Personal stuff

What to do with that motivation?

by Joe Sousa on January 17, 2012

in Affiliate Summit,Personal stuff

Last week I wrote a post about the recent butt kickings I have received. My motivation to succeed is higher than ever right now due to these two recent events and for the past two weeks I have been working on a plan.

Of course this plan is totally subject to change and as usually happens there will be something that comes up that will drag me away from this plan. I know myself though and if I don’t have a plan it is way too easy to just sit here day after day and piddle away on some of my projects and never make any real progress.

I am guessing there are some other people in the same boat as me and while my plan might not work for you hopefully you will be able to take something from it.

1. Organization – When it comes to organization I am HORRIBLE! I have so many projects in various states of completion and disarray. I need to get all that stuff organized and come up with some sort of plan/schedule for either completing those projects, scrapping them, selling them, or something. I have well over 100 sites and I would guess much less than half of them are really worth anything at this point. So I need to:

List out my domains

  • Designate each with either fix (rebuild, update, clean up, etc), sell, scrap, build, or hold.
  • Start working down the list of the fix and build sites. Hopefully crank out at least two a week.
  • If a domain is worth selling list it on some of the domain selling sites
  • Scrap – Don’t waste money renewing the dang thing!

Develop a plan

  • Create some sort of checklist for my sites. I am always forgetting some simple aspect of building the site as I go along. I need to be more organized in this to make sure I don’t forget to add Google Analytics or change the permalinks or something simple like that.
  • List out potential merchants for the domains and apply for the programs. Too often I wait until I am building the site to get my merchants lined up and by the time I get approved I have moved on.
  • Datafeed? Daily posts? Regular blog type site? What do I want to do with each of these sites?
  • Anyone I can partner up with on these sites?
Ditch it or Keep it
After I get all the sites up and going I need to decide if it will be worth the effort to hit them hard or ditch them. I have way too many domains that aren’t related and would like to try and stick to no more than two main niches. If you know me at all you know sports will be one of those. I am still trying to figure out the other one. Most likely it will be baby related. I have a few ideas but will need to see how they pan out.
Anyway, if the sites don’t fit into those two niches and don’t make sales they are gone. Either I will sell them to someone who can do something with them or I will just let them die. If they do make sales though I will keep them updated more often, add more content somewhat regularly, and work on building more links to them. No reason to ditch something that is making money unless I can sell it for a decent price.

Get Cranking

Like I said in my previous post, I have been lazy and complacent. Part of the solution for me will just be to work harder and more efficient. I will probably have at least 50 sites I need to build and that will take time. Some of them might only take a couple hours but some might take a few days. I would like to think I can have most of them up and running by the middle of February sometime. But I do need to work harder on the stuff like this that can become mind-numbing after a few sites.

2. Stick to a Schedule – Working from home it becomes way to easy to get a late start to the day and an early finish. But I need to treat this more and more like a “real” job and try to keep somewhat of a consistent schedule going. It is way too easy to run upstairs to talk with my wife and see my baby, way to easy to schedule midday meetings that take a couple hours out of the day, and way too easy to use the work day to run errands. While I will never give up the flexibility to do those things I do need to get them more under control.

Along with that I want to have some sort of weekly schedule. I am still working through that but something like this:

Monday – Work on sports sites

Tuesday – Work on baby (or whatever second niche I pick) sites

Wednesday – Build/Update old sites (At least one site a week, preferably two or three)

Thursday AM – Testing/Trying – new plugins, new link building, new WP themes, maybe try to learn some programming, etc.

Thursday PM – Writing – Got a couple ideas for some ebooks that would fit well with a few of my sites

Friday – Tie up loose ends, strategize, research, etc.

That isn’t the final schedule I will be working off of but something like that. Once I do get it figured out I want to post it every Monday on this sites with some details and then follow up on Friday to see how I have done. I am sure some weeks will be encouraging and some will end up being disappointing. But even this little bit of accountability will be good for me.

3. Do What I Should Have Been Doing All Along – There are many, many things I should have been doing for the past 14 years since I started doing this stuff. We all have those “If only I had started doing X when I began in this business…” moments. And I have those daily. Here are a few things I want to start or start doing more:

Build lists – Not every site will be a candidate for this but I do have a few of them where a list will be invaluable. So I need to dust of my Aweber account and actually use it. I already have a few great ideas of how to effectively use it for some of the sites so I just need to make that part of my weekly routine.

Write – Once again, this won’t apply to all my sites but there are a few of them where a couple good ebooks would be great. I can either give them away for a newsletter signup or even sell them depending on how they turn out. But if I could get a topical, focused ebook of some sort written every month? Awesome.

I also need to just do more general writing for the sites. It can be so hard to crank out content day after day but if I were to even write three or four decent blog posts a week over my sites and write 10-15 custom descriptions for products I think it would end up making a big difference in the long run.

Another area I need to improve in is link building. Whether that involves paying someone to do it or just taking the time to do it myself I need to do a better job getting quality links to my sites.

Better utilize social media. There is just so much that goes into this it is hard to write up quickly here. But it is an area I need to put more effort into and build a better social following for my sites.

If I can get those four things under control in the next couple months I will be happy.

4. Focus – It is so dang easy to lose focus. Every day there are new merchants to look at, every day there are new ideas that pop into my head, every day there are new promotional methods to test. But they are not all necessary. I need to forget about many of those for a couple months while I get all my other stuff in order.

Yeah, visiting Facebook and Twitter take time but I feel like those are somewhat of a necessity for this business. It is good to stay connected to the affiliate marketing community and those are the best way to do it. But do I really need to check Facebook every 15 minutes? Did the world change that much while I went to the bathroom or got a snack?

Having a plan and schedule will also help me focus. Having a list of tasks to get done before the day is over will help me focus. Even cleaning my office up a bit will help me focus. There will be day I just need to put the blinders on and get cranking on some sites.

I think those four main areas will help me turn everything around. If not I will need to find four more things to work on. I am hoping within 3-6 months I can replace the income I lost and hopefully even exceed it. We will see.

But I could use your help!!!

1. Ask me how I am doing – Facebook, Skype, Twitter, etc. Get ahold of me and ask me what sites I am working on, what projects I am finishing up, what I have planned, etc. Help keep me accountable! Please!

2. Follow along with me – Like I mentioned earlier, I want to post every Monday what I will be working on that particular week and then post a recap on Friday of what I got accomplished.

3. Work with me??? – Maybe you will see some of my sites that are similar to yours and you want to trade links, swap guest posts, share methods, or whatever. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you see something that can benefit us both. I really do want to help you as much as I can so let me know what I can do for you.

4. What works for you? – Are there any organizational tools or methods that have helped you? How do you keep track of all your projects? How do you stay focused and motivate yourself? Please let me know what works for you.

Thanks to all in advance. I will do my best to keep this site updated at least a couple times a week with my progress.

 

 

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What kicks you in the butt?

by Joe Sousa on January 12, 2012

in Affiliate Summit,Personal stuff

We all need some motivation from time to time. It can come in many different forms, it can come at any time, and it will look different for everyone. What motivates one person might not do a thing for someone else.

Swift Kick In The Pants

I should have paid the dollar years ago.

Usually around this time in January I have a ton of motivation after returning from Affiliate Summit but I wasn’t able to make it to this one. Conference like that are always great motivators for me and I usually come back with a ton of ideas. Some of them I will run with, some fall by the wayside but overall it is always great being around so many like minded people.

Since I wasn’t able to make it to ASW12 this time I had to see my motivation from elsewhere. OK, I didn’t really seek it as much as it jumped out at me from a dark alley and beat the crap out of me. But there have been a couple recent events that have me as motivated as ever. One event is a positive motivation and one is more of a kick in the pants, get your butt in gear type of motivation.

The first motivation (And this one is awesome)- On December 22nd I became a dad. My wife and I had a beautiful 8 pound 13 oz baby to take care of now. If that doesn’t motivate you I don’t know what will. When I was single just a couple years ago as long as I had a roof over my head and some food

Clyde William Sousa

How could you look at this every day and not be motivated?

on my plate I was happy and didn’t need much else. Now I have a wife and a baby I need to take care of. Along with buying diapers and all that stuff I need to think more about stuff like life insurance, college funds, Happy Meals, retirement funding, buying toys and clothes for a kid, paying for three Seahawks tickets instead of two, and all the other stuff that goes along with having a kid.

The second motivation (This one kind of sucks) – Within the last couple months my two biggest sources of income have pretty much dried up. First I had a site that was responsible for a big portion of my affiliate income that got hit hard by a Google update right before Q4 which sucked. I still think I can revive the site but for now it is buried in the SERPS. Second, a company that owes us quite a bit of money can no longer pay us. They were paying us monthly and now those payments are gone. I won’t get too much into the details of that one but it did come out of left field and it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

With those two events my expenses have gone up and my income has gone down. Not a good formula.

Let me back up a bit. Why do I need motivation like this? Well, to put it simply I have been very complacent (lazy might be a better word) over the last few years. I had some decent income coming in so why worry? I let my old sites stay old and failed to get any new sites really cranking. I didn’t adapt and grow. That is it in a nutshell anyway.

Take this as a cautionary tale, take this as something you can learn from or just take this and mock me for being an idiot. Do with it whatever you would like.

But in many ways this couldn’t have come at a better time. I needed something to kick me in the butt and get me going and while I probably wouldn’t have chosen this particular timing I refuse to be bitter, resentful, or defeatist.

Tomorrow (or maybe next week) I will lay out my plan to fix this situation.

But for now here are a couple things I hope you can learn from my stupidity:

1. Find your motivation sooner rather than later. Maybe you want to pay off your mortgage in five years. Maybe you need more money to pay for a sick parent’s health care. Maybe you want to retire when you are 50 and devote your life to charity work. Maybe you want to have more money to give to your church. Maybe you just need to pay your bills and put food on the table. Find whatever it is that motivates you before you need the motivation and you will be in much better shape. I wish I would have been thinking about this for the past decade.

2. Never stop growing and adapting. Don’t just let your affiliate sites or projects sit there. GET WORKING ON THEM!!! Even if it is writing a couple new pieces of content a day or updating a few datafeeds or testing out some new merchants or whatever. And learn how to improve your sites. If you don’t have a mailing list for a site start one. Add a Facebook page for one of your sites. Test something new on a site every day. I don’t know what this will look like for you and your projects but don’t become stagnant.

What is it that motivates you? I would love to hear about the things in your life that make you keep pressing on and striving for greatness. Leave a comment below and let me know.

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Why are babies so needy?

by Joe Sousa on September 21, 2011

in Personal stuff

Every day the inside baby is getting closer and closer to being an outside baby. Sometime around Christmas my wife and I will get to hold our little guy for the first time and I am sure that will be one of the greatest moments in my life. I am gonna love him, care for him, laugh with him, cry with him, help him, teach him how to throw a football, help him hide my wife’s expensive yarn that he tangles into a bird’s nest, clean him when he is messy, make him messy when he is clean, and all the other wonderful stuff that comes with being a dad.

But why do babies need so much stuff???

Earlier this week my wife and I went to Babies R Us and started our baby registry. We had previously started one at Target but for the most part they really had a limited selection so we decided to switch to Babies R Us. They had a much better selection, similar prices, and more stuff in stock to test out like strollers, car seats, etc. We have also added a bunch of stuff to an Amazon registry as well. Just to make it easier for people to buy us stuff.

Bacon baby formula

How many cans of this do I need for my baby?

Anyway, after about three hours we had 175 or so items added to our registry and there is probably a bunch more we could add. 175 items? Seriously. This baby will only be 8 pounds or so. How can they need all that stuff? I have seen a bunch of different lists of stuff you need for a baby and it usually amounts to over $2000. And that isn’t even counting diapers and food and stuff like that.

Some of it is pretty cool looking and I wish some of it was made in adult sizes. Like this thing called the Nap Nanny. If I had something like that in my size I don’t think I would ever leave it. It is like a barcalounger for babies.

Pretty much the only two events in life that are worthy of a registry are weddings and babies. But why do we need to stop there? Everyone is a fan of other people buying them stuff. Why can’t we create registries for more events in life? Here are a few suggestions:

1. The Grumpy Day Registry – If someone wakes up grumpy they can go to a site and activate their “Grumpy Day” and all their friends get a notification that they are grumpy. It would then list a bunch of items that would cheer that person up. Stuff like a new video game, a book, some cookies, a puppy, or whatever. The friends buy an item and it helps make the person un-grumpy.

2. The Dinner Registry - Maybe you just don’t feel like cooking dinner. Well, all you would need to do is send out a dinner registry. List your favorite restaurants and meals from them and a friend could then buy you dinner and deliver it. It is a win-win. OK, it is mostly a win for the person getting a free dinner delivered to them.

3. The Housework Registry – This might be useful in conjunction with a baby registry. Maybe you are super busy with work for a couple weeks and can’t get to the housework. Maybe your kids have been a terror and are making messes faster than you can clean them up. Or maybe you are just lazy and would rather watch TV. Just set up your Housework Registry and have all your friends and family come over and do all your housework.

But enough of that silliness.

My wife and I, for the most part, are pretty clueless when it comes to babies. We were babies at one time but we really don’t remember that time of our lives. So we need your help. What are some baby items you really like, what are some items you thought you would like but ended up not using at all, what are some things you wish you had? Please leave any and all suggestions in the comment box below.

And if you do feel inclined to help us buy all this stuff for our baby. Maybe we will name our baby after you. But probably not.

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All About The Cookies

by Joe Sousa on August 5, 2011

in Affiliate Stuff,Personal stuff

Since most of you who are reading this are probably involved in affiliate marketing you probably know the feeling of having sat at your computer for 10 hours or so finishing up a website, updating 10 different blogs, or constantly reloading your twitter feed to keep up on all the latest conversations. It is time for a break. Maybe you just had your biggest commission day of the year and you need a reward. Maybe your sales were in the tank for the past couple weeks and you need to drown your sorrows in empty calories. Well, I have a solution for all these problems.

All About The Cookies

Order your copy for only $19.99

A few days ago Missy Ward, along with Mary Poiley and Jen Goode, released All About the Cookies. What is All About The Cookies? Simply put it is a cookbook containing 90 recipes. You will find recipes for cookies, cakes, desserts, brownies, pies, and pretty much any other dessert you can think of. And one of the best parts about this is all the recipes were submitted by other affiliates and people in the industry. If you look on page 89 you will see my submission.

I will be honest though. Not all the recipes in here sound great to me but most of them are worth trying. I am sure you will find a few recipes in here that will become family favorites. And just to give you a teaser, the recipe I have in there for some Insane Chocolate Brownies has 2 cups of butter, over 2 pounds of chocolate, and 6 eggs. Some of these recipes are extremely simple so you don’t have to be an expert chef to turn out some great cookies and desserts.

Along with the recipes you will also find some great simple business tips from all these great people. They are just little tidbits from some of the greatest minds in this industry and are a very nice encouragement.

I was a bit bored so I decided to do some data crunching with this recipe book to see just how awesome (some people would say unhealthy) these recipes really are. We all know the three main ingredients that make a dessert awesome: fat, sugar, and eggs. Take these three out and you don’t have dessert, you have a salad. And that isn’t what we want. I went through and added up all three categories for each of the recipes and here is what we got:

First lets talk about fat. For this category I just counted stuff like butter, oil, shortening, and lard (yep, there is a recipe using lard). I didn’t include milk, cream, or anything like that.

Total Fat in All About The Cookies: Approx. 49.35 cups

Butter makes everything better

Let’s give a little perspective here. A cup of butter (by far the most common fat in these recipes) runs about 1628 calories. So we are looking at  over 80,000 calories just from the fat. That will also give you around 5750 grams of saturated fat which is about 28,771% of your daily recommended allowance of saturated fat. Pretty awesome if you ask me.

Next lets move on to the sugar. I am just talking about granulated sugar, powdered sugar, brown sugar, honey, etc. Are there really any good desserts that don’t have sugar?

Total Sugar in All About The Cookies: Approx. 120 cups

A cup of brown sugar has around 825 calories and a cup of white sugar is about 770. Liquid sweeteners like honey and molasses are closer to 1000 a cup. So just to make things easy lets average it all out to about 800 calories per cup. That would give us about 96,000 calories from sugars and sweeteners. Your dentist is gonna love this.

And finally let’s talk about eggs. With eggs you get calorie and fat so that is a double winner.

Total Eggs in All About The Cookies: Approx 166

A standard large egg has about 74.5 calories and 5 grams of fat. That calculates out to 12, 367 calories and 830 grams of fat. But you also get over 1000 grams of protein so that is good.

So just talking fat, sugar, and eggs we are up to 188,637 calories. If you figure on an average 2,000 calorie a day diet that would give you 94 days of calories. Which works out great since there are 90 recipes. Just make one recipe a day, eat the whole thing, and then you won’t have to eat anything else! What a great deal.

If you want to talk fat we are looking at about 9900 grams of fat. At 65 grams a day it would take 156 days to eat everything in this book.

But keep in mind these numbers don’t take in to account stuff like chocolate, pre-packaged cake mixes, marshmallows, peanut butter, and fruity pebbles. Yep, there is a recipe using fruity pebbles.

Don’t worry though, this is all for a good cause!

If you know Missy you know she wouldn’t put out a book like this just to make money for herself. Over the past few years Missy has helped raise well over $250,000 for breast cancer Affiliate Marketers Give Backcharities that support research, treatment, and awareness. Most of this money has been through the organization Affiliate Marketers Give Back.100% of the net profits of this book will be donated to the Avon Walk For Breast Cancer.

I have no idea how many of these great cookbook will sell but when it is all said and done it wouldn’t surprise me if Missy was able to donate another $10,000-$20,000 and maybe a lot more. So order your copy of All About The Cookies today and help Missy help others.

And if you do decide to make and eat all the recipes in this cookbook maybe you could talk Missy into giving some money to the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association since you will probably need it.

Be sure to check out Missy Ward’s site to follow her and all her great charity work. She is an inspiration to many people and her efforts have impacted more people than she realizes.

 

 

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Baby Sousa is on the way!

by Joe Sousa on May 31, 2011

in Personal stuff

Well, you may have heard the news by now but my wife Kate and I will be having our first child in December! The due date is Dec. 22nd so it is looking like we will be having a kid sometime around Christmas.

Seahawks Baby

I have a feeling my baby will be wearing a bunch of Seahawks gear

We found out we were pregnant back in the middle of April but wanted to wait until we could tell our families before making it public. My wife’s two sisters and their husbands live here in town so we told them on Mother’s Day and they were the first people to know. Well, OK, we did tell my niece and nephew (both about 1 year old) as soon as we found out but I am prettysure they were able to keep the secret.

This past week my wife and I were in Hilton Head, SC with all of her family (10 brothers and sisters) for vacation. Since we love donuts (we had 800 of them at our wedding) we decided to call a local donut shop and get some pink and blue frosted donuts. We also got some little plastic baby rattles and stuck them in the hole of the donuts hoping it would make it clear what we were trying to say. When we opened up the boxes of donuts it took everyone a little bit to figure out what was going on but eventually the got it.

We got home on Saturday and had dinner with my parents on Sunday to tell them and then yesterday (Memorial Day) we had our annual breakfast potluck picnic with all our friends. There were about 70 people there and we broke the good news to them.

It is so encouraging for Kate and I to see how excited everyone is for us. We have received so many encouraging comments from people and we know this little child is a great gift from God. When we first saw the ultrasound and saw the baby wiggling around and the heart beating we were both filled with so much joy. We can’t wait to introduce this baby to you all!

So far my wife is doing a wonderful job being pregnant. She even made me chocolate chip pancakes this morning! I know for now she has the tough job of carrying the baby and I love her so much for that. Hopefully I will be able to help her where I can and make the pregnancy as easy as possible for her.

Anyway, we are both super excited and can’t wait until December!

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Joe is Engaged!!!

by Joe Sousa on January 31, 2010

in Personal stuff

It finally happened. You read the title right. Joe is engaged! Well, to avoid doing the rest of this post in third person I will rephrase:  I AM ENGAGED!!!

So who is the unfortunate victim?  Her name is Kate. She is originally from Columbus, OH but she moved to Spokane, WA just over 4 years ago. I have been friends with her sister and brother in law for a number of years now so I have kind of know her for most of that time but I really met her a bit over 2 years ago when she started working in the youth ministry with me at my church.  Apparently she started liking me almost immediatly but being the bonehead I am I wasn’t too aware of that for probably a year or so.

Joe and Kate at the Seahawks Game

Let me back up a bit and give you a bit of my history with the ladies… Basically there is very little.  I was never the type of person who wanted to date someone just for the sake of dating them. If I ever dated someone I wanted there to be a VERY strong chance it would end up in marriage.  So because of that I never had a girlfriend of any sorts and had maybe been on 1 or 2 dates my whole life.  I had many people recommend many different awesome girls over the years to me and push me to ask them out but I never felt right about doing it. I would pray about it and God would end up telling me no. This really frustrated a lot of different people over the years but I stuck to my guns.

There were a couple girls I did ask out at one time or another but I got shut down there. It did kind of suck in some ways but it was also encouraging because I knew that if God didn’t want me with those girls he had someone better out there for me. And that made me very excited. So I kept waiting.

It was probably about a year ago that I started noticing Kate more. We would hang out in groups, see each other at church and got to know each other more and more. 2 winters ago I remember following her home after a bad snowstorm and I think I helped push her car out of the snow about 8 times during that trip. Then a year ago at Christmas we had another bad snowstorm and I had to make 3 different trips to the airport with her since I had a 4 wheel drive.

months went on and we started talking more and more.  I think around March 14th I texted her bragging about the awesome grilled lamb with pomegranate molasses I made and that started our semi-regular texting conversations. But I was an idiot. I would text her and then not text for two weeks or so. It wasn’t anything I was doing on purpose but apparently she noticed that.  Thinking back I feel like a real dork for that but oh well, we live and learn.

joeandkate2

Around August or so I realized that I either needed to ask Kate out or tell her that it wasn’t gonna work out with us. I spent a lot of time praying and talking to other people and came to the conclusion that I really did want to start dating her. After that it only took about 2 more months for me to finally man up and take her out to dinner (I think it was November 2nd or so). I was helping her set up a blog so she was over at my house and we started talking and it was dinner time so I said “Do you want to go get some dinner?” and of course she said yes. Then the following Wednesday I asked her out on a “real” date.

Over Thanksgiving weekend we eneded up spending a lot of time together, stayed up way too late talking, watched some football, and all in all had a great time together. After this I pretty much knew than an engagement was necessary.

Kate is everything I have been looking for in a wife. When I look at the passages in the Bible describing a Godly woman, wife, and mother she either fits them perfectly or she is striving to fit them perfectly. She is what I have been waiting for for the past 37 years (well, I guess I wasn’t really waiting when I was a kid so lets say the past 19 years or so).  I am truely blessed that God has given me such a great gift.

So I started looking around for a ring. I wasn’t super urgent at this time so I would just pop into jewelry stores when I was driving by to see what they had. I would look online for diamonds and see what different kinds of settings there were. I pretty much figured out what I wanted but now there was just one more hurdle: I had to meet her parents and family.

Kate is the second oldest of 11 children so her family is quite big. This past weekend we finally got a chance to fly out to Columbus to meet her parents and her 6 brothers and sisters who are still at home. Her older sister Melissa lives here in Spokane and I have know her for a few years, her two oldest brothers Austin and Tyler live in South Carolina, and her next oldest sister Claire lives in England although she is moving here soon.  So we wake up early and fly to Columbus and a big van pulls up containing her parents Brian and Judy and her 6 siblings Rose, Beau, Charlotte, Cole, Sophie, and Graham.

I know her mom looks like she is disapproving but she really isn't

I know her mom looks like she is disapproving but she really isn't

We had a great weekend visiting them that was filled with driving, hiking, games, Wii, talking, and LOTS of food. Sunday morning her dad knocks on my door and says “Wake up, lets go to Waffle House” and we have “the talk”. Thankfully he approves and is happy for his daughter and says if I can live up to his other son-in-law I am in good shape so that is good. Thanks to Isaiah for setting the bar low.

And all that brings us to now. This past Thursday I stopped by the jeweler and picked up the ring. The only guidelines Kate gave me was she wanted something sparkley so I bought something really sparkley. On Saturday I gave her the ring and asked her to be my wife and spend the rest of our lives together. It wasn’t anything fancy or elaborate because I didn’t really want the event to overshadow the meaning. Also I was pretty sure she already knew it was coming that day so I really had no chance to suprise her. But I am fine with that because she said YES!  When I look back at my life this day will be right up near the top of my favorite days ever.

engagement_day_016

Sorry guys, I took an awesome woman off the market.  You can try to find someone that matches up to Kate but I don’t think you be able to come close. And all the single ladies? You can now breathe a sigh of relief because you won’t have to worry that you will end up stuck with me out of desperation in a few years.

So that is about it. I am engaged. You can’t believe how excited I am to be able to say those words. This has been a day I have looked forward to for years and it is better than I ever thought it could be. Thank you to my parents and friends who have been praying for me for years, thank you to Kate for putting up with me and accepting me with all my faults, and thank you to God for giving me such a wonderful blessing in Kate. 

kate

Quick update: The announced the engagement at my church Sunday morning.  I know dozens of people who have been praying for me over the years and lots that have been praying for Kate and I specifically. Here is a video of the announcement: Joe and Kate’s Engagement Announcement. It was so awesome to see so many people happy for both of us. I was a real blessing to be there and feel that loved from so many people. I have been at that church for dozens and dozens of engagement announcements and always imagined what mine would be like. It was by far the loudest cheer I have ever heard for one of them and I was blown away. And we gave out Ring Pops to everyone to celebrate. Such an awesome weekend!

As far as a wedding date we are still trying to figure that out. We have some scheduling issues at our church and some logistical issues getting all of Kate’s family here but we should be able to set a firm date in the next couple weeks. Our ideal plan would be some time in April but we will see what happens.

Thank you all again for your love and support. Kate and I couldn’t do this without you.

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The 1450 Mile Roadtrip

July 30, 2009 Personal stuff

TweetFirst of all let me give you a bit of a background on this trip.  A very good friend of mine, Josh, moved to Phoenix from our hometown of Spokane, WA a few years ago. He is the type of friend I would do almost anything for. He was teaching in Phoenix and due to budget [...]

4 comments You know you want to read more →

What hinders your success?

February 9, 2009 Affiliate Stuff

TweetI was sitting here thinking about success and not just in business but in any area of my life and what holds me back.  Why don’t I achieve the level of success I think I am capable of?  Why do I get stuck in ruts so often? Of course everyone has a different definition of success.  [...]

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