Quite some time ago on Aridni I wrote about a dilemma I had in getting a project done.  I didn’t have the technical skill to actually write the software myself and I did not have the time to learn it adequately enough.

Now that I am actively trying to restrict the number of projects I’m working on, I wanted to get these ideas out of my head.  They are not quite as powerful as they were when the ideas were born, but they might be of interest to someone out there.  If you decide you want to take on one of the projects, great!  Go for it.  I’ll even help you with getting hosting.

The three projects are right after the break.  They are ‘Hivemind Snapshot Project‘, ‘Articles of Organization and Operating Agreement Generator‘, and ‘Auto-task generation… thing‘

Hopefully you will find at least one of them useful!

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Last summer I was doing some work for a store with a lot of walk in traffic.  It was interesting how diverse the people who came in were, but aside from grandparents, adults, and teenagers coming in as customers we had another group as well.  People trying to sell us things.

They would have these ‘opportunities’ for us that could usually be described as ‘hemorrhaging money from the company.’  This is clearly not the best thing to do, unless you are trying to show a loss for they year.  Yet still we would have a couple of people per week who had no idea about the business come in with plans that offered little to no value.

To be fair, there were some legitimate ideas and a couple were even worth taking up.  For the most part they were a waste of time.

One particular company was basically putting together a local web directory.  To be in the directory you had to do a little interview so they could write a paragraph about your company.  Then they would let you be in the directory to try it out for 90 days.  After that time was over, you needed to shell out some money. $100 bucks per month.

While $100 a month isn’t a whole lot for online advertising, there are much better ways to spend it.  Especially due to the fact that our store’s web page had higher search engine rankings and we were able to track the minimal amounts of traffic that their site brought in.

There is some value in their business model; however it is not quite balanced.  The value that they provide is having another link to your website, presumably marketed to people living in or traveling to the area.  One of the bigger problems about this site was that it was to new.  It didn’t rank well in google for local terms and not a lot of people knew about it.

If they would have also had a deal along the lines of, “If you link to us as well, we’ll give you x% off each month.”  Then they could build up the amount of targeted local traffic to their site buy leaps and bounds.  The more people that link to them, the more valuable their links become.

Any business wants you to provide value to them.  If all you have is a team of salesmen then where does the value come from?

If you are going to pitch your product or service, make sure it benifits enough to justify your pricetag.

Something has dawned on me over the past couple of months. I might be a packrat for ideas. By ‘dawned on me’ I mean it has been smashing me over the head with a hammer.

Over the last couple of years I have had so many projects that I wanted to get done. And new projects and million dollar ideas were sprouting up all of the time. Some of them were online, some of them off.

These ideas were across a broad range, everything from building a chess board, building a giant ‘colony size’ ant farm, to creating a program that sent out lottery numbers after every draw (And most of them were just as dorky sounding!).

It’s time that I start retiring a couple of projects of mine. When I get ideas, I want them to happen, so I’ll begin. The problem is that new ideas come and I want them to happen, so I’ll begin. Of course there hasn’t been enough time to complete the original project before starting on the next. This basically means the old project is doomed.

Soon there is another great flash of inspiration and a new project emerges and another becomes doomed.

My final stance is I’m officially closing down some projects. A big problem is that juggling so many things, none of them ever got completed. It’s time to start filling that filing cabinet with those ‘million dollar ideas‘ and start focusing on fewer and fewer.

I’ll be posting quite a few ideas and one-day projects. By one-day projects, I mean “one day I’de like to…” Hopefully there is someone out there that can benefit from some them.

Has anyone joined Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program? Katie and I were talking about joining it, but we just wanted to see if anyone has any thoughts on it.

There are two different options that he offers.  Blog Mastermind runs at $497 and the second package is the Blog Mastermind as well as a newer program of his, ‘Membership Site Mastermind.’  The bigger package runs for $997.

I think that Yaro has done a great job in the past.  He provides a tremendous amount of value on his sites and through his email newsletter.

Just wondering if anyone had any thoughts before we make the plunge here.