My computer still isn’t fully fixed, will probably have to get some cables installed or something. At the moment my laptop is good enough to pick up the wireless signal of the house from my room, but the desktop (which is new) isn’t strong enough. Oh well.

ONE DAY left to win a Creative Vado so get in if you haven’t.

Anyways, I’ve made a few changes to this blog, some big, some small… I’ll list them below and explain why too for the ones that are relatively big.

I’ve never really promoted this blog heavily – apart from a couple months ago where I had a contest or two while promoting in terms of guest posts, nowadays I’ve tended to set things up and then let them lie.

It’s time for that to change.

Personally, I feel that this blog tries to offer something different to blogs that are even far more established – although I wouldn’t say all my posts are useful, I do think that I offer at least one or two posts that can spark things off per week. For example, my blog commenting post which made people thousands of dollars… when was the last time you saw a post on an A List blog that actually made you money? Despite the posts frequently referring to it, this isn’t a ‘make money online’ blog – I tried to get out of that niche a while ago because most of the blogs there are absolute crap and as the title says nowadays, this is a young entrepreneur blog.

Sadly, I’m never someone to get off my backside and do things just like that… so luckily we have an incentive. Daniel at Daily Blog Tips is running a contest dubbed ‘Blogging Idol‘ where the winner picks up $800 in pure cash and $700 in SEO consulting. Although there’s a large probability I won’t win it (as there are around 100 participants) competition always helped me work far more effectively. So the month ahead will be one of heavy, heavy promoting – I’ve slacked off doing so for the past 2-3 months and this hasn’t really grown as it should have (although it still has grown some, thanks mainly to you guys ).

Here’s the changes:

Dofollow removed. This is probably a big one. I’ve always prided this on being a dofollow blog, but can’t allow all comments to be so anymore; now, I do not have regular visitors commenting on internal posts to get some link juice, but I do have a problem with drop by link spammers (guess I really shouldn’t have wrote that make money blog commenting post, eh ) with stupid anchor text. By stupid anchor text, I mean people commenting as something like ‘San Antonio Washing Machines’ … I’ve had people comment as that, then later send me an email to ask why it was deleted, very angrily. Remember that outgoing, unrelated links hurt this blog’s Pagerank and although it is not very important in real terms, everyone likes to see improvement

However, top commentators will still get the joy of a dofollow link to their own website, and one of the things I’ll be implementing from now on is a free link under Recommended Websites for the top five commentators each month. Think of it as comment one month, get the next to slack off

Entrecard / Sitehoppin’ Added. Why’d I add Entrecard after I’ve repeatedly called it a useless service for traffic? Simply because there are a lot of bloggers that use it, and it helps getting your blog’s name out. This blog is not a big name in the industry yet, and although I don’t expect it to become so… I would like to get the word out a little more. This kind of traffic converts at something like 1/1,000,000 (okay slight exaggeration, maybe ) but if I get one or two people that become heavily involved in the community per month, all’s good. I also wanted to test SiteHoppin’ as the guy behind it has put a lot of effort into it and I think it’s a cool souped up version of a traffic exchange program

Email Subscribe Form Added. In the past, I had a button that linked to the email subscribe; now people can just do it direct from the homepage. The more work you give people, the less work they’re going to do, so let’s make things easy. Subscribe if you haven’t to get a fresh email every day with some incoherent ramblings thoughts from me that will help you out. I’ll report back if I see an improvement in conversion (from visitors ==> subscribers).

Upgraded Wordpress. I’m almost embarrassed to say this, but I was still on the old version of Wordpress for TUK. Anyways, upgraded this, will probably upgrade my other websites in a few days (or weeks…). I used the best Wordpress plugin of all time for this which made things a breeze. Haven’t noticed any real differences (apart from the Top Commentators widget now working internally) but I have noticed that the tools plan to release WP 2.6 soon… meaning another upgrade. One wishes that they sorted all their numerous problems once and for all…

Dedicated Posting. One of the methods I’ll be employing to try and win the Blogging Idol challenge is heavily working the social networks… I’m going to try and write one Digg frontpage worthy post weekly. Whether it’ll get there or not remains to be seen, but I’m far more prepared than I was earlier with tools like WP-Cache and whatnot. I’ll be ‘making friends’ on things like Digg and aiming to produce one post per week that is better than all posts I have ever posted on TUK before.

Dedicated Commenting. The more discussion a blog post has, the more discussion it will continue to get… and so on and so forth. I’m going to try and comment at least once on blog posts of mine – I used to do this in the past but haven’t so much recently. I know I could, and I know I should (as without comments by you guys there would be no discussion) but I haven’t because I’m lazy; it’s time to start!

Working on SEO. I haven’t done much SEO with this blog apart from install the plugin; I’m going to start, but try out SEO that actually makes money – rank for product reviews, rank for hosting, etc. If you see a few keyword stuffed posts heavily promoting something (which I will have tried) do not worry, they are not for you.

There’ll be a review posted up on here tomorrow, one I gave away in a contest. Speaking of contests, I’m looking of having one to compete in Blogging Idol; I’d prefer less prizes but with each prize being of value; heck, I’d prefer things that are tangible (anyone want to sponsor an iPhone, let me know ). I’ll also post within the week. I have not forgotten the bum marketing thing, I did say I was waiting for the end of Euro 2008 (ends June 29th) for all those that asked.

Also, I hate work, so let’s make this a challenge; although I do not expect to win Blogging Idol, I do expect that on August 1st I will have double the subscribers I do now. If I do not, I will write a post on August first giving everyone that comments here a free link.