After 10 months of blogging I have discovered two big things:

1. I truly enjoy writing
2. Blogging is not a highway to riches

As it is evident through my income reports, I don’t make my living (yet) from Internet marketing. At this rate, I have been making about $175 per month (not enough to pay the rent). I make my living from my dance school, Dance Conmigo, and from my vacation rental business.

After 7 years as part owner of Dance Conmigo, my love for dancing remains untouched, but my enthusiasm for marketing and managing the school has been dwindling. If my classes could self promote and if the ratio of male/female students would be about equal, I would be in paradise, but a dance school takes a lot of time and energy to manage and promote, energy that is no longer there. I will try a hands-off approach for the next few months; If it works, great! If it doesn’t work then it’s time to move on to the next big thing.

After 15 months in the vacation rental business, my experience has been extraordinary. Airbnb takes 3% commission of my revenues and it does a fantastic job marketing my properties. All I have to do is provide a great service. If I could pay 3% of my dance revenue to someone who would do the promotion of my dance business, I would pay it in a second.

As far as my Internet marketing business goes, I will take out my violin and start playing a sad song while I give you all the excuses explaining why it hasn’t done great. My time balance has many arms and this past month the vacation rental business took the biggest chunk (mentally and physically). The result is that I have not promoted myself properly and I have not continued my  website development education. In addition, I have always been a workaholic and lately I have managed to carve out some time to do fun activities such as yoga, kickboxing, dining, etc., which in turn left even less time for Internet business. My goal is to do some catching up the rest of this month.

I believe that the Internet business has great potential and I am sticking to it. I just have to be conscious that it will take time before I get in a regular work flow and it will take even more time before I see consistent results.

Thank you for reading my rant.

Here are my results:

Revenues
Affiliate Bluehost:                     $65
Consulting                                $50
Total revenue:                         $115

Expenses:
Internet services         $60
Website hosting           $5
Total expenses           $65
Net profit                                  $50

Cumulative profit since June 2012:  $ 1785

It is already mid April and I have done very little Alain Internet Marketing. I am sure that the next income report will be even more disappointing.

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”  –Abraham H. Maslow (1962), Toward a Psychology of Being

The entrepreneur’s glasses… 

Kickboxing at Dance Conmigo

I don’t want to be obnoxious but I go around suggesting business ideas to my friends. Business ideas that they haven’t solicited. I have to make a conscious effort to hold back. Whether it is investment advice (I used to be a financial adviser), Search Engine Optimization advice or ideas about how to create additional revenue. A few of my friends have listened to me and I’ve seen big changes is their lives, but in most of them I see polite faking that they are listening while searching for an opportunity to change the subject.

Here some random unsolicited advice I’ve given to my friends. See if any is relevant to you.

To 99% of my friends who invest their retirement money in mutual funds.  Every time that you talk to your “financial adviser” they will recommend the products that make the most money for their employer, for themselves and not for you. How do you think that they make a living?  They will propose mutual funds with expense ratios of 1 to 2%. There are always alternatives called “index funds” that produce similar results with expense ratios of only 0.5% (or less). If your portfolio is $100K, already this is an annual savings of $1500.

To my yoga instructor

My yoga instructor stretches me to the limit

I love my yoga instructor. I don’t know if yoga is her full-time job or her side business. Either way, she could benefit from having her own website. She writes beautiful messages in her Facebook page where she’s giving away all her content to Facebook. If she had her website, (cost: $5 per month) she could be the owner of all her content, she could show snippets of her content in her Facebook page to bring people back to her website. All her students need yoga mats. She could be an affiliate seller of yoga mats, yoga apparel, yoga books, etc. By having a website, she could get free traffic from the internet and she could share her passion for yoga with more people with less effort.

The Kickboxing instructor

My kickboxing instructor could also have a website where he could explain the philosophy of his  fighting style, perhaps one or two YouTube videos showing basic fighting techniques. A website builds authority. When people do a Google search, he will be there among all the established schools in Montreal. If his students become passionate about martial arts, they will need gear, pads, shoes, etc. My instructor could have affiliate links in his website and he would be able to get referral fees while at the same time pointing his students to trusted suppliers.

The photographer

I believe that every photographer should have a website. How else would they show their creations to the world? The potential is huge for a photographer. They could sell their digital images over the internet over and over. The same picture taken 10 years ago, could continue contributing a few dollars every month plus he would get exposure to people searching for his services now.

Artisanal soaps

My friend Patricia makes soap made ​​from natural products scented with essential oils. She promotes her soaps in her Facebook page. She finally got tired of hearing my constant nagging about all the reasons why she should have a website. In the next couple of weeks we will build a website with a shopping cart, so that people all over the world will buy her soaps with just one click?

Now is up to you.

Do you see business opportunities screaming to be taken? Do you have friends who could benefit from the full potential of the internet? leave your comments below.

If you build your own website, please use my affiliate link for hosting services: Bluehost hosting service

WordPress is a free software that allows users to create a website or a blog in a few minutes.

Founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little in 2003, WordPress was built and is supported by thousands of volunteers around the globe. Since it’s open source, anyone can take the code and files and use them for free. Many people do take it, customize it and continue improving it and giving the improved version back to the community.

WordPress manages over 20% of all new websites. It’s the most popular blogging software in the Internet. It’s  used in 60 million websites/blogs and it is downloaded about 10 times per second; here is the download counter: http://wordpress.org/download/counter/

Some of the qualities of WordPress are its flexibility, its robustness and its constant evolution to be at the cutting edge of technology. WordPress is the software of choice of many Fortune 500 companies such as Best Buy, The Wall Street Journal,  Ford Motors, Pepsi, etc.

WordPress is considered to be a Content Management System (CMS). Each website has a template composed of HTML, CSS, Javascript and many other computer languages. WordPress separates the template where all the code is hosted and gives a clean slate to the user. The user doesn’t have to know one single line of programming code to put content live on the Internet. People can write blogs, upload pictures and embed videos with very little effort. For users who work on the road, they can upload content from their cell phones or simply by sending an email to their WordPress platform.

WordPress is used by many as their personal blog to share their ideas, but also entrepreneurs use it to promote their business, artists use it to show their portfolio and retailers to create complete online shopping solutions. The implementations are limitless.

WordPress.org claims that you can download the latest version of WordPress in 5 minutes. My hosting provider, Bluehost, has a button that allows you to get a domain name and download WordPress in a few minutes, but to be honest, it has never taken me 5 minutes. I have downloaded WordPress several times and it always takes me at least one hour to get anything going.

Another great advantage is that there are thousands of people in the WordPress forum willing to help a beginner. In addition there are hundreds of videos on YouTube which show step-by-step instructions on how to customize WordPress.  Here are some free videos provided by Bluehost that shows how to install WordPress.

If you need any help purchasing your domain name, finding a hosting service or uploading your WordPress blog, write me a line, I will be happy to help. If you decide to experiment on your own, please use my affiliate link to Bluehost.

Support this blog

If you shop at Amazon, you can support this blog by making your next purchase through one of my Amazon links. I am an Amazon affiliate and I get paid 4% commission.

Alain’s miscellaneous stuff

Part of my job is to dance with beautiful woman who are about to get married.

Reading Albert Camus was very depressing. I that life is stupid! should we just commit suicide and get it over with?

We are all going to die anyway, so all our goals and things that we set for ourselves are silly and meaningless.

But then, upon further reflexion I realized that I enjoy teaching and motivating others.

If you use spend some of your money in the yellow pages, this is what happens to your money: It goes to the garbage

I feel as if I am losing momentum or I am having a hard time finding my way. Dealing with clients is the best way to learn everything there is to know about internet marketing. They will always come up with the one thing that you don’t know how to do yet. Some other times the clients don’t know exactly what they want. They will know it when they see it.

All this to say I’ve lost two of my clients. Since I only had four clients, this represents 50% of my business revenue.

One client wanted to rank in the real estate industry in Montreal without creating any original content to his website. At one time he hired some black-hat SEO company to bring traffic to his website. They sure brought tons of traffic from a province in China. According to Google Analytics, the Chinese using smartphones to visit his website and staying in the site an average of 2 seconds. For someone who is trying to sell real estate in Montreal, this traffic is useless.  Now my client has found someone who creates original content for his website for $10 an article. I have seen it. It looks very well written. I just don’t know at the price level of $10 per article,how original could it be.

My other client, she is a sweetheart, but my WordPress design abilities are not sophisticated enough to create the website that she wants. It would take me many hours of research to learn how to create what she thinks she wants. I am not at that level yet.

The good news is that I am getting an SEO client. My work will start in July, as soon as his Yellow Pages contract expires. I find that this will be a rewarding contract and I will have an easy time ranking my client for the keywords of his choice (locksmith in Montreal). The one difficulty is that we live in Montreal, a bilingual city and everything has to be done in English and French. I’m looking forward to tackling this challenge.

Revenues
Affiliate Amazon:                       $15
Consulting                                $60
Total revenue:                          $75

Expenses:
Internet services         $60
Website hosting           $5
Total expenses           $65
Net profit                                  $10

Cumulative profit since June 2012:  $ 1735

Support this blog

If you shop at Amazon, you can support this blog by making your next purchase through one of my Amazon links. I am an Amazon affiliate and I get paid 4% commission.

Alain’s miscellaneous stuff

Mardi Gras in Montreal is cool.

Life has been generous with me. The dream is to work less and to live more.

Kickboxing at Dance Conmigo

I started Kickboxing classes. Some how I feel in better shape and more secure when I walk through dark alleys.

Yoga is more fun every day.

Yoga classes still enchanting me. This is a great crowd.

Philosophy is a great mental exercise.

I Made a comment in my Facebook profile that created a two-day debate with many comments. Here is the start of the conversation:

Would you obey a law that you know that wrong?

The Social Contract: Do we, by being members of society implicitly agree to obey its law? Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679)

Which laws you think that are totally wrong?

I go first.

I think that smoking pot should not be crime. It is no different that having a glass of wine.

You are next…

Alain correcting mistakes at Tango class

When I used to live in the States, for a short period of time I lived in a poor neighborhood called Little Havana. The rent was cheap and I did not mind the night entertainment. Who needs a television when you can witness a new drama every night? The husband and wife screaming at each other, the prostitutes on the corner waiting for their Johns, the drug pushers making their rounds and the gamblers collecting their bets. Unfortunate chains of events created numerous tragedies almost every night. Someone getting killed, someone getting robbed, someone getting arrested.

While living in this neighborhood, I saw  the thief, the prostitute, the pusher going to jail, but as soon as they got out, they would go back to the same old, same old. It is so comfortable to go back to the same repetitive behavior, to go back to what seems natural.

To change is difficult and painful, almost impossible. We see many patterns in almost all phases of life, the overweight person tries to diet and after a few weeks gives up and continues eating unhealthy. The smoker quits for a few weeks and celebrates by lighting up a cigarette. The examples are innumerable.

Unhealthy repetitive behavior is also common in corporations and governments. Businesses are comfortable giving poor customer service, businesses stop innovating, businesses become reactive instead of becoming proactive.  Governments borrow more than what they can earn, governments go to war without exhausting diplomatic efforts, governments do anything to earn votes even if they will hurt their constituents a few years down the road.

Recently I asked my Facebook community this question:

Why do people (or corporations) consistently make the same mistakes.

Here are some of the responses.

From reading all these great posts, I have come to the conclusion that the main reason why we continue making the same mistakes over and over again are: inertia: we are comfortable with the way things have always been; and fear: we fear the unknown so much that we prefer to stay unhappy with something that we know than to have a chance of happiness with something that we don’t know, how else can we explain the husband and wife who stay together even if they feel so miserable in each other’s company? How can we explain the person who stays at a job that she hates for fear of looking for a new job.

In future posts we will discuss how to tackle fear and inertia.

Thank you to the people who shared their opinion with me.

Here is a poem by my friend Cheryl Williams sharing her thoughts on the topic.

To judge a fly

It’s so easy to judge a fly
from where I sit and wonder why 
the screen he’ll hit but never try
to change his course – but just a bit!

Is it not freedom that he seeks?
in my mind these words repeat,
as do my actions that compete 
against my own will to move on…

A hundred times he’ll hit 
against the same spot that he knows,
and I think I know he’s thinking
that this time it will be different

But I know it’s not a hundred
or a thousand times it takes
to make you really want to hit the screen
so hard that it could break you

And I know the self-destruction
satisfaction, repetition
all-avoidance, self-denial
that will keep you incognito

So I watch the fly with pity
and I move to pull the screen back
and he jumps upon the offer
flying off to where it leads to

And I wonder if I’m waiting 
for an offer thus divine
while I try to change the ways
that keep me frozen here in time

My mind begins to wonder:
When does under turn to stand?
yet I turn away afraid again
to claim what’s in my hand

Support this blog

If you shop at Amazon, you can support this blog by making your next purchase through one of my Amazon links. I am an Amazon affiliate and I get paid 4% commission.

Alain’s miscellaneous stuff

Every week I try to go to a new restaurant in the area of Le Plateau and write a review on Vacation Rental Montreal, the blog that I have dedicated to my vacation rental business. Here are some pictures one of my regular restaurants in the area: Sabor Latino.

Dinner at Sabor Latino

Sabor Latino: restaurant, supermarket