Goals

I had planned to write this long review of everything that happened in 2006, especially with my work, but I was not able to get it done by today, so I might still post it sometime in the next few days. The most important thing for that post was going to be the last section, my goals for the future.

Over the last year, in relation to my work, I have often talked about plans in terms of the “first five years” after college. I have had an idea of what I mean by this but I have not really explained it to anyone. So I thought my blog would be an appropriate place for me to publicly state what my plans are in exact terms.

Before 28th birthday, which will be on December 31, 2010, four years from today, I plan to meet the following two goals:

- Be co-owner or owner of at least three successful companies.
- Have a net worth of more than $1 million.

For the first one, so far I am co-owner of Eidoan Trading Strategies, Inc which has been around since August 2004. It hasn’t exactly been wildly successful so far, but it has done alright and I think our new site, StockWeblog.com will do very well. My new business, Hill Seven will be born in January and I am very excited about the possibilities for this company. I am hoping that the third company will be for real estate investing.

For the second goal, I know it sounds difficult and perhaps unreasonable, but I think I can make it. I don’t think goals are worth setting unless they sound ridicules when you make them.

Anyway, those are my goals. While this post is, of course, centered on myself, I know very well that everyone who is successful only is because they help other people be successful as well. I already have some very talented people working with me on various projects and I hope to recruit more, especially for the Hill Seven concept. So when I reach my goals, I hope that some of you are right there with me.

Gerald Ford Dead Today

About ten years after that SNL skit, it is unfortunately true today. Our oldest living President has died at age 93. He was also the only President ever to be unelected. And despite running a very honest and open Presidency, he was so horribly plagued by the sins of his predecessors that he was not elected to his own term.

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”
-Gerald R. Ford, 1974

It is unfortunate that he will not be around when Bush leaves office. Hopefully those words will still be true.

The HillSeven Concept - A Blog Network

Starting in January, I am going to begin serious work on my new business venture, HillSeven. HillSeven.com will primarily be a blog network. There will be supplementary businesses, such as eBay stores, ebooks and perhaps even Second Life operations, but they will all tie in with building a network of high-traffic blogs.

Why blogs?

If you are one of the many people who hear the word “blog” and think of teens ranting about their lives, you many be wondering what the hell I’m talking about, so I will provide a bit of education…

Monetized blogs can actually drive some serious income. There are many blogs out there that pull in $5,000+ monthly. Of course, that level of income takes some serious time and effort to set up. Good content must be created on an almost daily basis for over a year to pull in any serious amount of traffic. But the people who can do that can pull in some serious income as well as a variety of other perks.

Why don’t I just set up my own blog and focus on that?

I am, sort of. I have this site that I write for once in a while, and I have StockWeblog.com that I write for, but there’s lots of other people out there who can produce much better content than I can, I’m sure. So I want to help new bloggers by giving them a professionally designed site to write on and just let them worry about creating great content while I manage the business side of the operation. Some of these blogs might be team efforts, like StockWeblog.com, and some will be for individuals, like this site.

Why can’t these potential bloggers just set up their own site?

That would be possible for some people, or anyone can go to WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, MySpace or one of the other major sites and get a cheap yourname.whatever.com free blog right away. But I have spent months learning how to set up blogs. Including how to design and market blogs, how to work with PHP and CSS (and this is with a pre-existing strong knowledge of computer programming), and how to effectively monetize them. I think I’m pretty decent with computer graphics, as well. Plus, I will have a dedicated server and the resources to fund new sites.

So anyone who wants to blog on their own will have to spend their own time learning all this, or they could just work with me and get the benefits of this knowledge without spending the time or effort that they could be using to create content. And not only will the site that I create not cost them anything, but they will have me working every day to make them a lot of money with it, because I’ll only make money if they make money.

Why a network?

Synergy. Along with the benefits described above, creating a network of blogs and other related business should greatly improve the traffic flow. The blogs can be linked together in various ways to get visitors to the site on the network that they will enjoy the most. I can’t give away too much of this part of the operation, but I have some ideas that I think will work very well.

Who do I want to work with?

Anyone. I want to talk to people who may be serious about blogging, but even if you only have the slightest interest in writing about anything that you enjoy, send me a message and we’ll see what we can work out. I am currently talking to a few people about this but I will constantly be looking for more who are interested.

Any topic has potential. Political, Religious, Tech and Personal Development blogs seem to be the most popular but there are some highly specialized blogs (e.g. scrabbooking) that seem to be doing well. Anything you’re interested in and could write about often would work. Video blogs are becoming quite popular as well (via YouTube). I would like some of these new blogs that HillSeven sets up to be a combination of written and video content.

Even if you just think the idea is interesting and might want to be involved in some way other than writing, let me know. I would also like to find a few recruiters/designers to work with as well.

Contact me here.

John Chow Dot Com

I came across John Chow’s blog a few weeks ago when I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Steve Pavlina’s personal blog. I saw a Google ad for John’s site, proclaiming that “John Chow loves Steve Pavlina (His blog at least)” or something to that effect. I thought that was a great marketing tactic so I had to visit his site and see what it was about.

John Chow Dot Com contains an interesting mix of website reviews, internet news, business advice/tips and war stories from John’s involvement in the tech boom of the late ‘90s, often with a subtle, dry sense of humor. I have especially enjoyed his posts about various aspects of current blog culture, e.g. Google AdSense developments, the evils of RSS, Digg conspiracies and the shortcomings of Alexa.

Also, I have to credit John Chow Dot Com as the first place I heard about the “How Much Is Your Blog Worth?” tool. This site isn’t doing so well yet, as you can see on the left bar, but my new StockWeblog.com site is up to $5,645.40 now. It’s a fun little tool.

He does tend to post a lot about certain things though. Such as AGLOCO. Which is understandable, since he now has signed up 1000+ people on that site, myself being one of them. But this ties in with my only other critical comment on the site, that more categories should probably be added for his posts. “AGLOCO” is a category with only 10 posts while some of the other categories have hundreds. If he’s going to make a special category for AGLOGO, why not a Google category? He probably has more than 10 posts about AdSense alone.

Anyway, great blog overall, John. Keep writing and I’ll keep stopping by to see what you’re up to.

SETI@home

A conversation the other day about Richard Dawkins reminded me that I have not been using my SETI@home account and I need to set it up again.

If you have not heard of SETI@home, it is a project run by UC Berkeley that uses thousands of home computers all over the world to analyze data collected by the SETI program. SETI stands for the “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” and was created in 1984 to “explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.” Basically, SETI@home allows you to help scientists discover life on other planets.

Setting up SETI@home involves downloading a program called BOINC, which can also be used to share your computer’s processing power with other research projects such as biological and chemistry research. The BOINC program automatically sets itself to the lowest priority for processor power, so you can keep it running all the time without it having much effect on your computer’s performance, especially if you have a dual core processor.

You can also set it to only work when the screen saver comes on. While the screen saver is running, the program shows a graphic model of the data that it is working on along with information such as where and when that data was recorded.

This is a great project and a fun program to run on your computer. Also, as an added benefit, if SETI is successful and life is found on other planets, that fact will disprove some major portions of Christian mythology.

View my SETI@home profile here:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/view_profile.php?userid=1119015