This blog post is proudly sponsored by Hypotheek Taxatie.

I’ve been running Adbrite interstitial ads for 4 months now. At my high points I was earning around $7-8/day with them. However, as of late, my Adbrite earnings are taking a hit. And I’m not even talking about my missing adbrite money. Every month my daily earnings in Adbrite go down and down. I’m back to $3-4/day in Adbrite with almost 4,000 daily hits on Pimp Myspace. There’s nothing that explains a drop in my Adbrite earnings other then their network is going in the toilet. I’m not the only one reporting a decrease in Adbrite earnings.

So I’m sticking it to them. Yesterday afternoon I made the switch from Adbrite interstitials to ValueClick Media interstitials. Since I joined VCM, I have been nothing short of impressed. I was even banned by them and reinstated after I appealed my case. They’re a great company in my opinion. There’s a reason their stocks are up 100% in the last year.

I made the switch around 2:00 yesterday afternoon and ended up with $4 from the VCM interstitials. That is almost more then what I made in Adbrite and it’s only from half a day. I don’t know if it will continue, but anytime I can get money away from Adbrite and into VCM I’m happy. VCM pays via paypal on the 22nd of every month. Adbrite mails checks on like the 7th or 8th of every month and it’s money you made from like 2-3 months ago. They’re so slow and they steal your money.

So if you’re running Adbrite interstitials, you might consider testing out VCM and see how they do. It can’t be any worse.

This blog post is proudly sponsored by Hypotheek Informatie.

The Buy Me a Beer wordpress plugin has been floating aruond some blogs recently. You’ve probably seen it on either Make Money Online or Bob Buskirk’s blog to name a few.

This plugin allows for your readers to donate money for all yor hard work. Posting everyday is not as easy as it seems. Those of you with blogs know exactly what I’m talking about. There are times when it feels like you’ve run out of topics. So why not kick back with an ice cold brew and relax after all the hard work.

And for those of you who don’t drink beer, maybe you’re underage or just don’t enjoy the taste, there is a Buy Me a Coffee in this same plugin. I thought about doing the coffee option since Starbucks is so damn expensive and I’m addicted to it, but I thought my readers might be more generous if they knew their money was going to alcohol.

I’m not going to beg for money or charge you $25 (hey, some bloggers do) for info that should be free. So if you like what you read, go ahead and support it. If you like what you read and you don’t want to send money, then support it with a comment or backlink. If you like what you read and can’t sent money, don’t have a blog to give me a backlink and can’t type a comment, then just keep on reading.

 

So you’ve spent 10 hours of design and coding into your new web site. It looks great. All the content is there, everything is ready to go. You official ‘launch’ your website and beginning checking the stat tracker every 10 minutes hoping to see thousands of visitors pour in. But to your surprise, no one is coming.. Not a single visitor in the first week? Has your web site failed?

Some of the top reasons your web site my fail are:

No one can find it - You must properly optimize your website for search engines using important keywords that people will use to find your site.

You have no call to action - When someone finds your website they don’t know what to do with it. Your site needs to have a specific reason or purpose for being. Whether it’s selling a product, providing a service, or entertainment…people need to know what they can get from your site.

Visually unappealing - If your site is ugly people won’t return. There is a lot of competition out there for design. You really need something unique (even though my blog skin isn’t unique I at least fixed it up with a cool shark logo in the header).

So those are the top three reasons your website won’t make it. Seems pretty darn obvious doesn’t it? Then how come so many people don’t fix it. When building a website, you have to build it for the non internet savvy users. People who don’t even know what a link is. The vast majority of internet users are not webmasters like us.

On a side note, I want to win this sick monitor John Chow is giving away, so here’s my entry:

John Chow dot Com, a blog that helps you make money is giving away a 24″ wide screen LCD monitor! To enter, you just have to write about it. This is my entry. Now give me the monitor! The contest is sponsored by BluFur, who wants to let you know that they’re hosting Canada and the rest of the world.

This weekend, Katie and I headed down to Melbourne, FL to visit with her parents for Father’s Day. We left Friday after work, and we’ll head back home to Jacksonville late Sunday to eat dinner with my parents.

Katie had a hair cut and highlighting appointment scheduled this morning. So, I dropped here off and started my journey to find a wifi hotspot. I’m glad Katie bought a laptop a month ago. It’s actually more handy than I thought it would be.

Well, my first stop was Starbucks. I mean they have wifi don’t they? You always see people in Starbucks on the computers. Well, I get there and the employee is like “Ya we have wifi but it costs a monthly fee.” What?! Like Starbucks can’t afford to give us free wifi with the purchase of a $4 coffee? I didn’t even ask how much it was, I just walked out the door (after I bought a mocha frappicino of course).

Next stop, Panera Bread. I don’t know if you guys up North have Panera, but it’s a sandwich/soup type of place and they have bagels and pastries as well. The Panera by my house has free wifi so I was quite confident this one would too. I walk up and SUCCESS…I see the free wifi sign on the door. I grab myself a comfy leather chair by a fireplace (don’t know why they had a fire going when it’s 85 degrees out in South Florida…. but anyways). I click my little connect button on the network manager, but for some reason it won’t connect. The Panera network was showing signal strength so I was confused. I ask an employee what’s up and he said a lot of peopl have been having problems but they don’t know why. Great!

Then I notice that my computer found another network available. ‘MTRESS MRKT’ … What is this? It’s showing a signal strength of 5%. I try to connect. SUCCESS! Obviously at 5% it was slower than a 28.8 so I was now on a mission to find MTRESS MRKT. I head to my car and look around. Across the street a see a run down building that says “Mattress Market”. There it is!

I get in my car and drive to their parking lot. There’s no cars here, but they have an Open sign lit up. So anyways, I’m sitting in the parking lot browsing the net. This is obviously not a secure network, so I’m not going to be looking at anything important on here. I’m listing to the radio, blasting the AC and buring my gasoline. Only 30 more minutes till I have to go pick up Katie.

So that’s pretty much it! Hope everyone has an awesome weekend!

GFX Rebels, one of the newest and hottest graphic design communities, offers up great discussions for beginner and professional designers. They have a vast library of custom tutorials and other digital art and render resources. GFX Rebels currently boasts almost 600 members and 14,000 posts. It is definitely one of the hottest communities right now.

To kick the summer off, they are holding a $25 wallpaper design contest. Simply create a wallpaper following the rules, and you will be eligible for $25 via paypal (or $25 to Amazon if you can’t accept paypal). The winner will be decided by a community poll, so there is no need to worry about it being rigged.

On top of the Design Contest, GFX Rebels also holds weekly Sig of the Week contests, with a prize of $5.

If you want to get into design and need tutorials or you’re looking for for a place to showcase your work and be rated, then head over the GFX Rebels. It’s a very nice community and active, so you won’t have to wait 4 hours for a response to your threads.

This blog post is proudly sponsored by Webmaster Forum

Man I love Conan O’Brien. I could sit here and post a hundred Conan videos, but I’ll just give you one. It’s Friday… time to laugh!