a few unexpected benefits:

• When I need to rant, I can get it out. It feels good, even if no one is listening.
• It keeps me accountable.
• It makes me think, and makes me think clearly.

I’ve got to say that I’m still not loving blogging yet, but it does have it’s advantages.

There was a time when I invested in real estate. I think real estate can be a great investment if done right, and I may do it again one day. I did a lot of things wrong. Here are a few of my lessons learned, or more accurately, “Things To Never Do Again”:

• Expect to run a rooming house smoothly in a low-income area.
• Expect to easily attract good tenants in bad areas.
• Be the slightest bit lenient with new tenants.
• Trust people (especially tenants) just because they seem honest and sincere.
• Take a seller’s word for what the income and expenses are without proof of EVERYTHING.
• Neglect to write directly into the agreement of purchase and sale the exact dollar figure of last month’s rents that the sellers will credit me with.
• Not expect repairs, especially on an old building.
• Not expect vacancies.
• Neglect to have a reserve fund set aside for repairs / vacancies / etc.
• Neglect to double the predicted numbers when estimating the time and cost of renovations.
• Expect to charge a higher rent just because someone says they’re low (it easy to SAY that they’re low… and if they actually are very low, the tenants really won’t want to leave!)
• Expect that utility costs will go down, since they look unusually high.
• Expect that utility costs will remain the same for the coming year (prices go up over time!).
• Expect that the amount of my insurance will be the same as the insurance of the sellers (since property values go up, insurance does too!).
• Use last year’s property taxes when estimating expenses for the coming year.
• If the bank is paying the taxes, neglect to account for the fact that they collect from me more taxes than are actually owed, in order to create a buffer for themselves.
• Not account for hiring a property manager down the road, even if I start out managing the place myself.
• Massage the numbers so they look better, since I’d really like to buy the place.
• Do a deal without getting the opinion of an experienced investor.
• Let a losing relationship drag on without change, especially if I’m paying for a the service (property manager, real estate agent, etc); demand instant change or end the relationship and find a better one.

Well, there you have it. If you’re investing in real estate, or thinking of it, I hope I’ve saved you a bit of frustration.

Google Trends now tracks website traffic, which is great news (previously, Google Trends only showed search trends). Personally, I’m glad to see this new feature, because:

Alexa.com is not very accurate.

Compete.com is more accurate than Alexa, but only uses U.S. traffic and only shows traffic for the past 12 months.

Google Trends for websites has the following advantages

• Probably accurate (although I can’t prove that)
• Allows you to look at traffic for various time periods
• Allows you to look at global traffic, or look at traffic by specific countries

Almost all Google’s products are fantastic, in my opinion, and this new feature is a great addition to Google Trends.

Here’s an example of how Globalization and the Internet helped me solve a problem yesterday…

THE PROBLEM:

I decided that I wanted to set up 2 new websites, partly because I wanted to experiment with different types of website functionality and CMS’s, and partially because who knows the websites might possibly become successful.

I wanted each of the websites set up with a different type of Content Management System (CMS).  A CMS basically allows a website owner to control and modify a website with very little (if any) technical knowledge.

I had already bought the domain names, and I have a web hosting account, but I know very little about hosting and how to use it.  After spending a frustrating hour trying to figure out how to get the CMS’s set up on my hosting and with my domain names (and getting absolutely nowhere), I decided to outsource.

THE SOLUTION:

Scriptlance.com is a website that allows people to post projects (mainly computer software / website projects) that programmers (a.k.a developers) can bid on.

I posted a project description on Scriptlance.com, explaining that I wanted two websites set up with the two different CMS’s, and that I also wanted to be shown how to do it so that I could do it on my own next time.

I posted the project description at 9:45am. By 10:55am, I had received 12 different bids on the project from website developers, which ranged from $15 to $500 (the $500 bid was out to lunch; most of the bids were $50 or less).  The bids had come in from India, Pakistan, Serbia, Moldova, Ireland, Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

I selected a $20 bidder to do the work, and after a couple quick emails back & forth to clarify the details, I headed out for meetings etc for the rest of the day.  When I returned to my computer in the evening, I had two new websites up & running (just shells basically, which I can now customize as I choose using the CMS’s) along with a clearly written explanation in my email inbox of how to duplicate the process for other websites.

I’ve outsourced like this before, but every time I’ve been quite impressed.  I don’t know exactly how much traffic ScriptLance.com gets but another similar website called ELance.com (which I didn’t use because they have a $50 minimum bid) currently has over 40,000 “providers” registered to bid on projects, and 15,000 projects have been posted in the past 30 days …so you can see that outsourcing like this is quite popular, and many of the projects are much more extensive than mine.

Cool stuff, eh?

I own a pile of domains related to Hydrogen Cars and Electric Cars.

With oil running out and gas prices going through the roof, I’m hoping the value of these domains will be rising in the near future.

If you’re interested in buying any of these domains now, I just might sell them for a bargain.

Contact me if you’d like more info.

This rant is not about this blog. It is about another website I own. This other website has been up & running for just over a year.

The only monetization in place (so far) is Adsense. The site consistently makes around $125 per month from Adsense, but after paying the hosting cost of $150 per month, it’s still in the red.

The most frustrating part of all is that it takes me about 4 to 5 hours a week to keep it updated. And the updating is not as interesting as writing blog posts. The work involved in updating the website is totally mundane, brainless work, and most of the time I absolutely hate doing it.

I work 4 to 5 hours a week to make -$25. How crazy is that?

For reasons I won’t mention here, I can’t just shut it down.  Anyone interested in buying it? A few (rounded) statistics:

• 12,000 visits / month
• 7,500 unique visitors / month
• 180,000 pagesviews / month

I think the site has HUGE potential if promoted and expanded correctly, but being my first internet business, I made a few mistakes at the beginning - I will likely elaborate on my “lessons learned” in a future post.

Do you know what mysticism is? Didn’t think so. Most people who I ask don’t know what it is. I didn’t know either until recently.

Wikipedia says that mysticism is “the pursuit of achieving communion, identity with, or conscious awareness of ultimate reality, the Other, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, or insight.”

I think I can shorten that to read “the pursuit of achieving awareness of spiritual truth though direct experience.”

It is the “direct experience” aspect that is critical. I’m sure you’ll agree that knowing the truth about something through direct experience is more effective than knowing the truth by trying to figure it out intellectually, or simply by being told by someone else that something is true.

Yet most religious people accept the “truths” of their religion simply because they are told by others that the “truths” are true, or because it is part of their culture, and they go through intellectual irrationalization necessary to convince themselves of the “truths” as I have mentioned before. Insanity.

Down with Intellect!

Down with Blind Acceptance!

Long live Direct Experience!

Of course, intellect and trusting what other people say are both important, but only “work” for some sorts of things. I read somewhere that Buddha warned against intellectualizing about things that can’t be figured out that way. Wise words, in my opinion.