A few months after I started my Ryan Grant fan site, I was approached by his agency and they wanted to use the domain I had to build his official website. I gladly gave the domain up to them and in return I was sent an autographed jersey! Pretty cool, huh? This is an authentic jersey too – not a screen printed replica.

I just wanted to give a shout out to Ryan Grant and his agency team – they’re really cool people. Next time the Packers come play the Jaguars I’ll be there to cheer him on.

I ditched Mail Chimp and signed up for Aweber (affiliate link). It’s only $1 for the first month so I figured why not. I added e-mail sign up forms to four of my websites and have 90 subscribers in just a few days. Two of the sites I created unique giveaway content for to entice people to sign up. It seems to be working.

I’ve set up follow up e-mail at intervals of 7 days to keep my subscribers engaged. I have about 5 follow up e-mails per site. The first three e-mails were drafted to build trust. There are no sales efforts in them. The next two auto emails I created still have content in them but I included some sales material in them to try and make money.

It will be interesting to see how much I can make from my e-mail lists. I hope I don’t want to kill myself for not starting this sooner.

Sign up for Aweber and get started today.

I’m not that great, but learning more every day. I’ve started entering a few $25-$50 design contests to give me something to work for and practice.

The book encourages people to determine what truly makes them happy and pursue monetizing around it on the internet. It argues that because of recent social and technological trends the cost of producing content has been driven low enough that passion, knowledge, and effort, which the book calls “sweat equity”, are now all one needs to build a brand and business.

I’ve seen Gary speak before (ASW09) and he was pretty good. The crowd really feed off his energy and he made everyone want to, well, Crush It. I’m guessing the book is going to be very similar to what he speaks about at conferences. I’m not really expecting a step by step guide or anything like that. From what I’ve heard, the book talks about his past and how he got into this business. Then it goes into how to use social media tools to help build a personal brand.

It’s a really short book and probably won’t take me more than a week to read. I’ll report back when I’m finished and let you know what I think.

It’s been 2-3 years since I’ve updated the look of Tebow Zone – it was still running on 800px wide! The site was definitely due for a design update. Tim will be joining an NFL team in a few months, so I picked a Wordpress theme that will easily allow me to change the colors to match that of his new team (hopefully teal and black). The new theme also allows for more/better ad placement.

With my Assassin’s Creed site, I really wanted to get rid of the dark theme I used to have and go with something lighter. I really hate black/dark themes, they look cheap and are hard to see if you have a glare on your monitor. This theme also looks more professional and sleek, and allows for more/better ad placement.

It didn’t take me too long to change the themes for each site. Just had to make a few adjustments, transfer some code and I was on my way.

Post a comment and let me know what you think.

There are some really cool apps that you can install on the toolbar including: search, rss subscribe, live notifications, photo galleries, twitter dashboard, facebook fan pages, youtube channels, games, chat rooms and more. And site visitors can view all these things without ever leaving your site.

To see some examples of the toolbar in action, visit Wibiya.com, Mashable or Think Computers – it was on Bob’s site Think Computers were I saw the toolbar and got inspired for this post. He didn’t always have it installed, but I got the live notification letting me know about it.

I plan on installing a Wibiya toolbar on Gator Envy. I want to test it on the blog and forum pages… see if people use it before I try it on multiple sites. I think the biggest benefit will be the Twitter profile and Facebook fan page links that let visitors know they can follow you in other places.

The tool seems cool, but it’s not for everyone. If I ran an e-commerce site I might be careful to add this toolbar. While it will help you showcase some of your social sites and additional features, you don’t want to distract people from making a purchase.

Do you have a Wibiya toolbar on your site? Post a comment with your link and I’ll check it out.

When I asked for the game I knew my PC was powerful enough to play it with my dual 2.5ghz processor and 4GB Ram, but I had a suspicion about the graphics card. In fact, the graphics card I had been using was an integrated chip (read: it sucks).

Sure enough when I install the game and go to boot it up for the first time I get an error message saying my graphics card sucks and can’t handle it. So, I head on over to newegg.com and bought a graphics card. I was lucky to be purchasing around the holidays because they had amazing deals. I picked up a Nvidia GeForce 9500GT 1GB for $69.99 + free shipping. It’s not a top of the line graphics card, but it is a very nice upgrade over what I had. It also has 2 monitor hookups so I can run dual monitors in the future.

In total I’ve played MW2 3 times about 15 minutes each time. I haven’t had time to dive into the single player campaigns and always get waxed when I play online. My best record so far is 7-8. Hopefully I’ll get more free time coming up so I can get the game down.

Right now I’m actually using the application to create the content for this blog post. I am talking into
the application as I’m driving home from work and it’s actually very convenient. I now don’t have to waste time by going home and sitting in front of the computer to write a blog post. I can just talk it through right now on my way home from work.

A couple things I really like about the application:
1. The ease-of-use. I mean it’s really one button and you push it and you start talking and it types for you.
2. As soon as you’re finished there’s a keyboard that pops up that will allow you to edit the text you created and forwarded as you wish.
3. There are built in voice commands such as “period” “question mark” and “paragraph” that help you organize your thoughts.

There are a few minor inconveniences with the application. If you stop talking for a few moments the application will think that you done and automatically stop recording. So if you’re the type of person that likes to think while they talk and take long pauses, then you better get used to restarting the recording.

The application is also not perfect in that it doesn’t correctly grab exactly what you say but it gets very close. From looking at my text documents I’d say it’s about 85-90% accurate. I’m sure that there are many issues with peoples names and words that end in “s” or “ed.” It just won’t pick up everything you say to the T. And god help you if you speak with an accent.

All in all, this is a must download for any iPhone user. Best of all, it’s free.

1. It provides consumer benefits
2. It is not easy for competitors to imitate
3. It can be leveraged widely to many products and markets.

Whether you’re online an online business, doing affiliate marketing or just run some fan sites as a hobby you need to define your core competencies to be successful.

What do you do better than your competitors? What do you deliver to your customers (site visitors) that makes them choose you over the competition? Do you have breaking news, the best pictures or technology on your site that can’t be found elsewhere? Those are core competencies.

If you ever find yourself straying from your core competencies, then you need to step back and evaluate what you’re doing and what you’re trying to accomplish with this project. How will it help you in the long-run? How does it fit your goals?

I suggest coming up with 3-4 core competencies that you can easily define and memorize. Write them down on a post-it note and slap it on your monitor. Don’t forget them and don’t stray from them.

I’ve been exclusively with ServInt for years now. They are the absolute best hosting company I’ve ever come across. There have been several times where I’ve hit some traffic spikes and the VPS can’t handle the load, so they upgraded me temporarily to an extremely high powered VPS at no charge for like 24 hours. They’ve done it on multiple occasions and without it, I would have had my sites down. Another positive of a VPS is that the hosting company can upgrade you to more RAM with the flick of a switch. Not like a dedicated where it takes hours/days.

During the holidays, most of us see an increase in traffic. Whether it’s from holiday shopping, people staying indoors (cold weather) or kids being home from schools – you will see traffic increases and you need to be prepared. Downtime during this season is not good. It can cost you a lot of money.

Today, I upgraded my VPS to a higher level. I’m tripling my RAM and bandwidth for a slightly higher monthly fee. I only need the extra juice until about mid-January, so after that I plan to downgrade to what I am currently on. Because I pay month-to-month this is very easy to do.

How are you planning for the holidays? Do you expect more traffic? Are you amping up your servers?