Quitting The Day Job

No Internet, No Problem?

This weekend I went to my parent’s house which is about 7 hours from my house. I don’t mind going and visiting them, but there is one catch. They only have dial-up internet. This poses a problem for me because I recently realized that I am addicted to the Internet.

I wanted to use this weekend as a great opportunity to redesign one of my websites. The website makes about $10 - $15 from Adsense, and $5 a month from CPA offers. Not bad for a site that I built and have just let sit for some time. The site has enormous potential, and one of my goals this month is to double my income from the site. I believe just by redesigning the site and doing a little promotion every now and then, I can double or triple my visitors, and hopefully double or triple my profits.

Weekend Without Internet

With kids, it is hard to find time to work on anything, especially when you visit a relative’s house. I did not get as much time as I wanted to work on my redesign. Surfing the internet was not the problem, it was just spending time hanging out with the family. I finally realize something very important though. I got more done on the site being without the internet than I would have if I had had the internet. Instead of wasting my time browsing sites, twittering, and looking at all my stats, I got to work.

This gave me the idea that when I want to get to work at home, I will turn off my wireless connection for about 30 minutes and just work. Then I can turn it back on for another 30 minutes, do what I need to, then back to internet-less work. Most of the work I can do does not need internet connectivity. You can write your blog entries in Word, then copy and paste them into Wordpress. You can do all your design and development work on your desktop before shifting it over to your server. Try it once, and you will be surprised at the amount of work that you will get done.

If you are interested in the redesign, it took me much longer to do the header and menu than I expected. I tried three or four different menu combinations before I still went back to the original. I also had the whole header and menu done before I decided to move some elements around. In going through color combinations, I realized orange on a white background does not look very good, but orange on a blue background looks AWESOME. Most of the content is already done, I am just going to be making a few changes to the appearance. I would say I am about 40% done, so I missed my goal of having this done this past weekend. I need to hit more of my goals!