I’m reading a couple of bizarre yet strangely related books right now.  I started with PD Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous
because I’d been following the path of Yoga and Meditation knowledge for the past few years now.  I’m consistently intrigued and following multiple, disparate paths to see where they take me.  In Search of the Miraculous was a path recommended on an Internet Marketing board, of all places, even though the topic has nothing to do with marketing.  What I find fascinating about this book is that it suggest a Fourth Way of knowledge and possible enlightenment as taught by GI Gurdjieff in the first half of the 20th Century.

While only halfway through the book, I find the premise intriguing.  Essentially there are three primary ways to enlightenment, as I am understanding it.  The first is through the physical, or the Fakir.  This is the person who will contort themselves into various positions for hours, days or months at a time to master or overcome the physical pain.  Of course you permanently fuck up your body, so this is not so intriguing to me, nor the authors.

The second way is through one’s faith and emotions and is called the way of the monk.  This is often described as heart-centered personal development and is the subject of most new age drivel.

The third way is the way of the Yogi, which is the path that I’ve been working through for a few years now, when the normal responsibilities of western life haven’t taken precedence for me.  This is mastery through mental habits and capabilities and often accompanies work with a guru of some sort.

The fourth way, as taught by Gurdjieff is thought to try to overcome the bad points of the other three schools.  It is an attempt to combine mastery of all three without retreating from society to do so.  It’s admirable but as to whether it will hold up to scrutiny, I will have to see through the remainder of the book.

Of course like any intriguing philosophy it’s been commercialized and bastardized by various schools in the name of Gurdjieff that by many accounts miss the mark entirely, an assertion that I cannot support or deny as I refuse to get involved in any formal school that has the pretenses of possible cult-like practices…which has also led me away from Sadhguru, one of my primary sources of yogic knowledge in recent years.

The second book (actually a series of nine books) that I stumbled upon basically because it occasionally quotes and refers to Gurdjieff is Laura Knight-Jaczyk’s “Wave” series.  In this series, she and her associates have allegedly channeled a group of beings from an alternate dimension called The Cassiopians (a word that I can never f’n spell right).  A dubious premise especially for the skeptic but there’s actually some highly intriguing information in the series and if you can suspend your judgement of the weird for a bit, I think you might dig this series.

The books is called Soul Hackers: The Hidden Hands Behind the New Age Movement (The Wave Series, Volume 2) and is the second in the series of nine.  Cool name btw, Soul Hackers.  I may name my latest band after that book.  Incidentally, I am in the process of recording some demos with this new band including a handful of covers and I will upload the stuff when time permits, and provided I have room on this server to do so.

I do suggest you start with the first book so that you can get the background, or spend some time on the author’s website reading the abundance of free information there.  I am told that most of the information from the books is free on her site.

Despite the very bizarre nature of this latter book, it did lead me to a nice exposition of breathing exercises that I found very pleasant and helpful that I wanted to share with everyone here.  They are free, though I do believe in Karma and that if you get value out of something, you should find a way to compensate the creator.  I’ve ordered four of the author’s books and am making my way through the second one now.  Check out this site for the breathing exercises, Eiriu Eolas.

Of course both books could be full of shyt, so decide for yourself.

What to do with the second half of my life?

I’ve been figuring out how to attack this post for a few months and I’m finally realizing that I’ve been living in fear of how others might judge what I write…and the end result is that I don’t end up writing though I love doing it more than any other activity.

I can count nine failures for every single success I’ve had in my first forty years on that planet.  In reality, my memory is probably faulty in that I’ve had thirty or forty false starts for every success.

What has kept me going is that I at the very least keep “starting.”

What kills many potential successes is failure to keep it going.

I admit that this is predominantly because I have so many varied interests, from athletics, to esoterics, from bookwriting, to songwriting, from personal finance, to ufology.

It makes me a weird mutherfucker for the most part, though most of that is tucked away anonymously.

I like to quickly build.

I like to quickly destroy.

I’m often manic.

I’m sometimes mildly depressive.

I’m a flawed student but a student none the less and I’m okay with that.

All there is is lessons.

If we look at life that way, as a game where the goal is to learn the lesson, then perhaps we can come to term with both our successes and our many failures.

All there is is lessons.

The past two months of shiny plans have been derailed a bit by learning a new corporate job and performing to the capabilities that I am generously paid for.  This job allows me to use my analytical mind as I carve up and disseminate governmental regulations.

Carve up and disseminate is a skill I am good at.

I’ve also been busy preparing a home for sale that is under contract and has cleared the hurdles of buyer’s inspection and mortgage company appraisal.  We are hopefully a few weeks away from closing this headache.

A decade ago I had purchased several rental properties assuming this would be my retirement passive income.  I’ve decided after this time has past that it is too much bother and so I am now deconstructing that plan and slowly, methodically selling the properties off.

The nice part will be that my primary home will be paid off when all else is sold and we’ve only been in the home since late 2010.

The pendulum swings back the other way for me again.

All there is is lessons.

My last post talked about working on Internet Marketing and I’m still coming to grips with it ethically.  While part of me wants to continue the experiment to see how successful and easily repeatable it is, the other part of me is quite annoyed by the myriad of assclowns that are typically in the Internet Marketing sphere.

I’ve started a separate website to cover Internet Marketing experiments going forward and will share that site soon, should it be of any interest to anyone here but am still indecisive as to whether to talk about those things here.

I still feel like experimenting with it for now because I feel there are lessons there still to learn.  In many ways, life is marketing in that day in and day out we are working to sell ourselves to others, even to convince ourselves of our own bullshyt.

All there is is lessons.

I’ve considered blowing out the articles on this site again, as I’ve been known to do every year or so.  In many ways, as I read and experiment day in and day out, I change over time and what resonates with me, even week to week, often changes.  But no decisions have been made yet and there is merit to leaving things alone warts and all.

And as long as we are in seek and destroy mode, I am considering pulling two of my books down from Amazon in the next couple of weeks.  Some of the books have seemed to go thru their sales lifecycle already, though Tao of Minimalism continues to sell well, and I am looking to move forward, including tackling my first novel.

I’ve been guilty of high expectations and the belief in quick fixes in the past.  In typical lazy human being fashion, I’ve searched for ways to achieve massive results with minimal effort.  Is that not one of the central tenets of Minimalism?

It’s the folly of the 4 Hour Workweek, I guess, and it’s definitely a First World problem where we have too many “instant” solutions to our perceived problems.  The issue is that those of us with the wherewithal to read these words are generally very comfortable, with every imaginable advantage in arm’s reach.  I’m not saying that the concept of 4 Hour Workweek is bad.  Creating systems and delegating or automating some of the tasks in your business is good sense, but Ferriss sold books because of the provocative title that elicits in the reader a sense that they can build massive, passive income and then ride off into the sunset.

And so where’s the pressure to succeed in this model?  Or if you succeed will you have the staying power to maintain it?

Unfortunately massive success doesn’t really work this way.  If we take the time to study the Greats in any field, we will see that there are some characteristics in common, chief among them is the willingness to do the seemingly mundane, but necessary, small tasks every day to get better at whatever it is you’re trying to get better at.

Arnold Schwarzenneger didn’t just go to the gym one day and start curling 100 lb dumbells.

Steve Jobs didn’t create a multi-billion dollar corporation overnight in his garage.

Dave Matthews didn’t write hit songs his first time out of the box.  In fact it took him ten years of touring in obscurity to finally catch on.

I’m not saying that you have to strive to be one of the Greats in any field.  The bar does get higher every day, set by people who decided years ago to put in the time every day to hone their skills.  And you may not wish to exceed that bar.  I certainly don’t have the fortitude to be the best of the best in everything I set out to do.  But I do have levels that I want to hit.

I am saying that to get from where you are now, to where you want to go, is a series of single steps executed every. single. day.

At least that’s the premise I am working with.

In all the biographical stories and books I’ve read, I’ve never seen any stories of instant success.  These are real people who have real success.

Yet the Self Help and Diet book sections are filled with 3-Step Instant success plans.  A book about how to lose a pound a week would sell for a nickel, yet if you are moderately to significantly overweight and you were 52 lbs lighter a year from now, you would be ecstatic, as you should be, for this is far more impressive to me…to be able to sustain hard work over time, and it is an elusive and difficult skill for many of us, myself included.

I’ve always been a good sprinter…waiting for the blast of inspiration and in a fury, racing to complete a task right before a deadline…most of the time.  But success is fleeting when it actually does come and when I fail to cultivate and innovate, I invariably end up far behind again.

Now I’m taking the approach of grinding through what will turn out to be a set of repeatable tasks done daily, weekly, or monthly to build a successful authority site.

I have my keywords.

I have my site.

I have a loose plan.

My goal is simply to complete the tasks and improve just a little bit each day…that .0000001%.

For these first several days I’ve been devising the plan.  Every component of the plan has its own plan and process itself.  How it all fits together is the “loose” part and I am sure it will change as new innovations and understandings come about.  One thing I’ve learned about Internet Marketing is that, while there are some tried and tested principles that stand the test of time, the individual methods get squeezed and over-saturated VERY quickly and then the cockroaches move on to the next feeding ground.  I’d like to avoid that and instead work something systemic, but again, adaptability and innovation are the keys.

I’m doing some site tweaks today and integrating social media links.  Content should be published tonight as well.

More to report later…

Valentine’s Day and the Wife’s birthday falling just a couple days a part…as a husband I always sweat this one out, hoping to make the grade but here we go, back on track.  From this point forward, I will start the clock sequentially.

When you’re wiling away in anonymity with a new site, you need to get readers to know you.  Most folks who create a blog or website don’t give much thought to whether anyone is actually searching for the type of content that you’re writing about.  People get into writing online often because they are passionate about a subject but it is definitely not, “build it and they will come.”

If you write an article focusing on a three million monthly search volume keyword, you won’t find it in the first 1000 pages for a good long time…and nobody is going to take the time to search that deep to find you.  And so the philosophy I am taking with the new authority site is to do some deep keyword long-tail research, using a variety of free and paid tools.

I use the free Google Keyword Tool, as well as a couple of paid tools such as Longtail Pro, Market Samurai, Keyword Map Pro and Keyword Atomic.  All good tools, and when I have time, I will provide some video tutorials on them, but what I am trying to avoid is spending several hours a day on this site talking about what I am doing on the authority site…when I can be using that time on my authority site.

Suffice to say that my criteria for keywords in this initial phase is to find a good thirty or so keywords that I can write thirty articles on for the next thirty days.  These thirty keywords should average a monthly search volume of thirty to sixty searches.  That’s a couple visitors a day for what will be very easy keywords to rank for on the first page of Google, without much more work than a few Tweets and a couple social bookmarks…yes I am aware that there is a school of thought that social signals like Tweets do not help rankings, however it seems to be working in tests I’ve done on other sites.

This will be the opening month’s content.

In order to stay organized, I simply export my selected keywords from Google Keyword Tool to a spreadsheet, along with search volume data, and I will mark them off after I write the articles.  As a special note, once I have the link for each article, I will add it to my spreadsheet.  This will help me keep track of interlinking opportunities in my future articles.

An important factor to consider with this is to try to be natural in your writing.  We aren’t writing for the search engines, we are writing for people.  So if you are finding ridiculous sounding keywords that will never sound normal in a sentence, bypass them, or add a small transition word in between to make it look more natural.  Google will still give you credit for it.

Day 3 will be writing content, the fast and effective way, and also a note on what I do for scheduling.

Some pre-work was done prior to today.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time considering what niche to chase after, and against all logic, I went with a primary niche that has over three and a half million global searches per month in alternative health.  Anybody in their right Internet marketing mind would tell you to stay away from this, but again, I am in it for the long haul and I see plenty of long tail keywords that have trickles of traffic that can be conquered with little work.

After the Panda and Penguin Google updates last year and the havoc they wreaked on EMD’s (exact match domain names) I decided to create a shorter url, of less than 8 letters, that is easy to remember and something I can build a brand around.  The URL does not have any of my keywords in it.  My litmus test, in this case, is whether a five year old can remember it and spell it.  I think I accomplished that with this site.

I bought the URL from Name Cheap and registered it for three years.  There are many marketers who believe that Google favors your long term commitment and gives preferential treatment to addresses that are registered for longer periods.  In retrospect, five years would have been smarter, but I am glad I stayed away from one year.

If you have the luxury of time on your side, I HIGHLY recommend that you instead pick up an aged domain, preferably one with Page Rank and high DA/PA (domain authority/page authority).  I will explain more about this in the near future, when I begin using private blog networks to bolster my site.

You can watch the GoDaddy Auctions for these types of URL’s but it may be weeks before you find one for your price, that meets the criteria, and also is a name that can be adapted to your niche.

In the future, I will definitely scope these, but for now, I have a brand-spanking new URL.  I’ve chosen BlueHost for my domain host, due to ease  of setup and good customer service.  There are other options out there that are also very good and I will branch into some of those again, when we talk about private blog networks.

As I know that I will be creating several sites, I decide to buy some premium themes from Elegant Themes, since as I previously stated, I hate Thesis.  I get 79 themes for $39 annually.

I install a theme and I try to keep the plugins to a minimum right now.  There is definitely a correlation between the number of plugins you use, and the speed of your site.  Google hates slow sites.

I have a handful of administrative plugins that help me schedule posts and also to do backlink research on my competitors (very important and we will detail this later).

For plugins that actually operate and load with my site, I use Contact Form Manager (free WP plugin).  I also use the premium version of gTranslate, which translate my articles into dozens of different languages.  I noticed that none of my competitors have this feature and thought this would be a way to differentiate myself from them.  It is a pricey plugin, at 15 Euro a month, but well worth it in my opinion.  A user can simply select their language in a drop down of my navigation bar and it translates every component of my site for them.

I’m also experimenting with a Premium plugin called Hybrid Connect, for my newsletter signups.  This plugin creates beautiful opt-in forms and supports Facebook as well.  The developer’s version (I can use it on unlimited sites) of the plugin cost me $47.  It is now substantially more expensive.

There are other premium plugins that I am testing out and I will mention them if they make the cut.

The point was to get a site up quickly and moving, and tweak along the way, while I am getting content out there.

Tomorrow, I will have some posts on content strategy as well as backlinking plan.

The site should chill out for a few weeks before you start building backlinks.  This site has been chilling for several weeks and we will be ready to proceed very shortly.

Costs to this point:

Domain Registration 3 yrs with Private Whois: $54

Elegant Themes – $39

BlueHost – 1 yr of hosting = $75

Hybrid Connect Plugin – $47

gTranslate - $15 Euro/month (~$242 USD annually)

TOTAL COST – $457

Total Hours Spent – 4

Unpleasantly plump ass is back from the gym.  I don’t know what my goal is yet but it is certainly to feel much better than I do now.  I wake up feeling like shyt and I think about how I felt some time ago when I was strong, agile, and had great endurance.  I’ll be forty next month, and I’m not feeling that way now.

I’m at the point of trying to get my body used to working out right now, so here’s exactly what I did today, as unimpressive as it is.

My gym is the local YMCA.  I have a family plan for my wife and three kids there which is $62 a month.  It has a pool, indoor track and full amenity of weights.  It does not have kettlebells which bothers me, but I have some at home.

I arrive and do one series of Sun Salutations to prepare my body and mind.  I then do a fast walk of half a mile around the indoor track and jump on a stationary bike for five minutes and sprint a little over a mile.

Then:

- Triceps pulldown – 40lbs – 3 sets of 10 reps.

- Sprint 140 meters around the track.

- Back – Lat pulldowns, overhand grip – 60lbs, 3 sets of 10 reps

- Sprint 140 meters around the track

- Biceps – Inverted bicep curl (15lb dumbells) – 3 sets of 10 reps

- Sprint 140 meters around the track

- Chest – Dumbell press 20lb dumbells – 3 sets of 10 reps

- Sprint 140 meters around the track

- Shoulders – Arnold’s Dumbell press – 15 lb DB’s – 3 sets of 10 reps

- Sprint 140 meters around the track

One set of Sun Salutations, then home.

I eat a Myoplex 30 protein bar and back to work writing this.

FOOD:  So far today, I’ve had three cups of coffee with cream (bad habit), a bowl of granola cereal with 2% milk, and this protein bar.  I will shortly have a half turkey, salami and cheese sandwich which will tide me over till dinner.  Salad with sliced flank steak on top is tonight’s dinner.

Staying away from night-time snack will be one of the keys.  My wife and I both run home-based businesses and after we put the kids to bed, we both tend to sit at the breakfast nook, on our computers, and start mindlessly snacking.

After my previous article, I’ve some explaining to do.  I’ve spent the last six months in deep immersion learning about marketing and running a business on the internet.  Many of the things I’ve learned have wound up to be total bullshyt, other things have turned out to be pure genius (not mine, but someone else’s).  I have some successes and some failures, including getting banned by Google Adsense because I tried to swim with the sharks in a micro-niche and the sharks clickbombed my ads.  Turns out Adsense isn’t overly sympathetic and they just ban people.

In that time, I’ve also worked extremely hard and my day job, and even as a surprise to me, I’ve been promoted twice and have seen my salary rise thirty percent inside of six months.  And while I’m not unhappy in my job, it still feels like a house of cards to me, in an industry that regularly swells, and then lays off tens of thousands of people.

For the sake of safety and stability of my family, it seems that diversification is the best idea…not having all my income in one basket.

I want to be able to share both the good and bad and be held accountable for taking action, which historically I’ve been good at in spurts, but never able to sustain.  I’m an excellent crammer, and always have been.  But cramming doesn’t generally build lasting results.

And while I want to share in the hopes that it will help others, I will not be giving exact URL’s or product/service names for my properties on this site, right now.  I learned the very hard way, as I said above, by sharing a property name on the forum, and then being put out of business over night.  Lots of haters in the world, I guess.

I also will be intermixing a lot of personal/familial details in this.  With a family of five, I can’t always devout 18 hours a day to building a business.  Above all, I don’t want my kids growing up feeling abandoned and wondering where the fuck dad was.

This site is now a traditional blog, as in web log, the same shyt that I’d write in a journal.  I often use Dragon Naturally speaking as well, to speed up the writing process and for this blog I will be doing very little editing here forward for that.  You may see multiple updates a day.  Again I am telling you this so that you can drop from the lists now, if this will bother you.

Updates will be coming fast and furious so if you don’t want to bother with seeing me so often in your feeds or email box, drop now.  I’m also debating turning off comments as I don’t want to fuck with comments from naysayers who have nothing better to do and are guilty of not building anything themselves.  This is my home and if you come into my home and shyt on the carpet, then you won’t be invited to the conversation anymore.

What’s the business plan?  I will figure it out as I go, but the key is that 730 days from now (2 years) I am aiming for the lofty goal of $1,000,000 earned.  Lofty or ludicrous?  Who knows, but what do we have to lose by going for it?

First thing is learning to build an authority site in the alternative health niche, something I am very passionate about.  As I said above, I will not be giving that URL out, for now.  Build it to a degree where it is predominantly on auto-pilot and can be tended to for an hour or so a day.

Then rinse and repeat with other niches that I enjoy.

I’ll tell you how many hours I spend each day, doing what.  I will share with you costs (yes, there definitely are some) and I will tell you even when I outsource (and links of outsourcers, if possible…some outsourcers work completely under the radar…if they do, I will tell you that).

Also, I’ll be exposing some “dirty tricks” for traffic on this site.  I won’t apologize for this.  Four years on the web, I tried to do it on my own.  I’m generally a very private individual and I don’t like brown-nosing people to get a link or some notoriety.

Believe it or not, these tactics are considered white hat, though in my mind, any promotion on the internet is gray or black hat.  I’ve spent time investigating the backlink structure of some of the top “nice guy” names in lifestyle design/internet marketing/passive income and they’ve all bent the rules of white hat promotion repeatedly on Digg, Stumbleupon, buying backlinks, etc.  I will tell you exactly what I do, I’m not going to shy away from that, like they do.  Some of you might hate me for that, or find me to be a hypocrite, but for those who will see the value, there will be enough “secrets” coming for you to build an extremely profitable web-based business.

It is generally completely false that if you build it, they will come.  You need to go hang out where the people are and tell them what you are doing.  .01% of them will care initially, but if you go hang out at enough places, you will start seeing results.

Also, to further protect myself, nearly all of the tactics I talk about will NOT be done on charlieforness.com.  I’m not completely paranoid to cover all my tracks from haters, and if they really want to spend the time to figure out where my web properties are, I am sure they can find them.  However as I publish some books under the name Charlie Forness, I really do not want this web address to get deindexed by Google/Bing/Yahoo.

There are more significantly black hat ways to be profitable fast.  One can get into CPA/PPC, click–jacking and other things for a fast buck, but I am looking to build a sustainable business model, as much as can be done in a world where last month’s SEO strategy may well have been last year’s.

So again, charlieforness.com is the (we)blog of how I’m doing everything on the other web properties.  No more pictures or videos unless it’s specifically to convey information that will assist in the new goal of this website.

I haven’t decided whether to rip down the archive of articles yet.  Something tells me that it will take me more time than it is worth and so I probably won’t bother to clean slate the site.

I will be spending five minutes here or there to update the template of this site and some of the design, since I hate Thesis and the people who run it.

Now, time to take my unpleasantly plump ass to the gym for the first time in six months.  More updates later today.

Reprinted from Huffington Post (which I usually hate, but this hit home):

Why I like this?  Because I am forever starting over.  The art of the start is where I excel, but bring in Mariano Rivera to finish because I rarely have.

Dear _____,

You aren’t doing yourself any favors by breaking your commitment. You have rationalizations and justifications for why it’s okay, sure, but none of them are the honest truth about why you are going back on your word.

Tell yourself whatever fictional stories you want to make yourself feel better, but the real reason you backed out is because you’re terrified that you’re not strong enough to make things work. Unfortunately for you, that fear has been — and is going to continue — holding you back your entire life.

You don’t understand commitment. To you, commitment is something that you keep conditionally and as long as it is convenient to do so, but the moment it gets tough or challenging you simply recede and flee in search of something better.

It is natural to think that you will have it easier somewhere else — but you won’t. Perhaps you’ll even convince yourself that you’re a champion looking for a new set of challenges — but you’re not. You’re a victim looking for a new set of circumstances.

The realization you are missing is that commitment is not about finding the perfect circumstance; it’s about dictating a certain choice. It’s not about making the right decision; it’s about making a decision and then making it right. You don’t commit to things as long as they are easy, you commit to do whatever it takes to make them work, and then things become easier.

The conundrum of commitment is that every time you break one in search of something better, you are actually making your life worse. You are making yourself weaker and you are pre-destining yourself to be only further and further from what it is that you actually seek. Until you understand this principle, I promise you won’t find anything better anywhere else.

In fact, you will only find yourself in the same identical situation in your next commitment. You’ll be forever starting over, forever searching for something better, but forever losing to your fear and guaranteeing that your life will always and only be more of the same. It’s just a matter of time.

I’ve been writing on this blog for a year now.

Without much focus.

Like a Dharma Bum, hopping from topic to topic.

While I still believe in and practice the fundamentals of Meditation, Yoga, and Optimal Living, one nagging aspect of a life that we can all say we live on our own terms has been missing.

And that’s creating a Lifestyle Business.  A business that can be run on your own terms, with low overhead, and good profits.

I’ve been a Corporate grunt for twenty years.  I’m not sure, quite honestly, whether I’ll make it to twenty one, given the job climate where I live.

There has to be a better way.

For the last six weeks, I’ve soaked up an encyclopedia of knowledge on different facets of online marketing, from SEO, to Backlinking, to Kindle, Adsense and Affiliate Marketing.  Six hours or more a day, in between my family and job.

And it’s time to put it to the test.

And so I’m dedicating the next twelve months to investigating, and testing, various ways to make money online in a way that is in line with sound values.

Will there still be articles on optimal living on this site?  Yes, for sure.  But the focus will be on total alchemy.

This is as much for my sake as for yours.  I have to do something to support my family when the Great House of Cards falls.  But there’s also precious little information as to what actually works on the more popular Internet Income and Lifestyle design blogs.  Everyone is keeping their secrets in their pocket.

Bad Karma.

Not me.

So this site will change drastically in the next month.

Design.

Implementing SEO…because there is none right now.

Backlinking…because there aren’t any right now.

Total marketing…because I haven’t done any historically.

In depth tutorials and case studies of what I am doing, including video.

And eventually a clean up of some of the older articles that are out of character for the direction this blog is going in.

I’d thought about creating a different blog for this facet, but realized I’d spend the next three years trying to come up with a clever name, and as I said in the beginning, I believe a lifestyle business can be an important part of an optimal life.

For those of you who’ve been with me up till now, thank you.  I’m hoping to provide you even more value for your time.