Well my wife somehow got me to agree to getting another dog. I’ve already got one named Ernie, but she thought that he needed a friend. So after a few days of convincing she came home from the pet store with Gracee.

So far she’s been a lot of work but luckily per the agreement with my wife she is doing most of the work with her although I try and help out as much as I can. She is a really sweet dog so far and I’m sure that her and Ernie will be the best of friends when she gets a little older. Overall I think it’ll be good for him to have another dog to play with and I’m sure they’ll have a lot of fun and possibly get into some trouble as well.

PepperJamNetwork Launches
In other news I’m still working pretty hard at my affiliate marketing efforts and I just joined the pepperjamNETWORK affiliate program and I just got activated today. So far my early impressions of the program are extremely positive and they definitely put together a great site to cater to their affiliates. Overall they’ve got a nice selection of programs to promote starting out and their site is extremely well thought out and has a ton of great features for affiliates to use. Since I’m pretty new to the network so far, I don’t have an extensive review, but I’m looking forward to writing one a few weeks down the road when I’ve got a little more experience with the program. So if you haven’t head on over and check out the PepperJamNetwork.

Well another year is over and a new one has begun with me reflecting on a lot of things in my life. It’s hard for me to believe that this time 10 years ago I was a junior in high school. Man it’s amazing how fast time flies by sometimes.

As I look back at 2007 I had a lot of great things happen to me and unfortunately some that I wish hadn’t. Back in August I put a list of goals on here that I wanted to reach by the end of the year. Well Here is how I came out on completing these.

• Increase My Affiliate Income - I did ok here, but I’m not going to tell you how much I made because that’s classified! This is going to be probably 80% of my focus this year, so I’m definitely going to invest a lot of time to really grow this into a success for myself.  As I progress throughout the year I’ll share more information and give some tips.  I still see a lot of doubt in people who think I can’t make a substantial additional income online and that drives me everyday to prove them wrong.  I don’t care what anyone thinks, I will be very successful this year, because I refuse to give up no matter what.

• Improve My Web Design Skills - Unfortunately I wasn’t able to spend alot of time improving my design skills, but I’ve been doing a lot of usability analysis on the web to find out what does and does not work. As I continue to do this this year I look for it to greatly increase my skills as to how effectively design and layout a site.

• Learn Some Application Development - I just haven’t had anytime to venture into this area yet and I really don’t see a great amount of time being dedicated this year. I do find it to be an interesting subject buy not nearly as much as internet marketing and pay per click. Most of my application development will be done at my day job as we are looking to build a great online travel application.

• Increase My Knowledge of SEO and PPC - I’ve put a ton of time into this over the last 6 months and it’s definitely starting to pay off. I’m becoming more and more efficient in quickly launching effective PPC campaigns that convert. Over the next year I plan on continuing to learn as much as I can about each because they both hold massive importance when it comes to internet marketing for years to come.

• Attract More Subscribers to My Blog - This hasn’t happened as I would have liked over the last few months. I’m going to try and come up with some ideas to truly make this an effective resource with my readers. I think this will go hand in hand with my increased knowledge as I focus on particular areas throughout the year. I’ll also probably launch a completely new design sometime in the summer, because this design could be so much better.

• Get Back Into Physical Shape - I did a little better during the last few months but I really need to do better. So starting this Monday I’m going back to working out hopefully up to 5 days a week. I’ve even started cutting Dr. Pepper out of my diet, although it’s been harder than expected I still may have one every now and then. Overall I do plan on getting myself into great shape this year because I’ve got to be ready for softball season. I used to be pretty fast and I’ve got to get that back because my wife seems to think that I lost a step from my younger days!

• Spend More Time with My Wife - I’m still not doing as good as I could here. I need to balance my time spent online and that spent with her. I learned the hard way last month that you need to not take your time with loved ones for granted. So this year I’m going to spend a lot of quality time with my wife doing all kinds of things and I’m really looking forward to it.

So I hope that you’ve got your goals ready for 2008, because if you don’t then you definitely need to make a list. I’ve got a whole year this time, so I plan on accomplishing everything that I set out to and I hope that you do as well.

I hope that you’ve had a Merry Christmas if you take part in celebrating the holiday. I just got home from visiting my family and overall I had a great Christmas in light of some unfortunate circumstances over the last few weeks.

Unfortunately a little over two weeks ago my grandpa passed away unexpectedly and it was definitely pretty tough for me. This was initially very hard for me for a couple of different reasons. I had a great relationship with my grandpa and I’ve got a ton of great memories that I’ll always hold dear to my heart. The hardest part though is the fact that I hadn’t been home in awhile to see him or my grandma and I think in a way that I took for granted that they would just be there the next time that I made it home. They last time I actually spoke to him was last August when he and my grandma called to wish me happy birthday. I spent the days after his passing feeling guilty for not keeping in touch more than I had been but finally I came to a realization. Even though I hadn’t seen him as much as I should have he knew that I loved him and we’ll always have numerous great memories of each other. Grandpa I miss you dearly and I look forward to seeing you again some day and I’ll cherish all of our memories until then.

Here are some best memories I have of my grandpa

1. My brother and I spending weeks at my grandparent’s house during the summer to go golfing with grandpa and our shopping trips for new school clothes.
2. He was at almost every organized sporting event that I participated in growing up to support me.
3. His funny stories - It didn’t matter if he had already told the story a 100 times he still told it each time with the enthusiasm of the first time.
4. The great vacation he and grandma took my brother and me on when we were young kids.
5. Going out to dinner with he and grandma. I could spend 2 or 3 hours just sitting and having a conversation with them after dinner.
6. The respect and appreciation that he should me each time the honor roll was released in school.
7. Seeing how proud both he and my grandma were at my wedding 3 years ago

So I guess my point is don’t ever take your loved ones for granted. Always take the time out to spend quality time with them. It doesn’t even matter what age because each of us never knows when their time will come. I know this has definitely changed my prospective on some things and I’m going to make a much stronger effort to spend more time with my loved ones and hopefully you will to.

I hope that everyone has a happy rest of the holiday season and I look forward to a great new year!

Well it’s been awhile since I’ve been able to update this lately, sorry I’ve been busy with some other ventures including Daily Deals. Currently I’m sitting here writing this as a major ice storm is just getting going here in Kansas City. It looks to be a major event and I’m guessing that most likely I’ll probably be without power tomorrow so if that happens things will really suck.

I’ve been putting alot of effort into affiliate marketing lately and I’m seeing some nice results so far. If you’ve ever considered trying it out I highly recommend signing up with NeverBlueAds. They’ve got a ton of offers to choose from including some really good ones that can generate some nice cash. They’ve just redesigned their site and it’s laid out very well and I find it extremely easy to use. If you get a chance go ahead and sign up!

Okay Now Lets Get to the Point of This Post
Ever since I started pay per click marketing I constantly heard horror stories about the Google Content Network. I’ve read so many things recommending that you turn off the content network on your campaigns because it’s wasted traffic that doesn’t convert into sales or leads. Well I actually believed this myself for the longest time until I actually did some testing.

Over the last month I’ve been promoting some affiliate offers over the content network and the results have been outstanding so far. Currently I’m seeing about a 400% ROI on my ad spend and I really haven’t even begun to optimize these campaigns because they’re just something I threw out there to test. I think that if I take the time to really put some work into them then I’ll definitely be able to see even greater ROI on my ad spend.

Now don’t get me wrong this may not work for everyone on their campaigns, but I’ve got a point that I’m trying to get across here.  If you automatically shut off the content network without even testing it out then you might be missing out on some very good traffic that does convert and converts well at a low price.

If  you do decide to do some testing here is nice method that I’m going to start using to constantly test my traffic from the content network.

1. Turn on conversion tracking in your adwords account and make sure that you’ve had the proper tracking code inserted on whatever affiliate offer that you you’re promoting.
2. Once that you start seeing conversions in your adwords account then run a placement report  to see what sites on the content network are converting for you and which ones aren’t.
3. Now that you’ve got that data to go off of you can exclude your ads from showing up on sites that don’t convert.  In order to do this click on the campaign and then look for the Excluded Sites option and then click add.  Now just add the sites here that don’t convert for you and you’ve easily taken an additional step to increase your profits!

So just remember the next time you’re planning on turning the content network off from the start you should really test it out first.  You never know but it actually may convert better than the search network and at a lower cost.

Since its the holiday season I’ve been doing a lot of thinking as to how I could help out those in need by doing something for charity. Well last weekend I came across this site via Jonathon’s blog and I’ve decided to try something out.

Basically, the concept behind ThousandDollarProject is that every 1000 hours the owner gives away $1000 to participants of the blog along with other great prizes as well. So far it’s getting some pretty nice traffic because of this and I believe it’s currently seeing about 4000 unique visitors daily and its growing pretty fast. In addition to the general concept the owner is also running another contest to try and raise $5000 for charity over the next 30 days. Basically you can pay $17 and choose your own subdomain on the ThousandDollarProject site and you get wordpress installed on the subdomain. You can use this blog anyway that you want as long as you don’t violate any of the content guidelines that are listed. The best part about this is that most of the $17 that you pay goes to charity, so in my opinion it’s really a win win situation.

So Here is What I Decided to Do….
I chose the subdomain DailyDeals and I plan to post 2 daily product deals per day from now up through the end of December. At the end of December any revenue that I generate from this I plan on giving 50% of that to charities here in the Kansas City area. At this point I’m not sure how successful this will be but I want to try and do something to help others out during the holiday season. So if you get a chance check out DailyDeals and help spread the word! I’m going to try and give a status update about the progress of this during the month of December so we’ll see what happens.

I saw this video the other day on Yahoo and though it was great.  It’s definitely a great example of some great viral marketing by the creators.  Watch it below and let me know what you think.

Last Saturday I went to 1 of the 9 Garth Brooks concerts in Kansas City with my wife Amber and brother Kyle. What can I say, the concert was an awesome time and its defintely something that I’ll always remember. I’ve been to several concerts in my life, but I can honestly say that none of them have compared to this. Overall the energy at the show was amazing and I don’t think I sat down in my seat one time over his set that lasted nearly two and a half hours. The only negative experience that I had was some moron drunk chick behind us kept spilling her beer on my wife. So here is little bit of advice, if you can’t consume alcohol in public without acting like a dumbass then just stay at home.

I hope that I get a chance to see him again someday, but if I don’t then this show definitely lived up to all my expectations. If you ever have the chance to see Garth live then I highly recommend it.

Ok, so lets face it not everyone is a great designer that can build or customize their own Wordpress theme to fit their tastes. However most people would like to have a blog design that stands out and distinguishes them from the rest of the crowd.

I actually came across this really cool WP Theme Generator the other day that basically lets you pick out the color scheme and layout to be applied to your own custom theme.  Once your done choosing everything you want then you can just export the theme and simply upload it to your Wordpress installation and your ready to go!

So now really you’ve got no limits as to what you can put out there for your own blog. You can choose the most hideous color scheme around and this tool gives you the creative freedom to be able to do that.  So if your looking for an easy way to quickly customize a Wordpress theme for yourself then I would definitely check out the WP Theme Generator.

If your time is valuable like mine is then you definitely appreciate this wordpress plugin. Awhile back I was looking for a quick way to put together a product review website to promote some different merchants. During my search I came across the Wordpress Review Site Plugin.

It does require some manual work to get going, but  it provides some great features once you do get the plugin fully installed.  Some of the features include:

• Allowing users to comment on products and adding their own ratings
• Displaying numbers of negative and positive ratings
• Click here to see the rest of the features of this plugin

I’ve downloaded this neat plugin and I’m going to see how quick I can actually develop wordpress review site this weekend.   I’ve also got to give some credit to the author Dan Grossman for creating a plugin that looks like it has the potential to be very valuable.  I’m looking forward to see what kind of site that I’m able to develop using this.  If you’ve used this plugin I’d like to hear your thoughts on it.

A few days ago I decided to give the keyword research tool Wordze at try after reading Jonathon’s review of the program.  In the beginning I’ve got to admit the interface took a little getting used to.  Ultimately though I got used to it and I must say that overall so far I’m extremely impressed with it.

Currently up to this point I’ve been using a variety of tools for keyword research including  SEO Book KeyWord Research Tool, KeyWord Elite, & the Adwords Keyword Tool.  So far I’m able to use Wordze much more efficiently than the other tools and I feel as though that overall I’m getting pretty accurate results.  Here are some of my favorite features that Wordze includes.

• A powerful keyword research tool with great options to see number of searches, KEI, & historical trends as well.
• Dig function to dig into the engine and find out what others are optimizing for
• KeyWord Expander Tool - Apply filters to keyword lists to quickly build targeted keyword lists
• Wordrank Tool - Cool feature to analyze what it takes to rank for certain phrases
• Thesaurus Tool - Tool to find related keywords

Those are just a few features as there are really a lot more that I could talk about, but I think I’ll write a more in depth interview about the product in a month or so.  If you want to see a more in depth view of Wordze check out the Wordze program tour.

One thing that I should mention is that overall the application is extremely quick, the only thing that does take some time is when the Dig feature is digging deep into the search results, but that is to be expected.   Last night I was able to knock out some pretty large targeted keyword lists in a very short amount of time.

Wordze is a subscription based product that is $35 per month and I really don’t think that is a bad price based on my initial review of the product.  Overall my early review of Wordze is extremely positive and I look forward to getting more in depth with the product and being able to write an extensive review of what I do and don’t like in the future.    So if your looking for a quick accurate keyword research tool then I would recommend that you at least try out Wordze for a month and see what you think.