I know it’s happened to me many times before as well. What I want to address today is a few tips about how to get past that hump and start working.

If you’re starting at the screen doing nothing, you’re in what I would call an “unproductive phase.” You aren’t helping yourself or your interests by being in this stage.

Being a webmaster you have to stay focused. The internet offers a lot of distractions and if you’re not careful it is very easy to spend a lot of time being unproductive. If you are at a loss for ideas you can easily fall into a leisure activity that can take away even more time that you could be working on your projects. I want to try to give a way of how I personally overcome a feeling unproductivity and get working.

So, to get past it we have to get your mental juices flowing and your mind moving. So, one thing you can do is start with something easy. Do something you know you can do and is simple. This simple task will get you focused and allow you to move onto the harder ones with relative ease once the task is completed (while still doing some work of value). Some simple tasks I personally do when I’m stuck for ideas is build social media profiles (make new friends), try to network, or just work on some of my affiliate marketing projects.

Another thing you can do is to talk to another person. Sometimes stimulating intellectual conversation can help jog the creative juices of the mind. A stray comment or even a targeted conversation can give you the motivation your mind needs to start working at full speed.

You can also remove yourself from the situation. Go watch TV or read a book. I know you’re thinking this might be counter productive but, if you structure and plan your time (do the activity for a limited amount of time), you’ll be able to come back to what you’re trying to do with a fresh mind.

Is there something you personally do to get your mind moving?

The concept is simple, Twitter puts no-follow on your website links in your profile. But as demonstrated below (the red box means no follow), if you put your website link into your bio instead, it is do follow (this means that it passes on link juice (or value) to your website). Voila, a free backlink.

(Red box’s mean the link is no follow)

By just switching the location of your website link from “web” to “bio” (you can do so by going to the settings tab) you get a easy backlink for a few seconds of work. This is so simple and easy, I hope you guys found it useful.

Over the past few weeks, I have been using him for a few projects I have going. He is an excellent designer and a joy to work with. He is my go to designer and I wanted to share what a great job he is doing with you guys.

The most recent project he did for me is my 468×60 banner which you can see directly below this paragraph (with a 24 hour turn around). The spinning coin is a nice added touch and he’s yet again gone above and beyond the basic job to give it that extra something special.

His professional quality of work warrants much higher prices than he is charging, but he won’t listen to me :evil:. His current pricing structure looks like this (it’s an introductory offer pricing chart):

Banner Design Introductory Offers:

125×125 - One flat image banner: $10

125×125 - 2 images with transition animation: $18

468×60 - 2 images with transition animation: $25

Other Stuff

Logos: From $50

Websites: Custom Quotes

Click here to order now

Honestly, I think its crazy that the prices are that cheap as I’d probably pay a bit more (but you didn’t hear me say that!). Good designers are hard to come by, and Forest is a great guy as well as a good designer.

So, if you have any design work that needs to be done. I recommend giving Forest a shout. He is extremely fast with high quality work at a dirt cheap price. Get your designs now before he jacks up the price!

Part 1: The Idea

The first thing you need to do is come up with an idea. Last night I had a brainstorming session with a friend about starting a project online together. During this session about 10 potential ideas came up for projects could earn online. I want to share with you what I did to come up with my ideas for this session in the hopes that my methods will help you guys come up with your big idea.

What I first did was open a blank sheet of paper. It always helps to jot down notes to refer back to during a session. What this does is allows you to remind yourself of some reasoning or important points that came up during your brainstorming session.

Next, I started spitting out ideas based on the skill sets we both had. I took what I knew my friend was good at and what I was good at and tried to find ideas based around this. They could be way off the mark, but getting an idea stream started is always a good idea.

As these ideas came out, I listened to my friends feedback and tried to reshape some of the better ideas into potential websites. What this does is keeps a narrow focus on what we’re good at and comes up with ideas well suited to both our skills.

Now this being said, I still haven’t talked about how to come up with the ideas in the first place fully. What I do is look at whats already being done. I look at successful websites and try to think about how they got there. What this does is it allows me to perhaps improve on those websites and usually results in niche spinoff ideas that my brainstorming partner and I can then improve on. This isn’t stealing an idea, it’s using resources already around you for inspiration.

Please note this tactic can be applied to single brainstorming as well. You don’t need to have a partner to do what I described above.

Part 2: Is It Worth It?

After you’ve come up with your idea, you and your partner have (or just yourself) have to decide if the idea is worth it. If it’s a great idea whats it’s potential, and how feasible the idea is.

During the brainstorming itself you will weed out most of the bad ideas. That being said, some seemingly good ideas have no potential and can actually loose you a lot of money. I want to talk about a couple ways you can catch these bad ideas in a net to make sure the ones you actually attempt are the good ones.

The first thing I do is call someone in my family that I trust (or a friend I trust). I tell them the idea and get their point of view on it. Sometimes you get so excited about an idea you can’t see the downfalls of it. As a result those ideas to make money you had turn into ideas to loose money. A close associate (such as a family member) can set you straight here.

Next, I would sleep on it. Sometimes you get so caught up in the moment you think the idea is amazing when really it’s a flop. Sleeping on an idea allows you get a fresh perspective on it in the morning.

A bunch of  your ideas to make money may make sense, but you need to compare them to each other as well. Why is each a great idea? What sets one above the rest? By asking yourself these questions you may see a clearer reason why some of them aren’t a great idea (or not as great as some of the others). This will allow you to pick the truly best ideas to make money to run with.

Remember, not every idea no matter how good it is destined to succeed. A lot of good ideas have fallen flat due to bad marketing or a bad partnership. Just because the idea is good doesn’t mean it will succeed.

In the podcast:

Tyler’s Sites:
TylerCruz.com
PokerForums

Publisherspot
Merandi Networks

Other Mentions:

SitePoint
MarketLeverage

Personally my biggest source of income is a few private projects which I can’t disclose. After that, a bunch of internet marketing projects (such as OIOPublisher and affiliate marketing) add a nice income stream to my pocket. My blog as a whole makes me the least money but I enjoy writing it!

Big Ben Patton - Are you an advocate for black hat methods when setting up a short term project?

Ben, everyone in their career will probably bend the rules a bit. Most famous bloggers have cheated at one time or another. That being said, I can’t fully answer this question. It is a moral question, do you cheat or don’t you? It is something you yourself have to answer. Personally, I prefer building a great project, but I have bent a few rules getting there in the past.

Rajaie AlKorani - Do you recommend foucusing on a blog for a long term income, or multiple projects/services for income?

It really depends on you. What are you good at? Each person has to find their own way on the internet. If you enjoy blogging, do it, if not, don’t. If you have great ideas to make money with products, maybe blogging isn’t for you. That being said, I firmly believe that blogs are a good source of longterm income. They are a following that you can leverage for income.

Acadia - Would you rather have comments on your site or links into it, if you had to pick?

I would rather have comments. Comments mean my readers are involved. I can work on gaining more backlinks anytime but comments show a blog is healthy and a good discussion is usually going on.

How to DIY - Can you discuss various methods of market research to help decide if that Niche idea that sounds great, really is?

Firstly, I would do a demographics search of the niche. I want to learn all I can about my target market before I get into the niche. Next I would research the other big sites in the niche, what are they doing, who are they? Then, I would map out the streams of potential income for the website in the niche to gauge if I can actually make money in it. Next, I would talk to a bunch of my friends and get there opinions. Then I would just do it, you never know if you never try!

Forest - How do you know when to give up on a failing project and move onto the next one?

I hate to give up. It is definitely a hard thing to do if you believe in something. That being said there is a certain point that you do HAVE to give up. This point is if after a certain amount of time (pre determined in your website plan) you aren’t hitting your goals but are doing everything possible. Sometimes there are certain ideas to make money just aren’t mean to be.

Let’s take that principal of backing up your computers data (documents, pictures, spreadsheets, etc) and apply it to websites. Websites are hosted on servers. Servers are pieces of hardware to, and can crash or have problems. It is one thing if your server is down and your website won’t load but imagine if it went down and you lost your website data!

Hosts usually make auto backups, but those can be corrupted. So in a whole string of bad events, you could loose all the work you’ve done on your website in one fell swoop. It has been known to happen!

So, what can you do to prevent this? It really is simple and takes almost no time. Backup, and backup often. Most web hosts can generate a full data backup for you automatically (in the control panel). This can be downloaded to a local computer. What this does is it allows a full restore of your website and data to the date when you downloaded the backup.

Some hosts allow you to schedule automatic backups which can then be emailed to you, allowing you to not have to worry about remembering. Imagine if a website you’ve been working on for years crashed and then couldn’t be recovered. You’d be crushed, so backup your data!

There are certain things you can buy to give you a failsafe net for your data. That being said, I do it a free and simple way.

I backup fairly frequently (1 to 2 times a week) and keep 3 copies. I keep one locally on my computer, 1 on an external drive (USB key) and one on a backup drive (that is used just for that purpose). This allows me 3 chances to recover my data. I do this incase one set of data becomes corrupted.

A lot of people think this can never happen to them (loose a website). Wouldn’t you rather be prepared and not loose it if it happens than run the risk. It is better to be safe than sorry. Just because you think it can never happen to you doesn’t mean it won’t!

Poly-web.com - $50

BenjaminPatton.com - $20

Techack.blogspot.com - $5

Congrats to everyone. I’m going to try to get you guys out another post tonight (since this one is a bit short) but am really busy today so no promises!