Another year on

After 22 months, Lorraine has finally been able to find a new role working in project management office role at ANZ Wealth.  The last 12 months have been fun and a challenge - fun in being able to share so much time together. We have travelled a bit. We got married. We travelled a bit more. We have spent a lot of time building new skills. We have struggled with the aftermath of Lorraine's surgery last year.

Foreign exchange trading has been a challenge. The courses at Knowledge to Action have varied in quality. The materials are excellent yet the presenters have not all been able to do the job. I suspect they don't trade the way the K2A strategies go and consequently they fail to teach with any conviction. For me, trading too has been difficult. I have struggled to find strategies that work for me - this requires consistency and constancy. Keep trading a strategy and stick with it. I have tended to cherry pick my way through and the results have been patchy. I have discovered I am not very good at seeing the losses and tend to pull trades off early. This is strange as in stock market investing I am much more sanguine about losses and am quite happy to hold onto losing investment positions waiting for the fundamentals to work their way into the prices. Now I work on trading robots to find a consistent way to trade some strategies and limit the discretionary trades to a mixture of daily chart trading linked to market fundamentals.

Beyond FX, we have attended a number of Internet Marketing courses initially introduced to them by 21st Century Education seminar in Melbourne but mostly following the teaching of Brett McFall. Lorraine did the Warp Speed course and we attended Success Speed in the Gold Coast last November. While it is easy to see that people are making passive residual incomes from Internet businesses, it is hard to see all the things that have to be right to succeed. An idea. A pasion for that idea. A website. Traffic. Google ranking. Backlinks. Social media presence - the list goes on. We invested in a number of programs to help us fill in the gaps:

For websites: Rapid Fire
For traffic: FB Cash Creator
For content delivery: Webinar Magic
For social media posting: Social Speed

Over the last few months, we have been working our way through this and results are Sales of $5.00 which come from an affiliate link to my domain name provider. What is missing? Well it seems very similar to the FX stuff - the need to find a single point of focus and to drive totally on that. My head is so full of ideas that I make progress on a whole range of things in a line but succeed at nothing. Quite frankly, it has been a whole lot easier just spending time with Lorraine and not doing the work. And there has been no shortage of administration to catch up. Every time I take a month off cycling it takes around 6 to get back on top of things.

I did invest in another package called Commission Killer. Basically this builds websites around keywords and automatically builds in the products for sale from Clickbank. The websites are supposedly SEOed - I have my doubts as I have not made a single sale since starting. The tool does provide a neat tool to add articles and videos - basically searches the web for content and puts together as a schedule for publishing said content. Well this was all very well until I checked why content was not being published - the software had reversed the numbers in the date filed and post were scheduled to be published in 2102. I do not think I will be around then. You can see a few of these sites - I will focus on the things I know something about:

• http://www.go4pianolessons.com/ - Lorraine says she will do the content for this as she learned piano a while ago
• http://www.go4forexprofits.com/ - a lot of potential here to leverage my lessons as a forex trader - robots; education; brokers; indicators
• http://www.go4yogahealth.com/ - have done a little of this and been through the tough journey out of hypertension and depression using relaxation and exercise techniques - yoga can be a big part of this
• http://www.go4paidsurveys.com/ - always a good way to make some incidental cash out of free time
• http://www.go4reversephonelookup.com/ - the service the phone company should provide but never does
• http://www.breatheyourdreams.com/ - a focus on matters cycling. I will change the domain for this to get closer to exact domain matching for the content. I want to build the core site into a placeholder for all the great things one can do in life and the things that affect me. Live your dreams - Breathe your dreams. 

Am also working hard on taking a new approach to managing my portfolios. To do this I have enrolled in an education programme with Trading Pursuits. This is all about taking a holistic view on investing beyond equities and fixed interest and including currency and commodities positions. My investment manager has not done well on the latter two parts - in fact my currency exposures are ugly and the use of commodities have been inconsistent - made money on Grains in the last runup and on Gold in the last rundown.  Eventually I am going to build all this stuff into a new area which I am going to call Stratocharge Your Wealth/Earning/Income/Life - http://www.stratocharge.com. This will become a site addressing the challenges I have faced in managing my finances and in building new income streams to take advantage of the digital world.

Now that is a lot of stuff and it is completely against the trend of FOCUS. But that's just fine - if I can tackle one thing on one theme each day of the week, I will be able to progress a lot of fronts at the same time. And I now have time - Lorraine heads off to work each morning leaving me space to do what has to be done. The financial settlement with my ex wife is out of the way and I do have some cash to make investments and to learn from my mistakes.

Last area of endeavour - a friend is building a new software business in the whole area of business performance improvement. I am a non executive director - well I will be once I do the paper work - and a shareholder. Software is being developed in South Africa and first wave of sales will be there. After that we go global and my role will be to grow business in Asia Pacific and Oceania. More to do - for now I look after the website development - had to get something started to have a presence. We do get onto the top page of Google if you search for Centimex (that took me about 30 minutes to do by creating a Facebook, a Google+ and a Twitter page). It's at http://www.CentimexPerformanceImprovement.com

Forwards