Jerry D. Russell dot Com

Also Known As: My wife’s JOB: A comedy of errors.

Some of you might recognize the reference to the immortal Robert Heinlein’s work in the title.  For those who don’t, if you are into Sci-Fi or Fantasy, you’ll love the book, which you can find by following the link attached to the image of the cover on the right. It’s a lovely diversion from daily life and I highly recommend it.

As for why I titled this post with a reference to JOB… It’s that life itself has become far stranger than reality television with evil producers who are on a tight budget and losing ratings.  In other words: it’s become a little tiresome for the cast, in this particular case that would be myself and my family.

Every long distance move comes with a slew of challenges. We are aware of these and please let me assure you that I’m not whining about having to get everything ready for a 1,700 mile transition.  I’m more than prepared to make adjustments.  What I’m miffed about is that every single thing we’ve done has come with issues…

The military has had problems completing our paperwork. Our home loan is getting very near to falling through; not because we’re not doing everything we can, but because our lender isn’t talking to anyone, including us. Plans for visitors and last minute get togethers fall through daily, mostly where family is involved and in the midst of all this I’m still trying to get all of the mundane day-to-day things that have to be accomplished on my end completed.

And then there’s work… Which isn’t getting done… But has to be done…

So what do you do when life is stranger than fiction?  Do you fight valiantly onward, forgetting the chaos around you, or do you fold beneath the waves of insanity that come crashing down around you?  Do you tackle one project at-a-time, working steadily towards your goal or do you try to handle everything at once and thus gain a little breathing room?

For me it’s a combination of both methods, depending on the day.  It is a sometimes vain attempt to balance home life, work and parenting with looming deadlines, commitments and other impending calendar dates of doom. I’m not always successful, but I do my best.

What’s your method for dealing with distraction, diversion and chaos?

Jerry Announcements chaos, ehtics, work, Work Habits, workflow

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve begun work on my very first ebook.  That work, along with the million things that go along with scheduling a military move, has been taking most of my time lately and it’s going well.

The book is coming along pretty well.  The main outline puts it at a little over 23 (short) chapters and as of today I’ve completed 5 of those for a total of 16 pages.  I expect to have at least half of the manuscript completed by the end of the week. My beta readers are quite happy with the work so far, so stay tuned for updates on the project.

In the process, I’m learning a lot that I’ve been itching to share with you guys, I just haven’t managed to find the time to get it off of my notepad and into a post. the first thing on my TO-DO list for tomorrow is to jot those ideas down in ecto and start fleshing them out as full posts, so please bear with me.

Coming Soon: I’ll have some insigts on Private Label Rights and how they can help you be a better writer/blogger.  If you’re unsure what Private Label Rights are or are unsure how they can help you out, I think you’ll apreciate what I’ve discovered over the past few weeks.

That’s it for now kiddies, it’s time to get back to the usiness of puting an almost three year old to bed and hopefully get another chapter written before I have to do the same.

Jerry Announcements Announcements, eBooks, PLR, Private Label Rights

Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of research on the subject of affiliate sales and affiliate marketing. In this short amount of time I’ve come to realize that 99% of the information that most people see on this topic when they first decide to venture into the world of affiliate sales is absolute chaff not worth taking the time to read through.

In my first three hours of research I was completely inundated with products offering me the one sure fire method that would jump start my online affiliate career. These programs promise all sorts of amazing results, from making a profit within the first three hours to making $700.00+ per day with just minutes of work on my part. Each one promises to give you all the secrets the top affiliate marketers don’t want anyone else to know. All you have to do is sign up for their program (for a fee) and they’ll show you how to get rich in minutes.

I call BullS**t!

The truth of the matter is this. There is no magic bullet. The promise of “if you build it, they will come” only works for baseball fields in small Midwest towns, not marketing niche sites. It may have been true in the early days of the Internet but it is most definitely not true today. Successful affiliates are doing well for the same reason any other entrepreneur does well. They work very hard at it.

I’m not saying that all of these programs are completely useless, but I do feel that he basic premise of most is to prey on the gullibility of people who really do want to learn new ways to supplement their income. Each and every one of the sales pages I visited tells the same story. “It’s simple”, “It’s Easy”, “we’ll walk you through a step-by-step method to make amazing amounts of money”, “it’s fun!”. The promise is for amazing profits with no effort, the same promise that’s heard all over the world on late-night infomercials and it’s the same in the case of the Internet. It’s a false promise.

The more reputable of these systems is selling information that anyone could have found for free on their own if they had just looked for it. In essence you are simply paying them for doing some of the legwork for you. My wife actually purchased one such affiliate program and made her money back within one month without spending another dime. The reason she did not continue was that she found she wasn’t really interested in the situation. Fair enough, the program delivered at least the basic tools for a complete novice to make some extra money. In this case it wasn’t a complete scam.

Other programs are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts to sell even more products that their customers will probably never really need, with the promise that these tools will help in making that first “Internet million.” The reality of this type of program is that they have taken the same basic skills detailed in more ethical systems and turned them into an affiliate marketing sales pitch of their own. In the end they’ll promise to refund the entire cost of their program if the customer isn’t satisfied (this probably happens quite often), but if their customer went through and bought several different tools and utilities as suggested, the company has easily made treble that amount of money off of that person.

It’s simple for an inexperienced or gullible individual to fall prey to companies like the latter and eventually find that they have spent thousands of dollars on useless software, bloated website hosting, design services and useless or outdated information. These people leave the experience disillusioned and disparate. They probably won’t try again, which is a shame, as there is money to be made if the situation is approached in the right manner.

That’s why I’ve decided to write an eBook on the topic. I want to take the mystery out of the process and point people to the right resources, tools that actually do work and people that can actually help them move forward without burying themselves in debt. As a byproduct I’ve come up with ideas for several other eBooks, all on topics that are designed to help people move in a positive direction toward their goals.

I have to be a bit vague at this point on topics and the actual titles and information these eBooks will contain, not because I’m not so excited about it that I don’t want to share it with everyone, but because I don’t want someone to take my exact idea and get it out before I have the chance to do so.

And how will I market this little gem, you ask?

With affiliate marketing, of course. I’ve already gotten a massive amount of help from dozens of affiliates, why not give back by hopefully earning them some money in the process. (Making a bit to help with hosting costs and other necessities doesn’t sound bad either.)

I’d love to know what you think about this. Is it worth the time? Does the topic interest you? Please leave your ideas in the comments. And hey, feel free to let other people know so that I can get as much feedback on the subject as possible.

Peace, I’m out.

Jerry Announcements, Business Sense, Monetizing Announcements, Business, Business Sense, ethics, growth, making money, Monetizing

I’m finally getting settled in to the new theme here.  It’s a bit more daunting of a task than I’d thought trying to blend three different blogs togaether, but so far it has been going fairly smoothly.  I’m almost ready to dive in and answer a slew of questions that have been posed to me over the past few days regarding Paid Advertising and other monetizing strategies.

It sometimes amazes me just how many people seem to hav the same questions.  It amazes me more that I find it difficult to remember that I had the same questions once myself.  I suppose that comes with having done something for a significant lenght of time, but I really thought that I knew better.  Ah well, live and learn.

In the works are articles on paid advertising, several tools you just have to use if you want to make your development chores easier and a smattering of wisdom adn a bit of ire on other topics.  I have a list.  somewhere.  I think it’s under the candy wrappers and christmas CD cases on my desk.  I’ll try to find it tomorrow.

For now it is extremely late and I should probably turn my attention to a bit of rest.  Stay tuned!

Jerry Announcements Announcements, site updates

If you got here because you were looking for a page on please don’t feed the writer or The SpunPuppy, you’re in the right place!  It was a hard choice, but i had to make the decision to combine the content from those blogs with Jerry D. Russell.com.  In the end, the other two blogs had stagnated, and the content is all relevant here, so the change makes sense.

Please pardon the dust while I work a few things out with the site and layout.  Code snippets from SpunPuppy are broken, and the ads obviously need attention.  Generally I would build the new theme in a sandbox, but the added pages and features of the other sites broke the template I was using, so the change needed to be immediate.  I’ll be working through this for the next few days, so be patient, it will all come together in the end!

Jerry Announcements changes, growth, Site News