Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

I finally got a Google PageRank and it was initiated at a PageRank of 4! This actually came as I was debating whether or not to change this blog and split it up into 5 more directed blogs with the sub categories of Blogging, Finance, Running, Golfing, and Tennis. My thought is to stop this blog and change it’s name completely and write about each topic at a new blog. It would require a lot of redirects and a lot of transferring of data but it might be worth it.

As of right now my stats are about 40 unique visitors a day with an average of 28 subscribers a day via rss feeds. Not sure how many of those rss’ers read my text but the feeds are downloaded. These aren’t great stats and my blogging hasn’t become as consistent.

I guess I am unsure if my blogging has been helpful with this mosh pit of information. These are my options. Let me know what you think is a good idea.

1. Change just my blog name (essentially a title tag change not that big) - I like “Blogging on Empty” or “Running on Empty,” the reason for the change is because I don’t think the name lends itself to much modesty. Some people might get the wrong idea behind what I’m trying to get across.

2. Change just the name and URL - I registered BloggingOnEmpty.com and I think it conveys the fact that I’m trying to blog while doing all this other stuff and holding a full time job. Maybe I can give it as a show you how type of blog.

3. Slowly phase out this blog by switchting all writing about blogging, domaining, and site building to bloggingonempty.com and then start 4 other blogs about running, finance, golfing, and tennis. That way I could use my PageRank of 4 but I would loose all that valuable content were I to ever switch to my new sites completely. I guess I could transfer the content to the appropriate sites if I wanted to once this is done?….

I kind of like the last idea. That way I use my blog to change the url and the direction of it without loosing all the hardwork and links that I’ve built up so far. This might work. It would mean that I would have to essentially maintain 8 blogs at once but that might be a fun challenge. I don’t write daily at Sprint Rants and this one would be phased out in about 5 months so I would essentially have 6 full time blogs with the 5 mentioned here plus myHawaii activities site.

Let me know what you all think, those of you that consistently read my blog or are just dropping by. Leave a comment and direct me please.

Thanks guys.

Erik

The Perfect Mile

The Perfect Mile by Neal Bascomb is just like the subtitle reads: “Three Athletes, one goal, and less than four minutes to achieve it.” For any person who has trained to run a mile I believe the dream of the four minute mile is bouncing around their head somewhere, man or women. The number is somewhat magical, just over 4 laps around a standard track, in less than 1 minute per lap, and the Author portrays every minute of it’s mystic quality on every page of this book.

The Perfect Mile follows three runners during the middle of the 20th century as they all compete against the clock and each other to break the unbreakable barrier first. Roger Bannister, the English fellow, John Landy the Aussie, and Wes Santee the American.

Neal Bascomb captures the excitement of each race, the grueling battles of workouts these men completed, as well as the human side of pushing yourself to the limit. I was amazed at how well a story I already new the ending to could be written but it kept me reading more and more with every page I turned. Even though the outcome was set in stone, literally, I could feel myself rooting for the underdog and wanting history to be rewritten.

The Perfect Mile ends with a less known race between Roger Banister and John Landy that will leave you wishing there were more races written down. This book is a must for anyone wanting an inspirational book about sport and life.

For those of you that run, or those of you that blog, or those of you that run and blog, Darren over at Problogger had a post with a great analogy between running efficiently and blogging efficiently. He has recently been attending the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne Australia and noticed that some of the best sprinters glide effortlessly down the track easily beating competitors that push themselves to exhaustion.

For those of you who run and especially race you know the feeling when someone passes you with a smile on their face while you struggle with every stride. Annoying, isn’t it. If you’re like me you think the same thing when you visit a blogger who seemingly effortlessly posts massive amounts of useful content day in and day out.

Now some of these people, like Darren, blog for a living, and some those people, like Asafa Powell, run for a living. Keeping up with people who make their living at blogging is going to be tough. However, you can become better at posting by focusing on what makes posting easy and what allows you to write a lot. Mostly it’s going to be things you’re interested in. Try to have a plan and work towards. Like running it will take practice, you’ll need to practice a routine and focus on writing faster and better.

Of course, like running, blogging might not be for everyone but you can at least try for the “gold” and practice, practice, practice.

I bought the latest issue of Forbes Magazine which is their special Billionaires Issue. I figured the list would be a couple hundred people long but come to find out there are 793 people in the world with over a billion dollars in assets. $1,000,000,000, now that’s a lot of money. United States leads the world with the most billionaires at 371 with Germany coming a distant second at 55, followed by Russia and Japan with 33 and 27 people respectively.

There were 102 more billionaires than last year with countries like India and China adding 10 and 6 new billionaires due to huge gains in stock markets and outsourcing. Millionaires are becoming old hat around the world. It’s just not the same when thousands around the US become millionaires yearly.

Here is a list of the top 25 Richest People in the World.

1. Bill Gates $50
2. Warren Buffet $42
3. Carlos Slim Helu $30
4. Ingvar Kamprad $28
5. Lakshmi Mittal $23.5
6. Paul Allen $22
7. Bernard Arnault $21.5
8. Prince Alwaleed $20
9. Kenneth Thomson $19.6
10. Li Ka-Shing $18.8
11. Roman Abramovich $18.2
12. Michael Dell $17.1
13. Karl Albrecht $17
14. Sheldon Adelson $16.1
15. Larry Ellison $16
15. Liliane Bettencourt $16
17. Christy Walton $15.9
17. Jim Walton $15.9
19. S Robson Walton $15.8
20. Alice Walton $15.7
21. Helen Walton $15.6
22. Theo Albrecht $17.0
23. Amancio Ortega $14.8
24. Steven Ballmer $13.6
25. R, T & W Kwok $11.6

Two other notables are Sergey Brin and Larry page or Google coming in at 26 and 27 respectively with $12.9 and $12.8. Dollars are in Billion of Dollars. Good Luck all you chasing the dream.

From Tucson, Arizona to Boston Massachusetts I couldn’t get away from the Indie Virus. I, along with a good friend of mine were recently “infected” with the Indie Virus from one of our favorite bloggers Yaro Starak. It appears a young man by the name of Chris pearson passed on the indie virus to Yaro and he was paying it forward to Cesar and I. Thanks for that.

To give you all an idea of how the virus has helped and to let Yaro know he done some good my feedburner subscriber stats read 20 people prior to the virus being sneezed my way. Now, 3 days later my subscriber stats have climbed 29 with steady increases each day! My stats are still having trouble surpassing the 60 uniques a day average but I have been away from truly helpful blog posts for a while and would find it hard to believe a mass of people would show up at my blog(step) just by dumb luck. You gotta help out the people to gain some sort of following.

Now I must pass on the Indie Virus and help out those around me that have inspired or entertained me over the past 4 months. Since my blog is basically about all the stuff I am working towards accomplishing I am going to send the virus to several blogs spanning a few categories. First off I am going to send the virus to Sean at A Runner’s Blog. I enjoy following his training and results to keep me going through my own training. Next up I am sending the virus to Success Minders” who recently wrote a nice article about training to learn. Good posts for those of you trying to work on your personal development. Lastly I am sending the Indie Virus to Scott. He may not need the virus but I love his blog and his idea. For those of you who don’t know he is a guy that has been wearing a name tag every day of his life for quite some time now as a sort of social experiment. Always interesting to see what he is up to.

Now that I have spread the virus and updated my blog I am going to have to head out. I’ve never been in Boston before and got in late last night so I had to start late today. I plan on visiting Harvard and MIT since I hear a lot of nerds hang out around there. Plus I want to say I’ve been there done that. Then maybe I’ll swing past Fenway Park and see if I can see any diehards setting up tents prior to the season beginning. I hear these fans are crazy.

Haven’t been posting much lately because I have been working hard developing a prototype and testing and tweaking that. Plus I’m traveling a bit to the mainland for work which has been keeping me busy. I know I promised a great tip about helping those who have been worried about their YPN account and I will keep my word and get it up here soon. I really think it’ll help a lot of you out and feel bad that I haven’t gotten to it. I would say it’s about half done but only the easy half. Time wise I still have about 4/5ths to work on.

As for the new look of these here pages I really enjoy them. I would suggest that if you haven’t tried nifty corners you do. I still have to tweak the location and call of the java files but I think I am going to keep the general feel of the site that I’ve created. As far as I can tell it is a unique enough layout that I may even try and package it for download by others using wordpress.

As for the holes in my blog that I have to fill: the goals section in the upper right hand corner needs to be completed. I plan on making a page for each goal and telling a little about why I may want to accomplish that goal and how things are going. I also need to continue to update on my golfing and running. For the most part (minus these last two weeks) I have been running quite a bit. Golf is getting a little expensive for me and I may have to spend more time on the range until I can go twilight at a local course.

My sites are coming along. I fell behind on my 12 in 12 months but it hasn’t been 12 months and I won’t give up that easy. I may about $0.50 a week and I would say that my sites are very poorly monetized so that is somewhat encouraging. $2 a month could easily turn into $20 a month if I were to place ads in the correct places. Once I return home from my trips I may try and work out a good strategy to get the monetization done.

Other than that I have to keep adding good content that helps others rather than these types of “Sorry for not Posting” updates. We’ll see how it goes.

Erik

When you’re golfing, why should you shoot for the hole? Sounds ridiculous right. Wrong.

Most golfers I play with or see have high handicaps. Like me they’re working down from around 100 and can’t seem to get anywhere. One of the biggest obstacles that I’ve had to overcome is shooting for the hole. What I mean is playing every shoot towards the hole. Since I don’t have a controllable fade or draw I cringe at going for spot right of the hole or left of the hole. My guess is so do you.

Playing on island courses and some of the most difficult in the world (slope and rating wise) I have learned you don’t always need to go for the hole. A lot of times the smart shot is to the right away from the bunkers 150 yards short! Most of the time I would take out my 3 wood and go for the glory. It was hard for me to justify hitting the ball short on my second shot into a par four and then trying to chip the ball close. That isn’t even laying up in most golfers books.

But it works! My scores have dropped quite a bit since I began to shot for a wide open patch rather than between two trees. Here’s some of the thoughts I go through when selecting a shot.

Play It Short on a Par Four

- One of the most helpful things I’ve done to improve my scores is to not go for the hole every shot on every hole. On Par fours where my tee shot has left me a horrible angle into the hole, or in a position where if I over shoot the hole it’s going to go long, dribble down a hill and end up OB, I lay it up. Of course I have worked also on improving my short game in the process, but laying up has shaved at least three strokes off some rounds.

Too often us duffers hit a tee shot to the left and leave ourselves behind a patch of trees that we need to either draw the ball around or shoot a perfectly straight shot dropping, with backspin. Both shots I don’t have in my repertoire quite yet. Instead, why not pull out a 4 iron take a half swing and pooch the ball low under the tree and out in the middle of the fairway. Chip the ball close you could save par, two putt and you get bogey. On your way to a 90!

Why Not Roll it Up

- Another shot that you should add to your bag-o-tricks is the seven or eight iron from 40 yards away. If there aren’t any bunkers in front of you why do you need so much air under the ball? Do you have the skill to drop the ball next to the hole? If I am within about 10-20 yards of the fringe with nothing in front of me I often take out my eight iron and look to get the ball just high enough to create some roll and get it on the green going towards the hole.

My guess is that most of you take out those brand new wedges you bought and skull the ball shooting it straight over the green and into the bunker on the other side. If you watch Big Break IV you noticed that a lot of them shot old English pitch shots where the ball would land 10 yards from the green but roll up in a good position. If you have no obstacles, some decent fairway in front of you, don’t work on your short game. Pull out the 8 or even 9 iron and use the much easier controllable pitch shot.

Long and Straight or Short and Open

- If you are like most you pull out your driver and go for the glory of hitting the long ball dead down the center of the fairway. Unless your playing from the back tees, you don’t need to let the big dog eat every single time. Especially if there is a patch of trees hanging over the right or left edge of the fairway.

On a lot of the island courses here in Hawaii there are short par fours but the designers placed a few trees about 100 yards out from the tee box blocking your route to the hole. You could hug the trees and go over them long or take out a 5 wood and shoot short to a big open patch. Hmm. I usually go hugging trees and shooting long, or at least try. Too often I find myself in the bushes trying to punch my ball at the hole (see previous). Might I suggest the 5 wood next time. 150-170 out is a lot better than 200 out and under a bush.

The biggest take away you should have from this is to not always go for the glory. Trust me. Look ahead to where your shot could be and then look at what some other options are. Start playing for bogey’s on every hole rather than playing for pars. You’ll begin to see the game in a hole new way and look towards scratch golfing like a reality instead of a dream.

I was recently Googling self improvement, entrepreneurship, and making money via content based websites and began to realize something. I’m stuck in a community where everyone knows everyone. What I mean by this is that I began blogging because a friend showed me Steve Pavlina’s and then Yaro’s Entrepreneur-Journey blog. From there I promoted my blog to those linked to and from Yaro’s or Steve’s. I would trackback, leave comments and try and link exchange with people who were reading those and similar blogs.

This was all fine and dandy for a while but I then noticed that all my comments were coming from people reading the same stuff that I was. The same stuff in the same niche dominated by Yaro, Steve, or Darren. Where is there room for me in that company?

That’s when I began to Google the topics of my blog looking for similar forums or blogs outside of this sub-web I got myself stuck in. Now don’t get me wrong, the sub-web led by the likes of those three is a good one to get in and I feel as though I have learned about a whole other business world. However, I needed to widen my blogs reach. I love the aussie’s as much as the next person but that seem to be where most of my comments were coming from and a good chuck of my repeat visitors as well. (Maybe they just like tennis and running more than other countries.)

In order to widen my blogs reach I decided to focus on several methods which I list below.

Google Your Topics

- As I mentioned the number one way to get into other sub-webs of bloggers is by googling your blogs topics and then following links on the blog or page results. I sometimes use google blog search beta but most of the time I’ll just google it and sooner or later come upon someones blog related to my search. I just make sure those people don’t have a link or back link to the usual blogs related to the 3 mentioned previously.

From there you can leave a comment, email the publisher, or click a link through to another blog. Eventually you should find someone responsive and if you leave good information you’re bound to get some type of traffic back to your blog. Even if it’s minor. Every bit of traffic helps.

Forums

- There’s no better way to boost traffic than by slipping your URL into a useful post at a medium to high traffic forum. It’s like when someone begin interviewed slips in their product line or company URL, you can’t beat the free promotion. Now some are bigger than others and you could post until you’re blue in the face and not get any outside links from it. But the goal here is to widen your reach. So look for forums that aren’t mentioned a million times in the usual pages you read. I found that the little traffic spikes from forum promotion have carried on for about 3-7 days depending on the forum posted in.

Just remember to post useful stuff. If you are shamelessly dropping your URL the people who visit often and ave websites to link from can spot you a mile away. Be helpful and informative and the traffic will come.

Look For No-Name Blogs

- Like no-name steaks, no-name blogs can be a diamond in the rough. I’m talking about blogs like this one where not a lot of people know it yet. If you bookmark the blog and comment usefully every now and then on their blog, and that person keeps posting and builds traffic, you’ll get the links into your blog. This is where you can really begin to widen your blogs reach.

Being the first “fan” of an up and coming blog will make you a hit. People that begin to visit or comment on that particular site will think you an expert or a friend, either way they’ll be curious and want to find more out about you. Click on your name, BAM, at your site. Beautiful.

Don’t Do The Usual

I guess in closing what I want to say is that if you are getting in a rut with your blog you should begin to search elsewhere for links. People in your niche might already have their 10 favorites and be passing yours by because they don’t have time. You want to find related blogs that don’t know about the big dogs yet so you can solidify yourself as a big dog.

Get out there and search for a new friend and possibly a new repeat reader. Keep updating your content and see where it leads. Hopefully some new eyeballs will be looking at your pages in no time.

It’s been almost two weeks since my last post which would make it the longest break I’ve taken from writing on this blog. As you can probably tell I have been busy learning a few things about PHP, CSS, and overall web page design. The new look spawned from my wanting rounded corners and a more bubbly Web 2.0 feel (excuse me if I use Web 2.0 loosely). I searched the internet for ways to make round edges on your web pages and came upon a site which uses only html and java script, NO IMAGES. This means a faster page load time if you’re going to use a lot of rounded corners in your design, like I have.

The coding I used was taken from Nifty Corners. All you need to add to your Wordpress or blog folders are two java script files and two CSS sheets. You could get away with one java file but I found it better to use the extra layout java script file as in example 10 of the Nifty Corners web site mentioned above. There are some downfalls with the scripting used in Nifty Corners but most can be fixed by adding extra div tags before or after the rounded elements. These downfalls mainly deal with padding and margins.

I have also been following my goals running further distances, trying to organize my finances, and developing more and more useful websites. I currently have 3 websites, with another in the early stages of development that will be my jump into Niche Content based AIS websites. I had a trip to Maui, I have an upcoming business trip back to the mainland and work is becoming increasingly busy. All in all, I need to slow down focus in on what I need to get done which I hope to get back on track within this next week.

I have also developed what I think is an interesting and quick way to solve some peoples problems they have been having with getting kicked out of Yahoo’s YPN advertising network. I have spoke with representatives from both Yahoo (via phone) and Google (via email) who tell me the ways I am fixing the problem abide by both companies rules. I hope to have a tutorial on that published here by the end of the week. I have to go back and look at the steps I took to see where I can simplify the process for others.

Look for that soon and more helpful posts as I learn to juggle a hundred things at once.