Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

OK, I just had to post this here as well. I’ve been checking my stats a lot lately with running the Link to a Coconut Contest and decided it was time to fess up and make fun a little. So over at Blogging on Empty, my blog about how to be a successful blogger part-time, I wrote the Top 10 Signs you might be a stat junkie.

I’ve listed the first 5 here and you’ll have to head over to see the rest. They’re a little amusing, hope you like.

10. Your Google Adsense “Last Login” timer never reads more than 30 minutes.
9. You can tell me right now who your top referring link is.
8. You know the IP address of your last visitor.
7. You’ve worn out the S, I, T, E, M, and R keys on your keyboard.
6. You’ve worn out the S, I, T, E, M, and R keys on your friends keyboard.

For 5., 4., 3., 2., and the number 1 sign that you might be a stat junkie, head over to the this post.

I’d like to introduce you to asOne Clothing and the the launch of their premier edition. The Shirts you see below are a limited edition set of hand designed Shirts never to be released again.

I am personally related to the artist (my brother) that created these shirts and love not only the shirt designs but also the concept of asOne Clothing and the fact that with every shirt bought, proceeds will be donated to one of my favorite charities, SurfAid.

SurfAid helps “improve the lives of those living in isolated regions connected through surfing.” It’s a great cause and I’m always happy to see people promote and donate to it.

The shirts you see each have their own story behind them and each come hand numbered for you. They are limited in number and will never be sold again.

Taken from the asOne Concept:

Nestled in a small corner of the owners’ imagination an idea lay dormant. Over the years, the experiences of life allowed this idea to grow and develop, the door began to open and the roots of asone Clothing took hold. The idea is the journey one takes in search of individuality and purpose. We believe that all people have a unique personality, for some it is unceasingly apparent and for others it is allowed to surface only in small-unnoticed doses of creativity.

We believe that a person should be given the chance to allow ones true self to surface regardless of social inhibitions. asone Clothing explores this concept through art, design and the friendships we will form along the way.

I actually bring it on myself, but most of the time, I have too much to do. I go a little crazy trying to keep up with the list of stuff I give myself to do and a little more crazy every time I add something to it. For one thing here’s a small little snippit from my list.

1. Blog on all 13 Blogs in the Blogtown Press Blog Network
2. Continue to Promote Blogtown Press
3. Find bloggers who want to write for Blogtown Press and Pay them (wanna write?)
4. Reorganize Sprint Rants Forum
5. Work on Top Secret Forum
    a. add blog
    b. add articles
    c. add vbplaza
    d. find beta testers
6. Work on Top Secret Project TOO top secret to mention what it is
7. Plan wedding (Sweet)
8. Try and keep fiance from thinking twice due to too much going on
9. Oh yeah, and work a full-time job as an engineer

OK, so that’s it, along with various other things going on, and other projects that I seem to take on and can’t say no too. But hey Why Rest?

So how do I try and keep up will all this jazz, keyword being try? I make lists. Lot’s of them. I hand write them on paper and I cross things off as I go along. I try and not make my lists too long or else I’ll end up jumping around too much on my list and getting nothing done.

If you’ve got too much to do, similar to I, try this out. It helps and it keeps you moving along. You actually look like you’ve gotten something accomplished then. It’s amazing.

 Look at that, I’ve been blogging for almost a year and I’ve made it to my 200th post on this blog. Now overall I’m around 700 posts for all of the blogs in my network, but I think it’s and interesting milestone to hit, any century multiple on a blog is reason for announcement. Plus I thought I would update you all on my progress.

Blogging
For those of you that don’t know, I started blogging last November, November 12th to be exact with the hope of creating a blog, a site, or a network of sites that received over 500,000 visitors a month. Well, I can honestly say that I’m way, way off from that.

However, the process of trying to get there over the last year has allowed me to learn so much that if I didn’t have that goal of 500,000 visitors I probably wouldn’t have learned nearly as much. I more than likely would have become one of the millions of bloggers that try it out and then drift away after about three months. If you look through many bloggers blog rolls you’ll find these blogs, especially if a blogger hasn’t cleaned up his/her blog roll lately.

But I’ve stuck with it and I’ve actually expanded from just this one blog into a whole network of blogs called Blogtown Press Blog Network. The network launch is coming along, however I feel as though it would have been a little more successful had I practiced what I recently preached over at Blogging on Empty about building content before a launch, but I’m a “do then learn” type. I’m still working on promoting and hopefully my Blog Network Launch Contest and blog network gets picked up by a big time blog and helps spread the word. (Hint Hint)

Forum Building
I’m working on a much needed forum (I have one called the Rants Forum over at Sprint Rants). I want to wait on the launch of that forum but hope that it is not only successful but also helps a lot of people out. I’ll be looking for some “beta testers” soon so let me know if you’re interested.

I’m also busy on some super top secret stuff that I can’t mention at the moment.

Thanks to everyone who has kept me motivated and kept me going at this blogging thing. I never thought I would actually have started a blog let alone 13 of them and continued blogging for over a year.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Missing home and missing the big Turkey.

So this was spurred on by Jason C.’s post about his favorite current blogger, which by the way is pretty sweet, and I thought I would relay my favorite blogger of the moment.

I used to hit up this blog strictly through search engines, never was a regular. Then the look of the blog changed and, bam, I can’t get enough. I can honestly say that this was one of the first times that I have realized that I was drawn back to a blog because of the layout. And know, I love the content even more.

Who’s blog? BloggingPro.com by David Peralty. It’s been around for a while and David Posts on everything blog related and really reports well on the blogosphere. He gives great tips and I’ve become hooked on his recent posting habits of 5 or more posts a day, all good content, all helpful to blogging and starting my network. David’s also kind of a blogging idol. Although he’s a full-time blogger, whereas I hold down a full-time job, he does do some massive blogging, blogging for Daily Pixel and Bloggy Network. Right on for those that try and do it all!

It would be interesting to sit down and just chat with him about what he does during the day, I’m sure it’s in his blog somewhere, I found a few posts on the life of a pro blogger, but it’d be great to arrange a skype call with him. Update After a little careful digging I found this Blog Herald interview with him that I’ve got for my next run lined up on my iPod.

If you haven’t checked Blogging Pro in a while you’ll love the new design. It’s great, simple and all about the posts and comments. Like blogs should be. No cluttered ads (I know my network has ads pasted all over) super clean, and bam, kind of like his Bloggy Network is starting to look across the board. He truly is a problogger, and you should follow Blogging Pro to help you get through this strange world a lot of people are trying to call home, or a job, or both.

Although I don’t think it appropriate to tell my readers if I get payed via a pay-per-post type affiliate service, the newest launch from the text-link-ads guy(s), called ReviewMe.com has promised $25,000 to bloggers who review they’re pay-per-post program, and I was one of them.

I recieved the payment, and that’s sweet.

It’s a great service and the fact that I can give positive and negative reviews, or neutral reviews, is awesome. People shouldn’t worry about me selling out, the chance of me getting one of these rooms is probably one or two slim, but I’m ready to give my two cents!

Nice work Patrick Gaven. I’m in.

Some of you may remember that I’ve gotten into the dreaded parking of sites as an experiment and a way to see if I can diversify my internet earnings. (See Blogging Pro’s most recent post on the need for internet entrepreneurs to diversify their internet holdings and businesses.)

I jumped into the parking of sites because it’s easy money. I buy my sites through forums like Namepros or DomainState from people who have already proven the particular name to be an earner. I try and buy for a reasonable earnings multiple, and then just add it to my NameDrive account and forget about it. To try and save face I’ll say that I don’t buy porn related names and I don’t use pop-ups, or put porn related ads on a non-porn domain name. I just put ads that are relevant to the typo or type-in that I bought and see where it goes.

Now you may remember in my Septemeber Earnings Report that I said I was seeing a lower than average Cost-per-Click (CPC) on my domains that I had parked with NameDrive. I hunted around the forums and even emailed NameDrive and everyone confirmed that, yes there were lower than average CPC for domains across the board. Well it seems as though the tables have turned and my earnings are back up! This is good news for me because, as I mentioned I was doing this as an experiment and was sweating it in those few months that earnings were down.

Now NameDrive told me that they had already contacted Google about the lower earnings and that they were working towards a solution. My assumption is that NameDrive aggregates it’s ads from Google and is allowed to display them in their own way as parked sites. So I did a little more searching and notice that a lot of people had lower adsense earnings around August September and October. It sort of makes sense that these would be lower advertising spending months with kids going back to school and all. We’ll just have to wait and see if this upward trend continues and I keep seeing more cash in my pocket from having sites sit there.

This following is a paid review of ReviewMe the new service from the same company that brought you text-link-ads.

ReviewMe is another way for bloggers to make money blogging. Some people may think being payed to post about a product is selling out but I think it’s a great way for bloggers to get paid for all the time they spend bringing their readers great content. After all, a reader doesn’t have to read every post, and hopefully a loyal reader will understand the need to make money for time well spent.

The system is super simple and you can apply in a couple seconds. Your blog is rated of course by, backlinks, pagerank, technorati rank, and that wonderfully controversial alexa ranking. If you make it in, ReviewMe automatically assigns your blog review posts a price and you are given half of what the advertisers pay them.

Probably the biggest plus side to reviewme.com over other pay per post/pay per review schemes is that you can write a positive or a negative review, and the review only has to be 200 words long. Which in the world of blogging a lot of bloggers have 200 word intros to blog posts!

I’ve signed my blog up as well as several others that are in my network of blogs for the reviewme system and hopefully will start seeing some review requests in my inbox.

I think ReviewMe.com will be just as popular as text-link-ads. The world is just beginning to see what a great tool blogs are for reaching very focused audiences. We’ll see if getting paid to post reviews lowers my regular readers but I don’t think a post here and a post there will ruin my numbers. If I, and the rest of the blogosphere keeps these types of reviews to a minimum I don’t see an issue.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, and haven’t noticed the Maize and Blue Michigan theme that I have now converted my blog to, the biggest game, of, well all time in college football is taking place tomorrow.

The University of Michigan Wolverines are taking on that other team from Columbus, I think they go by the name Ohio State University Nuts or Bucknuts, or, no, it could be the Buckeyes. I’m unsure? But in any event they are the biggest rivals in college football and they are currently ranked number 2 and number 1 respectively.

In sad news however, Michigan, college football coaching, and in general Coaching legend, Bo Schembechler passed away this morning. It is a sad day for any college football fan out there who knows what a great man this was. He compiled a 194-48-5 record in his twenty-one years as Michigan Head Coach, and in his 27 years of coaching he never had a losing season.

I hope you’ll all be watching “The Game” tomorrow.