Down On Our Luck

As if I don’t already have enough to do, I started a new blog this weekend and came up with an EXCELLENT business idea yesterday.

The blog I started was originally just going to be a directory for my Squidoo Lenses, but I didn’t have the patience to learn how to use Word Press as a Content Management System. It’s on my list of things to do, just not near the top. For now it’s a blog & even though I’m not an expert, I think blogging about my Squidoo experiences will definitely help me get there. Since I’ve made it into a blog, I’ll also be featuring many other Squidoo lenses as well; it won’t be all about me! (How boring)

I will touch on my other business idea as soon as everything is up and running. I love this particular idea because it’s fresh, original, Q loves it, and Q has already offered to help me out on the sales portion. Finally, a business that he can understand and participate in. Stay tuned for more information.

When I first announced One Million Pet Pics I promised a post or two about the tools that I used to set my new blog up.

I had some rules for choosing a theme for my new project. My first goal was to find a magazine type Wordpress theme that didn’t cost a fortune. I wanted to allow for multiple posts and pictures on the front page at once; basically I was looking for a magazine style. Having a featured pet was important, but having many pics on the front page was just as important.

My second rule, was I didn’t want every other blog out there to be using the same theme. Revolution has become a popular Wordpress theme this is available for sale, but there are tons blogs out there using it. I wanted our blog to be unique. After about 4 hours of searching, I kept coming back to the Jello-Wala-Mello theme from WP Designer. By the way, WP Designer is for sale if anyone is interested in buying an established blog. Anyways, the best thing about this theme was it was FREE and I don’t think it looks like a free theme, but if you disagree, feel free to let me know.

I really wasn’t looking for simplicity when it came to setting up my site and I’ll be honest with you, setting up this site wasn’t as simple as setting up Down On Our Luck. I’m not a programmer or designer, but I’m usually pretty good at looking at the code of a website and working backwards to figure out what needs to be changed in order to get the look I want. That’s pretty much what I had to do with this site. I didn’t get the whole Thumbnail and Thumbnail-full custom fields at first, but after the first 3 posts using these fields has become second nature.

We are going to be looking for lots more pics, so if you have a pet you’d like to see featured hop on over and submit your picture.

I haven’t done a top 10 post in a while, but I didn’t want my blog to turn into a link farm. It seemed that the only posts I was writing during February were “Top 10 Droppers” posts. I know, I should get off my butt and write more; give me credit here, I’m improving at that. Top 10 posts will be random from now on and some observations about my traffic and Entrecard follow the list.

First things first, here’s the list:

I have been pretty active dropping at Entrecard over the last month and a half; my traffic is pretty bouncy, but sometimes bouncy traffic is better than none. In a previous post I had mentioned this concern, but I have also figured out that the key to being successful is to start out dropping heavy to get onto lists and into “Inboxes”, make sure you at least reciprocate on your inbox every day to keep them coming back. Then make sure you update your content. After seeing your blog so often the droppers that show up in your inbox will start to stick around a little and leave comments. The key to getting these bloggers to stick is to make sure you have fresh content for them to poke around on. I know when I visit a blog that I see in my Inbox every day I can tell when they have updated their content almost right away; if I see a new post I’ll at least take a scan over it to see what it is. If it intrigues me, I’ll keep reading and possibly comment. Other Entrecarders do the same thing, my bounce rate goes down by almost 2-3 percentage points when I have a new post here and at One Million Pet Pics.

My point here is, don’t complain about how bouncy the Entrecard traffic is, write something or change something on your blog to make droppers take notice and stick around.

Feel free to let others know what you think.

I love Entrecard, it has brought me both good and bad traffic. Definitely more good than bad. I think it is the best way to bring a blog back from the dead or launch a new one. Reading other blogs also gives me ideas for my own posts and in some ways it gives me a swift kick in the rear to start working on my own content.

About a week and a half ago I launched One Million Pet Pics and I’ve been trying to drop 300 cards for this blog and that one every day; I was successful up until yesterday when I realized that everything else was being neglected. I would like to continue dropping 300 cards a day, but until I come up with a strategy for days when I have other necessary things on my plate, I’m going to have to start with 100 for each blog in the AM and then if I have time in the evening I’ll finish up.

It’s seems that I almost always have the same cards in my Inbox every morning so what I’m going to start doing is making some bookmark folders for those blogs that I find there and start speed dropping when I don’t have time to go through the chain dropping routine. If you’re wondering, I don’t stop and read everything when I’m chain dropping, but I definitely pay attention, comment and make note of things when I chain drop. I would like to continue chain dropping the way I have been at least twice a week. This way I can discover new sites and pay attention to what’s going on around the web.

I don’t want to become a credit hog that pays no attention to what everyone else is saying.

I’ve had an idea of making a website of 1,000,000 unique pets for about 2 years now. I was originally inspired by the Million Dollar Homepage and thought of charging people $5 to get their pet shown in my giant online pet collage; I registered the domain name and off I ran. I soon realized that my whole idea wouldn’t work; I don’t have the programming experience and who would really go for it anyways? I know you don’t know who would go for it, but it was the programming and lack of money which really kept me from proceeding.

For two years, I paid for hosting and the domain name with nothing on the site. I was busy working on other things and investing in the video game business that I run. The games were what was bringing me money so that’s where I concentrated my time; of course, this is what any good business person would probably do.

Using Entrecard.com and seeing all of the great blogs that I’ve been dropping on has given me inspiration to revisit this project and I pretty much spent this whole weekend setting this “pet” project up. Check out One Million Pet Pics for yourself and see how you can benefit from my new blog.

Within the next couple of posts I will also be writing about some of the tools that I used to get everything up and running. Obviously, I have a little bit of tweaking to do yet, but I feel it’s definitely ready for public viewing.

We have just added a privacy policy page per Google Adsense terms and conditions. Even though we are not serving Adsense ads at this point in time, we still think adding this page was a good idea.

I know many bloggers may be scrambling to find a policy, so I thought I’d let you know that tothepc.com has graciously allowed users to copy theirs. Just make sure you update the website and email address information.

Giving them some link love is not required, but I thought that it’s the least that I can do for saving me so much time.