He sent me this excellent list:

Think & Grow Rich

The Answer

The 4 Agreements

48 Laws of Power

The Magic of Thinking Big

The Checklist Manifesto

Getting Things Done

Good to Great

The Ultimate Sales Machine

The 80 20 Principle

The 4 Hour Work Week

The 4 Hour Body

Delivering Happiness

Super Freakonomics

Crush It

The E-Myth Revisited

Less is More

Linchpin

The Tipping Point

Guerilla Marketing

Outliers

Tribes

Small is the New Big

The Dip

Wikinomics

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The World is Flat

How to Win Friends & Influence People

Freakonomics

Blink

Believe Me

Innovator’s Dilemma

The Long Tail

Making Ideas Happen

Peak

Purple Cow

Success Built to Last

The Ultimate Question

I love You More Than My Dog

Raving Fans

The Wisdom of Crowds

Cultural Fit Factor

Drive

Fred Factor

Getting Your Shift Together

Tribal Leadership

Happier

Happiness Hypothesis

Happiness Project

Branded Customer Service

Gen Buy

Made to Stick

212 Degrees

3 Laws of Performance

Fish

Get Off Your ‘But’

Never Eat Alone

Now Discover Your Strengths

The Present

What Got You Here Won’t Get Your There

Who Moved My Cheese

Enjoy!

http://www.tredent.com/

On the trip home we decided to stop and hour from home, spend the night and take the kids to a childrens museum the next day.  That night I was up working till about 2am.  When I crashed I had some pain in my abdomen, but I went to sleep.  I woke up at 3:30 with excruciating pain.  I was up and down all night and by morning the pain had lessened and settled on my right side.  We went to the museum and I didn’t do too much, but it was a good time for the kids.  We went to supper and I looked up my symptoms and I had a text book match for an appendicitis.  That meant surgery if it was true and that wasn’t terribly good news.  We travled home and I went immediately to the emergency room.

After many tests they told me I did in fact have an inflamed appendix and I would have to have it removed first thing in the morning.  At this point it was about midnight and had been just less then 24 hours since I started feeling the pain. I was able to pull out the laptop and my mobile internet and get some work done and send out a bunch of emails.   I actually worked a good way thru the night just to keep my mind off of surgery.   I suppose not many people can just sit in a hospital bed and earn money. 

Don’t I just look great?  lol  I was quite scared actually and knew things would be harder afterward.  Well 6 hours after they put me in a room they came to get me.  I went down to preop, and met the people that were going to be in the room and helping with the surgery.  By this point it had been just 20 mins from when they walked in and said its time to go.  I was pretty tore up, until they gave me “something to help with my nerves he said”.  1 minute later things were swimming a bit and I felt groggy.  2 mins later they had me climbing onto the surgery bed.  I layed down and they stretched out my arms and were saying something and I woke up (what seemed like a few seconds later) in recovery.

It was done, and it hurt!  lol  I had a pain button that dispensed me medicine when I needed it and I spent 2 more days there before I got to head home.

The first week was rough, but I pulled the laptop back out and started working the day after I got out of the hospital.  I wasn’t able to get a lot done, but I still felt priviliged to be able to sit in my chair in my living room and earn a few bucks.  I am very blessed.

10 days later I got an infection and they had to slice my wound partly back open to drain the infection.  I was awake this time, although they numbed it, it was still “quite” the experience being cut open right in the doctors office.

Its now 2 weeks since the surgery and I am finally starting to feel a bit better.  I am on the mend and in another 1-2 weeks I should feel a LOT better and in 4 weeks I will be off the weight limit and be able to pick up my kids again, that will be a great day. 

Thanks to everyone for their prayers and support.  Its been rough at times, but I plan to keep moving forward.

When I went to college back in 1999 I started working with an administrator there who did web design for companies on the side.  I had done sites for myself, but not really with the intent to make money.  I think that was probably the first money I earned related to online, aside from selling stuff on ebay.

I went on to work with him for a few years and then branched out on my own, and picked up a few clients.  I took care of their sites and needs for several years and then finally quit doing that around 2007.   In that same year I started in a quest to make money online in other realms.

At the time I had already made web proxies for myself for personal uses, and then I discovered people made money off of them.  So I got into the web proxy business.  At the time it was the most money I had made in my life, as far as online on my own goes.  My best month was around $1500.  I even wrote an ebook on the subject and that turned out to be a great success as well.  It was my first digital product I sold.

While web proxies worked well for me at the time, they didn’t have a lot of residual income.  So I eventually faded those out and tried to get into sites that made income from ads such as adsense.  It put in a lot of hours and a lot of time and never even made as much as proxies.

In 2009 I needed income around Christmas time to pay the bills.  So I found a need online and started offering lists and services of various sorts.  Grunt work really, but it made money.  I would work at my day job on my lunch hour, work when I came home at night, work in the mornings, work on my days off.  Its pretty much been that way for the past 10 years, but more so for the past 4 years.

Then in early 2010 I discovered Scrapebox.  I purchased it for $47 at the time, and that was a lot to me to come up with as we were struggling. I first applied it to automate some of what I was already doing.  But over a few months those services fizzled out.   Then in April I needed more money so I started new services with scrapebox.   Those went well and evolved over the coming months.

One of the things I picked up along the way was the importance of books and learning.  I read “The Dip” by Seth Godin, and it changed my life.  I decided for 2010 that my dip was going to be Scrapebox.  In September of that year I finally felt I was getting a solid handle on Scrapebox and I started offering other products and services for SEO and link building.

As I neared the end of 2010 I was making more money then I had ever made in my life online, and was making huge headway in my plans to one day be full time IM.

At the end of every year I take time on new years even not to make a new years resolution, but to ponder where I might be at the end of the coming year.  At the end of 09 I was earning a little money online and had hope, but 2010 didn’t seem like it might be an excellent year.  At the end of 2010 I knew I had been blessed and I was making solid money and I hoped it would continue so I could get that much closer to quitting my day job.  But I figured maybe by 2012 -2013 I might get there, hopefully.

Then in the first week of 2011 I ran into some possibilities and was taken aback.  I couldn’t believe I was fortunate enough to have landed where I did.  Life had presented me with the opportunity to start planning to leave my day job.  So I followed thru with all the financial advice from Dave Ramsey and paid off the rest of my debt, and built up my emergency fund.

Today I sit debt free except for my house, with about 3 months expenses in the bank and April 13th I will be full time in IM.

Allthe long days, working before and after my day job, working 7 days a week, learning, testing, not getting to see my family as much as I wanted, its all starting to pay off.  God is good, and I am grateful for my opportunities.

Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb,  comes to mind – “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

FREEDOM!  I look forward to working full time IM, and working harder then I ever have in my life. 

Firstly I want time with my family.  Second I don’t want someone else to tell me I can’t excel without their permission or make more money then they allow.  My last post was about people not being like me.  How the co-workers I work with are either just not going after what I am after or they just don’t know its available.

A few days ago I turned in my resignation from my day job with that global company.  Its been 8 years with them.  While I am grateful for the opportunity they have given me to provide for my family, I have never wanted to live within the limited bounds that they set.  I work only a few more days for them and then I am working in IM full time. 

I find myself going to my day job and then coming home and working and everyone else talks about how they go home and do nothing.  Its kind of discouraging sometimes, just wish I had someone that I could see in person that wanted to hustle to change their future via online marketing.

I can connect online, but finding people that hustle and are on my level (not very advanced) is hard to do.  Ever feel like that?

When you check in you get Karma points.  Karma points can be donated to the charity of your choice (picking from the ones they offer, and you can suggest your own).  When you donate, it tells you exactly what/how much your donation will do.  Then the donation is translated in to real world dollars by their sponsors – Currently Citi and Kraft foods. 

The store you visit doesn’t pay anything, at least not now.  You can go visit stores you might not normally, but I have been using it to just check in at the places I was going anyway. 

So how much difference can one person make?  So far this morning since I downloaded the app, about 4 hours ago, I have been able to donate 7 times. In total I have donated 3 meals to hungry folks here in the US and have given clean water to 4 people in Sudan for 1 month each.  (Helping stop the spread of disease).   This has just been in my spare time this morning while going places I was going anyway. 

Did I mention the application is free and there is no cost to you? Think you can spend 5 minutes of your day to give a meal to someone?

When Thomas Edison was inventing the light bulb, it took him over 1000 tries.  Someone once asked him about his failures.  He said that he didn’t have any failures, but hundreds of ideas that didn’t work.  The point is you are going to have lots of ideas that don’t work before you have ideas that do work.  So you are going to have to work hard, test, and learn.

Of course I was wrong, because a link wheel is only a tool or a start.  Its like your core.  You need to link to your link wheel.  In the game of SEO its about looking natural.  If all of your links are pointing to your main site, Google will know that its not natural.  However if you had a site that went viral and everyone linked to it cause it spread by word of mouth, then you would have links showing up all over web 2.0 properties.

People hang out and create pages on places like squidoo, and Google likes links that they feel are from people “casting their vote” for a site.  So if you had a viral site you would naturally have links on web 2.0 properties, forums, blogs, etc…  People would also naturally link to other web 2.0 sites and not always link to your site. You have to understand that 90 something percent of people can’t tell the difference between paid ads on Google search results and organic.  So if they can’t even tell the difference in an ad and not, then they don’t really know that they should link to your site even if it was viral.  They would often link to the site that led them to your site instead of your actual site.   Basically the average person just doesn’t get a lot of in depth internet/seo stuff.  Thus we need to emulate this randomness of people.

So we make a link wheel and we create links to the link wheel.  Links from other web 2.0 sites, links from forum sigs, links from blog comments, links from article submission, directory submission, etc….  If you are planning on doing any greayhat/blackhat stuff, then linking that stuff to the link wheel rather then directly can protect your site from harm if google penalizes for the links, but you get the link equity if its not penalized.    Its a win win.  Also if you happen to be able to get a link from a “bad neighborhood” or totally no relevant site you can still pass the juice to your site ultimately, but by filtering it thru your link wheel.  I heard someone describe it as “link laundering”  lol.  Not that I am saying you should go spam your link everywhere, but I have had opportunity on occasion to get a link free that wasn’t really relevant.  Trade and different things.

Point really is just to try and emulate the total randomness of people that have no idea what they are doing when it comes to the web, or people that know just enough to be dangerous.  If you need some good examples sit down with a friend that knows enough to be dangerous, but no more and ask them to help you work on some project.  Research, creating a squidoo page, maybe a website they are intersted in, etc…. Just watch how they surf, what engines they use, what they click, what they think, how they act, how they react to things… I have had the opportunity just from circumstances of my day job to do this a lot.  Its VERY VERY enlightening.  Then just emulate them.  People are random, but thats normal to them.  You could also read about peoples world view.  I have read some good stuff, but the most recent is Seth Godins All Marketers are Liars – Now renamed All Marketers Tell Stories.  Its on itunes and Amazon.

Link to your link wheels. If it seems like a logical link structre, don’t do it.  If it seems like a random un logical link structure, thats the ticket, run with it. Not to say you don’t need a plan, but generally be creative.