April 13, 2023
14:45 Indian Shores, Florida
(the cover photo for this blog post was taken April 14, 2023 at 20:06)
I’m currently sitting at a little desk in the place where we’re currently living for the month. To my left is the gulf of Mexico and I can see the waves rolling in. Sadly, they aren’t big enough to surf and it’s mainly wind swell and pretty small.
I’m honestly considering trying to find a cheap foam surfboard just to head out and try to surf it anyway.
Last week at this time I was up in Augusta, Georgia for the Masters practice round. It was such an incredible experience. Last year we got tickets and drove up and went… but we got rained out. For some reason, they honored our tickets from last year for this year, so we were able to go again.
That course is in such incredible condition. Every blade of grass is perfect. I even took a photo of the pine needles that were in one of the walk-ways because it seemed like it was fake. Everything seemed to have a place and everything was in the right place.
So far this year has been pretty great. I also have been bad at documenting stuff for myself and sharing it with others. I’ve been a bit more active on Twitter and have been picking up a lot of stuff from there. For example, learning to create AI art with MidJourney and then selling it on Adobe.
Thanks to Chase Curtis for introducing me to this. As you can see it’s not a ‘big’ money maker, but it’s fun to create assets like this for me. Every time I create something that earns me income passively, I get excited.
I also wanted to dive in and learn more about AI this year as well, so this was a no-brainer. It allowed me to get a return on what I would be doing anyway. That’s pretty much how I look at everything. Is it something I’m interested in? Yes. Is there a way to earn money with it? Yes. Win-win.
I Created Another Additional Income Stream
Next up is something that I actually started in December of 2022. I came across a video from Spencer Mecham on my Youtube homepage and watched it. The idea immediately made sense to me so I followed my curiosity and learned a bit more. I then dove in a bit more.
It’s been fun to be honest. How does it work? Pretty simply.
Basically Amazon needs honest reviews of the products that they sell, from real people. If you’ve been on the Amazon site lately you’ve probably noticed that along with the photos at the top of the listing they have some videos. They also have video reviews from people who bought the products down towards the bottom of the listing. In its simplest form, if a customer watches your video and then goes on to buy the product you can get a commission for helping them along the buying process.
Here is the video that led me onto this:
So basically you can become an Amazon Influencer and review products. I’ve been an Amazon affiliate for about 10 years or so which made this easy for me to understand. If you’ve never done any type of affiliate marketing, this might be kinda weird or out of the normal for you. Before I learned about affiliate marketing, I had no idea it even existed.
As I mentioned up above, I love creating stuff like this so tend to spend my time doing stuff like this if it has the opportunity for me to work once and be paid over and over again for it.
I started keeping a journal again using the DayOne app on my iPad. At 8am every morning I have a ‘shortcut’ that pops up and reminds me to open up the app and journal for 5 minutes. For the most part I just talk about what I accomplished on the previous day and what my plans are for the day ahead. It’s been a great way to get me writing again and has helped me with identifying some areas I could improve in my life.
Journaling led me to adding a new habit of 100 pushups a day. When I was living over in St Augustine, Florida the last few months of 2022, I was surfing a lot more and when I was journaling I decided that I wanted to improve my paddling ability. One of the easiest things to do that was pushups everyday. So during that day of my journal, I decided ‘I’m going to do 100 pushups everyday’. So i’ve kept that habit up since then. I think the first day I did it was October 30, 2022.
I’ve missed a few days of the full 100 pushups. When that happens I usually put the previous days pushups that I didn’t finish onto the next day. So if I only did 60 pushups one day, I’d do 140 the next day to make up for it.
Journaling also led me to adding a daily Duolingo Spanish lesson to my daily habits. Back in 2012-2014 I had lived in Panama and Costa Rica, so I was able to practice Spanish a bit more which led me to improving. However when I moved over to Asia in 2015-2017 I didn’t speak any Spanish so my understanding of the language got worse. Then when we moved back to the states in 2018, I pretty much stopped with all Spanish. So, I decided to pick it back up. Duolingo has been great and I ended up paying for the full year of it’s premium version so that I’d stick with it. I’m currently on day 49 and am pretty proud of the consistency.
Now that i’m writing this out, I wonder if there’s something I can build around learning Spanish and if Duolingo has an affiliate opportunity that I can recommend in whatever I build around it. That could be a good way to get a positive ROI on the price of the yearly learning.
This feels pretty good to write this stuff out again and share it. I haven’t really done much blogging on my personal site in quite a few years.
What else has been going on?
So my main business stuff is around audience building, niche websites and affiliate marketing. That’s all been pretty consistent lately. Basically I just build social media audiences and use them to send traffic (people) to websites I own or products that I receive a commission for selling. For the most part that’s a lot of my ‘day-to-day’ stuff.