My blog — MeAndMyDrum — recently turned 90 days old. I’m celebrating by holding a contest!

I have two Google AdWords coupons that I’ll be giving away. Each is worth $25. It could be as one prize ($50) or two ($25 each) depending on if Google allows the two to be combined on one account (I’m waiting on their response now). Additionally, I’ll give free banner ad space on my blog for 30 days.

You can learn more about the rules and how to enter the contest on my blog.

It’s easy to enter, but you only have until May 31 to do it. So if you’ve been thinking about giving your blog exposure by using ads on Google’s search results, then this is the perfect opportunity to do it at no cost to you — IF you’re a lucky winner!

Please note: Out of respect to BAYB’s loyal readers, I will not accept posts made here as entries to the contest.

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Today begins a new series for Family WebWatch Blog: The FWW Spotlight. I’ll be highlighting online services, products and sites that are geared toward online protection, increased productivity, and family entertainment. If I find it useful for families, then I’ll pass it along.

Kephyr: Among the variety of offerings this site has, the one that I’ll be highlighting here is their file database. Ever wonder what those files are running in the background and if they should be? You can run a search in their database that currently has 13,400+ files to find out more about them.

Plaxo: I use this everyday. I have over 3,300 contacts in my Outlook database and I would literally pass out if I ever lost them. Plaxo gives me the peace of mind I need. Additionally, Plaxo makes synchronizing them between my office and home computers easy. If I update a contact on one, it automatically syncs up to my online account, and then syncs with my office computer. It does the same thing for calendar events, tasks and notes, too.

Common Sense Media: What a great tool to add to the parent toolbox. This site covers TV and movie reviews, parenting tips, and more of what a family needs to be aware of.

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Hey everyone! As you can see by the title, I will be turning 21….. tomorrow! If I can find my camera I will post some pictures, we are going out to Dave and Busters, it’s like adult chucky cheese if you haven’t been there. For my birthday I hope we will be able to give away the mini fridge finally, and I will be working on another giveaway for a nice leather day-planner.

I am accepting birthday presents, lately I have been buying sponsored reviews for blogs to review us, and it would be a great present for any reader to blog about us or subscribe to our RSS feed. I’m currently trying to use the anchor text “more web site traffic” (wink wink).

As some of our regular readers know, my family suffered a tragic loss, so I will also be attending a funeral tomorrow. I’ve been running around making sure everyone has what they need, so I appreciate the support from Lee and our great authors and readers. Your kind words were very nice, I’m glad we have such loyal people with us.

Okay, enough of the sappy stuff, any gifts are welcome. Let me throw up a paypal button. Donations will go to buying reviews from bloggers. Of course each donation will get a link or whatever they want! Yes I strip on webcam!

Someday I want to buy a John Chow, but with his increasing costs, and set prices (no deals; I’ve asked) that is becoming more unlikely. I have a deal with Kumiko in the works, for her to blog about us. She is definitely up and coming, and writes great reviews. So check out her site, she will be posting about BAYB very soon!

I also wanted to give out some more contact information, if you need to reach me, I usually have the computer on. Here are my instant messenger usernames, and yes the AIM/AOL name is not mine, it’s my girlfriend emma’s! I swear!

AOL: tinka5787

Yahoo: p0etree@yahoo.com (its a zero)

MSN: mattmacdaddy@hotmail.com

Happy Birthday…….. to meeeeeee.

Update! The button works now, stupid me.

Wow! Its been a while since I last had the time to post on BAYB. So in this comeback post, what wonderful and insightful content can I offer you. 😉

Well, I can’t offer you any of this insightful content, but I can offer you a free upgrade on a link at Flimble.com. Flimble, is a bidding directory where you can bid to have your link display higher up in the results. All you have to do, to claim your free upgrade, is add a link to the website and I will upgrade your bid by $2. This should mean your link will be displayed on the front page and hopefully give you some decent traffic.

If you would like to take me up on this offer, you have to post the link you added as a comment on this post.

Well thats all i’ve got! Maybe I can get over my writers block sometime soon.

P.S – I’ve got a new blog over at netflask.com. I sold my previous blog, go2tap.com (for a very nice figure) and tapcast.net is also being acquired.

My friend the Baron of Brown Thoughts has tagged me with another writing challenge: what are my favorite unpopular posts on my blog?

If the lack of comments were the only factor being considered here, that would include quite a few posts on my blog as it’s still young. So I’m going to add to that: posts that I was hoping for more comments based on my hope that they would generate more discussion.

One such post was a recent one I made for ProBlogger’s writing contest: 5 Sympathies For The Devil. It did receive a few comments from some of my regulars (cool, I can actually say that I have regulars on my blog!), it was actually more successful with the trackbacks — very successful. The reason for that kind of popularity is because quite a few people copied all the entries for that contest onto their blogs. I don’t mind that kind of attention. 🙂

I really put a lot of thought into that one and was expecting (hoping for?) a wide range of responses, from supporters to nay-sayers. At first I thought the title would put people off. But I decided to keep it in the end on account of it’s appropriateness to the topic and the inevitable response of, “What the…?”

Another one of my posts was Credit Cards to Illegal Immigrants? What’s Next? It’s topics like this that really strike a chord with me and was hoping for (again) to find other like-minded readers. But I suppose I was a little too eager to expect that sort of thing simply because my blog had only been 3 days old at the time I wrote it. 🙂

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I was lucky to include a submission in ProBloggers Top 5 Project. Yes, you read that right, I was lucky. To be one of the 800 something entries, I was lucky to be able to participate, and I will tell you why. First, however, I would like to thank This Eclectic Life for telling me about it through a comment. I didn’t read ProBlogger (I do now), so I had no idea what it was, but I figured I’d give it a shot.

Huge Exposure

Blog about your Blog got over 30 linkbacks by submitting just one article, Top Five Reasons for Blogging. This will not only hopefully give that article a nice page rank, but it gave us a lot of incoming links.

Traffic

The traffic portion wasn’t huge from the contest, as we were mostly published on a big list. However I did notice our RSS Feed numbers increased slightly. We were also chosen seperately for peoples “favorite” articles, which is always good.

Technorati Rank

This is the best gift from entering the Project. BAYB soared down the ranks from 12-13,000 to now well under 10,000. This not only gives us monetary opportunities, it’s a great feat to accomplish.

Why Did I Wait?

The ProBlogger Project has been over for a week-ish now, so why wait so long to blog about it? I wanted to find the overall effects it may have on this blog. We’ve been receiving linkbacks all week with people re-publishing the lists on different blogs. Just today we received two more links from the contest.

We Didn’t Win…

I never thought there would be so many entries, but I didn’t count on winning. 1000 Dollars would have been nice, but it wasn’t something I was aiming for. I never would imagine so many people would republish the list. By submitting an article that took very little time and thought to write and getting so much exposure for that… we definitely won.

Thank you to ProBlogger and all of the bloggers who took part in the project. Especially those who republished Day 3 (or the entire list).

It’s going to happen to you some time: blogger’s block.

The dreaded moment when you stare endlessly into your monitor thinking to yourself, “What can I write about?” Well, you’ve likely discovered many interesting things on the Web that you could write about, so maybe you just need a way to store all that knowledge to refer to. Here are two tips I use that you may find useful as well.

Google Notebook sits in the lower right corner of my Firefox browser. As I do my browsing and find something of interest, I activate it’s pop-up window and “clip” the URL and/or any content that I highlight. (This is how I take note of my Drum Corps candidates.:) ).

Managing my account is easy. I can rearrange items to other notebooks of mine or simply reorder the ones that I’ve already categorized. Comments can even be added to ensure nothing gets lost.

Another tool I find useful is Diigo (pronounced “dee-go”). True, it’s one of many social bookmarking offerings, but I find this one to offer a few more features, or maybe it’s just that it works well for me.

When I’m viewing a page I like — any web page — I can highlight content and also have it stored in my account along with the bookmark. What I find nifty if the ability to add sticky notes on the page for future reference. I can make these notes for my eyes only, or viewable by other Diigo users who have configured their toolbar to view other people’s sticky notes when they visit the same page.

Adding a special tag to my discoveries (e.g., “articles”, “posts”, “to-write-about”…whatever) can make it easy for me to find them again, thus de-cluttering my browser’s bookmarks.

So no more excuses about not knowing what to write about. 🙂

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