I downloaded the theme I’m using now (Studio Press Lifestyle Theme) from Filezilla, zipped it up and uploaded it into my test site.

After I activated it, I began adding some plugins to make it look exactly like my current site. I activated one plug in and got an error. I didn’t keep the error code it gave me (sorry!).

I refreshed the site but the error was still there. I called Bluehost and they deleted the plug-in for me.

I did this several more times and kept getting the same error. I then decided to delete the WordPress install and just start from scratch.

Guess what, it did it AGAIN only this time I kept getting different errors, including this one: wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 865. Other errors I got were plug-in errors and errors when I was trying to log out of WordPress.

Out of frustration, I decided to try something else.  I went to BlueHost’s control panel and then to file manager and zipped up the theme from there instead of FileZilla. Once that was zipped, I downloaded it to my desktop and re-uploaded it to the test site.

Guess what? It worked.

No more problems.

I initially didn’t know if I should attend or if I would get anything out of it but thankfully, I was wrong on both thoughts.

Walking the convention floor I made contact with a bunch of potential companies I could use to help with my website, get loaded down with tons of freebies and met some great people.

I didn’t go to the actual panels though. Why? It was $500 and I couldn’t afford the damn thing. Next year, I will though. Why again? Because I plan to be making enough money from my website that I’ll be able to afford things like that.

Oh, and let me tell you about another great aspect of the conference. The parties and free booze! Yup. Each party I went to had free drinks for at least an hour. And I took full advantage of that. I had 6 Red Bulls and Vodka in that hour.

So for that alone, Blog World was a success.

It’s going to be my online diary of my attempts to make money online.

Stay tuned.

In one of my previous posts, I was debating on whether to buy a theme or not. I mean, I could have found a different magazine theme for free…but I really liked this one and it was almost exactly what I envisioned.

It was advertised for $79 and that’s what was holding me back. On a whim, I looked for some sort of discount code and guess what – I found one for 25% off. So now it was $59. I couldn’t not buy it now.

Anyway, I got it and now I’m working on developing the site. Click here for the work in progress that is: Daily Actor.

I’ve had them on 2 of my sites since January and I’ve made a whopping total of:
$1.63

Yup.

I’m sure people are making money on this but I just didn’t want it taking up real estate on my site anymore.

I wonder if I can get a check for $1.63?

I’m kind of envisioning a newspaper style/Drudge Report type of theme but couldn’t find any theme that I really liked or that was free. I didn’t want it to look lame.

Then, I happened upon a theme last night that I really love – but it cost’s $79.

Now I’m torn… do I buy it or continue with my current theme and just not be as enthused?

I went back east to visit family… all the while having full intentions of posting while I was away. But every time I opened up my laptop and attempted to type I just couldn’t think of anything on topic.

Since this site started, it was basically a throw away site initially dedicated to my experience blogging. That then morphed into adding technology reviews. Since then, I’ve struggled to find things to write about because I didn’t want to go off topic. I hated not updating on a regular basis.

So, while I was away I just decided to start again. Not from the beginning but just a re-do. Think of it this way: First there was Ang Lee’s Hulk and now there is Edward Norton’s The Incredible Hulk. Same Hulk… just better.

And with the new theme comes a new focus. Basically, I’m going to write about whatever I damn well want to write about. Blogging and Technology with still be a part… but so will TV. Food. My love of drinking. Like I said…anything!

So keep checking back. You’ll be glad you did!

Since I have more than one site, I created 2 accounts. One for this website and another for CatPuppy. I created my little 125×125 icons and hit the ground.

The first thing I noticed on both accounts was that the same 7 or so people immediately asked to advertise on my widget. The same exact people! And I created these accounts a couple days apart. Do they just sit by their little computers and refresh their Entrecard page every couple of minutes in search of fresh meat?

I began to notice that my traffic suddenly had a nice little spike. This was with barely dropping my card on anyone’s site. I did a little research and found that this may be a good tool to drive up my traffic.

I discovered that some people make it their daily goal to drop the magic 300 (this is what Entrecard allows you to drop a day).

Here’s how they do it:
- You have to have the FireFox browser.
- Go to the category that your blog is in. Once you’re in that section, take your mouse and hover it over the first icon. Click onto the CTRL button and that will open it into a new tab. Go through all 15 of the icons till you have 16 tabs open.
- You’ll have to individually go through each tab and open up the sites.
- Once all 15 are open, go to the top of the browser and click onto Bookmarks. Then Bookmark all tabs. A box will pop-up and you can now create a folder where all the new bookmarks have been placed. (Pretty cool, huh?)

They do this for up to 300 sites. I guess some people have nothing better to do? Any who…

- Once this is finished, you can now right click onto each separate folder and hit Open All In Tabs. Every bookmark in that folder will pop open.

Now, you can drop your card on each site. Its a pretty quick process but still.. it seems like a little much to me.

I did this yesterday for CatPuppy. I bookmarked all 91 sites that catered to Pets. This morning, I woke up and did the first 30…then I got bored. I think I’d like to generate traffic from people who actually ENJOY my sites rather than have people who just to use it as a marketing tool for a few seconds.

But like I said, this seems like a great way to move traffic to your site. Meaningless traffic, but traffic nonetheless.

One thing I did notice was that the bounce rate is pretty high. I’m not exactly sure what this could mean for any sort of ad revenue. Anyone have thoughts on this?

Awesome!

I don’t even know if thats a good pace for a page 1 or not but I’m still happy.

How did I do it? I concentrated on good posts (hopefully!), finding no follow blogs in my sites niche and sending my articles to social bookmarking sites.

This still hasn’t translated into any higher revenue on any of my sites but I’m still optimistic.

This site in particular is hard to market. Its all over the place with technology and gadget reviews, blogging stuff and basically anything else I damn well want to put up. I really don’t think I’ll ever get a ton of people to regularily visit.

Whatever – I finally have a rank!