Ben Roy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Press Release) – Mar 24, 2010 - Alan Petersen conducted an interview with Internet Marketing and SEO expert Ben Roy on Monday, recording the call as a bonus for the impending launch of his new product, Maximize PLR. Topics discussed during the interview included the basics of social bookmarking, benefits and challenges of marketing through social bookmarking, and how to effectively automate the process of social bookmarking using SocialAdr.

My 4 year old nephew was over at my place the other day, and his Grandma was going to read him a bed time story. He pulled out one of my favorite books from my childhood, "The Monster at the End of the Book". Just in case you've never read it (you really should), I'll tell you a little about it.

The book stars Grover from Sesame Street. He starts off at the beginning of the book by warning you that there's a terribly frightening monster at the end of the book. He tells you that you definitely don't want to get to the end of the book.

It was kind of a strange weekend (long weekend, really) for me. I was out in DC for Yanik Silver's Underground conference. Most of that is a topic for another day, but one of the things I got to thinking about while I was there was the inefficiency with which a lot of my time is spent.

I'm not afraid of putting in hard work to get stuff done, but I realized that I spend a fair amount of my time sitting at my computer running at far less than optimal speed. Life is way too short to waste time, so I came home ready to shake things up and try to improve my processes.

I'm a big budgeting guy, which I accomplished for the longest time with Microsoft Money. It may not have been the best application in the world, but it worked pretty well for budgeting (for me). As long as I was using it, I really felt like I had a handle on my finances, like I was in control.

Well, a while back Microsoft announced that they would no longer be supporting Money. Great, my favorite money tool was cancelled. So I knew at some point I was going to need something new.

The day I got back from India last time (just over two weeks ago), my desktop computer died. I thought it might be the power supply, so I ordered a new one of those. It arrived a couple days later and turned out to not be the problem.

At that point I went ahead and ordered parts for a new computer, which all arrived this afternoon. I got it put together and a fresh copy of Windows 7 installed, and am now blogging from the new machine.

So the other day I went out and bought a guitar. How that came to be is a story for another time, and I don't have anything terribly interesting to share about the actual purchase, but just in case I have a story to tell later I thought I should at least open the topic.

I bought an acoustic, a Parkwood. Specifically: PW360M. I got a killer deal on it because they were on clearance and it was the President's Day sale. The net effect was that I got into a higher tier of guitar than I would have otherwise.

In Part 1, we talked about reasons to stay laser focused on a single project. But every coin has a backside, and in this case it creates a dissonance I previously mentioned.

There are a couple major opposing arguments for getting exclusively focused on one business, project, or effort. The biggest is the simple benefit of diversification. Especially in the realm of Internet Marketing, everything is subject to change.

I sometimes find myself jammed uncomfortably between diversification and focus. There are solid arguments for and against each, leading to a constant struggle that I have yet to find a comfortable resolution to.

One of the biggest mistakes you see with people starting out in online business is doing too much dabbling. They try a little of one thing, a little of another, and never stick with anything long enough to realize meaningful success.

I have a regular meeting with a few local Internet entrepreneurs, every 4-6 weeks or so, usually for dinner and drinks. The last time we met was the second week of December.

For the previous two meetings we'd gotten together at Boston's, which if you don't know is a chain pizza place. Our meeting last Wednesday was the third time we'd been there in about four months.