Gary and I have been sharing some great blogging ideas as well as programming ideas (details confidential!) and it’s interesting to exchange great ideas like that. The internet does make us all powerful!

Some of Gary’s recent articles include :

10 Steps to Getting Links for Non-bloggers
10 Things to Remember in Web Marketing
Yahoo Music Downfall – Signs to Come
Content is great but a useful site is better

Gary also started the “Technorati Faves Train” which I should probably jump on before it’s too late. Although I never added the post (I don’t do much trains) I added him to my Faves on Technorati.

So there it is. Gary Lee’s Blog in a nutshell.

The world of business simply comes down to that – who is pulling in the dough, and he is – no more questions asked, I will consider him a successful web enterpreneur.

His blog, TylerCruz.com, is a PR5 blog with nearly 500 RSS Feed subscribers (add 1 more for me now), and it includes a great collage of posts regarding online money making, work habits, taxes and finances, and much more. As I said, his figures simply prove his success and his mindset – so his blog content must be worth reading.

Tyler isn’t very far from me – he lives on Vancouver Island (I’m in Vancouver, so that’s a ferry ride away). He’s 23 years old (only 2 years older than me) and obviously well ahead of the game. I wonder if I can be at that stage when I’m his age? Although, I’m pursuing different avenues of business these days, and this blog is becoming more of a hobby that brings in $10/month in Google adsense revenue.

Here are some of the most interesing posts I found on Tyler’s Blog :

• 2006 Income Tax Results – Thats’ right. You need to do it, and I will start on it as soon as I have my paperwork straightened out.
• Deal or No Deal Break Your Legs – A blog post that is more casual, about the famous TV show Deal or No Deal (which I find to be an extremely irritating show)
• Backing up, Better Safe than Sorry – I recently had my ass saved because my web hosting company had backups for me. Back ups are so important, I cannot emphasize it more, and neither can Tyler.
• The 40 Hour Challenge – I guess he’s at an ample enough income bracket that he doesn’t work as much as I have to haha. He challenged himself to work a 40 hour week for once – and here are his results. Check it out.

I found his blog very entertaining overall as I read/skimmed through his posts, and he seems to have quite a lifestyle with his business.

Now, I’m never afraid to speak my mind openly, and I do have one criticism – the top banner design of his websites is simply ugly in my opinion. Maybe Tyler will put me on his blogroll if I design a header for him? We’ll see!

Although, some of the context links generated are total bogus, for example, this one that tells me to buy IE6 – it’s a free software anyhow.

In any case, I’ll let you posted on what this does to my website revenues.

Right now, it shows up sometimes, and other times it doesn’t – but Kontera did advise me it will take a few days to optimize completely to my site.

However, if you did want a high-quality printer, here’s a chance, because my friend Broc is holding a contest on his blog where you can enter to win this prize! You have a 1/500 chance to win, which is a hell of a lot better than the lotteries. Hey, it’s not a $30,000,000 prize but it’s something you can smile about.

Broc is marketing his blog through the MyBlogLog community, which I find is a great idea. I’m interested to see where he takes this campaign, and how the results are.

So far, because my blog was so new and I’m such a nice guy, I just exchanged blog links with everybody who asked, basically. I had an interesting chat with John Chow today over lunch, and he pointed out a few things to me. When Google gives me a pagerank (which is expected to be updated in April, so I will finally be given a pagerank), they determine the quality of my outbound links as a factor. My pagerank is forecasted to be 4/10 according to a somewhat-trustworthy 3rd party engine I found somewhere, and I don’t want to ruin that opportunity.

Starting today I am cropping out the following type of blogs from my blogroll :

1. Does not update regularly (I’m not asking for once a day – just regularly. I don’t care if it’s once a week).
2. Has no valid content. By valid content I mean it generates its own content (instead of gathering posts from other blogs and putting it all in one blog), and is not commercial (i.e. if your blog exists for the sole purpose of selling things for your affiliates). I will only link to blogs that have valid content that have valid information for surfers.
3. Has no relevancy to my blog. There are great logs out there that have great content that I do read, but it’s bad for my pagerank if that other blog does not have anything that is related to mine. I will do blog reviews of these type of blogs, but no links will be posted on a permanent basis.

For other bloggers out there – I suggest you do the same.

“In a recent survey, 3 out of 4 men answered that they feel vaguely uncomfortable when eating a banana in public.”

I would honestly say that there isn’t a single person in this world who reads every single article in their magazines (unless he/she was a magazine editor/inspector for content and errors). I recently realized it is the same way with blogs. I skim through blogs. I rarely read the entire article word by word because it simply takes too much time. Sometimes, on Netscape.com, I only read the brief description of the article and simply absorb the news. “US Military General says military action will not bring peace to Iraq.” and under it it explaines that the General told the press that a long-term political approach is the right way to establish peace in Iraq, and that’s all I need to know (and I gave that article a quick vote). I like to eat sushi. I’ll explain the reason why I tossed that in later. That’s pretty much how I read my magazines and newspapers – it’s only a few stories that I actually read into, and even then, I either skim through or read the first paragraph and move on.

So. How do we grab the attention? Well, I decided to toss in some elements to my blog that would make it resemble a magazine article a lot more. First of all, the title has to be catchy. Secondly, an image or two helps a lot to make the article a lot more approacheable (dense text all over the page is something that intimidates people). And thirdly, I started putting in those large quotes that magazines do.

“Want to learn how to do this stuff? Read this article.”

Whatever bit of the text that is really attention grabbing (a shocking/controversial statement, or statistics, or something vague yet strong enough to instigate curiousity in readers), I put it into that format and toss it in between the paragraphs.

In case you want the code on how to do that, here it is :

CSS Addition :

p.largequotes
{
padding: 30px;
font-family: Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;
font-size: 2em;
line-height: 28pt;
color: #990909
}

When you write a post :

<p class=”largequotes”>

Content here

</p>

Try that out on your blogs to pull the eyes towards your articles.

Now, in that article somewhere I randomly tossed in the fact that I like sushi. Tell me honestly, how many of you caught that? I’ll bet a lot of you were skimming through, and didn’t read that sentence.

Robb and I are both in the web-design industry (or at least part of our businesses revolve around it) and we have a certain understanding for the following areas :

• Enterpreneurship
• Time Management
• Business Ethics
• Technology, and Web Design talk
• And now, Blogging

I’d like to point out that I’m a hard person to satisfy – for me to like somebody from a business perspective, and for me to be able to praise them as intelligent and valuable people, it takes some time and effort, and Robb has definitely been on my good radars since I first exchanged a few comments and posts with him. Also, I love his designs. Yes, it’s true I came up with some good designs (not this site, I know) for my clients, but his design is simply impeccable on his blog. It’s clean, professional and simply looks amazing. I need to make the time to do that to my own blog after I get some contracts out of the way.

His insight for running a business is something that guys like me (and you) should all read into and think about. His latest series includes the “Bootstrapping Your Business” series.  He discusses leadership, attitude, ambition, decision making, and organizational skills which are critical to any businesspeople.

Other posts that I found noticeable are the following :

• Why Most Blogs Fail

• Succeeding Like the Genius

• Web Two Point Oh

Take a look at his posts – he is a valuable business coach, and you’ll find it very useful to add his RSS feed to your blog.

Facts :

• People, overall, are more intelligent and more informed than ever.
• One week’s worth of newspapers will give more information than the amount of information given to an average person living in Europe in the 1800′s… in a lifetime.
• 3,000 new books are published each day.
• In the last 2 years or less, there have been 17 Billion new web pages added to the WWW (World Wide Web). Between 1998 and 2005 (a 7 year period), the growth was a mere (well, mere compared to the recent growth) 8 Billion pages.
• Google indexes over 25 Billion web pages and 1.3 Billion images now (well, that statistic was released at least a few weeks or even months ago)

We has human beings are becoming more and more intelligent and that is due to the spreading of information. Scientists still say human beings, on average, use only between 10~20% of their brain capacity, and we can do more. The information highway, internet, is making it possible for us to learn a hell of a lot more than we ever could. That creates a transfer of knowledge and information, and the human society, as a collective, becomes more and more intelligent. The individuals benefit from the knowledge of other individuals, and as a mass, we become than the sum of us all!!!

Facts :

• Internet usage has grown by 7,000% over the last 10 years. That’s right. 7,000%. Not 700.
• The growth rate is ever increasing still. The growth chart only gets steeper.
• Despite the tremendous growth, only 16.6% of the world population has access to the internet (December 2006). For every person using the internet, there are 5 others who still don’t use it!
• Although it may seem to us in North America as if everybody is using the internet, the penetration rate of internet usage in North America is STILL BENEATH 70%.

If you thought internet is something that everybody is used to, think again. There’s still so much more to grow out towards, which leads to my next point. We’ve only tapped the potential of it. The growth is still there to be made, and more and more people will be connected. If you thought the internet as it is right now is pretty darn impressive, think again. Unless we get hit by a huge meteor that knocks us all out, we have much more to grow into.

“If you get your news from Fox and CNN and the Times Magazine, you may as well be stuck in a jailcell, getting the stories from this one guard that comes by to visit you every day.”

Facts :

• According to Technorati, there are 55 Million blogs. That banner with the figures has been up there for a while and I’m sure there are more blogs now, as they are popping up all over the place.
• With the new Web 2.0 trend, and the transferrability of data (which was achived through segregation of design and data) allows for a much higher deployment rate of blog information and other news media.
• There are, obviously, more blog pages than there are public news webpages and etc.

I hail the existence of blogs as the new wave of democracy and openness of information. Of course there are people who still want to control the information that the public gets – thinking that the public needs to be controlled and need to believe certain things in order for this world to work. But blogs ensure that everybody gets the version of a news from a different as well as a more personal angle. You may ask why this is good, but let me tell you this : the news media is heavily controlled and biased. If you get your news from Fox and CNN and the Times Magazine, you may as well be stuck in a jailcell, getting the stories from this one guard that comes by to visit you every day. Although the personalized input that you get through blogs are even more heavily biased in some ways, at least you have multiple angles on them, and as a collective, it creates a more objective source of information and opinion.

Despite the fact that our civilization as a whole is still at a primitive stage when it comes to open media, and many people remain so short-sighted and ignorant, the potential is still there for us as a collective to be more broad-sighted and open-minded.

“A true democracy of opinions can begin when the media belongs to the people – and the existence of blogs have achieved it in a very literal way.”

With blogs, we get the sides of stories that we NEVER would have gotten in this CNN-dominated North American society. Yes, it is true that there are some news stations that are not so biased such as CBC, BBC, but that’s not enough. A true democracy of opinions can begin when the media belongs to the people – and the existence of blogs have achieved it in a very LITERAL way. Think about how easy it is to start a blog these days. You can used a hosted-blog service through wordpress or blogger for free, OR you can host your own blog for not too much expenses ($5/mth for hosting, and $10/year for a domain, give or take). It is so accessible and easily manageable.

Another critical factor for the growth of blogs to take place as the new outlet and an interpretion of reported news media is the existence of community sites, and collaborative blog sites such as digg.com, netscape.com, StumbleUpon.com, and many more. The disadvantages of personal blogs was the marketing of it. Individuals like myself do not have the budget to market a site to the level of BBC, CNN, Fox News etc. But through these websites, a collaboration of the public occurs to promote the stories and posts that are deemed by the public to be important, and this is how I get access to other good blogs, and vice versa. These websites serve to make blogs as big as CNN.com, if not bigger.

“…it will bring a true sense of democracy to our world – not the kind of democracy that is used as an excuse to wage war for economic gains through petroleum.”

The existence of blogs and the continuing growth of the internet will bring a whole new face to what we could call “Open Media”, and it will allow human beings, as individuals and as a collective, to be more intelligent and capable than ever. It will create a transparency in world events, and it will bring a true sense of democracy to our world – not the kind of democracy that is used as an excuse to wage war for economic gains through petroleum.

Today I want to cover the basics of these two community websites.

These sites will both :

• Allow its members to submit stories, and vote them up if they think it’s a good story/news/post/whatever.
• Has categories that react to the # of votes for stories, and features them on the frontpage of the site or the category depending on the # of votes.
• Allow comments to be left on the item on the Netscape site itself.
• Allow sinking or burying of a story that people feel is not up to par.

Now, the critical comparisons :

1. Netscape features MUCH better categories. They are broader and more general, and it’s much easier for me to categorize my posts when I submit them to Netscape. On the other hand, Digg.com has categories that are MUCH TOO specified, but at the same time they don’t have too many categories so it’s painful to find the right spots for it.
2. Netscape offers a navigation bar. Some people may hate this, but I love it. When you click on “View Story” it will show you the actual site, but with the Netscape navigation bar (a black bar on the left-hand side) which allows you to browse related stories, add votes to the stories, etc. For me this allows me to do more reading while I am still able to vote the good stories, and it allows me to read on and on without having to switch between windows/tabs. It allows me to enjoy a much more fulfilling reading experience that goes from one random site to another. It’s like having StumbleUpon.com AND Digg put together!!!
3. At the top page of Netscape, they have some sort of a Javascript/Ajax tab that shows you the top stories of the top-searched tags at the time. This feature is innovative because it has nothing to do with the categories, but it only follows the tag statistics. It shows you the top-stories of the most-searched topics at that time and it is a great way to get a quick glimpse of what is happening today.
4. Ok, to be fair to Digg.com, I’ll give them one vote – they have the unique title of “Digg” which is quite brandable, and from a marketing perspective they did well. Netscape on the otherhand uses the term “Vote” which is more generic.

I Digg Netscape!

As you can see, I have the Netscape plugin installed, and i will monitor the traffic regularly.

Let’s do a quick recap of the growth in traffic :

• Once again, I tripled my blog traffic in a month. I started out at little under 300 at the beginning of February. On the last few days, I hit between 700~850, and the record-high so far was 856 on Feb 28th. Considering it’s not a full month, I’ll consider this a tripling growth month.
• My pageviews have exploded in the last 3 days. Before that, up until perhaps the 24th or so, my pageviews/visitor ratio was at abour 2.5 or so. If I do a recap of JUST the last 3 days, my pageviews/visit ratio is 7.43 – a phenomenal growth. Just look at the chart and see the jump in pageviews.
• Comments/Post rate hit 5.41. It’s a big improvment compared to January. In february, I’ve had multiple posts with more than 10 comments, some of them exceeding 20. 

Here are the things I did over the month of February to try to increase my blog traffic and the popularity.

•  Added more blog networking gadgets and links – you can see the full list in this post regarding my plan on February 8th to boost traffic (which apparantly was a great success).
• I made changes to the design of my blog. It only took 20 minutes, but it did make a difference. I do plan to re-design my whole site when time is available.
• Installed more plug-ins to optimize my blog in many ways. Here is the list of plugins I installed on my WordPress blog.
• I employed a new way of SEO that I branded SEQR. I noticed the niche for certain keywords that I was not capitalizing on, and one of them was Facebook – I wrote more about Facebook, as well as wrote DVD player reviews on the LG LDA-731 and the Toshiba SD-4990.
• I optimized my blog URLs for even better SEO. (According to Google analytics) Over 50% of my traffic comes from Organic Google searches. This is contradictory to what I see in other stat engines within my hosting server so I can’t take that accountable.
• Very recently I installed the Netscape plugin.
• I actually held my first contest. The participation rate wasn’t much but it was a start.
• I installed the top commentators plugin.
• Wrote EVERY DAY. I write multiple posts each day usually. The only time I skipped was when I was really sick. I even wrote a post with 3 videos, showing you the fancy stuff I videotaped at the Vancouver Franchise Show. It took a while to encode, process, and upload the videos. And it took a hell of a lot of traffic (look at the top chart. See where the red spikes up near the end?).

Of course, I have a long way to go until I can make lots of money on my blog like John Chow did, but I’m certainly enjoying this little experiment with a blog.

Next steps I will take in March are these :

• Be more involved in the community of blogs. I will be reading other blogs on Netscape, Technorati and Digg a lot more often and commenting a lot.
• I will do more reviews of other blogs. I like to share.
• I will keep writing quality posts each and every day to the very best of my opinion, and I will assert my personality into each and every post.