A couple of weeks ago I signed up to be an SEOmoz premium member. So far the content and the tools are definitely worth the price you pay. You really do get access to alot of great information for what I consider to be a relatively low cost. I’m currently in the middle of reading the Guide to Link Building and so far it’s a really great read.

Yesterday they released their SEOquiz, a 75 question quiz over SEO to see how much you know. I got a 71% when I took it and even though the badge below says it, I wouldn’t considere myself an SEO Professional. I thought that the quiz had some tough questions on it and I probably got few lucky guesses right on some tough questions. Needless to say I need to continue to sharpen my SEO skills just like I had planned on doing. So how good are your skills, head over to SEOmoz right now and take the SEOquiz and see how you stack up.

SEO Professional - 71%

Are you an SEO Expert?

Wow, I can’t believe that its almost September already. Next week I actually turn 27 years old and I can’t believe it, but I’m starting to feel old! Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking quite a bit about some things that I want to accomplish by the end of this year. It seems as though I always think about alot of stuff but I never accomplish everything that I want to. So earlier this evening I sat down and wrote a list of 7 goals that I want to accomplish by the end of this year. I read a great post from Amit Mehta about setting your own goals and thinking about them everyday that ultimately made be decide to create my own list of goals.  So now moving forward here is my list of goals in no particular order that I’m going to print out and hang by my computer for me to look at each day. On New Years Eve of this year I’m going to write a post regarding what I’ve accomplished on this list and I sincerely hope that I’ve accomplished all of them to some degree.

• Grow My Affiliate Marketing Income - I’m setting my monthly income goal of at least $2,000 a month. Now I know that may seem very small compared to some, but I think that’s a great goal to set my sights on. Currently I don’t do as well as I’d like with this, but I’ve got a lot of great ideas and I think I can definitely reach this goal.

• Improve Upon My Web Design Skills - I really do enjoy web design and I’m going to work very hard to improve my skills over the next few months. Basically my main goal is to be able to design my layouts completely with CSS as opposed to using tables for my layouts. I’ll be the first to admit that once you get into the habit of using tables for overall layout, then it gets to be a very hard habit to break.

• Learn Some Application Development - Right now this is one of my weakest areas that I want to improve upon. I do a decent amount of Coldfusion work at my day job, but I really want to get into some PHP stuff as well. I’ve always been extremely interested in PHP, but I’ve just never taken the time to sit down and really learn it. Maybe I’ll have to check out one of the books in Anthony’s Bookstore.  If I get good enough and have the time I might even just develop my own Wordpress Theme as well.

• Increase My Knowledge of PPC and SEO - These are some areas that I can definitely benefit from having more knowledge in.  Its extremely important that I continue to gain knowledge in these areas as they are constantly changing each day.   I think most likely I’ll look into some professional pay per click certification programs from Google and Yahoo to complete.  On the SEO side of things I’m going to continue to read some of my favorite SEO blogs on a daily basis and will probably sign up for a SEOmoz premium membership.

• Attract More Readers and Subscribers to My Blog - I haven’t fully decided how I’m going to accomplish this one yet, but I’ve got some ideas so we’ll just have to see how they workout over the next few months!

• Get Back Into Physical Shape - Before this summer I was actually doing pretty well with this one, but then I got busy with busy with buying a house and other things and I’ve been slacking lately.  Well its apparent that I’m not getting any younger especially with my upcoming birthday and I really just want to take care of myself and eat better to make sure I’m in the best shape that I can be.  This should not be a problem to accomplish and I plan on being in the best shape of my life by the end of the year.

• Spend More Time with My Wife - Sometime this gets overlooked by both of us since we are busy, but I’m definitely going to make every attempt to spend as much quality time with her that I can.   You never know how much time you actually have with someone, so I’m going to work as hard as I can to make the most of all the time that I get to be with her.

Well that may seem like a big list with alot of stuff,  but I’ve got confidence in myself to get it done and I’m going to work at it each day.   If you haven’t set some goals for yourself, then I challenge you to create some and see how you end up at the end of the year like me!

Ok, so there is not a whole lot of value in this post, but I wrote it out of frustration.  I’m currently battling a problem with Firefox where whenever I try to run a Java application within Firefox it constantly freezes and I get nowhere.

I’ve tried just about everything I can think of at this point including removing and reinstalling Firefox, Java, and all of the plugins that I had installed as well with no luck at all.   It’s starting to get really frustrating at this point.  If anyone else has ever experienced this issue drop me a comment here and let me know how you were able to fix it or any tips you may have.

A few months back I downloaded the Google Adwords Editor and for some odd I reason I never used it. Well today I decided that I’d give it it a try and now I’m kicking myself because if I’d started using it earlier it would have saved me a ton of time.

The program itself works great and you can easily access your Google Adwords account from your computer without having to login to the site over the web. Essentially you can do pretty much anything with the editor that you can when logged into the Adwords site. Today I spent about half the time I usually do on a daily basis managing my Adwords account. So far the thing that I see is a really big advantage is ability to easily make bulk changes to your account in very short amounts of time. Oh yeah and I forgot the the best part about all of this, its FREE!

If you’ve got an Adwords account I highly recommend this great tool, because its already started saving me a ton of time. The only other request I’ve got at this time is for Yahoo and MSN put together their own account management tools to manage their PPC programs!

Well I’m somewhat organized in my new house now, so I thought I would try and get back to some meaningful blogging. I thought I would share with you some nice tools that can give some easy quick stats on your websites. I’ve been using these and find them really helpful when I want some quick information about my sites without having to dive into my web analytics program of choice.

dnScoop.com - This is kind of a cool fun site to look at on occasion. Basically it takes several factors of your site and based upon them if gives you an estimated value of what it predicts your website is worth. Some of the factors it analyzes are domain age, pagerank, inbound links, alexa rank, and number of index pages. Based on these criteria it also gives an estimate of what a link on your site is worth through TextLink Ads. I guess for me honestly this neat tool is just kind of fun to look at every now an then because its kind of fun to see how different factors can affect the perceived value of your site.

Xinu Returns - This is a really great tool that can give you alot of great information about your site in a very short amount of time. All you need to do is enter in your url and let the tool gather all of the information. Some of the info that it returns includes domain information, ranking info from pagerank to technorati, syndication information, social bookmark info, validation info, index pages count, and backlink information across a variety of sites. I’ve become a big fan of this site because of the amount of information I can get about my site in a short amount of time and I highly recommend taking a look at it.

Serph.com- Serph is actually another creation from ACS the same company that built CrazyEgg and as you know I’m a big fan of that. Basically Serph is a social media search engine that searches social media sites to see what people are saying on the web right now. I’ve found it useful when I search for some information regarding ClarkeW.com and I can see the sites or people that have stuff referencing content on my site. This is just another fun tool to see what is being said out in the social media world about you or another topic your interested in searching for.

Well there is a quick list of 3 sites that I find useful for my own sites, so hopefully you’ll be able to get something useful out of them as well. I do highly recommend checking each of the sites out, as you can get some great information out of all of them. If you do end up trying some of them out, let me know what you think.

I haven’t had a chance to post in awhile for several reasons.  Most importantly I actually just bought a house and just moved in this last weekend.  Now I remember why I hated moving so much as it is a ridiculous amount of work, but thats the last time I ever do it myself, because the next time it will be professionally done.  Anyways I really like my new house and I will post some pics up here in the next few days.

Now that I’m getting settled in and got my internet up, I can getting back to writing some quality blog posts.  I’ve got lots of stuff on my mind to talk about so I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things.

So how many of you get sick of not being able to talk to an actual person when you call your favorite company over the phone?  One of my biggest pet peeves is when I go to call a company about a product or service and I have to listen to stupid automated menus  and go through numerous unnecessary steps in order to accomplish a task or actually get to talk to someone.  Oh and lets not forget my favorite part about calling.  Its when after sitting on the phone for several minutes waiting or navigating their impossible menus you’re then just disconnected for no apparent reason.

Well I came across this site the other day and I wanted to share it with you.  The Get Human 500 database provides instructions on how to actually talk to a human at some of our favorite companies when you call.  Anyways hopefully you’ll enjoy this and maybe it will save you some time the next time you have to make a call!

I don’t know if anyone remembers or not, but way back in 2001 before the release of Office XP there were some videos that detailed the demise of the infamous paper clip we all loved so much. I forgot how entertaining these videos were until I found them on YouTube earlier. I posted one of my favorite ones below and there are a few more out on YouTube as well. Maybe you enjoy this one as much as I do, its pretty good stuff.

Alright, well this new design has taken me much longer than I expected it to but its finally up.  I guess thats what happens when you are trying to redesign your site on top of working, buying your first home, and your wife studying for a major board exam.  The site is completely done for the most part, but I still have a few little small things that I’m planning on doing to tweak it over the next few days.

As you know I’ve always used Cutline  up to this point when designing my blogs, but this time I chose to go ahead and customize the new Copyblogger theme that was recently released.  Overall I’m pretty pleased with the way the site turned out and I think it looks much nicer and cleaner than my previous design.  Now that I’ve got the new design out of the way, I plan to concentrate more on doing some quality blogging here and some other projects I’ve got going to try and bring in some revenue.

Anyway I’d really like to know what you think of the new design here, so leave me a comment with your honest opinion.  I really don’t care if you want to trash my new design or anything, but just be sure to put the address of your site so I can check it out.  Its amazing some of the people that will take shots at your hard work, yet they have nothing quality to show for themselves.

Well it looks like Antbag tagged me with his “What I Would Look Like on South Park” post. If you haven’t seen it the site is pretty cool concept actually. It allows you to create a South Park character that resembles whatever you want and it gives you a ton of options to add to it. If you get a chance go take a look at South Park Studio and spend 5 minutes and design your own character for fun. So this is my interpretation of what I would look like on the show. I know it looks as though I need to get out and get some sun, but it doesn’t always work that well for me and usually it just ends up in a sunburn!

Well this was a fun break to take from redesigning my site here, but its time to get back to work.  If everything goes well I’m going to try and launch my new site design sometime this weekend, but I’ll just have to wait and see.