cashslacker

I was glancing thru a how-to-make-a-million type of book at the bookstore today when I found this card stuck inside. A few things stuck out to me about this. First, I’d be pissed if I was the bookstore owner if some guy was sticking his business card in my books. It makes it look like this card comes with the book or is in some way related to it. Second, he uses Tim Ferris’s The 4-Hour Work Week logo (cover) which can also lead one to believe that he is affiliated with THAT book. Third, and worst of all, this idiot misspells “Trillion” on this nice glossy copyright-infringing business card.

Yes, spelling counts!

How many times do you remember a teacher saying that to you when you were dumb enough to ask the question? Now we all know why. Bad grammar, punctuation, and spelling are all around us. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen “’s” used as plural in signs on businesses. I’ve seen No Check’s Please, We Carry The Freshest Meat’s, and We Carry Grocery’s. I’ve seen other less noticeable errors like We Don’t Except Credit Cards and the like.

If you’re going to take the time to make a sign or business card to try and get business, at least spell everything correctly. Otherwise, just make a thousand business cards with your phone number that say, “I’m an Idiot” and stick them in business books everywhere. Better yet, all of you idiot’s and moron’s quit advertising.

It’s always good to be an extrovert.  Sometimes when I meet someone who feels alone or lost in a crowd I feel bad for them.  Today I had an awesome Saturday!  My wife the minister had a wedding to perform this weekend and I got to tad along!  I rolled into town knowing our hosts, Kyle and Elisa and their totally awesome 2-year-old Austin (met them once at Elisa’s law school graduation party) and the bride and groom (Toby and Krista - met them once too - friends of Elisa, who recommended Sunny to do the ceremony).  It’s only early evening on Saturday and I have a host of new friends!  Let me tell ya, good friends meet each other near the dessert table…great friends meet each other near the cooler of Budwesier underneath the dessert table!

Toby is the groom..an English “chap” in a Southern upper-class world!  He fits in wonderfully from what little I can tell.  His bride-to-be-tomorrow Krista is a pretty transplant lawyer with relatives from everywhere BUT down the road.  Toby’s English “mates” and other relatives were frequent visitors to our “cooler” so I felt comfortable meeting them every 7 minutes! One difference, however, was mixology,  I found.  In England, in the Summer heat, a “shandy” is the popular choice.  Those fellas (chaps) kept saying a shandy was lemonade and beer mixed together to help beat the heat.  In Tennessee a Shandy is Sprite and Budweiser to beat the heat and make a case of beer last for 4 hours.

Back on our side of the pond, Krista’s great uncle was just that.  Uncle Ross is a 95-year-old cashslacker being of full sound mind and body!  He is without a doubt the oldest human with a Budwesier in his hand who talked about life, love, and the persuit of happiness I’ve ever chatted with who wasn’t complaining about medications, Medicare, or their wet diaper!  This guy freaking rocks!  He lives in Southern California and gave me an open invitation to meet him in Vegas anytime once he heard my poker aspirations!

For not knowing anyone in the wedding when we first arrived, I am having a hell of a time with my new friends.  Like I’ve always said, I can make friends anywhere, anytime!

It is less than a year until I’m 40! I put this countdown clock on my blog to remind me (and you) how long I have until I’m 40. I used to think 40 was old when I was a little kid. I don’t feel old at all - mentally. Physically is a whole other issue (which I’m working on with a diet and exercise program).

The overall goal of cashslacker.com is to provide me with enough income so that I can take from April 7, 2009 until whenever off and do a few lifelong dream-type things. Of course all of this is subject to my future child being born. Would I love to be 25 and know what i know now about affiliate marketing, SEO, PPC, making money online blah blah blah? Of course! All of this technology is very recent according to my lifespan. The best time to start making money is yesterday. The next best time is TODAY!

Here are a few things I want to do next year pending approval of the Queen Bee:

I want to play in a few events in the 2009 World Series of Poker! I can hear the announcers as I amas chips:

David makes his money online and is celebrating his 40th Birthday by playing in the Main Event.

I want to take my wife on a cruise or two. Other than our honeymoon we really havn’t had a chance to go anywhere spectacular together. She has a three month sabbatical next year and it would be a great time to dance acroos the hemishperes!

If my child is here, we would also love to have enough time to travel around the country and show our infant off. This child will be the result of a lot of “labors of love”. Sunny and I have family and friends scattered across the country and we’d love to visit as many as we could - $4.00 per gallon gas be damned!

I want to go to all my usually summer camps and maybe even try a few new ones. Cashslackers never have to fill out “Vacation Request Forms” for approval!

If all this works, I want to find Tim Ferris wherever he is in the world and go there just to buy him a beer. His book is probably the only entrepreneurial book that made any sense to me.

This June is my 25th MDA Camp! I can’t imagine missing the next 25!

When I was cleaning up my hard drive / flash drive I ran across this article I wrote for a blog back in December of 2007 about goal setting.  I thought I would repost it here since mid-2008 is upon us.  How is your goal setting going?

SpecificMeasurable Attainable Realistic Timely

As another year draws to an end we are all faced with the task of setting new and better goals for ourselves. Some people make “New Year’s Resolutions” that sputter out and die like my old 1976 Datsun 710 I drove in high school. Setting goals for the upcoming year is an important part of success in your business, health, and your relationships with God and family. If you are going to take the time to set goals, take a minute or two and use the S.M.A.R.T. method of goal-setting.

Specific

Losing weight is not a goal. If is not specific. Do you mean one pound? Three pounds? Fifty? Set your goal as specific as possible. Examples of good specific goals are:

• Lose 15 lbs. by June 1 and another 15 lbs. by Dec 31.
• To write and perform 60 new minutes of jokes for my standup comedy routine (I do standup comedy so this is a goal of mine)
• To sell 1 house per month in my first year as a real estate agent.

Measurable

How do you know if you accomplish your goal? It needs to be Measurable. If I set a goal to increase my sales by 10% then that is a measurable goal. I know what my sales were last year, right? Increasing them by 10% gives me a specific number whether it be number of sales or revenue or whatever your measuring stick is in your profession.

Attainable

I would love to set a goal for me to climb Mount Everest or make an NFL Roster but guess what? It’s not gonna happen! It is useless to set a goal that is unattainable. Whenever I talk about this with others I think back to an exercise we did in graduate school. The professor had us shoot a small ball in the garbage can. We could put the garbage can wherever we wanted. Some people put it all the way across the room (a very large room). Some put it right in front of them. Most put it right in the middle. It was difficult, yet attainable. This is how your goal-setting should be. You want to challenge yourself with difficult, yet attainable goals. You don’t accomplish anything by setting goals so low you achieve them without trying.

Realistic

In order for a goal to be realistic, you must be willing and able to work towards it. If you truly believe you can accomplish it, it is probably a realistic goal.

Timely

A goal has to have a time frame. You must know the point at which you either accomplished your goal or not. In our example above, our goal of losing 15 lbs. by June 1 and another 15 lbs. by the end of the year is a timely goal. June 1 we will know where we stand as we will again on Dec. 31.

As you reflect on your accomplishments for 2007, keep in mind your 2008 goals and objectives and apply S.M.A.R.T. goal setting.  How are you tracking for 2008?

Well April was really my first month as an affiliate marketer.  My main focus was getting my cable, internet, and phone sales system off the ground and running.  When I was with Charter Communications, I was a Direct Sales Representive.  The easy part (and really only fun part) of my job was taking flyers to apartment managers in my area and having them handing them out and I would make easy sales.  Then Charter decided to redesign my job (which I’m sure they knew what they were doing since they are $19 Billion in debt and have a stock price so low it’s a butt-hair form being delisted).  So, I quit.  I’m not always the smartest person in any situation but I’m convinced so in this case.  I established a relationship with an affiliate program that deals in cable, high-speed intenet, and phone and promptly left Charter to do my own thing.  Now all of a sudden the local Charter people were interested in these “easy sales” as they attempted to stop me.  They figured out they couldn’t and that was that.

It was slow but I made $240 my first month just printing up flyers and dropping them off at a few apartments.  Spring is better for sales in the cable industry so I expect that number to climb.

To quote Keith Alberstadt, “Suck It Charter”.

If you’ve done any type of research into affiliate marketing, you’ve run across the Build A Niche Store (BANS) affiliate marketing software sites. Most are “reviews” that are really affiliate sites themselves selling the software. I have yet to run across a site that says “Don’t do it - it sucks!” If you haven’t heard of it (gasp) it’s basically a site builder program that takes your ebay affiliate ID and pulls current auctions from ebay in a specific category and makes them all into a nice, neat store for you. When someone buys something form one of the auctions thru your site, you get a commission (basically a portion of the seller-paid fees ebay receives). It costs around $100, which isn’t that bad considering you can buy it once and repeat the whole process over and over with new niche sites. I have a few niche sites in mind (based on products that I am both interested in and researched quite a bit before making actual purchases). I want to stick to stuff I am interested in and can stay excited about. Although it might sell a lot, I just don’t think I could sit in a bar and tell a hot chic that I sell Hannah Montana crap on the internet.

Before I dropped a $100 on the software I have decided to do a little market research first to see if I can drive traffic to a site thru AdWords If my AdWords campaign (very little cost) drives enough traffic (tracked using Google Analytics which is free) then I’ll go for it. One of the key concepts I took from The Four Hour Work Week was to test demand before investing heavily in some business idea.

I’ll keep you posted.

Since my recent discovery (and by discovery I mean WordPress suspended my blogs and told me) that my affiliate marketing blogs / sites were violating WordPress Terms of Service, I’ve been trying to figure out how to set up my own hosting and moving my blog to it.  I got this far but I can’t seem to get the blog theme I had before so I am still trying to figure that out.  Hopefully by this time next week I can have things back to normal.