admin | 
08 22nd, 2010| 
Everytime I travel to a state with a tollway I always seem to miss one or more tolls along the way. Lucky most tollways allow for a grace period of 7 to 10 days where you can pay your missed toll. I decided to start a new website what will help people find quickly how they can pay any missed tolls on any tollway in the United States. The blog is called Tollway Payment and in time will contain the means by which you can pay any unpaid or missed toll anywhere. This will not only be a great new project, it should help me as I travel. Recently I missed a toll in Virgina and had to go through quite a runaround to find the license plate number of my rental and call into the missed tolls division. Finally I did get my toll paid but a website like my Tollway Payment blog would have helped out quite a bit.
I decided to get back to work on my websites related to Minnesota Cities, so I added a blog to my Coon Rapids website and started putting some content. I’m hoping the blog form factor works because I can add content much faster and on the fly. Since Coon Rapids is on my way home from work and also where I own rental property it gives me many opportunities to stop grab pictures and write about the various stores and restaurants that Coon Rapids MN offers.
First download and install the latest BlackBerry Desktop Manager software. You can get it from Here
Install the software so you are up to date on your PC.
Next drill into c:\program files\common files\research in motion\apploader and rename vendor.xml to vendor.old
Next download and install JL Commander on your PC. This will install the application to C:\Program Files\JL_Cmder where you can run JL_Cmder.cmd to start the application. Be sure your Blackberry is plugged in when running JL Commander.
Use JL Commander to wipe the blackberry.
To reinstall the OS on the BlackBerry, connect it to the PC with BlackBerry Desktop Manager installed and you can use the Applications part of the software to update the BlackBerry Software.
I decided to return to a hobby site, something fun and something that i’ve wanted to improve for a long time. I started a website years ago about Sportster Pictures that just featured pictures of Harley Davidson Sportster motorcycles. I encouraged visitors to send me pictures of their own bikes and lots have sent in some great pictures. The problem is that I rarely have time to post the pictures in a timely manner. I decided to add a blog to the site to make putting up the submissions easier and i’m very pleased with the results. The blog looks alot better than the website and I can post the photo’s quickly and visitors can comment and ask questions. I have a ton of backlogged photos to post so i’m hoping that my visitors find the blog and participate.
I’ve learned in the past 18 months that managing my life works much better if I manage it like my business. At work for years i’ve managed my team using MBO’s or Management By Objectives. This involves setting goals on a periodic basis and then scoring the goals at the end of the period. This year I decided to lay out some goals I have for myself for 2010. Last year I was focused on getting out of debt which went well. I paid off all my credit cards, my own vehicles and my primary residence. So my goals for 2010 are as follows.
1: Pay My Taxes By 4/15/2010
2: Complete the Learning Spanish software packages I received for Christmas 2009 and start another course preferrably a tutor or class to learn to speak and read Espanol.
3: Pay off my wife’s truck
4: Purchase one additional rental property
I’m sure as 2010 begins i’ll have new goals but for now I see 1 and 2 being accomplished in the first 6 months. Hopefully by years end i’ll have all goals met.
If you are a landlord in Minnesota and your tenant doesn’t pay early you’ve probably received all the rental income you are going to receive in 2009. This means you can go ahead and get your MN Renter Rebate forms to your tenants. These are also known as the Certificate Of Rent Paid which your tenant can use to obtain a refund based on rent paid during the year 2009. The idea is that rent paid is used by the landlord to pay property taxes so the state of Minnesota gives your tenant a refund based on the amount of rent paid during the year. There is a fine if you do not get the forms out by the end of January 2010 so be proactive if you can to stay out of trouble with the state.
November is always a bad month for myself and my wife. We’ve had two dogs pass away in previous Novembers and this month we found out that my oldest dog has four tumors and my youngest has bone cancer. Yesterday we had my youngest dog’s leg amputated making her one of those three legged dogs that you see occasionally. The dog amputation was necessary to save her the extreme pain that comes with bone cancer and will give her back her life for whatever remains. She’s only five so is very playful and having a leg in terrible pain that she could not use really hurts her quality of life. Deciding to amputate your dog’s leg is not an easy decision and much research went into it. Knowing that others will unfortunately go though this I decided to document our situation and things we learn at a new dog called Dog Amputation. It uses some great keywords related to the subject so should be easily found in the search engines. Each day i’m anticipating seeing and learning new things about the healing process that I can pass on to those who want a peek into the near future of their own dogs going through this.
I write alot here about how to generate revenue through Search Engine Marketing and advertising using Google Adsense. What I have not written about is what to do with the cash you make to ensure your future is one of wealth. I’ve been doing this since 2002 and you’d think that would be a huge pile of money. True enough, if you add up all the extra income it does make for an impressive number. What troubles me now is what I could have done with all that money that would have built a foundation for a more solid future. I view online revenue especially via Google, to be a fickle thing that comes and goes, feast and famine, and someday could just disappear overnight. So the key is to grab as much cash as you can now and then invest it wisely so you aren’t screwed when the faucet shuts off. By this I mean in the past, early on, I bought “stuff” motorcycles, gadgets and lived larger than I should have and didn’t save and invest as much as i’d like. A few years ago I did better, buying a rental property and getting out of debt. Today i’m focused on paying off my mortgage, and then buying more rental property. When I add up all the earnings from Google since 2002, while i’ve done some smart things, I don’t have a paid off house. I could have had that two years ago if I had focused. So now with a new plan all my profits go to my mortgage. I have a day job so there isn’t any reason my Adsense income can’t go to pay off the mortgage 100%. The plan is to have no mortgage as soon as possible, and then buy more rental properties and possibly other businesses. That way when the online income ends, which it may or may not, I have another established business built with my new cash flow. This from from having 0 debt and the rental property business is extremely stable in good and bad economies. If the online thing continues then so much the better, but it’s always best to be prepared for when the good things come to an end.
So tonight I started a new project focusing on credit issues for those that live in Apartments. It may or may not be well known that folk that rent especially in apartments focus on their credit more than those that do not. So my goal is to present a site on Apartment Credit that can help folks improve their credit despite the fact they live in an apartment and allow me to hopefully bid on reasonably priced keywords to get some revenue from credit based ads.
Sometimes simply creating web content isn’t enough. If you don’t mind a little risk you can pay for advertising to drive traffic to your websites. One of the best ways to do this is with PPC advertising via Google or Yahoo or MSN Adcenter. You bid on keywords and the idea is to pay less for the advertising then the revenue you gain with increased traffic. A recent example of how this works for me is my Unified School District website. I use Yahoo Search Marketing to bid on the keywords Los Angeles School District and then send them to my page about the Los Angeles Unified School District. In this particular case it costs me less to send them there then I make when visitors click the ads so the scheme works. In many cases it will not and you need to abandon the campaign and try agian. When you find winners you let them run and your income will pile up. Part of this is knowing what to publish, what to bid on and how to manage the PPC vendors. They are picky about keywords you bid on and pages you send visitors to. Keep your keyword related to the content your sending them to or you’ll have your campaigns turned off or as I was get kicked out of the advertising program alltogether. Arbitrage is a challenge to learn but once you figure it out it really juices your revenue. I’m currently spending $15k per month advertising my websites with Yahoo. So far the retuens have been well worth the risk.