Well, it’s been a week of underachieving for me, and I have to say this is working out pretty well. Not only do I feel more relaxed, but I working faster towards my goals and not slower. I have been talking to one new person a day on campus since Wednesday (I’m back home for the weekend so I won’t get to resume that until Monday). I have also been able to go to sleep close to midnight and somehow wake up right around 9am automatically. I think subconsciously my mind was thinking 9am because of that blog post and that’s why I woke up then (with no alarm). Nine hours is more than enough so next week I will focus on cutting it to eight hours. Blogging once a week hasn’t been too difficult as you can see. The “going to the gym” thing totally didn’t work out. I didn’t hit the gym not once. As far as doing one small thing to promote Walamu, I was doing well until I promoted Walamu too much one day without noticing and got banned for a week from the Internet in my dorm room. So no Internet until next Thursday. I did get a lot of attention from a one day run of Facebook flyers at Rutgers promoting Walamu (30,000 ad impressions). I am going to try out real flyers again for next week and start promoting the Classifieds portion of Walamu now since the textbook season is kind of over.

Speaking of Walamu, I have recently received a number of emails from my major competitors concerning partnerships or liquidation. It is too early to decide on this matter and certainly too early for liquidation.

The next thing I need now is some sort of inspiration. I feel like I’ve been running in the hamster’s wheel for the past six months and I need something new. I think I’ll go snowboarding for the first time or something.

I just had a huge revelation last night while I was finishing up Cash Flow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki. He talks about taking baby steps to financial freedom and to avoid making that “one great leap” so many people try to do when they reach for goals such as losing weight. For the first week or so things are great and you’re hitting the gym an hour a day and eating less calories per day than your pet bird, but at the end of that week you’re exhausted and just go back to your old habits. Instead of an hour a day at the gym, Kiyosaki says you should underachieve and go to the gym for just 20 minutes a day or something similar where you feel like you could stay for much longer. I, myself, have been experiencing a little bit of entrepreneur-burnout lately as you can probably tell by my limited posts and lack of comments. I didn’t have much of a break because I focused on making “the great leap” on not just one goal, but many others. I want to achieve a little more balance in my life and maybe even have a good time here and there. My sleeping pattern lately has been awful and my lack of planning leads to nonconstructive days. I’ve decided it’s time for me to take baby steps and underachieve in terms of my goals. Small victories kick ass after all. In terms of this blog, I’m going to update it once a week on Sundays for two weeks. After that, I’ll bump it up to two. I know I’m making it sound like keeping this blog updated is a ton of work when it really isn’t, but I need to achieve some sort of balance in my life. I’ll be updating if anything big happens, however. Some baby steps I want to take:

• Talk to one new person a day.
• Go to the gym three times a week for 20 minutes a day.
• Blog once a week.
• Do one small thing to promote Walamu each day.
• Go to sleep by midnight and wake up by 9am two nights a week.

I apologize for the lack of updates this week. I got too carried away with trying to monetize this blog during the first few weeks of winter break and decided it would be healthy to take some sort of break for the last week of break. Today was the first day of classes for the spring semester at Rutgers so it’s only a matter of time before we’re back in the swing of things.

The first day of classes also means tons of students looking to buy/sell textbooks. Walamu’s popularity here at Rutgers is skyrocketing mostly as a result of word-of-mouth. Hits are going up and people are posting their books everyday. Competition is stiff, no doubt, with the bookstores using their megafunds to plaster huge ads in the university newspaper. There is also competition from other much more established websites such as half.com and bigwords.com. The longer I’m in this business, however, the more I realize that my target market isn’t even college students–it’s a certain type of college student–and I think realizing that makes a significant difference.

Speaking of college, I’m finding myself at a sort of crossroads as to what I want to do in regards to my eduction. The question- “Is college really worth it?” tends to keep coming up. Here are some routes I’m currently considering:

• Study abroad for the fall semester next year at City University in London.
• Take a semester off (not likely, as business school starts next semester) If I were to take a semester off it would have been this semester, but I was not in a position to withdraw.
• Take a leave of absence, work on Walamu, and build multiple streams of income.
• Work on Walamu, other businesses, and go to college at the same time (again, is it really worth it?)

I was looking for a way to display the books I found that are most essential for young entrepreneurs and figured I might as well sign up with Amazon’s affiliate program and create an aStore to display the books. These books helped me tremendously along my entrepreneurial journey and will continue to do so as they are focused more on the entrepreneurial mindset rather than tips, tricks, and techniques. These are absolute must reads for any young person trying to make it in the entrepreneurial world (or world, for that matter).

aStore: Essential Readings for Young Entrepreneurs

With a total of 130 page impressions on Sunday, I had absolutely no clicks on my AdSense. I was really surprised about this, and I’m sure you are too. This is why trying different placements is absolutely essential in optimizing your AdSense earnings. In an effort to better my placement and avoid intrusion on content, I’ve decided to add a horizontal leaderboard on top. Hopefully, this will result in a better (or actual) CTR.

Cool, I’ve finally been tagged for the first time thanks to Adnan over at Blogtrepreneur.

I’m not a big movie guy but here are five of my favorites in no particular order:

• Boiler Room
• The Good Sheperd
• Collateral
• Minority Report
• Wall Street

The Web 2.0 Effect

(aff.)
With so many e-books out there today, the good ones are really few and far between. The priceless ones are even more rare. The Web 2.0 Effect is clearly one of the latter. This book was not written merely for the purpose of making a quick buck on the Internet, but rather really makes a sense of all the hype out there and let’s the reader know what exactly makes sites like Facebook and YouTube a success. If you are an entrepreneur or own a Web 2.0, this is an absolute must read. There have been too many failures by companies trying to mock the success of the now few behemoths in the Web 2.0 world to think that you already know what it takes. Don’t look over the most important aspect of your business: the way it’s execution. The information found in this ebook is absolutely invaluable to the success of your business and if you miss out on even the small stuff in this book, you’ll be very behind.

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve added a couple new plugins to the site. First off, you can see the Top Commentators for the month in the right sidebar. Your name will be linked with the URL you use to comment on this site. Furthermore, if anyone links to a post on this site, they automatically receive a link back from this blog as opposed to simply a trackback.

How to Blog for Profit for Beginners
If you’re just getting started with blogging, I would recommend getting an account at blogger.com. Get a free blog set up and choose a niche that you think would be profitable. To get an idea of what keywords are profitable, use the keyword tool provided to you by Google on your Google Adwords account. Following this look for articles related to your niche that you can use for free from sites such as ezinearticles.com. If you are going to be writing your own content, make sure the niche you pick is something you are passionate about.
This is the process I used with my first AdSense project, MesoSource. I must say the research paid off as the site is still my top AdSense earner.

One of my recent posts, “Be Unique,” was featured in this week’s Carnival of Entrepreneurs hosted by www.startupspark.com. The Carnival is a great way to meet new entrepreneurs, find some great posts, and share some link love so join in.

From the site:

The Carnival of Entrepreneurs is a weekly event, where we bring you the latest, greatest in the world of entrepreneurship. Our goal is to collect awesome content, link it up and briefly review it for you so each Wednesday you can find a plethora of stuff that will interest you.

Submit your own entrepreneurship-related article for January 10, 2007, click here.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably noticed a couple changes in the recent past. For one thing, I went with a new blog theme because I felt it was about time and have received a lot of compliments on it. More significantly, however, I’ve decided to place Adsense and TLA on the site and have tried to make these ads as unintrusive as possible. My need for funding has pushed me to go this route and has also forced me to learn more about creating good content and focus on my reader’s needs. You may remember that this blog started off as more of a journal on my entrepreneurial experiences. While that aspect of this blog will certainly remain, I will try to update this site more frequently with entrepreneurship-related entries that you may find useful.

I must say, however, that the potential and reach of this site is really being noticed as in less than two weeks I’ve achieved four sponsors by way of Text Link Ads and have amounted $46 in revenue. This is an 820% increase from November when I only earned $5 via Adsense. There are only four more spots left on this site so if you’re looking to get some targeted traffic you should act quickly. Needless to say, if anyone owns a site or blog, I highly recommend signing up with Text Link Ads. It only takes a second and remember to use my referral link to sign up here.

To purchase a link on this site, go to Text Link Ads and search for “Rutgers.” This blog, “Entrepreneur in the Making,” will show up.