Or is it? If you’ve been following the financial news of the past two weeks, you’re probably feeling all doomy and gloomy right now wondering what in the hell you’re going to retire on. Every where you turn people from President Bush to the guy who mows your yard is going on and on about how this is the WORST economic disaster of the past 75 years. Well, I hate to tell you this, but it really isn’t. Lets take a look at the numbers, shall we?

Unemployement is up to about 6.1% as of August. We can expect it to be a little higher, but its still low compared to other countries and indeed when compared to the Depression following the 1929 stockmarket crash. The Foreclosure rate is still under 5% and so far, everyone still seems to have enough cash to buy gas if you can find it (at least in Atlanta). Not to mention that the US’ GDP has risen steadily this year. Things are not as bad as everyone has been portraying them to be.

What has become clear over the last seven days is that the American Public was being sold a bill of goods that it did not want or really need. Yes. There is some uncertantity in the markets right now, but giving Wall St. a free pass with this “700 billion” dollar bailout is not the answer. Its like giving more candy to your kid after they threw up from eating too much candy. Its not the way to teach them a lesson. You hand them 700b this time, who’s to say that in 50 years, they don’t come back asking for double or triple?

Dave Ramsey has developed a good plan for fixing what ails the economy and surprisingly it doesn’t involve a government handout that would put the country deeper in debt. The biggest and best part of his plan is calling for the removal of Capital Gains taxes. This would make the profits investors earn theirs free and clear prompting more people to invest in the market so many hold so dear.

Take a look at Dave’s 3 Simple Steps and let your congressman and senator know about them. Push them out to your pick for president. lets see someone take some real action for a change.

Popularity: 1% [?]

When Michael Phelps trains for a competition like the Olympics, he really trains. Most days he swims four miles in preparation. Others he works outside of the pool on building muscle mass and endurance. The man is a machine and its no wonder that he’s on pace to set an Olympic record of 10 Olympic Golds in his career. Everyone could learn from Michael Phelps. He sets his goals and he works to accomplish them, much in the same way a blogger should.

Perhaps you started blogging for any number of reasons (I started because it sounded like fun). After awhile though, your original goals become outdated and often forgotten. It doesn’t hurt to reevaluate your goals every couple of months. Perhaps you reached that goal of 100 subscribers on feedburner. Maybe you average $100 a month from adsense for the past three months. Nows the time to step it up. Instead of posting once a week about your cat, post twice. Find new things to post about. Venture in to an area where you might be considered knowledgeable.

Much like Phelps and his Olympic team mates, we need to always be working harder on our blogs/sites. There’s always going to be someone with better grammar, a cooler layout or better plugins. If you keep the same site you’ve had since you started in 2001 because you’re used to it, things will over time become stale. Instead, push yourself to the limit.

It doesn’t hurt to reinvent yourself, as long as you’re not doing it weekly. The important thing is that you work hard. After all, PR and Alexa ranking don’t just fall from the sky. You have to earn them.

Don’t forget about the ENTRECARD CONTESTS I’m running right now, you have the chance to win 3k in credits!! Also, if you haven’t Joined the Pepperjam Network and Received your $10 Sign On Bonus You’re missing out on a great opportunity to take your blogging to the next level!!

Popularity: 1% [?]

I’ve been working for online affiliate programs in one form or another for several years now. Back in January a new one started up and its been a pretty good source so far for advertising dollars. Even better now that Pepperjam Network is Now Offering a $10 Affiliate Sign On Bonus. Thats right. $10 for signing up with PepperJam.

PepperJam is a quickly growing ad network with advertisers like MGM, Cartoon Network, JellyBelly, BBC America and more. You can advertise through Text links or banner ads and their affiliate center is one of the coolest I’ve seen yet.

Pepperjam is the industry’s leading full-service internet marketing agency, assisting businesses launch and optimize three of the most important revenue channels for today’s e-commerce companies, search-engine marketing, affiliate marketing, and media planning and management. With a unique expertise in the unparalleled medium of search, an unyielding mastery of the pay-for-performance based world of affiliate marketing, and the most cutting-edge media buying capability anywhere, Pepperjam has the power to take your e-commerce strategy to the cutting-edge and beyond. What separates Pepperjam from the competition is years of consistent, proven success. The Pepperjam service model is built on a tradition of unrivaled results, which makes partnering with Pepperjam an aggressive yet fiscally sound choice for online businesses looking to substantially increase online sales and exposure.

There always seem to be support staff online to help with any questions and the advertiser offerings are some of the easiest to find and some of the most varied online. If you’ve been looking for an affiliate network to help monetize your blog or other websites, I’d give PepperJam a good hard look I mean after all, Pepperjam Network is Now Offering a $10 Affiliate Sign On Bonus. Join Today.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I must be crazy! I’ve amassed over 2k in Entrecard “credits” and here I am giving them away!!! Thats right!! The month of August is going to be crazy mark’s crazy give away month!! What can you do to win?? three things.

First, comment on the my blog. Thats all you have to do. The EC’er with the highest number of quality contributions will receive 1,000 credits. Thats 1,000 credits for visiting my site and commenting on my posts. What could be better??

How about 750 credits for doing nothing but dropping on my site! All you have to do is drop your card through out the month of August. On Sept First, I’ll pick a winner at random from the top 10 droppers! So thats a chance to win another 750 points by dropping your EC when you stop in to make a comment!!

Lastly, I’ll give 250 EC credits to a randomly selected person. All you have to do is link back to this post (using the trackback URL). Mention it in a post on your blog. Blog about the contest. Whatever. As long as your blog shows up in the comments list you’re entered to win!!

Thats three chances to win up to 2000 Entrecard Credits. Its like I’ve gone mad!! If you’re not a member of Entrecard (WHATS WRONG WITH YOU?!!?!?!?!) click the Big E on the gold bar that says drop and you too can sign up. Its an easy way to increase traffic to your blog!!

Popularity: 1% [?]

If you’re like me you’re always finding ways to improve click-thru-rates on your websites. Whether its to advertisers, friends or other pages on your site, your ultimate goal as a webmaster is to get people to click right? After all, what good would a page be if people didn’t click on it? They might visit once. See the static, never changing, non-interactive content on your site and say “forgitaboutit!” The exact opposite of what you want them to do.

And tricks, tips and scams abound that claim to be able to help improve click thru and retention rates right? Well, I think I found one of the ultimate tools in a webmasters arsenal. The SiteSpect Difference aims to teach you how to use behavior tracking and “multivariate testing” to increase the “loyality” of your visitors. I’ve read through most of this white paper so far, and while some of it goes way, way over my head, most of it is simple stuff that as webmasters we should be doing anyways.

Chances are you know where your visitors are clicking already, and chances are even better that its not really where you think they should be clicking. This paper helps you make changes to your site that will change that. Check it out, its free and who knows, it might help improve your clicks!

Popularity: 1% [?]

So, I’ve been a member of Entrecard since they opened their doors. And to be fair, its been a good, if sometimes onesided, relationship so far. The traffic has been decent, the friends and new blogs I’ve visited have sometimes proved valuable and other times not so much. I was intrigued, to say the least, when I heard about the newest endeavor by EC to help boost readers and participation on blogs. I mean, afterall, we’ve all seen how well blogrush helped right?

July 15th saw Entrecard announce a partnership with sezwho. Its simple. You join sezwho and add their dealie to your site and you have the ability to earn more EC credits via posting comments on other blogs. Now, I know you’re thinking “AWESOME!! Finally some payback for being first on problogger all the time” but thats where you’re wrong.

Your comments have to have substance and are subject to the ratings of the masses. If people like your comments, good for you, if not…..

Its an interesting idea, and one that is kind of patterned after digg, blogging zoom and other sites like that, however, this is strictly for comments. The more you leave. The better they are, the more likely you are to benefit from this conglomeration of stuff.

Yes, I’ve added it here, so comment away, you willing commentors, maybe you’ll get a good ranking! Oh and let me know if you’ve added it as well….

Popularity: 1% [?]

There was a point in time where I was posting multiple postings in one day. Some times, as many as 6. Of course, there has also been a time when I’ve posted as often as once a month, and then again, there have been times where this site has not often been online for one reason or another. I’ve noticed here (and on other blogs as well) that blogging, like everything else has an evolutionary cycle that is followed, sometimes more closely than others.

Blogs, it seems, start out like many other “loves” in our lives. At first, the need to populate their pages with witty banter is great. Bloggers seldom go longer than 12 or 24 hours between posts (many may fire off a rapid succession of posts in a shorter amount of time. Whether or not these posts are of the caliber needed in the blogosphere is another debate for another day). Like young lovers in a new relationship, the new blogger mostly gets a sense of belonging from posting the menu from their lunch, what they think about the bitch in the cubicle next to them or what funny thing the odd looking man did on the subway this morning on their way in to work. Its almost as if blogging gives their lives meaning. A reason to exist online and try to connect with others.

Many new bloggers feel that the work their doing is important. As if Marty Kline in Podunk, IA (thats Iowa) really cares about the street musician in San Fransisco. But the truth is he doesn’t and after months of posting and checking PR and Alexa and god knows what other rankings, the new blogger is often let down.

After a while (rather quickly if the blogger is only blogging for money and not for any real reason) the process of blogging becomes something of a chore. A “yes, I must update today, but I won’t over the weekend” attitude sets in. Posts become more mundane, regular and more of a job than anything else. Its this point of blogging that most bloggers fall in to and never seem to escape from. How many posts can you find about the pizza someone had for lunch on thursday? Or about the way their boss makes them feel unappreciated (not that its a boss’ job to make you feel appreciated). Too many.

This period is perhaps the most dangerous for a blogger. For its now that the act of blogging looses its fun. If something isn’t fun, your more likely not to do it. When blogging becomes a chore, when you’re searching for that next post instead of just freely typing to get what you want, you’re more likely to stop.

I’ve noticed, among the bigger, more popular blogs, that unless you have multiple authors or contributors writing for you, content updates are sporadic. Its not a fault of the blogger (well, some of it is) so much as the fact that blogging has become a job. Its like waking up in the morning and driving to work. Punching the clock and counting the hours until you get to go home, except that in this case, you’re keeping track of word count.

Anyone can fall in to the point where they lack the desire to blog (I think I went most of February with out posting), the hard part is finding a reason to blog again. This series is going to continue with several topics on maintaining that desire to blog. Don’t ask for a schedule of when I’m going to post them, because I just don’t know.

Popularity: 2% [?]

With all the brouhaha over the google bitchslap that took place towards the end of 2007 (in case you didn’t know, google penalized sites who posted links with out nofollow for payment) something was bound to step up and take its place. The question is can a new comer survive in the shark eat shark world of SEO and Page ranking? IZEA (payperpost’s daddy) hopes so and it thinks it has a winning product with RealRank.

RealRank (RR) is Izea’s answer for its affiliates on how to retain a ranking system that doesn’t care how or what you link to so much as traffic quantity and quality to your site. The idea is that the realrank weights blogs 70% on daily unique visitors, 20% by daily active inbound links and 10% by daily page views as reported by ITK (Izea tool Kit). While the idea was just released to the public, Izea and the PPP crowd have been using this since December ‘07 as a way to rank websites in order to maintain the level of advertising as before. From where I sit, the only down side is that advertisers have been slow on the uptake of the new ranking system, prefering PageRank still despite the fact that anyone who would even consider posting about their products has virtually no PR at the present time.

The realrank system is a pretty nice system with some nice looking graphs. According to the ranking, Delusions of Grandeur is some where around 452 for the day with a weekly average of somewhere around 588. Not bad when you consider the 100,000 blogs that Izea/PPP is potentially already tracking. A nice feature about RealRank is the ability to keep the stats private. While I personally do not mind if others see how successful I am, it might not behoove a smaller site to have its stats public until they’ve built up a good base.

According to the realrank site:

RealRank is a more accurate ranking than Alexa and Google PageRank because it isn’t based on a small sample of a site’s visitors or on a censored link-weighting algorithm. It’s based on real traffic.

One of the other cool things is that they have an open api so anyone can develop for it with out any penalty. Already, there’s a rank badge available and its only a matter of time before there are more and more things developed.

We’ll have to see if RR makes a difference. If you haven’t checked it out yet, visit IzeaRanks to check out your blog, create an account and get the tracking code for your site. It could help boost your traffic!

Popularity: 2% [?]

When I hit 300 drops yesterday (which I repeated today!) I mentioned to gruntled that I had come across a ton of bad sites and a few good ones in my quest. He wanted to know which ones I liked, so I thought I’d let everyone know. Here are five of the better blogs I came across on EntreCard. In no order….

1. Fabulously Jinxed – A really cool site that has a mix of everything. The writing is easy to read and the site is rather well laid out.
2. Mrs. Sparrow – Granted, if she was married to the famous captain, she wouldn’t really have time to be blogging, but her site is fun, witty and another good read. Not to mention that chick pirates are HOT!!
3. Gospel According To Rhys I actually came across the Gospel before I came across Entrecard, but it wasn’t too prominent on my radar until EntreCard. Rhys is a witty writer from across the pond (thats England for you wags who didn’t know) who chronicles most anything he feels like.
4. Gorilla Sushi is a fun and light hearted read who is going to Ear more whale blubber this year. I can only hope he does.
5. cigar Jacks – This has become one of my daily must hits. If for any other reason than to extend my knowledge of cigars. I smoke an occasional cigar (I even have a Humidor), but my knowledge is rather limited to the one brand I happen to have on hand. I need to learn the lingo and find some new smokes and this is a good place to do it.

I think I’ll work on a five of the worst finds on EntreCard… the problem is going to be narrowing it down to only five.

Popularity: 2% [?]

It appears that several of the bigger players are abandoning ship in hopes that they aren’t dragged down with it. The promises made by BlogRush head John Reese have failed to materialize as more and more bloggers pull the widget from their sites in an effort to rid the web of such bloaty scripts.

I had posted back in November about my experiences with BlogRush and whether or not it was worth it and at the time, I decided to make some changes to the way I handled their system. Instead of giving them my main feed with every article in it, I switched to a specific blogrush feed that only showed the articles I wanted to show. It helped a little, but as the next screenshot shows, it still wasn’t the boon to traffic that programs like EntreCard, and even just making comments on other blogs has been.

My next step was to change the category my blog lived in as well on the BlogRush system. That did little more than drive my credits up as I received less and less exposure. So now, I have around 20k credits that aren’t being used (which is a far cry from the Cow’s 10,000,000 credits). I’ve noticed that as I browse the blogosphere, I’m seeing the BR widget less and less and with bigger sites pulling their widgets, I have to wonder if it was a good idea poorly implemented. One of the things that makes EntreCard worth while is that you have to get out and drop your card on other blogs and YOU get to choose who you advertise on and who advertises on you.

This form of self quality control enables you to make better choices that benefit you and your readers more than blogrush. Most of the crap on the blogrush widget is just that, crap. I really don’t need to know that you failed to make 28,000 a month last year. What I need is good incoming traffic.

Popularity: 2% [?]