This past weekend John Chow of www.johnchow.com was in T. and I had the privallage to sit down with him and a few other bloggers from TO and talk blogging. John has a great personality and he's really the same guy offline as he is online...and he video tapes EVERYTHING ;)

In attendance there was a few other bloggers including: ZK of Web Traffic ROI, Ahmed Dawn of A Dawn Journal, Chris Ye of Customize, Manuel Maniquis of Adobo Republic, Max of Money Bites and Blog Gears,Francis Chung of Tech Viva and Antonio Leong.

We're going to continue and try to meet up as time permits, I would suggest a monthly meetup so that everyone can fit them into the schedule. I had a great time this weekend, can't say I learned anything new per say, but it did get me pumped up without a doubt. Scratch that line about not learning anything... I personally didn't know John owned TTZ media and that he has 2200 publishers on there. God only knows how much money he's bringing in a month from that site on top of his blog earnings of 30,000+ ;) Evil John... Evil.. or should we start calling you Evil Rich John Chow ;)

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Every few months my main site hits a stall and I worry, now I worry more then ever after quitting the corporate world to blog full time . Well it seems like I'm hitting a traffic stall right now as I write this, if you're in a stall never ever panic. If you panic and start changing too much of your site you might cause more damage in the long run and never be able to recover.

It's a weird strategy to do nothing, but most likely it's off site factors that are affecting your traffic rather then something you did. Here is a couple of things to try to see if your in a traffic trend:

First ask yourself if you've made any big changes to your site structure, a new theme you might have installed etc. If you have then most likely that's your problem.

Now take a good long look at your analytics, I live by Google Analytics it's your best friend, especially in situations like this. Open up your traffic section go into keywords section and start going through them to see if any big traffic keywords dropped in traffic.

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One of the biggest questions each entrepreneur will ask himself/herself in their entire life is... When do I quit my full time job... it's a question I've been struggling for a long time.

Some people will argue, quit as soon as you can so you can lead a happy life sooner, and I agree yet I'm a cautious person... I belie in balance and getting to your goals slowly but surely. One of the biggest things that kept pushing me to quit was thinking that I was building a business on the side working 2-3 hours a day and weekends and I was making some decent money and how much faster I could expand if I focused on it 40 hours a week.

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So a few months back I signed up for Kontera publisher account. Installation went smoothly and I've been making a few bucks everyday. But then over the next few weeks I've started getting a few complaints from my users, their complaint was that the site looked too spammy. And I agree.

This is the invisible line of running a website putting advertising on it. Its' the line that has never been clearly defined and it moves everyday, how much advertising is too much. So one of my first actions was to take down Kontera, it was just a few bucks a day so it wouldn't affect my master plan too much... yet the weeks after, I kept seeing the message don't put all your eggs in one basket... and I've preached it in the past as well.

The Solution

Pretty simple actually, I've took some time to analyize the Kontera and how it works, and came up with the conclusion that it works really for new users... as soon as people hover or click the links they realize that they just clicked on an ad, which is not bad but for returning users this just becomes one big eye sore on the website with having these double underlined links all over the content they're trying to read.

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First off, I would like to apologize for anyone who's attempted to read my blog over the past few weeks... it's been a crazy past two months. I've been working on a major redesign of aboutmyplanet.com and it's finally live.

There was a major redesign of the UI, you could say it's a brand new site. However on top of that I've been able to recode the entire backend templating system of wordpress. What I've done is build the entire system in OO PHP Classes which makes the code so much easier to read and much more organized. It allows me to easily add new additions to the system much faster then before.

I've also implemented a big bridge between wordpress and vBulletin which works quite well right now. Over the next few months I want to refactor the code a bit more and deploy it on my other site, and who knows maybe in the future release it to the public.

Other then that I've started a new job at JumpTV which is an IPTV company and everything is going great, just busy busy busy. Some other projects I'm working right now are pretty cool. One will be a wordpress tool I'm hoping to be able to sell a subscription for, it will be a linking strategy system for your blog, more on that in the coming weeks.

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Wherever you look on the net you see tips and lists of how to implement SEO onto your site. The thing is you can't just go and do your SEO optimization once and be done with it. If you're going to do SEO yourself you need to take a few months and learn it yourself and then use what you learned on ongoing basis. SEO is one of those things that takes weeks and months to truly be able to see what’s working and what’s not. On top of that Google and other engines go and change their code every often, so in a way you’re always guessing what works.

When you invest the time to learn SEO you quickly learn that content is king and really the best thing for your website long term is to focus on content alone. Here are some quick tips on SEO:

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This is pretty major setback for google, I've come to trust them and maybe too much. I've spent months getting my personalized homepage to the state I wanted... I had some custom ToDo Lists and note modules that I've written and now all the data is gone... I'm not sure what's going on but from a quick search on google tons of people are having the same issue. So I'm still crossing my fingers that it will come back... I wish there was some backup option to save all my data to email once a day... I've emailed Google, hopefully they'll have a general response... stay tuned for an update..

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I find myself often asking this question... when will I quit my fulltime job and work for myself... And by working for myself I don't mean find projects to work on for other people (at least not entirely). The problem is we spend the most amount of our time working for someone else. It's a vicious cycle that I hope when broken will reap major benefits.

I've been working for seven years right out of school and only for the past year I've really started looking at how to make money online, by using your own projects.

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People are always out on the lookout for how to make money…from my experience you need to start in your daily life. I’ve never been an advocate of buying expensive lunches or that cup of coffee for $5. Brilliant business plan BTW. I’m also not cheap, I spend money when I feel I’m getting a good value on something or celebrating a particular occasion, I think it’s smart living.

One of the biggest achievements I’ve accomplished to date was buying my first condo. I was 24 and after losing quite a bit of money on the stock market I finally decided to put my money into good use and buy my first home. The first step was getting an agent, they make sure you get out there and actually start looking J. I found a great condo that was on the market for 1 day.. a penthouse suite with an amazing unobstructed view of the lake. It’s small but the price was right. I purchased the condo for 189,000, that was over three years ago.

The condo market here in Toronto has been red hot, which is great but I wasn’t looking at flipping, I’m in it for the long run. See there is a few ways to look at a mortgage payment and I look at it this way… I used to spend $700 on rent plus utilities, when I got my new place it was going to cost me $1400 with maintenance. The way I see it is, I’m paying myself about $300 a month that’s the principal amount. So my cost goes down to $1100. Now I also got a bunch of great amenities and the luxury of living in a penthouse suite, not bad. So there is a little bit of a difference but not much, easily I adjusted to the new hike in my living expenses. See the brilliant thing about this is, just a few months ago I got an estimate on the value of my property and it’s valued at around 250,000. That’s about a 33% jump in my equity in just over 3 years, divide that into 3 years invested and each year I’ve made a potential additional income of $20,000. Now that’s what I call a sweet deal.

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For those of you who have been living under the rock, there is a TV revolution going on. Let me get this out of they way first... yes I do "borrow" TV shows off the net. Let me tell you what... I'm really not sorry... the amount of money corporations are making off us is insane... and there are no limits every year it's more and more and it will never end, unless we do something about it. I agree people need to get paid, but in my opinion entertainers get paid way too much, yes they do entertain millions of people but that's just because the way the system is setup. There is plenty actors out there who would be happy to work for much less money. I feel like I'm getting off topic here, all I'm trying to say is that we pay way too much for entertainment.

I recently moved and just got cable installed today, it's costing me $50 a month... what am I paying for? well basically 20 minutes of commercials per hour and other promotions within the actual shows.

Why did I get cable?

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