Well, today marks the 1 year anniversary of my first post on this blog. I started the blog with an intro post titled A Little About Me. I had been making money online about 8-9 months prior to my first blog post here. It’s fun to look back and see how far I’ve come in the last year….although at times I still feel like I’m in the same boat.

I only own one of my previous “Big Three” websites from a year ago. And that’s Fight Song Lyrics. This site still goes strong, earning me $3-10/day with 0 maintenance. A lot of sites have come and gone in the past year. Some good ones, some bad ones. Money has been made and money has been lost. But most importantly, I’ve learned a lot in the process.

One of the best things that has come out of this blog in the past year are the friendships I’ve developed through it. My blogroll has been virtually unchanged since this site launched on July 23rd 2006. My friends have been very loyal and helpful along the way.

In the past year I’ve made 277 posts (not bad considering I don’t post on weekends). And a total of 924 comments have been made on those posts. Also,I’ve gone from PR0 to PR2 to PR4 to PR5 and hopefully to PR6 on this next update. Ya PR doesn’t mean much, but I would like to sell some more featured links!
My goal for this blog in the next year is to increase traffic to 500 uniques/day. Have 500 RSS subscribers. And to make $500/month from it. I have a lot of work to do if I want to reach those goals. Best way to achieve them is to actually write content people want to read! Content that will help others in their journey.

So here’s to another solid year!

If I can increase my earnings this year by the same rate I did in the previous year… I’ll be blogging from my new yacht on July 23, 2008.

A lot of scripts, like Wordpress, have great SEO right out of the box. You don’t need much tweaking to get a blog indexed quickly in the search engines. However, if you’re starting a site from scratch, or not using a script with well designed SEO, then you will need to make changes so the spiders find you and rank your site well.

Last month, Small Business SEM wrote an article called How to SEO your site in less than 60 minutes. I’ll outline below a few of the first steps you should take as suggested by Matt McGee. For the full list of steps and details, check out his blog post.

1. Visit www.yourdomain.com.

• A. Does it take you to somewhere else? Visit yourdomain.com. Does it automatically forward you to the www? If not, then you need to do a 301 redirect. Search engines might consider your site as 2 seperate sites (dupe conent).
• B. Review site navigation. Textlinks are the best. If you have flash navigation, search engines might have a tough time finding their way around your site. Included in site navigation is your URL structure. How long are your URLs? Do they have keywords in them?
• C. Review home page content. Do you have an adequate amount of text? Are your keywords placed in the text copy? Do you have a sitemap?
• D. View the source code. Check your meta description and meta keywords.

There are 8 or 9 other steps you need to take to ensure your site is properly optimized in under 60 minutes. So be sure to check out the rest of them.

Every now and then you will come across a blog and see someone writing about how lazy they are or that they only work 2 hours a day because they’re too tired. There’s really no excuse for that. My post today is going to provide you with a few easy, yet effective home workouts you can do in under 15 minutes. They’ll give you energy and help you start off the day with a fresh feeling. The summer after I graduated college, I worked as a personal trainer at a local country club and studied exercise physiology in school. So if you have any questions, shoot me a message on MSN.

Disclaimer - If you don’t know what some of these exercises are, or need more details either ask me or google it. 

Exercise 1 - Crunches / Sit Ups - core abs

One of the easiest exercises to perform at home. You need no equipment. Lay your body flat on the floor and put your hands by your ears (if you put them behind your head you might be tempted to use your arms to pull your head up and strain your neck). Contract your ab muscles in a basic crunch. You can do full sit ups too if you have someone/something to hold your feet down. Do a set of crunches for 1 minute. Be sure to count how many you do as a form of measurement/improvement. After the 1 minute is up, rest for 30 seconds and go again. Each minute you’re doing a crunch is called a ’set’. Do 3 sets of crunches every morning with 30 seconds rest.

Exercise 2 - Reverse Crunch - lower abs

You’ll need to find something to hold onto, possibly one of the legs from your bed or desk. Lay your body flat on the ground and grab the desk leg behind your head. Swing your legs up and stop them when they are completely perpendicular to the ground. Your body should look like a big L. Do this for 1 minute, with 30 seconds rest. Count your reps and try to improve them. Do 3 sets total.

Exercise 3 - Pushups - chest and arms

The push up is the best overall home exercise you can do in my opinion. I’m assuming everyone knows how to do a push up. With this exercise we will do a super set. Do as many pushups as you can in 30 seconds. As soon as that time ends, move to the push up stance but on your knees instead of your toes. Don’t rest between this. Do another set until 30 seconds is up. That is a superset. Do 3 them (rest 30 seconds in between each superset). Be sure to count!

Exercise 4 - Dips - triceps 

Most beds have a mattress and a box spring. I usually do this exercise by putting my hands in between the mattress and box spring, the guy in the picture is using a chair. When you workout at home, use what you have. With a dip, start with your arms extended, and then lower yourself till your elbows are at 90 degrees. Do as many as you can for 1 minute, then rest for 30 seconds. Do 3 sets total.

So there you have it. 4 very easy, very quick exercises you can do at home in 15 minutes. You have no excuse now to ever be tired or lazy. These exercises will get the blood flowing and give you a good feeling to start your day off. These exercises are not hard, but will make you tired (unless you work out constantly already).

If you want something more advanced, check out any of these sites for more routines:

• Askmen
• Men’s Health
• BodyBuilding.com

 

 

This blog post is proudly sponsored by Key Directory. Submit your link to improve your Link Popularity.

Add another site to the list of URLs banned by Digg? What site is that you ask? None other thanmy own blog, lithman.net. That’s right. This very blog was banned by Digg and marked as spam for the rest of it’s existence. I was going to submit yesterday’s post about the Website Profit/Loss spreadsheet because I knew it would be useful for a lot of webmasters. That’s when I found the bad news.

There’s really nothing you can do about it. I’ve had a couple people tell me to email them and find out what’s going on. They want me to ask why I was banned. But in my experience, and other’s experience, it won’t get you very far. An email would only generate a generic auto response from Digg saying ‘your site was marked as spam. the end’.

I think it’s funny that I was banned by Digg. The thing is, I’ve only submitted 1 article to digg. And that was 5 months ago when I wrote an article about the Evolution of Yahoo. Surely that article isn’t considered spam?

Maybe someone was out to get me and was secretly submitting all my posts to Digg? Nah… couldn’t happen. I probably would have found out about it from all the incoming Digg links.

So that’s that I guess. I can’t submit anymore of my blog posts to Digg. I wonder if my IP is banned as well? I’m not sure if it will be because back when I made the Evolution of Yahoo post, this blog was hosted on a different server with a different IP.

If I hear of anything else, I’ll let you know.

For those of you who buy websites, I’ve created the best spreadsheet tool for you. Do you ever wonder if a site you plan to buy will be a good investment a year from now? If you buy stocks or mutual funds, anything from 10-20% is considered a great return. So what about if you invest in websites and not stocks? Well this spreadsheet is for you.

I created a simple spreadsheet…it’s so easy a caveman could do it. You just type in your website name, enter in the current daily revenue, your investment (purchase price), your other revenues, and expenses (servers, content, advertising) and out pops your Year 1 revenue. To get Year 2 revenue, add the expected increase in daily revenue. Scroll to the bottom to find your ROI (return on investment).

The higher your ROI the better your investment.

This is a great tool to play with if you’re looking to borrow money from a friend or family family. You can put everything down in writing and check the numbers. Best of all, it’s all automated for you. You just edit a few spots highlighted in yellow, and the spreadsheet does the calculations for you.

Note: I set the default tax to 30%, so adjust it accordingly to your tax bracket.

Note: If you don’t keep a site for a year, then adjust the variables to your specific time frame. Say 30 days instead of 365.

Download Website Profit/Loss Spreadsheet Here

Win 6 months of Free Hosting, 2 domains and more!

Our friend Nomar is running another contest on his new webmaster forum 9MB.com.

The prize: 6 months of free hosting, which includes:

 • 300MB storage
• 20 GB Monthly Bandwidth
• 10 POP e-mail accounts and 20 e-mail forwarding aliases
• 1-Click MySQL Database Installs
• Easy-to-use Plesk Interface
• Webmail access to your e-mail
• Web Traffic Monitoring
• E-mail screening to block viruses and minimize spam
• Unlimited Sub Domains

You can host 2 websites on this hosting package. This prize also includes wordpress install and support.

Because you can host 2 websites on this package, 9MB.com will sponsor 2 domains of your choice (it has to be a .com, .net, .org or .info). This makes the prize worth $ 100

This prize is a complete package to start 2 new sites. 9MB is quickly becoming a hot new forum. They already have 100+ members and 5,000 posts in just around 1 month’s time.

To check out the complete contest details and how to win the prize, click here.