Please post a comment on what you would like to see and you may see it in upcoming articles, cheers!

I got a new tattoo! Right smack in the center of my back between my shoulderblades. It is currently healing so it itches/hurts but within a weeks time it will be all healed and will be a fully functioning part of my body once again. A picture of it can be seen here. I chose a cross simply because I am religious, and as I move away from my home this fall to head off to college I want to be able to remember my religion. While I may not actually be able to see it, I will always know it is there.

I also got a new car! Well, not exactly. This bad boy was sitting in the mall and I just couldn’t help but give it a test drive. If it had a bit more head room I may have considered it.

Last but not least, I got a new cell phone. I have finally branched away from my parents a bit more and gotten my own cell phone plan. Got a shiny new phone and a simple calling plan. I use verizon and have a Blackberry Curve 8330. So far so good and the only downside I have found to this phone so far is the small buttons on the keyboard. Oh and the insane price, even with a new 2 year contract.

Hopefully that will give you a few updates on ym status and you should see more posts coming soon. I will also be updating the Nintendo DS tickets today so keep an eye on that post for changes.

Design is a vital part of any website looking to hit it big in the online world. While it may not be top priority, it should be something of importance when you first start, and even when you go through later on. Design is the very first thing people judge your site on, and if your site looks like it got hit by a freight train, your better off not even opening it in the first place.

Originality. This is the key to having a successful design. If you are really striving for 2nd best, copy someone elses design, otherwise you will need a fresh new idea. You most likely will have a picture of what you want in your mind, but just don’t have the ability(or motivation) to draw it. That’s where a hired hand comes in. While there is no “big dog” out there that you can go to, there are some great places you can go to find a good designer that will work for you.

The best place for this that I have found is GetAFreelancer. GetAFreelancer has tons of people waiting to be hired for coding, data entry, and even designing, exactly what you have been looking for. After joining you can post the job you want in the website design section. Your best bet is to become a Gold Member right away. If you aren’t a gold member and you’re new, people won’t trust you. No one can be certain of anything when you haven’t even taken the time to invest, and have no prior work done here. Also Gold Members get higher listing priority.

After you’ve listed your project, people will bid on working for you. If you are paying a reasonable amount, you will get tons of bidders in no time. But remember, the cheapest will not always be the best quality, ask for links to past work before hiring and make sure they are willing to do everything you ask them, you don’t want to be stuck with something you don’t like, or doesn’t look good.

Not only does GetAFreelancer have designers, but they have coders, data entry users, and much much more! If there is something you can’t figure out and are willing to have done, post a job, you will surely get someone to do it. GAF is an excellent resource for anything you are looking for and will sure to make you happy at the end of the job.

GetAFreelancer gets $5/$5 because their service is great and is an excellent tool for any webmaster. I have used this website personally a few times and I have had nothign but great success from it. I highly suggest everyone to use this service when you are looking for some online work to be done.

How can you achieve great status without anything special? Easy, just get your composure right. Let’s take The Rich Jerk for example. What does he have to offer that others don’t? Nothing except the attitude of a donkey and a hairdo to match. While he does provide some great information that could help new webpreneurs expand their business, it’s nothing that you couldn’t buy from anyone else as well. Others sell the same thing, but not with the “great” niché of being a jerk. He tells you everything you don’t want to hear, but then quickly counteracts that with a “But I am willing to help you anyways” sort of attitude. It doesn’t do much for your own self esteem, but it brands him in your head, and keeps you looking back and thinking about it.

If you post something, firstly you should always make sure it is correct, secondly always back it with 100% of your will. If someone questions it, find out how they are wrong, and prove that you are right. No one likes to be told they are wrong, but it shows a sense of confidence just to hold your position. Webmasters are always a little pushy, and aren’t upset to “cut down” a few users in the process. While I don’t suggest “cutting down” anyone, it is a good idea to correct anyone that contradicts you. When you say something on your own site, that makes it fact, and you better be sure you can back it. People feel a bit intimated by someone in power(as you are) and won’t usually go to great lengths to argue anyways.

Whenever you make a change to your website/blog, it is always a good change, that will expand your site for the better. Don’t ever be wishy-washy on your actions. Users have to follow you in whatever you do, make sure they are following a leader who is confident in what they are doing. You wouldn’t want to go to war with a commander that “isn’t sure” if your going the right way, or even fighting the right people. While this may not be as dangerous(or life threatening), the concept still holds true and needs to be kept firmly.

You are the webmaster, you are right, you are in control. Let your users know this, and show it. Don’t be a jerk about it, just let them know. There are tons of ways you can get people hooked to your certain composure, don’t be afraid to do something you think is a bit “crazy”. JohnCow.com is also another great example of this. His niché is obviously, cow-based. This may seem a bit immature at first, but eventually it is amusing for readers just to see how he implements it into the basic parts of the site. Comments are “Moos”, Money is “Mooney”, and he is never too kind to leave an angry remark at an outgoing commentor. His composure fits exactly what his site entails, and it has led to great success.

Whatever type of site you decide to do, always be the best at it. Or at least tell people you are.

Total Tickets: 50

Entrant : Number Of Tickets
Kristina : 1
Wreckadge : 1
TechM : 2
Azuma : 1
Bones : 1
Simon : 1
Bunny : 2
Deb : 1
XZin : 1
Valmg : 2
Eva : 2
Melanie Lee : 2
ES : 1
IndoContest : 2
Jenny : 2
Angela: 2
Tonya: 1
Rhonda: 1
Stacey: 1
Christy: 2
Daniela: 1
John: 1
Brenda: 1
Cheryl: 2
Joanne: 1
Sue Chumley: 1
Sue Williams: 1
Shilo: 2
Mary W: 1
Kristinia: 2
Linda F: 1
Shauna: 2
Justin: 1
Barbie: 1
SieraMari: 1
Kim: 1
Hazel: 1
Jenna: 1

Updated April 29, 2008 - 50 More Tickets To Go!

Hopefully we can get some more contestants.
Also don’t forget you can get more tickets just by commenting, I will soon be giving out the tickets for comments and will do so every day. If you comment is good, you get a ticket. Click here to see the original post and found out how to get in on this lovely contest!

Good Luck To Everyone!

Highschool ending is sort of a good, and bad thing. While I get to finally move away from the daily routine of class, I also lose many lifelong friends that I may never see again. We recently had our senior prom(note picture on the right, my dates name is Cortney) and it was shortly after this that I realized how close we were to our final days together. It is very apparent in our school as all seniors do near the end of the year is sleep(this is caused by what we call “senior-itis”). It’s hard to believe I’ve spent 12 years of my life in this school and it is all so quickly coming to an end. Keeping in touch with others will be my main goal, and I think it will be fairly easy to do so with the technology we have today(Facebook/Myspace). All in all, it will be hard to say goodbye to everyone, but I can’t say that I’m not willing to do it. I will be attending The University of Toledo in the fall, along with my old business partner, Enigma. Hopefully this will prove beneficial to my life in the future, as I believe it will.

My network selling is also something very hard to part with, but very beneficial to the future. As stated above, I will soon be attending college, selling this network earned me almost enough to pay for the first full year of college(a grand achievement in my eyes). I have built this network from the ground up with Enigma, and it is very hard to let it go, but I will have less and less time to keep it going with upcoming activities and feel it is best for the network, and myself to let it go. Hopefully the new owner takes care of it, he does seem very able to do so.

And last but not least, the benefits of letting your users know a bit about your personal life. Users want to get to know the owner, to sort of “get under their skin”. It is a great idea to post big happenings in your life, as users want to be right there with you all the way. Expect to see more of these types of posts from me in the near future. Hopefully you can help me along the path I am about to take.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Put even simpler, we will start from the beginning. Google is the largest web search engine online today, and will always be. From junior high schools to retirement homes, the latest trend when you want a question answered is to “Google It”. This phrase has swept the nation and almost everyone currently uses it. If you’re a webmaster, you want to be on the top of the results and to do this, you need a decent Google PageRank.

Google PageRank is based on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Sites with PR0 have either just started, or were bought and never had any content or traffic. You should be able to attain a PR1 quite easily. Your PageRank is based on the number of links directing to your sites from other sites. The more you have, the more you will go up in rank obviously. But don’t be fooled, some sites are better to be linked from than others. Being linked to on a PR7 site will do a large amount of good compared to a PR1. PR0 links are virtually useless as they are new and have no content, so their links mean practically nothing.

PageRank does work and is efficient for getting your site into some keywords on Google’s monopoly of a search engine, but overall it is not worth the hassle and is a dead market. Google does not show results on a page solely based of PageRank as some seem to think. If you swap links with some large sites and manage to get a higher PR than that of a site that has been running for 5 years solid, they will most definately get the higher result. Why? Established sites mean everything. Google strives to link it’s users to the most relevant information and most likely the site that has been active for 5 years will have better content and more information on the subject than your 3 month old site. Inevitably, PageRank is just another tool to rank yourself against other websites of the same niché to see where you stand.

Google has opened an entirely new market by simply allowing this new feature to be used. While it is somewhat beneficial to the engine as a whole, it could simply be hidden because it is not solely relying on backlinks like everyone believes. Users are now paying up to $100+/month to have their link posted in a PR7 link directory. A link directory is a site that contains just links, and that is all, it is created solely for the use of boosting PageRank and is against Google TOS. People have literally wasted thousands of dollars getting backlinks. Sometimes it works out in the end but most often, it does not.

As stated above Google is now a monopoly online and quite literally anything they brand with their logo, they will start making millions from. There is no denying that PageRank is an excellent tool to use in their search engine, but it has started a spending spree that is leading most people nowhere.

The great part of Entrecard is that it is a very simple setup, and anyone wishing to use it can get it up and running in minutes. There is no complex form or html code to put on your site. To get going just sign up, verify your email address, choose the image you want to use for your site, and insert the small html code onto your page anywhere. That’s it, you’ve set it up, Entrecard is installed and ready to use on your site.

Now that you’ve got it set up, you will probably get a few advertising requests in the next hour or two. This is normal because your blog costs only a few credits to advertise on currently. When a new blog joins, it only costs 2 EntreCredits to advertise on. Each time an advertisement is bought, that number doubles. When you first join you will get a few advertiser requests because 2 EntreCredits is a very small price to pay for advertisement. After a while you will casually rest at a cost somewhere near 32 EntreCredits, sometimes a bit lower.

As for actually earning these EntreCredits, there are many ways to do so. You get 1 EntreCredit for each blog that you “drop” your EntreCard at, and 1 for each other blogger that “drops” their card on your blog. ”Dropping” means visiting the blog, finding their EntreCard widget and clicking the “drop” button. You also earn 25% of the advertising credits you earn on your blog. This means if someone pays 100 EntreCredits to advertise on your blog, you will earn 25 credits just for letting it run.

On top of the cheap advertising and easy usability, their forums also provide a great place to expand and meet other blogmasters. While you most likely won’t get any real customers for anything you are selling, you can make friends with those who have users that might. Perhaps you will meet someone willing to do a linkback, or even a full article about your site. Even if you don’t post in the forums, if you are an active “card-dropper” your image is shown to the owner of the blogs you drop at every day. The owner may see you frequently and check in on your site to see if it’s any good.

One issue stands out above all else on EntreCard, the quality of traffic. While normally we take a neutral stance on traffic quality, this is one of our few exceptions. Nearly all traffic you get to your blog from EntreCard is from other bloggers using EntreCard. The only reason you get hits is because they want to hit the little “drop” button on your blog. Some may view for a little bit, but most won’t stay. Even if a regular person clicks your image on anothers site, it takes them not to your actual site, but to your EntreCard page. If they decide they still want to see the site, then they must click on your URL listed on the page, this concept gives very low conversions.

One last note I have is… DON’T GET ADDICTED TO ENTRECARD!!! Many webmasters think EntreCard is good, just like you should after reading this, but some of them use it as their primary source for traffic. This is a bad(actually horrible) thought and should be immediately omitted from your mind. EntreCard is not the solution to your traffic troubles and should be used just for a few spare hits here and there. If you start getting bad or no conversions, just remove it, don’t waste valuable space on your blog for it. You shouldn’t have to put serious amounts of time into EntreCard to make it work for you, if you are, you should stop using it.

EntreCard gets $3.50/$5.00 simply because the traffic lacks any real users, and conversions are hard to get from their bounce page. Other than that the service is wonderful and an excellent idea for anyone entering into the blog world. If you have a blog, you should have EntreCard.

Once you’ve decided that you want to purchase some traffic, why not look a bit deeper into what you are purchasing? Any schmuck can sell you traffic on a web forum and deliver it all to your site. But what if you are looking only for US-based users, or perhaps users wanting your specific genre, should you pay extra? No! Chances are these users are being coaxed to your site and being compensated(paid) for it. They don’t really care what genre your site is, or what your site even is altogether. They view the site solely for the purpose of getting paid to do it.

While targetting seems like a good idea, in the long run traffic is traffic. If your content is good enough, you will be able to convince them to stay. 19/20 people forced to view your site when someone purchases traffic won’t stick around on your site any longer than they are paid to do so. If you want real traffic, advertise your site, don’t purchase traffic.

When you purchase things online, you always get what you pay for. When you purchase advertising, you get advertising. When you purchase traffic, you get traffic. Make sure your site has content to keep them stuck to the page, if you rely solely on the hope that all of the traffic you purchase decides to stick around, you are going to be very distraught once your traffic flow has ended.