Today I’ll be covering the following:

• SEO contest
• Sitepoint
• Logo for Marchingbandforums.com
• Mobile Herald starts earning
• July Roundup

SEO Contest

There’s a new search engine optimization contest called ambatchdotcom seocontest that started a couple of weeks ago which you can read about here. I briefly thought about entering, just for the experience as I certainly wouldn’t have a hope of winning (especially with a late start), but I decided against it. Mostly because Work Boxers is offering $100 if you link to his entry so long as he wins. I figure my odds of getting $100 this way are exponentially greater than attempting it myself, so that explains the new link in my sidebar. So good luck James, go get ‘em. = )

Sitepoint

I just finished up a logo contest at Sitepoint that went pretty well, but I’m still done with them. They’ve increased fees all over the place, which is reasonable enough in the forums where you’re trying to sell something or get work done, but they’ve also started charging for things like link requests which I find utterly ridiculous. I recently posted a text link ad on Sitepoint which cost me $10 and netted me one response and one sale. I posted the same ad on Digital Point and nearly sold out my inventory in 24 hours. And the ad on Digital Point was free.

I’m also not interested in supporting a forum where the owner addresses the members like so:

Look, I said we’re working on it. I’m sure most of you don’t read the rest of the thread before you post. You’re like a pack of sheep. I’m not sure why you all feel the need to tell us you’re going to DP. If you want to post “me too” rubbish and you have no interest in helping us improve the forums by submitting well thought out constructive feedback, then seriously we’re happy for you to go to DP, see you later. Waste their bandwidth!

I’m sure I’m not a big loss for them, I certainly didn’t post alot there, and I’ve only spent $50 or so dollars there in the past few months. However I’m sure there are plenty of other members who feel the same way as I do, and I just can’t understand why a business would actively drive away customers and potential customers the way SitePoint is currently doing.

And if you look at some of their Marketplace forums it’s clear that people are staying away in droves. The Want to Buy forum has had five total posts in the last four days, and many of the other forums have slowed down just as much.

I might consider selling a site there in the future (if it’s a bigger site), but that’d be it. SitePoint has lost me as a customer.

Logo for Marchingbandforums.com

Here is the logo I selected, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out:

Next step will be to get a Vbulletin skin designed and coded based on this logo. If anyone has recommendations for designers/coders I’m all ears. I’m hopeful that this forum will be launched by September, but we’ll see.

Mobile Herald starts earning

Mobile Herald is a cell phone blog I purchased from David Krug a while back for what I thought was an excellent price. The design is top notch, and it has some pretty nice backlinks so I was pleased with the purchase. Mobile Herald picked up a Page Rank of 5 in the last update, and I’ve managed to sell a handful of links, enough that I’ve now made back the purchase price. It only took a couple of months.

Apparently there’s some sort of controversy with another site that David sold, but all I can say is that my experience with the guy was top notch.

July Roundup

The summer months are rough for me, so July wasn’t a huge month by any means. I managed to increase my dollars earned per day by exactly one dollar, which, while not much, is at least a move in the right direction. August is looking to be a tough month as well, but I’ve managed to make a good bit of unexpected money in the past couple of days that’ll help alot.

I also have a new writing project with a major company that’ll bring in an extra $20 or so dollars a day that starts this month. I’d actually like to do more writing for pay, cause I’m a fan of steady income, but it’s tough when there are so many internationals that are willing to write content incredibly cheaply. But anyway, I’m pretty psyched about this new endeavor, and I should be able to talk a lot more about it in the next update.

Hope everything is going well for you guys, have a great week!

Just wondering.

• GamingPCGuide sold
• Dreamhost
• AzoogleAds
• New Project revealed

GamingPCGuide sold

GamingPCGuide was a site I bought a while ago from the guy who used to run College Startup. It wasn’t really a site that I had plans for, in fact the main reason I bought it was so that I could get the rights to this Wordpress theme. With that accomplished I wasn’t really sure what to do with the site, and it languished for the last month or so, with no new content or updates.

So when a friend asked if I’d be interested in selling it, I jumped at the chance, and sold it for the same price I bought it for originally. In the end, I got the rights to the theme above for free, so I’m pretty happy with the outcome. The site has potential, and a pretty good domain, but I just didn’t have a plan for it, nor the passion for the subject to write good content. I’ve sold it to somebody who does though, so it’s a definite win-win.

Dreamhost

I’ve been a huge proponent of Dreamhost since I started hosting with them, pushing their “777″ deal (where you get a year’s hosting plus a domain for under $10) on various message boards. I’m still a fan, but the downtime the past two weeks is getting to be pretty ridiculous. Just check out their status page and look at the various problems they’ve had recently. I’m hoping they get things straightened out, or I’m going to be forced to switch hosts, a headache I don’t really want to have to deal with right now.

AzoogleAds

I also signed up with AzoogleAds this week, and I can say that I prefer them hugely to Commission Junction. The offers are much easier to promote, and CJ is just too cluttered, with too many advertisers with similar products competing with one another. I made about $100 just screwing around the other day, and I’ve gotta say it’s pretty easy money. I’m planning on getting into PPC a little bit with this, and I’ll report back when I see how it goes. I’m also now using it on Mobile Herald in the right sidebar. Mobile Herald doesn’t get a lot of traffic yet, but that banner pays $11 per lead, so I think it’ll work fairly well since the site heavily emphasizes ring tone news.

New Project revealed

So I figure I’m not going to be too secretive about my new project since I’m hoping to get it launched in the next month anyway.

I played sports in high school, and didn’t really know much about marching band, but my wife (and most of her family) is musically inclined. Since meeting her I’ve realized what a huge sub-culture band kids are. Kids take marching band and marching band competitions seriously, and most band kids hang out together, form their own social niche, etc. It seems like a great subject for a community focused site.

I did some searching and only found one site (http://www.marchingbandplanet.com/) that has an active marching band message board. And it’s, to put it bluntly, pretty ugly. I think this is a niche that is ripe for the taking if done right. And I am planning on doing it right. I’m going to get a VBulletin license, have a logo designed, and get an attractive skin for the forum.

The first thing I did with this project was to purchase a domain: MarchingBandForums.com. It’s long, but it has all the keywords I want and it’s easy to say so I’m happy with it.

The second thing I’m getting done is the logo, and I’m having a competition for it over at SitePoint (you can see it here). It’s the first competition I’ve run at SitePoint, so I’m very interested to see the entries! It runs through August 1st, and I’ll put the winning logo up here when the contest ends. You guys will have to tell me if I picked well or not.

Have a great week!

This entry’s subjects:

• Red Reporter blowing up
• Page Rank Update
• New Themes for celeb blogs
• MB Project
• Links

Red Reporter blowing up

Red Reporter, my first and favorite site has been doing great things lately. The community has exploded, and there are now over 600 members of the site. Game threads now routinely get 300+ comments, and there is tremendous participation from the community. It’s really awesome to see.

The Reds made a big trade last week, which caused traffic to rise quite a bit. My reaction to the trade was quoted in two newspapers, here (Lexington Herald-Leader), and here (Dayton Daily News). That’s always a bit of a thrill, and it’s nice to have something to tell people about. The whole website business is tough to explain to people sometimes (the monetization especially), but when you can point to a magazine or newspaper and show them quoting you … people tend to understand that you’re doing ok then.

And just to put the traffic in perspective, I started my Reds site back in 2002, and it got very little traffic for the next year +. I got a little more serious with it in February 2004, but even then I was thrilled on days when the site got more than 100 visitors. But I kept working, and got an invite from Tyler Blezinski to join Sports Blog Nation, a network run by him and Markos Moulitsas. Traffic kept increasing, but even as recently as March I was still just getting 300 uniques or so a day, and maybe 8-900 page views. In the last couple of months that number has grown and grown, and I’m now getting 6,000+ page views a day, and well over 1,000 uniques. In the grand scheme of things this still isn’t a lot of traffic, but for a small niche like the Cincinnati Reds I think it’s pretty good!

Page Rank Update

There was a Google Page Rank update last week, and I made out pretty well. Mobile Herald went from 0-5, and I had another site go from 0-4, and a couple of other sites go from 0-3. My only drop was The Beijing Blog (about the 2008 Summer Olympics) which went from 4 down to 3. Overall I’m pretty pleased though, and I signed up Mobile Herald for Text Link Ads, so hopefully it’ll start bringing in a bit of money from text links.

New Wordpress Themes for celeb blogs

I started two celebrity fan sites after reading this at ProBlogger, just as kind of a long term experiment. I had been using K2 as the theme on those two sites, but for some reason lately every time I changed something on the sites the layout would break. So I figured it was time for a new theme, and I chose fLight from Fahlstad.se, a guy who seems to be a pretty talented designer. You can see the theme in action on my sites here:

Scarlett Johansson Watch
Hilary Duff Watch

Let me know what you think, I thought the theme was very well suited to those two sites.

MB Project

I’ve mainly done nothing but blogs so far in my business, but I’ve got an idea for a forums site that I’m going to be starting this month/next month. I need to get it up and running by the time school starts, so we’ll see. Not quite ready to reveal what this is, but it’s a pretty big market, with a good demographic, and I’ve yet to come across another site serving the subject. Should be good. I’m planning on using Vbulletin and getting the logo and skin professionally done, so that’ll be something I’ll be looking into in the near future.

Links

And finally, if you’d like a link on my sidebar, please ask. I’m always looking for other entrepreneurial blogs to read, so definitely send them my way. I figure I’ll be adding Tyler Cruz since I’m kind of stealing his posting format, but I’m looking for other links too.

And that’s all for today. Thanks for reading, and feel free to drop me a line if you’ve got a link I should look at, or if you have any questions or anything.

This is one of the finer themes I’ve seen for niche marketing. The theme makes the site look like a regular site, somewhat hiding the blog aspect of the site. The Niche Marketing Theme features excellent Adsense integration, and plenty of room for affiliate ads. This is an excellent theme for product centered blogs, or any blog that’s extremely geared towards making money. Not really a theme for a personal site.

See the theme in action here.

Here’s a screenshot:

Installing:

Download Niche Marketing for Wordpress.

After downloading, unzip the folder and install it to your Wordpress themes directory. Important: The theme comes bundled with the plugin the_excerpt_reloaded, you’ll need to install that and activate it for the theme to work. If you don’t you’ll get some errors.

If you have any problems or questions, please don’t hesitate to ask!

I recently read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, and in the book he talks about “epidemics”, how ideas and trends are started by relatively small groups of people. He classifies people into a few different groups, and one of those groups is the Connector group. Gladwell talks about a test given where a person is asked to look at a long list of surnames and then count how many of the surnames they know in their personal life. (So if you took the test and saw the surname “Arney” you could check yes since you probably know me - after all you’re reading this.) Connectors score very highly on this test because they know a tremendous amount of people. They thrive on meeting new people, introducing friends to other friends, that sort of thing. Gladwell thinks about this and realizes that most of his friends aren’t really “his” friends after all - they’re friends of his Connector friend, who introduced Gladwell to them.

Shaun Culbreath is the Connector in my life. Let’s just run down the list, off the top of my head:

• I ran cross country in high school, largely on the urging of Shaun.
• I worked at Greenwood Lake Camp entirely because of Shaun. It was something I never would have done if I’d never known him, and I ended up working there for five summers. I made countless friends at GWLC and did a lot of growing up there over the years. I also met my wife at Greenwood, and it’s pretty much a certainty that I never would have met her if Shaun hadn’t convinced me to work at GWLC the summer after our senior year of high school.
• I coached cross country and tennis at our high school alma mater after Shaun recommended me to the Athletic Director there. Again, something that wouldn’t have happened without Shaun’s influence that turned into a great experience.

There are many others, but the three above are the quickest to come to mind. I don’t see Shaun as much as I’d like because he’s in Michigan going to law school (and he’s the hardest working student I’ve ever met - no one else comes close), but when we do get together I’m always reminded of what a positive influence Shaun has been in my life and of what a positive influence he continues to be. After spending a few hours with Shaun I inevitably feel invigorated and more positive about life in general. As I get older I realize how rare it is to find people who can inspire such feelings.

All these good things, despite the fact that he struggles with the handicap of Republicanism. It’s really quite impressive.

- I’ve really been suffering from a lack of competition in my life for awhile. One of the tougher things about graduating from high school is the lack of opportunity for playing sports. However I was giving a tennis lesson at Schiller Park today and saw a flyer for this company. They’re having tennis leagues and tournaments this summer in Columbus, which is very cool. There’s a singles tournament on June 10th that I think I’m going to sign up for, and I’ll probably sign up for their league too. It has some weird scoring and rules (so as to get all the matches in I think), but it’s better than nothing. I joined the USTA a while back and then never did anything with it, but this seems like a low pressure way to start playing some tournaments.

- Took Larkin to the vet yesterday, and talked to them a little about breeding her. She’s only one so it would still be a ways off, and we’re just trying to decide whether or not to spay her. Lots of strong opinions on the internet on this issue, not surprisingly. People get goofy when it comes to animals. I know that there are tons of dogs in pounds, so you shouldn’t breed unless it’s a show quality dog, etc. etc., but how do people get pet quality purebreds if nobody ever breeds pet quality animals? I don’t know, we’re still undecided. Here’s a picture of Larkin:

- The weather the last week is killing me. I really need summer to hurry up and get here. Once I’m rich (come on, it’s just a matter of time) I’m going to have to leave Ohio for the sake of my sanity. I require better weather.

Authorities in Athens said that they were investigating a mountain bike that put the Ohio University campus on high alert Thursday morning.

Athens Acting Fire Chief Ken Gilbraith said that the bike had a sticker on it that said, “This bike is a pipe bomb.” He said the university police discovered it overnight, parked outside a campus restaurant.

OU closed four buildings, police blocked streets around the Oasis restaurant, the fire department brought in off-duty firefighters, and the Columbus fire department’s bomb squad was called in.

Gilbraith said the bomb experts attacked the bike with a high-pressure spray of water, then pried it open with a hydraulic tool and found no bomb inside.