Ben Roy

This is something I decided a couple of years ago, but some recent work on a business plan has it fresh in my head and a little more solid than it was previously so I thought I'd share. I've been doing New Year's resolutions for a number of years. About two years ago, I realized that it was important for me to create resolutions that I could track my progress against, and that I could tell for sure if I had stuck to.

I'm not looking to offend anyone here, but I'm not pulling any punches either. Most of the software out there in the Internet Marketing world is crap. I haven't used every application on the market of course, but from those that I have and those I've seen demos of, the bar is awfully low for what's considered 'great'.

I've been really busy the last week or two, right around the time I'm normally thinking of a few relaxing weeks off. Instead, I've been hard at it trying to cram a few things in while I've got time off from work. So what am I working on?

Alright, so it's not a perfect analogy. My wife and I are headed on a cruise in January. It's not just any cruise though, we're going with a group of Internet Marketers. In fact, there'll be a few big names along with a bunch of other up-and-comers. On the days at sea there are going to be sessions in the morning, but most of the time will be more informal networking and general vacationing.

I think a reasonable person might ask the question, "Why are you messing around with writing a Twitter application?"

There are lots of possible answers. Profit would be the first obvious one, but that's not really the case. I don't have it in my mind to write a Twitter app to sell (no clue if one even would sell). Publicity would be another possibility. That's not it either. Sure, that'd be a great tertiary benefit if this turns into something that's actually useful to people, but it's not a driving motivation.

One of the great things about the Internet is that sometimes the best thing you can do is nothing at all. A while back I wrote about trying to get ranked for the keyword 'Ben Roy'. At the time I was on page 13 I believe, and it seemed like the first page was a long ways away.

What I could have done was run out and start a campaign to get my site ranked. In fact, that's what I thought I should have done. What I actually did instead was get distracted by other things and not pay any attention to this site. Terrible, right? Wrong!

Years ago I was very concerned about what people would find when they typed "Ben Roy" into a search engine. It might not be what you think though: I was worried that they'd find me. My primary concern was privacy, and I was quite happy to discover that my name is way too plain for anything about me specifically to make it's way to the top.

Yesterday wasn't the first time I found myself pondering my use of time, but it stuck in my head and I decided I needed to address it. I realized last night as I headed to bed that I'd spent a long time at my computer, ostensibly working, but didn't have a lot to show for it.

I mentioned before that I'd fired up a new Twitter account to try to network with some people. That was afew weeks ago, so I thought I'd toss out an update on how things were going.

I currently have 15 followers. I don't know if I should feel good or bad about that. I'm only following 9 people, so I didn't pick up all the followers by just randomly following people. I just had two people unfollow me this evening, after two other people started following me this morning.

I just set up a new account on Twitter. It's not my first, but my old account was fairly focused on personal stuff, and in any case didn't have my name attached to it. I wanted to do a little more networking, so I decided a clean slate would be the best bet.