Accountability Update (21-10-10)

Posted on 20. Sep, 2010 by Aaron in Accountability

Well it’s finally happened, I’m no longer someone who does this as a part time interest or hobby. Although I’ve not gone full time affiliate yet, I do have an accountant and all the necessary paperwork completed to say that in the eyes of the government I’m actually a business.

This has also been due to my web design efforts really picking up which is going to be part of the overall plan so I have a really nice mix of work, and also some degree of insurance that in the future if one of my income streams stops, say for instance Amazon ban me for some reason unbeknown to me, I’ll still have a steady income coming in.

This has also been quite liberating at a tough time in my day job, but instead of a few years ago where I’d of panicked I now feel confident enough that the business will be my lifeline. So much so that earlier in the week one of the guys I work with (who always has a negative view on things) said what happens if this internet marketing and web design thing of yours doesn’t work out after all that money you’ve spent on it. Without thinking I just said ‘There’s no way that’s going to happen’. I’d have to spend all day sleeping for it not to work, I’ve never been so amazingly confident of anything in my life.

I will hopefully in the future do a little guide for anyone new out there ‘in the real world’ who doesn’t want to risk everything on credit cards to hone their PPC skills and wants to build up some sort of safety net. There are a few little tricks I’ve learned along the way, but it really does boil down to either targeting a service you can provide or building simple affiliate / Adsense sites. Then re-investing that money back into PPC. I however need to clear some debts first before I go into this all guns blazing but I know 100% it will work. It may be a bit slower than the methods some other affiliates practice but you won’t lose the shirt off your back doing it.

Anyway, back to the work this week. Pretty much all of the week has been spent streamlining my systems and looking for new offline services to provide. I look back at the way I used to work and it horrifies me to think how much time I’d spend working on what I thought were one off tasks for a bespoke site but were in fact repetitive tasks. There was one part of a site that has taken me well over 3 hours this week, but next time I do it it’ll take about 10 minutes now I’ve documented the whole process. Do this throughout the course of a site build and the build time comes down considerably.

Well the basic upshot of this week is I can finally see light at the end of the tunnel and soon my life won’t be governed by a J.O.B , soon I’ll be the one calling the shots and there’s absolutely nothing my boss can do about it now.