In July I rented my house to a family and since then, I’ve been living in Bryant about 30 miles from the Little Rock. The drive takes about 30 minutes and its been killing me.

I’ve purchased a few

I finally found a house here in Little Rock… Its off of Hillsborough and its in the process of being remodeled… a process that I swore I would never do again… but this time it’s different… this time people are getting paid to do the work… it goes a lot faster, its better quality, and it keeps the stress off of me. I don’t think I’ll be there for a long time but it is a step in the right direction… I’m excited to see the property after the work is done.

      

Well… I’ve started a new project that involves real estate… specifically - single family homes in Michigan, South Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, Georgia, Illinois, and Indiana.

Its been a lot of fun and I’m learning a ton about other state laws, other markets, and meeting new people. This opportunity has great timing, great planning, great vision, and a lot of potential… But, I still feel like we’re missing something.

Its something I talk about a lot… great people. They’re hard to find…

When I find good people, its hard for me to share my vision… its hard for me to get them excited.

When I find great people, they just get it… Sometimes they get me excited. Sometimes they see it before I do!

I love working with great people… but they’re hard to find.

I’m looking for partners in the states listed above… Or you must be willing to relocate there

If you’re interested, let me know.

      

So, we’ve purchased a new apartment complex in Jacksonville, AR. It’s 46 units and is currently full (no discounts given to facebook-friends). It should be a good deal. I’m 100% confident that we bought it at a great price, the cash flow projections look good, the management is solid, and the occupancy rate is high.

We’re doing a good job at aligning our properties such that they are relatively close, the management is getting better as screening tenants, contractors are more understanding of our terms, and most of the properties have similar goals.

With any organization there is a “culture” that everyone buys into… that includes the owners, contactors, employees, management and even the tenants/customers. If you can’t get everyone to buy into the culture, you either have to change the culture or change the people.

The guys at the top typically define the culture… the guys at the bottom have to buy into the culture… if you’re at the bottom and you want to change the culture, you get repromanded… thats why turnover is so much higher at the bottom…. thats why you hear of so many employees that “just didn’t work out.”

If you want to change culture, the guys at the top have to change… and I mean they have to be replaced. Changing people is too hard to do.

      

From Feb 7, 2007 until February 13, 2007 - 8.5 Hours
So, as some of you have seen, I’ve registered www.RJMartino.com and moved my blog to a different server. One thing that I’ve done is registered the name for 10 years. Search engines recognize this as a more “permanent” web site. This helps with “natural” search engine ranking. Registering and Setting up the domain was the easy part.

After the domain name was setup and the server was configured, I spent 8.5 hours moving the files and the database over to the new server. I also upgraded to the latest version of wordpress and upgraded all of my plug-ins.

Currently I’m using the following plug-ins:

1. Akismet - SPAM control
2. Feedburner Feed Replacement - Help users find the RSS feed
3. Related Posts - posts related posts at the end of each post
4. Text Link Ads - to publish ads from text-link-ads.com… CLICK THIS LINK IF YOU WANT TO USE TEXT LINKS
5. WP-ShortStat - to view short statistics on my blog

After the upgrade my permalinks didn’t work correctly. I found out it was because the .htaccess wasn’t moved correctly. I removed my old SPAM control plug-in (it wouldn’t work with WordPress 2.1) and started using Akismet. From the articles I’ve read, it seems pretty sophisticated.

And lastly, I’ve removed my photo gallery (Gallery2 is what I was using). I’ve decided that I’ll start using flickr. I was a flickr user back when it wasn’t cool to be a flickr user.

This is another article in the “Monetize Your Blog” category and although we haven’t done a lot to make more money (we have only inserted an affiliate link for Text Link Ads) we are now up-to-date with our software and we can use the latest plug-ins with no problem.

We’ve also registered the domain name to increase visibility and awareness. And we’ve moved to a more stable server.

Any technical project requires a stable infrastructure… and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve stabalized our infrastructure. After 8.5 hours, we have a stable infrastructure.

      

I’ve been making changes to my blog for a number of reasons. But one of the reasons is because I’m going to try and monetize the blog. Currently it doesn’t make any money, not directly. I hope that some of my “technical” articles have resulted in new service contracts for iProv, but either way, I haven’t personally seen a check for this site.

I’m going to keep everything public and feel free to ask any questions, I’ve making RSS feeds more visible. I’ve always been a big advocate of RSS feeds but I’ve never really “advertised” the ability.

I’ve also added the ability to leave a donation via paypal… really… EVERYTHING HELPS… It takes time to write a blog and I’m hoping my blog isn’t going to be so much of a “journal” but more about information and a knowledge base. Just click on the page that says “Donate to RJsWeblog”

I’ve added Google Adsense to show advertising to my main links. I will get a small royalty each time the link is clicked… SO CLICK THEM.

I’ve added “Recommended Amazon Stuff” so that if you order from that link, I’ll make a small referral fee. Yeah, small. But I get to choose what is “recommended.”

And lastly, I’ve added text-ad-links.com to the right hand side, these ads will also be published in the RSS feed as soon as I do the WordPress upgrade. I recieved $100 in free advertising just for signing up as publisher as well

I’ve reorganized some of my link categories too. I like to think I’ve organized them in order of interest.

I’ve got a list of other changes I’m going to make but I’m only spending about 2 hours a week on making the changes. The other time is going toward writing and my “real job.”

I’ll try to keep track of how much time I take as well.

Hopefully this weekend, I’ll upgrade from Wordpress 1.5.2 to Wordpress 2.1. Wish me luck.

      

http://www.invent.org/challenge/

Have you been pondering, tinkering, building, or crafting the next modern marvel of the 21st century - but weren’t sure what to do with it? Now you have a chance to be recognized and win a $25,000 grant for sharing your BIG IDEA and expressing your inventive spirit. So go ahead and take your shot at becoming a part of history!

      

Everyday I get spam that tells me what stocks I should buy. It’s a good thing that my spambayes throws these away b/c I would probably lose a lot of money.

Here is a guy that keeps track of the latest spam stocks…. it’s pretty neat and shows you have horrible these companies have been performing. Out of the 35+ stocks that have been sent to him, only one has actually been a winner. You can get better odds at Vegas.

http://www.spamstocktracker.com/

Any company that thinks trying to spam “the hottest company on Wall Street”, is bound for failure, under poor management, and should be shorted as soon as possible.

Dear Publicly Traded Companies:

It is a bad idea to send Spam to potential investors.

Your friend,
The Common Internet User

      

I am now the owner of a new duplex and an apartment complex… not a bad deal. Just thought I’d keep you posted.

      

Well, we pitched an offer on the apartment complex and one of his duplexes. He took it… Now, that sounds like a good thing except now we have to convince a bank that we can make the payments. Since the building has 9/12 apartments rented, I think it’s a sure deal. But, we’ll see what the bank says. I’ll be tied up the next couple of weeks trying to sweet talk banks, boasting about my past accomplishments, and gathering random statistics (banks find statistics interesting).

To get the bank on my side, I’m going to have to establish a partner that has credibility or a relationship with the bank. Since Sam showed me the property and we’ve been looking for a project we would both enjoy, I thought it would be a good starter. In general partnerships are really inefficient and generally rob you of your hard-earned money. But, sometimes you can’t do everything yourself.

It’s all about “resources”. To accomplish anything you need resources. Resources could be time, people, an extra hand, etc. If you have everything you need, why establish a partnership? Money is a substitute for almost all resources (money is also a resource itself). If you need extra people, you can pay someone to help you… no need for a partnership. In general, your only partner should be the partner that provides you money… which in most cases is the bank. Or, if you need a partner because the bank wants more people to kill if you don’t pay them.

Do you have a great idea? Go to the bank and get a bunch of money. Then, pay someone to work with you. You don’t have to convince them that the idea will work. You don’t have to consider their thoughts when you want to make an aggressive decision.

PS… I’m glad I have great partnerships that do nothing but help me!

      

Well, Sam showed me some apartments for sale and we’ve made an offer on them. It looks like he may accept it and now the hard part comes. We’ve got to find a finance partner (aka “a bank”). I think we’ll start by visiting bankers that know us. The apartments are 12 units and have a current income potential of around $45K per year. All but 3 are currently rented and he has given us the promise that by the time he leaves all 12 will be “rentable”.

I’ll keep you posted.