There is no better way to see what you are doing wrong than editing hard. I wrote roughly 10 paragraphs and simply deleted them all. Starting all over is a healthy way of changing habits.

What the fuck was up with smashill?

Smashill believes in creativity, art, writing and doing what you love. In 2009 focus was something that lacked. The development of an idea and the focus on a peer group is something that was neglected very long. Trying to make money, but not being able to make any significant amount was pretty fucked up. Doing other things to pay the bills was the smart move, neglecting smashill instead of shifting the focus was the easy way out.

2009 launch – death – rebirth 2010

It could be the story of a phoenix, but to be reborn the traffic has to increase. Creativity. That’s what it’s all about and that’s what it’s going to be.

Bypass income, or how to make a living

As smashill has not been the source of income for me yet I will create other venue streams to support my income. Smashill was a great idea: create a low traffic blog that was shooting for advertisements used all my illusions, yet burst like a bubble. It’s probably smart to start other ways of creating an income and share my path right here.

• Build up a Photographer Portfolio and start shooting Portraits, Sports, Businesses and Weddings. I have been photographing for ages and I am capable of taking better pictures than most of the photographers in my area. It’s only logical to work on this
• Get our Gallery up and running. We have the domain, webspace, wordpress template, photographed a few of our works, the logo. We have to fix the template to our needs, which is roughly about 60% done, as it looked better than it was programmed. We have to put the logo on the site and write the content. 2-4 weeks and the site should be up and running.
• Blogging. This year will be the first time to launch a german blog. The goal besides creating content and teaching is to build it up a community that strives to improve itself. Domain, webspace and template are the things that I own, content & traffic is something I have to create. Time to get going, as I have been procrastinating writing the first 10 articles since the start of the year.
• Writing. This year writing a novel is a dream. It’s about time, as three different story-lines wait to be developed and written down. Not to mention finding a publisher and selling them.
• Shirt designs. Last year designing shirts was a big goal, but about the only one that got left behind. I have my fine wacom tablet and will start to pump out a few designs and participate in a few contests to build up a reputation.
• Silkscreen prints. Having access to a great place where I can produce silkscreen prints for little money will be another outlet for my art. Printing used to be the medium of my choice, then I switched to concept, picked up painting last year, and will create a lot prints this year. Prints are a great way to create unique art that is not as expensive as paintings.
• Help other artists sell their works. Knowing quite a lot artists might be helpful in this endeavour, as we open our online gallery this year and want to add a few more artists to it. Hopefully we can pull this off and create something cool. Can’t wait to invite a few friends once this whole project goes live.
• Teach. Find a part time job at a place to teach about art/photography once or twice a week.

Seems like it’s going to be a very busy year. Loads of stuff to do, it’s time to get going.

Hopefully you can enjoy some time off and spend it with your family or friends. Take a moment to reflect on yourself and don’t be angry if you could not afford that shine bling to give away. Rather spend time with the ones you love and show them that you care. If they can’t appreciated they should be working on themselves.
Take care,
smashill

Every vacation comes to an end unless you are a traveling freelancer with a nomad lifestyle like the guys from location indepentent or Chris Guillebeau. Almost 3 weeks without internet, television and other media on Sardegna has been a blast.
Sardenga is a really nice country, and I will visit it again and travel the north of it, as we have explored the south this time. Be aware if you decide against a rental car and go by bus, there are a lot of places where the buses stop their service once september starts! We did not know this and had a lot of fun finding a ride to cover the last 6 km of our first route. As it turned out there was no taxi, so we started walking and were picked up after about 1km… walking can be hell if you are rolling 2 big suitcases behind…

We all need holidays, especially once we are self employed or stuck in a job that takes more than it gives. Sure, all this stuff may put the food on the table and allow you to spend some time under in a warm room, but after all, we need time to please our-self.

1. Work burns out

We work too much, we end up burning out. No matter what we do, once things are the same every day and the stress is almost unbearable, we have to stop. Actually we should all stop far earlier, but most people don’t.

2. Time off refreshes

There is more to life than work, and if you do not know how you can spend your time off, you are doing something wrong. There are so many things one can do in life, and most of those things are a lot of fun. Don’t think too much, and go for the experience, at least you will be able to tell a more interesting story at the water stop in the office next time.

3. Only time allows you to reflect your life

When we are caught up in life, we don’t have time to adjust it. Sometimes it’s great to simply react and see what is coming, but after all there should be something we strive for. In case you are in a struggle with your work and have to make ends meet it’s almost impossible.

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.

Tyler Durden

So, take time off and start working on your creative output. Start being someone who actually cares enough about himself to do what he wants to do, instead of taking the easy road out.

This has been a quiet month here at smashill, but nevertheless a lot of stuff got done. Outside the blog at least. I finally have 9 files approved at istock, which is one short of the amount I want to have there, I even made my first whooping 29 cent there, which just underlines how stupid stock photography is. It’s a numbers game nothing more, but it’s something that I had to test out. Otherwise I had a pretty good opportunity of ordering a few posters and photos for free through my old blog and I have been creating loads of stuff offline, as I have been pretty sick of the online world this month. The sensor of my camera was dusted, so I had to give it away and I am still waiting for it from last week Monday… annoying to go to the shop when they say they would have it ready by Saturday and they don’t have it when you drop by. Guess I will try to harvest a discount for that, but I guess they won’t do that for me. *shrugs*

Project Stats & Earnings

Istock
9 files up and running, which is more than double to last month. 29 cents earned!

Zazzle
I started to delete a few of my zazzle items and will restructure my gallery the upcoming months.

mygall.de
Deleted a few images and upped the price for my images quite a lot. As I don’t make any sales there yet, it does not matter at all. I just don’t want to underprice myself there.

flickr
Repeating last month’s words: Wonder if I will use that service more often in the future. It sure looks like a great community, but I have not been taking part in it too much.

twitter
As with everything related to the online world, my twitter usage has been very low. Less conversations, less traffic, more quality offline time.

Site Stats

Since February 11. 79 Posts and 61 comments were written, this month I’ve hit the publish button every other day if I believe my stats, but it’s been a lot writing early and a lot of nothing later, I skipped my main traffic generation tool of textures for 2 weeks, as my camera was dusted and I did not bother fixing the textures for this.

Traffic wise it’s been a great ride thinking of how little time I put into the blog, as there came more than 850 visitors ending up on over 1000 visits! I know what drives the traffic for my niche and I will work on this once I get my camera back. I’ll probably upload textures twice per week, as those are the engine of my blog.

There has been another pagerank update, but this blog has neither dropped nor increased and stands at a steady pagerank of 2. Here you can have a look at the stats for this month. A little increase compared to last month, and I will work on this the upcoming month. It’s not about time put into this, it’s about using the time spend effective.

Outlook for June

It’s been tough to update as regular as I did when I started this blog, the weather is so great I actually don’t want to waste as much time in front of the computer as I’d do when the weather sucks. I have to work on my timing and get at least 3 regular updates per week. I count I stock as done this month, and will work on my photography portfolio and try to get some more sales there. Traffic wise I will push this blog and try to find a bigger blog to share my textures with, maybe someone reading this would be interested in that. Just drop me a line.