I spent all weekend painting my new house. Every single wall and baseboard needed to be painted. We spent 15 hours on Saturday and about 7 hours on Sunday working, and still aren’t finished. Luckily my sister and some friends came to help on Saturday. Best thing about painting was that all the floors are coming out so I didn’t care if any paint got spilled.

Here are a couple of pictures. They were taken with my iPhone so the quality sucks. I’m bringing the Nikon D40 tonight so I’ll grab some high res photos or every room.

A view from the kitchen, overlooking the family room.

Study is straight ahead, front door to the right.

View from the family room looking into the kitchen. Master bedroom through the door on left

Blue master bathroom w/ his and her sinks. We’re painting this room

Master bathroom. Sinks on both sides. His and her closets on both sides. Separate shower and tub

Green guest bathroom, also getting painted.

Blue guest room, getting painted.

Backside of kitchen. Opening to the left is dinning room entr. Door down the small hallway leads to 2-car garage.

Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Las Vegas is coming up January 11-13. I’m pretty excited about having the opportunity to attend for the first time. For those of you who don’t know what Affiliate Summit is, here’s a quick clip from their website:

Affiliate Summit West is the largest Affiliate Summit, the premier affiliate marketing conference, of the year. This three day conference includes an exhibit hall with affiliate merchants, vendors, and networks, as well as multiple tracks of educational sessions covering the latest trends and information from affiliate marketing experts.

This will be my third trip to Vegas, but will be the first time I’ve gone for business purposes. I’ll be flying out on Saturday January 10 and returning Wednesday the 14. There’s just under a month left before I leave, so continue to check back as I’ll be filling you in on a lot of happenings and details with the event.

Also, on a sidenote: I have 3 125×125 ad slots available for the right sidebar. Leave a comment or contact me if you’re interested in purchasing.

It’s time to let some domains go. Before November, I owned about 60 domains. That may be a lot of some of you, and to others it’s merely a drop in the bucket. Owning 60 domains is pricey though. That’s about $500 in renewal fees.

So over the last month or so I’ve let a lot of domains expire. I can’t even remember them all. The domains I’m letting go are ones that I bought, but never got around to doing anything with. Some of them maybe I had planned to build sites on, while others were used for affiliate marketing purposes. Whatever the reason, I don’t want them anymore and they’re not even worth the $7.60 renewal fee to me.

Here’ s a list of a couple domains I still have control of, but am letting go. Either the just expired or the will be in the coming weeks. After these few go I’ll be down to around 40 domains: much easier to manage.

golfingtips101.com - this one had a small mini site on it. I tried to sell it, but got no offers. So I let it go.

mentalgolfers.com - bought this domain for a golf ebook I was working on. Never got off the ground.

gopolls.net - used this to test some zip submit affiliate marketing offers.

ojmayofans.info - this one has a fan site on it. Tried to sell it for $10, but got no offers so I’m letting it drop.

tjford.info - never built the fan site for this player.

wootringtones.com - was going to promote video game ringtones. Never got into it.

epolicyquotes.com - used for affiliate marketing (insurance and free online quote offers).

If you’re interested in any of these before the drop, let me know.

Sorry I haven’t been as active posting here lately. We all know how busy this time of the year is. But on top of working diligently on my websites and at my full-time job, my wife and I are purchasing our first home. We are closing on the property December 18.

After a month or so searching, we found a winner. We got an amazing deal on the property - we paid about 35% less on this house then the person who bought it in 2006 did. The reason we got such a great deal is because the house was a short sale. This means the bank (seller) agrees to discount a loan balance due to an economic or financial hardship on the part of the mortgagor. Their economic hardship was my gain. The house was going into short sale because the previous owner was one of many millions of victims of the mortgage crisis, not because it was in bad shape.

The house is 1898 square feet. Has 3 bedrooms, 2 full bathrooms, a study, formal dining room, laundry room, large kitchen, family room, 2-car garage and a fenced in backyard. It’s a much larger house then I thought we would have found in our price range. Homes in the southside of Jacksonville are much more expensive than any other side of town. That’s because the southside is the most desireable location and very close to the beach.

We already have a couple projects planned for the house. We’re immediately painting the entire house and adding new hardwood floors throughout (except tile in the kitchen and carpet in the 2 guest bedrooms rooms). Those are the only projects that need to be completely before we move in, everything else we’ll do slowly over time. We have to move in by December 31 because our rent at our current place will be up.

Here’s a picture of the outside that was put on the realtors website. Once I get a hold of it, the landscaping will be 100x better. I’ll be sure to take many pictures to show you guys in the coming weeks.

Everywhere you look on the web you will see internet marketers hawking products, ebooks, services, etc. and using testimonials to help boost sales. It’s a proven fact that testimonials will help increase sales, but do most people actually believe them?

Savvy internet users have you be skeptical of testimonials. If you’re searching for an e-book and come across a Clickbank product, you will see probably 10 testimonials on one of those long sales pages.

Here’s an example of a page I just found with a couple of sketchy testimonials: Make Cash With Will. Looks like the owner of the website just found a couple of pictures from Myspace and wrote in a fake testimonial.

You’ve go to be careful with this things. I would only trust a testimonial if it comes with a person’s URL, and then the name/url match is confirmed by doing a WHOIS lookup. Even then I’m not sure I’d believe something off one of these online sales pages.

So what do you think? Do you believe anything some online testimonial says?