I've just had a very good month in August, and amazed at where the time has gone. I went into a bit of a depression during April-July, however word got out that I was available for work and it slowly started to come in during July, with a day a week booking from an old friend, followed by another old friend who has lots of work for me.

August was therefore a bumper month, work wise, though the last week has taken its toll a bit in my energy, and the regular golf slipped a bit, so I'm making an extra effort to get some golf in before the weather turns too bad to play regularly and also the season ends.

I made a point of playing in every medal competition (about every 2 weeks) as a way to make sure I got out regularly.

I've just managed to combine a great offer of a free game of golf at a prestiguous course with an opportunity to get some more business. Though a friend of a friend I was invited to a taster day of a free round of golf. When I booked it, I was asked if there was anyone else I wanted to invite, so I invited one of my best customers from the past, as a thank-you, and to keep in touch, as well as someone I knew from my last job who I suspected would't have done anything about his website yet. I played this cool, and only invited him for golf, but did mention the place where I used to work, so he knew who I was. He immediately ask what I was doing and said that he hasn't done anything about his website, and hasn't committed to do anything with anyone else. So it looks like this might have the desired outcome.

I've just checked my credit score and it's "FAIR" at 783. I'm sure the last time I chedked it it was "Good", but I can't find the results at the moment. The report said too many agreements and the total balance was too high, which I already know I need to work on.

We've started clearing out some of the old office things that have been stored in a neighbours garage, so we'll sell some of these off, and aim to increase billable work, and keep on top of getting invoices out and money chased to come in.

We had 1 big bad debt of £16K, though I had pretty much written of £12K, I was expecting to get the other 4K, but the company has called in the receivers, so we won't see a penny. I don't feel as bad about it as I maybe would have otherwise if I hadn't been busy. There's nothing I can do now, but concentrate on not letting something like that happen again.

I'll update my current debt once I find the original spreadsheet. (I'm done a clean install of WIndows so it's not in my favourites anymore!!)

Shit! I’ve just been let go! The numbers don’t add up, and as one of the higher salaries I’ve been dropped. After 7 months of been employed it’s a bit of a blow. Someone else is due to be canned tomorrow for the same reason. This is a major blow as I’d hoped to work at least for the whole of this year and reduce my debts.

What I’ll have to do now is get my finger out and get some business in for myself. My finishing date hasn’t been set, but if I can get paid until the end of the month and keep the car to the end of the month, that’ll help a bit. there’s work I can do starting next week that will cover my overheads for the month (3 days a week for the the next 2.5 weeks, 7 days in total), but there’s 2 days this week I’d like to try and get as well and that’ll be my goal tomorrow.

The bummer is that the numbers haven’t been good enough because of someone else, who shall remain nameless, who’s still there, but who was a hindrance at every stage to bringing in new work, and to getting work out the door and billed. He does no project management of others in the team and takes no involvement in projects he’s meant to be in charge of. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word Management and just Fannies about most of the time on things that interest him.

He’s being kept because he’s a “fee earner” but his billing time is practically nill because he spends his time on the wrong things, spending 3 days to set up a laptop for the bosses wife (self preservation anyone?) but sends out emails saying he’ll be project managing projects, followed by another email 7 weeks later saying he’ll correct the project slippage on the project he’s had zero involvement in for the last 7 weeks, despite supposedly managing, followed by another 2 weeks of doing absolutely fuck all on the project.

Sorry for ranting an swearing, but I’ve been “let go” because this bastard won’t do his job, yet I didn’t stab him in the back when the opportunity was there because he was a “friend”.

I suppose it’s true that “good guys finish last”

From now on, I’ll need to look after number one, and be ruthless about it.

citi have kindly sent me a pre-approved application form for a credit transfer with 0% until June (ish) 2009 so IO’m going to apply tomorrow and try and transfer about 9k which in conjunction with my 13k transfer to Virgin shoudl leave me interest free until Summer 2009. I’ll let you know once I’ve done it, and then again when I get the results back. Fingers Crossed!

Been very quiet recently, been keeping spending down, not done anything about the 2 big things I need to address, enjoyed a few movies and a concert, played no golf, got on with things well at work, got excited about $9.24 from Adsense, found 2 credit cards have been put into credit by recent balance transfer (need to sort this ) and recieved pre-approved offer of credit card from citi bank (will take this up after looking at current credit charging balances – may mean no credit card interest for the next 14 months), will update more often, even if short.

I need to get my priorities sorted and spend time on the more important things, urgently!

I’ve 2 MAJOR things which need to be addressed and while they will both be longer term items, they are potentially worth a lot of money and won’t take much time to get moving, and won’t take much time each time I need to keep them moving.

What’s not much time? Probably about an hour each, in fact one probably even 15–30 minutes each to write a letter to chase them and threaten legal action.

I’m now committing to doing something about both of these things this week!

What I’ve done instead, is spend almost the last 3 hours moving sites around, setting up temporary pages and starting a project which will eventually allow me to automate a template to try and make some income from Google Adsense.

When I initially setup this blog, the idea was to just commit myself by making a public statement of what I’m doing and hopefully build up a little traffic and some feedback and maybe inspire some other people to do the same. Once I’d setup the site, I realised I could maybe make some money from the site (monetize my blog, as they say) by placing ads from Google and linking to Amazon books, where I’ll get a small commission. the books aren’t linked properly yet, since the CMS I’m using doesn’t support amazon UK yet, though I’m hopeful it will soon, otherwise I’ll have to do that bit manually and I don’t have the time.

I’m slowly doing thing to increase the traffic to the site, though not yet going full out with linking and SEO strategies yet (writing a post like this take enough time, without going back and adding in keywords and descriptions).

One of the things I did was point a number of domains I had to go to the blog, but I’ve also been aware that some ISPs put ads on expired domains, adding maybe a title and an H1 to the page, but not much else, so one of my unused domains (don’t ask!) was setup in this way, rather than just pointing to this blog. Imagine my surprise when I actually earned some income (the $2.95 of the title). when I looked into it, it all came from this other domain, so as a result, I’ve spent the last 3 hours setting up other domains in the same way, cross linking them, check which pages were indexed in Google so none of them ended up as broken links and were wasted. AND FOR WHAT!! ANOTHER $2.95. WHAT AN ARSE I’VE BEEN!! In less time than it took me to do that,  could have written the letters that would at least have brought in about £4k that overdue and possibly been the start to retrieve a possible £28k – £18k of which is highly unlikely, but if I don’t try I’ll get absolutely nothing, and I’d settle for nothing less than 5k out of the other 10K, so 9K minimum versus $2.95/ No wonder I got so much in debt when I can’t sort out priorities that are as obvious as this.

The only defense I have is that I actually enjoyed doing it, and maybe it’ll bring in more than $2.95, you can tell I’m an optimist can’t you.

Feedburner is now showing 21 hits in the last 26 hours, Graffiti is showing 33 views today and Google Analytics shows 1 hit yesterday (most recent figure)

Adsense show 1 click on 379 page impressions (I’ve a feeling they’re all me), though no income for that 1 click, which is odd.

So I’m not going to make my fortune, must setup that paypal donations account. – Only (half) joking. If I can make any income, or receive any donations, that’ll be a bonus. The main reason for the blog is to focus on doing something every day and committing to blog about it to both see through on that, and also to help achieve that goal.

It turns out we are were listed on Google after all. I was reading into the Google Sandbox effect today and did a search at sandbox.google.com and discovered the site showed up. I then searched on normal Google and it didn’t. This seemed to prove the Sandbox theory. Somehow I decided to also search Google.com and it turns out that we’re listed in the .com site, but not the .co.uk site. Not to worry. that’ll come.

The site is also showing 38 urls in the sitemap tool, but none indexed.

Just checked again and this time the site isn’t showing up anywhere in Google – WTF!!!

That’s a hell of a change from lunchtime at work, until now at home.

Could it be that work (20 miles away) hits a different data centre than at home? I don’t know, but I’ll double check in the morning at home and at work. I don’t think this’ll be the case with currently 19 Google datacentres worldwide (as far as I can tell) it’ll be unlikely that they have 2 in the UK

 

 

I’ve felt really good about myself and how much more motivated I’ve been since I started this blog. Last week motivation week through the roof and I felt even better. I now realise that it’s mostly down the the fact that it’s stops raining after about 6 miserable weeks of constant rain, cold, winds, grey skies, and very short days.

We had good enough weather at the weekend that every golfer I know was out playing. We had sun and a breeze in our hair, and when you standing in the middle of a half empty golf course with practically no-one around you can’t help thinking “it doesn’t get any better than this”

Spotted my first subscriber today. According to Feedburner, I’ve got 1 subscriber and 8 visits in the last 36 hours.

It’s not much, but from humble beginnings…..

Traffic has gone up, but nothing’s showing in Google Analytics, so it must be hits to the feed rather than the pages.

Google is now showing no pages indexed, down from 12 pages the day before yesterday, and there’s no links to the site, so the only traffic source is Feedburner and PingOmatic generated.

I think it’s time to get some links from indexed sites. I’ll do some of that tonight, and submit to dmoz and see where it goes from there.

I’m keeping up with logging my spending daily and I’d recommend this to everyone.

This is mentioned in every book about getting out of debt and it’s so simple and such a vital step.

The key is to do it, and never miss anything.

As soon as you commit to do this, you’ll think twice before spending money and it’s worth it just for that.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve held back, not spent anything, or kept it to a minimum since I know it’s GOT TO BE logged.

Keep yourself to account! No-one else will!