Hey everyone. Just another Monday here in sunny Florida…well, yes it is sunny here but also 45 degrees today. See, I live in Jacksonville, FL which is at the very northeastern tip of the state. We are not below the tropics so we do get season changes here. Not all of Florida is palm trees and beaches in January.

The New York Giants are coming to town tonight for some Monday Night Football against my Jaguars. It’s going to be a great game. Tom Coughlin returns to the house he built. Lots of emotions going on in this city. I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow. I hope I don’t freeze my butt off!

Keep em or Sell em?

So I built (or am in the process of building) 4 new sites this past weekend. I took advantage of some .net coupons I had and registered 4 domains. Since I love sports so much I decided to make some fan sites: Tracy McGrady, Dwayne Wade, Tom Brady, and Philip Rivers. They still have some work to do, especially with getting the sub pages up. But I have the color scheme and headers up on most of them. I plan on updated them daily with gamer performance blog posts as well as new pictures and quotes that come out. Go check it out.

I’m not sure however if I want to keep these sites and actually post on them everyday (like Joe Mauer and Ryan Howard) or if I just want to sell them off (like I did with my Randy Moss, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Albert Pujols fan sites). I can probably sell any of these for around $50-75. I might need some extra cash since Christmas is coming up and all… We’ll see if I keep them. What do you think?

Weekend Adsense Earnings

• Friday - $14.31
• Saturday - $13.23
• Sunday $9.96

Not a bad weekend for me. Lately it seems like I’m doing better because of all the rivalry football games. Fight Song Lyrics is making me a lot, especially on the weekends.

Ebook Updates

Still trying to get the website finished! Stay Tuned!

While this isn’t baseball, it is still possible to “win one for the skipper” so to speak. While I was eating lunch today, ESPN News cut into NFL Live with some breaking sports news. Bo Schembechler, one of the best coaches the Michigan Wolverine football team has ever had, passed away this morning in a hospital. How ironic that a man who lived and breathed the Michigan vs. Ohio State rivalry game passed away just a game before the biggest game in the rivalry’s history. I wonder if this can lift the Wolverines high enough to beat the 7 pt favorite Buckeyes tomorrow.

But this isn’t a sports blog, so I’ll cut off my sports ramblings at that. On to some site news! Well.. sorry if I built your hopes up, but there really isn’t much to report today. It’s been kind of slow. But I do have a few minor things to touch on.

We’re in the Money!! We’re in the Money!!

Not really, but I had a good day with Adsense yesterday. $12.81 total. I think that’s my highest day yet since I sold that stupid proxy about a month ago. And the weird thing is that most of it didn’t come from Layout Pimps, even after I switched the site over to the new script. Most of it is coming from Fight Song Lyrics, but that is expected since rivalry week is coming up for college football. I better eat it up now while football season is still here. December and February-August are going to be rough times :/

Ebook Template

I was able to find a nice simple template for my ebook site I am working on. The colors aren’t right so I will have to change them to one that fits my theme. But the layout is nice. It’s very similiar to all those ebook sites, just one very long page. Now I need to work on making a header and some of those little ebook graphics. Like I said, my goal is to have it all launched on Monday (realistically that probably won’t happen).

Weekend predictions? Gators over Western Carolina 38-10. Jaguars over Giants 24-20.

Have a great weekend!!!

Not much is going on today, so I thought I would just post a few updates around the network.

Layout Pimps Facelift

I have changed Layout Pimps completely. It used to run on that simple Myspace Resource script that everyone and their mom used. It was an ok script, but didn’t really provide a lot of depth for the users. There wasn’t much going on if you know what I mean. So I took the plunge and removed that script and have uploaded the same script I was using on Free Myspace Layouts. I’m not sure if this script will make me more money right away, but it will definetly provide my visitors with tons more content.

Hopefully in a few weeks time, people will use my content and I will get links on their profiles and in turn get more traffic. I will let you all know how the move works out in a couple of days.

Ebook Updates

I was kind of getting bored with writing my ebook so I rushed the ending (probably not a good idea). I was just tired of researching for the book and wanted to get it finished. So I’m stuck at like 9 pages and have ended the book. I sent it off to a friend to review. He said it was good (probably lying) but that I have some grammar mistakes. I’ll spend tonight fixing the small grammar problems, then I will transfer it to .pdf.

I have purchased a domain for the ebook, but have not set up a site yet. I need to set up my Paypal account to show a business name instead of my personal name. Hopefully tonight I can find a template I like and load it onto my site. I am aiming for a complete Monday launch. Of course once I get the book put in pdf, I will give everyone that reads my blog a free copy if they want one. I’ll keep you posted on that as well.

Domain Sale

I put up a couple of domains for sale on Digitalpoint and Namepros. Only $5 each. What a steal!! I was already able to sell one domain to a friend for the $5. I’m just trying to clean everything up and consolidate my domains/sites. I have way too much junk. Too many open and forgotten projects.

That’s all for today! See you tomorrow!!

Several months ago I was pissed that I wasn’t getting any traffic from search engines to my History Forum. I’m leaving the link out of it right now, so this post doesn’t get indexed front page for my search term. Anyways… I was getting 0, absolutely 0 traffic from Google, Yahoo, MSN and any other search engine. I should mention that my forum runs on PHPBB, and if you want to know which one I’m talking about, just look on the right sidebar under My Network.

After browsing around, I came to realize my problem was that I never removed Session IDs from the URLs. A session id is when a url ends in something like this:

http://forums.domain.com/viewtopic.php?t=1689&sid=c80e688fbf4ec5347f170b3e4r2067b7

Those are awful URLs and search engines do not index sites like that. Well they might index a few, but they are not friendly that’s for sure.

So I was looking around for a solution and found this website: Optimizing phpbb

It gives you the step by step instructions on how to optimize your phpbb forum in under 3 minutes so it will get indexed in search engines. And trust me, it works. Since implementing this, I have noticed my number of pages being indexed going up every week. I have over 10,000 posts on the forum, but currently only 2,000 indexed pages on Google, so we still have a ways to go. But I’ve seen a nice jump in traffic and am now getting 250+ uniques/day and have over 500 members on the forum.

I don’t have an exact number right now, but I’m getting a lot of search engine traffic. Probably close to 60% of traffic is from Google. I am indexed for all kinds of crazy words like “egbert alfred great william conqueror”, “confederate nicknames”, “battle of tours”, “real fire breathing dragons”, and “who really discovered america”.  All my hits come from people searching for unique history topics.  Searches that don’t have a lot of competition.

It’s time for me to start building up more backlinks, so I can move up in those rankings.

I hope this thread helps someone!

I wrote a post back in September about submitting to directories. It’s a a boring and tedious task, but it has to be done. For those of us that can’t afford (me) to pay for other people to submit to directories for us, we have to do it ourselves. I’ve been slacking on my directory submissions as of late. Yesterday I picked 5 random directories from the Digitalpoint directory forum, and just submitted all my sites to them. For now I’m just submitting to free, no recip directories. I don’t really care much about the pagerank, but obviously if it has some that’s great. Everyday this week I am going to pick 5 random directories to submit too. That will build up 25 backlinks a week per site. It’s a lot of work and does take time, but in the end it should be worth it.

Pagerank Prediction

Yesterday I mentioned that I wanted to talk about pagerank prediction. I know a lot of these tools hold no weight when it comes to accuractly predicting pagerank. Some of them don’t take into count the number of outbound links you have on your site, while others don’t track inbound links correctly. And the truth of the matter is, no one can accurately predict pagerank. Only Google knows what it will do.

Regardless, it is always fun to check out some pagerank tools and see where your sites are headed. For this demonstration, I am using IWebTool’s pagerank prediction tool. I submitted 10 sites, and here are the results. Please note that the results differ when using www and when not using www. I am including www in my search.

• Lithman.net, current PR0 - predicted PR5
• Historum.com, current PR2 - predicted PR5
• Layoutpimps.net, current PR1 - predicted PR5
• Mylink-space.com, current PR1 - predicted PR5
• Fightsonglyrics.com, current PR4 - predicted PR4
• Ingameflix.com, current PR0 - predicted PR4
• JoeMauer.info, current PR0 - predicted PR4
• MVPFlix.com, current PR0 - predicted PR3
• Freemslayout.com, current PR0 - predicted PR1
• RyanHoward.info, current PR0 - predicted PR1

Now, as you can see according to the tool, I will have several PR5 sites after the next update. I really don’t see this happening. The only site I see getting to PR5 is possibly Historum and maybe this blog. Layoutpimps and Mylink-Space have waayyy too many outbound links. That will drain all the PR. Those two myspace sites might get to PR3 if I’m lucky.

InGameFlix and MVPFlix should both go up in PR since they are new sites and I have done link building tactics for them. Joe Mauer as well might go to PR4 because of the quality link exchanges I have done and the high rankings I have in Google.

All in all, don’t put much weight into these PR prediction tools. Just wait and be surprised during the next update, which will hopefully be in late January.

Let’s start off today’s blog post with a rant about how bad the Jacksonville Jaguars suck. If you’re a fan of the NFL, then you probably don’t hear much about the Jaguars unless you live in Florida. You might think we’re an ok tram because we have a 5-4 record, but don’t let that fool you. The Jaguars suck. We just got swept by the Houston Texans. That’s right, the Texans. Even the most casual NFL fan will know how bad the Texans are. So what does that make the Jaguars? I hate when I hear people talking about the playoffs after just getting swept by Houston.

Well onto some web talk…

Google Adsense Earnings

My Adsense earnings are still hovering right around $10/day, averaging just below that. Here’s a breakdown of the last 4 days:

• Thursday - $8.26
• Friday - $10.79
• Saturday - $8.23
• Sunday - $7.51

So, as you can see I’ve got a lot of work to do, to reach my goal of $10/day consistent by the end of December. If I can launch maybe 1 or 2 more decent sites by the end of November, I think I can pull this off. My only concern is once college football season is over, my Fight Song website won’t be getting half the uniques it is now and won’t be making much money at all. That’s what sucks about having a seasonal website.

Ebook Updates

I’m still sitting at about 8 pages done. I know I made this a priority, but I had some family come into town this weekend and I didn’t have 1 minute to start writing. It’s amazing how there are so many things that can sidetrack us from working on our websites. I’m not the only one that this happens to. I read a lot of blogs, and so many complain about being lazy or playing too much video games while putting their websites off to the side. I don’t even play video games and I can’t find time to work on my websites over the weekend. It’s a shame that I get most of my stuff done in the hour between the time my alarm clock goes off and before I leave for work.

Myspace Site updates

Well it seems my experiment with the Free Myspace Layout website I launched is working. Yesterday I had over 400 uniques and I have made $5.50 in my first week of launch. It just goes to show how easy it is to make money from myspace resource sites. I didn’t send out any bulletins or buy any links. Just classic link exchanges. As the site gets more and more uniques and starts moving up the ranks in Google, it will easily be making $1-2 a day with absolutely 0 work on my part. It’s called easy money.

I don’t know why my other myspace site, Myspace Login, isn’t getting nearly as much traffic or money. It might be because of the anchor text or domain I chose for this site. “Myspace Login” is a very popular search according to oveture, but this site has yet to pick up even though it has the same links as Free Myspace Layouts does.

Well that’s it for today. Tomorrow I plan on talking about Directory Submissions and Pagerank prediction.