Live for the present…not for the past

As an entrepreneur in the 21st century, I feel that I am always wanting more, always feeling that what I have is never enough. In the last few months, these feelings of desire for money and physical objects have driven me up to the very ends of my tolerance.

With the launch of Blogtrepreneur.com for me, came a new era in my internet career as I vowed never to become obsessed with money again (although a few of you may hear my occassional rants at my internet earnings!). As a result I feel more at peace with myself, and I feel that I have more time to spend on the things that I really want to achieve on the internet.
I think that this sort of discipline should be carried forward into any business or working routine. It is easy to experience depression or “burn-out” if you are constantly trying to achieve.

As I read Steve Pavlina’s blog, I began to understand that the true reason for depression is due to a person recognising their certain failure or difficulty. Let me give you an example,

Suppose you’re deep in debt with no end in sight, and you hate being in debt. The debt is only depressing when you think about it. If you think about something else that makes you happy, something good about your life, then at least temporarily, you won’t be depressed. So it’s not the existence of the debt that depresses you. It’s only your noticing the debt and not wanting it that depresses you.

This quote from Steve Pavlina has made me realise that I should try and look at the broader picture. As an entrepreneur I should ask myself everyday “What are my goals for today and for the future?”. By focusing on the past and by trying to find a reason for a certain mistake, or by trying to think of what would happen “IF” I had done something else, then you are only going to put yourself in even greater turmoil.

Living for the present may be a difficult thing to do at first, but if you continue to push your negative thoughts to one side and try to continually strive to goals everday, then you may find yourself enjoying the smaller things that you do have more than the other objects which you are trying to obtain.

Age discrimination - a reality?

Yesterday was a big day for me. It was planned to be the start of my working life. As a teen I decided that I should find a job which suits my interests, therefore, after seeing a lot of them on television, I decided to become a Golf Caddy.

Now the prospect of carrying around someone’s clubs for them, cleaning them and repairing divots didn’t seem too appealing, however it certainly beat stacking shelves in the local supermarket or standing behind the counter all day. Better still I had heard that the pay for a round of golf (around 4 hours) was £20 ($35) plus a tip which could range from $10 to in some cases $100, depending on how well you did your job! I can definitely say that the entrepreneur inside me was ecstatic with the fact that I could be earning quite a lot of money to reinvest into my online business.

So I woke up at 8.30 in the morning and headed down to the golf course as instructed by the caddymaster, who is responsible for helping caddies to get hired by the players. After greeting him and going to sit down with the other caddies, I realised that I was the youngest person there, with the majority of caddies being aged between 30 and 40.

Then was the wait…after about an hour of sitting on the bench, I had not been booked for a job and quite a lot of the older caddies had been called up by the players. I started to get angry at the fact that my age seemed to be the factor separating me from a few hours on the course and a decent wage. This made me ask myself whether there really is age discrimination in business?

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Poll: How much SPAM do you receive?

As a result of a few comments in my previous post about the amount of Spamming emails people receive as a result of their website or blog, I figured that I should start a poll to see how much SPAM people actually receive. This is my first poll, and it was made extremely easy thanks to the Democracy plugin that I found for Wordpress.
All I had to do was a tiny bit of Sidebar editing and edit the poll options and it was done. Simple!

Aims of the poll?
My aim of this poll is to see the extent of how spam has taken over the internet. I want to have qualitative data to see whether spammers are actually becoming more and more of a nuisance. I will place the first vote, which is in the “0-10″ category, because at the moment (fortunately) this site has not been indexed in Google. I am expecting more SPAM in the future though.

I will be posting the results of the poll in one week’s time, so please voice your opinion so that we can come to some sort of formal conclusion.

UPDATE: Once you have placed your poll you will be taken to a blank page, so please refresh the Blogtrepreneur home page! Sorry about the inconvenience

Blogging safely

A few days ago, I realised that a person from WorkBoxers had linked to me, so naturally I checked out their site. Unfortunately, although Jamsi from the site did praise Blogtrepreneur, he was more concerned about my blogging safety.

I’m not sure how he managed to research this, but he had noticed that my email address for Blogtrepreneur was plastered all over the internet. Stupidly, whilst I had been in forums, and in my submitted articles on Ezine.com, I had left my email address in the text. As a result, my email was showing up for 19 results when searching on Google.

There is a problem with this. According to Jamsi, spambots are able to scan through the internet very quickly and send loads of spam to the email addresses it finds. The only way to combat this is to not write your email address on the internet at all. Although I’ve not really seen that much spam directed to my account, this has definitely put me on edge, and Im now worried whether I’ve left other security holes in my blog.

These mistakes are quite common, and as a blogger, I should have seen this coming. All is not lost however, but I will have to be more alert in the future. My contact page does not show my email address now, and instead uses a very cool plugin from Wordpress called InTouch, which automatically generates a custom build contact form which forwards the message to my account. The email address then remains invisible from “spamming” eyes. Have you ever had any problems with security on the internet?

Schools out for summer!

Well after a gruelling Physics exam this morning, I’m over-the-moon to say that I’m officially on Summer Holidays. Yay! This time I’ve got over 2 and a half months to really focus on my entrepreneurial dreams and to start building my internet empire.

I think the best idea now, is to make a plan of what I would like to achieve. For me planning is essential, as it helps organize my thoughts and concentrate me in one direction only instead of splitting my thoughts and attention.

Opening a forum has always appealed to me in terms of ease and monetising. I was talking to a few people this week who have built up a forum portfolio. One of the main reasons for their success they said, was the fact that forums have user-generated content. This is of course very valuable for SEO, as search engines love fresh content. Also forums tend to get a lot of pageviews, as people regularly arrive to check whether there are new posts or replies. As a result CPM advertising (cost per 1000 impressions of the ad) will result in a higher revenue.

As a result of these facts, I was inspired to buy a domain name for future forum development. GolfChum.com I think will become the number 1 golf forum, and I also have an idea to turn it into a Wiki…another money making method which I will be exploring in a future article.

I hope to make the most out of this long period of free time, and who knows, by the time I go back to school, I may have made a small fortune from my hard work!

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