The end of a pretty hectic week, only to start up again with the first of the month upon us. For Comment Friday I asked for opinions on our layout and if displaying recent posts and recent comments on the sidebar matters. I will be doing a follow up post about it when I get the chance, pretty interesting responses.

One of the things mentioned by RoDaniel, Homemom and Brooke was that our sidebar runs past the page. It has to do with the CSS I think? I haven’t been able to figure out the problem, if anyone knows how, please contact me we’ve had this problem since we rolled out this design months ago.

Thanks to everyone who wished Matthew a happy birthday. He is the heir to the BlogaboutyourBlog.com empire so start sucking up to him now. He is still accepting presents by the way. Thanks to Susan Mellott about the kind words regarding me and BAYB.

Since it’s almost Monday I will give our current blog of the week another week on the sidebar. I hope the link love above was enough to hold some of you over until next friday.

Tomorrow we will be announcing our months income as well as the Blog about your Blog authors who made money.

I’ve had a cell phone since junior high and I’m 21 now. Within that period plenty of my cell phones became old, outdated, and obsolete. Using Cell For Cash you can easily sell your outdated phones.I spent some time looking at cellforcash.com checking how much they would actually pay me for my old phones. Since I’ve had quite a few Nokia cell phones I started there first. They don’t offer a lot of money for them, but it’s better than nothing (5-15$ range for ones I’ve owned). If it’s older than 2 years old you may not be able to sell it, but you can recycle your cell phone for free.

The process to sell your cell phone is simple. Select the cell phone you wish to sell, submit a form, and a free postage paid box will be sent to you. Once you send in the phone you can receive the $.

Win a Wii… Or Not

I chose to review this website, not just for the unique idea of it, but I also thought it would be fun to promote their Wii contest. However I was pretty disappointed to find out there wasn’t a way to register. If you are trying to win a wii there is no entry form on that page. You can see a winners list, so they’ve given away prizes before. Good luck trying to enter…

Friday already, I think I will take the time each friday to mention whats going on with me personally. I’ve been really overwhelmed and stressed, mostly about money. I should be getting into that later next week. My son is turning two tomorrow (Saturday) so the stress runs through that as well. With so much to do, and blogging my main source of income I haven’t been able to devote enough time to it. Now onto Comment Friday!

If this is your first comment friday, the idea is pretty simple. Leave us a comment about anything you want. I will select one lucky commenter that really stands out, and I will be giving out a free link to that person. In addition to that that, I will be giving them a free blogroll spot.

I have been really experimenting with ad placement on this site and It’s All Free Online. Along with putting up new ads, I’ve also removed the “Recent Comments” and “Recent Posts”. Have you noticed? If so what do you think? If you don’t regularly visit the blog, do those two things on the sidebar really matter to you?

I will be choosing a winner for the contest soon, I have all the entries together (40 entries!), I just have to film myself drawing the winner. Don’t forget we still have a free promo code for the newest thing in website promotion, Adspheres.

Written by Mark MeAndMyDrum | Fave MAMD | Subscribe to MAMD

SeatGuru is a repository of 275 seatmaps for planes. Big deal, huh? Well, it is if you’re a traveler and want to know where your seat is, is it close (or too close?) to a lavatory, near the bulkhead or wing or exit?

Traveling can be a hassle just by itself. Why not make your flight a little more comfortable/enjoyable by finding out what others have said about where you’re placing your backside? What’s more is that you can also help others by leaving comments about your experiences.

What can I find out?
More than you’ll probably need to know, but nothing wrong with being prepared:

• Is there a changing table onboard for infants?
• Are their video monitors? If so, where are they located?
• Are there any power outlets I can use for my laptop or charge my cell phone?
• Are snacks offered? When?
• Does one seat have more legroom than another one?

What types of planes are included in this baby?
Tons. First, you select your airline in the alpha listing. When you do, you’re greeted with a list of plane models currently on file. Select one of those and you’re shown a layout of the plane’s seating, complete with color codes, some of which present information when you roll over them.

I mentioned comments are gathered from fellow travelers, but you can also expect to find information from insiders like pilots and flight attendants.

So, you like a certain site, but you don’t like all the posts in all of the categories that the writer writes in, some of the topics just don’t interest you or you are only interested in one of the topics.

Well, did you know that for WordPress sites there is an RSS solution that will save you scanning through all those feeds your not interested in?? It is simple, use the category feed instead of the main site feed.

You can subscribe to the category feed, by simply go to the category page that you wish to subscribe too.

For an example the “blogging” category here at Blog About Your Blog is at this URL: http://blogaboutyourblog.com/category/blogging/

You will know it is a category page because the word category is in the URL itself. This is a default URL from WordPress and I don’t think there are very many bloggers that change this default as it is a good one. You can find the category pages on a lot of sidebars and on most sites somewhere next to where you click to leave comments.

You then just simply at the word “feed” with a backslash(/) to that category page, so the example blogging category feed is located at: http://blogaboutyourblog.com/category/blogging/feed/

You go to that page and it will allow you to subscribe to only the feeds of that category and you will no longer need to sort your RSS feeder of the stuff you aren’t interested in.

I am Jennifer from The Life of a School Bus Driver, hoping that you will check out my Blogger of the Day and even subscribe to the Feed.

Written by Mark of MeAndMyDrum | Fave MAMD | Subscribe to MAMD

If you’re a newbie blogger looking for tips on how to get started or someone who has been blogging for a while, but needs a little boost, there’s a contest you should know about that will help you both.

Garry Conn has more blogs than you can shake a stick at. It’s no hobby either because this is what he does for a living. He makes his money mostly from his successful use of Google AdSense. What’s cool is that he can help you do the same if you win.

What do I win in this Conn-test?
Something you don’t see very often, that’s for sure. Here’s a summary of the goods:

• 1 year free hosting for a blog
• Help finding a profitable niche for your blog
• Help finding the perfect domain name
• Install WordPress with all the bells and whistles working behind the scenes that can help your blog stand out

Garry recently launched a new blog called How Do I Make Money Online? On Day One it received well over 1,300 visitors. Not too shabby right out of the gate.

If you were to put a price tag on all this, you’d have $2,000 worth of services. If you want a chance to grab that, I encourage you to visit his post for more details.

I held off on the inital ‘rush’ for this website. Instead of posting another generic post announcing that BlogRush is sweeping the blogosphere I held off on that, instead put the widget in on the sidebar.

The ‘rush’ for MyBlogLog has really died down since they haven’t offered anything new in a while, so the BlogRush widget took it’s place.

The Results

As bloggers like John Chow and ProBlogger have reported, their click-through rate has been low, so how about bloggers like me who don’t have 100’s of referrals?

It’s even worse.

Credits we’ve earned over “the last 7 days” is 4,353. If traffic remained the same thats over 10,000 impressions per month. At a result of only 3 clicks and no revenue generated, that space is essentially wasted.

Abuse of the System

BlogRush has stated that click-through rates are low due to ‘users cheating the system’. Unless the format is drastically changed I can’t imagine how they can weed out who’s cheating and who’s not.

It has also been mentioned that some users are placing the widget in places that doesn’t get many clickthroughs anyways. Or that the blog itself doesn’t get many clickthroughs. This will continue to be a problem. Unless there is some moderation, which would be impossible, clickthroughs will remain low due to this problem.

If you were someone who actually experienced a “rush of traffic” consider yourself lucky.

There are a few posts I’ve written here where I’ve mentioned the phenomenal bookmarking service call Diigo. It’s something I use all the time. And when I do, I’m making a copy to two other bookmarking sites at the same time just for safe keeping.

The folks at Diigo have pushed the envelope a little farther with something they’ve recently announced call WebSlides. The reasons for using such a service are numerous, but the one I see being used the most is for bloggers to highlight other sites.

Another use is to create a presentation about your own blog for visitors to get to know about your place. It might be a nice addition to your sidebar or About page.

A presentation is very simple to make. While in your Diigo account, you select the sites you want to include and save them to a list. You can then add an audio file for background music or narration if you like.

Readers can adjust the speed at which they move from site to site. They can pause it or even click on the sites provided in a list at their own pace — all without having to create a Diigo account of their own.

I’ve explained more in my own presentation, so click the button below and take it for a spin. (Btw, yes, that’s me narrating. )

The sites I’ve included in this presentation are:

Brown Thoughts
Ordinary Folk
Pink Internet Marketing
ShanKri-la
Revellian.com
Kyle’s Cove
Christy’s Coffee Break
The Sapheyerblu Review
Blog About Your Blog
Garry Conn dot Com
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