August 8, 2008 and What It Means to You, This Site, and Me

photo credit: HAROLD PHOTOGRAPHX

Yes, the rumors are true.

The Official Date of my retirement is August 8, 2008. Yeah, I’m aware that’s 08/08/08 because I’m obsessed with the number 8 for reasons I’ll divulge on the 9th of August or thereafter.

At the moment, I am semi-retired due to illness. You may have noticed that I’ve been turning off some of my sites (or letting them get turned off). I’ve also been closing in on Morgan and Cindy with what they’ll need to do in order to take over, as well as shoring up a year’s worth of content to help them through the transition.

I’m still going to be active online, just not primarily in search and marketing.

After my official retirement date, if you’re a member of our upcoming re-opened membership site, you’ll still be able to get really great tips and information from me, just not in public. Most of my new tips, secrets and news will be behind closed doors.

Why?

I need to recover from this illness, and then I need to not relapse.

True, I can get ghostwriters and hire a staff to do the things I can’t presently. The alternative has been presented to me many times.

But for ME, it’s not the right choice unless I continue to produce the content myself. It looks like it will be a year or so before I’m 100% even with total rest. And in that time I am not able to have predictable periods when I know I can do blog posts or even podcasts. But I can advance write evergreen content about traffic techniques that no one has written about in the years that I’ve been online, and space it out periodically.

I can make a small business blueprint for traffic and have it updated with tools, tricks, articles, video and audio.

The few people I’m working with now, I’ll continue to work with after my “retirement”, I’m just going to be behind the scenes. What this means to you is that if we’re working together now, or we start working together between now and August 8, we will continue to, but as of that date, I’m not taking on any new projects personally. Forever.

I’m considering putting together a kind of school where I train ten people to work with me and start a consulting firm. Or I might not. It depends entirely on how I feel. But as far as your chance to work directly with me? It’s over on August 8, 2008, unless you live in Austin and can work with me locally.

(More on the Austin thing later.)

What about new guides, audio, video?

If you have been collecting my work, here’s what you need to know: anything that comes from me between now and August that interests you, you’ll want to pick up. Because after August, there’s a maximum of two channels you’ll be able to get content from me through. One is the membership site. The other isn’t quite finalized yet, but if you’re a newsletter subscriber, you’ll get a hint as to how before the end of the week.

No, this isn’t a publicity stunt.

No, I’m not going to do a Michael Jordan, as in, retire and come back in a year. I may pop up from time to time, meaning like four times a year. But except for the membership site, we’re talking about content pushes only. Live talks, tele-seminars, webinars, etc will be extremely rare. I’m returning to my roots of being the one behind it all.

No, I’m not going to keep affiliates from being able to sell my products.

No, Morgan and Cindy aren’t going anywhere. It’s actually why they’re here.

Thank you again for a wonderful journey. I’ll see you here periodically between now and August (much more frequently than I have been since January). Otherwise I’ll see you around the web.