Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

As I was sitting out on the waves today during my lunch break I began to think about some recent “affiliate” income that I was able to generate. It got me to thinking how great the offer is and how it essentially creates $35 for the economy.

Some of you may remember one of my first posts titled Wanna Make $25. It could have been better titled “Here’s $25 for Free” or earn “Earn 10% On an Investment in One Day.” But either way it got the point across. Inspired by Steve Pavlina’s post (surprise surprise) about offering his ING referrals through his website I thought I would do the same. Besides I was learning about affiliate income being generated through other websites and this was a sure fire way to have people make me $10.

For those of you who don’t know the deal goes like this. INGDirect.com is an online banking firm with very few physical banks anywhere. Essentially 1 per major city. Having less people and leases allows them to give back more to their customers in the way of interest. Currently their interest rate on a basic savings account is 3.9%. Better than a lot of CDs that I have seen from local banks. When you sign-up with them you are allowed to get people to sign-up through you and make some money. When the referral you acquire joins INGDirect by funding their account with at least $250, you’ll get $10 credited to your account but better yet your referral will get $25. They don’t even have to put any more money in the account and they still get to keep the $25.

Yup, the only affiliate program I know of where your customer gets payed, guaranteed.

The best part is, you tie your checking account to the savings account and transfer money between the two just like you would if you had a savings account at your own bank. It’s that easy to fun the account. You can withdraw money whenever and you can fund the account whenever. Just like your bank it takes a day or two to clear between accounts and that’s it. No fees, nothing.

Well, as I mentioned I posted that about 5 months ago when this blog first went live. Since then I have gotten 0, the doughnut, to sign-up. I had one person email me about it but no one sign-up. Then, out of the blue, on Monday I got an email from someone interested in getting an ING account but not wanting to fund their account without the opportunity to get the free money.

All I had to do was get her email address and her first and last name and send her an email from my ING account with that information and there you have it. Done! $25 for her, $10 for me, $35 of free money created.

By the way if you would like to get and ING Direct account and make $25 for free send me and email at evossman@gmail.com and include your return email address, First, and Last name, and I’ll get you a referral link as soon as possible.

FREE MONEY

My good friend and peer Cesar has just launched Kokua Design and Consulting and wants to give you a free website. That’s right, a free custom website design. All you have to do is head on over to his blog (check out that custom design while you’re there) and read about his custom site design contest, send him a proposal for your site via the contact form, and then leave a comment on his site that you entered the contest.

To give you a little more on who Cesar is, he has a background in computer science and has been designing websites and programs for over 10 years. I know from experience as a co-worker and a friend that Cesar’s attention to detail will produce only top quality sites. He is able to learn whatever technology you need for your site and can help you achieve the site look, feel, and interactivity that you need.

Head over to fleethecube.com and join Cesar’s custom website contest. He is accepting entries for the next 3 days until April 28th, 2006, (that’s Friday.) Check it out, it’s free and you can get a great site.

I opened up the business section of the local paper, The Honolulu Advertiser, today to find quite a shock. I was checking to see how the DOW and NASDAQ were doing, what were the big movers and shakers of the previous day and also how some commodities were fairing when I stumbled across an interesting and astonishing quote.

SILVER IS AT $14.00 AN OZ.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Could that be right?

Sure is. A while back I posted about how if you had a decent source of 1, 5, and 10 oz. silver or gold bars you could stand to make a sure profit on EBay, so long as you bought at a few dimes over spot price. (spot is fancy for saying the quote, like a stock quote, measured in dollars per troy oz.) I had bought and sold several bars but didn’t have the time to track down a source, or which there wasn’t one on the island here in Hawaii. Shipping would kill my margins if not bought in huge quantities. At the time I was buying the bars oz. by oz. for $7.00 and oz. at a local jewelery store.

I had done some research into precious metal price trends and from what I could tell both gold and silver would be a strong buy, so long as interest rates continued to rise and the economy made an OK comeback. Everything the fed was indicating suggested interest rates were on the rise and the economy had already rebounded, precious metals just hadn’t responded yet.

My idea was to keep buying silver and eventually gold and selling it on EBay. With the profits and only the profits I would buy silver bars and keep them as part of an investment. This way I would be risking nothing but my time and energy for a sure thing investment and learn about marketing, EBay sales, and running an investment business. “Precious metals are a poor investment,” said the jeweler that I was buying from.

Now as I mentioned I didn’t really have the time to become an internet entrepreneur in silver and I didn’t have the boat loads of cash to be spending on the silver to negate shipping costs in terms of my margin. However, having someone in the business of precious metals telling me it was a bad investment didn’t necessarily help all that much.

This is where I should have seen what those comments were, which was someone who goes with the norm and what they’ve been told and doesn’t want to take the risk which at the time and from my limited research seemed like a solid investment. Funny that I read that today as I just finished a book titled The Essential Buffet about Warren Buffet and his using Value investing when everyone else preaches diversification and uses a more high portfolio turnover approach. Buffet has gone against the norms for over 40 years of investing and done quite fine for himself.

Lesson learned. Stick to your calculations, stick to your own ideals, and try to not be so influenced by the norm. If I had continued with the so called risky investment plan I would be up 100% in one year. It may now be too late to get into the mix but I will have to evaluate the market once again and see where things could go from here.

April is almost half over and I would consider myself half way to a few of my April month goals.

I have completed work on setting up 2 of my blogs for my blog network. The design is done which really took me the longest time and setting all of the php and css up so that I could easily transfer the files and start a new blog with the same look. I would consider it a success. It took me approximately 1 hour to set up the color scheme and the 4 graphics that I needed to create and another hour transferring the files and changing some of the out going links and set up pages. That was 2 hours to setup a complete blog with a unique layout.

My athletic goals saw a little attention this last week, not as much as previous weeks but still working towards a goal. I ran twice averaging about a 7 minute mile pace for all 8.5 miles of running, and biked twice for about 45 miles total. I neglected to swim all week long except last Sunday which I only swam in the pool here at the condo where I live. I also played tennis once and lifted weights one day.

The next week I hope to setup 3 more blogs, swim 3 days, run 3 days, bike 3 days, play tennis 2 days, and get to the driving range at least once. Now I said it, let’s get’r done!

During the past week I have been working on developing the Wordpress template for my blog network and have tried to locate and install a few valuable Wordpress plug-ins. (Plug-ins are addons for Wordpress that perform some function valuable to the publisher) Below I have listed and linked the top 5 Wordpress plug-ins that I am using and a little bit about why I feel they are so useful.

1. E-Mail to a friend wp-email - word of mouth, in my opinion the best online advertisement method. This plug-in allows you to easily install an email this post link and form to any page. A very well developed plug-in, although I still had to figure a few things out, I think this is a must for everyone.

2. Related Posts or Entries - Don’t let your viewers leave your page, give them something else to click. This wordpress plug in uploads quick, and inserts quick, with basic and easy formatting options. Keep your visitors where you want them, surfing your blog.

3. Recent Comments - Another great Wordpress plug-in from semilogic, recent comments is useful for your front page to encourage viewers to read others comments and post responses. A great way to increase commentors on your site.

4. Contact Form - Could a form be easier than just posting your email address? I guess for those not wanting to post their email to the world this is a good plug-in. Also most of the big name sites use a contact form so there must be something to it. This Wordpress plug-in will quickly insert a form wherever you ask it to.

5. Feedburner Redirect Plug-in - Although I have been unable to get this plug-in to work on any site other than my root Wordpress blog install (no doubt issues with Netfirms, my structure, or both), this plug-in or Feedburner is a must for stat crazed bloggers. Feedburner allows you to track subscribers and have yet another traffic stat for yourself or published to your viewers. This plug-in redirects all of you feed traffic using a randomly generated feed.

Enjoy these plug-ins and let me know if you have any questions on them. There is pretty good support out there for all of them and as I said I have had my difficulties with them as well and worked through most all of the problems.

Windows recently starting introducing it’s Live brand of software which is run through your web browser and can be accessed from any computer anywhere in the world. The Live products are no doubt in response to Google beginning to make a play into the software market by offering such things as photo software, site statistic software, desktop search, as well as numerous other products which you can find available in the Google Pack.

The newest release in the Windows Live Free Software is it’s Windows Live Beta. You can sign up to get an invitation at mail.live.com, or if you have a hotmail account an invitation may be sitting in your inbox.

The overall look and feel of Windows Live Mail is almost identical to the Microsoft Outlook Mail service, except for the ads at the top and right of the screen which at first glance are quite annoying. I am sure they will get less noticeable but they flash and blink and scroll unlike Gmail where the ads are a bit more subdued. Mail Live, unlike hotmail, offers 2 GB of storage right off the bat which is a serious upgrade, although all the major services are realizing that this is becoming the norm.

The biggest difference Windows Live Mail has over Gmail is it’s folders feature with drag and drop capability. This can save major time when trying to locate a group of emails. That is just too easy and I still can’t figure our why Gmail doesn’t offer it. I know that Gmail offers a label service that allows the user to label emails, but that method is quite cumbersome and annoying. I prefer the drag and drop and my assumption is that most of you do as well. Correct me if I am wrong.

Microsoft also has search capabilities integrated right into the Live mail, just like Gmail but trying to remember what was specifically said in an email is a lot more difficult than remembering the subject. Another reason the drag and drop wins out. Maybe if I could drag and label I would be happier with Gmail’s method???

Overall I still like Gmail, the font is easier to read, there is less clutter on the screen and the colors are softer. If Gmail adds a folders option I may never sign into my Live account again, but until that happens I’ll see what both have to offer and what improvements are made. Plus it’s always good to have an extra email account for those spammy forms you have to fill out.

Some of you might remember a while back when I signed up for Google Analytics. Yeah, it was 4 months ago, I signed up a day or two after analytics went live and was a day or two late! They put me on a wait list as they ironed out the bugs from the software they recently purchased from Urchin, a great site stat provided.

There main issue was said to be that too many people signed up too fast and had too many visitors for their servers. In other words, the biggest search engine on the planet didn’t have enough server power to handle the loads of traffic from it’s new product. Whatever it was, I was too late and needed a solution. This prompted me to search out some alternative stat counters which I listed here. I ended up using addfreestats and sitemeter, both of which work well and offer different things.

Well, this past week as I have been working on getting my blog network up and running I received the invitation to join Google analytics. I quickly signed up and installed it on this site. I have only been using it for a day or two but see some things I like and things I don’t like. One good thing right off the bat that I noticed was that they allow you to track multiple sites, up to 5 for me now, which I heard wasn’t the case. That was a nice surprise and I hope there will be more to come.

I am going to continue to use the stat service and come back here with a review of what I think of it. It seems like it will off quite a bit of site optimization stats which will help if I end up sticking with the service for my network but all the services seem like they will take a bit of time and searching to figure out how to best use them.

For those of you who might have recently signed up for the wait list, it took me 5 months. Hopefully they’ve lowered the wait time for you.

I’ll keep you all posted.

This last week was more like a week that I want to become a typical week for myself. I still need to fit in a little more activity between working on blogs, personal time, and working at my job but overall I would say my training has increased from weeks past.

As I mentioned previously I am learning and practicing how to swim laps so that has added yet another activity which is keeping me motivated in other areas. I also signed up for a fitness club here where I can lift weights and get cardio in if it is raining too hard to bike, run, swim, or play tennis outside.

All in all a good week, here are the numbers.

Sunday

Biked 1:20 about 17 miles
Ran 22 mins, about 2.5 miles
Swam Laps in small 15 meter pool to work on form

Monday

Ran 43 mins, about 5.5 miles
Swam Laps in small pool

Tuesday

Ran 43 mins, about 5.5 miles
Lifted weights

Wednesday

Biked 1:00 14 miles
Swam Laps Pool

Thursday

Golfed 18 holes
Lifted Weights

Friday

Swam 45 minutes at lap pool

Saturday

Biked 2 hours, about 32 miles

Overall I got 3 days of biking, 3 days of running, 4 days of pool work, 2 days of weights, and one day of golf. I’d like to get up to 4, 4, 4, 3, 1 (respectively) and throw in a day or two of tennis. It was a good week and a busy week. I hope to keep it up this next week and build on the previous.

As you may have been reading in a few of my recent posts I am working on creating a blog network and I am starting out with developing a design that I can apply to multiple blogs easily using CSS and wordpress. I have developed several blog looks and those keep evolving as my design skills evolve and I learn more about what attracts and keeps a visitor.

With my blog network design I am spending a little more time on the design, looking at all the current network layouts (why reinvent the wheel) and also looking into sites that I like to visit and think have a nice layout with a little flare. Searching around has brought up the question, “Do I go simple, or simple and Web 2.0ey?

What is Web 2.0? Well basically it has come to mean white space, bubble letters, bubble icons, and a few vibrant colors. Coincidentally JC over at jcCommerce recently posted an article about Web 2.0 that had quite a few useful points and links. I guess I would call it more of a rant than an article but he basically ranted about Web 2.0 and how some feel just making their site look good or “joining the fad” will make it popular. He voices his opinion that a user should be more concerned with content at first and less with design.

Well, I see his displeasure with people joining the fad, and I also agree with him that for a site to be good you need to have quality content that contributes something to people. Just look at how simple Steve Pavlina’s site is and he gets a lot of traffic and repeat visitors. However, I like the way “Web 2.0″ sites look and I find the rounded corners, color patterns, big print and faded backgrounds enjoyable to look at and usually keep me on a page.

Since posting that article and since I began writing this JC has actually made his page a little more web 2.0ey and the color scheme is pretty nice, check it out. The reason for mentioning his post was that he found some interesting sites that I think would help anyone looking into web design and creating a more in the now web page.

One of the best sites he linked to deals with a basic description of Web 2.0 called Web Design From Scratch. It has tons of great resources about what exactly Web 2.0 is and examples of interesting Web 2.0 Sites such as 9 rules (evolotion of their design), mozilla, and iomega, among others. I think also they could have added technorati since that’s one bloggers are most familiar with but you’ll get the idea. There are also links to other example sites at the bottom of that page of which I found Web Creme to give a lot of good 2.0 Designs.

There are tons of great site designs out there and a few decent explanations of designs as well. I am working hard to come up with a great design and will be sharing my search, design, testing, and publishing experience with Web 2.0 as I go along. The links above should get you started and on your way.

I had some unfortunate news happen upon me today. I was at the local bike shop looking into buying a computer for my bike, as well as some tubes, and noticed a body analyzer on the counter. At home I have a scale that claims to measure body fat but I have always questioned the accuracy of these. That scale says I’m regularly between 23% and 25% body fat and weigh around 200 lbs.

Now I don’t doubt the weight, it seems to follow me on every scale that I try, but the body fat, 25% come on???

The analyzer at the store was supposed to be one of the most accurate impedance body composition analyzers on the market. Used specifically for athletic people. (An athletes water weight can fluctuate a lot causing big changes in body impedance). With those accolades I thought it worth a shot to see how my at home scale compared.

I entered my body measurements as best I could, weight, height, wrist size, age, and sex. Grabbed hold of the impedance device and waited for the results…

A few seconds later I was able to scroll through the outcome of this experiment.

Muscle mass 111 lbs, 11lbs less than average
Body fat 24%, on the high end of average
Water 54%

Overall Body Type- - Low muscle mass, overweight

That last part was what the chart provided with the analyzer exclaimed. Now I am not sure if I should be happy or sad that I was able to average a 6:25 mile pace for 3.5 miles this weekend or be sad because I did that with low muscle mass and being overweight. Either way I am out of shape and need to get my butt in gear.

Motivation enough!!!