Check out this cool moth I photographed earlier today!  Credits go to Tanya (www.trphoto.co.za) for colour-correction and re-composition!

Exactly 2 months ago (29 Jan, 09), I blogged about "Finding My Three Quarters".  I was making around R5,000 a month passive income.  That is to say, I wasn't putting in any hard hours to get that R5,000.

I'm half way to R20,000 so this post is about finding the next 2 quarters.  Pretty exciting stuff!

What happened?  Two of my sites started getting the traffic they deserve.  By no accident, mind you.  The one site has undergone (and is still undergoing) a LOT of optimisation to get it to this point and the other is being actively promoted by one of our affiliates.

Groovy stuff huh?

Now I could still go ahead and try make up the remaining 2 quarters of my desired passive income by building 30-Day-Challenge sites (see my previous post) but it's obvious to me that focusing on what's already working would be a wiser investment of my time.

So keep that in mind next time you wanna make more money - figure out what's ALREADY bringing in the most significant amount of money and focus more attention on THAT. 

Also remember to work smarter not harder. 

As a web developer (or webpreneur), working harder means bookmarking your site more, commenting on more sites, submitting to more article directories, writing content, etc.  Working smarter means helping your site's visitors bookmark your site, encourage THEM to write more content, add a weekly newsletter that runs itself, automate posting GOOD content to Twitter, Facebook and the likes.  I'm hoping you're getting the picture by now :)

For the first time (EVER) in my entire life, I'm experiencing what it means to be "organised".  However, I'm not the one organising my life, Tanya is.  Once a day we meet up and we go through my work items and then she helps me decide what gets done, etc.

Now, please understand, I (just about) never studied for a single exam in my life.  I can count on my hands the number of times I prepared for an exam and I did that by reading over some notes the night before.

In fact, everything in my life has been "winged".  I seem to trust that things will just work out and, for the most part, they always do.  The difference is that I end up being stressed about how they will work out.  So planning does have its benefits - you stress a little less about how something will get done because you've already figured it out.  Of course, this comes at a price - you need to sit and think before you sit and do.

The most important change in all of this is that Tanya's forcing (whipping me and everything - serriusss!) me to plan my projects.  This is new to me because generally I (rather successfully) "wing" everything.  Right now I have a massive project that I'm planning and it's taking me most of the day just to plan it.  Tanya says that planning is 80% of the project.  I hope she's right.  It almost feels entirely wrong to be doing all this "planning" when I could be klapping bugs but I trust in her.

Wish me luck :D

Just received this from: http://www.bemotivatedtoday.net/3823

How to resolve conflict...

1. When a conflict has occurred, immediately decide that you will RESOLVE it as soon as possible.
2. Believe that you will be able to resolve it peacefully. Don't think you won't. Believe you WILL!
3. Have a PLAN of what you will say.
4. Realise the purpose for resolving the conflict is not to establish blame but to RESTORE harmony and find a solution.
5. You are a TEAM solving a challenge, not fighting each other.
6. TIMING. Choose the right time to approach the person.
7. Be HONEST at all times.
8. Each person must have an opportunity to speak.
9. Try to understand the other person's reasoning or point of view.
10. Be OPEN-MINDED. Be prepared to change your thinking.

Over the past few months (at least!), most people I know have been experiencing financial issues.  I'd say it started since around January 2008 - about the same time load-shedding started.

Well, over that period of time, people have become quite skilled at worrying.  I managed to find my way to the top of that list of skilled worriers.  I became quite adept at figuring out everything that could go wrong and then feeling terrible about it for quite some time.  Pretty useless way to spend your energy but it's such an easy trap to fall into.

So today I decided to steal 30 minutes for myself and listen to Jim Rohn talking about "Kicking the Worry Habit" and one of the things that really resonated with me was his definition of worry.  It's quite a long-winded thing so I'm just gonna summarise it like this:

"Worry uses fear to let you know all about the negative facts around something and then tries to convince you that those are the ONLY facts about it."

In other words, worry only shows you the negative side of something and hides the positive from you.  If you take a moment to acknowledge those negative things and then also acknowledge the positives related to whatever you're worried about, you'll gain some confidence and confidence kills worry.

The other important thing to note about worry is that most of the things it brings to your attention simply will never happen.  You might worry that a brick will fall on your head when you step out today but it probably won't and if you let worry run your life, you'll never realise that.

So take some time to analyse your worries and you should find some balancing things about the situation that will set your mind at ease.

My single most powerful weapon against worry is hindsight.  I've spent many a sleepless night worrying about all sorts of things.  When I find myself doing that, I try to think back about something else (similar) that I was worried about and then see if it actually happened.  9 times out of 10, it didn't.  The remaining 1 time - I probably learned something that can help me prevent it from happening this time.

Depending on the complex, here's a short list of things you don't have to be responsible for:

Security
This includes everything from installing electric fences, barbed wire, decent walls or palisade fencing to keeping big dogs :)

Garden Maintenance
Not always but, oftentimes, the complex you stay in will cut your grass for you. Even if they don't do anything with the flower beds, this saves you having to buy and maintain a decent lawnmower.

Municipal Hassles
Again, depending on what complex you stay at, electricity is often handled by an agent which makes things easier.  One agent I can think of here that operates in SA is "Impact Meter Services".  Call them to see what complexes they're responsible for.  The queues are much shorter and the deposits are reasonable.

So my list is really short but that was the point.  You pay more for these conveniences but, as far as security is concerned, it's well worth it.  The rest, I think, is more subjective.

Of course, there are a bunch of negatives to living in a complex.  Not least of which is the amount of control they have over what you are and aren't allowed to do.  If you can deal with those rules and limitations it can be quite a sweet deal.  Ask me, I've just moved out of a complex into a house and while the space and freedom is great, I need to fork out cash out of my own pocket to secure the house.  Garden maintenance is hard work.  Oh and the Ekurhuleni municipality is expensive (R2.2k electricity deposit!) - although pretty efficient, actually.

I love moving companies.  They save me a lot of back-ache and unnecessary lactic acid in my muscles.  They also save me the stress of trying to organise bakkies, trailers, people to help us move stuff and more.

We've never used a moving company to actually pack our stuff, though, because no one takes care of your stuff like you would and that's just the truth.  (Or at least very close to the truth - there are few exceptions)

But the thing is, these guys are overworked in this country.  Our particular team got to our old house at around 08h30 in the morning and had all our stuff in our new house (40 or so kilometers away) by about 12h15.  They then had another 2 houses to move that day.  What makes it worse is we don't have as much stuff as you'd fine in the average house.  After all, we're young, we'd barely been living there 2 years and I don't accumulate stuff (although Tanya does!)

Now imagine moving 3 houses worth of stuff in a day?  Now imagine going to bed between 23h00 and midnight.  Now imagine waking up early the next day to start all over again.  Getting the picture?

The last company we used, one of the movers told me that they sometimes sleep in the back of the van because they get back to head office to late to still get transport home.

Starting to paint a pretty grim picture, isn't it?

On the plus side, these guys looked like they genuinely enjoyed their work and took pride in it.  They also make substantially more (I'm assuming) than your average African employed in a labour-intensive industry.  So that's good I guess.  I just know I wouldn't want that life.  So it's a friendly reminder to me to be thankful for my life.  Maybe it can work for you too :)

Not mine - re-posted from a forum I visit and seems like they got it from somewhere on the internets.  Absolutely love it!  Click for bigger versions.

Jog My Memory is an email & SMS reminder service designed (way back in 2007) to help you remember all the stuff you inevitably would forget without such a service.

I started it because I was forgetting things like birthdays, meetings & anniversaries and it was growing to be a problem.  Sure I could set up my phone to beep a reminder at me but there are a few problems with that approach...

1. When I upgrade my phone (once every 2 years on my contract), I have to copy all my reminders across.  Pain in the butt, especially if the new phone isn't using the same OS as the old phone.
2. I hate typing on my phone.  No really, it's miserable.  Even with my slide-out QWERTY keyboard, I just don't like it.

So I created www.JogMyMemory.co.za and got a couple of people using it.  The trouble is that, back then, I wasn't very good at running a business so it never got promoted.  If anything, I've learned that promoting your products is the most important thing to do after creating it - even more important than improving your product!  Because once you have more people using it, you'll quickly learn where to spend more time developing it to improve it.  Also, it helps to have some money in your back pocket to fund the development.

Anyway, I digress.  The site was used by about 2 people on a consistent basis and never really went any where.  About a week ago, I decided to upgrade all the moving parts in the site (so to speak), improved the interface, simplified the signup process, worked out a pricing system for the SMS reminders and re-launched.

I relaunched by advertising on Facebook - my favourite way to advertise these days! :)

So far, I've got 4 new people signed up and 1 potential investor.  Clearly, I've learned a lot in the past 2 years and, clearly, promoting your products is a good idea. *duh*

Well, if you'd like to try it out, go sign up at www.JogMyMemory.co.za.  It's a free, quick and painless signup and, once you're registered, you've immediately got access to free email reminders.  Once you've decided you're comfortable with that, I'd recommend buying a coupla SMSes as that's the REALLY useful bit.  My phone's always with me and I've never forgotten something I've put into Jog My Memory.  That's got to be worth something, right? ;)

So I sat down a day or two ago and worked out just how much money I make each month that is, give or take a few hours of maintenance, passive income.  It turns out I'm about one quarter of the way to my R20k a month goal.  That is, I make just over R5000 a month without putting in any "hard" hours.

Well, with that in mind (and on paper), I now needed to figure out how to get the remaining three quarters and, by golly, I think I've got it :D

Using something like The 30 Day Challenge, if I could set up 15 sites that each make a little over $100 p/m each, I'll be golden :)

Is it feasible to set up 15 good sites in the next 5 months?  If I put in the hours, sure!  Will each make $100 p/m from the geto-go?  Unlikely but some of them certainly will and that will put me in a stronger position than I am in now, so it's hardly a fail.

The biggest trick in getting this right will be doing the research part.  If I develop a coupla sites around dud-keywords, I'll be wasting time, so I need to spend enough time doing research so that, when the time comes to actually do some SERIOUS work, I'll have a much greater chance of actually making money instead of wasting precious hours in my day.

Another thing that comes to mind is the possibility of using these 15 sites to help boost the traffic to some of my other sites that are already making me some money.  Cross-pollinating, if you will.  That should definitely make the exercise worthwhile.

Will it work?  Well, let's see :D