I’ve been tagged!
I was asked by Nick “The Details” Techboggle to complete some sort of modern day chain letter deal. Namely, come up with a paragraph explaining each of my top 5 obsessions, and then tag, or pass it on, so to speak, to 5 more bloggers to rinse and repeat. That is a tall order, unless you are a compulsive obsessive with 5 names in your address book.
Wife It is no secret that I am into my wife, especially when she stands over my shoulder like this and reminds me that I love her dearly and will do anything to make her happy. It must be a joint obsession, however, because when I am at home watching TV while she is off at work, I often think about her, and mysteriously she’ll phone me up a few seconds later.
Blog I am into the Pisstakers blog, big time. It started off as an obsession, when it was all new and I knew not what the hell I was doing. Gradually I developed a routine and it all settled down a bit. In the last couple of weeks, though, the time being spent in different endeavors is building again. Relax, breathe deeply… the traffic will come.
Chocolate I am prone to the odd bar now and again. Nothing regular, just some dark, cocoa-rich chocolate about 4 times a week at 10pm. I don’t subscribe to the camp that says cocoa has healing properties and will cure all known ailments. I secretly think that is a load of crap. The smile on your face while eating chocolate is what cures you!
Cycling This obsession comes under 2 categories. The healthiest obsession actually involves being on a bike and pedaling. My terrain of choice is a mountain, and lots of it. Sadly, there are no mountains nearby, so that obsession has dwindled recently. For balance, however, I will still happily sit through every hour of the Tour de France. That is a sad obsession limited to 3 weeks a year, thankfully.
Balance Whenever I walk into a room I can’t help but look at the decor. I used to refurbish places for a living and my thing was to try and achieve balance in terms of layout. So I hate it when there are 2 different sized windows on the same wall, or everything is green, or a picture is off center. (To be honest the most obsessive person I know like that is my millimetric wife.)
On that note, I will end and pass you over to 5 horribly obsessed folk, who I have met on my travels these past few months. Hopefully they will find a few minutes to put pen to paper and continue the fascination with obsession:
Blogger’s Choice Awards
One of my blogging friends, Tisha nominated my blog, Mike’s Money Making Mission, for the Bloggers Choice Awards in the Best Business Blogs category.
Now I didn’t know too much about this award thingy but this is what their site said:
‘Welcome to the Blogger’s Choice Awards! Here you’ll see which blogs are currently making an impact in the blogosphere. All of the blogs you see here are nominated, voted and commented on by users like yourself! Winners will be announced on June 2nd at PostieCon in Orlando FL.’
There are over 33 categories of blog where you can vote and nominate others. These cover a range that should include most blogs.
It got me thinking that perhaps we could all help each other with these Bloggers Choice Awards. If we all nominated a few of our BAYB blogging friends, and voted for each other, we might get some publicity and perhaps a few referrals. What do you think?
I’ve just joined myself, though the confirmation email hasn’t arrived as yet. Once this is received I can vote and nominate.
If anyone has any suggestions as to how we can use these awards to help each other please leave a comment.
Good luck,
Mike.
Link: Bloggers Choice Awards.
Crystal Coast Tech Blog Review
As I am exposed to new blogs, I notice many are now becoming community or collaborative blogs. If not, at least they use guest posting from time to time. It’s definitely beneficial to have multiple bloggers on one blog. Which brings me to our latest blog review.
One of the blogs on my feed reader, is a great tech blog, Crystal Coast Tech. Recently we have been able to work together and exchange advertising spots. You may notice a banner in our rotation about their site. Just the same, we have a Blog about your Blog Banner on their site!
They are running a busy website developement site, and when they get the chance, a great blog as well. To meet demands, they are also using guest tech bloggers. They get a good amount of traffic, I believe about 900 pageviews per day, so it’s a great opportunity to be a part of their blog.
Our friend Nick, who we’ve mentioned several times on our blog, most recently his Evil John Chow Photoshop Contest. I referred Nick to the Crystal Coast Tech Blog a few weeks ago. Since then he’s had several articles posted on the blog and got to know the guys behind the blog.
This is what Nick had to say about Crystal Coast Tech:
“Being a frequent poster on CCTECH, I would have to say that Anthony is a great guy and a great blogger, even though he is constantly busy with his web design business, he is still great to talk to and I am thankful for the experience gained from writing on his great blog!”
Anthony has given me a few tips I’ve used for this blog. Plugin advice etc, that I am definitely thankful for. So as a bit of a thanks, go on over to their blog for me and let them know BAYB sent you.
Comment Friday Winner: GiveawayProject.com
I am a little biased, but I am allowed to be right?
This week I have chosen the GiveawayProject. Michael blogs about all the competitions, contests, and giveaways around the internet. He also blogged about BAYB already when he wrote about our Mini Fridge Giveaway. We have exchanged nice emails, and he left a few comments for comment friday as well. We try to reward those who are really promoting us, reading about us and just being involved.
We wish Michael well on his blogging project, and we will be sure to announce our future contests on his blog.
Announcement: We have finally been added to Text Link Ads. If you want to advertise on our sidebar check out our TLA Package. 
We also are offering RSS feed advertisements. I can also fill those manually if you want to work something else out.
Thank you everyone for participating in Comment Friday, we are just under our goal of 30 comments. I know we can make it happen next Friday! Tell your friends.
Ideas for moving The Pisstakers – up
I started The Pisstakers from zero a few months ago, with no blogging experience. I have been gradually getting into the swing of it, and about 4 weeks ago, I made a conscious decision to shift gears (not direction!) and get this blog moving. Afterall, in 2 years time, I expect to be supporting my wife off the proceeds, (you may recall I have a wife!) so, traffic will be key. I like this shifting gears idea btw, as the stats have got quite exciting in my modest world!
Talk to the reader, not at them
Content is the real king and fortunately I have no trouble finding the funny or satirical side of serious tech or general news, but I think I have been a bit distant. What I mean is, a blog is a personal voice, not a corporation. Now I consciously write less like the Onion, and more like Ed! The posts are pitched “I” not “us” (which is still part of the final plan), and I added Ed’s personal blog spot. Now there is no excuse, visitors have every opportunity to know what I am like – even if they don’t like me or even listen.
Blogs need a hook
So I have personalized the blog a bit, and next, I wanted to develop some sort of hook. Funny observations will get you quite far in life online and offline, but having something useful to offer will get you even further! So, I have devised a few features.
MyBlogLog Sunday is a link love day on the quietest day of the week for me, at least. By going round to all the members of my MyBlogLog community and letting them know the crack, there have been noticeably more faces in my sidebar. And Polliwog is a happy camper as last week’s first prize winner, so that is cool.
Today I started Spring Widget Saturday for flat-out humor blogs. If you have a Feedburner RSS feed you have the means to generate the code for a nifty spring widget. Send it to me and I will display it on the Pisstakers. Highena are the first, but not the last to appear, I hope.
The blogging experts always bang on about being focussed and developing a niche, so last week I decided to beef up the Search section and offer something specialist within funny-ish tech. Eventually, The Pisstakers will be the place for webmasters and bloggers to find out about web search, search engines, paid-to-search options, blah blah. Sounds like a boring topic, but the content I am turning out, isn’t! At least, that is the aim.
The outcome of new features
It has taken about 1 month to put these things in place. Last week I reported traffic for march had risen by 30% over February. Since April 1 I have had 150 uniques per day, about 30% more than ever before, and stickiness has dropped (or under 30 second visits have risen!) by only about 3%. There have been no spikes, no stumbles, no diggs nor reddits. And the SEO work has got Google growing slowly but surely too.
So, that is my blog about my blog for this week. And whether these benefits are exponential, or long term or not for The Pisstakers, time will tellonly . However, I am still pretty sure Matt and Lee are going to make a go of BAYB with their latest Blog Doctor ideas, contests and ongoing solid foundation. Blog on, guys.
Comment Friday: April 6
Haven’t heard about Comment Friday?
Comment friday is a fun and simple idea. Leave us a comment about anything you want. By leaving a comment, you will have your blog visited by me, and you may even get a link out of it. I will select a blog from the comment list to be linked to and have their link on our blogroll, until next friday.
As comment friday becomes more popular, you are also going to get a few hits. Not only am I visiting blogs, but other people are checking you out as well. If you are hosting your own comment friday let me know. Its a great way to get interaction with your readers and we could promote eachother.
Last friday we chose bobbarama as our winner. This week our goal is 30 comments, and by then we will have our new winner. It could be you!
Don’t forget about our two running contests, blog review competition and rss feed subscription contest.
I’m glad to see the increase in comments as of late due to our contests, so keep it rollin’ on our Comment Friday!
Round Up of My Blogs and Projects
Whew, it’s been a long week even though it’s a short one! Yay for holidays (even though I’ll spend it working probably!).
Instead of my usual post I thought I might give everyone a catch up on what I’m doing in general in the blogosphere.
Details About My New Project
First off and this is perhaps the item I’m most excited about right now is that I’ve just launched a new project called Urban Cultivation. The blog is all about my trying to inject a little bit a nature into my city life and grow some veggies around the house. If you’ve been reading my personal blog Quit your Day Job then you’ll know that I’ve been going on about closing the gap between where the food is grown and me eating it and this is a natural (excuse the use of the word) extension of that. So visit the site – a couple of people have already discovered it through mybloglog (less than an hour after it was first posted). Which is why I love mybloglog!
BAYB Round Up and Exciting New Feature ‘Blog Doctor’
Closer to home here Matt and I will be working on a couple of his projects, we just have to knuckle down some finer points so we can get rolling with those. Here on Blog About Your Blog we’re starting an exciting regular column called Blog Doctor. This is where you can contact us via the contact form and nominate your blog to have a checkup and I’ll go through your site and give suggestions for any problems you may be having. Things like people aren’t leaving enough comments or no one is visiting the site, anything that’s ailing your site! You don’t have to actually have anything wrong either you can always just get us to go over your and give you a clean bill of health LOL!
It’s a free service so you’ve got nothing to loose, we’ll post the suggestions here on Blog About Your Blog and check in with you later on down the track to see if any of the suggestions helped! At the very least you’ll be showing others in the blogging community that you are interested in improving (which is important for all of us!) and get a little exposure to boot! Remember just use the contact us form and nominate your site and I’ll send you some quick questions and we’ll be ready to roll!
Pop Culture Heroines, Crypt Hunter and Coast to Coast Kombis
Pop Culture Heroines had a huge month last month and more than doubled its readers to around 3000 which isn’t too shabby considering we don’t use the blog exchanges only mybloglog. Word of mouth has been awesome as well as some great contributions. W’ve got a great discussion going right now about Thelma and Louise and you’re welcome to come add your two cents!
Over at Crypt Hunter there is a promotion which if you link to Crypt Hunter and mention it in a post Memphis will send you a rubber training snake!
The other exciting news I have is some great news for one of my clients Coast to Coast Kombis who is still finding his feet in the blogging world but last month posted his highest hits so far on his blog and his main site so it shows that business blogging can help get you more hits on your company website!!!
So thank you everyone who continues to read my posts – Matt tells me that I’ve got a couple in the top ten posts here at BAYB so that’s very gratifying!
Have safe holidays everyone!
Lee
Making Money With Free Blogs
I’ve done six months. That’s blogging not prison!
It’s been an interesting journey so far, considering I was a blog virgin when I started out. My intention was to make money using only free blogs and without any financial outlay.
So what have I learnt?
Quite a bit I suppose, so I thought I’d do some longer than usual posts, on my blog, all about Making Money With Free Blogs.
These posts are mostly aimed at newcomers and I don’t profess that all of the content is completely original. There are, after all, only a certain number of things that can be done to make blogging a success.
Part 1.
The main theme is about blog content and how to retain any visitors that may turn up at your blog.
Part 2.
This second part moves on to getting visitors and hits to your blog.
Part 3.
The final part, so far, and this is the money making bit.
Have a great Easter Holiday.
Good luck,
Mike.