You just never know where things will lead and how quickly your life can change.

Nearly seven years have passed since I had first met a fellow Entrepreneur at conference in Las Vegas.  We met at the very first event that a Company I was associated with was hosting.  During the course of six years, we remained in touch, often running business ideas and opportunities by each other, hoping one day we could find a business that we can work together on.

About six or seven months ago, this gentleman gave me a call to run a new business idea he had by me.  Because of the industry that the idea stemmed from was one that I had no prior experience or first-hand knowledge in, it took me a few days to research the idea and true potential.

As the potential began to unravel and show itself, I quickly realized that this business has the potential to become a “category creator“.  Not to mention the potential to quickly change a lot of people’s lives for the better; providing them with a real and sustainable monthly residual income.

Since I accepted the mission to help turn his idea into a reality, it’s been one heck of a ride.

There’s nothing like the excitement of building a Company from the ground up.  The challenges.  The wins.  The losses.  The ideas.  The ah-ha moments.  And the thrill of it all.

Considering todays economic climate, some would think that starting a new business is one of the riskiest things one could do.  But in reality, isn’t putting all of your eggs into one single basket – hoping that the Company that employs you keeps their doors open and/or doesn’t decide to do a round of lay-offs to cut cost?

Right now – it’s more important than ever to have another stream of income coming in.  We live in uncertainty.  Investments.  Real Estate.  The economy.  The job market.  You just never know.  And for the sake of your family, heck, even your own sanity, it is wise to spend time building an income stream that has the potential to supplement or even replace your current income.

If I was not involved at the level I’m involved with this new Company – and I was one of the first to learn about it (like you are now), I would be doing EVERYTHING I could to build this business.

Over any other Affiliate Program out there – this has the potential to create one heck of a walk-away income.  Meaning, you do the work once and you get paid over and over again.  Residual income is a powerful thing.  It has allowed my family and I the chance to take months off at a time to travel and spend time with family in other states.

It’s provided us with freedom; something that seems to be becoming harder and harder to attain as people take on second and even third jobs in order to make ends meet and put food on the table.

Seriously.  I would drop everything I was working on and focus 100% of my time, energy, and attention to building this business.  Sure, I do have some insider information in regards to how BIG this Company is going to be and how the Affiliate Program is going to be unlike anything the industry has ever seen.  But even if you go through the information that is made available to the public right now, you’ll begin understand what we’ll officially be launching in mid-January.

As of this very moment, the Company is in beta, with the official launch date set for 01.11.11.  Between now and then you’ll see a lot of changes, updates, new enhancements, and the opportunity to generate a very strong long-term residual income become a reality.

Trust me.  I’ve been marketing online since 1999 – and you truly have one heck of an opportunity in your hands.  I’ve never seen anything like what we have here – not to mention the positioning you will have in a multi-trillion dollar industry.

In January, you will learn about a brand new method that we have developed that will have potential customers literally begging you to enroll them as a customer.  And I wouldn’t put it past business owners to offer you all sorts of things to convince you to enroll them as a customer.

Sounds crazy, but I’ll be personally going business-to-business within the next week or two to prove that the above is a fact.

I’m sorry I cannot say anymore.  The rest of the details will be shared in January.  In the meantime, I strongly suggest that you enroll as an Affiliate.  It’s 100% free.  Zero gimmicks.  Zero upfront costs.  Zero monthly costs. Enroll today, start going through everything, and watch your email with information regarding our live training webinars.

I have a feeling you are going to both love and be extremely excited about what we’re going to share with you.

To enroll as an Affiliate for free, click here.

Domain names.  I first got the domain name bug back around the year 200o or so.  At the time there was a new computer game coming out that I knew was going to be a huge hit.

I registered around 30 related dot com names for the game and posted the eBay auction when the game launched.  After a crazy number of bids and views to my eBay auction, the domain name package I put together sold for over $5,000.00 to some dude in Canada.  I was thrilled.

Since then I’ve bought and sold many, many domain names over the years.  Domain names are like real estate.  If you have a killer dot com domain name (even .net or .org) there are many people who will pay a premium for it.

However, unlike Real Estate, some crazy things can happen.  For example, a couple of years after I sold the domain names I checked a couple out to see what he ended up doing with them.

I was surprised to see nothing there.  I mean nothing – page cannot be displayed.  I want to NameCheap.com to see what the deal was and to my surprise the domain name was available.  I started checking out several of the domain names he purchased and they were ALL available.

He let all of them expire.  So I re-registered the couple of good ones and have been sitting on them ever since.  One of these days when another big launch happens for the computer game, which I’m sure will happen again.  Crazy.

That’s like buying a house, flipping it for a profit in 30 days, the buyer giving you the house a couple years later for free, and now you own the house again.  Gotta love it.

Anyway, during my downtime I do some research to find expiring domain names that contain keywords that I’m targeting and/or are just cool names that I’ll do something with at some point.  I’ve scooped up a few domains that have been registered as long as 18 years.  Crazy, huh? 18 years ago was the year 1992.  I was still in middle school.

Now I’m not going to get into the whole domain name world in this post.  There’s a lot to it.  Besides, I’m not selling anything here, so no need to.  But I will say that the domain age does play a roll in helping your website get ranked in the search engines, among a ton of other things.  But a nicely aged domain name adds some brownie points from Mr. Google, Mr. Yahoo, and Miss. Bing.

The very first domain name I purchased was in the year 1999.  I had a wild and crazy business idea that I wanted to run with.  I still own that domain.  And that business idea now haunts my hard drive and my head.  Another story for another time.

Back to work.

If you’re someone who likes to drive a new car every few years… or year.. or even every six months, and you like to save money, you’re going to like this.

If you’re in the market for a new car and you don’t drive a ton of miles a year, maybe you should consider a lease.  Now I’m not talking about the traditional lease where you go to a dealership, put thousands of dollars down, upgrade the warrantee, and all that jazz you’d typically go through.

I’m talking about taking over an existing car lease.  There are some AMAZING deals out there right now.  You can literally take over a lease to a Porsche, Mercedes, Lexus, BMW, Range Rover, or other luxury cars for FAR, FAR less than what the payment would be if you were to purchase it.

Now of course you can find nearly every other model car, truck, or SUV out there as well.  And some people are so anxious to get out of their lease, some people even offer some cash upfront.  Some will make a few payments for you.  Some will pay you several thousand dollars which will cover several or even many months of payments.

People move.  Jobs change.  Needs change.  There are a million reasons why someone would want to get out of their car lease.  Now you’ll have to shop around at all of the car lease trading sites to look for deals.  Depending on the car, how much is left on the lease, how much they put down, and many other factors will determine the monthly payment.

Shop around.  You may find the same car, same year, and same color for less in a nearby city or state you can go pick up.

Now one thing you will also want to watch out for is how many miles are left on the lease.  Some may already be over the miles.  Stay away from those.  Others will be right in line with where they need to be.  Others will not have many miles at all and have a ton of miles you can use to tour the countryside with.

What I love about this deal is that you can take over the lease payments, drive the car for the remaining period of the lease, and then drop it off when the lease is over and pay nothing to return it.  (Unless you drove over the miles.)  You also can take advantage of the option to purchase the vehicle at the end of the lease at the special pricing.  So if you wanted to buy the car when the lease is up, you may save some money there as well.

So for the past month or so I’ve been looking around some of the lease trading sites out there.  Waiting for the steal of a deal to come along.  And finally, one popped up yesterday.  It was everything I was looking for.

Now because I work form home, I don’t need to have a ton of miles left over on a car, but I do want some miles to play with.  I also wanted something fun.  New.  Different.  Found it.

Depending on the type of car you get will depend upon the lease process.  Some finance companies take a few days while others can take weeks to do the whole lease transfer.  And best of all, it doesn’t cost you one penny.  In fact, the seller of the lease has to pay the fee.  So all you have to do is literally take over the payments until the lease is up.

Some companies allow people to trade their lease at six months left while others you can only do it if you have 12 months or more remaining on your lease.  So yes, it’s totally possible to drive a new car every six months if you wanted.  Some of you may choose a Mini, while others choose a Hummer.  Some may choose a VW bug, while others choose a Porsche.

I submitted the easy online form the car company sent to me in order to take over the lease.  Within 24 hours, they do the approval, overnight the docs for me to sign, I overnight them back, and within a couple of days later I meet the folks who have the car I want at the dealership.  Oh, what’s also great is that I’m having them bring it there to get checked out from top to bottom, serviced, etc. so that I won’t have to worry about a thing.

All oil changes are covered (which I won’t have to bring it in even once because of the new fuel injection deal I’m told), service is covered, free tires is anything happens to the run-flat tires, and a bunch of other goodies.  It’ll literally be sign and drive.  And for 12 months I’ll have a cool car that my wife and I can zip around town in – at far, far less than the normal car payment.  Nice.

When it comes to the two things I love most in my business (and use the most) are my Macbook Pro and WordPress.  Now when it comes to WordPress, I’ve launched a ton of blogs over the years.  And I also use WordPress when the need to create a static site or salesletter exists.

Now I don’t consider myself a “blogger” but I do launch an average of one or two or more blogs a week and have been for awhile.  Most of these blogs are “niche” blogs that generate income through affiliate or CPA offers.

A very small handful are auto blogs using some of the well-known auto blog software available today.  And there are a few that I do contribute to often, or have others who post fresh content a few times a week.

On of my more successful blogs has received over 1.7 million pageviews and has received over a half of a million unique visitors as you can see by the screenshot below:

Now the reason why I’m sharing this is because the above blog has really been my testing ground for marketing ideas I learn about or every once in awhile think up myself.  Or, more often than not, I’ll take a marketing idea or technique I’ve learned about and put my own spin on it.

For the most part, this little niche blog has performed very well over the last year and a few months. And when a site starts doing really well and begins to take off, it become a little harder to pull the trigger on creative marketing strategies.  After all, not every test is a winner, and there’s always a chance it could flop.

When you build up a reputation in a niche and/or become an authority, you’ve got to let go a little and not be afraid to push the marketing envelop a little.  If you don’t do it, one of your competitors will.  It’s not about taking chances as opposed to taking some risks; calculated risks.

My blogging partner on the blog mentioned above and I have pushed the envelope fairly hard a few times.  One of the successes pushed the blog up to the number one ranking in search engines for the particular niche’s top keyword.  Another success drove hundreds of super highly targeted backlinks all pointing back to us in just a couple of weeks – with very little effort on our part.

And yet, there have been some flops.  One flop caused an advertiser we had at the time cancel because she thought what we were doing was “too edgy”.  Funny thing was that she was the only person we heard a peep from.  The other couple of flops wasted a little (OK, sometimes more than a little) of time more than anything.

Losing time bothers me. You can always attract new visitors, but time is something that you cannot get back!

Speaking of visitors, this blog has something unique going for it that I’ve never heard anyone say about any blog that I own.  For that matter, I’ve never heard of so many people doing such a thing.

What is it?

We hear from at least one person a week – sometimes several more who admit that they want back to the FIRST post and worked their way forward.  Or they let us know that they were in the process of doing so.

You have to understand that there are HUNDREDS of posts.  In fact, I’d need to check, but it has to be somewhere around 800 to 1,000 posts.  And most are not these short little blog posts.  Some are extremely long – imagine 4-5 times longer than this post long.  Seriously.

That’s what you call a HUNGRY market.  And when you combine a hungry market with compelling blog posts that compel them to go back and start from the beginning, that’s when magic happens.

We’ve also heard from no lie, at least 100 or more people who contacted us and said that we should publish a book with all of the blog posts.  It’s something that I’ve been considering doing, but not personally.  If and when I pull the trigger on that I’ll outsource the entire process to a writer.  That’s just one heck of a project that I just don’t have the time to do.

However, if the day comes and the book is ready to launch, I know exactly what to do to get the book in the top 10, maybe even the top 5 Amazon best sellers the first week that it launches.  Easy.

Between all of the top contacts we have in that niche plus the creative book launch I can put together, it would be fun.  Hopefully within the next few months when I’ve cleared my plate a little I’ll start that as a little side project.  It would actually make a great case study – and it would finally give me the content that I want to create for a domain that I’ve had for awhile, MarketMyBook.com.

Anyway, this has been a good public brain-dump.

It’s an interesting exercise to blog (write) without any motives (i.e. ask you to buy something, refer you to another website to buy something, etc).  All of the other blogs I have are built for two purposes.  To provide good, relevant, and unique content, and the other is of course to make money.

To write without caring about structure, spelling (although I’m a copywriter, I’m far from the best speller which is why I have a great editor), or have to worry about dropping in the psychological triggers that evoke the buying response from readers is… nice.

So hold on to your hats – this blog will surely be filled with twists and turns as I loosen up here.

If all goes to plan, at some point next week I will be doing something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

Here’s the plan:

Step 1: Log into my servers and go through all of my e-mail addresses and add an auto-responder message.  The message will simply say that I no longer check that e-mail address and if they need to get in contact with me to… (steps listed here).

I’m afraid to tell you how many e-mail addresses I actually have.

Step 2: Just have one e-mail address where those who contact me (or my other identities) are funneled to.

Step 3: Check e-mail 3 times a day.  In the morning, around noon, and mid-evening.  I’ll have a time limit set as to how long I can have e-mail open.

It’s too easy to have e-mail open all of the time.  Every minute my Mac dings because there’s always email coming in.  Sure, I’m on a ton of industry-related lists so I can have a good scope of what’s happening in the Internet Marketing world, who’s launching what, who’s doing what, etc.

Believe it or not, that wasn’t hard to stay on top of not too long ago.  And I truly benefitted from many of those e-mails, launches, etc.  However, times have changed.  And I’ve really noticed the complete overload over the last year.

The amount of information, marketing, launches, tools, software, etc. is beyond exploding – and it’s only going to get noisier as we’re in massive momentum in the information age.

I’m Unplugging Myself

It’s time.  Reading the  latest “Four Hour Workweek” book again made me realize that I had gone off the tracks in a few areas.  It’s funny how gradual the process can be – so subtle that you hardly notice it until you take a step back.  (Or you’re sick for a couple of days and purposefully unplugged.)

No more newsletters. With most of the directions I’m going in my businesses, there’s no need to have my finger on ‘the state of Internet Marketing’ as I had been doing for years.

No more Spam. If I had $1 for each Spam e-mail I received on a daily basis, I’d be able to buy close to 30 Macbook Pro computers every month.  My junk e-mail filter works on overdrive – which is why a good 10% or more still slip into my inbox.

More time. The amount of time this will free up is yet to be seen.  However, I do think it will be quite a noticeable difference.  I just wonder how I’ll be able to function without those ‘dings’ every minute when a message comes in.  (I know, having that thing on breaks every rule in all of the time management books.)

More money. The amount of time saved can be invested into other areas of my businesses.

More family time.  The amount of time gained can be used to spend more time with my why.

This is one step of many that I’ll be taking to simplify… everything.

This blog reminds me of what happened to me on Facebook awhile back.

You see, when I first started using Facebook, I had every intention of using it for business networking only.

Of course my wife was on Facebook, so we added each other.  And before I knew it, I had her friends adding me, my friends adding me, old high school classmates adding me, and I was left in a strange position.

Now of course everyone adding me wasn’t a bad thing.  After all, that’s what social networking sites are all about.  But it made me re-think my strategy there.

I’d rather keep both separate…

Working full-time from home over the past seven or so years has been a road full of life and Entrepreneurial lessons.  One of which was to have that business life and private life separation.

Although there is still room for improvement, I’ve been fairly successful in keeping each life separate.  Believe me, it’s too easy for work to consume your home or for your home to consume your work.

Self-made boundaries are just as important as doing all you can to stick to them.

So I’m going to allow myself to slip a little here.  Meaning, I’m going to combine my lives here from time to time.  Some posts may be on marketing lessons I learn about, books I read, or cool new products that I found.  While other posts may have absolutely nothing to do with business and marketing.

Blowing My Own Cover

Since launching 84 or more blogs over the years, a personal blog is something that I have not actively pursued.  I’m typically one who prefers to be in the background, use pen names on my websites and/or projects, and purposefully choose not to be in the ‘marketing world spotlight’.

Yes, of course I know that self-promotion is a huge piece of of the puzzle in many aspects of marketing.  I know that, and I used to do a lot of self-promotion online several years ago – and it worked very, very well.

But let’s face it:  Some businesses or products require self-promotion while others require the promotion of a product, service, business, website, etc.

So I’m blowing my own cover so-to-speak.  I may talk about projects I’m working on, businesses I’m working with, opportunities that I feed compelled to share, etc.  Typically all of this information resides in OmniFocus or one of the other few Mac software programs I use to organize, prioritize, strategize, and any other words that end in ‘ize’ that fit there.  (I’m also a big fan and user of BaseCampHQ.)

And on the flip side, I may even share some glimpses into my non-business world.  You just never know.