Where I've Been Lately

I can be accused of reaching too far. I can also be accused of getting in over my head, at least for a few days at a time. But, if I had a choose between having a path laid out ahead of me or just taking steps forward like an explorer, not waiting for the rules or maps, I would choose the later.

I do like making money online. I just want it to be easier. The words that I can write at the various blogs and sites I own are only one part of the equation. The part that I will continue if I didn't make any money.

The other parts are getting visitors and monetization. Each of these I have done well at in the past, before the blogs, by running a search engine backwards. At least that was how I thought of it in my head. If you had a network of sites that basically ran an algorithm that was a mirror of a search engine's chances of ranking high are pretty good. If the system also matched products to content without a middleman getting a cut, chances for profitability also run pretty high.

A system of this sort would only leave writing and socializing to be done and take the grunt work out of the equation. A nice dream to have when I have built a database of over one million affiliate products. I didn't think it was possible at first. I am still not sure how it would run on a server which had me investigating Hadoop and Sphinx.

The research for this has been relatively massive. And to the passerby on this blog, boring. But I am stubborn.

You see, I like writing and blogging. But it seems just as I get on a roll with blog posts, I have to go cultivate all my other sites for a while to keep the money coming in. This was pissing me off and this system has been in my head since I made my first affiliate sale. I am not really a salesmen and I am pretty sure I don't have what it takes to be a rockstar/buy-this-now-or-die type blogger. It doesn't fit me and I tend to put those two careers right up beside lawyers and used car salesmen.

Outsourcing worked to an extent, to the extent I could explain what I wanted. But for the most part, I got "WTF". I can overlook data and see how it relates. It's dealing with the language to make it happen that's the bitch.

So posts have been slow lately and the topics scattered and random. But that's just the way it goes sometimes. I sort of mix myself in the topics related to what I am trying to do until I come up with an answer. I have the answer in my head. Unfortunately, my laptop can't turn this into code yet.

These research jaunts have taught me a lot. One side project that popped out of the research lately was a Commentluv and KeywordLuv Blog Post River. There are 600 feeds in the river and it updates every 3 hours. Not bad for running on one dedicated server with 4 other sites, but then I learned the trick of using remote services instead of my own processing power. My site just serves the resulting feed.

And what the hell, here's the mindmap I've been working on. It explains a lot more and started with this post.

Profit-ware is supposed to be the test case for some of the concepts I have been working with. But for a while it is sitting there. I started two blogs a long time ago before I knew how. This time I want to start one with a plan before I start jumping in and messing things up.

So I'm here, I'm slowing down to make room for the research but I am in no way out. And it's starting to get interesting, at least to me.