Business Blog for the Bohemian Bourgeois

Blog Claim for Technocrati

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:37:00 +0000

z6aq2xsv8b

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:59:00 +0000

Well we are settling into another night shift here at the capital of Bohemian Bourgeois. Like everyone else who does business in this world, we are working over time. Today we are reviewing all the marketing channels for www.DestinationBillion.com and things seem to be going pretty well. AdSense revenue is up even though traffic is down month over month. Content is all updated so that is good.

Progress continues slowly on www.AmericanEducationAffiliates.com however everything is in place as soon as I get my new copy of the Adobe Creative suite... well that call will be the next one I guess! Hahah, if writing does anything it helps you sort out your priorities! There are a few minor formatting changes to make on that site before we push for new network education offers. As progress progresses on AEA we will keep working on the back end for www.GreenEducationAdvisors.com and www.CanadaEducationAdvisors.com

So stay tuned, in the next couple weeks we will launch a number of new marketing initiatives that should start to drive significant traffic to the new sites, enough to actually start working on the optimization!

Thanks for reading, lets talk again soon.

Dugan Selkirk

President

Fife Group Business Development Services

dugan@fifegroup.net

778-994-9283

www.DestinationBillion.com

www.GreenEducationAdvisors.com

www.AmericanEducationAffiliates.com

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:54:00 +0000

Wow, tweeting, digging, and analysing! I dont even know how to spell analize.... Good luck buddy! You will be dead any day now. Hahaha not likely, i am a survivor. I will be eating seaweed and green ling long after the stock market evaporates into thin air.

That said, the fact that citigroup posted profits the other day is an obscene example of how sick the financial system is. arnt they on the verge of break up?? Hahah, that would be like me buying my girlfriend a ring right before we break up! Ouch.... lucky no one reads this blog! Hahah!

More on the stock market: Anyone who thinks USA stocks are a long term investment is ... stoopid. These days a company is only as good as its founders will to rule the world. Oh ya and watch out for China. They will rule the world (again) soon enough. Lucky i love dim sum. That said, there is no reason to believe a company that comes out with the killer ap today will still be around in 20 years. Does anyone remember Corell?? They invented the spread sheet. And now... ask anyone younger than me and they will have never heard of it. Think Google will be around in 50 years?? Maybe, maybe not. Facebook is already sending more traffic to some sites than Google is http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=135112. Think Facebook will be around in 50 years! Hahah good lord I hope not.

You read it here first: The life of a company will become shorter and shorter as we drive into the future. There is no such thing as a blue chip anymore. If you are going to buy stocks, get them at the IPO, hold them for a couple years and then sell them to the hopeless schmuck who still believes he can get rich working for someone else. Hiring execs to run companies forever just doesnt work anymore. Everyone is out for themselves these days. Everyone wants to be a rock star. You put someone else at the helm of your company they will milk all the cash they can out of it then watch it die from their estate in ... where ever. Is anyone paying attention to the financial crisis??

Dugan Selkirk

President

Fife Business Development Services

www.DestinationBillion.com

www.AmericanEducationAffiliates.com

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:44:00 +0000

We are just back from LeadsCon in Las Vegas. I love tech shows in Vegas, well anything in Vegas really! Hahaha. LeadsCon was great, way more specific to our business than say Affiliate Summit. I always feel like a bit of a round peg in a square hole there. We went to pretty much every presentation and learned plenty. We have launched our latest greatest site www.AmericanEducationAffiliates.com to not much fan fare but plenty of good feed back from the people we spoke to about it. These are people that matter, people who are well connected in the business for sure, and most importantly, people who will buy our leads!

Onward, Destination Billion

Back again

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 04:11:00 +0000

Blown off so much work there is too much to write about! When the economy is on its knees, you shouldnt be working, you should be out spending!! Hahaha, keep the wheels turning and take advantage of fire saled gear and optimal conditions at your favorite surf break or back country powder field.

On that note I am heading down to the Galapagos Islands on Jan 29 back Feb 10. In the mean time I will be adding some serious content to the www.DestinationBillion.com home page, and it will become a forum where everyone who cares to join the club can post up pics and movies about how they blew off work because they are the boss.

In other news Affiliate Summit West (Las Vegas Baby!!) was an all out balls out success. Look for lots of new projects coming up in the next days and weeks.

Peace love and prosperity to all,

Dugan Selkirk

Blogging, what is it good for.

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 05:51:00 +0000

Links man, links!!! Ok look, I have not made a sweet cent from this lovely medium, but hey, its theraputic. A couple weeks ago, Google kicked me in the nads. Well I guess I had them hanging out there. I had some cheap traffic so I threw it at my site, and as with any venture, you get what you pay for. So they gassed my ads. I came to blog and me ads were gone, gone man, GONE!! Ironically I had already discontinued the traffic as I knew it was more or less shite and I did not want to gas my quality score. After an impassioned plea, they restored my add code and away I went. The next day I had 3 adsense clicks!! So I love adsense. Ok, I do, I admit it. I am converting as high as 46%!!! So that to me is about as good as it gets. Now I just need da mad hizzles yo!!! So to round out the matter, whatever is going to bring high quality traffic to my site is what needs focus. Ok, as we all know links are critical. Each little link from the signature of this blog is one of thousands needed to keep 'em all coming. And the real gravy train is yet to come. There is some more tweaking to the site that still needs to happen, however this is a perpetual condition. We must move ahead then! Ahead at full speed, onwards upwards to eternity, to the end.

"Love, and do what you will." St.Augustine

Dugan Selkirk
President
Fife Group BDS
www.DestinationBillion.com

Post On Video Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:47:00 +0000

Video is the new pink, and has been my bain for the last few months. It all started in earnest after the ECom Expo when I discovered a firm who does the….(claimed to do) the virtual spokesperson video hosting and production. I never really fancied the animated avatar; a cartoon babe didn’t really sell the sizzle for me. I needed a real live spokes person. A video babe as I called it was going to propel destination billion into the stratosphere. Fortunately I didn’t order a brand new yacht before finalizing details with said firm because although I had my video babe picked out from their website they never did return my calls or emails. I found another firm peddling a similar service for over 3 times the price. They were very good at getting back to me however I didn’t really feel that a 30 second spot justified a $1000 purchase especially because the new skis that I had picked out also cost $1000 and would net significantly more than 30 seconds of pleasure. Further more the whole point of the thing was to have regular video updates.
I have been uploading YouTube Videos and posting them on my sites for quite some time now but never really saw them as the vehicle I wanted, however after seeing a smaller version of such on the affiliate summit website I was instantly sold. Watch for videos to spring up all over my sites. Seriously, he who has the most video wins.

Dugan Selkirk
President
Fife Group BDS
www.DestinationBillion.com

Post on Affiliate Summit Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 18:26:00 +0000

I am writing this blog post in the air from Vancouver to Las Vegas for Affiliate Summit West. This is our second consecutive year in attendance and we are super stoked. We have punched through the cloud layer so there is no more view of the gorgeous coastal terrain that I love about me home, so I can freely write. This is probably the first time I have actually been that guy who feverishly types away while on the plane. Usually I am the guy wondering what the hell that guy could possibly be doing on a laptop without a high speed connection! So about the Summit, last year we were pretty green, I more than my partner for sure. I had just completed a suitable mock up of an affiliate site. I had some idea of the content I wanted to put on it but no idea at all about the vast resource that awaited me. We made a point of meeting someone at every booth at the summit. I tried to blow off a few of them because I didn’t think they looked too cool (probably really because I was overwhelmed), but my dear partner would say “Ah they are like the biggest network there is”. A year later I am in a bit better shape although still working on a newer version of the same site and currently reconstructing it from the ground up in my head at least. I had a new batch of business cards done the day before we left, bought a new suit and a new black berry and ya boy me gonna rock it dis year!! This is to say I will make it to at least one of the big parties, Webmaster Radio thank you in advance for the several single malt scotch whiskies!

Dugan Selkirk
President
Fife Group BDS
www.DestinationBillion.com

Post on Google Reader

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 03:10:00 +0000

If you haven’t heard of Google Reader it is high time you did. Google Reader is the self described inbox of the internet. More specifically it is an inbox for news feeds and blog posts. So this is how it works. Sign up for Reader through your Google account. Of course you already have a Google account set up to host your Google ads. Then comb through your favorites folder (how turn of the century) and go to your favorite news sites and blogs and add them to your reader list. Each time your news site or blogger posts an update the headline or subject appears in your reader view. You can click on it to read it and as most of your web 2.0 favorites allow, you can post a response, with a link back to your own blog in your signature. I love this because it works like a self fulfilling prophecy. Read the blogs and the blog readers will come! I have set the Google reader as my home page on my business machine. Whenever I see something that catches my eye I can blog about it. Easy blog post ideas can flow all day long. It is not too hard to make little changes, it is hard to make big changes. So set up your Google Reader and Alt+T O to make it your home page. It’s a small change that can have big results.

Dugan Selkirk
President
Fife Group BDS
http://www.destinationbillion.com/

Blogging is the new black

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:16:00 +0000

Blogging is the new black! Seriously, you can't just wear black , you have to be black, it is kind of a lifestyle choice. Remember back in the day! Haha, walking to work clad head to toe in black, drinking black coffee, smoking benson&hedges blacks, or worse, john player blacks! Ha, well one thing it was was consistent. It was an everyday thing. Blogging is the new black. Blog and ping, blog and ping that is the new everyday. Blogging is the last vestige of the little guy and who knows for how long. Get in early enough and you may not be the little guy anymore once that time comes. Remember all the things you wanted to start, and didn’t; now they are huge industries the founders of which are billionaires. Well what holds true in those cases is that them that are billionaires now, once were the little guys on the way up. Rockafeller Sr. didn’t invent the oil refining process, but he was in on the ground floor, started acquiring assets and leveraged his position up and up until standard oil was one of the largest firms in the world. It is the same type of deal for Billy G who we all know. He didn’t invent software per se but he was one of the first to inflict his property rights onto the genre and well the rest is not so distant history.

Blog into the future!

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:15:00 +0000

In the last 2 months i have had plenty of time to think about blogging and some time to reserach blogging =). So here are some topics that I want to blog about in the next several posts which i am going to post every day! I bet we have all heard that before eh?

Blogging as a business, what is the deal, its an open topic so i can bounce around here quite a bit. Emailing as a business and the ins and outs of that. Affiliate marketing as a business and its future, the future of internet marketing, is it really social media?? and if so how can I get paid.
Look, I love helping people and posting usefull information, but this is a blog about making money so if I am not making money doing this than what good am I??

This blog and my site have always been as much about the work from home lifestyle as of the work itself. OK, its work, its not that exciting. No one works just so they can work! We work to get paid so we can do the fun stuff that we want to do.

I will also be reading several top blogs and posting on them and reviewing other things that may help the home bizzer.

So there is the outline for the next posts. Enjoy, and please comment!

Dugan Selkirk
President
Fife Group BDS
www.DestinationBillion.com

Liquidity!

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 19:44:00 +0000

Time for my monthly blog post! Eeek. I have been rather productive in the last while. Here is a quick recap on the lifestyle before I segue into the topic of the day.

The RHIB (Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat) is almost completely rigged; sea trials were a smashing success with top speed on flat water a sustained 42.3 nautical miles per hour! Ya Baby. First voyage to the west coast is set for this weekend, Port Renfrew to Carmanah Point. Take a look at http://www.westcoastsurftours.com/ for a little teaser.

The SLED (Summit 800 HO) is getting final tuning and modifications and will head up to Whistler with me on Tuesday God willing for the season of powder shredding to commence. Follow updates there at http://www.whistlermountainchalet.com/.

So in order to understand how this has all been possible, lets look at the concept of liquidity! Roughly translated to spendable cash on hand, to understand the importance of liquidity right now we need to look at the credit market instability. As the ARMageddon continues, similar effects are becoming visible in the consumer credit markets. People refinanced their homes, and used the equity to spend on toys or to back lines of credit with which they bought toys. The higher mortgage payments induced from refinancing reduced real income so consumer spending then had to be financed with credit. Now citizens are carrying higher mortgages as well as more credit card debt so.... sooner or later something has to give.

So if you are smart and disciplined and have not stretched yourself too far, like the poor victims mentioned above, you are now in a wonderful position. First now would be a good time to ask your credit card company to reduce your interest rate. If your payment history is in good standing the CC company will have incentive to keep it that way. Secondly ask for an extension on your limit. Again, as bad loans go down the toilet, CC's need to cover for those losses and increase their revenue through their solid customers. Once you increase your available credit, and don't use it, your beacon score will go down, making you look even better.

Now, you have liquidity. Tumultuous times make for good deals! As the markets shuffle and settle there will be good buys to be had. Real estate foreclosures are certainly a market worth watching. Cautiously. Watch for stock dumps in areas where speculation has been hot, or where mergers are falling apart. To bring these circumstances into a more personal level if, say, your neighbor happens to be a little bit stretched, of course s/he does not want to default on their mortgage or credit card, so now might be a good time for you to help each other. Perhaps they have some toys they don’t use that much, and maybe need a bit of cash to get caught up?
It's a buyers market, buy low, be high! See you on the water or mountain soon.

Dugan Selkirk
President
Fife Group BDS
www.DestinationBillion.com

Human Capital

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:00:00 +0000

As winter fast approaches and we busily squirrel our nuts away pause to reflect on the most valuable things in your life. What is the one thing that makes your life flow smoothly from one day to the next: YOU. You are the most valuable thing you have. You are more valuable than your house, your job, or your portfolio. If you lost your house, could you build another?? Oh yes. Through the dotcom boom, the real estate boom, oil market boom, the rapid expansion of economies in India and Chinga and the financial market ...ah... explosion, there has been more cash wealth created than ever before in human history. This great growth period has created labour shortages in every industry. For the first time ever, in general market metrics, there is more money than people!

From Geoff Colvin's Fortune article "Firms need good people, more than good people need firms." This is a time of great leverage for the life long learner. If you created within a firm make a list of ways you could add more value to the organization. If you work on your own, add value to your operations by learning something new about your business every day.

Take some time each day to read, research or develop new business. As you increase your human capital your return on financial capital will increase. It still takes money to make money but you can go alot further with less these days. Human capital is still a means to the financial capital end. If you have ever tried to pay your bar tab with human capital, I trust you would agree.

Dugan Selkirk
President
Fife Group BDS
www.DestinationBillion.com

Island Reflections

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:36:00 +0000

Just back from my holiday home in Whistler, and had an excellent meeting with a good old friend in Squamish on the way home. Andrew is Bohemian Bourgeois through and through. He manages a staff of 25 full time painters, like hearding cats for sure, but he is truly the bar by which the industry can be measured. He runs such a tight ship that painters come to him for work and his reputation is growing in the industry so work he gets.

Like any good business man he has rods in plenty fire and is going full speed in several different directions.

Like any good bohemian he can blow off work to ride wind water or mountain whenever conditions warrant.

A cruicial practice then for the busy life styler, one that i will talk about often here and one that Andrew and I discussed at some length is the regular personal financial inventory. Have a regular review of everything you have going on and determine what pays the best, what has potential and what is not going to pay. What do you do that makes the most money in the least amount of time. Figure it out and focus on it and cut the dead flesh of non production away. BE HONEST with your self and don't let emotion cloud your vision. Lets face it, although you may enjoy whatever work it is you do, the point of work is to facilitate play. So if you are doing work that isnt paying, scrap it. Focus 60% of your alloted work time on whatever it is that pays the hardest. That leaves you with enough time to research and peruse other projects, but will ensure you stay paid in the process.

Figure out the 5 things you do best, do them with all your power, and outsource everything else!

Dugan Selkirk
President
Fife Group BDS
www.DestinationBillion.com

Go Day!

noreply@blogger.com (Dugan Selkirk) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 06:34:00 +0000

Hello Blogland. Welcome to me and my point of view. A poet come economist has a perspective on the world that goes deep like a canyon into the mountain side from which gushes forth a cold refreshing spring of insight, comedy and cheap advice. Take it or leave it, I don't really care, but read it coment on it and for goodness sake go to my website and click on something! There is a wealth of information there, find what you need.

Dugan Selkirk
President
Fife Group BDS
www.DestinationBillion.com