Personal Finance Advice

This is another post that only has a minor connection to actual personal finance, but might explain why there may be a bit less posting than normal this week. This is going to be one of the busiest and most exciting weeks this summer for me.

First and foremost, this Friday Nate and I will finally meet for the first time. It’s amazing that we have worked together for a number of years now building all these sites and have never actually met each other (a testament to the Internet and how it can break down borders and make things possible that could never have happened 15 years ago). The meeting is long overdue.

We’ve even set up the meeting to coincide with a couple of our websites. While Just One Spin only raised $45 for the roulette spin we’ll be doing there, the site has been a much bigger success than that number would lead one to believe. It was one of the very first satellite sites we made and the first to make over $50 a month in advertising which was the initial motivation behind our idea of creating 100 sites that all made a minimum of $50 as the base of our business. Had it not been successful, the current satellite site system we developed would have never been created.

We have also created a website called Save In Vegas where we will be looking for good ways to save money while we’re there and hopefully find enough to turn the site from a single page into a respectable satellite site.

We also hope to lay the foundation of some thoughts we have been having regarding where we want this blog and the main website to go. It should be an exciting time and I’m looking forward to it. it will likely become a annual tradition (although since the plan is that Nate will come on full time beginning in January, none of this weekend stuff in future years – hotel room rates are 3 times as expensive on the weekend as they are during the week)

While we will do some gambling (purely as entertainment), we won’t be spending that much time at the poker tables. We already have tickets to a comedy show on Friday and a concert on Saturday (one of the reasons we picked this coming weekend to go). It will be a good break for two guys that spend far too much time in front of the computer for their own good. If you have any suggestions of must do / see things in Vegas, be sure to let us know.

The other big event this week is that I will be attending this week is the Search Engine Strategies Summer 2006 in San Jose. While I would have loved to attend some of the workshops, the price was definitely not in our current budget. Instead I picked up a free pass for the convention floor and will spend Tuesday wandering the booths and gathering what type of advertising opportunities are available beyond what we currently incorporate into our sites.