Interview with Jonathan C. Phillips from Smart Wealthy Rich

Recently I had an interview with Jon over at Smart Wealthy Rich. I saw that in one of his blog posts he said that he enjoyed doing interviews, so I decided to give it a try.


Web Goodness: Ok, so first question is, what tool do you use to post your articles?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: To post my articles, I use wordpress, I usually write my posts in Text Edit (notepad for Mac) and then copy it in Wordpress.

Web Goodness: Is there a method to how often you post an article?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: I usually write articles "on the spot" but I do have about 30-40 posts that are unpublished, in case I run out of ideas or something. I usually post 1 per day, sometimes 2. I don't really have a method as far as posting frequency goes, I just go with the flow and dedicate time everyday to write at least 1 post.

Web Goodness: 30-40 posts, woah, that is a lot of backup posts. How long did it take to accumulate that many "emergency" posts?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Well I started writing on my blog in February, and right from the start I started writing those posts, but I didn't publish them mostly because a lot of them are not finished and incomplete 3-4 paragraphs and in need of serious editing, but I often use those posts as starters for new ones.

Web Goodness: So you basically have a topic and then try to build on that. I guess you could call it a "stub" (little wikipedia plugage ;)

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Exactly! :)

Web Goodness: When did you actually start posting?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: The end of February / beginning of March of this year

Web Goodness: So, you spent about a month writing articles before you posted your first one?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Well, I started posting right away in February, but at the same time was writing other articles that I didn't publish, either cause I got a better idea and posted that instead, or simply cause some posts were incomplete. At first I wanted to write 2-4 posts a day, but realized 1 was already nice, and all the other unfinished posts still serve as starting points :)

Web Goodness: Is smartwealthyrich your first blog?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: I also have jonathan-phillips.com, which is more like an experimental thing. It was a static website before, and after I decided to start blogging on smartwealthyrich, I decided to turn jonathan-phillips.com into a blog also, but it's not updated often (4-5 times a month) althought it will be updated more often eventually, but you could say smartwealthyrich is my first and main blog :)

Web Goodness: How large would you estimate your audience to be?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Humm, good question, well I have arouund 290 RSS Subscribers, but judging from all the comments and traffic this blog receives I'm thinking it's more than that, say maybe around 1200-1600 "casual" visitors (swr gets between 800 and 3000 visitors per day)

Web Goodness: Wow, congratulations!

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Thanx! :) :)

Web Goodness: How well do you know other popular blog authors?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: I do know Liz Strauss from successful-blog.com pretty well, she helped me a lot when I started out. also Wendy Piersall from emomsathome.com, Phil from makeitgreat.typepad.com and many others, I met many when I attended the sobevent.com conference in May in Chicago :)

Web Goodness: I'll have to check out one of those conferences one of these days.

Jonathan-C. Phillips: I love those conferences! ;) It's really a great occasion to meet fellow bloggers. The sobevent one was really "taking the conversations out of the comment boxes" which is awesome

Web Goodness: What feed reader do you use and why?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: I use Netvibes, mostly cause the interface is really user friendly, and you can add myspace profiles, weather, news and other stuff on top of rss feeds.

Web Goodness: Ok. I was wondering about your take on AdSense. Do you click on other people's adsense ads. Also, what percentage of people to your site would you say click on your ad links?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Well, I don't click on other people's adsense ads, cause I wouldn't wannna see my adsense account cancelled for click fraud cause adsense verifies that. I'd say about 2% of the visitors on my blog click on those ads.

Web Goodness: I'm not sure i understand the fraud issue fully. What would you being doing that would be considered fraud?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Well, since I use adsense, clicking on other people's adsense ads is considered click fraud. When you're in the program you cannot click on your own ads, or other people's ads

Web Goodness: Oh, I didn't know that. That's very strange. I've clicked on an ad before. It was actually something i was considering purchasing.

Jonathan-C. Phillips: I did that a couple of time, cause I was i nfact interested in purchasing something and clicked on the ad, but a couple months ago I got an e-mail from adsense to remind me their terms of service, so I just never clicked again hehe.

Web Goodness: What are some of your favorite social media sites?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: stumbleupon and reddit :)

Web Goodness: what percentage of viewers read your XML feed compared to actual site visits?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: I have around 300 feed subscribers, but get an average of 2000 visits per day, so about 15%

Web Goodness: Where does most of your traffic come from? (e.g. search engine, etc.)

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Most comes from social networking sites, especially stumbleupon, I get stumbled so often I don'T know what my "real" traffic numbers are hehe.

Web Goodness: Is this common for most sites that have been stumbled or have you optimized your site to receive stumble visits?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Well i really believe a blogger shouldn't focus on write "for" social networking sites, but for the readers and visitors, there are a couple of my readers who are really active on stumbleupon that stumble almost every single post I write, and I'm also realy active on SU and stumbe other sites a lot.

Web Goodness: What do some of your routine activities on stumbleupon include?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Hehe, well, I just use the stumbleupon toolbar quite a lot, I just stumbel sites and thumbs up or down. And write reviews and tag them when I like them. And I also check often for stumbles from my stumble friends, so I stumble those too.

Web Goodness: I read on one of your comments that you're in a rock band. Any information on that?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Yes, I'm a guitar player, been playing for about 13 years, and well, we're in the recording studio, recording an album, which should be out in October. And we plan on touring most of Canada, then the US, and then see where we can take the band :)

Web Goodness: How long has the band been around. Name of band/ website?


Jonathan-C. Phillips: it's been around for about a year, it's sorta like a rock/metal/alternative band, there are some samples you can listen to on myspace.com/thegodsofnow

Web Goodness: Awesome! I'll have to check it out!

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Cool :)

Web Goodness: I noticed that all the money donated goes to Kiva, how did you hear about them?

Jonathan-C. Phillips: Dave Olson (http://www.daveolson.ca/) told me about Kiva, and he held some sort of contest a while back and donated some money to Kiva, and I decided it would be a good idea to do the same, so I put up that paypal thing, and all the money I get on donations I send to Kiva (not a lot, but so far it helped 3 entrepreneurs, 3 X $25 each)

Web Goodness: Well, thank you for your time! I think that is all i'm going to ask for now unless there is something you would like to add?

Jonathan-C. Phillips says: Thanx a lot Tyler :)
I really like those interviews, if you have any questions feel free to ask :)

Keeping track of expenses

I am sitting in my room trying to think of content to write because I had previously told myself that I was going to write (or at least try to write) an article every morning, so far it has been wishy washy but for them most part I have stuck with it. It is very therapeutic to be able to write down ones thoughts early in the morning. It gives a direction and goal to what would, probably, be an otherwise chaotic day.

I received mail this week from the Department Of Treasury. I thought it was a bill. I opened it and saw that I owed the Defense Financial and Accounting Service my entire tax refund! (I filed late this year). I called them up only to find out I owe them $4,000 dollars for not fulfilling my service agreement to the military. We proceeded to setup a payment plan.

One thing that I am noticing since implementing my GTD system, is that I have become more financially accountable because I actually know where my money is going. The guy was asking me questions about my expenses so that we could setup an appropriate amount to pay, and I was answering his questions to the exact dollar. I have a money tracking system built into my current GTD setup; I use Buxfer (http://www.buxfer.com) to make my budgets.

Before setting up this system, I would have ignored my financial obligations and would have run the other direction. This, I am noticing, has not helped me in the past and I am thankful that I have found a system that holds me more accountable.

Parents

Growing up, I was never really close to my parents. I used to blame them, like a lot of children do, for the majority of bad things in my life. Only recently have I discovered that these things weren’t entirely their fault and that I have to take some responsibility for my own actions. I’m not saying that they never did anything wrong. I mean everyone makes mistakes. But they did the best they could for the amount of wisdom they had at that age.

I think we tend to dwell more often on what is wrong in our lives rather than dwell on what we are thankful for. This has detrimental affect to our wellbeing because it causes depression and other effects on us that hinder us in our daily lives. A big part of overcoming this condition is to try and forgive our parents for whatever wrongness we think they have incurred on us in the past. I know this is easier said than done. I have problems with it myself. In fact, only recently, after several support groups have I even been able to entertain the notion of objectively understanding the bad parts of my life and trying to heal from them instead of getting angry and lashing out at the very mention of their occurrence.

This has been an exciting journey for me because it has brought a lot of peace and restoration to my otherwise chaotic life. It’s difficult when your parents expect you to heal faster than you are ready to. They shouldn’t pressure you into it no matter how healthy the processes may be for you. In the end, you’re not really healing, you’re just stuffing it own deeper. Which says a lot about the parent, but I’m not going to go into that right now.

I would like to end in saying that I am grateful for my parents and admire any efforts they made to do the right thing when raising me. If it were not for their diligent work during those years I would have ended up a very different person; most likely not for the better. Some people say we are a product of our cumulative experiences. If that is the case, then we owe some of that good result to our parents. As I said before, I don’t think the issue is really deciding whether or not our parents were good parents. The real issue is deciding whether or not to dwell on the positive, instead of the negative.

Radical Thankfulness

Whenever we feel irrational anger towards someone this is usually pointing to the fact that Satan is lying to us. In order to counter this lie we must discover the truth in what is being done. In order to do that, we have to ask ourselves, “What lie is Satan telling me right now?” Once we are able to identify the lie, we can take steps towards correcting it and finding Truth. As we all have heard from John 8:32, “You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall set you free.” This is a very important verse because until we realize Satan's grip on us, we can never be free. We are constantly bound to his incessant lies.

Another step to this procedure is to not only realize the lie and the consequent Truth, but to discover something you are thankful about in that person. The natural response to real understanding of Truth is thankfulness. Effectively, what we are doing here is, converting irrational anger towards someone into radical thankfulness. The reason I use the word radical, is because there is an overwhelming sensation we feel when we can dispel the lies that Satan is trying to feed us, and instead embrace Truth.

This method, while affecting your current attitude, also provides great emotional healing. When we start to realize Satan's lies for what they are, it allows us to identify the lies we have believed from him in the past. We may still even cling to some of them. Once we have identified the lies of our past that we had accepted as Truth, we can purge them from our minds and lead a more spiritually healthy life.

While I have only recently put this method into everyday use, the benefits I have seen thus far are staggering. Not only do I feel better emotionally and spiritually than I otherwise would have, other people around me see the difference. This effect is what makes it all worth while. They see the change and ask what is different. This gives me an opportunity to explain to them my method of Radical Thankfulness and thus the cycle continues and Truth prevails.

Limiting Creativity

I have decided to break free from the confines of niche blogging. I have decided to use this blog to post my creative writings. I'm not changing the address to the blog as I will still continue to write GTD related material. I feel that creating a separate blog for each niche topic I want to write about not only hinders my creativity, but is also inefficient.