I am beginning an adventure to get more traffic to this blog so it can earn money.  I have never monetized a blog before.  I have done affiliate sales with a blog but never had outright advertisers on a blog like I have had with my websites.

So starting today, I am starting a (semi)weekly update on traffic.  This is not on sales, it is on traffic.  I am going to show where I am at and what I am donig to increase it.  Again, this is not tracking income.  This is tracking traffic.  Understand that I am not going to devote a tremendous amount of time to doing this.  I have sites that make money to manage.  Sites that desperately need my love and attention and a server that loves to have temper tantrums.  So between stroaking my money making sites and kicking my server, I don’t have a bunch more time to write here.

So that being said . . . here are the current rankings

• Technoratti Rank: 2,655,296
• Alexa Rank: 21,699,16303|Linking In: 21
• Around 15 pv a day, not worth
• RSS Subscribers 18

Barton Damer of Igniter, Echo, Collide and even Catalyst fame has a new blog of his own, Already Been Chewed.

You may not recognize the name but Barton has been on the leading edge of some of the coolest church graphic design stuff for a while now.  I sent him an email a while ago asking for a recommendation for a graphic designer and he completely ignored me.  (just putting that out there)

Barton has been featured on the web as a contributor to the popular Gomediazine.com. His tutorial on Creating Intricate Patterns in Illustrator is recognized by Smashing Magazine as one of the “Best of Illustrator Tutorials” and PSD Tuts featured his Bling Effect tutorial in a post about Great Photoshop Tutorials.

If you can get past the lime green, barely recognizable links, the blog has a bunch of good stuff on it.  My advice?

1. Use permalinks preferrably /%postname%/
2. Ditch the browns. For an incredible graphic designer, this site is hard to look at.
3. Only use one header.  You use a boring one with your logo in the top, then a changing one with logo variations just below it.  huh?

All in all I am looking forward to what he writes about and I have subscribed to his feed.  Which would give him double the size of my feed.

I have gotten emails through every contact form I have regarding the new search engine Cuil.

<a href=”http://www.cuil.com/”>new search engine</a> [url=http://www.cuil.com/]new search engine[/url] <a href=http://www.cuil.com/>new search engine</a> [url= http://www.cuil.com/ ] new search engine [/url]

Come on guys, quit spamming me.  I have no idea what you thought this was going to do but it is only annoying me.

I now have a first criteria in selecting a new VPS host, monthly billing.  I have been the semi-anual billing guy for a long time.  I had no idea that a host would take a nose dive faster than the US economy. 

So today, I bought a new VPS with a monthly billing plan.

For my ministry, I recently needed to create a photo slideshow in Sony Vegas.  I thought I was going to have to manually add image transition and spacing but I found this tutorial about creating the slide show in Vegas.

enjoy