Lenstrom dot Com

Scared money doesn’t make money! Words to live by if you run a business. I don’t mind spending money to make money. Recently Alan (a fellow, local affiliate marketer) generated a little over $10,000 in gross revenue in about 10 weeks, it was all done via NeverblueAds with the assistance of Coach from PPC Coach. As Alan stated this is gross, not net, his net profit was somewhere around 50%, he spent $5,000 to make $5,000. Not bad, but I just can’t stomach giving Google or Yahoo! that much money. I hear stories like this all the time, via Twitter or on other affiliates blogs. “Just lost $500 testing this new offer, but it looks like it might do well”, when I hear things like that it makes my stomach turn.

Now I said “probably”. I know enough about PPC from soaking up knowledge over the years, I’ve just never taken the “dive”. At some point I might join PPC Coach, the guy has created a lane for himself and has helped a lot of people, he is probably one of the few people in this industry that sleeps really well at night, knowing that he is truly “laying his treasures in heaven”, not just making a lot of money and keeping it [and the knowledge] to himself. I respect that.

The future for me is local. I’ve already got a great system in place with no concerns of Quality Score or Split Testing. For now though, I’ll stick to SEO, Media Buying, email drops, and my many other methods, be they white or black, they have served me well, and if it ain’t broke, well, leave that MOTHA alone!

Social Network Applications (Apps) are all the rage these days. It started with a Poke and now everybody wants to be a Mobster. MMORPG’s have seen a resurgence in popularity thanks to developers like Zynga and The Godfather adapting the dying gameplay style to today’s hottest Social Networks. Currently Mobsters, the top Myspace Application, boasts 12,834,528 users. Myspace Applications were a long time coming. The Myspace Developer Platform (based on the OpenSocial API) went live February of this year (2008), putting it over a year behind the launch of Facebook’s massive list of Applications.

But Myspace as a whole are not the only ones that are slow in terms of expanding upon their developer community. Myspace Application Developers themselves are leaving lots of money on the table. While perusing the Facebook Application inventory I noticed that some of the biggest Facebook Applications have yet to be ported over to Myspace, and vice-versa. What a shame! These “professional” developers are dropping the ball all over the place.

It’s like buying a .com and not protecting your brand by purchasing the .net and the .org, at the very least. I’ve seen this done as well. It’s sloppy, but it opens the window of opportunity for smaller web developers like myself.  Opportunities like this are always presenting themselves, and while developing a Application for Myspace or Facebook may require a little more money and knowledge than other methods of making money online, situations like this teach us to always keep our eyes open, because you never know when that window will open again.

January of 2009 marks the dawn of a new era — complete freedom. Working from home, at least for me, sucks in terms of time and productivity.  My kids are home and my wife is at work.  See the conflict?  I have limited time during the day and because of that I am forced to work into the wee hours of the night, sometimes until 2AM. Well, that’s not working for me, never has, never will and my productivity suffers because of it. If I work past 12AM, I feel like I got hit by a Mack truck in the morning no matter how late I sleep in. Come 2009 this will no longer be an issue.

When my youngest son was born my wife expressed her desire to stay home with the kids as a full-time Mom. At the time it just wasn’t a possibility. My business was still very much the infant and the income was not stable enough for her to quit her job.

I’m a people person, for the most part. Though there are some days where I think I would just rather be dropped in a jungle to live with the apes, rather then deal with the insanity and stupidity of todays society. Like my father, I like to talk and interact, and like Gary Vaynerchuk, I want to meet as many people as I can before I leave this rock. I believe my days in food service really fostered this. In food service you meet new people everyday, and while my home office is nice, I’m not really able to meet anybody new, at least not face-to-face anyway. God Bless Twitter!

Freedom, I think ultimately, is what people that work from home are striving for, if they aren’t, they should be. Because everything else falls into line after freedom is achieved.

The brain is a fickle thing, if you tell it to think, it won’t. It’s known that a change of scenery can do a person lot of good. And thats what I’m looking most forward to come 2009 — the mobility. Most of the ideas I have come up with, be they website ideas, scripts or blog posts, have been while I was in the shower or while driving. Jay-Z, arguably one of the greatest emcee’s of our time, has been quoted in interviews confessing the same thing, that his best songs have been constructed in his head, while driving.

In November I will be purchasing a new laptop. Dude, I’m getting a Dell! The clunky IBM I have now, which hasn’t been used in years, just doesn’t cut it anymore. Paper Weight status. And soon after I will be hitting the streets. Panera, Starbucks, Bagel World. It’ll be a different place everyday.

My wife got her wish. I believe it will be good for her health and sanity. Office politics, especially in a room full of women, has sent her over the edge more than a few times.

Personally, I just can’t wait to see what ideas pop into my mind when I’m able to feed off fresh air, coffee, bread and interaction. Sky’s the limit!