HOEI

There are a few creative lessons that can be learned from spammers. Digest the source code of your spam emails once in a while. You will notice that many mass emailing systems use custom images using the “img src” tag in the email body. Chances are that many legitimate emails in your inbox contain this type of code. Sometimes they even use a unique image per recipient. This helps the sender spammer track who has opened the email. Hence, the spammer immediately knows which emails are valid. This system does require that the recipient’s email client be configured to display HTML.

As a new blogger or web site owner looking to get a few more hits on a fresh domain, this might be a helpful technique for adding hits to your logs. By adding a custom signature to your mass emails you can register hits to your site. For instance, I might add the following code as an email signature.

[img src="http://www.hoei.com/images/HOEImini.jpg" alt="HOEI email logo" / ]

Of course you would need to replace my ][ brackets with the standard HTML tag brackets.

This little morsel is an example of what can be placed in your email signatures when sending out to your site subscribers. Each recipient who has HTML enabled on their email client will see the anchored image and will register a hit on your web site statistics simply by viewing your email. This can increase the hit count of your site’s raw visitor logs even when no one is actually visiting. This might be helpful if you are looking to build up those numbers to impress a perspective advertiser or client. Not only do these embedded images build hits, they can also help in building your brand.

There are some great ways to make money or shall we say monetize your blog or web site. I have used most of the following over the years.

Some Ad and Publisher Services:

AdBrite.com
Commission Junction
Text Link Ads
AuctionAds
Amazon Associates
LinkShare.com

Direct Affiliate Examples:

HughesNet Satellite Internet Service
IX Web Hosting

My favorite money maker is Google AdSense.

Disclaimer: Some of the links above are affiliate links.

This caught me a little by surprise. I was not expecting an upgrade this week. This blog has already been upgraded to WordPress 2.2. One great advantage of using something other than the default WordPress theme is that you don’t have to worry about the upgrade overwriting any of your edits.

I will admit right up front that I did not read all 893 posts from Darren’s latest writing project, and I do not plan to read them all. I did not get 893 visits to my Top 5 post so I know I am not the only one skipping a few in this list for one reason or another. I chose to read only the ones that caught my attention with their titles. From those I started bookmarking my favorites. Out of a few hundred posts that I did clink into, here are the ones I marked as favorite:

• Five Reasons to Participate in Group Writing Projects
• Top 5 ways to love your wife
• Top 5 methods to increase comments on your blog
• Top 5 Things Moms Should Keep in the Family Minivan
• My Top 5 Favourite WordPress Blogging Tools
• Top 5 Business Startup Myths
• Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use (Or At Least Consider Using)
• Top 5 Steps to Redirect Traffic from Your Old Site to a New One
• Top 5 Free Ways to “Start” Generating Traffic to Your Blog
• Top 5 (+2) Ways to Earn Respect on the Internet
• The Top 5 Free Search Engine Optimization Tools

The above list includes blogs ranging from an Alexa ranking of 28,000 to infinity. That tells me that there are plenty of lower traffic blogs out there that appeal to me just as much as the heavy hitters like Darren Rowse. I just need to find a way to identify more of these blogs. Oh wait, I just did. I joined this writing project and followed the links to some of the other participants as suggested.

I have some others that I will call honorable mentions saved in a separate favorites folder. I will give them some attention later in the week. I also need to identify those who were so nice as to include me on their favorite (pick a number) list.

The move from the Treo 650 to Treo 700p has been fairly painless but has not come without problems. Here’s a list of the top three:

1. Calendar sync errors.
2. No Freedom Keyboard support for the 700p.
3. Bible Reader crash.

It was calendar synchronization errors that were the most prominent, but were the easiest to correct. The problem looks something like this:

“The application cannot be launched because it is missing localization information.”

I did a quick Google on some key words from this error message and found out that I only needed to do the following:

1. Perform a reset of the Treo 700p by pressing the power button while using the stylus to push the reset button found under the battery cover.
   
2. Delete or move C:\Program Files\palmone\Username\backup\calendar*.*
   NOTE: That means you would delete all the files beginning with word calendar from the backup files related to your user profile.
3. Synchronize the Treo 700p with my Palm Desktop.

The Freedom Keyboard issues were a surprise, but I am not really that heart broken. I would really like to try a different keyboard with my Treo anyway. I do love being able to blog with my Treo, but I found myself using the built in QWERTY keyboard just as much as the Freedom Keyboard. I found that my Freedom Keyboard normally stayed tucked away in my laptop bag. When remote web access was needed, I would more often use the Treo as a modem for my laptop as opposed to using the Treo with a wireless keyboard.
The Bible Reader problem still has me stumped, but it is not a show stopper for me. Admittedly, I have not spent much time on this problem. The folks over at Olive Tree software offer a Desktop Assistant program for the Bible Reader. I had problems with the Treo 650 when trying to get my custom DailyBible.pdb file to work. I have been writing a custom Daily reading Schedule based on the reading plan posted on my personal blog. I hoped that maybe my problems were related to the Treo 650. I hoped that the Treo 700p would be the answers to my custom reading schedule efforts. I was wrong. The Treo 700p actually crashed when trying to access the Daily Reading Schedule when the Extended memory was not configured. I don’t use the Bible Reader’s built in Daily Reading Schedule. I plan to email Olive Tree to see I am missing something with my test reading schedule.

Being the first to comment on a blog can bring you more traffic from that blog’s visitors as compared to being the 37th person to comment.

If you are like me, then you probably do not visit the blogs of every single commenter after reading a blog post, especially if there are already dozens of comments. So how can you beat others to the punch and comment early on blogs where the blogger has never posted on a subject that you are passionate about?

Answer: Custom Feeds from Search Results

I subscribe to the feeds from custom blog search results on Google Blog Search and Technorati using my RSS feed reader. For instance, I might generate a Technorati search “in blog posts” for the string “burnlounge“. That will return me a list of every blogger that is pinging Technorati who has recently posted with the string “burnlounge” found anywhere in the post. I then use the handy little “Subscribe” icon with the traditional feed symbol off to the right side of the search results. This will often allow for me to be the first to comment on blogs where a person posts on a subject that I have expertise or current interest.

I was approached by a friend to sign on to BurnLounge as a retailer. After tracking feeds from some custom search results, I would now define BurnLounge as a multi level marketing version of iTunes. Being able to read about the experiences that many other people were having with BurnLounge helped me decide to pass on this business opportunity.

Building multiple blogs under one domain could be the key to accelerating your blogging career. Many high profile bloggers publish on multiple blogs, but very few do so under a single domain name. I could probably come up with just as many reasons not to build multiple blogs under a single domain, but instead I will focus on the top five reason that you should build multiple blogs under one domain. The following reasons support an argument against (1)hosting multiple blogs on separate domains or (2)having a large number of categories under a single blog.

1. Site Ranking - Getting links to separate blogs dedicated to various unrelated subjects all built on a single domain can raise the domains ranking on services like Alexa.

2. Single Domain Registration - You only have to pay for and track one domain registration.

3. SEO - A link to one blog is a vote for the domain it lives on with Google. A vote for your domain in turn raises all of the blogs in the search engine relevance simultaneously. So each blog actually helps all the other blogs rise in Google results.

4. Simplified Domain Maintenance - A single sitemap, robots.txt, etc. Also having a single point for FTP, email, and database management does make life easier. It is hard enough to administer multiple blogging control panels like with WordPress.

5. Niche Link Attraction - This point fits the argument for separate blogs in general, but plays well with the site ranking and SEO mentioned above. A niche blog with a narrow scope is more likely to get links from other bloggers who might disagree with some of the content of a single blog containing a large number of unrelated categories focused on controversial subjects. For instance, a liberal blogger who runs a popular cooking blog might be more comfortable driving traffic to my niche blog Grill’n Time rather than to a cooking category on The Land of Ozz where a large amount of blogging is based on conservative political opinions.

This idea of multiple blogs under a single domain should only be used if you are very confident that you will be retaining your domain name for the long term. For instance, let’s look at lashawnbarber.com. There is a high likelihood that La Shawn will not sell a domain name featuring her fairly uncommon name. So adding a second blog to the domain is not a big risk. La Shawn is one of the few high profile bloggers hosting multiple blogs under a single domain. Her second blog is located at lashawnbarber.com/ffc.

I have six separate blogs under HOEI.COM. You are reading the newest blog that was created when I switched the main page of my website to a blog. My other four blogs were built to focus on different subjects.

Caden’s Page - The story of our family’s triumphs and trials related to our son’s medical challenges. Caden was diagnosed with Di George Syndrome (22q11.2) after several heart defects were found during prenatal care.

Riley’s Page - A blog journaling some of the highlights in the life of my oldest son Riley.

The Land of Ozz - My personal blog featuring topics on parenting, technology, and spiritual growth. Includes a podcast of The Living Bible and a daily Bible reading plan.

Grill’n Time - A site (needing more attention) that is dedicated to cooking on and off of the grill.

Tech Land - Technical tips from TheOzz.

This post is participating in ProBlogger’s Top 5 - Group Writing Project.

Much to my own surprise, I am rapidly moving into what I consider to be the part-time equivalent of a “Pro” blogger based on the criteria in Darren Rowse’s “What makes a Problogger?”.

Is it the fact that somebody blogs for another person, getting paid per post? Is it someone who blogs alongside others, sharing the revenue between them? Is it somebody who maintains their own blog, making an partial, or substantial income from their blogging activities?

I agree with these because all of the bloggers I consider to be pro fit into at least one of these and most of them fit into all. I can think of at least one more point that might identify a person as a pro blogger. Is it when people respect you enough as a blogger to approach you for blogging advice where some even offer to pay? Some of these things are happening to me. My blog related income is growing, traffic numbers are rising, and I am increasingly getting tapped for answers to blog related questions, some paying and some not.

My personal blog and Caden’s Page have historical seen the majority of the attention on HOEI.COM. I will be highlighting each of my blogs in the coming weeks to talk about why I started them and where they are today. I hope that I can raise this new front page blog into the ranks of those respected in the “Pro” blogging community. I believe I have some relatively unique insights on blogging and will be sharing them here on this blog.

One of my favorite bloggers in the pro category is Dareen Rowse over at Probloger.net, if you couldn’t tell by the references I have already made to his site. I read Darren’s blog almost daily because he is straight forward, seems like a genuine guy, and he is a professing Christian. I am not setting out to become a full-time (six-figure) pro blogger like Darren, but I do hope to learn some things from him to help keep my blog activities profitable and growing. I should be comfortable inside the four figure range by the end of this year and hope to double the blog related revenue by the end of 2008. This is realistic if I stay on track with my current growth.

Keep an eye on the Problogger site over the next couple of days. Darren’s releasing his latest Group Writing Project where the top prize going to a random participant will be $1001.

Even though this blog is young, I hope that Darren’s Group Writing Project will be built around a topic that will match up with some of the post ideas spinning around in my head this week. I did not participate in the last Group Writing Project over at ProBlogger, but I might just have to jump on this one. I am not counting on any cash prizes from any of Darren’s sponsors to get me into the four digit revenue range this year, although it would be very nice boost to the bottom line.

I found out that Eric Giguere has started a multi-part series on moving From Website to Blog by way of ProBlogger’s recent Speedlinking. I recently made the switch from website to blog here on the main page of HOEI.COM. Up until this point all of my blogging has been done in the subdirectories of HOEI.COM and on hosted blog services like Blogger and WordPress.com. My reasons for switching the front page of my domain to a blog falls right in line with Eric’s pros and cons. The decision for me to make the website to blog move was based mostly on the ease of content management. I also want to move HOEI LLC into more of a blog focused consulting service, which means I should probably feature a blog as a front page. I thought I was crazy for even considering this switch until I saw a post by my online friend Pastor Jon titled What if? just a few weeks after making my change from website to blog.

The iGoogle thing is not a movement to raise feathers on the folks over at Apple who sometimes give me the impression that they think they patented the letter “i” by placing it in front of just about everything. I almost went out and registered ihoei.com today so I could join the movement, but I didn’t. I did check to see if the domain was available. It still is available if you are interested.

The Google Personalized Homepages simply have a new name. The Google Personalized Homepage, now called iGoogle is a blogger’s best friend in my opinion. There are certainly alternatives to the concept seen at iGoogle, like NetVibes and even MyYahoo! to some degree. The iGoogle pages can be filled with little gadgets to help track stuff all over the Internet. For instance, many people like myself, use feed readers to track activity on a number of different blogs and websites. I am a huge fan of the iGoogle’s Google Reader plug in for getting this job done. I use other gadgets, but the reader is by far the most used tool on my homepage next to a few embedded custom RSS feeds built from search results.

I am a little disappointed to cind out that this is not a movement against the MAC cult(ure). Can you tell that I use an iRiver to play my MP3s? Yes, I do get a tiny bit of satisfaction from owning a portable digital media player whose name begins with a small “i”, but is not manufactured by Apple.