Since this is my first year of really blogging actively, I thought I would take a look back at everything that’s happened, some people who have given JoeTech.com link love, and talk a little about what’s to come for 2008.
January Even though I was still figuring out how to blog and, quite honestly, still just rehashing news from other tech sites for the most part, we had some exciting news as Apple unveiled it’s iPhone to the world, which was answered with rumors of the Gphone (Google Phone), and I posted about a bunch of other fun technology. Nobody really gave link love to any of my posts in January, but traffic was low, anyway.
March through July
In late February, my father died and I spent the next few weeks flying to Iowa, Mississipi, and Alabama for things related to that. The next few months after that were largely devoted to more flying around, dealing with the estate, and catching up on work. I really got out of the habit of posting, but this turned into a good thing in a sense.
August When I regained my focus in August, I decided to jump back in with an original post. This is where I decided I would much rather spend the time on my own content rather than just posting news others have posted. I also posted my first contest, giving away my Motorola Q Smart Phone, bringing in a lot of new visitors and a handful of new links. This is where my contest addiction began. This was also the month I found FeedM8, which turns your feed into a readable version of your blog for cell phones.
October October started off with a little giving back. I participated in the Donors Choose blog drive. I donated $40 and was able to convince absolutely nobody else to donate. I managed to invent Web 4.0, and nobody noticed, then promptly broke and subsequently fixed my TV. When I had to replace the heat sink and fan on my wife’s laptop, I decided to document the process, which turned into the most visited post to date (thanks, Google). I also found TNX this month and began to actually make some money on w3t.org and Pic.gs. The extra cash helped me to sponsor ShoeMoney’s RSS contest, which felt awesome. After Honda Asimo crashed my anniversary, Google dropped the page rank of many blogs.
November November started a little slow, but then MyBlogLog had a contest, which made me decide to have my own. My new contest not only drove even more new visitors to JoeTech.com, but it landed me the 8th and 9th places in MyBlogLog’s contest, which brought even more traffic. I made a post that ruffled some feathers and gave some Thanks Giving Link Love. I made yet another post that riled some people up and wound up with a little Digg love. My post about Google Android and the $10 Million they’re giving to developers landed some link love from Fam5.com.
December Although this month didn’t see a lot of posts as the holidays kept me busy, I managed to give JoeTech.com a huge makeover, which seems to have been met with open arms by my readers. Then I joined Entrecard (if you haven’t, stop reading and go do it right now), broke my phone, and then had another great contest, which had 1,055 entries and 20 blogs linking back to it. I also reviewed Zlio and got some link love for it from Search For Blogging, even though Zlio hasn’t made me a dime yet. I put in my bid to be an Entrecard Seller, which I am anxiously waiting to find out about.
2007 has been a pretty crazy year for me. Despite a rocky first half, the second half has been great and I’m planning to make 2008 even better. For starters, I’m having another contest (check back in the next couple days for the info). Here’s some of my goals for 2008:
- Reach 50,000 visitors per month (This month is 27,000 so far).
- 300 RSS subscribers (if you’re not one of the current 37, subscribe here).
- Earn enough to pay for my contests. =)
- Introduce some guest bloggers (contact me if interested).
- Guest blog on a couple blogs (contact me if you want me to guest blog for you).
- Have at least 1 contest a month
- More posts where I get to rip apart electronics (robot post coming)
- Review some geeky products (I’m talking to you, ThinkGeek.com!)
Thanks to everyone who helped make 2007 great! I hope you all stick with me for 2008. And remember… If you drink tonight, please do not drive!
Have you ever scoured the internet for a random fact, image, or a site you heard about, but it took you longer than you would have liked? There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to find anything quickly on the World Wide Web. Here’s five things that should help:
1. Find that image
You know what image you want, but you just don’t know where to find it, right? This is actually pretty easy, depending on your needs. As a web developer, this comes up quite often when I need a logo. Today, in fact, I needed the official seal for the town of Florence, Arizona for a client’s site. First, head to Google Image Search. Most people would just type “florence” and stumble through the 6,020,000 results. I’ve found that it’s much more efficient to tighten up your search and then broaden it if needed. Google Image Search defaults to all image sizes, but will also let you filter to show only extra large, large, medium, or small images. I prefer to look for the best quality image first, so I set my search to “Extra Large”. I also wanted a GIF image (hoping for transparency here), and typed in unique words that should be on a page the image is on, but may also be in the image’s file name and/or ALT text:
florence arizona seal filetype:gif
The results were less than favorable, so I tried again with “all images sizes” and this returned 9,780 results. The second result was the one I wanted. Try on your own. If you have to go to the second page of the search results, you can often fine tune your search with a unique word or narrowing down the size.
2. Google Calculator
If you have a Google search bar in your browser, you’re ready for this one. If not, just head to Google. Type in any mathematical equation and hit the ENTER key for the result. like below.
3. Get maps and directions
Most people who have been online for a number of years remember Mapquest, and they’re still kicking, but I want to show you a couple tricks I’ve picked up to help find a place quickly. Suppose, you need to find the closest emergency animal hospital, and you need it fast. First, head over to maps.google.com, type in your zip code, and click on the “Search Maps” button. When your map appears, remove your zip code from the search box and type in “emergency animal hospital” and click on the “Search Maps” button. If your new map does not display any pins, but there are search results on the left side of the screen, click the minus (-) at the top left of the map to zoom out a little. You can even use the Satellite view to check the parking situation. That took less than a minute for me. Once you have determined the closest location, click on its pin or its search result to see the street address. Try it yourself and let me know your fastest time.
Bonus if Street View is offered in your location. Often, I find myself wondering where the actual business is when I get to the general location pinned on a map. I could try to read the address numbers on all of the buildings, but I’m lazy and that’s not as safe as simply recognizing the building front. If you have a “Street View” button on your map, click it and you will get a little guy you can drag around. Drag him to the blue outlined street in front of the map pin for your chosen location. A street view should pop up and you can use your left and right arrow keys to spin the view and find the building. I did this last night to find a Wendy’s last night.
4. Find it even without a computer
Did you know that you can find stuff even when you are away from your computer? It’s pretty simple, really. First, head to the Google SMS page and click the “Get started now” button. Enter your cell phone number and click the “Send now” button. Within a minute or so, you will have a text message from Google and you’ll be ready to go. While away from your computer, just follow these steps to search Google quickly:
Select the text message Google sent you and choose to reply to it. In your reply, just type in what you’re looking for and a zip code (eg. “wendys 85016″) or if you don’t know the zip code, type in the cross streets, city, and state (eg. “wendys near 32nd st and thomas”). Google will then reply with a (and sometimes more than one) message with search results including addresses and phone numbers.
5. Research the easy way
Every now and then, the internet is used for actual research. Those of who who don’t know about Google Scholar should definitely take a look. It puts the powerful Google search algorithms to work on journal articles, abstracts and other scholarly literature to keep away all the distractions that a normal Google search might provide.
It’s Christmas morning and the Entrecard 1,000ec contest is over. So if you’ve entered, I’m sure you’re chomping at the bit to know if you’ve won.
I counted 1,055 entries, but unfortunately, I can only draw one winner for the 1,000ec.
I don’t have a drum roll for you, but I do have a winner, thanks to Random.org (as always). The winner (as seen below) is Bun-Girl. The winning number drawn, 678, matched up to one of her 20 bonus entries she got for posting about the contest.
See, Bun-Girl, I even wrapped ‘em up for you! Thanks to everyone who entered. If you haven’t subscribed to my RSS feed, you should, because I’m going to keep having contests and I’m planning another cash contest very soon.
By now, I’m sure you’re familiar with Entrecard. One of the reasons Entrecard will succeed is their dedication to continued improvement and expansion, tied with their near-obsessive communication with members. Throw in a healthy dose of thinking outside the box, and you’ve got success on a platter. One great example of this is their new Store and how they’re looking to members to get it cooking. One thing at a time, though. I’ll start with the current offerings.
What can you buy?
Right now, you can purchase a Featured status (200ec), Fast pass (300ec), or an Entrecard sticker (25ec). Stickers are pretty obvious, the Featured status makes your blog stand out from the crowd, and the Fast pass gives you a front-of-the-line advantage to advertise on someone’s blog, which can be handy as we all fight to show up on one of the top blogs. While it’s still pretty new, I have seen a lot of buying, and people seem to generally take to the idea (with exceptions, of course). I bought 2 stickers, and I’m saving the rest of my ec for more ads and my 1,000ec contest winner. The store may include more upgrades, shirts, other swag, etc. in the near future, too. Just head to your Entrecard dashboard and click on the store link.
Get in on the action!
Now the fun part:
We’re going to let the six people with the biggest, best, most creative and most unique things to sell have the seller status. Do you have T-Shirts for your website that you want to cash in for credits? Maybe you would like to sell a review on your blog, or perhaps a full month ad spot. Maybe you’re good ad graphic design and want to sell a card design… or an entire BLOG DESIGN! Who knows! Impress us with your ideas and you will get access to set up shop right here on Entrecard. And yes, you can determine your own price. You receive all the credits as proceeds from a sale in the store.
How about that? I’ve already been tinkering with Entrecard tool ideas, and now I have a tie-in directly to the site. So here’s the plan. I’m nearly done with my Status Snoop tool to determine when hard-to-get ad spots on blogs like JohnChow.com and JohnCow.com will be available to purchase.
As you can see, I’ve got the data aggregation in place. I won’t go into how I’m nabbing data, but Entrecard staff is aware of and OK with it. The data I will make available to you will include the last ten dates/times that the blog of your choice has had an Entrecard ad spot open and an analysis of when I expect it to be available again. Additionally, you may receive an email the moment I find the ad spot to be available for purchase. To get your hands on the data for your favorite blog, you will just need to buy a Status Snoop token from your Entrecard Shop page. The cost will be a mere 250ec. I will make only four available per day to purchase. This, of course, all depends on Entrecard choosing me as one of only six members to gain their “Seller Status”, so if you want to see this come to life, comment on this post and let them know I have your recommendation.
A week or so ago, Peter Sewell of Zlio emailed me, asking if I would like to review the services offered at Zlio.com. He let me know that they had a new version in the works, too, but it won’t be ready until after the new year, and I was anxious to review something other than a blog. Today, I jumped in and started playing.
I started by signing up for a new account. I must admit that I got a little worried when I saw the second step in the process (shown below), but I laid the whole process out so you can see what I quickly learned: it’s relatively quick and painless. Honestly, I hate signing up for affiliate programs. It seems like it takes forever and there’s not a lot there to help me make the sale. Zlio, on the other hand, was actually not too bad. I was able to get my store running pretty quickly. Too bad it starts out without any products, but that’s a good thing, actually.
Next, I needed to select products to sell. Obviously, being a tech blog, I wanted some computers and electronics and cool stuff like that. This, however, is where Zlio has a lot of room for improvement. Finding the specific products I had in mind was not an easy task. The good news is that there’s hundreds of products to choose from for many categories. The bad news is that they’re not organized very well. The search is helpful, but only if you have a very specific result in mind. For example, I wanted to list products I would buy myself or that I already own, so decided to start with the laptop I bought earlier this year. When I viewed the Computers and Software category, I didn’t see any laptops at all. I then searched for “laptop” which returned 300 results. “sony” returned 300 results, as well, which means there’s probably a maximum of 300 results returned for any query. Still, I’m not about to poke through all 300, so I searched for “sony vaio” and got back 138 results. I finally found my laptop on page 8. On the other hand, when I searched for “apple ipod touch”, the first item was what I sought. Ultimately, though, the drill-down category method should be better organized, leaving search as a secondary option, or they should fine-tune the search. Within about 10 minutes, I had 9 products live in my store. This part of the setup was my only sore spot.
Once my store was filled with some products, I decided to poke around the rest of my control panel to see what they had to offer me. I half expected to be done, but I found a few more goodies. One of these is the ability to choose my revenue model. The choices are Pay Per Sale revenue model (A commission is earned for every successful sale that you contribute to), Pay Per Click revenue model (A commission is earned for every click on a merchant link from your ZlioShop – Not available yet), and Mixed remuneration (You earn commission per sale + per click). I chose the mixed. There’s also a section to fill out more details about yourself and include an image, internal blogs, commissions reports, alerts (so I get an email when I sell a product), community tools (this IS supposed to be “social shopping”, after all), ZlioLive (I have NO clue), and ZlioZone (as seen at right).
Clearly, these guys have put a lot of effort into their service and aside from the product discovery issues noted above, I think it’s very clean and easy to get rolling in a hurry. Something else I noticed is that they seem pretty active with their product offering and their interaction with members. Peter was good with his communication with me and they help promote members on their blog to keep people more involved. Will it make you money? I imagine anyone with enough traffic can make a few bucks with it and even more with the referral program, but I won’t know until I give it a little time. If I make any money with Zlio, you’ll likely see a follow-up post in January.
Even though I was still figuring out how to blog and, quite honestly, still just rehashing news from other tech sites for the most part, we had some exciting news as Apple unveiled it’s iPhone to the world, which was answered with rumors of the Gphone (Google Phone), and I posted about a bunch of other fun technology. Nobody really gave link love to any of my posts in January, but traffic was low, anyway.
I dreamed about owning an X-Hawk flying car, I met Jason from Gorilla Sushi, and my top commenter was probably Tisha. As well, Steve Jobs said DRM is bad for consumers, Nine Inch Nails launched a viral campaign with their new album, spurring one of my oddly more popular posts, and the world witnessed the attack of the iPhone clones. I got some link love from myninjaplease.com, my post about the OpenMoko open source cell phone got 13 diggs (this was a big moment for me), and I got even more link love from nexus404.com and podcasts.cc.
When I regained my focus in August, I decided to jump back in with an original post. This is where I decided I would much rather spend the time on my own content rather than just posting news others have posted. I also posted my first contest, giving away my Motorola Q Smart Phone, bringing in a lot of new visitors and a handful of new links. This is where my contest addiction began. This was also the month I found FeedM8, which turns your feed into a readable version of your blog for cell phones.
In early September, I wrote “I’ll Send You a Postcard From Space in 2010!“, and almost 2 weeks later, I promised my wife that she and I would be on a flight into space on September 17, 2017. While my head was in outer space, Apple treated us to the iPod Touch, Transformers left the big screen and touched cell phones, and Google put up some cash for the X-Prize. This month, I tried my first “Top 10…” post, thinking this would magically get one hundred bagillion diggs. It got 3. I tried again, too, but with something more original, 76 Web Ranked Candidates For President, which topped out at 11 diggs. My post about why BlugRush sucks and Bla.st doesn’t got some link love from My First Million Dollars and My Journey to One Million Dollars linked back to my post about eBay’s new features as the top post of the week. September started to make my writing feel appreciated, and gave me incentive to write more original posts.
October started off with a little giving back. I participated in the Donors Choose blog drive. I donated $40 and was able to convince absolutely nobody else to donate. I managed to invent Web 4.0, and nobody noticed, then promptly broke and subsequently fixed my TV. When I had to replace the heat sink and fan on my wife’s laptop, I decided to document the process, which turned into the most visited post to date (thanks, Google). I also found TNX this month and began to actually make some money on w3t.org and Pic.gs. The extra cash helped me to sponsor ShoeMoney’s RSS contest, which felt awesome. After Honda Asimo crashed my anniversary, Google dropped the page rank of many blogs.
November started a little slow, but then MyBlogLog had a contest, which made me decide to have my own. My new contest not only drove even more new visitors to JoeTech.com, but it landed me the 8th and 9th places in MyBlogLog’s contest, which brought even more traffic. I made a post that ruffled some feathers and gave some Thanks Giving Link Love. I made yet another post that riled some people up and wound up with a little Digg love. My post about Google Android and the $10 Million they’re giving to developers landed some link love from Fam5.com.
Although this month didn’t see a lot of posts as the holidays kept me busy, I managed to give JoeTech.com a huge makeover, which seems to have been met with open arms by my readers. Then I joined Entrecard (if you haven’t, stop reading and go do it right now), broke my phone, and then had another great contest, which had 1,055 entries and 20 blogs linking back to it. I also reviewed Zlio and got some link love for it from Search For Blogging, even though Zlio hasn’t made me a dime yet. I put in my bid to be an Entrecard Seller, which I am anxiously waiting to find out about.
