Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

I know there has been a little buzz about the new Microsoft adCenter for a while, Darren posted about it back in October 2005 and again in August 2006 (just a couple weeks ago), but today was the first time I saw advertising to the masses for it.

I was checking my stats a few minutes ago and noticed at the top of my screen some blurbs abotu Microsoft beating Google. A banner ad stating “96 million customers” and “an audience that beat Google click conversion rates 4 out of 5″ or something to that nature.

Click on the banner and sure enough, it takes you to a getting started page at Microsoft® adCenter. You can sign up and start you ad campaign today with as little as $5. Just three easy steps.

1. Contact Info
2. Billing Info
3. Start your Campaign.

The $5 is a one time activation fee, so you actually have to put a little more in than the $5 but you can get started. I really have nothing to advertise right now but the one page “getcha ad” claims 96 million users of which 80% (that’s 4 out of 5) where recent online buyers, (their source is the Nielsen/NetRatings for July 2006).

technorati tags:Microsoft, adCenter, advertising, publishers, Google, adWords

I’ve been waiting for a post from Steve about his earnings over the past few months, and although I must say I haven’t been visitng his blog daily I check in periodically and hadn’t seen a post since he wrote about making nearly $5,000 a month.

He was sparked by Darren Rowse’s recent article on about how much a blog post is worth and wrote about using the formula to determine his blogs posts value. Turns out they’re worth $20 a piece.

The formula used is:

Monthly revenue per post = ( current monthly revenue ) / ( total number of posts )

Makes sense and it turns out Steve Pavlina has 500 posts over at his blog. And these are top quality posts. Doing the math this leaves Steve making $10,000 a month, as he stated. For a blog like Steve Pavlina’s it makes sense that his posts are worth this much. He is top on Google search results for many keywords, many keywords that only he has quality articles on the internet.

Thanks Steve for filling us in.

technorati tags:Steve, Pavlina, Making, Money, Blog, Posts, Worth

The promise of a better life for some, and the promise of super human abilities for others has scientists and researchers always trying to improve on and mimic the functionality of the Human Body.

In a recent article from Wired titled What if Bionics Were Better, they bring to readers attention a growing group of people eager to try any new technology that improves on current human performance. Performance such as the human hand, feet, interaction with WiFi, etc etc. Whatever you have control of oustide the body people are probably thinking of ways to integrate it with your everyday human features. Those bland things like, your eyesite, why not imbed a chip that allows you to watch TV in one eye while you walk down the street and look for obstacles with the other.

Or how about the whacked out idea of feet that integrate into a car and allow your nervous system and muscle movement to control the machine. Does it sound like something straight out of the Terminator? Well if people are willing to try this stuff out, these technologies could begin to enter the testing phase sooner than we think. Look at the last 15 years and just try and imagine what the next 15 years will bring.

Will you be able to listen to millions of different songs without even carrying an iPod? How about an embedded chip in your brain that sends signals to the same nerves that control sound recongintion and gets it’s song signals via Wi Fi. Turn it off and on with a thought.

When can I get one of those? How about we call it the iPod Cloud?

technorati tags:Technology, Bionics, Wired

Yeah that would be a nice 18 round golf score, (one with a few holes in one I would think), but that’s not what I’m talking about. For the first time in this blogs short existence, it broke 51 readers via the rss feed. I use feedburner because I like the tracking of readers it does, and the tracking site is pretty sassy and easy on the eyes.

I’ve been hovering between 44 and 48 for about 4 months now (pretty pathetic, I know) and have been waiting for a time when I could write this dang post. Not sure why I think 50 is a good number, and I’ve read before that you shouldn’t even show your readers your feed stats until you’re over 150, (sorry no link couldn’t find where I read that before, but it must have been a credible source ), but none-the-less I am going to keep my stats up there for all to see.

I think when you see someone’s stats you feel like your becoming part of something, even if it is my small little something, it’s something.

I’ve found a renewed vigor to keep going on this online craziness that I’ve gotten myself into. I keep thinking of new ideas and finding new ways to make those ideas come to fruition. My brother is also helping motivative me which I think is helping out a lot and we are going to begin working on a joint project in the coming months that could turn into something good.

Thanks all you readers and I hope I’ve been helpful and entertaining over the last few months.

For those of you who haven’t seen this yet, it’s hilarious. The newest Tickle Me Elmo, I guessed called Elmo TMX, just went on sale and is already sold out. Maybe I haven’t been following the right news outlets but I wasn’t aware the there was going to be another one in time for this years holiday season. I’m bummed I missed it because retail on these little guys is $40, and after you watch the video you’ll think $40 is a steal for the entertainment value.

By the way the video is in the upper right video block, or if you’re reading this later check out my Archived Videos Section.

Also of note is that it’s the 10th anniversary of Tickle Me Elmo. Yeah that’s right, Tickle Me Elmo has been around for 10 years! To think, it’s been that long since we saw news clips of mothers crawling over each other, smacking one another with their purses and doing whatever else it took to get their child the greatest gift since the radio flyer. And all that one did was laugh a little bit when you touched it.

This new “Elmo TMX,” does everything but tickle you back. It says more, rolls around, slaps it’s knee, stands itself up, slaps the floor, and asks for more. This thing is crazy right now. Going price on eBay seems to start around $70. I’m very tempted to get one but I’m unsure how long the amusement would last.

SprintRants.com, which is seeing a surge in both traffic and quality ranters now has a forum. It’s my first attempt at a forum but it was pretty easy to start and install through netfirms. I’m using phpbb and they basically do the whole install for you.

The forum is just an extension of the rant board and will allow users to interact to get their questions answered and their rants heard. We’ve had a sprint customer service supervisor hanging around the rant board lately and helping a lot of people out so I thought it was fitting to begin the forum now. Hopefully people won’t be shy and head over to it and begin posting.

So if you have sprint and want to support a good cause, check out the Sprint Rants Forum, sign-up, and talk about your sprint service, phone or anything else related to sprint PCS or Nextel.

Yeah, Yeah, I realize its the middle of the month and I haven’t given an update on earnings last month, August. It was another good month and an improvement over last month, which was $122.05

Text-Link-Ads — $8.29
Adsense and Chitika– $21.61
Namedrive — $76.44
Affiliates — $44.75

Total = $151.09

This month, which is almost over!, is going OK. I think I’ll see a drop in overall earnings because affiliates last month really boosted my cashflow and it doesn’t look like that will happen this month.

I’m planning on reinvesting the earnings over the last two months into more domain names. Even though their short term ROI is super high (most are coming out to over 100% a year) I’m not sure what the long term outlook is for domain names and unsure if that’s where my earnings should be invested. But…, the return is nice and I’m going to focus on higher traffic names that still make a return. You can always do something with the traffic.

Congratulations and thanks Michigan, for a Big Win this weekend over Notre Dame, Michigan won 47-21.

technorati tags:Michigan, Notre, Dame, Lloyd, Carr, Win

I recently happened upon a great little article called How to Dissuade Yourself from Becoming a Blogger over at wikiHow.com. Most likely if you read this blog, you’re already a blogger and this should just be an amusing article to you. But if you’re reading this and you don’t have a blog, and you’re on the fence about joining the masses and multitude of over 50 million blogs then this how-to is for you.

Here’s an outline of the steps:

1. Read blogs - you won’t want to write after you read blogs for a month.

2. No one will really ever read or care about what you write, (slim chances)

3. Write in wordpad to fill your urges

4. Do you have the time?

They’re pretty amusing and best of all you can add your own because wikiHow is editable by it’s readers. So if you have a funny add on that is funny but true, then head over and add your wisdom.

technorati tags:Blogging, How-to, writing, blog, amusing

The newest issue of Fortune has the myspace.com guys on the cover. Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe. You can read more about their small little company at…

MySpace cowboys - September 4, 2006

It has some great info, that’ll surely motivate you to try and make it, wherever you can.

technorati tags:Make, Money, Myspace, Entrepreneur, Business