Prioritize Profitable Projects - TFS Day 4

As I have discussed before I have pretty bad Attention Deficit Disorder. Its never been clinically diagnosed but anyone who has spent time around me, talking to me, or even hearing me speak (when I ask the audience member to repeat there question after i start to answer it) knows that I have it. What ever it is. My wife actually came up with this slogan a long time ago - Prioritize the Profitable Projects. Basically its simple but it makes all the difference in the world. Last September I published a list of ideas I had but never followed through on (well some i made a half ass effort on). I honestly come up with a new idea a day. 95% of them are cool or fun ideas... here I will share a few with you: RSS Lotto - having a service that incetivizes people to read your rss by offering a random number to be included in the rss feed that people could check to see if they were a winner. You could have it be the first 100 people to put in the code or just randomize it for prizes. It would be pretty easy to do and I think probably would be a good idea if done correctly. PeopleSpam.us I created this website about 4 years ago.. maybe longer.. basically i wanted to create a service where people could opt-in to recieving spam (it would post your email in many places spammers comb and also sign you up for Free scam services (free ipods etc..). This may not sound like much of a service now but 5 years ago when I thought of it there was not good baseline blacklisting services. Anyway never really did anything with it. Diggb**** - actually I think I am going to do something with this one so ill keep it hush for now... Clickshield - I have been offering services to very few select people to detect clickfraud. I registered clickshield.com many years ago and have been using that as my company name for this product. One of our initial tests was with pepperjamsearch and they got back over 10,000 the first month we tested it from Yahoo alone. While a lot of people have requested our services unfortunatly at this time we have to be very selective and make it worth our time. Now I see a company called ABCsearch has launched there own click fraud detecton product called clickshied... pretty interesting! Things to watch out for to be productive and maintain profitability: Fun factor - I love love love having fun... who doesn't? I really could get lost spending hours on forums and reading blogs (mostly celebrity gossip or tv spoiler blogs) or playing this goddamn desktop tower defense game (seriously play on hard and use the group name of shoemoney, you cant beat me neener). But no money in that. Coolness - I love making a image tracker for MySpace mixed with geotargeting where I can show people how many degrees of separate there are between themselves and say... brad pitt... or whatever. Having some programing ability allows me to do some SUPER COOL fun stuff but unfortunately not always profitable. Pride - Lots of people love to attack me and even people who call themselves my friends to my face will cut my throat if they thought it would get them 10 more hits to there website. Sometimes i try to make an appearance and correct the facts on a blog or forum post but then never return. You have to realize there are people that are so envious of your success that they pray for your downfall. You see this with the rich jerk (I have more on that soon). He is one of the most genius masterminds I have ever seen. Everyone can learn something from the Rich Jerk no matter what you think of his ethics. Another Big time/money sink for me is what you are reading right now. This blog. Yes it brings in over 10k a month in revenue but it takes at least 1 hour a day for me to maintain. I try to do it over lunch or at night on my own time. While I think most people would think 10k a month is a lot of money for someone just doing a blog you have to remember one of the key reasons people read this blog is because I have demonstrated through other companies that I know how to build successful companies and websites. Its not because I am a particularly good blogger. I really love writing on this blog though I just wish it had a better return for the time I spend on it. If this was a normal company in corporate America and the CEO was spending 20% of his time on a blog that was accounting for a very very small percentage of overall profit I think that CEO should and would be fired. So I have to think about things like that very carefully and really limit the amount of time I can spend on this blog. Right now I am about 85% focused on AuctionAds and getting 100,000 publishers by the first of the year. We are on a very good pace with almost 15,000 users in less then 3 months of operation. The #1 question we are getting from other ad networks and VC's when they see our numbers is how we grew so fast so quickly. Its not a mistake. Before launch I mapped out a complete 10 phase marketing plan of which we are in about to hit phase 3. This of course is all made possible because of TFS day 1 tip - Your only as good as your team. If I did not have total trust and faith in CTO David Dellanave to do everything we planned we would never have the successful launch we have had. 10% of my time right now is devoted to keeping other ShoeMoney media companies profitable and operational. The other 5% is blogging/surfing/and what not. So prioritize your projects and keep your eye on the prize. This has been your tip for success day 5!