I haven’t written here in a while. It’s Good Friday 2012 and slow in the office, so it’s not a bad day for an update and to practice my typing. See when I write posts directly from my head I can just type, and it allows me to practice typing without looking at the keyboard. I first learned to type this way in 3rd grade, but like most 3rd graders I could care less about typing, so I cheated. Of course now I wish I had taken it more seriously.

So what have I been up to in the internet world. Well I’ve been focusing on SEO, what works, what doesn’t work, what I have time to do, what I can pay other people to do, etc. I’ve found some good deals on Fiverr where I was able to buy Google plus ones for a few sites. I also bought a link wheel for a site, and 8 article submissions for another. Overall I think I spent some money wisely and wasted some money at the same time. I do like having Google likes on my sites, and buying them are so much easier than trying to collect them from friends.

I’m also trying to branch out and try some other creative ways to get links. I submitted a few pages to Reddit which have done rather well. Then I noticed the sportsbook subreddit links to a few external sites like Doc Sports and others. I though “Man I would love one of those links.” Well instead of begging the moderator to add one or several of my sites to the sidebar, I requested that I become the moderator for r/sportsbetting instead. In my opinion this sounds much better than r/sportsbook anyway. I’ve fairly confident that I’ll become the main moderator for this subreddit, and then I can add whatever links I want to the side bar.

I’ll also take moderating that seubreddit very seriously. I love Reddit and to get a chance to build and develop a good subreddit is awesome. Right now I’ll be competing with sportsbook, but it’s not that big a deal. I have 14 subscribers to their 1,000, but I feel like it’s more natural to look for r/sportsbetting, so I imagine that once I start updating links and content, I’ll be getting most of the new subscribers going forward.

Aside from that, I’ve been fucking around with my Super Bowl site and my site about MLS betting mostly, I’ve once again put the idea of writing baby books to the side to focus on building sites. I really wish I had the time for both, and maybe one day I will. But I just don’t right now.

So that’s about all for now. I think this has been a good update. I’ll try to update this site at least once a month. I really love this domain name, and it’s nice to just relax and type without some kind of agenda. So that’s it for now. Time to develop content for another site…

So I recently made 13 new sites live. When I did this, I wasn’t intending on doing anything but turning them on, adding a few pages and letting them sit and age. Well that’s what I did, but while I was doing this I was making plans to optimize and develop every site along the way, with one or two exceptions. The problem with this is that I was stressing myself out.

This was supposed to be a hobby for me. A hobby that I enjoyed and gave me relief from stress, a break from the daily grind. But what I realized is that I was treating this hobby as a part-time job (which at times it really can be). I don’t want a part-time job!

What lead to me turning on all these sites was the idea of writing children’s books. I wanted to write a book or two for kids, and I thought I would create a site at the beginning of the process, so when I was ready to publish and market these books, I already had a website with some age and a little authority that I could use.

Well that idea lead me to transferring a bunch of domains to one hosting provider, buying a new domain for writing baby books and I ended up buying a few other new and unrelated domains too. Then I thought, hey if I’m going to make the site about writing children’s book live, I might as well make the other ones live too. Same Dice was one of these other sites…

Now a simple quick step at the beginning of a new hobby created a monster of another hobby that I just don’t have time for. Since I started this process, I have been stressing myself out! Trying to balance my time between work, my family and this new “part time” job that kind of developed out of nowhere has been no fun.

It’s going to sound weird, but it wasn’t until I went to a yoga class yesterday that I realized this. I was in the class and we were doing so pose where we were leaning forward. I think this was during the Sun Salutations. The instructor said to let all your worries, thoughts and responsibilities fall from your shoulders, and it wasn’t my job that I let drop, it was these websites! These websites are my current source of stress. That was one hell of a realization.

So this weekend, I’m going to take some time to sit down and think about what I want to do and accomplish in my free time. I think I need to reprioritize my list of hobbies, and maybe have a few take a back seat so that I can refocus on what it really important, and enjoy a stress free life… Or just a life with a little less stress!

15 minutes here, 20 minutes there. That’s how this website development thing has been going.

This is a hobby for me, and last month I decided to create about 14 new websites. That’s a lot of sites to write for and add new, relevant content too all by myself, especially since I have a relatively demanding full-time job and a family at home. If this was my job, I think 14 new sites wouldn’t be so hard to manage, but it’s not my job.

If this was my job, I think I wouldn’t like to so much. Right now I enjoy creating websites and learning and practicing SEO, and that’s probably because I don’t rely on it for a living. I have my job that I rely on to feed my family, pay my mortgage and provide me with health insurance. That job enables me to enjoy this as a hobby.

Sure, I make money doing this, but not enough to do it fulltime. If I quit my job and decided to do the internet thing fulltime, it would be very hard at first, but I’m sure that I could make a living doing this. I living in the United States and I often think that if I knew what I know, but lived in a much cheaper part of the world, like India, I’d be rich… or at least very well off on just what I make on my internet hobby.

In fact if I lived in India, I’m sure that this internet thing would be my job. I’d have been making decent money for year, and I’d have focused on this fulltime. Of course I probably would not have focused on the same ways of making money had I been raised in India, but with an internet connection and a little start p money, I’m sure I would have still been a successful internet marketer… and it would be my fulltime job.

Actually, I wouldn’t even need start up money. When I think of all the free ways that you can start a website, no one really needs a domain name to get started in this business. There is WordPress, blogger and many other sites that enable you to create and host a website for free. Some on my best original sites are still hosted at these places. It’s only when you want more control over your hosting and sites longevity that you need to buy your own domains and host your own sites.

For instance, early on, I had a few sites that were removed from blogger due to their spammy type nature. I think someone noticed that this sites had a few links pointed at them, but didn’t have much activity, so they reported them as spam, blogger took them down, and then the person who reported them created new sites on them. Well, at least I think that’s what that person did, because that’s exactly what I did in order to get them back.

Of course, once I had them back, all the original content that I had on them was gone, which sucked. I ended up quickly throwing up some BS content on them, and using them to link to other sites that I developed later on.

That was a big lesson for me. Now I’ll never put a lot of effort into a site that I don’t own completely. I never again what to develop a site that can be taken down at the discretion of someone else…. Even the US Government, but that’s a whole other issue (ie SOPA).

Well, it looks like this ran a little over 15 minutes, but it’s good.

If you managed to spot by and read all of this, Thanks!

Please leave a comment so I know someone is out there… Or don’t and leave me guessing…

So I just created about 13 new sites, and I feel a little overwhelmed. Up until now I’ve only created and managed a few sites, and I’ve always thought to myself that I should develop more. Well I just switch hosting providers, and I decided to make almost all of my domains live. So more I have a lot of site to develop.

Of course, I don’t have to go crazy. Part of the idea in activating all these domains is just to get some kind of internet history for each. I figure for the time being, I could probably just write a few posts on each and link to them all from this page just to let Google and Bing know that they are out there. Then when I get around to developing them, which could be tomorrow next week or next year, they will already have some history to them and rank better in search results.

So that was my thought anyway. Get them live and get them aging! After all I do have some really cool domain names that I should have done this for year ago. One I particularly like are surferonacid.com, ghostchili.com and collegebartender.com.

Other domain names that I want to develop and could protentially make decent money off of are bet-the-world-cup.com, betMLSsoccer.com, and atlanticcitysportsbooks.com.

Then two domains that I turned on for legitimate hobbies (aside for this one) are singlehandedbeauty.com (for my wife) and sportsbooksforbabies.com (this one is mine).

Anyway, activating these sites took longer than it should, but I’ve learned a few things in the process. Overall I’m very happy with the way things stand, and I’m looking forward to developing all of them in the future.

Yes this is the first post of Same Dice! I’m not sure of exactly what I want to do with this site yet. I might turn it into a site about craps, since that is where the term “Same Dice” comes from.

I bought this domain name years ago after someone else let it expire. I then left this site sit empty for a while and even recently used it as a testing platform for another site that I was working on. Once that was finished I thought I would keep this domain open, as a personal site for myself. I’m a real fan of the domain, even though it’s not really marketable… so there it is. This is now my personal blog space!

Anyway that’s enough for now. I just wanted to get this site set up, and off the ground for now. I’ll be back to write more and edit this page later. If you made it here, thanks for stopping by!