I wrote about the SEOBook Training program a few months ago and have been a member for 3 months now. The training program usually costs me $50 a month (it is now up to $100 a month) and I think it’s worth this price however, I don’t think it’s worth $167.63 a month. Let me explain:

The subscription to the training program automatically deducts $50 a month from my Paypal account every month on the same day. So when I did a withdrawl from my Paypal account for most of my balance I made a mistake and only left about $10 in the account. I thought the $50 had already been removed for the month, but unfortunately it wasn’t. I received an insufficient funds message from Paypal when they tried to remove the funds from my backup bank account.

The next day after I received that insufficient funds message from Paypal I received $50 from some Halo 3 Lessons I sold (I’ll save that for another post). So I assumed that because more money was put into my Paypal account they would just pull the funds from my Paypal balance and not my bank account. I even sent in a ticket requesting that they do that. So time went on and I thought nothing of it.

A few weeks passed by and my stack of mail continued to grow. I’ve never been a fan of receiving mail unless it is in electronic form. I understand that some things need to be physically mailed but why so much? Not only is it a waste of paper, but it’s so annoying to open envelopes when if it was an email you could simply delete it or better yet not even open it. In any case, last weekend I decided that it was time to pull out the paper shredder and go through my stack of mail. One of the first items I came upon what I thought to be my typical pointless Timberland Bank account statements that have shown the same balance for the past three years; however, I soon discovered these letters were much different. Instead, the first letter I opened was an overdraft statement and apparently the bank’s third attempt and getting me to deposit funds into my overdrawn bank account. After I finished going through my mail I counted a total of seven requests to put money into my bank account that dated back to early April. Each request was the same and mentioned that I was being charged $5 a day every day my account was overdrawn.

Now before you respond with, “You’re an idiot why didn’t you open your mail?” Well because of my distaste for opening mail and love for lazyness, I have set up every single bill, credit card, car payment and anything else you can think of to be done electronically except my Timberland Bank account statements. I previously made several requests to this bank to receive electronic bank statements instead of paper statements but they never bothered to do it for me. So when I take the time to go through my mail I know that everything is just pointless junk mail accompanied by several pointless Timberland Bank account statements.

So I called the bank on Monday morning and tried to explain the situation. I even told them, that if my bank account was overdrawn why didn’t you try an alternative form of communication? We’re not living in the Middle Ages so why didn’t you call me or send me an email? lol, I said if you mailed 7 letters and I did nothing in response to them than why not try and get in touch with me another way? First the employee said they do make one phone call (which I knew to be a lie unless they didn’t leave a message.) Then the employee let me know that it’s actually against the law to email someone that their account is overdrawn! I thought this was ridiculous. It seems like a pointless antiquated law that if I had the time I’d try to contact my legislators about the process of actually changing it lol. Anyway, after talking with the employee some more she told me that unfortunately earlier that morning my account was already put into collections and there was nothing that I could do except pay the collections agency $167.63. Now fortunately I paid off the bill before it affected my credit rating but needless to say overall it was a funny yet costly situation.

Now I do still recommend that you sign up for the SEOBook training program but I don’t recommend having a small balance in your paypal account when your backup funding source is a bank account created for you when you were five that you don’t use anymore lol.

This if the first full month that I’ve offered advertising on my blog and although I haven’t implemented all of the tactics I plan to use to maximize my earnings I did manage to make some money last month. Here is the earnings breakdown below:

Private Ad Sales: $75
Sponsored Reviews: $50
DealDotCom: $2.63

Total: $127.63

By no means is this a large sum and it’s humorous that I posted the $2.63 from DealDotCom, but it’s a start towards my $1,000 a month goal by the end of this year. As I mentioned earlier there are still several ways I plan to increase the money I earn on this blog. Here are a few:

Implement Kontera Content Link Ad Code
Sell links through OIOPublisher
Stop giving away free advertising lol

The free advertising that I gave away in my blog’s birthday contest took up most of the ad space on this blog, so when these spots free up I expect some of those will sell which should help to further improve my earnings. After those ads are done running I also plan to fully implement the OIOPublisher code on my site to make it easier to manage the ads so far I’m really impressed with the plugin though. I’m also interested to see how Kontera performs because the only experience I had with it before was from using it on video game related forums.

Next month my goal is to hit at least $200. I know I have a long way to travel to reach the $1,000 mark, but I still believe I can do it in 2008. For more ways to earn money on your website or to read about companies I work with check out my recommendations.

Subscribe to my RSS feed to track my progress and read more practical ideas for success online.

I’ve held this post as a draft for a couple days because I didn’t want to announce the page rank update too early, but the flucutations between page ranks seem to have steadied out finally so I think it’s safe to announce it now. I’ve seen page rank updates accross all of my websites and the flucuations have just been back and forth between the old rank and the new rank, so even if it’s not done fluctuating I believe it’s safe to say the new ranks I’ve seen will stick around.

The good news is that with this update my blog’s page rank moved up from a PR2 to a PR4 which will mean I should be able to sell links on this blog easily after I finish implementing the OIOpublisher text link code. Although there are many people that have tried to discredit the value of Page Rank because of Google’s recent adjustments to high profile bloggers that sell links and sponsored reviews, it’s important not to lose sight of the value of Page Rank. Some ad networks even require it in your application so having a higher page rank will help to improve your chances of getting in. Either way, I will sell links off this blog, but I haven’t decided if I’ll require the nofollow attribute or not.

In addition to my blog, several of my other websites improved their page ranks as well. In fact when I wrote about how Text Link Ads was finished back in March I mentioned that one of my forums, Xbox Live Arcade was hit and suffered a PR4 drop to PR0. At the time I believed this was due to the fact that I was running TLA code on the site and after seeing this month’s page rank update it looks like I’m right. The site has since gone up to a PR2 and I expect it will make a full recovery when the next page rank update occurs. So it’s nice to see that there hasn’t been any permanent damage. In fact, this just helps to prove that running TLA on your websites is a big risk and why I recommend that you only use it on websites that you don’t care lose their page rank.

How did your websites fare with this latest page rank update? Do you agree with my assessment of TLA?

For those of you working any significant amount of time on the web I urge you to purchase a second monitor. I’ve been doing most of the work for my blog on my laptop while I ride the train, but I have several other projects I’ve wanted to start that will take much more than the time I have on my daily commute. With that in mind, I finally purchased a second monitor that is basically the same as my old monitor (i.e. same screen size and max resolution) but a newer model number.

I never really bothered purchasing the second monitor before this because I wasn’t really focused on starting any new projects but I have several ideas lined up that I couldn’t put off any longer. So although I should have purchased the second monitor long ago I’m looking forward to the increased efficiency that it will bring to the table. In fact, part of what kept me lazy was the fact that at my 9-5 job I have two monitors and it’s frustrating to come home with only one to work on. Again, yes it’s that stupid that I never purchased this long ago but either way check out the new set up:

Before:

After:

By the way, they’re two 19 inch monitors. The next time I’ll upgrade is when I get a bigger desk. Then I’ll go with two 24 inch monitors.

Are you dual wielding?

I was thinking about how I’ve received numerous links to my posts from various bloggers, yet I can’t remember the last time I’ve found a traditional webmaster (non blogger) that has linked to one of my other websites. Why is that?

Are webmasters the stingy kids that stick to themselves and play in their own little world passing out links to others only in exchange for something in return? Meanwhile the bloggers are social butterflies - linking to other bloggers content without some form of an agreement set up for something in return?

Perhaps it’s the social aspect of blogging and how it’s so easy to find people that have linked to your content that drives the link loving behavior of blogging? Or perhaps it’s something more simple than that - if you link to another blog post it’ll eventually be moved off the front page of your blog?

I think this is the first post I’ve written where the number of sentences that ended with question marks outpaced those without, but I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

Why do bloggers freely hand out links whereas traditional webmasters do not? Do you even agree with that statement?

After running the contest to celebrate my blog’s first birthday I realized that I made a few mistakes in the execution of the blog contest that I have since had some time to reflect on. So as a result of that contest I’ve come up with a list of 5 lessons that I learned from running my blog contest that I believe will help improve the effectiveness of your blog’s contests as well.

1. Define your contest goal(s)

Before starting a blog contest you should clearly define the goal of the contest. What are you trying to accomplish?

Do you want people to post about your contest and receive some link backs?
Do you want to increase your RSS subscriber count?
Do you want to encourage more participation?

It’s important to determine what you want to accomplish with your blog contest otherwise it won’t be as effective. I never really set out to define the goals of my blog’s contest and so I ended up with a contest that I ran but without any strong numbers to shoot for. If you set specific and measurable goals for your blog contests you’ll see improved your results because you’re more invested in the outcome.

2. Simplify the contest

First and foremost make it easy for your readers to participate in your blog’s contest. Don’t create a laundry list of hoops your readers have to jump through, but at the same time you don’t want to innundate them with too many ways to enter. If your contest is relatively small like mine was, try providing only one way for readers to enter your blog’s contest. If your primary goal is to increase your RSS subscriber count than use that criteria as the only way to win prizes in the contest. The size of the prize pool should also help you to determine what you should require your readers to accomplish. Because if you’re not offering a lot of prizes than it will be hard to get people to put forth the effort and write about your contest.

On the flip side you don’t want to make it too easy to enter the contest. The perfect example here is just requiring readers to write a single comment on a post to enter the contest. While this makes it incredibly easy for readers to participate I wouldn’t recommend using this entrance method exclusively even if your blog is really small.

3. Offer more prizes

With the contest I ran I offered five 125×125 blog ads on the sidebar along with a 468 x 60 ad. These prizes came out to a total cash value of $140. This is a fairly small sum of money and it doesn’t really bring about a strong call to action to participate in the contest. Looking back at how many people entered the contest I can see how this contest served more of my current readers as opposed to bringing in a ton of new subscribers and link backs. Perhaps a few people subscribed to my RSS feed that were sitting on the fence, but again if I offered more prizes I could have seen much stronger results.

4. Set a deadline that provides plenty of time for readers to enter

I ran my blog’s birthday contest for only two and a half weeks, which doesn’t allow for a long time to enter a contest. Granted, I already knew that the prizes I was offering weren’t really that huge but I should have ran the contest for at least one month to grant plenty of time for people to read about and enter the contest.

If you’re running a really large contest than you may want also want to consider running it for a couple months to not only provide ample time people to participate but to also provide a lot of “face time” for the sponsors of your contest. The lengthy deadline will also give you more time to heavily promote the blog contest as well which leads me into my next point.

5. Promote your blog contest

Just because you built it doesn’t mean they’ll come. Promotion is one of the most important aspects of a successful blog contest. One way you can promote your blog’s contest is through advertising on your own blog. I did this for my past contest by creating a couple simple banners. By promoting the contest through your own blog it will help to inform any new readers that may have missed the initial contest announcement post. Another way to promote the contest is by mentioning it in the bottom of each post during the run of the contest i.e:

I’m running a contest to celebrate my blog’s birthday. Subscribe to my RSS feed for your chance to win free advertising on ChrisGuthrie.net

Another option that should work well is if you’re offering such a large prize pool that people are much more inclined to write about your contest for a better shot at the prizes. This will help to further promote your contest but will only work well if the prize pool is significant.

Wrapping it up

Overall, I know that the next blog contest I run will take into account some of the lessons I’ve learned above and I’m sure I’ll learn even more the next time around. I don’t plan to run any more “small” blog contests in the future though as I want to go for something much bigger next time.

What do you think of the lessons I’ve learned? Have they helped you think about how you’ll run your next blog contest?

Are you struggling to come up with a domain name for your blog or next project? Why not choose a name that sounds like or rhymes with an existing well established website. I thought of this the other day when I was waiting to catch my bus to take me into Seattle for work when I saw this truck drive by with big bold letters plastered on the side - Jobdango.com. Now what site immediately comes to mind when you hear ‘dango’? For me it’s the wildly popular Fandango.com. I checked out Jobdango.com and while it’s a Northwest job search engine and not something related to the movie business it’s easy to see what they’ve done by incorporating ‘dango’ into their domain name.

I’m certain that most people that see the advertisements for Jobdango.com or have heard of the website already have likely heard of Fandango.com. They may even go so far as to believe it’s a partner company. What Jobdango.com has done is used the association from another well known brand and applied it towards their Northwest job search engine Jobdango.com

This advertisement on the side of the truck got me thinking about other websites I’ve seen that have used similiar domain names in an effor to build off of some other websites’ branding success. Some other prime examples I’ve seen are dogster.com and catster.com both of which are named after friendster.com. The only difference is that they’re used for pets. However, it’s safe to say that the creators of dogster.com and catster.com knew what they were doing when they choose domain names with ’ster’ at the end to cash in on the success of friendster.com. Now some of you might be worried that it’s possible you could run into legal trouble for purchasing domain names with this practice in mind; however, as you can see from the above examples they’re different enough that there have been no lawsuits filed yet close enough to cash in off the previously established successful brand.

What are some other examples you’ve seen? Do you believe this is a good way to get a kick start to the branding of your website?