It’s a Friday before a 3 day weekend. These days never seem to end! I know this goes against everything I said in my new blog goals, but I’m really just out of it today and don’t feel like doing any work. We’ve got college football starting up (Gators are playing Western Kentucky tomorrow) and a beach filled weekend. Work is just not on my mind.

But I didn’t want to leave everyone empty handed, so I thought I’d mention a small network update.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, Pimp Myspace got a new homepage redesign. There was too much text on the old index page. Now there are tons of graphics and thumbnails. I also added an Azoogle and VCM rectangle ad on the index page. Those weren’t there before. The page looks a lot busier now, but hopefully it leads to more revenue and a better user experience. It’s win-win!

Gator Envy is also doing well. With football starting up, lots of people are heading to my forum to chat about gator football. I ran a contest about two weeks ago, and have one running right now for a car decal. I feel lot more confident about this site and the prospects of reaching 50 members online/day by the end of 2007.

My Tim Tebow site is also steamrolling. It’s only like 2 weeks old and is getting traffic in the 70-80s/day. I’m impressed. Can’t wait to see what happens when I get on page 1. Might be time to put some ads on it!

That’s all you’re getting today. Monday I’ll be off too for the holiday, so be sure to check back Tuesday for the next batch of ‘Ask David’.

This blog post is proudly sponsored by Pimp Myspace.

I’m sure a lot of my readers have tossed around the idea of working on a website with a partner. Then there are those of you who would much rather work on projects by yourself. Working with a partner has its advantages and disadvantages. So how do you know which one is right for you? When should you fly solo?

Personally, I prefer to work online as an individual. I’ve had partnerships on a few sites, and it seems like none of them made it. Working with a partner, or group of people, can be very difficult. Not only will time zones hinder your ability to finish jobs on time, but so will differences in opinion. What do you do when you and your partner don’t agree on something? You want the design to be custom made, and your partner is cheap and wants a free one. Having to compromise on every little thing can be draining.

When working with a partner, you also have to divide the work up evenly or you might have someone get mad. So if one of you is a programmer/designer and the other is a marketing/promotions person … how can you tell if you’re doing equal work? Another problem that can arise with partners/teams is splitting up the money. What if one person feels they deserve more because he did more work? If you run adsense on the site, who’s publisher code do you use? How do you distribute the money when the adsense earnings get taxed at the end of the year? How do you work out taxes if one of you is in China and the other is in America?

Unless you actually file papers and form a business, working with a partner or group of people can be very difficult. If you’re going to be serious about it, get everything in writing before you start the project. This way you can always refer to your ‘contract’ should any problems arise.

On the flip side, some good reasons for having a team or partner are:

• You lack the necessary skills to complete a project.
• You don’t have the funds to hire someone, so you bring them in as a partner.
• You don’t have time to work on the project. A partner splits the time in half.
• The site will be so big, even 50% of the profit will be enough.
• You can trust the person with anything.

Like I said above, I prefer to work by myself on projects now. It’s not that I’m greedy and want all the profits for myself, it’s that in past experiences I’ve found it to be too difficult to juggle the partner’s expectations with my own. Having a full-time job and responsibilites when I get home, doesn’t leave me much time for online work. In the past I’ve felt bad that I couldn’t contribute to the project as much as my partner. I’ve felt like I let them down. It’s much easier to work by myself so I can set my own timeline, have things done my way, and don’t get friendships/feelings mixed up with business.

By now you should know that my buddy at King Nomar owns an up and coming Webmaster Forum. In just a few months, 9MB has nearly 200 members and will soon hit 10,000 posts. That’s quite an accomplishment, considering I’ve owned several forums for MUCH longer then 9MB has been around, and I can’t get stats that quickly. It’s a great forum and you need to go check it out.

In honor Nomar’s 1,000th post, he is launching a new contest in which all members have a shot to win $100 CASH. I’m not talking about vouchers or funny money. This is cold hard cash that you can easily get your hands on. For the official contest thread, click here.

How to Win

Get as many new people to the forum! New users need to fill in your username as referral when signing up of course, or we they can’t track it!

Those members that sign up under you need to make at least 20 posts or they will not count! This rule is here to prevent numerous fake sign ups!

How To Get Referrals

• You can write about it on your blog/site!
• You can invite friends from your MSN/ICQ/Yahoo etc.
• You can promote it on other forums.

This contest is getting started today and will end September 19th. If you own a blog, there’s no reason why you can’t signup on 9MB.com and make a quick post in your blog to get tons of referrals. I’d do it, but I don’t want to steal potential referrals from you. I want you to win the cash.

This blog post is proudly sponsored by Transformer Myspace Layouts. And yes, I can sponsor my own posts.

Richard from Blogger For Life recently interviewed me. You can view the entire interview here. It was a simple three question interview conducted over email. I appreciate the interview offers and the free link backs that come with it

I have been interviewed several times before this. In June, Carl from Webventurers asked me to be the first interview he conducted on his new blog. I haven’t been back to Webventurers since my interview, but by the looks of it… he only conducted one interview after me and then stopped. I hope I didn’t curse him?

The first interview I did was with Buck Being Normal. One of the questions I was asked “How much money do you have in your pocket right now?” It’s funny that the answer then and the answer now are the same. $0.00 (yay for debit cards!) The site also interviewed several big name bloggers and webmasters. However, they stopped interviewing in January. Perhaps another curse?

I wonder what it is with interview blogs that just don’t seem to make it? Is it too hard to find bloggers to interview? Do the questions get boring because the responses are all the same? I really think an interview site properly run would work very well and attract a ton of readers. There’s no short of potential interviewees with thousands of new webmasters signing online every day.

I only had one Ask David question since the last post. Readers, you do realize that you get a free link back from an authority PR5 website with targetted visitors right? By simply clicking the Ask David button up top, you can fill out the contact form with any question in the world. I’ll answer it in the next Monday’s post, and give you a free link back in return for the question.

Question #1 comes from Danny (who didn’t leave a link). You went on vacation a few weeks ago and talked about pictures. Do you have any?

Of course I have pictures of my trip to Amelia Island Plantation

 

This first picture is a view from our room. The condo was 3 stories, with like one or two rooms on each floor. We were pretty much right on the beach, you just had to walk on a little boardwalk through the dunes to get to the sand. Notice how small the waves are. You’d think I was on the Gulf.

The second picture is me getting ready to go tubing. Tubing gets fun when you get outside of the wake. It takes a lot of strength and body positioning to stay on the tube and ride the wake.

Picture 3 is me tubing in action. It doesn’t look like we’re going very fast. The picture must have been taken right after the boat started going.

Here’s a picture of Katie and I sitting in a couple of rocking chairs at the shops they have on propety. It was isanely hot that day. Man, I look like I’m only 5′4″ in that picture. Guess the rocking chairs were made for Paul Bunyan.

The last picture was taking right after lunch on Saturday. These guys had just caught this bull shark and we were watching them reel it up while eating. So when we finished we went to check it out on the docks and the captain let us get a picture with it. Thank God it was already dead and I might be typing this post with 1 hand.

That’s it for the pictures. I have a lot more, but just wanted to share a few. If I ever sign up for flikr, I’ll be sure to let you guys know.

 

This blog post is proudly sponsored by Bidding Web Directory. Bid for the #1 position.

Every time you purchase a domain you’re prompted with that all important $2.99 question. Would you like to purchase private registration? “$2.99 seems a little steep. I think I’ll pass.” Those are the words of most domain buyers as they proceed to checkout. I’m guilty of it, and I’m sure most of you are too. In this post I wanted to briefly chat about why or why not you should choose private domain registration.

When you shell out the $2.99 (or whatever the registrar is charging that day) to privately register your domain, you are essential blocking your contact information from being displayed in the whois information. The whois information for a domain can be found at most registrars or at WhoIs.sc. So what are some of the advantages of having a private whois?

• No spam – By blocking your email address and home/business address, you are eliminatig a ton of potential spam. I get stupid letters in the mail from companies asking me to buy their SEO services and what not. I know for a fact where they got my info… whois.
• Competition – With private whois, you won’t have your competitors checking what sites you own. You don’t want your biggest rival checking the whois info for the top 5 results in Google for his keyword only to find out you own all 5 of the sites.
• Privacy – Maybe you just don’t want your name and address all over the internet.

The other option when buying a domain is to skip over private registration and make your domain information public. There are really two reasons I can think of to keep your domain informaiton public.

• Cheap - You’re too cheap or can’t afford to pay the private registration fee.
• Contact - You actually want people to be able to look you up and contact you. A lot of advertisers and website buyers look up whois information to contact owners of websites. If you own a website with no contact button and an advertiser comes along wanting to pay you $300/mo for an ad spot … they will have no way to get ahold of you if your whois info is private.

I’ve sold a domain before simply by someone searching that domains whois and sending me an email. I never would have sold it for as much as I did if I simply listed it on DP. The buyer found the domain he wanted and was set to buy it. If my email address wasn’t public, I never would have made the sale.

In my opinion, everyone should have domain whois set to public. That is unless you’re running an illegal operation or something you don’t want your family to know about. If you’re worried about spam, just set up a PO Box to have mail sent to instead of your home address. Also, set up a special email address you only use for registering domains. You never know what you might miss out on if buyers can’t contact you.