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.

As of right now, I’m in the process of looking for a new theme for our blog. The old one was just way too busy and the more I looked at it the uglier it became. Until I find a new theme, I’m going back to the standard out of the box wordpress theme in order to make things easier to read. I’ll be sticking to free themes for the time being as my budget is $0.

We bet you thought this blog was dead, I was just on vacation with no access to a computer. I know this isn’t a real post, but I thought I’d write about the fact that I signed up on the Million Blog List while I was thinking of a better post to write. That’s it, that’s all I have for now; I’m numbers 528 and 529.

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’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.