KeithJamesLock.com

It’s about that time…this blog is almost 6 months in the making…time to give away some great prizes! This is going to my first contest so I want to do it up right. Well, technically it’s the 2nd…the first one was a contest on a whim and nobody knew about it but me. I gave $20 to the first commentator Nate of Legion Forex who is still a loyal reader of my blog today. Thanks Nate!

Doing My Research

I’ve been reading up on the best way to have a blogging contest and like anything else on the Internet and in the world there is so much conflicting information. I’m just going to go with my gut as everyone should. Trust your instincts right?

One common suggestion I read though was to keep the prize lot small when your blog is still small. I say screw it! Even if I only get 1 entry I’m still giving away the prizes! Not like that renegged Nintendo Wii contest over at Tracking202! (just kidding Wes) They did say up front that if there wasn’t enough entries they wouldn’t give the prize way. Well, I’m telling you up front that I will!

Easy To Get Entries and Everyone Is a Winner!

Call me crazy but I’m giving something to everyone who enters. And to gain an entry it’s as simple as pushing the big red WIN button! You don’t need a web site to get an entry and no technical experience is required.

I’m still hashing out some details and the Official Contest Post will be here soon enough. I’ll explain what the grand prizes are in the next post. But the entry prize will be this: A 100 character or less text ad that links to your blog, an affiliate offer… anything. I will rotate the ad in the stripe ad across the top of every page of this site for 6 months minimum. Worth playing for!?

A Hint at The Grand Prizes

You will be handed on a silver platter everything that you need to make some money online. How much money? Who knows? The sky is the limit! It will cost you nothing and the work will be done for you!

Some will be asking…where is the value in that? You are feeding fish but you are not teaching how to fish. That is true and I thought of that as well. However, this blog provides the information necessary to maintain this business I will be giving away. Also the Q&A Section will be there to fill in any gaps!

Like I said, in the next post I will be explaining the base prize you will be getting. I will also explain what I hope to offer to complement this awesome package! Stay tuned!

It would be greatly appreciated if you let others know about the contest as we gear up! Thanks!

Andy Bailey from FiddyP.co.uk made this really cool Wordpress plugin that "takes the url from the comment form and tries to parse the feed of the site and display the last entry made". Ok, I know a ton of people know about it and are using it on their blogs but I wanted to share something that I felt was a decent idea to get targeted traffic to your blog. It has worked well for me on a few occasions.

Most people already know that commenting on blogs in their niche is a good way to get traffic to their site right? And as mentioned a bunch of sites are using the CommentLuv plugin to reward their commentators. We all know the value of comments on a blog and CommentLuv is a decent way to thank the commentator. Your CommentLuv link is similar to that of a signature in a forum and can be quite valuable. Let me explain…

The timing has to be right for this. It’s probably best if you are the first commentator on a blog for the most exposure but that hasn’t always been the case for me and it still has worked quite well.

Ok, here’s what I do, it’s quite simple. I subscribe to most blogs in a feed reader and by email so I could get a jump on them as soon as possible. I head over, read the post and since I’ve been doing this for awhile now I don’t always learn something from the post. It’s often something that I’ve known and have been doing myself already. In fact, so much so that I might be able to provide extra bits of information that wasn’t covered in the post.

Sometimes it can be specific technical details that were deliberately not written in by the blogger. It could be a part where he/she stated "I’m not 100% sure about this". It could be something they overlooked. Whatever it is and I am able to add value, I rush over to my blog and quickly fire up a nice post…the post that provides the missing value from the other post and I title it appropriately. I then run over and put in a nice comment on the other blog and CommentLuv does the rest!

You never want to disrespect the blogger. Always do it with tact. It can work very well for you and bring a bunch of traffic.

With that said, I hope Andy drops by and adds my site to his latest Interesting sites that use CommentLuv series

Any reader of this blog knows I love Wordpress. It’s an amazing free tool that replaces any Content Management System and web design tool (in my opinion). Gone are the days where I use Frontpage or any similar tool. The vast majority of my sites are now Wordpress based…not necessarily blogs, but Wordpress driven sites. I’m going to be showing you one soon and holding a contest that I’m sure you won’t want to miss. Lots of awesome stuff is going to be given away in exchange for some pretty darn easy tasks.

Ok, back to the point of this post. Despite my love for Wordpress and although I remain calm, cool and collected there are still a couple of things that bug me about it. Some are features and some are bugs. I know that this powerful software is free so I don’t complain too loudly. Just voicing my feelings is all Some of the issues might be my own doing by breaking something, I dunno.

Annoyance #1: One thing I seem to always forget to do now is choose a category. With the category selector underneath, it’s easy to forget (for me at least). I prefer it to the right. I end up with a lot of posts in my default category and then I have to go fix them afterwards. That’s if I even notice.

Annoyance #2: The Preview this Post button doesn’t work for me. Am I the only one?

Annoyance #3: Even though I am logged in to my Wordpress admin area, if I open a new window to reply to a comment on a post, it sometimes doesn’t show me as logged in. If you aren’t sure what I mean…you know when you leave a comment on your own blog it knows you are the admin because it has only the comment box and not the Name, Email and URL boxes? Well, it doesn’t always do that for me. It just started happening though. I usually have to log out and login a few times before it kicks in. Very annoying!

Annoyance #4: This new version of Wordpress has a new WYSIWYG editor that is supposed to not mess with your post as much as it did in the past. For the most part that is true but one thing that I noticed that it does is it will leave a space after the closing anchor tag. It only does it in Visual view. So, if I’m being a perfectionist I have to switch to Code View and fix all instances of it before saving my posts.

I didn’t spend much time looking for fixes and I haven’t mentioned it to the Wordpress folks but these things have a way of working themselves out, or eventually I stop caring. But…if anyone knows of anything that could help please let me know. I already have workarounds, I might just have to wait to see if the next version fixes them.

What bugs you about Wordpress?

I wrote a post at the beginning of April explaining how to add Google Analytics to your Wordpress blog so you can keep an eye on visitor stats. I just read a post from the Google Analytics blog which had a couple videos showing how to interpret the data. I embedded the 1st time walkthrough video below. It’s about 10 minutes long and covers a great deal. It’s definitely worth a quick watch for any Google Analytics users.

Credits: This image comes straight from JohnCow.com. I didn’t make it, I suck at graphics.

So…it begins…on May 19th. JohnCow.com’s and GarryConn.com’s respective owners are going head to head to see who can earn the most money with their “from scratch” blogs. You can signup if you haven’t already to get updates as they go along. They are revealing everything to their readers! To get both angles though you will need to sign up to both newsletters. Here’s JohnCow.com’s Cowpetition page and here’s Garry’s.

Win $2300 in Prizes Following Along with John Cow!

Not only will you be getting some free education, John Cow will be giving away a bunch of cool prizes. It is even possible for one person to win them all. He’s giving away the following:

• A FREE Copy of Affiliate Elite Enterprise Edition ($550+ value)
• A FREE Copy of TrafficTravis ($97 Value)
• A FREE 1 Year Membership at PLR Pro ($1164 Value)
• A FREE Copy of Easy Member Pro Unlimited ($297 Value)
• A FREE Copy of Video Post Robot ($197 Value)

Don’t only pay attention to the things Cow and Conn are telling you they are doing, pay attention also to what they are doing…if you know what I mean. Enjoy and be prepared to learn a whole heap!