It’s been a long and productive year for us. We have grown up into a great popular blog, as well as gotten some great writers and regular readers along the way. Pulling in about 10,000 unique visitors a month and 500+ RSS readers is nothing to sneeze at.

Daily Blog Tips listed their top posts of 2007, I thought it was a great idea to do. So I’ve done the same. I took about 4-5 excellent posts per month. Some were left out, but I did my best to give you some good reading.

January

• No Comments? Why Bother?
• This is NOT a sponsored post
• Confessions of a Blogging Veteran
• Top 10 Sins of Blog Usability

February

• 5 ways to get more comments and make you smile
• Why is it that people send spam still?
• Dodgy Money Making Schemes
• A few sophisticated directories

March

• Here’s a quick way to make your long posts more readable
• Displaying your RSS Feed Count: What is the Big Deal?
• Hey!? My Blog is a Transformer
• Hi My Business Name Goes Here and This is My Blog

April

• To tweak or not to tweak your blog?
• Finding Cost Per Visitor: Are Your Ads Paying Off?
• Are you using your RSS to promote your other blogs?
• The Benefits of De-Lurking

May

• It’s Not Always About Traffic
• Increasing Blog Traffic by Using HTML in Comments of Other Blogs
• 4 Steps To Becoming A Bad Web Parent
• Top Five Reasons for Blogging

June

• Join the iReply Revolution
• Round ‘Em Up!
• Make Money Online with SurveySpot
• Business blogs - how personal to get?

July

• 6 Great Tips for Hosting a Blogging Contest
• 5 Must Have Comment Plugins for WordPress
• Don’t Underestimate The Power Of Link Love
• 9 Reasons for a Blogger to Use a Desktop RSS Reader
• 9 Reasons to Use a Desktop Blog Editor

August

• 10 Quick Blogging Tips
• Using Craigslist to Promote your Website
• 6 Spanking New WordPress Plugins You Haven’t Seen
• 6 Firefox Add-Ons That Boost Productivity

September

• 10 Firefox Add-ons to Supercharge your Blogging
• Blogger/Blogspot Next Blog Warning
• Two Free Font Utilities You Should Check Out
• Bloggers Are the Biggest Copy Cats
• Isn’t Email Marketing Spamming?

October

• 5 Things You Can Do With Your New PageRank
• Blogging The San Diego Fires
• Affiliate Marketing With NeverBlue Ads
• Getting ‘Scammed’ Got Us Mentioned on John Chow Dot Com

November

• 3 Magazine Themes For WordPress
• Top 20 Contest Blogs
• Making Money With Videos
• Does McDonalds Pay More than Blogging?

December

• Leaving the pack to follow the flock: A Browser Fairy Tale
• 3 Must-See Lists for Top WordPress Plugins, Tweaks & Firefox Extensions
• Entrecard: Blogging’s Newest Fad
• Domaining is Bloggers New Pastime

Have you ever visited a blog with a random title, read the latest post and known all you needed to know about the author?

Well if you have, then you’ve been lucky and that writer just happened to have the right post at the right time on the first page and tomorrow when they post again the next group of people will miss out on that brilliant first impression.

So the odds are the first post a new reader will see on your post may be something like:

• More fun with crayons… - a post which features a drawing of Dracula in crayon.

From this first post you can gather some small information about me, I willing to experiment with crayons and possibly I like Dracula. It doesn’t tell you what I do for a living, my age, why I blog or even what my name is (well you can find that if you try without too much trouble I suppose but you get the idea).

This is where your about me page comes into play.

The about me page on your blog gives you an identity instantly that can if written well add authority to your posts. This is especially important if you’re blogging for business reasons or as a portfolio and nothing helps your adsense dollars like repeat readers who will pass on the good word because they like you!

So on your about me page write about why I should read another word written by you, do you have some experience in the field that you’re blogging about?  Are you passionate about what you write about? Or just write more about who you are which will help me identify with you, make you feel more like a real person rather than the sum of a potentially uninformative random post!

Just don’t go look at my about me page!!! I’m going to go work on that now LOL.

Cheers

Lee
Quit Your Day Job

It’s Matt here again from Contest Beat with another Weekly Contest Roundup. Being the holiday season not too many people seem to be online and so there aren’t all that many new contests being run. However, there are quite a few that go through until January and February next year, and even beyond, so make sure you check those out on Contest Beat. That said, I have just three new contests to update you guys with this week:

$300 Mystery Prize

This is an interesting contest for two reasons - firstly the prize (worth $300+ retail) is not disclosed, and secondly because in order to enter you have to head over here and then guess what is making the sounds! Once you’ve figured it out just email them your answer using the contact form supplied and you’re in.

Cash and Much More

DotSauce are trying to get their domain forums up and running with lots of activity and are running a New Years contest in order to try and achieve this. To enter you first need to register on the forums yourself, and then for each friend you refer you get another entry in the comp. Up for grabs are everything from Entrecard credits, to cash, t-shirts, advertising, subscriptions and more.

Hosting and a Domain

This is a weekly contest being run by AdesDesign up until February 13. Each week someone will win a free domain registration for 2 years along with 2 years of hosting. To enter you just need to subscribe to their RSS feed and then leave a comment on the contest post.

Thats right Blogging is one of the new favorite tools of many of the top domainers!

I decided to take Matthews previous post on Domaining being the new pastime for blogging by completely throwing things into reverse!

I started out in online business buying and selling domains, which I guess would make me a “domainer”. Luckily I started out when I was very young which also meant the internet was fairly young. And this meant there was plenty of awesome domains still available to register. But it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I really started to get into blogging!

But why the hell would I want to get into blogging? Well quite simply, I saw huge income potential in developing and then selling blogs. And im happy to report that I have been selling many predeveloped blogs for around the past 6 months.

But the question still remains, why would a domainer want to get into blogs? See domainers make money from either selling domains or putting up parking pages where you earn on type in traffic. Just take a look at WeddingShoes.com (owned by a prominent domainer) which is a great example of a parking page. A page like this makes a lot each month (im talking thousands) so why on earth would a domainer put a blog on such a great domain?

But what about those not so great domains like doshpro.com or bloglover.info. These domains aren’t anything special and wouldn’t sell for anything much above the registration price and will receive no type in traffic. Therefore, these domain would make perfect candidates for a blog. And with just a couple of hours work these domain could sell for hundreds!

And this is the exact technique many domainers are using to monetize the myriad of worthless domains in ones portfolio.

So if you have any domains just sitting around gathering dust, chuck a blog up, post some content and in a couple of months you will have a fairly valuable asset.

You can find me and my blog at Marketvice.com a blog all about marketing, blogging and of course domaining. I hope to see you there.

I originally posted my list at YoPress, but I thought it was kind of funny so I decided to share it here. Hope you enjoy, let me know if I missed anything.

10. Won’t be difficult to wake up with the kids in the morning

9. No unfriendly hangover to wake up to

8. Do you technically get any older if you sleep through it?

7. No need to wear those cheap hats and play the annoying whistles

6. Don’t have to worry about crowded places

5. You won’t freeze to death! It’s 30 degrees in San Diego!

4. You have a big day of drinking ahead of you!

3. No need for any new years resolutions

2. No annoying countdowns, like Tila Tequila on MTV

1. You don’t have to get stuck kissing the ugly girl at midnight again

Can you think of any other reasons to sleep through New Years and just skip it?

We all should know what time of year it is by now. The final days of decorations and Christmas lights. The final days of unnecessary holiday cheer and courtesy and kindness towards family members that we can only tolerate for a limited time. Excuse me if I come across as a Grinch but, whatever.

I personally can’t wait till its over. I can’t wait to get this huge obstructive Christmas Tree out of my living room. I can’t wait to take down these ultra bright shiny Christmas lights that keep me up every night because someone had the brilliant idea to put them right outside the bedroom window. I can’t wait to get on to the real festivities, NEW YEARS EVE!

New Years eve can all but make up for a crappy Christmas holiday and give a little redemptive quality to the overuse of the term, “Season’s Greetings!” New Years even can pick up and turn a bad year around 180 degrees or at the least erase from your memory those things about the preceding year you would rather forget. This year, however, I’m taking a different approach. I plan to make it through the New Year absolutely and positively sober. *Gasp

You may wonder what this is all about well allow me to tell you. I stumbled across a very informative blog post in my usual web travels and it changed my perspective on all things blog (especially all things intoxicating). No, it wasn’t a preachy expose talking about the ills of drinking and warm testimonials from “Those who have been there” but it was about the thing a lot of us do almost every day. I can clearly trace the masses of confused faces in my mind after that last statement so let me continue.

The single dot I stumbled upon in the net matrix is a quaint (simply meaning clean) little blog know as Copyblogger.com. At first I thought it was yet another one of those, “This is the way you blog” sites (Unlike the greatest of them all right here - Blog About Your Blog) but upon digging a little deeper beneath its digital surface I found an article that literally made me stand up out of my seat (Ok, it wasn’t that dramatic but you get my point.) The article talked about, not the ills of becoming physically intoxicated, but the ills and pitfalls of becoming INTOXICATED ON OUR OWN WORDS. Now this can either be taken at face value or you can look just a little deeper.

He talks about how writers have a special gift to make all who read their words become intoxicated and ready to buy whatever they want or even go as far as wearing a blue Santa hat on their head in June (Think the movie Perfume - If you haven’t seen get it at your local video store - lol - seriously). Writers who do this well will get their point across and retain the reader throughout the entire post. Writers who do this not so well will have their readers taking a detour after the first period. Its a delicate balance and the blog author Jonathan Morrow breaks it down exquisitely.

He gives tips on how to know if you’re drunk on your own words and how to redirect your time and energy if you realize that you are going to veer off that cliff. He breaks down all of the things that we bloggers do but points out some fine points that we may have never thought of. The blog post is called 7 Warning Signs That You’re Drunk on Your Own Words and tells exactly what the title suggests. I thought that it would be a perfect segue into the new year as all of us prepare for the night of festivities and reminiscing.

I’m gonna be sitting around sipping on a cool glass of ice and sprite laughing my head off at the others who did “a little bit too much”. In order for me to be this years designated driver I plan on bringing along printed out pages of my favorite BAYB posts and other blogs I frequent to fill in all of the dry spots. I plan on making it into the new year a calm and collected blogger (without exposing too much) and I plan on seeing you all here right after.

Be sure to give Mr. Morrow and his Copy Blogger Web site for more useful tips and articles (I promise that you won’t be disappointed). In closing, I hope everyone enjoys the rest of 2007 and transition gracefully into 2008 and remember…

BLOG RESPONSIBLY

Sorry about the lack of posts around here, we are just recovering from Christmas. We are also having some family issues, so we have been spending some time with everyone. I guess I had to use a few blogging sick days. However, BAYB is doing great still and we are close to cashing out on Adsense once again. Hoping to beat the end of the month deadline to get our check faster.

If this is your first Comment Friday we give one lucky person a free weekly blogroll spot as our “blog of the week“. Along with that we are also giving that winner 50 entrecard points.

Our entrecard points Christmas gifts were also given to A Cowboys Wife and JaseemUmer.com. They each received 50 entrecard points. For those wondering, I closed the comments on that post. I closed them after the day ended, so only comments for that day were eligible.

Back to Comment Friday. Leave any comment you want. We’d love to hear about your Christmas and how that was. Maybe the best gift you received. I’d also like to know what posts you’d like to read around here. Happy Holidays and get commenting!

We didn’t get a chance to post yesterday, with it being Christmas and all.

The morning started with opening tons of presents for my son. After that, of course we had to play with them all! Christmas breakfast then on the road to visit family. The best part about that was, I found my calling.

Yes that’s right I may quit blogging to become a full time Guitar Hero rocker. Yesterday was the first time I played and I felt the crowd behind me. I’m not sure I can balance both in my busy life! Choices… choices.

Sometime after the 1st of the year we hope to announce another BAYB contest, but we have yet to find a contest sponsor. However, today we will be giving away 100 entrecard points. 2 people who leave comments here will each win 50.

Merry Christmas