Automate Your Business

Archive for the ‘Background’ Category

If you’re reading this now, you’ve probably come from one of the other blogs I run, most likely SiteGenerationTools.com or MonthlyStrategies.com

It’s Feb 13th, and I’ve not updated any of those blogs since at least the beginning of the year. Here’s why:

I got tired.

Tired of building up my adsense income only to see it plummet. Tired of running after hosting companies trying to keep my blogfarms up and running without hitting bandwidth limits. Tired of spinning content. Tired of seeing my workload increase and my income drop. Tired of being at the beck and call of Google’s undisclosed adsense payout algorithm (by far my biggest earner, but still not enough to make a major difference to my life). Tired of doing things for the money and not doing what I enjoyed.

So basically I took January off, and then had a few weeks working overseas for my day job. And all I did was think. And think. And think.

I’m going back to my roots – software development, idea generation, and business process analysis. It’s what I enjoy. It’s what I’m good at. And it’s an area where I can provide enough value to others, to generate a reasonably steady income. Income that ultimately is down to me: if I release a suitably researched product and promote it well, I’ll earn some money. If I don’t, I won’t. But if I do it well, I’ll earn more than other months, and won’t be punished by someone in Google changing a “% payout” figure in a spreadsheet somewhere.

I’ll still get involved in side projects, but my main focus will be software development. I’ve had a lot of ideas over the years, but the inherent support costs of developing fully-fledged desktop applications is huge. More than I was willing to risk. But recently I came across a piece of software that will dramatically reduce the support required for desktop applications, thus allowing me to drop the prices of my software to low enough to make them sellable.

So I’ve set up a game plan. 11 bits of software over the next year. And in some cases, a related site that ties into the software as well.

And to keep my divergent thoughts on focus, I’ll be posting here about automating your business. Automation through my software, obviously, but also automation through other software I find, and through managing your business processes, your workload, and your time.

I hope you enjoy the future journey together as much as I think I will.

Will I be going back to those other blogs in future? Certainly MonthlyStrategies.com is one I intend to go back on – I like the idea of doing pilot projects in areas I know nothing about – I’m an natural dabbler, so doing one different project a month is a great motivator to me.

But I’ve got bills to pay, and dabbling wasn’t cutting the mustard, as we say in the UK.

Time to get to work…