My Internet Marketing Adventures

My recent adventures have taken me to NameDrive.com to sign up and earn some money from a few unused domain names that I have. NameDrive puts ads on the sites and splits revenue with you. NameDrive also has a referral program...so if you're interested you can follow the above link and give me credit or you can circumvent my involvement and risk karmic disaster by cutting me out of the loop. ;-)

I heard about a new deal called Qassia on becslife.biz (and signed up with her referral link), another benefit of participating in the Entrecard community. Here's what the folks at Qassia have to say about themselves:

"Qassia is fantastic because you get credit for sharing your intelligence. The more credit you earn, the better your websites will rank. And you get a backlink to your website for every intel you add - only Qassia gives you unlimited quality backlinks.

Last but not least, Qassia also has the best ad revenue sharing system on the Internet, so in effect you get paid for promoting your websites. Qassia rocks!

The more people join Qassia, the more everyone will benefit, so give Qassia a spin. Signing up takes less than a minute, so you've got nothing to lose. See ya around!"

I even dusted off an old post about "Is rock music evil?" and added to their "intel."

Whilst on becslife.biz I noticed she had a "tip jar" in the form of a Scratchback "Are You In My Top Spots?" widget and decided to toss a buck in and sign up for my own tip jar. Feel free to do the same! (No referral program yet.)

I had applied to join NeverBlue's ad program last week and spoke yesterday with my account rep, Craig, who asked me about my business, etc. Yippee! I got approved. Of course, I had to smile when he wanted to verify my mailing address for the Accounts Payable department. I did get my first email from NeverBlue today and there were a couple of pretty interesting affiliate ad programs that I could sign up for. Several people (sorry, I can't remember who) had mentioned in their blogs that they were very pleased with NeverBlue and so I'm hoping it will work out well.

As far as Entrecard goes, I'm just grinding away. I have found that card dropping goes well with my riding my exercycle in the morning and I'm just plugging along. Props to Turnip for being an Entrecard expert so I don't have to be. He's also very generous to provide his list of Entrecard booksmarks for free, which will save the new Entrecarder many hours of work. I could post the link, but you would be doing yourself a disservice to not read his posts about Entrecard, so head on over to his site to get the list and some great advice.

Last note for today's entry is that I changed my profile photo to my Bearded pic. Why? I like the look of my beard in a photo more than I like the feel of it on my face. This way I get to enjoy seeing my bearded self showing up in the BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog widgets without having an itchy face.

You might expect that I could give the following 6 reasons for being a monetized blogger:

1) To Make Money
2) To Make Money
3) To Make Money
4) To Make Money
5) To Make Money
6) To Make Money

Actually, while the money IS a consideration, it isn't the only reason that I'm wandering down this road. There are plenty of ways to make money in life and plenty of roads to travel, and so as I am creating my plan for blogging and other online marketing activities, I am trying to keep things in perspective and make sure that I accomplish other goals than just making money. Here's numbers 2-6 on my list:

#2 - To Promote My Interests.
I have an itch to propagate Multiple Intelligence Theory and my own ideas about brain wiring and our unique intellectual abilities. Notice that I said "itch" and not "burning desire." Intelligence, personality and temperament intrigue me, but don't absolutely inspire me to make Intunique my life's work. Yet, when there is a possibility of earning a few dollars while I research and formulate my ideas about intelligence, it helps to get me moving forward.

#3 - To Leverage My Regular Business Activites
I have worked with small businesses in my local area for a number of years and continue to be active with the local Chamber of Commerce. Occasionally these small business owners need some marketing advice or are willing to pay for some of my experience and talents, like the fact that I've been a radio talk show host and am comfortable conducting live interviews. Blogging about business in our local area helps me add greater value to my clients.

#4 - To Stay Reasonably Proficient with the Internet
There is no way that I can hope to be an expert, but the process of setting up blogs and learning about social networking, etc., at least gives me the hope of not becoming a complete dinosaur. The Entrecard community has been a good source of info about blogging for dollars and I've been a Mashable reader for several months now. Even though I took a Fortran and Cobol class in college, I highly doubt that I will ever be much of a programmer, but it's nice to be able to tweak things here and there.

#5 - To Exercise My Creativity
It's tremendously cool to register a domain name (or an account on a site like Blogger) and be off and publishing within minutes or hours. Several of the blogs I am developing are extensions of ideas that I've had over the last 20 years, ideas that have heretofore languished in a folder in my file cabinet. I'm not particularly artistic, but I've managed to come up with a few relatively novel ideas for sites that will be graphic intensive. Again, I doubt that I would be pursuing these if I weren't aided by the possibility of a earning a few bucks along the way.

#6 - To Participate In the Larger Community
My family keeps me busy and I'm not one to spend much time socializing. As I have been working from home for most of the past 3 years, I find that days can go by where I don't talk to anyone who doesn't share DNA or a surname with me. And while I'm basically ok with that, I recognize that I have a desire and responsibility to support the larger community. Blogging gives me an opportunity to meet people from all over the world and never have to take off my slippers.

I guess the big question about my list of reasons is how likely am I to continue blogging if reason #1 doesn't materialize. Hmmm.

I spent too much time today messing with templates and trying to figure out how to make some minor modifications to Minima. I got off to a productive start by fleshing out my Orem Business Blogring and Provo Business Blogrings and the 10 sites that will be in each one, as well as another 4-5 blogs that pertain to the local area. My advertising plan is to include ads for Ready Health Products, World Vital Records, and Hammaka on each of the blogs, with Google Adsense being the only other ads. These blogs won't be up and running with content for a couple of weeks minimum. And it's important to know that the reason for having so many sites is that there are tie-ins with some real world business activities that I am involved with, like the Chamber of Commerce. Otherwise I couldn't justify the time expenditure just to have another 25 blogs.


Orem Business Blogring

New Orem Businesses

Orem Non-Profit Organizations

Top Rated Orem Businesses

Homegrown Orem Businesses

Orem Business VIPs

HOBnobbing in Orem

Open or Closed in Orem

Big Big Biz in Orem

Orem Professionals

Provo Orem Chamber News

Provo Business Blogring

Top Rated Provo Businesses

Homegrown Provo Businesses

New Provo Businesses

Provo Non-Profit Organizations

Provo Business VIPs

Big Big Biz in Provo

HOBnobbing in Provo

Open or Closed in Provo

Provo Professionals

Provo Orem Chamber News

Other Local Blogs

Get Rid Of It Now

Utah County Auctions & Ads

Where In Provo Am I?

Where in Orem Am I?

Top Local News

Utah County Job Finders

I've been grinding the past week getting my main blog, Intunique, up and running. It's been an interesting learning curve to say the least! I've tried a couple of times to get a blog about intelligence and personality started in the past, but after reading a couple other blogs about blogging, I made the decision to host my own blog on my own domain. I still have my blogger site that will have similar info but with a different look and different widgets.

Installing wordpress wasn't all that bad and I only had to ask my programmer son for help on a couple of sticky spots. But it's not like I want to go and repeat the process tomorrow! Instead I am planning on starting blogs here on blogger and if things go well, like I actually write in them more than once a month and I'm getting some traffic, I'll consider moving them to my own domains. It's just so easy to get started on blogger and this morning I created about 40 blogs, bringing my total here on blogger to over 50.

Why? It's not that I like to write all that much and most of these blogs will be in the neighborhood of 2-3 entries a week on average. But as long as I'm going up the learning curve on blogging, advertising, linking, communities, directories, feeds, etc., I might as well leverage that knowledge as best I can. The economies of scale that result from having multiple blogs makes sense if I can keep up on everything...which only time will tell. Also, the ability to create my own rings, will allow me to drive traffic back and forth between related blogs that I'm writing.

How many is too many? I'd like to have 100 blogs!

Today's big adventure was to create a spreadsheet with all the blogs, advertisers, communities, directories, feeds, etc., so that I can keep track of what I'm doing. That, and starting to write in them!