CHESSNOID

I love that show Seinfeld and often catch reruns. Even though I have seen it many times, it still makes me laugh. I have the first 3 seasons on DVD but quite honestly, its not the same when you just catch it on TV even with its commercials. As far as this blog being sexy, well you know it’s not. That was more of my dry sarcastic humor.

I love to write in my blog like my daily journal. But because it is on the web, I just want to make sure I have someone reading it other than myself. I use to get the occasional hit from google or yahoo searches, but they are very few. Sure my family checks it out every so often but they are not interested in getting to know me anymore than they know me now. As you can probably tell, I write about the same stuff over and over that interests me. But hey, you figure there must be many people like me who have similar interests. Thus, I began the quest for an audience on the net.

My wife sent me some great resources before I started the blog. One of them was johnchow.com. I downloaded his e-book. It is definitely useful and talks about making money and how to market. Lots of computer lingo that was and is still beyond me. I did put some google adsense ads and amazon.com ads that are suppose to be targeted to stuff that I write about. In the beginning it didn’t but soon after it started to put related products out. I am not sure how that is suppose to drive traffic into my site, but it is suppose to indirectly. Hmmmmm.

The first site I signed up for was Blogexplosion.com. They actually have a great idea where they monetize your time into internet currency that allows you to buy ads to advertise your blog on other blogs or their site. I surfed a few days and have about 700 points. I was pretty enthusiastic about that. The site said it takes up to 48 - 72 hours to get approved by them. They just want to make sure I am not a porn site or do promote anything illegal. Well, it has been 2 weeks and 5 un-responded emails later, I am still waiting for admin approval of my site. They SUCK! Email me if you want me to transfer my credits to you. However, on one of the blogs they were promoting, the blog had a link with those tiny avatars leading to MyBlogLog.com. I clicked and found that community friendly and helpful. Many groups of common interest to join and many blogs to read (over 100,000). I set up Snoopy avatar and that was that. I really am not sure why I have been getting more hits and have become a temporary hot community, but if I had to guess it is because of the snoopy avatar. I have had over 800 profile views clicked to check out who I am, which is probably more people who have ever read my blog. That is no joke, but whatever works, right?

From that site, I read a few blogs that I really liked and some nice guys who helped me by giving me some tips. I have since added them to my blog roll on the side bar. I do recommend you clicking on those links because you will like what you see. The 2 other sites recommended to me were BlogCatalog and WeBetUr.com. I signed up for both of them 2 days ago. I am still waiting for admin approval from BlogCatalog and WeBetUr was working right away after I verified by email, I wasn’t a robotcrawler. I put their widgets under the MBL widget so you can actually see the face avatars of your most recent visitors. You can pretty much judge and see how many people have come in from the 3 different sources. I am not sure exactly how to post my blog posts in the WeBetUr site, so if any one wants to enlighten me, it would be much appreciated. As for now, I am cutting and pasting my current posts and some old interesting posts onto their site so they can be voted on. I like all 3 sites because they are free, offer help, and you get to meet a lot of new people and lastly they direct you to other sites and blogs with relevant information you are looking for.

I found the WebUrbanist on MBL and really enjoyed his site. I was surprised when he actually came to visit my site and left me a comment. Cool! He gets over 250,000 hits so I figured he was a very busy guy who didn’t have that type of time. He runs another site called Allsux.com Both are worth checking out.

At this point I am leaning to pulling all my google and amazon ads off my site, and increasing my blog roll widget with sites that I enjoy. I have already replaced one of the ad spaces with one of those cluster maps to hopefully illustrate where other bloggers are coming from. I hope my site is good enough to get return visitors once MBL takes me off their hot community spotlight. I know my 15 minutes of fame timer is counting down.

One last thing, I found this article called Ethical Blogging by Dave Lucas who I found because his avatar clicked on my profile. Yes, we all check out to see who is stalking us by stalking them. Anyways, in the beginning of his post he writes or quotes:

Because there are certain people who are not really blogging: they think they’re in a ‘popularity contest.’ I think it started with MySpace. The race to add “friends” and more “friends” has spread to bloggers who crave links, hits and “recognition.” They think that by chalking up hits they’re becoming popular. Nothing could be farther from the truth!

To me that was very thought provoking and encouraging for someone who is just starting his blog out. That post has a lot of great material to read on self promotion and a story about getting over 300,000 hits a day. Wow! Anyways, I really liked this article and found it insightful.  By the way, since I used Seinfeld’s name in my post’s title, I stuck this unrelated video here that I thought was funny.