Super Bowl Weekend, Bj Penn Vs. Georges St. Pierre and I’m Flying to California

Big weekend coming up and I am sick (super lame!)  So basically we have Super Bowl 43 with the Steelers and the Cardinals.  I have friends who are Pittsburgh fans but I gotta say I want to see the Cards pull it off.  And why not, I mean honestly, when are the Arizona Cardinals going to be in the Super Bowl again!  They may not make the playoffs again.  Sorry Cards fans, if it makes you feel any better I will not see a single live minute of the game as I will be on an airplane.

Before the Super Bowl, the UFC will be airing UFC 94: Penn vs. St. Pierre on Saturday.  That should be a great matchup between to of the top rated pound-for-pound mixed martial artists on the planet!  Super-Fight is a good description for this matchup.

And, exciting for me, I fly to California to visit my sisters for a week.  I plan on enjoying my time away form Minnesota and hope this head cold clears up before take-off.

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Scene From Boiler Room

 

I like to refer to quotes from the movie “Boiler Room” from time to time.  Now that is a fun movie.  There are a few scenes where Affleck gives a speech in front of a group of people he’s training.  If you don’t want to hear any cursing DON’T click the play button!  I’m not a fun of using that much foul language myself but I do get fired up about working when I listen to Ben Affleck rip into this group.

Posted in Blogging, Video | Tagged | 2 Comments

Using eBay To Find Domain Names

I guess you can use eBay to find anything really but any time I spend on it is usually to find domain names.  There is a ton of crap that one must sift through when searching for anything on eBay.  Learn to use the Advanced Search Options that eBay offers.  As far as searching for domain names goes, I usually use the “minimum bids” feature and set it to “2.”  This will make the search only display domian names that have at least two bids.  That takes all the hard work out of sifting for quality domain names!

I have a few Build a Niche Stores that I’ve setup around domain names I’ve found very cheap on eBay.  Here you can see an example of an advanced eBay search for domain names.

Posted in Computers | Tagged | 3 Comments

Submitting Your BANS Sites To Directories

I love checks from eBay.  There isn’t a single thing that gets me fired up more about working my Build a Niche Store business than seeing an email on my Blackberry about how eBay is giving me money.  Sound greedy?  I don’t care, it’s fun!

With that said, some of the things involved with getting a BANS website ranked well with the search engines are not very easy to do.  The main thing I hate doing is submitting to directories.  This is a very effective way of getting some anchor text out there that links back to your stores.  But it can be very lame.

Recently I purchased a package from Submitedge to get a domain name ranked faster after I had to transfer a store to a new domain name.  I used a link from Dave’s blog to get there, as my way of thanking him for his BANS Blog.  I’ve done manual submissions with directories before and it’s very time consuming with the reward coming from that work sometimes months away.  I decided to try SubmitEdge and I don’t know if I can get myself to do directory submitting manually again.  Using SubmitEdges’ system is not cheap but I would have to say it’s very worth the one-time fee to get a website out there and ranking in search engines for the terms I chose.

The other option is, of course, submitting to directories yourself which is free and still a very effective marketing technique.

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Our Emotional and Physical States

Today I caught a whiff of perfume while at work and it reminded me of a time and place from about eight years ago.  This flash caught me way off guard and made me think of how different my life is from eight years ago.  It totally changed my state of mind and reminded me how something so small as a scent can totally interupt my emotional and physical state at any time of the day, under just about any circumstance.

I’ve read a few of Tony Robbins books and listened to his Personal Power cd’s (I still listen to those cd’s every once in a while.)  I would recommend Tony Robbins to anybody, he really helps you realize just how much control we have over our lives and our physical and mental states.  It’s one of the best lessons I’ve learned in my life about myself.  I try to use it every day at work and at home.

I can give a few quick examples of how we have control over our lives.  My sister was visiting last year and she was complaining that she had a headache.  We were at a cousins house visiting and she was displaying all the classic signs of a young girl being bored and wanting to be somewhere else.  Sitting low with her shoulders hunched, a frown on her face, just overall not enjoying herself.  I told her I could get rid of her headache.  She didn’t believe me but she did agree to do anything I asked her to do to get rid of her headache.  So I took her to an open area in the house and I told her to do ten jumping jacks.  You remember jumping jacks right?  You stand straight with your arms at your sides and jump straight up landing with your legs spread apart and your hands above your head.  Then you jump straight up again and land in your original position.  Repeat ten times.

Now, if you tell any adult to do ten jumping jacks out of the blue they are going to think you’re insane.  And it will immediately effect whatever emotional state they are in.  Telling someone to do anything silly will have that effect.  It works on just about anything.  What if you stood up wherever you are at right now and did ten jumping jacks?  The idea alone probably makes you feel silly.  There could be several factors in play for you.  Who would see you?  Do you even have room to do them?  I bet if you are in an emotional state of being depressed or stressed out, doing ten jumping jacks would totally change your mood.  So why don’t you just do them?  I bet if you were in a physical state of being tired, or just not having any energy, ten jumping jacks would change that to.  The rush of blood and adreniline from doing that physical activity would make it impossible to keep feeling that way.  You might be a bit winded from it if you’re out of shape but you would feel different.

I’m not saying the ten jumping jacks are important.  The important part of changing your physical or emotional state is deciding that you want to change it right now.  If you are feeling down about something, or depressed, or stressed, it’s because you want to feel those things!  Tony Robbins told me so.  And he was right.  He spends a lot of time in his books and cd’s basically trying to convince his readers of the same thing.  We have control of our states for the most part.  And we can change our physical and emotional states at whatever time we choose to.

So, back to my sisters headache.  I made her do the ten jumping jacks and her headache dissapeared.  Basically it went away because she didn’t have time for that stupid headache anymore, she was to busy feeling silly about doing ten jumping jacks, then she had a rush from the actual physical activity of doing them.  Of course, as soon as she sat down and went back to being bored, her headache came back.

Living in the United States of America, we have endless opportunities and anyone can become anything they want to.  Want to be jobless and live on welfare?  No problem, we have that.  Want to be a multi-millionare with 4 houses and big stinkin’ boat?  No problem, it’s there for the taking.  All you have to do is want it and take action.

Posted in Blogging, Family | Tagged | 1 Comment

Adding Videos To Your Blog

I just went through each of my blogs and added Video posts to them all.  I’ve been working some long hours the last week and have not had as much time as usual to put as much thought into my posts.  Using video as the main content of a post is quick and easy using Youtube to search for a blogs main subject matter and good SEO.  Many times Youtube users don’t exactly concern themselves to much with using good keywords so sometimes you can even rank better for the video then the Youtube page.

Using this method doesn’t mean you don’t have to add any text content, it just means you don’t have to add as much.  A quick description above or below the video using the keywords you are targeting can make for an easy blog post.

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WordPress.TV

I did a whole post on how to install your first WordPress blog and then WordPress comes out with this!  WordPress.TV is a visual resource for all things WordPress.  It’s got tons of guides to get you blogging in no time.

I’m going to do some digging in myself and plan to take in as much as I can.

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Using Twitter With Your Blog

There are lots of different ways to use Twitter with your blog.  I use it on this blog to display my latest “tweets” (I didn’t make up that word.)

One way I use Twitter on one of my other blogs is with an entirely different Twitter account.  The best part about this method is that it is automated.  I don’t have to log into that Twitter account very often.  Using Twitterfeed, I update the Twitter account with relevent content quite a few times a day from different blogs that relate to my subject matter.  For instance, if the blog I want to promote is about football, then I could create an account with a football user name and theme.  Then I would use Twitterfeed to post updates from a few blogs that relate to football.  Then I add my URL to my blog that relates to football in the area that Twitter allows for that.

With that done all I have to do is use Twitter Search to find users who follow football and start following them.  Usually users will follow back if they are interested in your subject matter.  I have done this with two of my blogs so far and they are getting a steady stream of traffic directly from Twitter.

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Football Will Not Allow Me To Be Productive

It’s the playoffs today.  NFC Championship and AFC Championship games.  Already watched the Eagles lose to the Cardinals.  Who loses to the Cardinals?  Arizona will be in the Super Bowl this year.  Oh and I won’t be able to watch the Super Bowl this year coincidentally.  My amazing sister purchased my plane tickets for me right around Super Bowl start time.  Not her fault, I told her whenever.  Plus I really should have done it myself I just couldn’t stomach forking over the money for four plane tickets to Oceanside.  So I let her fork my money over.  But she did pay for half.

Where the hell was I going with this post…  Oh yeah.  Zero productivity today because the playoffs are on.  And the Cardinals are in the Super Bowl…

Posted in Blogging, Family | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Transparency and Affiliate Marketing

I was trading emails earlier today with Sallie over at Affiliate Marketing Adventure earlier today discussing transparency in our blogs.

I have a difficult time being to transparent when writing posts concerning affiliate marketing because there is always the risk that a fellow affiliate marketer will copy my work.  For example, in earlier posts I’ve written about my problem with the LEGO group concerning one of my domain names.  I went out of my way in that post to make sure I didn’t mention the actual domain name in question for a few reasons.  I hate it the idea that other affiliate marketers can copy my work.  When you consider the path that someone would take in getting to my blog you realize that a high percentage of my visitors are going to be affiliate marketers and, more specifically, BANS affiliate marketers.  A visitor is going to get to my blog either from a search engine or through a link from a fellow affiliate marketers blog.  It’s a good chance that these visitors are looking for ideas for BANS sites.

Now I’ve got to say that I would love to give my two cents to help anyone with a project.  It would be very cool if each visitor that came to my blog went away learning something they didn’t know about affiliate marketing, the Build a Niche Store system or anything else I may write about.  If that is the goal of writing in this blog than it would be smart to be transparent with everything I write about and give readers as many ideas as I can.  But I don’t want anyone copying my work.  It sucks putting in the work to research a niche, finding the best keywords to promote, designing a website, and creating unique content only to have some loser affiliate marketer copier copy my work.

I’ve read a few different instances where affiliate marketing bloggers have had their work copied.  One famous instance of this is Shoemoney reavealing how he was making it big with affiliate ringtones.  He basically laid out step for step how to make a ton of money with affiliate ringtones and everyone copied him.  He recently did a post called the seven deadly sins for trying to make money online where he touches on not revealing exactly how your making a killing online.

I just read Marks post over at his blog, the Niche Store Builder, where he discusses how easy it is to impress MSN.  He mentions in his post that he would not reveal the website in question or his earnings.  This is a fairly common theme for internet marketers because many people can be envious of ones success and put effort into, not only copying their work, but doing what they can to sabatoge their work also.

I think we as bloggers have to draw a line with how transparent we are with our affiliate marketing projects and do our best to be as descriptive as possible while avoiding malicious visitors.  I am interested in networking and helping out as much as I can so feel free to send an email if there is something I write about here that you would like me to touch on a bit more.  But I won’t do your work for you.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Blogging | Tagged , | 4 Comments