Yellow Dog Ventures

Boomtown is the new name for Jaime Mintun’s consultancy program. Her intention is to provide participants with everything they need to create and sustain businesses as Internet consultants. She promises to hold one’s hand until they are making thousands each month.

I joined last year when it was called Turbo Charged Consulting. It was a bit slow getting off the ground at the time and, to be honest, my intention was to use it as a back up only if my efforts to create streams of Internet income fizzled. So it was way on the back burner.

I’m currently really enjoying my projects and activities as a marketer, and my income is increasing, but it’s time anyway to revisit the prospect of being a consultant. I envision myself working with local business people, coordinating their efforts to create a presence on the Internet and increasing their success in marketing and selling their services online.

Right now Jaime has a WSO going (a Warrior Special Offer on the Warrior Forum) that offers a blueprint for a weekend seminar teaching “local business people” the ins and outs of marketing on the web. The sales copy is fabulous and really psyched me up. Then I learned I get access to this as a member of Boomtown. Cool!

So tomorrow I am going to put my other activities on hold and devote the day to Boomtown, checking it all out and getting my feet wet again. I may really enjoy niche research, site building and seo, but if I intend to truly create a living for myself, I believe it will be as a consultant. I know I’ll need some hand holding, but I’m finally convinced that’s the way to go.

I’ll keep you updated…

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Today I finally finished reconfiguring my eBay affiliate sites from Commission Junction links to eBay Partner Network links. What a process! I only have about 6 sites promoting the eBay affiliate program. I really feel for the people who have thousands of pages! What a job for them.

Now comes the question of reporting by the EPN. Folks on the E1KaDay forum are reporting inconsistencies and errors in EPN’s stats. I have to admit I haven’t gotten into checking out the reports yet. But, it will be important to watch how this plays out. I expect they’ll have some growing pains, but will hopefully work them out quickly.

My eBay sites are all on Wordpress blogs. I have used 1 specific theme for a number of them and it really works well. Would it be a problem (footprint) if I used the same theme for all of the sites? Probably not with such a small number, but I’ll have to check into this. The Prosense theme is the one I like. It puts so much more blog content above the fold, and that’s what is drawing me to change all of the blogs.

My task today was very tedious. Glad I’m done. On to more creative projects.

Have a good one!

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Well, I’m sort of all over the place again, but having a very good time. I actually do have a written plan I am implementing that involves creating a variety of websites (or improving some existing sites that I’ve had for awhile), adding backlinks, and driving traffic. I have a ton of great resources available, too. So now my job is to focus, focus, focus and accomplish as much as I can each day.

One of the fun parts is hunting for cool WordPress templates. There are a lot of them! I’ve been creating a number of sites using WordPress as the platform and I really like it.

But, I watched a video recently that demonstrated WordPress 2.5, which was due out this week (it’s delayed). There are huge changes coming. Darn! I’ve become very comfortable with this interface and really like the feeling of competence. Can’t say I feel that very often, but I guess I’m confident I can catch on to the new layout.

Today was the first in an 8 week series of classes with Jack Humphrey and Samuel Clark of the Authority Site Center. They’re offering “16 Steps To Success,” which will teach how to create a successful authority site. Looks like it will be really good, and I feel pretty excited about it too. This does fit into my plan, although I had envisioned building an authority site a bit further down the road. But, the training is available now, the price is right, so I jumped at the chance. I feel really lucky.

That’s it for now. Thanks for visiting.

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I wrote the following lines a few days ago, and just before I published them, when I went to my GoTryThis dashboard to look up a link, it was very obvious the program was not functioning.

“Accomplished a bunch of odds and ends today. Feels like a whirlwind but feels good.

For the past 18 months I have been using GoTryThis on a server that has not been very reliable. This morning it was down for another 7 hours. That means none of my affiliate links work either. Not cool.

I decided to move the GoTryThis script and database to a different server - Hostgator - which has always been extremely reliable. I have a video that covers how to replicate a database, that I picked up from a member of Earn 1KaDay. Turned out to be a piece of cake, although cpanel is a bit different than the platform shown in the video. I was able to figure it out just fine. So now my GoTryThis database and script is on Hostgator and I expect will up almost all of the time.”

Well, either I didn’t figure it out just fine, or something else went screwy, but all I could get were error messages. Dang! Nothing I tried to fix it worked. Even redirecting the nameservers back to the original server led nowhere. (That one I can’t figure out, unless it was triggered by GTT thinking I was trying to install it on two servers at once and so it shut down. Can’t do this with the whitehat version.)

I’ve messed up the GTT database before, and so at least for now I’m giving up on that program. That’s why I have moved to a new link cloaking and tracking program — Cloak and Tracker — by Jay Jennings. I’ll write a full review on it soon, but I did find it easy to set up with good documentation, including videos and a pdf. So far I like how it works. It appears to have all the features of GTT whitehat and more, and the data is stored on my harddrive, not a MySQL database.

So, I guess that qualifies as another techno-snag. I think this one will lead to good results, though.

Thanks for visiting and have a good one!

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Today is a complaining day. Ever have one of those?

Out of the blue today I can’t connect with my GoTryThis database. What’s the deal with that? I’m sure it’s something I did and not something wrong with the program. It’s a good program.

But it seems little snags like this are happening very regularly lately. It goes in spurts.

Yesterday it was trying to update a WordPress blog to version 2.3 with Fantastico. It didn’t work. Turned out to be a problem with my .htaccess file. I’ve never touched it. What’s the deal with that?

Before that it was trying to implement a process for blog posting via email. It’s a really cool idea for getting posts onto feeder blogs with a minimal of effort. I could not for the life of me figure out how to post to wordpress blogs by email. Sure there’s a section to input a secret email address and a detailed explanation in codex how to make it work. But I couldn’t make it work and still haven’t. I did learn of a plugin that might help, but haven’t tried it yet.

Then before that it was a backup system for all my websites and blogs. This program allows you to back them up via cron jobs and save the backups to your designated spot, so it’s automatic, and you can reinstall them with one click. Very cool. Could I get it to work? No way. Turned out to be a problem with the overall configuration at BlueHost and their firewall, or something. Had to move the script to another server.

Too much lately, and they turn into distractions. I can certainly be my own worst enemy when it comes to taking focused action in my work. At least I learn something new with each technology snag. Hopefully this cycle will end soon and I can stay on track a little more easily.

Sorry for the complaining. That’s enough for now.

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