Unique Blog Designs 1 Year Anniversary

One of the hard parts about blogging (aside from keeping up with regular posts (sorry)) is finding a template that fits your style. I was lucky enough to come across the one I’m using now and have since modified it a bit to fit my needs. However, if you’re serious about blogging, you’ll need a unique blog design. And that’s where Unique Blog Designs comes in!

Unique Blog Designs has been in business now for 1 year, and to celebrate they’re having a contest! I love contests, especially when I win :) Rebecca has been borrowing my iPod quite a bit, so it’s about time she gets her own. Then I don’t have to keep High School Musical and Camp Rock on there at all times.

So if you’re looking for a Wordpress theme that truly reflects your style, check out Unique Blog Designs; and if you’re looking for a way to win an iPod, check out their 1-year anniversary contest!

Catching Up

Yeah, I know I haven’t written in a while. We got back from Disney late (24 hours late) and I’ve been busy catching up and getting to work. But I have a lot of photos to write captions for and upload, and a few blog posts waiting to be written. The ideas are in my notebook, I just have to get pen to paper fingers to keys. I’ll try really hard to write tonight.

My Problem with John Chow

I’ve got a big problem with John Chow. He’s a casualty of my information diet, but Steve and I always joke about his site. First of all, he admits:

I Make Money Online by Telling People How Much Money I Make Online

Well, good for him. For some reason, he’s got almost 15,000 regular readers of his blog. These people love reading about networks that John Chow finds with a 2-tier affiliate system, so he refers them to the network, and when they do the hard work, he makes money, or he writes about what he had for lunch that day. In case you were wondering, here’s my lunch today:

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Someday, these readers will wake up and realize the only reason John Chow makes money online is because of them. He’s built up an army of bloggers, affiliates and wanna-bes to make money for him. And as more signup for the Chow army, he can charge more for his reviews and ads.

Goal: Blog 5x / Week

Another 2008 goal of mine is to blog more often. It’s not hard, as there’s a lot on my mind, but I often wonder if anyone really wants to read this. There are readers who are looking for an affiliate marketing tip (which I admit that I rarely give), those readers who want to know what’s going on with their grandkids (hi, Mom!), some who like my Christmas lights, some who are interested in how I invest & financial tips, and the rest of you are just a bunch of stalkers.

But to blog 5 times / week? Can I do it? Really, cutting out much of the TV I used to watch gives me a LOT of free time to read. Reading makes me think, and thinking makes me want to write. I think it helps that I work from home, alone, so I don’t have the typical water-cooler gossip that a lot of traditional workers get to talk about.

In all honesty, in an hour I can write 3 pretty good posts, and just change the timestamp so they are published throughout the week. So hopefully in 2008, you’ll see > 250 posts from me. I’ll have to install some sort of Wordpress statistics plugin to get those numbers to you.

If you want to hear about something in particular, leave the idea in the comments, or email me. I’ll try to get to them.

Moved to a New Server

If you can see this message, you’re looking at the site on a new server. Let me know if you see anything that looks wrong.

I Got Dugg

One of my complaints to Steve the other day turned out to be inspiration for a blog post of his, which then got Dugg, which caused a spike in traffic for each of us.

Here’s Steve’s daily stats for this month:

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And here’s mine:

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Here’s a screenshot of digg.com, when my name is on the homepage linked to Steve’s blog post:

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This spike increased my AdSense earnings 1,250% that day… to $0.80 :D