Starting at the BOTTOM...

So today, it feels like a new beginning for me, after being away a week house sitting for some friends, and my fiance being off of work for spring break, reality hits that I'm back to my normal life and I'm looking at where i stand. As i stated in my first blog, I lost my "day job" as of last week, and I start this week with my online business being my primary income for the first time in my life. It's a good and bad feeling i guess, being that my day job was a hassle to deal with and very unstable, but it was also my main source of money so adjustments have to be made. As thing stand now, I'm making a small amount from my business, my fiance has a good job, but it will barely cover our bills right now (but this will hopefully improved as we are 2 payments away from paying off our installment loan,) and we live with my Mom in my Grandmas old house since my Mom and Dad are getting divorced and my mom was willed this house by my Grandma. So basically, I'm at the bottom of the barrel right now, barely making it, but I'm not afraid to admit it get to work. So this with this blog i wanted to put down my current situation, so I can look back in a few months and see that I'm doing better. I find that in times like this, I seem to get more work done in a day, because its motivating to have the need and want to make things better. Right now, I've just set some small goals that I'd like to achieve, like covering bills, and being able to buy groceries and such without having to worry about money. Sure me and my fiance have big dreams like many do about future vacations and things of that nature, but right now we're being realists and hoping to achieve minor goals like being able to move out and have a place of our own, and have some financial security.

There have been a few other times when we've had to worry about finances and making it, and have even overheard family members saying I need to "Get out and get an F'n job," in reference to me working and putting time into my website (which obviously isn't good enough for some people.) But I've learned to turn that type of thing around and use it as motivation to work twice as hard at my business and make good things come of it. Sure I could go scrub toilets or flip burgers at a job I hated, and make myself miserable, all for more money than what I have now. But, as I said before, those of us with the "vision" can see that we are building something much bigger, more stable, and something that we can own, without the worry of a boss walking and and firing you for whatever reason, and having your whole world turned upside down.

So now I have it down, I'm at the bottom and ready to move upward, this is the starting point of working for myself officially, and relying on my business to at least get us to a "living without worry" stage. I"m trying everything even outside of sales from my site, since my rankings in Google have dropped earlier this month (at the worst possible time), including AdSense, Amazon Affiliate Ads, Auction Ads, and blogging. I'm aiming to bring in enough income to pay for groceries and a place to live (even renting a duplex would be suffice right now,) so small goals are just fine right now, nothing fancy, just want to get by on my own, without the help of people who didn't want to give it anyway. Upwards I go...I hope!

Let The Journey Begin...The Story Behind This Blog...

Welcome to my newest blog, Ultra Business Ramblings. This blog was a brainstorm of mine after thinking about all the things I do daily in an attempt to generate enough income to support my needs. I recently lost my "day job," which i held for the past 8 or so years. I basically reported payroll information and probably have been on easy street as far as a "job" goes for the past few years. Being my Dad was my boss, under normal circumstances you would think I'd be pretty secure with my former job, but really it'd been the exact opposite for the past few years and I've been well aware of it. Since about 2001 or so I'd been interested in making money online, and have been a part of many many money making programs, in which almost all of them turned out to be failures or scams. But nonetheless, my interest in making money somehow online, and bringing in my own income without having to rely on an unstable job remained steady. Around 2002 I ran across a company called Cognigen Telecommunications. At the time it seemed interesting, but it involved the sale of phone service, Internet service, and many other telecom related services, which I didn't see myself making money from being I didn't think I could go door to door selling these services, and didn't know how to drive any traffic to a website, so I passed on Cognigen at the time.

About a year later I began hearing about Cognigen again while in chat rooms with a few people discussing online business opportunities. This time around I got a better explanation of how it worked and read up more in depth and could now see it was a legit company as opposed to all the others I had either seen or been a part of in the past. I liked the business set up and the fact that no money was required to join, which told me they weren't just out to get my money like many others. I joined Cognigen and began trying to sell the services via flyer's and mainly chat rooms. I made a couple of small sales such as domain names or a cell phone plan every few months, which didn't amount to much. After some frustration, I began learning more and more about how to make this work. The first key was getting my own domain name, and driving traffic to the site. Another thing I picked up was that I had a good number of people I was talking to online, that were also frustrated with what they were trying to do, but the path most of them took was just to jump to another program or sell something different if whatever they were working on wasn't bringing in money fast enough. Those people were failing time and time again, which made me realize I needed to stick with whatever was stable, and learn how to make it work. The group that once shared ideas in similar chats was cut down fast and pretty soon, myself and my future webmaster were all the remained. We were both in Cognigen, but he had been in longer and had more experience making sales and had a lot of information to pass along to me. Pretty soon we had thrown out a lot of ideas about making it work, and our goals were very similar, which mainly were to not have to get a 9-5 job flipping burgers and answering to a boss, and instead build something we would own and could generate our own secure income from.

In 2005, after many attempts at throwing a few different websites together and experimenting with a few different ideas, I hired G.C. (who I mentioned above to take over as my webmaster. This was the first time we had a real site together and were ready to make an impact. A few months in, we were learning about link exchanged and pay per click advertising, which was a huge step that had me making a little extra cash off the site finally. We had a few thousand link exchanges going, and PPC was also bringing us descent traffic. To our surprise, in May of 2006, I was contacted by someone who was interested in buying my domain since we had built it up to the point that it had descent search engine rankings, mainly on MSN. So the price was right, and we sold for a nice amount (for a first time website.) It wasn't all about the money in the sale, we saw it more as a chance to start from scratch and go back and correct mistakes we had made early on, and had since learned how to do better (even choosing a better domain that would be more targeted).

A few weeks later, UltraCellSaver.com was born. We've had a few ups and downs so far, but we surprised ourselves and got ranked in Google for many keywords in a short period of time and picked up some nice traffic for a few months. Since then, we've dropped out of Google for a lot of keywords, so we've explored more options such as different PPC services, directory submission, and better site navigation and options. We're learning daily about perfecting the art of search engine optimization, which is not an easy process, but we've come a LONG way since 2004.

So now I've created this blog to share our ideas and maybe even get some opinions from other bloggers and readers who would like to share their experiences. Since losing my unstable job, my website and everything related to it (such as this blog) is now officially my primary source of income. I know there are more of you out there who are also trying to make a living off of their websites and doing what we're doing as well. I've experienced the question "OK you have a website, but WHEN is it going to make you money?" To those people that don't have the vision that we who believe in what we are building and see the great potential it has, those people can have fun at their 9-5 jobs with bosses they hate, hours they cant stand, and the struggle of now knowing when their rug could be pulled out from under them, until they're elderly and realize what they COULD have done with a little hard work and determination. (Hey, at least they'll KNOW when their getting paid, and the EXACT amount, unlike us website people who have no idea what we're doing or talking about ;-)

Welcome to the blog, I hope this will be a place where people can learn, share, and make all of our businesses GROW!