Entries Tagged 'Clarkes Thoughts' ↓

Well here it is in the middle of April and it is going to snow in Kansas City tonight. I’m so sick of winter and it should have been gone a long time ago.  In my entire life I don’t think I’ve ever seen it snow in April, so maybe that will be exciting, yeah right.

Anyway I’m flying to Dallas in the morning with my brother to take in some Nascar racing action at Texas Motor Speedway. The main thing I’m excited about is that the weather is supposed to be nice in Texas and more importantly it will be nice to getaway. Hopefully when I return on Monday night, winter will be gone from Kansas.

Here lately I’ve been doing quite a bit of research in relation to some affiliate marketing projects that I have in the works. I have been spending considerable amounts researching different markets and products that I may want to promote. Everyday during my research it never ceases to amaze me the amount of get rich quick products that promise to make users boatloads of cash with very little work at all. Unfortunately at this time this is very profitable for those selling these programs. The real problem here is that you get people who really don’t want to work hard for anything, they just want you to hand them the magic key to success. These are the types of people that fall victim and buy these products and end up making someone else alot of money other than themselves.
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A few weeks ago my wife’s car need the oil changed so I decided to take it to a local place nearby to get it done quickly.  I usually take it somewhere else, but due to time constraints I decided to take it there to get it done quickly.  In addition to that this establishment had banners up for
$19.99 oil changes all day long.

Ok, so no big deal I took it there and when I pulled up I was promptly greeted and they told me that they would get the oil change taken care of right away.  Now the mistake I made was to just assume that I was getting the $19.99 oil change without having to ask for it.  Man I don’t know why I would think that, could it be because there were only like 4 huge banners all over the building advertising this price.   So about 15 minutes later they told me my car was ready to go and I went to pay.  I was surprised to find out that a $19.99 oil change turned into almost $40.  The reasoning for this is that they put the premium synthetic oil in without asking me if I even wanted it.  They assumed that I wanted this because I was driving a newer car.

How can you assume that a customer wants something when you don’t even ask them?  I did not request the special $19.99 price, because I didn’t think that I had to considering the heavy promotion of it all over the building.   Basically it’s just another way to nickel and dime customers for extra money, for services they probably don’t want anyway.  Oh and by the way how do I even know if they put in the “special synthetic blend oil” and not just the regular oil.

Ultimately I should have specified what I wanted from the beginning, but I was under the impression that at least some people were still honest.  I guess in the end that is the way they like to run their business.    Now is it really worth the extra money to potentially sacrifice the overall value of a possible lifetime customer?  The answer to that is no, but they did get their extra $20 out of me that day so I hope they enjoy it.  One thing is for sure though, no matter how convenient or cheap it is, I will never go there again nor will I instruct anyone that I know to go to this establishment either.

 Well starting next week I’m going to be living on my own for the next month and a half, because my wife Amber has to finish up her final clinical rotations before she graduates in May.  She will take our dog Ernie with her as well so the house will definitely be pretty quiet, but that can be a good thing sometimes.

I am definitely going to miss the both of them alot, but I will take some trips to see them since they will only be a few hours away.  Actually the thing I’m going to miss most is waking up at 3am to find Ernie laying on my chest because he wants me to take him out to the bathroom.  Also, I’m really going to miss at hearing him bark everytime a doorbell rings on tv!

It has been a long 3 years of graduate school with my wife but she is almost done and I’m really proud of her and can’t wait to see her get to graduate in May with her Doctorate in Physical Therapy.  Anyways I’m definitely going to miss her and Ernie in the coming month as the house just won’t be quite the same withouth them, but I’m sure it will be over before I know it.

Well I’ve been hard at work on my second modification of the Cutline Wordpress Theme and I decided to build a site around one of my interests which is Nascar. SpeedSpott.com is a blog about Nascar news and my opinions on the the sport. I have alot of stuff that I still want to do to the site, but I’m happy with the way it turned out. If you happen to be a racing fan especially Nascar go check it out and let me know who your favorite driver is. However if its now something your interested in I highly recommend checking it out anyway, because its definitely an exciting sport.  If you do get the chance to check out the site please let me know what you think about the overall look and design of it.

My blog has been live on the web for a little over 2 months now and so far I am happy with its progress. Right now the one thing that I regret most in my early blogging experience is my mistake to decide to run adsense advertising within the content of my posts.  I have to admit I was after the idea of a little extra cash in the beginning, but I don’t feel the same way now.  I really don’t like they way they take away from the look of my blog and the points that I am trying to make with my posts.

I initially started ClarkeW.com to express my thoughts on issues and interests in my own personal life and to be quite honest the small amount of revenue I made was not worth losing potential readers.  So going forward I don’t plan on running any more contextual advertising inside my posts and any other advertising I decide to run will be on the sidebar.

I know some bloggers feel different about how they monetize their blogs and I think maybe it is right for some people, but I am just going to concentrate on creating quality content right now.  I have several other sites in the works that I planning on implementing monetization techniques on and look forward to getting those going in the coming weeks. How do you feel about running contextual ads on your blog?

Things have been slow on my blog lately and that is due to a variety of things.  Over the last week I have been part of a big project at work that has required vast amounts of my time over the last week.  In addition to that I have a several other things going on in my life.

Hopefully I can get refocused on my blog this week and be able to write some quality content for it as I have been having some good ideas lately.  In addition to that I have some other web projects in the works that I hope to launch within the next month so I am excited about that.  I also plan on making some more design modifications to my blog, because Cutline is so easy to modify and I usually seemed to get bored with my designs easily but we will see. 

 Last Tuesday I had the opportunity to go to the Jack’s Mannequin West Coast Winter Tour when it made its stop here in Kansas City.  For those of you who don’t know lead singer of Jack’s Mannequin is actually Andrew MacMahon from Something Corporate.  Also on the bill for the show were Head Automatica and The Audition here at The Beaumont Club in KC on a snowy cold night.

I was extremely excited to see the show since I bought my tickets a few months back.  I have been a big fan of Jack’s Mannequin  since I bought their first album Everything in Transit back in 2005.  Well it was no suprise to me that they sounded great live and a great majority of their songs are piano driven and it definitely added another element to the live experience.  They pretty much played everything off the Everything in Transit album with a couple Something Corporate songs as well.  Overall their show was outstanding and in my opinionsome of the highlights for me were songs like Dark Blue, Into the Airwaves, The Mixed Tape and Holiday From Real.  I have to say my favorite part of the show was torwards the end when they actually did  a cover of Message in a Bottle by The Police.  It was very unexpected but it sounded great and was definitely the highlight of the show for me.

I definitely look forward to when they come to Kansas City again and I can’t wait for their next album to come out.  If they are going to be in your area, I highly recommend seeing them and be sure to go buy their debut cd Everything in Transit as I can assure that you won’t be disappointed.

If you don’t watch The Office on thursday nights on NBC then you should.  This is by far the funniest show on television right now and it just keeps getting better.  The writers do an awesome job coming up with great material and the entire cast fits perfectly with that material.  Check out the clip below from one of the episodes and be sure to check out The Office thursday nights on NBC.

Well I’ve come to the conclusion that winter sucks.  It has been pretty cold here in the Kansas City area for the last few weeks and I’m just sick of it.  I like warm weather and I really am ready to see spring come.  You would think after living in Kansas for 26 years I would have gotten used to it by now, but it still sucks as much as it always has.

Since its cold though it does give me an opportunity stay inside and work on my blog.  My site might look a little strange today because I will be working on upgrading my blog theme.  Chris Pearson released Cutline version 1.1so I am going to upgrade today and it might take me a little while to get all my CSS looking right.  If you get a chance take a look at Cutline, it is a great theme to modify and give your own look to.

I probably will watch a little bit of the Super Bowl tonight, but it is really not that big of a deal to me.  As long as the Bears don’t win is all I really care about.  I am a Cincinnati Bengals fan so the game tonight really doesn’t matter much to me.