If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

TNX.net is a website that allows you to buy or sell text links on any webpage in their marketplace. Upon first going to TNX.net you will see a quick break down of the primary features advantages and benefits of their program for Website Publishers and Advertisers which I will go into later on in the review. But what you’ll see next are the stats showing the sheer size of their network.

At the time of this review, there are over 25,966,645 pages that links can be purchased on. You’ll also notice that there are currently 52,808 users on the site with a daily growth rate of .23% (about 121 new users a day!) So you should already know by these numbers that TNX is an established marketplace for buying and selling text links that not only serves to pad your wallet but also to improve your rank in the SERPS.

Selling Text Links

What I like most about being a website publisher on the site is the fact that you simply copy and paste the TNX code into your website and the links are automatically listed to be sold to thousands of advertisers. You also don’t have to spend any time figuring out the price of the link as this is calculated automatically (based on PageRank, link popularity, inbound links etc.). They also only take a 12.5% cut as opposed to some other services out there. You can also get paid out via PayPal which is always a plus.

The process for adding the code to your website, a new website to their marketplace and selling your TNX points is very simple. This is all done via your control panel which also displays the number of TNX points you have. From the single forum I have added to TNX.net nearly two months ago I’ve gathered 7,847 points.

Currently you can sell 1,000 points for $.78, but this number will continue to go up as the TNX network grows too. There is a way to sell your 1,000 points for $.82 but I don’t want to adhere to the guidelines to get the higher payout. The first line on the guidelines is the only one that doesn’t make it worth it for me:

1. Links are not all in one block (up to 4 links), but spreaded throughout entire page (4 blocks). Only one link is allowed in footer.

I would prefer to just have all of my links in the footer as opposed to setting up the code in additional spots to ensure I meet the requirements. But if you’re generating thousands of points and have several spots on your website that you can add different blocks to then I would recommend doing so to get the extra five cents each time you sell 1,000 points.

Going back to the number of points I’ve accumulated you’ll see that I’ve made about $6.00 worth of points which may not seem like a lot for having the code installed for nearly two months, but as I recently discovered I could have made four times that much!

From your site list there is a link that you can click to “show site options” this pops down (picture to your right) and you’ll notice that there is a way to increase the number of links sold on your website. I had it left at 1, but after writing this review have since increased that to 4. I left this number at the default of one because I never really noticed that you can increase the number of links sold on a website because this is not mentioned anywhere else in the TNX control panel. I really think that the site options should just all be displayed by default because it also shows you a lot of other important information.

Another great feature is that you’re able to go in and see the links that are put on your website and delete or block them from showing on those pages again. Because I’m using a forum I’ve sold 401 links, but most of these links are on pages without a page rank so if you have a site with multiple websites with at least a page rank of one you’re going to earn a lot more points. As an example, on my forum I am getting 750 points a month for a PR2 link.

Buying Text Links

As an alternative to selling your points you can also easily use the points to buy links of your own. I love the ability to just take what you’ve already earned from selling links and apply it towards buying links. The concept sounds so simple, yet there are so many other publisher programs that don’t allow you to take the money you’ve earned and spend it through their advertising program so I’m happy to see TNX offering this. Now almost everyone knows that inbound links and the anchor text used for those links play a key role in determining where you sit in the SERPS for various keywords and phrases, so one strategy to improve your ranking is to purchase links.

Like the control panel for users looking to add new websites, sell points and check out their list of websites there’s also an equally easy to use control panel for advertisers.

It’s very easy to set up a campaign in three simple steps. First you set up the the initial steps of the campaign by choosing the category of websites you want the links to be displayed in (obviously choose categories related to what you’ll be promoting). Each category also has a little “$” indicator to show which links are more expensive “$$$” and which sites are less expensive “$”. You’re also able to select which websites you want to advertise on based on the number of Yahoo Backlinks and Google Page Rank and even which language the website is in. After you select all of these options you then set the number of points you want to spend each month.

After inputting all of these options you’ll be able to see an estimation on how many links you will be purchasing. So if you look at the final number and realize you want to get more links than that simply increase the point spending limit, or lower the page rank of pages you’re targeting and it automatically updates the estimated number of links you can get.

Second you will be setting up the actual text of the campaign. Pictured below is the “simple” way to set up the text for your campaign:

But you can also choose an advanced option to put in several different variations of keywords that will be randomly used before your link, for your link and after the link. So the end result is several different phrases and links that point towards the same webpage. It’s always recommended that you don’t use the same link and instead provide some variation so that your links look “real” to search engines.

Lastly you can set the number of links you want to appear in the variations of page rank and yahoo backlinks. It’s recommended that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket and instead seperate the links you plan to purchase accross all of the categories. You can also limit the number of links that will display on the same website as well which helps to add a further level of control as to where your links show up.

Wrap Up

Overall, I am very pleased with TNX.net and am happy to say it’s made the distinction of being offered on the Chris Recommends list which contains quality products, services and or companies that I have personal experience using and recommend to my readers. It made my job much easier to do this review for TNX when I had already been using the service for nearly two months. It also makes me feel more confident in recommending that you sign up for an account and test out the service on some of your websites. I plan to add the TNX code to more of my websites and purchase multiple campaigns in the coming months.

Click here to sign up at TNX

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Today the winners have been announced in my free advertising giveaway that celebrated my blog’s first birthday. For those of you that might have missed it I ran a short contest for some free advertising on this blog that you could win by posting about the contest, subscribing to my RSS feed via email or stumbling some of my blog posts.

Without further ado here are the random winners (thanks Randomizer.org):

Winner of the 468 x 60 banner ad is:

Hyder who blogged about the contest. You may remember him as the designer of this blog! Some may think this looks a little shady, but there were hardly any people that linked to this blog contest and that was the only way to win the 468 x 60 banner.

5 Winners of the 125 x 125 ads are:

contact [at] thatblogsite.com
enews [at] dennisedell.com
gndoro [at] gmail.com
rajgaurav [at] msn.com
Phil Benwell who blogged about the contest

Overall I viewed this contest as a small success. I’m glad that I was able to give away the free advertising to so many RSS readers but it would have been nice to get more people that linked to the contest. I’m going to write a follow up post about running the contest and provide my ideas for improving my future blog contests as I already have thought of a lot of things I could have done differently.

Anyway, you have until April 12th to contact me via chris [at] chrisguthrie.net with your blog ad that you’d like to run.

Also something to keep in mind is that some of the RSS readers that won have been subscribed to my RSS email feed for several months now, so you should sign up for my RSS feed now if you’re interested in winning future prizes. As long as you’re a verified email RSS subscriber you’ll be eligible for all future contests that involve RSS subscription.

Click here to sign up for RSS subscription via email

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

‘How often should I blog?’ is a question we’ve all thought about and I believe is one of the most important questions to address. In the past year of reading numerous other blogs, I’ve come accross this discussion and it’s various forms so many times that I’ve lost count. But what I believe all these posts on the topic have done is to create the false sense that what they advise you do is the best and only way to approach blogging.

Find what works for you

I believe that it’s more important to determine what’s the best level of posting frequency for you than to listen to some person tell you how much you have to blog. Let’s take physical trainers as an example: Do you honestly believe they approach each and every client the same way and offer the same advice and excercises every time? Of course not! They develop a strategy specifically for that client based on various factors such as current physical condition (how long have you been blogging) and the amount of time you have dedicated to work out (time in the day to blog). But one thing is for sure, physical trainers give you a schedule to stick to that is designed to give you maximum results. This idea can be applied to the categories of posting frequency in the same way:

Daily Posting

Readers visit your blog on a daily basis because they know what to expect - one post everyday. I have several blogs in my RSS reader that post daily and I enjoy the fact that every morning I check my RSS reader and I get to see what they have to say. This consistent blogging schedule works great for those that can keep it up, but this is a huge time commitment for the blogger. Don’t try and commit to a daily blogging schedule if you know you don’t have the time for it because eventually this will show in your writing. If you do decide to post daily then I would highly recommend that you use the wordpress time stamp feature to ensure you have a post ready in advance.

Three to Four Posts a Week

This is the category I fit into along with most of the other blogs in my RSS reader. I do my best to blog every other day; however, I mainly just try to make sure I post about 3 to 4 times a week. Occasionally I’ll write a couple posts back to back and follow up with another post two days later, but the main focus is to make sure that the gaps aren’t too far between each post. What I do like the most about blogging in this category is that fact that I never feel a constant pressure to blog, which is really good for me considering I work a full time job and have a long commute as well. If I did have this constant pressure to churn out a post every day than I believe the quality of my content could possibly suffer. Likewise, readers don’t really have a set expectation as to when they’ll see a post if you have already established that you blog about 3 to 4 times per week because they’ve seen your posting frequency on your blog before and if they’re still reading your posts they’re fine with it.

Once a Week Blogging

The only way I believe this category of posting can work is if you write very lengthy and incredibly useful posts on a consistent scheduled basis. If you post once a week every Friday (or some other day of the week) I believe it could work for you. But if you are inconsistent on the day you post you could severely limit your success. I believe there is significantly less “wiggle room” when it comes to your posting frequency if you are already only posting once a week.

Anything beyond these levels of posting frequency and I think it’s time for you to start writing more frequently, but if you feel inclined to post a couple times a month on an inconsistent basis and still manage to obtain readers I’d love to hear from you.

Wrapping it up

I want to reiterate that in the quest to maximize blogging effectiveness it is important to establish some form of a blogging schedule. You have to decide on whether this schedule will be on a daily basis or less. Now I don’t believe your blogging schedule has to be completely rigid, but readers come to expect a flow of content based on your past posting behavior and if you don’t meet those expectations you may lose some readers. Although I believe the loss of readers due to an inconsistent posting schedule has been over exagerated by many bloggers it is still an important factor to consider when deciding how often you will blog. In the end, I believe that if someone truly loves your blog’s content they won’t unsubscribe simply because you don’t post for a few days. If they’re that fickle, then they are probably just as likely to unsubscribe to your blog just for reading a post they don’t like.

So now that you’ve read my ideas, how about sharing some of yours? How often do you blog?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!