Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

This past Sunday I ventured back over to the west side of Oahu to play the Hawaii Country Club (HCC). A little known island course in Kunia, HCC makes you think of the movie Tin Cup. Placed in the middle of Delmont Pineapple fields the course length is 5911 yards long from the men’s tees with a course rating of 67.3 and a slope rating of 119 and par of 72. The difficulty in this course comes with the twists and turns of stuffing 18 holes in between a few fields of fruit. There are a lot of greens guarded by trees and quite a few dog legs left and right.

The first time I played the course was earlier this month and I was close to getting under 90 golfing a pair of 45’s. The last 3 times I’ve been out playing I shot a 90, 90, 94 and now this past weekend I shot an 88. A pair of 44’s. The front nine was two pars 5 bogeys and one double bogey. The back nine saw 4 pars but had a horrible triple and double bogey. Those holes really hurt my score but after the double bogey I really focused on keeping my score at par. It payed off and I made it under with one to spare.

On my way to becoming a scratch golfer I have learned that you need to play the day with game you came with. You could be having a horrible day and still manage to play bogey golf. You need to play each shot thinking about making par. If you duff the drive but it rolls 150 yards off the tee, don’ think, “there goes the hole.” Rather, you should be thinking, “OK, I hit it straight, now I have a 5 iron in that should get me near the green. To make bogey golf you don’t need to put the ball on the green every single time. First work on hitting it straight and near the green. Now you’re only a chip or pitch off the green. Now you need to focus on getting it within a two-putt. That’s generally within 20 feet of the hole, think of how much room 20 feet is.

With the next putt work on getting it close. Once you get it close you’ll have one putt left and still make bogey. Once you stop trying to make it on the green in two you’ll begin to swing smoother and hit more consistent shots. Play to the bogey and you’ll see your scores coming down.

Good luck,
Erik

Do you want to add a post to del.icio.us link to your post’s without using the WordPress plugin that is available from Arne Brachhold? Or maybe you want to just add it to you blog that’s not php based. Then you can use this simple html link.

<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=< ?php the_permalink() ?>title=< ?php the_title(); ?>” target=”blank”>post to del.icio.us</a>

All it is is a link to del.icio.us using their post link and adding some of your php code. If you look at your main or index.php template from your presentation-theme editor tab you should find the if posts loop. Follow this loop down to the bottom just before you begin to see the php code for the comments section. Right above that is the end of your posts. Copy and past the above code below the php the_content code. This will insert a post to del.icio.us link on every one of your posts.

You can play around with the code and add it elsewhere if you’d like. If you don’t have a php blog figure out what you use to insert the permalink and title, or you can just insert real html http:// links after the “url=” portion and different titles in the “title=” section. Mess around with it but this is the easy way to add the post to del.icio.us link at the end of your posts.

Aloha,
Erik

The recent tumble of Yahoo’s stock shares sent the tech sector plummeting and business people worrying if advertising dollars had hit a peak. Google shares followed suit dropping like a rock by it’s largest single day loss of 8.5% or over $36 a share. With all those people out there blogging about how they’re finished working for the man and busy publishing AIS sites, it’s a wonder we didn’t hear more tones of worry in recent posts.

It seems as though everyone and their mother, literally, is starting some type of niche AIS website aimed at getting traffic via search engines and turning that traffic into money making clicks. I regularly read the following blogs related to AIS; Burt’s osCommerce, Jonathon Wold’s, jcCommerce, and, ProBlogger. All these sites discuss how click’s earn them money and the sites that are doing it for them. Burt’s osCommerce recently held a challenge to develop a niche website, launch it, and see how much money it could earn in a month. 12 people have joined and most of them are doing quite well from what I have seen, 3 have made at least $50.

Most of these sites rely on click-through traffic. Later I will get into why I think click-through traffic is going to slowly lower in value but for now I will just mention that it’s usually used on sites geared towards search engine results. Repeat visitors tend not to click through as much. For those sites like cnn.com, espn.com, and myspace.com, where visitors return often, the publishers need to use more creative approaches to advertising. Things like review spots, placement of graphic ads, pop-ups and what not. It’s like TV, you don’t click through the commercials but if you see a Coke enough times next time you might order Coke rather than Pepsi.

What’s Leading the Online Advertising Push

Besides the fact that thousands of people get introduced to some form of the internet everyday, the DVR. The only guaranteed captive audience any more are those searching web pages, sifting for knowledge and seeking out entertainment.

That simple acronym has made thousands of advertising execs come in off the golf courses and re-think their advertising program. With the advent of Tivo and now DVR for Time Warner, the Dish, and numerous other services, the public doesn’t have to subject themselves to 10 minutes of commercials per 30 minute show. I realize that VCR’s have been around for decades but they have never offered the ease of use which DVR does. There’s no comparison. What this means for advertisers is that they have to begin looking at new ways to promote products.

DVR relinquishes a viewer from being a captive audience. Even if before DVR you went to the bathroom during a commercial break or the kitchen to grab a snack, you’d still spend more than 75% of TV time watching commercials. Now with DVR you can pause live TV, spend 20 minutes getting ready to go out for the night, come back and watch a whole one hour show commercial free ending near the same time the live feed finishes. It’s about time too, I pay enough for cable TV, why should I have to sit through an hour of commercials each night. Not everyone has a DVR, this I know, but soon enough they will be as standard as cable TV, which people also thought was a foolish idea. “Who would pay for TV when I can get it free with these great big antenna?”

Advertisers need a captive audience and what better place to get that audience then online. I go to web pages and can’t help but view ads. They’re everywhere, some helpful, some annoying, but plastered all over. Contextual ads, poster ads, moving ads, talking ads, pop-up ads. Advertisers are constantly developing new ways to get their message across to a user. If I want the information on a page I have to look at ads and advertisers know that. For all you publishers this is what you want to keep in mind.

Of course there will be a new browser that blocks pop-up ads or removes ad code completely before displaying a page, but there will be ways around that. Popular pages that everyone wants to go to or has to go to, not just those search engine friendly pages, will write code that only displays if their ads are displayed. It’s the never ending battle of technology, something that the music industry has already spent a few years waging war against.

There could also be a technology that only allows you to watch a TV program if you have to watch commercials but I find this a little less likely. As I mentioned VCR’s have been around for quite a while and never raised much of a stink after their initial release into the world of media. Aside from that, the biggest cable providers, Time Warner and Comcast have already embraced the revolution and come out with a DVR service of their own. That would be a lot of wasted money on components and advertising, but, I guess we’ve seen corporate America do stupider things.

I’m not saying the 30 second commercial will go away, it has become a staple of network TV and they won’t give it up without a fight. The times where I still see commercials are when I watch live TV. Yes, TV shows will have to go back to being so good they make audiences want to be the first to see them. Who wants to be the last one to know what the heck is in the hatch on ABC’s hit drama Lost, I sure didn’t’. Sports programs are prime examples of shows that are tough to watch afterwards. Only die-hards can withstand constantly being on the lookout for a newspaper article, conversation, or email that will ruin the playoff game they just tivo’d last night.

Yes, times they are a changing and the advertisers will have to make the shift to the internet in a big way. They will have to look for those sites which create daily traffic and bring in huge amounts of repeat eyeballs and turn new eyeballs into repeats every single day. Places like myspace.com, engadget.com, espn.com, and yes, even stevepavlina.com. These types of sites, not just search engine friendly sites, are where big ad dollars are going to be spent. And since the online world is so fluid there will always be a new big player lurking around the corner. Getting someone to change favorite shows from the OC to Dancing with the Stars is pretty tough, but when they can use the click of a mouse to go from Gizmodo.com to Engadget.com without needing to be caught up on plot, there’s a whole new ball game out there. With the internet, like tivo, the content is always there for you to go back to, (unless of course you make it 2 day only content, hmm).

Click-Through Will Change

If you think click-through dollars will remain strong you are sadly mistaken. I’m not saying people still won’t be able to make a living on creating AIS sites, or having ads on their blogs. People will click when they see a link they like, it’s the nature of the internet. What I’m trying to say is that there will be more and more people seeing others making money this way and will want to join the party. This in turn diluting each niche that’s out there. Of course there will always be another niche created, almost daily, but more people will try to jump in that niche as there are more niche site builders and so on and so forth.

I will reiterate that the basic idea of a click is to earn the publishers money by a visitor leaving their site. The only real trouble with this is how do you know if those who are clicking are really clicking to view the ads or are clicking to make the publisher money. Now I know everyone believes that Google, being lord of the internet, is able to truly tell when clicks are false. How naive. And you can’t tell me that you haven’t been past some of those great sites that give you all that wonderful information on how to monetize your blogs and clicked on an ad or two saying, “why not give him/her some money, they give me great info?”

Isn’t this cheating the advertisers who pay good money to Google and Yahoo for clicks to their websites? Of course it is. Also creating click-through woes are bots specifically designed to click AdWords ads on search result pages as well as making their presence known on sites such as blogs. These click bots can supposedly be curtailed by tracking a user, in this case the bots IP address and keeping track of previous search engine activity and click through activity. With this in mind the perpetrators have developed IP masking and relocating software, kind of like phone tracing re-routers.

Now I won’t get into the why people would go through all the trouble to falsely click ads on a grand scale. Rather, I want to delve into why I think online advertising will continue to be big money and where I think it is going in the future.

Click through advertising needs a formula. I’m not talking person-A clicks 5 times on person-B’s website in 3 days, or person-A doesn’t usually click on ads about fitness so it must be false. That’s not going to solve the problem of false clicks, it will just loose money for ad publishers. Someone needs to do research such as the Google twins did for their unfinished doctorate and come up with an algorithm to successfully weed out false clicks. I’m talking something like:

IP address-A click on 2 ads from IP-address-B’s website, and was only on the click-through for 10 seconds each, and IP-A has sent email to server with IP-D and IP-B has logged into a server related to IP-D and sent email to IP-C which IP-C has a website on IP-E that writes about IP-A, therefore has a 10% chance of being associated with IP-B, therefore the click through cost of ads on IP-B’s website from IP-A clicker are 10% less than they would be for a random person such as IP-Z having no relation to IP-A, B, C, D, or E except they visited IP-B’s site.

This will open up a whole new field that some smart student right now is probably already thinking of. There are companies out there such like Authenticlick.net and adwatcher.com who offer services related to stopping click fraud. How good are they, who knows, but don’t you think Google would have bought them out or be using their software instead of fight million dollar lawsuits in court over false clicks? The battle against false clicks will be continuous and one that slowly lower the cost per click the publishers see in the end.

False clicks coupled with more and more content based AIS sites will eventually bring the click-through only monetization scheme to a nice bar tab leveler income rather than a pay the mortgage level. This is where sites that bring in repeat visitors will become the main attraction on the internet. Like TV shows, such as Lost, that bring millions upon millions of viewers every week, websites that create traffic in a similar way will become the staple of a true online entrepreneurs portfolio. Eventually if you want to make it big you won’t be able to sit idle watching clicks create buy you that new Porsche income.

The Future of Online Ads

As I was saying, the future of online advertising will switch to those people who can show they are generating repeat traffic with growth or the potential for growth. The reason Weblogs Inc. was able to sell for $28 Million to AOL wasn’t because how much they made on their blogs, it was because of how much growth they had as a company and how many eyeballs they were able to keep coming back to their pages, ultimately measured in page views. Jason Calacanis, CEO and co-founder of Weblogs Inc. makes a point of reiterating this in his blog within several posts. He mentions how they were able to sell key spots of their weblogs long before they ever made a million dollars a year from AdSense.

Steve Pavlina one of those lone shark bloggers out there, has just offered a top spot on his page using the blogads medium. Even he, the great leader of probably thousands of new bloggers over the past year has come to see the light that the real money in online advertising is gaining single source advertisers paying top dollar to reach your regulars. Even the six figure man himself, Darren Rose, has a post (via Arieanna Foley) about advertisers shifting money to blogs. His company B5 Media has sponsors, you can see in the left hand column. Sponsors that sought out his blog network to specifically target his repeats. My guess is on a monthly pay schedule rather than a click-through basis.

Big money in online advertising is already in sites like these that keep people coming back and will continue to shift there. The next big opportunities in online money making is in sites like HomeStarRunner.com that offer a weekly and sometimes daily show update to viewers on the internet. Advertisers will either create these sites themselves or pay others who have these sites to run their clients ads on them. Banner ads, pop-ups, prior to entering ads (those are those ads that myspace.com started to have once they were bought out over the summer, did you even notice?), will become common place among those regular blogs you can’t live without.

Couldn’t you see a company devoted to designing strictly advertising shows, like Initial D but for a Saturn. I’m sure they’re already out there, I just haven’t spent the time to look for them. Young kids will want to come back to see what sweet drift Yoshi Kaboshi did this week and before you know it they’ll be driving and asking Dad for that pimped out white Toyota hatchback (yeah I mistakenly ended up with one of those, no prior knowledge of Initial D though.)

In Closing - My Crystal Ball

I guess what I’m trying to say with all this is don’t go believing you are going to sell your blog network for $28 million dollars. Unless you are building a cult following such as Steve Pavlina, Darren Rose, and newcomer Yaro Starak of course. I’m sure they could sell the ad rights for their blogs for a pretty penny. I am sure most of you AISers out there will continue to make a nice chunk of change from the thousands of sites you are creating. Hell, I’m even trying to jump on the band-wagon. All I’m writing this for is to simply offer an opinion of where I think the next swing in online dollars will come from.

I strongly believe repeat visitor sites with the potential for growth will become the standard by which people can make dollars via the internet. More sites offering the same information will be posted every single day and less revenue will be earned through click-through advertising. Create a brand, create a following, and you could be hearing from Mr. Gates wanting to get in on your Intertainment Network of Sites.

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I am busy working on some other sites as well as having a bit of a writers block with this article I am compiling on the future of online advertising. I know what I want to say but reading Steve Pavlina’s recent post about writing quality articles has made me over analyze some of what I am writing. Either way the article will be published soon and I think it’s a great editorial piece on how advertising is going to change and why it’s here to stay.

Now on to taking the pen. I was recently watching Seinfeld, as any normal human being does 2-3 times a day, and was quite entertained by the Take the Pen piece. So entertained that I began searching for the Astronaut pen that Jerry was enamoured with during the show. I came across the original Zero Gravity Pen over at allwrite.nl. It’s the pen the was designed and patented in 1965 by Paul C. Fisher. It was then used in 1967 on the Apollo 7 Mission after extensive NASA testing.

Now that right there could be a Seinfeld skit in itself. Why would you need extensive testing to see if a pen worked. If you don’t have anything that works at the time why not take the pen into space and test it there. Couldn’t it be used right away if there was even a thought of it working. I’m mean really?

So the pen got me thinking as to how big a time saver it could be. The premise in the show was that while lying in bed you could now write longer with your head facing up at the ceiling rather than sitting upright. Does anyone ever write like this, have you ever tried? Well take it from me it’s not comfortable. I guess that could have been the joke?

My conclusion on the space pen is that the chances of it saving you time are slim to none. However, if you need a $125 novelty gift for your next office gift exchange, first invite me, then buy the pen.

Ever notice all those blogs with the add feed buttons like the ones I have here to your left? There are all different aggregators which keep you up-to-date via RSS (real simple syndicate) with all your favorite blogs and feeds. I use Google Reader right now but only check it every so often. Most of the time I use the drop down history address bar to get back to my favorite blogs but find the aggregators simple to use. Most people use them especially to keep track of the multitude of blogs that are out there. As a reader it’s simple, click and done, but as a writer, all you have to track those clicks is your exit url stats from your stat counter, which often times can miss a click.

That’s where FeedBurner comes in. If you’re using WordPress, Blogger, TypePad or similar software you already have a rss feed url that comes with it. This is no doubt what you currently use for syndicating your feed. Those are great but they don’t track your statistics. What FeedBurner does is allow you to track how many people are currently reading and downloading your feed from their aggregator. You can track current results, feed evolution, what aggregators are most popular, and page views from each aggregator.

The other great thing about FeedBurner is that it allows you to tell your readers how popular you are. This is a great way to garner excitement and readership for your blog. If someone sees that 1000 people are currently reading your blog regularly that will more than likely make them want to add you to their aggregators just to keep up with the Jone’s. This is also a way to attract advertisers if you are into that. A prospective client that visits your site and sees that you have feed statistics similar to say TechCrunch.com, will want to jump on your site right away to get their products out to more viewers. FeedBurner also helps match up advertisers with similar content feeds to help monetize your blog and feed.

I was able to get setup using wordpress within a few minutes. All that was need was to follow the simple instructions linked to on the front page of FeedBurner.com which included a plugin download and I was set to go. If you’re interested in making money off a blog, or just want to allow people easier access to your feed while keeping track of them, FeedBurner is definitely the way to go.

Happy Burning,
Erik

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Quite ironic that the title of this post has nothing to do with it’s content which is SEO, search engine optimization, but I thought I would start out with a little bit of lame humor. Living on an island I have come to realize that if a couple people are sick in one office every office on the island will eventually get it. Half of my office has been out sick at one point or another for the past 2 weeks along with my girlfriends (which is where I think I got it.) Today I foolishly decided I needed to be at work for at least half the day but came home after I realized I would continue to perpetuate the sickness around the office with my caughing if I stayed. On the way home I got to thinking, “If it’s always hot outside, such as the case in Hawaii, do you catch a cold, or can we start calling it a hot.” I guess if the symptoms are the same you might as well call it a cold, but people here call their porch a lanai, so why can’t I call it a hot? I mean I don’t feel cold. Ponder that for a second.

On to what I really wanted to talk about. One of the blogs I just began reading is about designing niche websites for automatic income, called automatic income sites or AIS. Although I haven’t fully jumped into developing these, the idea behind it seems fascinating. Put up a site, leave it alone, and watch it make money for you. Brilliant. The blog is called Niche Designer Blog and is part of HelloKelli.com. HelloKelli is where the main information and links to each niche site are but the blog I find interesting because the person (I assume Kelli although have not found an about page), has begun posting about the niche site development process as well as earnings and advertisement trials (not just the default AdSense).

Her (or His) most recent post is about SEO tools. The post has a link to a site called Search Engine Optimization Tools. Why I haven’t found this site through my Google searches is beyond me but I’m glad I’ve found it now. There are all types of tools located there including a really useful tool called the backlink builder. It allows you to enter a keyword and then it returns sites that offer link exchanges or add url here pages. It’s great for building incoming links which is half the battle in developing a high traffic site.

There are countless other tools that are pretty fun to play around with as well. You can check out the rankings and indexed pages of all your competitors or favorite pages, you can see how much a link should cost on your page per month, or see the density of keywords on your pages. You can use that last tool to check on a competing site and see how many times a keyword is used on their site, especially if it’s google search results ranking is higher than yours. For niche sites, this could mean dollars a day! There are quite a few other tools all neatly organized into one simple site. Sure you can go to Google and type in all the links:www.blahbla.com or site:www.blahblah.com but it’s so much easier when someone does it for you. Why re-invent the wheel?

Hope it helps you out.

Aloha,
Erik
Trying to get better

Thanks to two helpful sites (one at moshu the wordpress moderator’s site and the other at Jonathan Wold’s great site) as well as a lot of trial and error, I was able to add a WordPress Blog to my existing site. The other site AlohaUpdate.com used to be a very cumbersome static html only site that was created using a Dreamweaver template that I hacked up into my own. Now it has all the functionality of a blog with the same static pages it did before.

I added the blog in order to have a daily update as to all the crazy adventures my girlfriend and I have around the islands. This way I can easily build content within the site and attract more search results without having to labor through all of the static html programming. I am still going to keep updating all the static pages but at a more gradual pace. Plus a blog allows visitors to believe that you are updating the site regularly rather than once and leave it. The islands are always changing and adding new adventures for us so we thought it only right to show our visitors this.

There are basically two ways to add a blog to an existing site. One way is to place a simple php loop within the area that you want your blog text to appear. The other is to design a theme around your existing html site using CSS (cascading style sheets) and update your links accordingly. I chose to do the second option because the first has a few drawbacks for someone looking for a quick solution. The loop only allows the page to retrieve the post from the WordPress file. WordPress has no control over the setup of the links within the site and therefore makes the post title link, comments link, categories link, and paged navigation link useless. I would imaging on would have to develop quite a few php files to create the illusion that the links discussed above came from the WordPress engine.

The second option on the other hand allows the blog page (in my case the index page) to be its own control of the blog, and as long as the links out of the blog direct themselves to the proper folders and files there will be no problems with all those mentioned links. For example, on AlohaUpdate.com there are links at the top of the page to navigate to our pages on the different islands. At first when I created the index.php file within my new theme folder I kept the links the same thinking the index.php rerouted to the index.php within the main blog folder. (I am using an “Out of the Box” WordPress setup so I assume as long as you didn’t change anything these files and folders will make sense) This is not the case. the index.php file you can access from the WordPress administration site is within the wp-content/themes/ folder structure so the static links that worked before won’t work unless you paste all your linked files to the themes folder, messy. Instead what you can do is direct each of these links on the main them template (index.php) to the URL of your blog (http://www.yoursite.com/folder/file/etc/etc) and this will give you the same functionality as if you were starting from the main folder.

Another thing I noticed from this that was a little odd was when I used copy and paste within my host (netfirms) it changed all the pictures to .JPG rather than keeping them what I had as .jpg. This does make a difference. So, if you use your hosting company’s file manager to copy and paste files, check to make sure it didn’t decide to redo your file extensions, especially if your pictures don’t work afterwards.

I would write more about how to integrate and add a WordPress blog to your existing site but I think Moshu and Jonathan do a pretty darn good job of it. If there are any questions or concerns I would be glad to make another post about this but will save my time for cleaning up Aloha Update. I have some links that seem to not be working and I need to redirect some of those includes.

In trying to become a scratch golfer I have learned that you need to practice body control as much as possible. Since I am not getting payed to do this, have many other goals, and work full time, I am unable to sit on the course or on the driving range working day in and day out on this. Body control is what I call keeping your waist, shoulders, and knees in their respective plane throughout the swing.

A key element to making sure you don’t dip or raise your body out of one of these planes is taking a proper back swing with only body rotation. Doing this will eliminate the need for your body to compensate and get back to a square position at impact from an out of plane rotation on your back swing. Since the swing I am using to become a scratch golfer is a one plane swing I try and just worry about body rotation and letting my arms go along for the ride. Therefore I have begun to use a quick and easy drill to work on my back swing or takeaway and keep all those planes level.

Drill
It’s a very simple drill that you can do anywhere; waiting for an elevator, the bus, grocery line, watching TV, anywhere. You first need to get into the proper golf stance, whatever yours may be. Then, as I have mentioned before, you need to begin your rotation back with just your shoulders, read don’t crash your helicopter for an explanation of proper shoulder turn. While you are rotating your shoulders focus all your energy on keeping your waist pointing straight ahead. If you have a belt buckle it should remain in the same position the whole time. You will begin to feel a strain in your mid to lower back. You may even begin to feel short of breath from the torque that is being built up.

Once you get back as far as you can go stop and hold it for a couple seconds. This will help stretch out those muscles giving you more torque with a greater body rotation. Keep doing this until it become ingrained in your muscles and you can easily repeat it while hitting golf balls. Once on the range your waist will turn slightly but you should do this drill without turning it at all.

You can also add the downswing practice after a while which all I do is straighten my left (forward) leg and my shoulders follow the uncoiling of my lower back and swing through the imaginary ball.

My hope with this drill is to make my swing more repeatable by eliminating all that extra motion in my back swing which makes my body try and adjust on the fly. Last week I had 5 pars on a tough course, Luana Hills, and still shot a 94. I should have easily been under 80, but had a 3 triple bogey holes due to duffs, slices, and fat shots. I also hope this drill will help you in your golfing goals whether its trying to get to scratch or trying to break 100.

Good luck,
Erik

Just thought I would mention this to my regular readers and to whoever finds me from a search engine or other Blog. I am up to 14 people subscribed to my feed through FeedBurner and I get an average of 45 unique visitors a day. So enjoy this little tidbit.

Steve Pavlina and his blog are becoming a blogging icon. He has increased his visitors to over 700,000 unique visitors a month in a little over a year. Amazing! And with posts like this he’s bound to get just a few more. Just today Steve placed an “advertise here” box in the upper left hand corner of his blog. The advertisement section is powered by BlogAds, a great new blog advertisement tool where you can publish ads, find advertisers for your site, or find blogs to advertise on. Companies such as MSNBC have bought tons of ads from BlogAds in the largest blogads buy ever.

Now Steve has offered up his high traffic blog to people like you and I to buy a very premium spot in the top left corner of his blog! His price list is as follows:

1 week ($650)
2 weeks ($1300)
1 month ($2800)
3 months ($8350)

Now I haven’t dealt with AdWords at all so I don’t know the pricing of it too well but lets do some math with average click through rates for Steve’s recent AdSense results article. If he really has $5,000 in earnings for the same month that he has 700,000 unique visitors and we can consider that each click through might bring him and average of $0.40 per click then he has $5,000/0.40 = 12,500 clicks. 700,000/12,500 he has a click through rate per unique visitor of 1.5%, pretty much average if you read around on the web. That means for $650 you have the potential to get 12,500/4 = 3125 unique visitors, in one week. Of course you could get more or less it all depends on how well your add matches his content to get people to click through.

Just thought I would mention this as another possibility for your advertising needs. Almost a million people seeing your ad in one month for $2800 isn’t too bad of an idea. If you’re only getting money from AdSense it might not be worth it, but if you have a service where you can make a lot of money off a few people then it’s well worth the money. You choose, just passing on the info.

Post Update
You can find out more about why he place blogads on his blog here. I was wondering when he was going to post something about it and it is interesting to note that he went with them because he is a little bit ticked off with how chitika is running their ad program. Glad I could be one of the first to post about this in the blogosphere late last night, even before Steve

Have you been looking for training tips to break the 6 minute mile? Well you’ve come to the right place. I have trained for competition in the mile for about 7 years total, in 7th grade I began and broke 6 minutes in 8th. Through high school I ran, training for running just during the 3 months that is track season. I was able to get my times down to the low 4:20’s and owe most of that to coaching and training.

Within this post I am going to outline a basic training schedule so you will be able to run a 6 minute mile, or faster. There are also some milestones you should reach along the way, and some guidelines to tell you if you are ready to run below 6 minutes. I would like to start out by giving a warning: IF YOU HAVEN”T BEEN ACTIVE AT ALL FOR THE PAST 5 MONTHS JUMPING INTO TRAINING FOR A FAST MILE WILL ONLY HURT YOU.

Now on the other hand if you have been active and what I mean by this is getting your heart rate up, and more importantly allowing your legs joints and muscles to see similar impact that they will see in running; such as running, basketball, soccer, some biking, etc, then you should be OK. I just want to point out that you should consult a doctor before you start any training.

Now on to training. If you have been running and want to get your time down the following training routines should help you out. I have split it up into a 13 weeks with milestones. If you reach the milestones earlier you can feel free to jump ahead to the next portion of training but I recommend, for your long term running health, stick with the time line.

Three things you want to keep track of: 1. Total Mileage, 2. Long Run Pace, 3. How your legs feel. You want to keep your total mileage up at first and taper down when it comes to race time, knowing what you ran is a good way to do this. Your longer runs, on your so called days off, shouldn’t always be at the same pace. These runs are what we will use as indicators for how you are progressing. Lastly, if you don’t keep track of how your legs feel how will you know how to back off so you don’t get injured?

Base Building

If you’ve been running more than 20 miles a week you can skip to Week 3

Week 1

Non-runner: Start out slow, run 3 times this week and run 1 to 3 miles. Just get used to it

Recreational runner: I assume you run 2 or 3 times a week already, or more. Continue this but keep track of your pace, what you ran for each mile. You should be running each mile in at least 8:00 to 8:30, that’s minutes and seconds. Run about 2-4 miles each run.

Progressed Runner: You probably are running 20 miles or more a week. Keep this up but make sure you are running faster than 8:30 pace.

I have found the slower I run the more pain it causes my joints. All that pounding, there was no momentum carrying my weight forward, it was all going into my knees, shins and ankles. Pick up the pace you’ll need to.

Week 2
Non-runner: If you’re hurting, as in shins and knees, consult a doctor or run less, this may take you a little longer, repeat week 1 either way.

Recreation runner: Repeat week 1 but add some strides at the end of two of your running days. Preferably on grass find a distance that is 50-150 yards and run at a fast pace taking long strides. Stop rest and run back. Do 5 of these this week.

Progressed Runner: Repeat week 1 as well and add some strides just like the recreational runner.

Week3
Non-runner: We are still building a base here but you should be up to at least 8 miles of running a week all at about 8:30 pace, maybe faster. Try doing strides, 50-150 yards on grassy surface, running at a fast pace, “striding” out your legs.

Recreational Runner: You’ve probably had an easy time with this and should be running 8 to 12 miles this week (or more). Try and bump your running up to 4 times this week, more if you can handle it. Do strides again, 5 times at the end of 3 runs.

Progressed runner: You’re probably running 5 times a week, just remember to keep the pace below 8 minutes per mile. Do strides 3 times this week.

Week 4 - This will be the last week of base building

Non-runner: You might have one or two more weeks of base building. If you haven’t been able to run at least 10 miles within a week all at below 8:30 pace go back to week 2 and follow through on the steps. Trust me you’ll be glad.

Recreational runner and Progressed runner: You both should be at about 12-20 miles a week, and each mile should be better than 8:30 pace. Finish off week four with the same amount as in week 3 as well as doing the same amount of strides. Take note of your legs and make sure to stop if you feel pain in the shins. Don’t go slower, you’re legs will be junk if you slow down your pace, trust me.

Get on the Track

Once you’ve got up to 10-20 miles per week of running at 8:30 or better pace you’ll need to find a route that is a half a mile long. I prefer a track but if you don’t have access to that look for a half mile loop on a trail, and then if you don’t have that go to a road (not the best for your legs). This is where you will begin really training to run a faster mile time. I will write this in week formats as above but assume you now know what pace is and mileage.

Warm-ups: Your warm-ups should start off slow (not slower than 8:30 pace) until you get loose, I suggest running for about 10 minutes. Remember to stretch.

Cool-down: Your cool-down time should be about 5-10 minutes, just get your legs back to resting. Remember to stretch.

Pace: You should run your workouts (800s, 400s, and 200s) all at the same pace. Check your watch at 200 meters or even 100 meters for each lap and make sure you are on pace for to complete the laps for the correct time.

Week 5

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Week 6

Repeat Week 1, you don’t want your legs being mad because you began to do some speed work. Just make sure you are doing your mileage at 8:30 pace or better.

Week 7

All runs this week should be run at 8 minute mile pace or better. If you aren’t used to it you may have difficulty the first 1 or 2 runs. But stick with it, you’ll get used to it.

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Week 8

Again all runs this week should be run at 8 minute mile pace or better. This week will probably be the hardest week for your track workout day. You should try and get the first two 800’s in the correct time. The remaining two you should of course work your hardest to get them in the correct time but if you slip don’t think it’s the end of the world. Just make sure you don’t slip below your pace from last week for your 800’s (5 seconds slower than this week.)

Next week we will go for one 800 at below 6 minute mile pace. You will have to push yourself so practice pushing yourself this week.

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Week 9

Keep going at 8 minute pace. This should be getting easy for you by now.

Non-Runners. Do one more week like week 7 but drop the 800 time to 3:20. For the other two go onto the following week 9 workouts.

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Week 10

You should now try for runs of 7:45 pace or better for everyone. If you can get to this point and you were able to complete last weeks 800 workout then you are on your way to running a 6 minute mile! That’s only 90 second quarters, therefore we will now throw into the mix a couple of 400 meter runs (400 yards if that’s easier for you, it’s close enough.) We’re going to throw in two workouts this week. It shouldn’t be too bad if you have been able to complete the mileage and pace as of yet. Almost there

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Week 11

Remember to keep running 7:45 pace for all your runs, if you can go faster then by all means go faster just don’t burn your body out. This week we will speed up our 400’s just a little more. For you non-runners you will finally run a pace faster than 6 minute mile pace. Push yourself to get there and you will reap the rewards soon.

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Begin The TAPER

Week 12

You’re very close now. The next two weeks we will do something called tapering. Your legs have been getting used to running a lot of miles at decent pace, building strength and speed. Now you will run less intense workouts and your legs will get energized for you to run that 6 minute mile or better.

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Week 13

The last week. Run at a decent pace for your regular runs. If you were finding it easy to run at 7:45 pace then keep it up. If that was a struggle don’t worry about slowing down this week, your legs will love you. Run a little less mileage this week and enjoy the rest. You should plan to run the mile over the weekend but if you can’t run a few miles such as Friday and Saturday the days leading up to the run. Do some extra strides if you need for some of the days leading up.

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The 6 Minute day and Pacing
There you have it, 13 weeks to a 6 minute mile. The day of the race you should go over your usual race routine. If you don’t have one treat it like a workout day. Warm up for about 10 minutes. Stretch, do some strides, stretch some more and then get ready to run! If you were able to finish all the workouts you should be able to easily run a 6 minute mile. If you are looking for pacing I will only mention that I like to use the pyramid ideal. Run your first and last lap the same but faster than your middle two laps which should be the same as each other. Take this for instance:

85 seconds - 95 seconds - 95 seconds - 85 seconds

When you get to the last 200 meters, kick, kick, kick. You will do it.

Good Luck,
Erik

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