This morning I accepted an envelope from FedEx. In it was a cheque for $14,864.60 from Escrow.com, which is $15,000 minus their fees.

I earned this cheque the exact same way I earned the other one – by grasping an opportunity. In this post I will share with you exactly how I turned a $2,000 investment into over $15,000. But more importantly, I will teach you through example the importance of taking advantage of opportunities when they pass your way.

The Acquisitions

On May 19th, 2007, Blizzard announced that they were going to make a sequel to their popular game Starcraft. For years, people speculated that a Starcraft 2 might be in the works, but after 9 years of waiting with still no word or hint from Blizzard of actually doing so, people started to give up hope.

So when they announced that Starcraft 2 was officially in the works, Starcraft fans around the world (me being one of them) were hysterical. I published a blog post as soon as I learned about the announcement and how I immediately went to purchase some Starcraft and Starcraft 2 domain names.

Now, while I managed to get my hands on a dozen or so Starcraft domain names simply by paying the registration fees, since the game was so popular and people were already anticipating and waiting for Starcraft 2 before the official announcement, the domains Starcraft2.net and SC2.net were already taken.

I really wanted a good Starcraft 2 domain though, and I knew that I had to move fast because if I didn’t, there would be others like me who would be contacting the owners and making them offers.

For the Starcraft2.net domain, I acquired the domain after a few back and forth e-mail exchanges. At first, the owner, a teenager around 17 or 18 or so, didn’t want to sell it. He was too set on developing the site into a fan site. He did show some weakness interest in my offers, but finally said that he wasn’t interested in selling it.

The next day he e-mailed me back basically saying that he might be interested in selling it after all, but it would have to be $1,000. I guess he thought that number was high I agreed right away and sent him the money via PayPal immediately. He seemed overjoyed to have actually received $1,000 (I guess he thought it was too good to be true or that I wouldn’t really pay or something) and was very happy with the sale. So was I. Maybe he should have read my post on The Art of Negotiation

For SC2.net, I believe I e-mailed the owner but he wanted to talk to me through the phone.

Now, I’m actually a pretty shy guy and usually prefer to use E-mail or instant messengers rather then the phone, especially when it comes to business. This is partly because I’m too nice on the phone and in person and often tend to make poor deals, give too much information, and just generally become too soft. I’m hard as stone online but just way too nice on the phone and in person.

But I already acquired the Starcraft2.net domain and I knew that SC2.net would be the perfect domain pair for it, so I prepared myself and phoned him.

He actually turned out to be some government official who worked at the South African Honorary Consulate and was very nice. I ended up mailing him a cheque because he had some issue with his PayPal account, and a week later I also owned SC2.net.

It was good that I moved fast not only to block out other bids, but to prevent their knowledge of the value of the domain. My thinking appears to have been correct because when I spoke to the owner of SC2.net, I found out that he only bought it because it was a short domain name – not from any relation to Starcraft 2. If I had waited longer to contact him, it is likely that other interested buyers would have contacted him and tipped him off that it was actually a great domain for Starcraft 2.

It’s funny, because as I look over my old blog post about that acquisition, I wrote:

“It will take about a week before it’s in my hands though due to the escrow process. Ugh, I paid a lot for the domain. Exactly how much, I won’t say, at least not yet. Help calm me down by saying it’s a good domain please “

I paid $653.37 (I believe the weird amount was due to the US/CDN exchange rate based on our original deal) for it, which right now seems like a steal, but I guess I can see my apprehension at the time.

The Development

I didn’t do much in terms of developing Starcraft2.net due to being so busy with other project, but I did know that I wanted to put up a forum to at least do something with it’s traffic.

I can’t remember the exact amount I spent on developing the site, but I believe I paid around $135 for the vBulletin license (I get good “bulk” discounts since I own so many licenses), a few hundred for the skin, and around $150 for a vBSEO license.

When you add up everything, including the other dozen or so Starcraft domains I bought, I invested roughly $2,300.

The Sales

First, I made roughly $900 by selling private ads and running AdSense on the site. That isn’t much over a span of 3 years, but that more than covered for paying for everything minus the Starcraft2.net and SC2.net domains.

I also sold a few of the domains I bought at the registration fee rate ($7 each per year or so). I sold StarcraftHelp.com for $400 and Starcraft-Forums.com for $300, but since I used Sedo to sell those two, I only made a total of $600 since Sedo takes enormous fees. But I only spent around $40 for those 2 domains (I usually register domains for multiple years) to make $600, so they were a good investment.

I can’t remember for certain, but I also think I sold at least one other domain through NamePros and/or DNForum as well.

And then, we come to the rest of the package.

On July 25th, 2010, I created a public auction on Flippa for a package sale which included Starcraft2.net, SC2.net and the remaining domains, which were:

• StarcraftForums.info
• StarcraftForums.net
• StarcraftForum.net
• StarcraftForum.org 
• StarcraftForum.info 
• StarcraftTips.com
• StarcraftCheats.net 
• StarcraftBoards.com

What makes that date interesting is that it was 2 days before the official release date of Starcraft 2.

I didn’t want to put the domains up for sale any sooner because I know that buyers (especially on Flippa) usually tend to live in the moment and don’t look at the long term or to the future. I’m pretty sure that if I had put the domains and site up for sale in 2009, for example, that there would be only a fraction of the interest that there would be around the release date.

The other thing about my timing of the auction listing was that I put the site up for sale at its absolute peak. This is actually a type of business strategy that Paul Piotrowski and I are starting to think about more, and is probably what I will end up doing with RobotWarz.

Traffic started to really skyrocket as the launch date neared. In fact, Starcraft2.net’s traffic used to average 100 unique visits a day, but on the launch date it had climbed to an enormous peak of 1,800 uniques a day! This was all purely from natural, unpaid SEO rankings (for “starcraft2” and “starcraft 2” mainly.

In fact, I forget who it was that told me, but at one point around that time there was a Starcraft 2 related query (something like “Starcraft 2 review") that was actually the 16th or so most searched keyword on Google (during the past hour).

After the release, the traffic predictably died down, but did still average at 400 uniques a day a month later which is still 4 times what it used to be.

It ended up selling for $15,000, which was also my reserve price, and I had the buyer pay the 5% buyer success fee, which would have been $750 but is capped at $500.

We did the transaction through Escrow.com which I love because they take a very realistic fee (0.89% for transactions $25K+), and the deal is now done. I don’t know why the new owners haven’t put the site up yet… I might give them a call to see if they’re having an issue importing the CPanel backup.

We both agreed to split the Escrow fees, and I also paid for a FedEx express delivery of my cheque. After the fees, my cheque came out to $14,864.60.

When you add everything up, I made a total of approximately $16,500 from all my Starcraft 2 investments. I spent approximately $2,300 which means that I ended up netting $14,200.

Sure, it took 3 years of waiting, but it’s not like I was working on the site or anything. I bought the domains after hearing that Starcraft 2 was officially announced, set up a basic forum, and basically let it run in the background by itself until the game was released to the public.

I knew it was going to be a wait when I bought the domains (although to be honest I thought the wait was going to be more along the lines of 1 year, not 3), but also understood that it was a good investment. I had several offers of around $7,000 for the Starcraft2.net and SC2.net pair in 2009, but turned them down because I was pretty confident I could get more if I waited until the release dates.

Grasping Opportunity

The point of this post is to give you another example of why taking advantage of an opportunity is so useful.

I know that not everyone is a gamer or Starcraft fan, but I know that some of you are and probably heard about the news on the same day I did. When I heard that SC2 was officially in the works, my first thought was “Awesome”. My second thought was “This is going to be huge – I’m going to see what Starcraft and Starcraft 2 domains I can grab ASAP”.

There’s nothing I did that somebody else couldn’t have done – I just saw the opportunity and acted on it. I also went what you might call a step further to actually phone the owner of one of the domains instead of just hoping he’d answer my e-mails. I didn’t want to lose the opportunity.

Of course, this mentality goes beyond simply grabbing gaming domains and even domains in general. The point is to take advantage of opportunities when you see them, because the early bird gets the worm and if you snooze, you lose.

Try to keep a third eye open for opportunities (you could call it your “opportunity eye”) in the future. You might be surprised at just how many opportunities there are out there. Be sure to act on the ones that you think are real gems, and not just think or talk about them.

Over the next series of posts, I will be sharing with you various tools, tips, and techniques that I use to save time while working. While some of these things may seem minute in their amount of time saving, you could be very surprised in just how much time they save you in the long run.

2-3 months ago, my friend Brian and I were doing a lot of chatting on AIM, discussing everything under the sun from business to personality types, when Brian noticed that I would often pause for a minute to take a screenshot, copy it into Photoshop, upload it to my server, and then send him the link (I couldn’t send it to him via AIM file transfer since he uses one of those multi-instant messenger programs which are usually buggy with those advanced features).

Since this would often ruin the flow of conversation, Brian recommended that I use a program called ZScreen. It’s a completely free, open-source software tool that makes taking and sharing screenshots extremely easy. It also does a number of other features as well, but its main purpose is to quickly and easily share screenshots.

Below is an 11-minute screencast of me showing how ZScreen works and why it’s useful:

You can download ZScreen, completely free, here.

Of those 54 enquiries, 21 continued on to receive actual quotes, and of those 21 quotes, 11 of them actually went through with the projects.

Kudos to you guys for having an idea and actually following through on it. So many people have ideas and like to tell their friends and family about how good their ideas are, but never actually do anything about it. 54 of you at least attempted to do so, and so I salute you.

I have been working with Interberry for a year and a half now and have got them to do two very large projects for me. So far, I’ve commissioned roughly $11,000 worth of work from them, so you can be sure that I personally like and use these guys.

In fact, after I write this post I’m going to get them to add some more cool features to Movie-Vault.com (which they made for me) including full Facebook integration.

Work with Interberry and you will get your own private team assigned to your project. Here was my team for PublisherChallenge:

Remember how I said that 11 of you actually listened to me and went ahead and hired Interberry for your projects? Well below are testimonials from 2 of those 11 people:

Greg Vermis’s Testimonial

Greg Vemis is a lurker of my blog who trusted my recommendation of Interberry and hired them for not 1 but 2 projects. He was so happy with how the first project turned out that he hired them again a few months later for another project of his.

FantasyPickup

FantasyPickup.com is a very unique idea for a website. While I think that the idea itself may be difficult to grow and monetize, I do think that it is a very interesting idea.

Basically, it’s a type of online scoreboard that is meant to help push you out of your comfort zone and be less shy with the ladies. As I am very shy myself, I can really understand how this game can help some people.

In FantasyPickup, you and your friends agree to a set of rules (that you make yourselves) and assign points to different actions. For example, going up to a pretty girl in the mall and asking what the time is could be worth 1 point while actually asking a girl out could be worth 30 points.

The points are put into the website which keeps track of everybody’s score and the winner could receive some cash, bragging rights, or whatever the group of friends decide.

Below is a YouTube video describing how the game works in more detail:

I personally believe that using competition and games is one of the best and most fun ways to do things, so I do like this website idea. I just think that it may be a bit hard to market and monetize.

But Greg had an idea and went with it, and Interberry helped make it happen.

“To Everyone,

I just wanted to take this time to thank everyone for making Fantasy Pickup a reality. It was very refreshing working with such a competent group of individuals. Your professionalism and pride in your work did not go unnoticed.

I hope to do future business with Interberry and will be happy to refer others to do the same.

Thanks Again,

Greg Vemis”

Brackulous

Brackulous.com is a sports pool website in which users can join a public pool, private pool, or even create their own sports pool.

The website appears to still be under a bit of construction – mainly content such as the about and FAQ pages, but it looks like the core of the system is complete. I wonder if Greg is planning to allow users to place actual bets on the website in the form of cash.

It’s not a bad idea for a website. I would actually recommend for Greg to expand the site a bit though, and not have it focus exclusively on sports. For example, a lot of computer gamers run private tournaments for games such as Starcraft. It would be cool if users could create their own single or double elimination brackets on Brackulous, and then be able to link to the brackets and/or insert the dynamic images into their websites.

“I would like to thank Interberry for another job well done. Everything was handled in a professional way and the quality of work was exceptional.

A special thanks goes to Bijoy for his hard work and dedication on a project that proved to be more difficult than expected. It’s never easy modifying existing code from another developer but we were still able to finish the job successfully.

Looking forward to working with you again in the future.

Thanks again,

Greg Vemis”

Stefan Kalevski’s Testimonial

Stefan Kalevski is another lurker of my blog but also a long-time reader.

EmailMarketing

EmailMarketing.rs is an e-mail list management website that looks to be the Russian version of AWeber, only cheaper.

Developing such a site is no easy task, and requires a lot of backend programming. Due to the sheer volume of e-mails and lists being managed, proper server and programming resource management is also vital to developing such a website.

While it looks like the English version of the site is still being translated, I like the overall look of the front-end of the site. In fact, I remember hearing from Interberry now that the site is in it’s final stages of development now and isn’t 100% done which explains the translation not being done as well as a few other minor areas of the website

But overall, I really like how clean and user-friendly the website is. A site like this could really do well with proper marketing.

“I am a long time reader of Tyler’s blog and when I was looking for a proven development company for my project I was lucky to see Tyler’s review about Interberry. From the review I concluded that the guys from Interberry were capable of developing complex projects, so I decided to contact and hire them.

My project wasn’t easy and it required a lot of advanced knowledge in the area of advanced email marketing systems and the implementation of latest email authentication standards.

Now that my project is nearing completion, I can only say that I never regretted hiring Interberry as they are really professional in what they do and are always very helpful.

Thanks,

Stefan Kalevski”

It’s Not Just Me

See? It’s not just me. Above are 2 glowing testimonials from readers of my blog who hired Interberry and are very happy with the results.

Need Programming Done? Try Interberry

I’m sure many of you have hired numerous programmers in the past that left you unsatisfied, I know I have. If you like the programming of PublisherChallenge and Movie-Vault, then you’ll be happy with Interberry.

They prefer to work on larger projects ($3k+) and really enjoy working on big projects ($7k+). They have the staff to take on almost anything you can throw at them, so be sure to take advantage of that.

They excel in web programming and developing CMS (content management systems), and are therefore great for most website ideas you have. They don’t do Flash or iPhone apps, but can do Facebook apps.

You can find them of course at Interberry.com in which you can request a quote, phone them  toll-free at +1-888-367-1110 (during 9:30am to 6:30pm Indian Standard Time), or if you’re like me then you’ll want to talk to them via Skype chat. Add cheb.iberry to your Skype contact list for that.

I really don’t like revealing my sources when it comes to designers and programmers so please let them know that Tyler sent you so that I can get some discounted work done from them in the future. That’s how you can repay me back for sharing such a great resource with you

Let me know how your project with them goes – hopefully you can be the next person giving a satisfied testimonial!

Well, after organizing both my personal and corporate year-end’s as best I could, I dropped them off at my accountants.

2-3 weeks later, my accountant was done and I only had to drop by to sign some paperwork. He handed over two envelopes, one for my personal taxes and one for my corporate taxes, and each of them contained a report of my income taxes and all the organized paperwork done for me. All I had to do then was write them a cheque and file my taxes away in my filing cabinet.

I’ve been using this accounting firm for 4-5 years now, and it’s the second year they’ve done my corporate taxes. I made this post to show those of you who don’t get their taxes professionally done what you can expect to receive by doing so.

Doing your personal taxes is easy enough these days if you have a “normal job” due to all the tax software programs out there. After all, all you really have to put in is your T4 information and that’s pretty much it. But if you run a business or corporation, then doing your taxes is going to be a much larger headache.

Using a tax service company (or better, an established local accounting firm) can save you countless hours and stress (not to mention possible errors which can haunt you in the future).

Below is a short 5-minute video showing what I get back from my accountant once my taxes are done:

Here are a few photos:

Below are my completed corporate T2 forms. Imagine doing all that yourself! No thank you!

I’ve known Zac for several years now and actually had the privilege of meeting him in person a couple years back. Zac runs a fantastic blog and somehow manages to consistently publish high-quality posts. If I had to describe Zac with only one word, it’d definitely be: consistent.

His brand new eBook, which was just released today, is a 97-page manual on how to build, grow, and profit from a blog. I just finished a “thorough skim” of his book and can tell you that just like his blog, it’s full of high quality content.

Why should you listen to Zac? Well Zac now makes over $100,000 a year from just his blog alone.

The best part is that his eBook Six Figure Affiliate Blogging is completely free, with no strings attached. Well, unless you count entering your name and e-mail to receive the eBook a string, which you shouldn’t, considering you can always opt-out of his AWeber list at anytime anyway.

Six Figure Affiliate Blogging is a solid eBook and is a great resource for anyone looking to make money blogging.

I hate preparing my taxes. It’s probably my most hated thing to do, period. It wouldn’t be so bad if I had a simple online business such as being an eBay merchant or a freelance programmer, but when you have dozens of websites and projects going on, and income and expenses coming in and going out from literally scores of different places, it can be a huge pain to organize everything.

I always start by making a detailed list of what I need, and focus on my personal taxes first. Once those are done, I proceed to my corporate taxes. I break each set of taxes up into 3 components: General (Government tax documents, past instalment payments, bank documents, etc.), Income, and Expenses. This seems to work for me and makes it a lot easier to prepare everything.

But there are added pains, such as PayPal and bank wire fees, US to Canadian dollar conversion rates, and other things that need to be documented.

Anyhow, after what must have been around 12 hours spread across 2 weeks, I’m very happy to announce that my taxes are now all done and prepared to send to my accountant. I organized and labelled everything very nicely so hopefully he won’t have to call me in to clarify anything.

While I still have a fair bit of time with my corporate taxes, the deadline for personal taxes is April 30th, so hopefully their office isn’t too swamped at the moment to be able to tend to my taxes in time, as there are only 2 weeks left!

Below are a few photos of what my office looked like about 30 minutes ago, before I put everything together. These are only my corporate taxes (my personal ones are already packaged in the brown case near the orange chair), and some of those piles contain a lot of documents:

Now that my taxes are all prepared, I thought I’d share with you guys the expenses for my fiscal year which ran from March 1st, 2009 to February 28th, 2010.

These are all my complete and accurate numbers… where else will you find somebody that divulges this kind of information?

These are all of my main expenses. They do not include smaller things such as office supplies (ink ain’t cheap!), donations, or corporate lawyer and accountant fees.

Various Outgoing PayPal Payments:

• Programming: $3,055.00 (My programming costs were actually a bit over $10,000, but I got crazy discounts from Interberry by referring close to $50,000 worth of projects to them)
• Software/Licenses: $290.44 (vBulletin, plugins, etc.)
• Web/Graphic Design: $2,462.29 (Movie-Vault.com revamp, banners, etc.)
• Service Fees: $15.00
• Advertising: $1,531.00 (Paid Review on Shoemoney, listings, etc.)
• Writing Services: $1,231.75 (Content for Movie-Vault.com, PokerForums.org, etc.)
• Domains: $1,260.41

Total: $9,053.89

Affiliate Marketing Costs:

• Secret Source: $2,555.93
• Facebook: $605.71
• Secret Source #2: $100.00
• Secret Source #3: $44.61
• Microsoft AdCenter: $2,845.04
• Yahoo Search Marketing: $9,750.00
• Google AdWords: $14,166.09

Total: $30,067.38 

Payroll:

Payroll: $56,400.00 (This may be off by $100-$200)

Hosting:

• ThePlanet: $2,220.73 (I switched to HostGator a few months into the year)
• ThePlanet Server Management: $599.70
• HostGator: $2,662.60

Total: $5,483.03

Miscellaneous:

• AWeber: $243.80
• Tracking202 Pro API Fees: $98.72

GRAND TOTAL: $101,346.82

Damn! I knew I spent a fair bit, but I was completely shocked when I added up the totals and it came to 6 figures. Granted, this does include payroll, but even without it the total still comes to $44,946.82!

Most of this is locked into my affiliate marketing efforts, which I was never really able to take off. Hosting also takes up its fair share… what’s scary is what before moving to HostGator, I was paying even more (around $7K-$8K).

I bought a lot of domains in 2009, mainly to build run a lot of niche-specific affiliate sites. Most of them were purchased for multiple years though, so I shouldn’t see such a high amount in 2010 unless I purchase a bunch more.

Overall, 2009 was a bad year for me. Well, that’s not true. I did fine personally, but Merendi Networks Inc. didn’t fare too well. Here’s hoping for a better 2010!

How much were your business costs in 2009?

One of the main reasons I love them so much is due to their live chat support. Simply put, it’s phenomenal. Within any point of time on any day, as they’re open 24/7, you are immediately put into contact with a native English support representative who is ready to help you instantly.

I actually use their chat support quite a lot. This isn’t because something is wrong with their service (I’ve never had any problems to date), but simply because I run around 40-50 with them and so I often need help with things.

The other day I logged into their live chat support because I needed PDO enabled on one of my server’s PHP configuration. I could probably have Googled how to do this myself, but it’s so much faster to just ask them to do it for me.

Below is the transcript of what transpired in the chat, complete with typo’s and all:

(2:59:27 PM) Byron Th: has entered the chat.
(2:59:31 PM) Byron Th: Hello, welcome to HostGator Live Chat.
(2:59:31 PM) Byron Th: How may I assist you today?

(3:00:22 PM) Tyler: PDO does not appear to be configured on my machine, but shoudl come default with PHP 5.1+, can you enable it for me?

(3:01:19 PM) Byron Th: Is this your primary domain with us?

(3:01:51 PM) Tyler: No, my primary domain is: Merendi.com

(3:02:16 PM) Byron Th: Thank you very much, one moment while I locate your account.(3:04:41 PM) Byron Th: Hello, Tyler, I know you actually I believe.
(3:04:54 PM) Byron Th: Very interesting.
(3:05:09 PM) Byron Th: Tyler Cruz, from Vancouver perhaps?
(3:05:30 PM) Byron Th: I am currently checking on that for you by the way.

(3:05:38 PM) Tyler: Vancouver Island

(3:05:54 PM) Byron Th: I’m actually one of your friends and followers how weird.

[I had no idea who he was…]

(3:05:58 PM) Tyler: haha
(3:06:12 PM) Tyler: time to hook me up with lifetime free hosting

(3:06:19 PM) Byron Th: I’ve been following you since you did the John Chow!
(3:06:27 PM) Byron Th: Promotion I mean.

(3:06:31 PM) Tyler: which one?

(3:06:46 PM) Byron Th: It was about 3 years ago I believe before he raised it to $500

(3:06:57 PM) Tyler: oh you mean paid review

(3:07:04 PM) Byron Th: Yes, correct.

(3:07:07 PM) Tyler: yeah he still charges me an arm and a leg and a kidney

(3:07:40 PM) Tyler: Yeah, the lead programmer I hired for my RobotWarz site is transfering things to my server but needs PDO installed

(3:07:51 PM) Tyler: http://www.php.net/manual/en/pdo.installation.php

[While waiting, I searched for “Bryon Th” in my blog’s Wordpress comments and username sections to try to find out who this guy was, when I got his full name.]

(3:09:04 PM) Tyler: Byron Thurman

(3:09:07 PM) Byron Th: Yeah, checking the best process since you are on dedicated. I should be able to enable that for you. It should be installed by default but the php.ini will have to be updated with the information.
(3:09:14 PM) Byron Th: 100% correct Tyler
(3:09:46 PM) Byron Th: Let me see if I can get that setup for you to save you some time.(3:09:49 PM) Byron Th: For verification purposes may I please have the last 4 digits of the credit card number on file for this account?

(3:09:56 PM) Tyler: Oh I see how it is!
(3:09:59 PM) Tyler: jk
(3:10:16 PM) Tyler: can u ask me a different question or do i need to get up to fetch my wallet?

(3:10:22 PM) Byron Th: Not like that at all I’m shocked I have you in chat, I’ve even joked about it before.
(3:10:46 PM) Byron Th: I can send a verification email if you would like, we can use that as a form of verification if you can reply back to the email.

(3:10:54 PM) Tyler: haha ill get my wallet

(3:11:17 PM) Byron Th: Okay whatever is most convenient for you.

(3:11:33 PM) Tyler: XXXX [censored for obvious reasons]

(3:11:46 PM) Byron Th: Correct, you are verified.

(3:13:17 PM) Byron Th: I have added the entry for you and it should be working now.(3:13:33 PM) Byron Th: If you have a way to verify like installing a script you’re welcome to check to be certain.

(3:13:39 PM) Tyler: http://beta.robotwarz.com/
(3:13:55 PM) Tyler: getting a fatal error at the bottom but thats probably just because the rest of the scripts weren’t configured
(3:14:06 PM) Tyler: the programmer probably just stopped once PDO wasn’t installed

(3:14:54 PM) Byron Th: Well if it proves that there is something misconfigured on our end I’d be happy to look at it for you again and see what I can do to get that worked out for you.(3:14:55 PM) Byron Th:

(3:15:18 PM) Tyler: I’ll let the programmer know but its probably just more configuring he needs to do
(3:15:30 PM) Tyler: He was working on his server and is now moving to my server

[While chatting I had Googled “Brian Thurman” and found his blog, which got us talking for a little bit, omitted here for length reasons]

(3:18:04 PM) Tyler: Okay, I’ll let you get back to work so you don’t get fired

(3:18:06 PM) Byron Th: I will check that out when I have a break.

(3:18:09 PM) Tyler: thanks for the help

(3:18:21 PM) Byron Th: No problem at all Tyler it was my pleasure! I’ll see you around I promise.

(3:18:24 PM) Tyler: cheers

(3:18:28 PM) Byron Th: Cheers!

(3:18:31 PM) Byron Th: Thank you for using HostGator Live Chat. If you could take a minute to rate your experience with HostGator as well as my overall performance, that would help us to improve our customer service. To do that, just click the button that says Rate and Exit in the upper right hand corner. The survey takes less than a minute to fill out.

(3:18:35 PM) Tyler: (ill give u 5 star rating so you get a raise hehe)

Haha, I don’t know… I thought it was neat. There’s something like close to a hundred HostGator chat support technicians, and I get paired with a regular reader of my blog.

It reminds me of a time not that long ago when I phoned my local cable company as my Internet connection had gone out, and the support technician on the other end happened to be my old next door neighbour and friend from around 14 years ago.

Anyhow, as you can tell from the transcript above, HostGator rocks. This was no special treatment just because he knew me – this is the average quality of their support.

You can view Byron Thurman’s blog at ByronThurman.com.

I have had pretty low energy lately which has made working difficult, and the other day I just did not feel like working at all so I decided to play some poker. After 3-4 hours of building my $200 up to nearly $800, I started to get bored of grinding it out and lost all of it shortly thereafter after moving up limits purely out of boredom. This is always what happens.

After that, I needed something to expend energy on, and since badminton just finished and wouldn’t be available for 4 days, I decided to reinstall good old Starcraft.

Starcraft has never failed to entertain me, and within minutes I was already immersed back into the 12-year-old best game of all time. I basically spent the past 3-4 days (how long it really was I can’t remember) playing Starcraft and sleeping. I did a fair bit of sleeping. In fact, just yesterday I slept for 10 hours, got up for 1-2 hours, then had a 2-hour nap! Then I went to bed only 8-9 hours later and slept for another 7-8 hours!

I did do a tiny bit of work during the past 3-4 days, but it was mainly just writing yesterday’s blog post, and since it was about buying a house it wasn’t too labour intensive to write.

A couple hours ago I uninstalled Starcraft (after losing several games in a row which frustrated me), watched a couple of episodes of Family Guy, and then went to my computer to get back to work.

I grabbed a Red Bull, worked on trimming down some of my unanswered e-mails, and am now writing this blog post.

It was probably the Red Bull, but as I started this blog post I felt real good. Reenergized.

Although to be honest, my eyes are starting to tire right now so I’m going to need to take a bit of a break after I finish this post.

Nevertheless, the effects of my little gaming marathon over the weekend are showing. I am once again interested and somewhat excited about working again. I have a new little project I’m going to be trying with affiliate marketing which I’m curious how it will turn out, and it will feel good to get caught up with the rest of my unanswered e-mails.

Even though I felt really lethargic and hazy over the past few days, I think that avoiding work for the most part was good for me. It was certainly needed.

For those of you who don’t do this for a living and work for yourself at home, you may not realize that this is usually a 7-day, 365-days-a-year job. I work every day, in some capacity. Even when I’m on a vacation I bring my laptop and my Blackberry.

After a while this can really accumulate and have an effect on you when you’re not getting those 2 full days off work that most people get by working a ‘real’ job.