Kind of an interesting situation..

Congratulations on the chance of a lifetime,

If you want to PM me, let me know how much you pull from your sites each month, let me know the minimum you would want to take if you passed across your sites to me, depending on the figures I may be willing to continue your sites for you while you travel, I would of course continue to grow your business, the more business you make, the more profit I would get too.

Just an idea, but PM me and we can discuss

Darren

I'll be honest, right now most of the money I have coming in from my sites is affiliate sales and it's not really a lot. It's enough to keep my bills paid and food in my stomach, but I'm far from "guru" status.. lol.. but that doesn't mean I'm willing to give up just because another opportunity comes my way. I've found that it's always good to have more than one source of income (the main reason I bought BFM 2.0 and decided to try launching a couple Butterfly sites), so I'd like to continue building my business while I'm working on the music thing and hopefully have enough income from several different sources to finally live comfortably.

edit: Just by posting my question in a public forum like this I've already started the wheels spinning in my head to come up with a possible solution.. lol

I'm not much of a writer (even though I enjoy it sometimes), so I'm definitely thinking I should outsource most of my blog posting and article marketing. My helpdesk doesn't get a lot of traffic right now, so I think I can handle that on my own for a while and hire help when it becomes too much work for me to handle everything personally. My Twitter account is all me, my followers aren't exactly as "targeted" as they could be because they're spread out across a couple different niches, but one of those niches is music and I'd like to be able to personally keep those people updated with what's going on.

I think for now I'll handle the Butterfly sites myself too, but might outsource that later. I'm having a lot of fun learning all the little details about how to use the script and I know I'll be around for at least a month or two after the sites launch. The "built-in" helpdesk feature of the script is one thing I don't use, I'll be linking that to my OSTicket helpdesk instead, so that gives me the option (again) of hiring some help when I finally do need it.

What kinds of mods do you need? As long as it's nothing too complicated I might be able to help out. Right now I pretty much have the look of my Hyper Plugin site figured out, basing it on one of the templates Cata made available on that forum, the other site I'm working on is in the process of getting started and I haven't done too much work on it yet because I've been keeping myself busy trying to get Hyper Plugin to work the way I want it to.

One thing I'd like to work on, and I'm sure it's pretty simple, is "clean" affiliate links like Mike uses on some of his sites.. for example, instead of yoursite.com/?thankyou-page=123 I like the way it looks on The 7 Figure Secrets site, thesevenfiguresecrets.com/yours-free/123 (not my affiliate link, not sure if it's anyone else's lol). I know it can be done with a rewrite rule in .htaccess and a small mod to one of the script's PHP files to generate the "clean" link for all the promo tools.

Steven, you could hire someone to take care of your online business for you. I am paid to manage a site for another person and there will be others who are able to do the same.

Approach someone you know who covers the same niche as you and see what they charge.

That's a good idea. At this point I'm just thinking and trying to figure out my options (and hoping I have a little more money coming in by the time I actually need to outsource.. lol). Thing is I'm a pretty "hands-on" kind of person and I like to do things on my own when I can, but I also realize that as my business grows outsourcing is going to be more and more important for me if I want to have any free time to actually enjoy life... so I guess the right thing for me is to find some kind of balance between those two extremes.

I would say outsource as much as possible, it make take a little time to set up the actual "systems" to give to your outsourcers but thats the worst of it. For like $600/mo you can have afull time person out of the phillipenes from agents for hire. Check it out, its a really good option, good luck with the band, I know how that can be!

The last time I went on a national tour there was more than enough time to operate a business. In fact, both the tour manager and I owned internet businesses and conducted everything from our laptops and cellphones. It was a great way to burn time on the bus. It might not be an ideal situation, but it can be done for sure. If the cellphone tethering doesn't work for you, you might be surprised how many places have free wi-fi these days; even in small towns.

Also, think about BLOGGING your experiences as rock star/IM'er. Might be a great segue into selling a time management product.

Good luck on the tour! I'm sure you'll have a blast regardless of what you decide.

That's actually a great idea.. and my brothers are in the band, might also be able to get them involved in the business.. I know one of my brothers is really good with Myspace marketing (an area where I'm really lacking) and he's been wanting me to teach him a little more about how things work "outside of myspace" not just to promote the band, but to promote a book he's been writing. Just recently (like within the past week) I finally managed to talk him into getting on board with Facebook and Twitter.