This is more a musing than a truly valuable post, but I had a chance to think about the way we run our lives when working for ourselves.

I know that there are countless “gurus” out there that will talk about automating your business so that you can get away from that one-to-one connection between hours and money that we call “having a job”. Now, I think that is a great thing to aim for…there’s no doubt that this is the only way to get to the final prize in internet marketing.

The trouble is that we all have to start somewhere and I’m convinced that many people really are trading their time for cash, just so that they can meet those payment deadlines! Heaven knows, I’m there myself. I’m sure it all comes down to an element of bootstrapping.

You need a bit of cash so that you can start to outsource some of the work, so that you can start to multiply your efforts, so that you can expand into other areas etc etc. In the mean time though, we are stuck with building our own autoresponder sequences, setting up our own squeeze pages, making our own products or countless other small tasks that make up the world of the IM expert……and then along comes something like Christmas!

I don’t know about you, but Chateau Percival tends to be a bit busy over Christmas. The world of mulled wine and presents takes over the house and any attempt to get out the laptop is met with a stare which is even stonier than normal. So, what to do? The freshness of a blog seems to me to come from its timeliness and that works against setting up a load of posts in advence.

You might think that this is exactly one of those posts…until I rave about going to see Avatar yesterday…in Leicester Square in London….in the miserable snow. Yet one more thing coming between me and IM world domination, taking up my time, but one that I would gladly repeat – an astonishing film.

So, what do you think? Are these breaks in our plugged-in life something we should try to minimise? Or do we take back some of our humanity and use them to remember why we work so hard in the first place. I’d be interested to hear your views.

One of the biggest problems I have found with the internet marketing world is just the sheer volume of material that is available on every subject under the sun.

My previous life as a technical evangelist trained me in many ways to be a hoarder of information. There was always something being detailed by a competitor or journal that could inform a presentation or conversation with a customer.

Unfortunately, this approach is completely wrong for the world of internet marketing. Although I can already tell you many things about many areas of this huge subject, I haven’t yet got down to the task of making just one technique work for me consistently.

I’ve played with PPC, to get clicks to a site that I was sure would convert well.

I’ve played with Amazon affiliate sites, building small niche sites that make a few dollars here and there.

I’ve dabbled with building some small products of my own.

Despite all this, I have not concentrated on any one thing for long enough to truly see (what I would call) success. So, this is my own personal call-to-action. I am going to concentrate on those same Amazon niches that have shown some small success and I will try to make them even more successful.

In some ways this is still me just “playing” at internet marketing. My journey so far has been interrupted by many periods of wondering if I have done the right thing. In all honesty, I miss my old colleagues more than I thought I would and I have found “working from home” to be a lonely existence!

So, 2010 will be a chance to sort myself out.  Making some real money, concentrating on one technique and also making some proper contacts in the IM world.

As a first target, my most succesful site is at number 10 on the first page of google. I will commit to getting that up several places by the end of the year and will see what that does for my income. Watch this space for reports and details of what I have tried.