Well it has been a long eventful year, as far as historical years it has definitely been one for the record books.

From the recession, to the presidential elections and more. This will definitely be a year many people remember for years to come.

I would like to take a moment and give a gratituitous holiday greeting to all of my readers, friends, and fellow bloggers. This blog is a major success thanks to all of you, without your support I could never be a full-time blogger.

I appreciate all that you have done for me, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah or another holiday this season I wish you the best in your celebrations, and hope that everything goes safely for you this season.

I also wish you a happy new year, and good luck!

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Just a thought question that was posed at the Ward Christmas Party tonight – somebody asked the question do they have to like the mormon tabernacle choir if they’re LDS, and I was thinking to myself, ya know – I would much rather be at a Linkin Park concert than motab anyday lol.

What say you? Is that bad for a good little mormon boy or girl? Can a Petey priesthood disavow affections for Mormon Tabernacle Choir?

I’d like your opinion – especially if you’re LDS/Mormon.

We’d all love to get our hands on the latest greatest gadget on the market. I myself would love a 42 inch tv or larger, can I afford it? Probably not. I’d also love to win an iphone, ipod, macbook, netbook, etc… I’d love to win anything – who wouldn’t?

Blog contests are great ways to win great prizes. You not only win though, you help smaller blogs get their feet off. It’s a win-win situation.

BlogContestSite.com has been around a long time. It started out as one of the first blogs to host blog contest information on the internet.

It has sinced moved into a different direction where you can add your own contests to the site, and vote other contests up and down and win in the progess.

I am a little biased being the co-owner of Blog Contest Site, but I believe it’s headed for greatness. I have relaunched the new design using DRIGG for Drupal. I will be giving prizes to users with the most Karma – getting karma is easy just vote, and leave comments on contests.

You can also follow blogcontests on twitter and get updated every 30 mins on new contests that are running!

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Does Google PR even matter anymore?

Nobody knows when or how it’s decided, save a few select programmers at google. Does it even matter anymore?

I have 0 PR after having my blog up for nearly 2 years. I have many incoming links, I have a google index of 3,180, an alexa rank of 250,000 give or take, daily traffic equal to about 700 hits per day, and a yahoo index of 11,400.

My blog is also helping me earn over $1000 monthly working from home on a consecutive basis.

I’m at the point where whether I write or not I get traffic – when I do write an article I will spike and get between 2-4k hits on those days.

Each of my blog posts are pinged to many directories, and announced via ping.fm to all my social circles.

Yet, I have never sold or bought links. I have never blatantly spammed my links. I have never done anything to try and gain incoming links in a blackhat manner. All my incoming links are perfectly organic.

So, why do I have a 0 PR?

I would love Matt Cutts to write to me and give me a good reason. I’d also like a good reason why this site has been adsense banned, not that I need adsense I make more off adbrite, and honestly think it’s probably better going with a different company than google.

Especially when google hires Nazis like Matt Cutts and other programmers who basically have the power to say who can or can’t stay in their program based on stupid reasons, and won’t answer why.

It’s like the statement JP Morgan Chase Bank made today about the bailout:

“We’ve lent some of it. We’ve not lent some of it. We’ve not given any accounting of, ‘Here’s how we’re doing it,’” said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. “We have not disclosed that to the public. We’re declining to.”

Lets change this to Matt Cutts of Google (I attack Matt Cutts because he’s the PR arm and well known, maybe he won’t like being attacked and will answer my questions if not then he truly is a Nazi and I’m calling him out on it):

“We’ve slapped some sites, we’ve not slapped a few, we’re not giving any accounting of who we have slapped, or why.  We don’t care if people’s businesses are hurt by it – we’re google we can do anything. Oh and by the way about that “Do no harm” thing…haha just kidding!”

With all this said – the funny thing is I may be google slapped when it comes to PR but I do still get good traffic from the search engine arm – I just have no PR juice, maybe that will change – I’d be happy to write a retraction if I ever get an answer as to why my PR is still 0, and my adsense account was deactivated.

Do I have high hopes? Nah – maybe someday though Matt Cutts will see this and look into it, maybe he googles his name every now and again, maybe he will see me ranking high for the term Matt Cutts is a Nazi.

One last thing I use Nazi, not as white supremist, but as totalitarian. Hitler had full control, and could do as he pleased. Those at google think they have the same power when it comes to the internet – I’d love to see them get slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit by the USA – it’s only a matter of time.

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I wrote the first part of this series about a month ago, and it’s taken me awhile to get back on topic. November has been a busy month for some of my other business ventures.

The rest of the series can be found here:

1. Set Goals or Die! Part 1: Posting Frequency Goals…
2. Set Goals or Die! Part 2: Traffic Building Goals..
3. Set Goals or Die! Part 3: Monetization Goals…(forthcoming).

I’ve been doing a lot of ppc campaigns, as well as some blackhat techniques(shhhhh)…

In the first part of this series I spoke about setting and keeping a daily posting schedule of at least 1 post per day, but 3 is an ideal number. If you can post religiously 3 posts per day, your blog will be at the top of your niche in just a matter of months.

Today I’m going to talk about traffic building. Traffic is also paramount to a good successful blog. In fact traffic is the lifeblood. We include with traffic building – building followers or subscribers.

Here are a few steps on getting a lot more traffic.

1. Help people on forums. The more help you provide on forums like digital point, blackhatworld, or one specific to your niche, the more credibility you will build. Apply your link in the signature and you’re sure to get a lot of new visitors and blog subscribers.

2. Use google trends. I’ve spoken about this a lot. Google trends is a great way to get some immediate traffic. If you have some other good posts at the ready, people will stay a lot longer and might even subscribe. One thing I’ve done though that I’d actually advise against is using this exhaustively.

I posted a large amount of posts related to google trends, and got a lot of traffic – but it wasn’t the best quality because it didn’t always match my blog’s topic. Use this technique sparingly – but use it. I’d recommend posting 1 google trends blog post for every 5 normal blog posts.

3. Build backlinks. A great method I use for this is comment kahuna. This software finds blogs that remove do-follow and helps you write comments faster. One tip though: When writing comments try to find a post related to a post on your blog, then for your link back link to that post, not to the front page of your blog. This will build your google PR better, plus the people who visit your blog will be looking for similar information and will be more likely to subscribe.

4. Moniter your traffic. Part of setting goals is monitering what you’re doing and seeing if you’re making progress or not. I use statspress reloaded wordpress plugin, alexa, and google trends to track my traffic. I think it’s best to use multiple tools so you can get a more realistic picture.

5. Tweak. To be successful in blogging you will always be tweaking your efforts. Find what works for you. There will be some things that work for one specific niche that would never work for another. Just keep working and researching new ways to gain traffic.

6. Newsletter. To build stickyness and repeat traffic it is highly recommended that you give away an ebook, and build a newsletter with it. You can see an example with my newsletter form at the top of this blog.

7. Set little goals. The best way to build anything is to set mini goals. For instance set a goal of 1000 unique hits for December. Then set a goal for maybe 1500 for the next month. Do what you need to do in order to get those hits and you will be pleasantly surprised that you might get a lot more.

Bottom line: Don’t get discouraged, and never give up. You will succeed if you stick with it. Most big blogs began as small blogs. Also most big blogs took at least a year to build to big. It takes a lot of time and effort but in the end it is so worth it. It’s recession proof. I make money each month regardless of the financial woes of the nation or world. That’s job security.

Feel free to add any traffic tips you might have to this post and help others out.

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Everyone could use some help in one form or another with learning to be better organized. Face it as a blogger or internet marketer being organized can mean making more money online.

Every top affiliate marketer is a master organizer.

Mashable wrote about a year ago a list of 100 ways to organize your life with online apps, and today they’ve created  an even better updated list of 100 more ways to organize your life. Give it a quick read – some very useful advice.

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Image via Wikipedia

I don’t have aids, nor do I personally even know anyone who does. (I am a big rent fan though, of which aids was mentioned quite a bit).

I would just like to ask that everyone take a few moments today to offer up a prayer to all of those who’ve been hurt by this disease. Also don’t judge those who have the disease as evil, many people still associate the disease with immoral acts, but aids is as often transferred by mother to child, or unfaithful spouse to spouse, or through rape, and a plethora of other ways as it is through immoral activity of the victim.

Take a moment today to watch the movie Rent, or just think about the disease, and maybe even think of a way you can help, whether it’s via volunteering, donating money, etc.

Just my two cents on World Aids Day. Not really a holiday to celebrate – yet(maybe someday), but one to be ponderous of, and to take a moment to remember those who’ve died from it, and to say a prayer of thanksgiving that you don’t have it.

I also hope everyone had a wonderful weekend – Thanksgiving was yummy. Lots and lots of turkey, mmm…. I could go it again.

Blackfriday was a nightmare as always, and I’m looking forward to Cyber-Monday.

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