Happy Halloween everyone. Hope you had fun last night on All Halllow's Eve. My wife and I took the kids out trick or treating in the neighborhood. I took some videos but most of them came out to dark to see.

The neighborhood we live in doesn't have a lot of children so there weren't very many people giving out candy. I felt the kids made a sub standard haul, by my standards, but they were quite pleased with the amount of candy they got and that is all that matters.

"Back in the day", we weren't happy unless we had filled up our pillow case for the second time, soaped the neighbors windows, and TP'd half a dozen yards. Things are a lot different now. The excepted vandalism that used to go hand in hand with trick or treating isn't "excepted" any more.

Have people lost their sense of humor? Oh well, here is the only video footage that came out where you could see it. Maybe I should break down and get a decent video cam with a light.

I just have to give a shout out to my number one fan! My daughter turned 4 years old today.

Man they grow up so fast!

I ran across this and just couldn't resist. I'm an old school rocker.

The significence of the holiday season means a lot of different things to a lot of different people depending on where you are from and your religious beliefs. For me, when I was a kid, it always meant family get togethers. My family is spread all over the United States some living as far as Hawaii. My mother has 3 brothers with families and we have not all been together since both of my Grandparents were alive.

I now have my own immediate family and also 2 children from my first marriage who are in their twenties. The youngest has just recently made me a Grandfather at age 47. I couldn't be happier. Unfortunately, I am not going to be able to be with them this Christmas but will be visiting them soon. This year, the family is coming to my house here in Florida.

I am making this post because I want to make sure that every one remembers why we are doing this. Here in the United States it has become the accepted norm that if you want to excel at your job, you need to put in 50 – 60 hour work weeks. This is as true for corporate America as it is for Blue collar America. Some where along the line we have become obsessed with chasing the dollar and material possesions for a lot of different reasons.

I was a legal resident of Holland for 2 years and I have traveled and worked in places like New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and South America. I met my wife in Venezuela. The rest of the world does not think like that. Family and being happy takes presedence over money.

This goes out to all you Americans. Don't forget to have fun! Being a workahoic is not going to make you happy. I have a hard time with this myself. The job that I worked when I was traveling required me to work 12 hour days, sometimes for 7 days a week. The jobs usually lasted 3 to 4 weeks and then off to another one.

Now I work a 40 hour a week job, but old habits are hard to break. My wife thinks that I am absolutely crazy. Sometimes I will get home from work and start working on the computer until 10 or 11 without stopping. Then I'll get up at 3am and put in a few hours before every one gets up.

It's good to know that I can still do it when crunch time comes but I have made an effort to scale back. Since using the planning and the Daily Did Sheet that Alex gave us, I have been able to do away with this type of behaviour. I have a sign on the wall in my office that says "Have You Had Any Fun Today?"

This helps keep me from being obsessed by my wants. All I really have to do is ask myself "why I am doing all this?" The answer is easy. Like they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words."

Alejandro and Mary, and of course Santa

With that said, I think I'll take a break, go watch some football, and have a couple coldies

Back in the summer of 1998, I left the United States for the first time in my life. I had recently went back to school to get a degree in electronics so I could start a new career and basically a new life. Three years prior I divorced my wife of 15 years and the school and new career was a way of starting fresh and putting all of that behind me. I pretty much swore that I would never get married again and intended to spend a lot of time doing the things that I like to do with no body to answer too.

I buried myself in my studies and work for the next 3 years. I got a great job working on automated welding equipment. The job paid really well but required me to travel and work between 72 to 84 hours a week. No kidding! The company does repairs at Nuclear power plants, coal burning power plants, refineries, and paper mills. These plants lose a lot of money when their units are down so the work schedule was 6 or 7 days a week, for 12 hours a day until the repairs are made. The average job lasted about 2 weeks but I have been on some that lasted for 3 months.

Back to the summer of 1998. I had been working my job for about 2 months and they sent me to work at a refinery in Puerta La Cruz, Venezuela. That is where I met the woman who changed my life forever. I am not going to go into all of the details (this post is getting way longer then I intended already), but we met and corresponded for the next 5 years via email and windows messenger. Luckily for me, my company had a lot of work in Venezuela and I went on every job to spend time with Yvonne (my wife's name). I also took several vacations to Venezuela over the years.

She was unable to come visit me in the United States because of our crappy immigration policies, but we kept trying to get her a visa. I won't go into the details, because they are a little shady, but after 4 years we finally managed to get her a visa. Meanwhile, I accepted a position with my company as the maintenance manager for our European division that is located in Holland. We got married in the United States and then spent the next 2 years living in Rotterdam.

I then came off the road and we moved back to the United States where I took a job at the home office working in the shop. (no more traveling) This came with a considerable reduction in pay but was worth losing every penny. At least it is to me now. I hope I haven't lost you yet because I am just now getting to the point of this post. After spending 7 years travelling all over the world and being heavily exposed to South American culture, I have realized that our way of life in America is absolutely nuts!

We work ourselves to death so that we can keep up with the Jones or some other idiotic reason. (Europeans have a mandatory 36 hour work week) Family values have gone to shit in this country. We go to such lengths to chase the almighty dollar and turn a blind eye to the things in life that are truly important. Teenagers are running wild and getting into trouble. Why? Because their parents are too busy pursuing their careers to notice what is going on. They both work. The kid has been letting himself in the house after school since he was 10 and stays their unsupervised until one of the parents arrives to tired from work to even talk to him.

This has become the norm. The same goes for the elderly in this country. The minute they show signs of not being able to care for themselves we put them in a home to live out the rest of their days staring at a television. OK, this is turning into a rant. I'll stop. I just want to thank my wife, of 5 years as of Friday, Yvonne for showing me what is really important in life and how to tell the difference. If I made a list of what matters most to me now, happiness would be at the top and money and material objects don't even make the top 10.

I want everyone to think about why you have started your online business. Make sure that your only reason isn't just the money. Ask yourself this: "Am I having fun?". If the answer is no then you are probably doomed to fail. Unless you are just incredibly passionate about making it work, you will never have the drive it takes to see it through. Those programs that talk about making money fast are a crock. You have to look at this as a business and until you do, you are going to have poor results.

Start looking for ways to outsource the work. You need to be the boss, not the worker. I no that most of you do not have the money to start paying people to do your work. I know exactly where you are at. You can do it yourself as long as you are working towards an outsourcing scenario. Start recording your daily tasks in a video form so that you can easily turn the work over to an assistant when you can afford it. That day WILL come.

Don't fall into the trap. I know people that start a home business so that they can have more freedom and free time only to end up working more then they did at their old jobs. don't totally defeat the purpose of working from home. Yes, you will have to at first but don't let it take over your life. Remember to have fun! Work in spurts of no longer than 2 hours and then go spend an hour playing with the kids or hitting golf balls. You can even spend time with your wife. What a concept!

Happy Anniversary Yvonne! The last 5 years have been the best of my entire life.

Hi all, I have been really busy this week and didn't get much done this past weekend. I did manage to update the Hub page a little. Hub pages gives every Hub a score that is based on content, how many visitors you get, and other mysterious variables that no one knows. When you first make a Hub, your score is 50 and 100 is the highest. Right now my Hub is at 74 which is pretty good. The Squidoo lens is ranked 930 in the Business category and is ranked 15,333 out of all lenes, which is also pretty good. Remember that these pages are not even 2 weeks old.

I checked Google today and Grafixplus has appeared in the results under "web page graphics". The website was not in the results for this keyword before I started the promotion. It is in the 250th spot which is page 26 in the results. Not very good but it's a start. I will continue to keep you updated and as I turn up the heat on the promoting, we will watch it move up in the rankings. My Hub page is in the 330th spot and my Squidoo lens is in the 386th spot.

This past weekend, I used my favorite Web 2.0 tool, Web 2.0 Submitter, to submit my Hub page to several of the big Web 2.0 sites. About 2 days later is when Grafix plus appeared in the Google results under "web page graphics". You will soon see just how effective this strategy can be, even for a competitive keyword phrase.

Before I start on the Squidoo lens, I want to cover something I forgot to tell you about the Hub page. When you set up your Hub page, (and your Squidoo lens as well), make sure you add at least 20 tags. If you did your keyword research properly then this should not be hard. Make sure you add a few general keywords as well. For instance, I would use internet marketing and web promotion with my "web page graphics" page. This is very important and can make the difference of your Squidoo lens ranking higher than someone elses on the same topic.

You will run into this on Squidoo because there are a lot more people using Squidoo than Hub pages. You may not be able to get the url that you want when you start your lens. Try to get as close as you can to your keyword phrase. Maybe you can get the phrase with out hypens like "webpagegraphics" or use under score like "web_page_graphics". Yesterday, I also failed to stress the importance of using your keywords in the capsule titles. Squidoo calls their capsules modules. The modules will let you use subtitles as well. This is a good place to put your secondary keywords and maybe some of the high competition keywords in your niche. (hint, hint)

You will create your Squidoo lens with a similar layout that you used in your Hub page. Don't be overwhelmed by all the different modules that Squidoo has. Start out with the basics. Create a nice introduction with keyword rich content from your article. Don't over do it with the keywords. Keep it under 5%. Use variations of the keyword instead. It looks more natural. If you look at the lens I created for this promotion you will see that I used "web page graphics", "website graphics", "web page design", and "web design".

Take note that I created 3 anchor text links in the introduction. Two of them using the text, web page graphics, and 1 using Grafixplus. When you start a promotion like this you want to always use the target keyword phrase as the anchor text in your link. For those of you that don't know, that is the text that will be clickable. You may have some difficulty with your linking if you don't know any HTML. Squidoo does not have an editor like Hub pages. You must enter the HTML tags yourself. Here is a quick lesson.

• To make a link: <a href="http://targetwebsite.com" target="_blank">Your Anchor Text</a> (will open in new window)
• To make a word bold: <b>your word or phrase</b>
• Italics: <em>your word or phrase</em>

There you go. That should be all you need for now. HTML is not very difficult. You just need to learn a handfull of tags and you can do a lot. If you more help, just leave me a comment with your email address and I will get back to you.

Take notice that in my lens intro I created a link to my Hub page and two links to the Grafixplus home page which is our ultimate target. One of the links used our target keyword phrase and the other used Grafixplus. If I was promoting an affiliate product, I would do the same. One link to the product affiliate page using the keyword as anchor text and the other link using the name of the product. I used the same linking strategy on my Hub page. Two links to Grafixplus and one link to my Squidoo lens that targets my keyword phrase for Grafixplus.

OK, back to the Squidoo lens set up. After you create an awesome intro lens you can use the base package to get started. Go ahead and set up an RSS module. Try not to use the same feed that you used on your Hub page. If you are in a hurry you can but make sure you go back and change it after a day or two. The same goes with the You Tube module, look for another video.

I used the same videos on both because they are really high quality vdeos, created by the guys at Stompernet, with extremely relevant contenet to my keyword phrase. Also, the owners at Grafixplus are working on a video that I will use on which ever page is in the lead. It is always better if you can create your own video but I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. There are usually plenty of good videos on You Tube to chose from.

I would go ahead and use the Amazon module and then make sure you change the title on Guest Book. If you don't set up at least the intro and 3 modules, your lens will not be published. It will be listed as under construction. You have enough with the intro, rss, youtube, and amazon modules. You can always use another text module to add more content but I wouldn't go over board at first. It is better to set up a basic lens and see how it does in the search results. If hasn't done what you want in a couple weeks then you can slowly start adding modules.

That doesn't mean that you can't do it now. If you feel frogy then go for it. Click on the add modules button and browse through the screens. There are over 100 different modules you can add. I like the link modules and the poll modules. The poll modules let your visitors interact and the link modules give you a chance to promote some of your stuff. I belong to a program called Squidoo Secrets that I always set up a text module and promote on all of my lenses.

That should get you going on your Squidoo lens. If you need any help feel free to leave me a comment. I didn't go over this in baby steps because most of it is straight foward and self explainitory. You want to make sure that you put your keyword phrase in the url, if possible, and in all of the module titles. Use the same setup as your Hub page but try and use different rss feeds and videos to prevent any duplicate content penalties that Google is know to access.

When you finish with your lens, make sure you click on the "Publish" button and your site will be live. Then make sure you submit it to Onlywire. The next post we will start promoting in earnest. I want you to sign up for accounts at the following Web 2.0 sites:

Stumbleupon, Technorati, Digg, Propeller, Shoutwire, Reddit, PlugIM, Newsvine, and MarkTD.

If it takes me a while to get the next post up, (I'm soooooo busy), then go ahead and submit your Hub page and Squidoo lens to all of the above except for Digg and Propeller. These two are very picky and will ban your account if you do anything the least bit spammy.