This week was very exciting, first of all, I’ve hired my second VA, she is really dedicated and works great, I hope the ROI on her will be awesome as well.

I actually hired her in order to give my other VA more free time, so she could help me with the research part, since I’m about to make 520 websites, I need a lot of keywords that will convert!

I said fair well to my best friend, who is in a really exciting time of his like, he flew away to Thailand, and I will miss him, but that’s what skype is for, you might be interested at readin his blog at: http://passiveincometrip.com/.

I had a problem with Piwik, its the way I use to see enters to my websites, it seems that if you’re not running it from a dedicated server the latency time is too high, so I’ve decided to stop putting it on my websites until I have a dedicated server. Why I use piwik? I just don’t want google to have THAT much information like they have when I use analytics.

After all that said and done, now I’m going to do what we customers do, “Buy on emotion and justify with logic”, long story short, I’m finally giving up and buying an iPhone 4S.. I’ve got a Macbook, and I love Apple, but I always wanted to stay “unique” in my phone, so my current phone is Samsung Wave, its pretty fast phone, but now the Camera option is working very bad, when you press on the button, it doesn’t take a picture, and it doesn’t have a touch screen alternative to the real button.

I’ve seen that I didn’t take normal pictures for about 2 years now, I hate this current phone that I have, and my Camera is like 6 years old, its compact and all, but you can’t see anything on night shots, so.. I’m buying a 4S, I’ve heard only good things about its Camera, I see it in action everyday since I’m working in a Company which develops also an IOS app, so its pretty common with us, I finally gave up, I really wanted NOT TO BUY IT, but I really believe that “The best Camera, is the one on you”, and since I usually don’t carry a bag, and I don’t have an extra pocket for my compact Camera, the phone is my only option, and the iPhone should be the best, Yes, I know that Samsung S2 have a nice Camera as well, but I’m growing to hate Android everyday (especially since I’m developing some stuff to it at work), and I saw many comparison which showed the the 4S wins.

Just to show you what kind of Quality my old camera from 5 years ago takes:

Clear pictures when taken on a Tripod

No image stabilization.

It’ just too annoying to carry it around

Oh, and as Eban pagan always said, I’m waiting a month with this Decision because I want to see if I really should spend that amount of money, I’m already pretty convinced I should do it, but the date for after a month is the 8th of February, so whoever wants to convince me not to buy an iPhone, can leave a comment.

Cheers!

I’ve finally made a sell! I mean… I always make sells in older websites, but this is the first time I’ve made a sell using those websites from the plan of the 520 websites, it was a website that is less than a week old, and it already converted

There is money to be made online, I always knew it, and now I’m starting to scale up on it, I’m using my time to do more precise research, and I’ll crack the code eventually.

So what are the stats? I have bought 30 domains this month, already made 20 websites, and in this week I’ll make another 10 websites, I’ve hired another employee to handle the work load, so now I have 2 VA’s, and I love having them, having a VA is something that every internet marketer should use.

So.. now I can finally relax, put my legs up and stop working…

Or not! tomorrow I’m going to Install the theme on all of the 10 new websites, I’m going to check with my article writer whats going on with the articles, and keep working.

I don’t feel like I should relax, there’s a lot more that I have to do, and since next week I’m going to put more pressure on the “link building” side of the business..

Tomer

I used to have this problem with waking up, well I still do have it, but since I started a day job a while ago, I really have to be up in time, so I wake up early.

But instead of feeling bad about having to wake up early, I’m actually execute what I’ve studied in Eban Pagan’s wake up productive, first of all, if you don’t know who is Eban Pagan, google him, find him, he is a great mentor, I really like his material, back in the days when I wanted to hit on some girls, he helped me with my “Inner game”, but lately, he transformed into a success guru, and I appreciate all of his material.

So what do you do when you wake up in the morning? (there’s an hebrew song titled just like that), well, I try to wake up as early as I can, resulting usually at about 7:00am, I immediately go and drink some water, it helps making you full for a while, then I brush my teeth, and then I start exercise, YES – exercise in 7:10am in the morning! I know it sounds crazy, but stay with me.

I really agree with Eban Pagan, he says that we as humans were made to move, and in the modern world we usually just sit in front of a computer, and then our energy level goes down, so what he recommend is to move your body in the morning, I do physical (weight and stuff) exercise because I want to get fit, I’m too slim, but if you’re a girl, or a guy who is a bit over weight, I recommend you to do aerobics, anyways, after the exercise I try to eat a balanced meal, for now its still not balanced since I stop eating so many diary so I need to wait for my veggies based protein, and then I’m off to work (riding 11 minutes with my cool ass bicycle).

And what results does this “Morning ritual” gives me? I am feeling that my energy level is higher during the day, I accomplish much more than before, and my day is organized, and feel much happier.

When I really do my “Morning ritual”, I’m way more productive than when I don’t do it, and I feel a bit like I’ve won, like I’ve eaten my frog in the morning, because doing exercise is something that was never really a part of me, I did have a 2 years record of going to the Gym, but I hate the time that is wasted going from and to the Gym, but it really was the time which I was the fittest in my life.

What do I recommend? Make yourself some morning routine, something to start your day more healthy, and more powerful, so what do you do first thing in the morning?

Ok, so first of all I’d like to say that the first 10 websites I needed to build have already been completed, I still didn’t buy the domains for the second batch of 10 websites for next week, but I will do it tomorrow.

For now everything is going as planned, my money-wise goals for January already have been completed so I’m behind schedule, but I will keep on pushing forward.

I’m currently hiring 1 full time employee (VA) and 1 article writer, the full time employee is an amazing filipino, I’ll talk about her in more posts, but the indian article writer failed to deliver the articles for the first week, so I will have to use the service iWriter.com which costs much more than what the indian costs, the reason I’m gonna do that is because I am going to keep up with the 520 websites for this year.

That being said, I’m going to hire another VA, because currently my VA is doing a lot, and I’m starting to think that its too much, since I give her not only to put the articles on the websites, she also customize the websites, install wordpress plug ins, make hubpages / squidoo, make flixtime video for each website, and posts answers in yahoo answers, I think its too much for 1 person, and so I’m hiring now.

Hiring new worker is never easy, especially when you do it remotely, you must give them a test, to see that they will not run away at the first crisis, you must ask them questions and see how they answer, and then u interview them on skype, its pretty hard but it all have to be done in order to hire someone for your online business.

Other than that, I’ve recently stumbles Anki SRS, its a great software(free!), that show you flashcards in an intelligent way, if you ever need to remember anything, I think its the way to go, so what it helped me with is.. studying Spanish and Chinese characters, since those are some of my goals for this year, I see that now I know about 250 chinese characters, and before I started I only knew about 150, it does the job for me, some of my friends didn’t really connect with the software, so I guess its about personal preferences.

That’s it for now, I wish us all a great week!

Tomer

In the past 7 years since I’ve read the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, which I highly recommend, I was “trying” to make money, I was “trying” to break out, but as Nik Halik once said in a lecture I attended – “Trying is having the intention to fail”, he suggested to get rid of trying, and just DO whatever we say we need to do.

Another concept he introduced me which I wasn’t using until recently, is the concept of sharing your goals, and making your friends and family ask you from time to time what’s the progress, so lately I go around stating my plans for 2012 all over the place, and I actually get good suggestions from people.

For example, when I told my plan to my friend Igal how I intend to build my business, he told me that I seem too out of focus, and that if I am going to have that amount of tasks to focus on while having a day job, I will never be able to finish all of those tasks, so I limit my tasks to the important, which is btw a rule that Tim Ferris wrote in his book.

So what are my plans for 2012?

Business

It’s simple, I will focus on building 520 niche sites. Say woaa? 520? yes, it counts for 10 per week.

And the question you all are going to ask is.. “why do you need 520 niche websites?”, well, I did my math, and it seems that 1 out of 10 websites that I build actually make good money, 2 makes little amount of money, and the rest just fail.. So in 2012, I’m going to get a great income by beating the statistics, If only 10 percent of those websites do make money, and let’s imagine its “only” 300USD per month, then I’ve got myself 52 x 300, which is 15,600USD a month, at which time I can start building authority websites around winning niches and actually get much better results.

Another ventures I’m going to make are my link building service, which is link building velocity, on which I’m offering to build links in a way google wants, naturally and effectively.

I’m also building my own high pr web sites farm, so that I could rank my websites faster, I’ll write a post about high pr farm later on in the blog.

Personal development

Languages wise:

I want to finally know Spanish right, to study 500 Chinese characters since I currently can speak Chinese, but can only recognize about 150 characters.

I want to start study Thai in the end of the year, since I want to visit Thailand many times in 2013 and perhaps live there for a while.

Wealth wise:

Start a REAL saving account, one that is also in my mind, I had saving accounts before, but I broke all of them in order to have the trip of my life, next time I’m leaving Israel for a long term location independence journey I’m planning not to touch my savings, and have a special budget for it.

also, another thing I came to realize is that, while traveling in Asia can be cheap, I want to continue to my other goals, such as:

• Surfing in hawaii
• Surfing in australia
• Snowboarding season near Bariloche (Argentina)

I cannot complete this goals if I’m just depleting my resources, so next time I’m flying around the world, its with “shitload” of money, so it means I have to make significantly big wealth generation plan.

Its advised to put 10% of all of your earning every month into your “wealth account”, and in that account to only buy assets, such as real estate, or things that can be later translated into cash, but grow in value (woww I sound like Eban Pegan now), so once I’m debt free, I’ll start working on my wealth account.

Intelligence wise:

I want to read at least 40 new books, I think that its one of the main reasons I wasn’t on top of my game in 2011, I focused to much on doing and too less on studying.

Keep being up to date on the internet marketing world, see latest trends to better understand the market.

Body wise:

Eat healthier, unprocessed food,, I recently stopped drinking beer, I might drink wine but definitely not Shots.

Get back in shape using nutrition and sport, meaning I want to gain at least 6kg of mostly muscle weight.

Soul:

Be more happy, there’s a reason we are all alive, and it’s to enjoy life, so I want to come into peace with myself, and accept my reality that I’m not yet a millionaire, but I’m soon going to be

Fun:

Go sailing with my dad, get some fish while I’m at it and cook it.

Get back into mountain biking, and enjoy the ride.

Watch many movies.

Make cool apps that make my life easier everyday.

Parties – Even my friends from my home town are a little lame since they all got a serious girlfriend so it makes their main weekend activity “Go to a cafe”, I’m going to still party on, I’ve got a friend who loves it so we’ll go hit the clubs, I’m not going to get any long-term girlfriend since I want to live abroad and it might sabotage my plan, but I am going to enjoy.

Well that’s all I could think of for now.

2011 is still not finished, but for me it has been a great year, I enjoyed all of the difficulties, studied from my mistakes, and I’m now moving forward.

Tomer

P.S – I got the job, it was only after another test in C# which took about 2 hours, I’m starting to work on the 18th of Dec.

Today was a happy day, I had a job interview, and it didn’t suck even thought I wasn’t so good.

Some ground rules for job interview:

1. Don’t be late, ever – This is the most important one, since if you are going to be late, its going to imply that your level of seriousness is pretty low.

2. Know your potential employer -  You should research about the company you are going to work for, for me it was kinda easy, since the company is making a software that is available for download, I grab a copy of their free trial, installed it on my Mac, and immediately found a bug (and told about it in the interview).

3. Be calm, ever heard the ocean when there are no waves? that’s you! – By being calm you will project to your potential employer that you are in his own level, people hire people, not only based on their skills, because eventually every subject can be learned after some time.

4. Don’t get stressed – Today, on my job interview, my potential boss brought some super programmer to test me, that man knew his shit, he made me “look small”, because after about 2.5 years of not studying theoretical programming stuff, and only using practical stuff, I forgot a lot, however, I still aced it, since I didn’t get stressed, I’m scheduled a continuation interview to see whether I could get the theoretical stuff up to speed in my memory, but by saying “don’t get stressed”, I actually mean “accept the stress and go with it”.

5. Don’t attach too much significance for that particular job – We live in a world of abundance, you will have more opportunities.

6. While in the interview, don’t focus on getting hired, focus on the interview – Some people are thinking too much about the outcome, while not giving enough importance to the process, and the process of getting hired is important, you are given the opportunity to present yourself in the best light, so do just that.

7. Talk to the point, don’t stall – If the employer is asking a question, don’t try to deviate from it, and don’t give a lengthy explanation.

8. Talk to the employer about his problems and how could you help solve them – The more value you give in the interview, and show how you could help, the more likely the employer want you instead of others, because you care, and other potential employees don’t.

Overall it was a nice experience, I don’t like job hunting because it means that I’m going to actually get hired to do a job for someone else, but I think its a fair trade of my time, the salary will be used to fuel my business, of course that when I’m hired I will work very diligently and will help my employer with his goals, but still I’m not fond of having a job, so I set myself time limit.

When I will find a job, I will still work on my own business once I come back, this year is going to be super hard, because I’ve finally decided what do I have to do in order to be successful, and I’m going to do it without any distractions.

Tomer

Last week I was still a bit in shock of coming back to Israel, but now that I’ve totally landed, its time to start working.

Today I wrote a big ass email to my VA, she is a cool phillipina, that always say she like working in my company besides that, she is a machine.. I’ve got my own special way of dealing with VA’s after having few of them dis-appear on me or have too many tornado’s when the weather next to their house is chilled.

One of the reasons I like to hire Philippines  people is their willingness to learn, for example, whenever I ask my VA “do you know what is xxx?” and she don’t know, she say “I don’t, but I bet google does”! that’s the spirit and how you should teach your employees to behave, they’ve got a problem? let them try to handle it first, if they cannot find the solution, only then they can ask you, very Tim Ferris style i know, but it works.

Recently we’re not even working on the same timezone, so I wake up and then after a few hours I get the daily report in clockingit, clocking it is actually a really nice service that let you manage your tasks and assign tasks to your VAs, its free and that’s what makes it even more amazing.

So getting back to business, I’ve filled this week with one of my most tedious tasks, some of them are programming tasks that help me with my SEO, and those tasks are very hard and needs a lot of time and endurance, for example, I’ve just spend today doing only 1 task, and when I finished looking at it I saw that I tested my system 33 times, every time tweaking something else, and finally it works, so I’ve got some blogging time.

Another cool service I’d like to recommend is “Evernote“, its also completely free unless u want to add some pdf’s to it and such, it helps me keep all of my notes in the same place, another cool feature it got is that it synchronize with your iphone/android/pc/mac automatically, keeping you remembering stuff everywhere.

Wishing everyone a productive week, either with conquering your dreams and with getting all of your work done.

Tomer

So here are the 4 BIGGEST Lessons after using that kind of money in two and a half years.

When I quit my job at 2009, it was a wonderful experience, I still remember until this very day how I walked out smiling, looking for a better future, I had affiliate income of about 1000USD a month, sometimes it was 800 sometimes 1,500, but it was really nice having that.

So first of all I flew to New Zealand to fulfill a dream, I traveled there, and then did Snowboard for 2 months, everyday having the time of my life, It was a revelation, that you can do what you love, while having money coming in, after that I did a month full of “must everyday massage” in Thailand with my best friend, and then I settle in China.

When I left my country I had 26,770USD, but somewhere along the way I collected debt of additional 8,230USD in those two and a half years.

Lesson #1:

Make sure you diversify your streams of income – When I set up for the journey, I had many offers that I was promoting, but only one of them stick really good, and I put all of my eggs in the same basket.

The lesson that I learn was that next time I quit my day job I need to have at least 6 different streams of income, be it 6 different clients or 6 different websites running different advertiser’s affiliate programs or so on.

Lesson #2:

Trust people, but not so easy – When I started my journey in China I have taken some jobs and got some people who have cheated me, I trusted them because they were from my own country, but in the end I figure out that trusting people shouldn’t come so easy, and you must test them for a longer period of time.

I was really naive, I have built a website for someone, and made him a really clean design and nice template, but he just keep asking for more and more, and so I told him that I want him to pay me something because the time it takes is too much, so he paid 25%, then he kept asking for more improvements and I made it perfect, but he just said that its not really complete and its not what he wants, and all the while he came to my house and waste my time while studying how to do it himself in wordpress, then he didn’t pay the rest.

So that being said, from now on I will use escrow or other services or pre-payment for my services, because I can’t have this kind of mess up going on again.

I used to trust people very fast, but now I learn to give them a test before I start really trusting them. because it wasn’t only about one website creation job, it was also about people who told me what “not to do” because they were just protecting their territory and I believed them, until I tried doing things myself and figure out they were just trying to keep me away from something good.

Lesson #3:

Live your own dreams, not other’s – Before I came to China I had many dreams, I knew I want to have 1 Million USD in the bank until I’m 30, and that I will travel and enjoy the world while doing it.

But then when I came to China, after a few months the affiliate offer went down, and I had to adjust, so I took my father’s dream to sell physical products from China, electronics, and sell it online, looking back now, it wasn’t such a smart idea, I couldn’t travel that way, because I was bound to one place, and it wasn’t my goal, my dream, so I couldn’t enjoy it for the long term.

My good friend always told me that I should do what my heart tell me, and not what seems logical after talking to people especially my father, and when I really took a break from everything, and asked myself “what will be good for me?” I realized that making my kind of business, all online, is what I really need.

Lesson #4

Don’t let others control your time! – This one is a big one, the mistake was that when I was out of affiliate income and just wasting money, my father came to visit me in China, and I also had a girlfriend, and I just let them completely control my time, I couldn’t do anything, next time I wouldn’t never consider anyone to move in with me like my ex-gf did, and just take it slowly while building my dream.

The sole responsibility was on me, I could easily say “please come less often”, but it was comfortable, having my needs satisfied every night, waking up and doing it again, it was like living a dream, but actually it was draining my money away since I had no income, and I couldn’t set my time to focus on my goals.

————–

All in all the lessons were learned and are living pretty well inside of me, it was a really good use of the 35,000USD that I had, I’d definitely do it again! of course now that I study my lessons, I can focus on the future, and stop thinking about the past, but I just wanted everybody to learn from my mistakes, and my good friend asked me this questions today so I wanted to write a post about it.

Stay tuned for more.

Tomer

Hi, my name is Tomer and I started this blog in 2009 in my own language, and since then I started to advance towards my freedom, but some where along the way I lost my way, and I went with the thoughts of other people, and then I realized that if I keep on that way, I’m going to live other people’s dream, and not my own.

So in those two years I’ve managed to study and build affiliate marketing business, to quit my day job at Microsoft as a programmer, to travel to New Zealand and do snowboard every day while having my affiliate marketing money coming in, then going to Thailand with my best friend and having fun for a month, and then, the worst have happened.

My affiliate marketing was constructed from a few affiliate sites, but one of them made the most amount of money, and the advertiser decided to remove the offer leaving me with almost no money every month, so I had to adjust, I started working harder and harder while living in China, and then all the mess started.

I had a girlfriend who took most of my time, I gave her the permission to do it and then its my fault, she also got me to spend a lot of money I didn’t have, and then my dad came and put his dream upon me, to start selling physical products from China, and so I did eBay, got to make some money, then I got my account suspended (in Psychology its called – self destruct mechanism, when u hurt yourself without noticing), and it was because the eBay wasn’t my dream, I must have sold about 12,000 products, packing each and every one of them, and it was kinda a crazy time in China.

The good points are that I study how people work, every time I started a partnership somehow the partner got the best side of the deal, so I study a lot about partners, I also got to hire real people, sometimes for packing, sometimes for buying goods, sometimes to do the sourcing, so I understand job interviews better now and how to understand if someone is going to be a good employee for me later.

My two best friends always told me to go back to my country and restart it all, work again until I make another affiliate business, but I refused thinking that it would be admitting a failure, so I stretch my time over two years in China, living my father’s dream and not my own, he always wanted me to buy him stuff from China, and so I did, and he really encourage me to do that kind of business, but in the end I realize what two of my best friends told me was the truth, that I should go back to my home country and do it all over again this time do it my way.

So here we are, I’m going to study from all of my mistakes, and best of all, I am going to advance toward my ultimate freedom, I just got back to Israel last week, and I’m ready to look for a job now.

I had a fun experience in China all in all, I studied enough chinese to keep up a conversation with a chinese, I study about people, about e-commerce (I made some e-commerce websites). I study how is it to live in a foreign country for a long term, how to get new good friends, who is there to get me (some bad people who just try to stop me). I actually feel that those two years in China were good education, it have cost me a lot since I came back with some debt, which I never had in my life since I was taught never to get into debt.

But the most important fact is, that I have a plan, and it’s very simple:

1. Get a job in the hi-tech industry and return all debts.
2. While working in the day job returning home every day to work on my affiliate business.
3. Exactly one year after starting working a day job, quit the job, and fly to Thailand and live from my own business’s profits.

I have only 1 rule – Before I leave the job I must have the business income coming from at least 6 different directions, so that one will not affect the other.

So enjoy reading my blog and I hope you will learn from my experience.

Tomer