A good blog post at the Nitro Marketing blog that puts things into perspective for people wondering how much effort they need to put into building an online business.

“100 hours of REAL work focused on one outcome will give you an online business making consistent income every day. “  Breaking that down, if you spend 10 hours a week, then that is 10 weeks… or a little under 3 months.

The followup rule is then:

“500 hours of REAL work focused on one outcome will give you an online business making a full-time income.” Breaking that down,  at 10 hours a week, that’s less than 1 year and you are at the full-time online level.

Whether it’s an affiliate business, your own product, or  a home-based business. Most opportunities seem to ask your commitment level, with 10 hours a week the suggestion.

Just in case you were wondering what kind of hours you need to spend, to build an income online.

Read the whole post at http://www.nitromarketing.com/blog/100-hours/

I’ve been revamping  Australian Flower Shops again lately.

I originally started the site back in late 2003, and it’s had 2 makeovers since.

It’s actually fun going on the Wayback Machine, to see how the layout and content has changed over the years. I’ve finally gone away from the green colour scheme that seemed to be a fallback for a few of my sites.

Surprisingly, there hasn’t been much change to the content. Back in 2003 I was teaching myself SEO, and the trend back then was hyphenated domain names and filenames and reciprocal link exchanges.  So I still have hyphenated domain and filenames – there’s no need to throw away the history, and if someone offered me a nice link that still remains, then I’ll keep it there, as you should.

And my keyword research back then showed that there was less competition for the long-tail phrases like “floral emblems of Australia“, than initial seaches like “flowers”.

It was easy to rank on Yahoo using hyphenated names, and I would get regular organic traffic from there and MSN. Google was always a hard nut to crack.

But despite the amount of time that I spend researching SEO and web development, with a normal job during the week, plus a couple of kids and dogs, I never really spent much time refining the site.

So recently I decided to try and vamp it up.

Being lazy, I bought Confession of a Lazy Internet Marketer, and was surprised to find that I was already doing 80% of the content and structure approach that he suggested.  Way back in 2003.

So as usual it comes down to SEO.  Some of his techniques I won’t use, in the link exchange area – I don’t feel like getting an ongoing paid membership to a linking site. But some of his other techniques for SEO are quite good. It’s interesting how they also overlap with some of the techniques used in 30 minute backlinks, which I also bought recently. So I will be using some of their techniques that they have in common. I think the 30 minute backlinks suggestions are easier for less technical people.

But I haven’t actually done any of their suggestions yet. I’m about halfway through preparing the groundwork.  So my Google rankings still need a lot of work.

And now I’m about to go out to a door shop, cos I really need to fix up the bottom room – it’s too crowded and dog oriented, and needs simplicity and lightening up.
Like a lot of websites I know.

One day the site will be finished. And then I can go on and revamp some more websites.

I had to drive into the city last night for a dance lesson.
Was pretty happy to find a generous parking spot across the road from the St James Hotel.

But unfortunately FailPerson – the St James Jerk was there.

It took me 5-6 attempts to get my car straight, with enough room not to get parked in (I got parked in once for 3 days). I heard some background noise, but ignored it until I got out to pay the parking meter.

It was FailPerson, at the St James Hotel, who decided he would impress his friends with his ability to hurl abuse at a single woman, having obvious troubles parking.

For about 5 minutes he shouted abuse, accusing me of taking up too much room, the economy, and anything else he could think of.  Really really loud yelling.

Assuming he was just a drunk, I was going to ignore him, but he continued to hurl abuse, getting everyone’s attention from the hotel, bus stop and the street.  Not wanting to be a pushover, I crossed the street to see what his problem was.

He wasn’t drunk. He was just a pathetic young jerk, who liked the sound of his own voice, trying to impress his friends, a  pack of guys and girls in their late 20s.

In a just world, the St James Hotel staff would have come outside to see why one of their patrons, sitting at their tables on the footpath, was creating a disturbance.

If his friends had any courage, they would have told him to shut up.

He looked soft and stupid.
He wouldn’t have wanted people to shout at his own mother.
He wouldn’t have had the guts to shout at a Hells Angel bikie.
But thought it was ok for him to yell at a woman alone.
He probably kicks dogs and small children.

I don’t like making mistakes. I even asked him if he wanted to help me park better, instead of just shouting abuse about it. He did.

But I was shaking and near tears when I got to the dance studio. I don’t like pubs, loud noise, or confrontation.

Is this really what young jerks think is ok these days?

Gotta say I wish I’d taken his photograph. The temptation to GoogleBomb his picture so that his face/Facebook page would be shown for the search “FailPerson” or “St James Jerk” would be hard to resist.

If you know who is is, feel welcome to tell me. I don’t always resist temptation.
Henceforth his name is FailPerson.

I can’t believe how easy it is to use WordPress with an iPhone, to upload pictures and maintain a blog.

The one thing I hadn’t done with my iPhone was upload pictures when I’m out. I’d been manually uploading them to my laptop first, and adding them to applications later.

There are actually a few platforms I need to do it on – Flickr, Facebook, WordPress, Twitter – and I hadn’t played with photos on any of them, mostly because I hadn’t had time to research how it used up bandwidth.

But I’ve come nowhere near using up mymonthly bandwidth, so it was time to play.

I created a new blog for free, at wordpress.com.

I already had the free WordPress for iPhone application on my phone.

I setup the username and password for my new blog, on my phone.

Took a quick photo of the flowers in my garden.

Went to WordPress on the phone. Logged in. Selected Photo. And the application asked me which photo I’d like to upload. Added a comment. Clicked save.

And voila. A photo and accompanying text uploaded with no hassle to my blog.

Beautiful.

And the blog was free.

It’s a bad first photo, because it was evening and you could barely see the flowers.  But check it out at Flowers Australia.

Geez  it’s a pleasure with the one-click upgrade available at WordPress.

Both the core, and plugins now have one-click upgrades available. I’ve done plugins in the past, but this is the first time I’ve upgraded the core (to version 2.7.1).

No need to download, unzip, upload and run the upgrade.php. It just works.

If only Drupal, PHPFox and x-cart ran this smoothly.