How Do I Pay For New Shoes?

March 12th, 2010 by Kenric

About 7 months ago I bought some new shoes.   I paid $85 for a pair.   I’ve been happy with them but I need to get a new pair. I didn’t want to pay another $85 for them, so this is what I did…

I made a site about my shoes.  I made a good website with information about these shoes.  I put up some affiliate links and ads.  The site is now ranking very high and traffic is increasing.

It’s been 2 weeks and the site has made about $5.00. At this rate only 7 more months and I can buy a new pair.   But the traffic is increasing so I think I’ll see my new pair very soon…

Mt. Kilimanjaro Video

March 10th, 2010 by Kenric

I finally finished editting my videos of the Mt. Kilimanjaro climb.

The video below is a Summit on the Summit Trailer Video. I do find it amusing how they manage to add so much drama into the trailer. “It could get so cold that it would freeze your corneas.” LOL, I guess that’s the goal of trailers, to make people watch the full show. You should watch the trailer first before my video. Watching it would scare you into not ever trying to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. So watch it first and then watch my video and you see a huge difference. The people in the documentary climbed the exact same route as me 8 days before me.

The hour long documentary on MTV on this Sunday. It’s called Summit on the Summit. As you can see from my video, I got lucky with weather. It was nice and sunny at the top for me. It was snowing and windy for the folks who went before me.

The video goes in chronological order of the climb. It was hard to cut it so short, I feel like I left alot stuff out. I will have my safari video done soon.


New Stores

March 7th, 2010 by Kenric

The hardest part of opening a new store for me is naming the store.  These days, coming up with a cool name is only step 1.  Step 2 is checking the domain name availability.  Step 3 is checking for a trademark and Step 4 is checking on the origin of the word just to make sure it doesn’t mean something bad.

Most of the good domains are taken, so you end up making up words that sound good or combining two words together that sort of make sense.  This process takes me weeks and probably the most frustating part of opening a new store.  A name would pop into my head while I’m trying to sleep and I have to get up and check it.

The store name process eventually becomes a long list of names that I type into domainsbot.com just to find out that they are all taken.  It’s not unusual for you to enter 100 domains and have them all be taken.  I only look for .com names with no numbers and hyphens.  It must be a pure name.

I even bid on a few names on Sedo.com but I didn’t hold my breath as I’m sure most people wanted more than my low bids.

But after two weeks I found two great names for my 2 new stores.  I even found a great name for one of my old stores.  So once I had the names, I could begin to work on the look and feel of the stores.

I’m sort of doing these stores backwards because I want to open stores of products that I use.  So in these cases, I decided on my niche market and then a store name.  Now I’m going to get suppliers.  Yeah, I know it’s totally backwards but I have more confidence now and I’m also not limiting myself to dropshipping.

So hopefully within a month I will have another 2 stores up and running!

Gold Bubble??

February 25th, 2010 by Kenric

One of my local meetup groups is having a gold buying party.  When you see stuff like this, you wonder if it’s time to sell some gold.

You’re invited to attend a Gold Buying Party in XXXXXX to make a little extra spending money. Doors will be open on Saturday XXth and Sunday XXth from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm.

XXXXX would like to buy any gold, silver or platinum jewelry, coins, or flatware that your ex gave you a long time ago and don’t wear or use any more.

How many rings, single ear rings or broken gold bracelts do you have tucked in away in a jewelry box that you haven’t worn in years? Why not turn them into cash? Gold is at all time high. All that jewerly that you bought a long time ago is now worth a lot of money.

Unlike those gold commercials that ask you to mail your gold in and hope from the best. XXXXX weighs it, tests it and tells you what it is worth while you wait. No risk involved.

You’re welcome to invite friends and family members to attend. He pays a 5% referral fee to anyone that gets their friends to bring in a pile of their excess and scrap gold.

Refreshments will be served all day. Wine, cheese, crackers and hor’derves will be served from 5:00 pm to 9:30 pm.

I wonder if I can go as a buyer, maybe I can pick up some coins.

Beer and Pancakes Meetup

February 23rd, 2010 by Kenric

This past weekend was the annual Beer and Pancakes meetup where a bunch of people from the Fastlane Forums get together and talk about what they’ve been doing and share any strategies and knowledge. As always, it was a great weekend with plenty of presentations, discussions and fun night life.

I never know what to expect when doing these because you just don’t know what you are going to learn. A wide diversity of businesses were represented during the weekend. We had a person who was a Google Adwords Certified Professional and I learned a few new things about google adwords that I implemented while he was giving his speech. (I love the speed of the internet world)

We had someone who was in the fireworks business who gave a very interesting presentation. I think he has alot of potential in his industry and it will be interesting to see where he is in one year. After his presentation, many of us wanted to be in the fireworks business.

I was glad to meet a few of the readers of this blog. You know who you are! It’s always great to put a face against the comments.

I would say that this year it was about 50/50 in terms of real estate and online businesses. At the first meeting with Robert Kiyosaki, it was 95% real estate and 5% online business. The world has changed alot in 5 years.

Every year the B&P jumpstarts my motivation and those who heard my presentation know what my plans are. I’ve had those plans for 3 months now and finally after this weekend I’m launching a new store. With my new streamlined process, I can pop out new stores for hopefully $25/month. The good thing is that I can test out stores and open and close them spending only $25 + domain name.

Tented Lodge in Rhotia Valley

February 10th, 2010 by Kenric

I took over 1300 pictures and over 16 gigs of HD video during my trip.  It’s a little overwhelming to edit that much video, so I thought I’d start with the easiest first.  This video is of a tented lodge that I stayed at during the safari portion of my trip.  Who would have thought that the tented lodge would be one of the highlights of the trip!  Once you see the video, you can see why it’s special.

The food was incredible also.  You could not have a better setting for dinners.  The restaurant did not have walls, so eating at night was like eating at a very fancy restaurant in the middle of nowhere.  The restaurant was heated by fireplace and also by hot coals.  They would place a pan of hot wood coals next to you if you were cold.  I wish I took a photo of that.

On top of all of this. The tented lodge was created to help fund the children’s home that the owners built.

Rhotia Valley Tented Lodges from Kenric on Vimeo.

I’m back

February 7th, 2010 by Kenric

I’m back from Africa.  Actually, I’ve been back for over a week and have been getting caught up in my online stuff.  The trip to Africa went very well.  I am happy to announce that I made it to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro.  The final summit day was pretty tough.

We started at 11,000 on Day 1 at the Shira trailhead.  The actual distance in hiking to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro is not very far.  What makes it a difficult hike is the elevation.  Our bodies have to acclimate to the higher elevation and the only way to do that is to spend time at higher elevations.  This is why it takes 5-7 days to get to the top.  Each day we hiked about 6 hours.  We had acclimatization hikes where we would hike up to the top of a hill and back down.  This was solely to get our bodies use to the elevation.  These side hikes did not get us closer to the top.

I had slight altitude sickness on Day 3.  I had a headache and nausea.  But I still went on the acclimatization hikes because I knew that it was the only way to help my body.  It’s a weird feeling because you feel like you have the flu or a bad cold, but you know that resting won’t help you at all.  Day 4 I was still not feeling that well.  By Day 6 my altitude sickness symptoms were gone and I felt pretty good.

On the morning of Day 7, which I use morning loosely, we woke up at 12am and started to head for the summit at 1am.  We hiked very slow in the dark.  The distance to the top was only 4.5 miles, but the elevation went from 15,000ft to 19,350ft.  I could feel the air get thinner at about 18,000ft.  I was having trouble staying awake while hiking.  I was able to snap this picture as the sun began to rise.  I used my camera as an excuse to rest.

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I made it to the top at 8:30am after 7.5 hours of hiking.  In our group of 12 hikers, 10 of us made it to the top.  We were lucky because the weather was great.  It was sunny and clear and probably about 20 degrees at the top (which is really warm for the top).

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The next 2 days I went on a safari at Lake Manyara and the Ngorongoro Crater.  I’ll post some pics of that in a few days.  I say a few days, because I’ve been lazy catching up on my online stores and things in general so this blog priority keeps getting pushed.  Sorry.