Welcome to Smuggle Me

Get your minds out of the gutter. This is the mile high club for bloggers. I’m writing this post from 30,000 feet on a flight from Las Vegas to Atlanta. This is just awesome. I can’t wait until every flight has this available. Not to mention, I’m watching the Olympics on NBC at the same time. The US just won gold in 4 man bobsled.

I just did a speed test and it’s showing 0.97 Mbps download and 0.25 Mbps upload. Not bad for most of the things that I do. I might have to go test out Youtube and Hulu and some things like that and see how it does. Amazing!

Oh yeah, and the best part is that I got it for free. That a baby!!

Only problem is that now I won’t get any sleep on this red eye flight. Tomorrow’s going to be rough, but it will be so worth it.

This weekend I had a little bit of fun and installed BuddyPress. YesN I know I’m twisted to think that is fun. Oh well, it is what it is. I must admit that it was super simple.

I’m really looking forward to using it. I’m planning on using it for my next project. I still need to find a good host for it and create some killer plugins. Hopefully I can get it to work the way I need it to work I’m a little hesitant building this project on top of BuddyPress, but at least it can bridge me until I can hire a true programmer to work with me.

I just got a Blackberry and I’m surprised how much I like it. Today I decided that I’d try out the WordPress app for blackberry. So, this is my first blog post from the blackberry.

I like it since now I’ll be able to do a lot more blog posting during down time. The small keyboard is kind of a pain, but it’s manageable. The only problem I see with blogging like this is that it’s harder to add links to blog posts also.

Are there any other must have Blackberry apps? I already have email(of course) and Twitter. I also use I’m quite a bit as well. I think I want to look into a Mint.com app if there is one. Are there others I should get?

Last night I had a second to start reading through a bunch of content. I realized as I did this that it had been a while since I’d really spent a good amount of time just consuming interesting content. I think I’ve been spending too much time creating content and not enough time consuming content.

This isn’t completely true. I think I’ve done a decent job of keeping up with content on So You Think You Can Dance and electronic medical records. I kind of have to in order to maintain those blogs. However, even there there’s so much content out there that I only have so much time in a day.

There in lies the problem. How to prioritize your time between the creating and the consuming of content. Creating content is how you make money on a blog. However, I sincerely believe that the more content you consume the better content you create (old school people say “To be a great writer you have to be a great reader.”)

However, even more than the above is that I probably need to spend a little more time consuming content just because it’s enjoyable. I love reading about the progress of WordPress. I love reading the various venture capital or entrepreneur blogs out there. I enjoy me a bit of techcrunch talking about startups, etc, etc, etc.

Of course, it still goes back to having enough time in a day to do everything. All in all, I have no complaints. I love my life. I just can’t help but wonder if I’d love it even more if I tweaked my balance in consuming versus creating content.

One thing is certain. I love blogging!!

Yes, I’m sad to admit it, but I have a problem. I enjoy looking at my stats far too much. I’ve kind of known it’s a problem before, but now it’s just going overboard. Don’t believe me?

I’m absolutely addicted to the WordPress.com stats package. I hit refresh of that screen far too often. With over 12 blogs that I like to watch their stats, I never have one that hasn’t changed. However, I have my 5 favorites that I watch far too closely. I almost wish the stats weren’t real time.

You’d think that would be enough. Nope, I relatively frequently go and check out some of the same stats on Google Analytics. It’s far too fun. I love seeing the traffic grow.

However, that’s not the worst of my problems. Yes, I also have to constantly check Google Adsense to know how much my ads have paid. Yes, this is real time also. Yes, I am absolutely addicted. By day, by channel, by month, by site. Oh brother, the things I could tell you about Google Adsense.

Nope, that’s not all. All my affiliate programs. My favorites are iTunes, Amazon, Ticketmaster and eBay. iTunes being my most common stats checking. Buy.at (which runs that iTunes affiliate program) has the worst reporting of any affiliate program I’ve seen. Luckily, that’s good for me, since there’s less for me to check. Plus, it’s batched at really weird times. However, since it’s weird times I check it too much as well. Ticketmaster has a nice little widget that sits on my desktop like an IV into my veins, pumping stats before my eyes constantly all day. Do you think that’s a problem?

Ok, you thought you were done, right? Not even close.

Yes, I have to watch my feedburner stats too. You’d think just checking the main page to see how many people have subscribed to my feed would be enough. Nope, not for me. That only wets my tongue to get at more stats. Yes, I have to dig into each feed to see how many views it has and how many clicks for my most recent posts. Thankfully this is batched daily too instead of in real time. See the above comment about my 12 blogs and you’ll realize this is really starting to add up.However, I’m not done with the feedburner stats either. Yes, I have to also check how many people have signed up for the email subscriptions as well. I love watching that number grow since how many people really give over their email? They must really like what you’re doing to give you that.

Nah, maybe I don’t really have a problem checking too many stats. It’s probably just a misconception on my part.

Oh wait, how could I forget? Did you know I passed 3000 followers on my @TVBlog twitter account? Watching follower accounts grow isn’t really a stat is it? Just because I look at follower counts on my 4 different twitter accounts doesn’t mean anything does it?

What do you think? Do you think I have a problem?

Yeah, bring on the comments about how much more content I could create on my websites if I stopped checking stats or how much more promotion I could do for my website if I didn’t check my stats. Certainly this is true. However, just think about this for a second. I’ve done nearly 5000 blog posts over the past 4 years. Guess how many posts I would have done, if I didn’t have stats?

I’m a huge fan of WordPress.com. I’m amazed at the platform they’ve created. There are some amazing benefits to using WordPress.com which I’ll save for another post. However, you can be sure that it’s a big part of my marketing strategy. I just wish they’d open it up and allow users to show ads on it already.

What is so amazing about WordPress.com is how they monetize traffic on the site. I’ve been using it for a long time and driven quite a bit of traffic to the site. However, I’d pretty much forgotten that WordPress was putting adds on my blog. At least when they launched, they said it was only a small percentage of the pages on WordPress.com and ads are only shown to people that aren’t logged in to WordPress.com (or was it just users of that blog that weren’t logged in?). Either way, it’s a genius plan.

See, since they don’t show any ads to logged in users (which the owner of the blog is almost always logged in), then owners of the blog forget that the content their creating is being monetized by WordPress.com. How smart is that?

I imagine Matt Mullenweg back there with a little percentage setting that he can change at any time. This week it might be set at 10% of the pages getting ads. Then, next week he decides to double the revenue of WordPress.com and so he changes the setting to 20%. Best part is that users of WordPress.com won’t even notice the difference.

It’s not quite money growing on trees, but pretty close.

I’m a big fan of Google Adsense. I reserve the right to change this opinion, but for now they’ve been doing very well for me and they are a great partner for my websites. My key is to create great content and drive traffic like crazy. So far it’s worked out really well for me.

Well, Google Adsense has kind of caused a pain in my butt with this new Privacy Policy requirement. Basically they gave until April 8, 2009 to post a privacy policy with certain things about Google Ads. Well, I’m late, but better late than never. I now have a Smuggle Me privacy policy and posted a similar policy across all of my blogs (at least I hope I got them all). Thanks to JenSense for a lot of the wording.

At the end of the day, I don’t think that Google really cares about all this. I’m sure it’s just something they’re required to do because of some lawsuit. It’s just so lame, because like anyone really cares about a privacy policy on my blog. Oh well, at least now it’s done.

Here are the details for the third Las Vegas Lunch Tweetup:
Location: Metro Pizza – website – map
Time: Noon
Date: Tuesday, March 10th

View Larger Map

Send me a tweet or leave a comment if you’d like to come. Everyone’s welcome.

Just for my reference more than anything. Here’s the list of people who are planning to attend (with a link to their twitter account of course):
techguy
lollieshopping
Sara_Mooney
vegasgeek

As I discussed at the first Las Vegas lunch tweetup, I’ll be trying to do a tweetup about every other week. We have a new location this week so make note. Everyone’s welcome so let me know if you’re coming so I can let the restaurant know.

This month will be at a nice little italian restaurant on Tropicana not far from UNLV.

Here are the details:
Location: Sergio’s Italian Gardens – website – map
Time: Noon
Date: Tuesday, February 24th

Send me a tweet or leave a comment if you’d like to come. Everyone’s welcome as long as we don’t get too big for Paymon’s.

Just for my reference more than anything. Here’s the list of people who are planning to attend (with a link to their twitter account of course):
techguy
JustJulie
PalidinLV
vegasgeek – Solid maybe
JessBerlin

After I experienced a bit of jealousy over all those people that were going to the Beer and Blog Las Vegas, I decided to do my own Las Vegas Lunch tweetup. Evenings are just too hard for me with my little ones. Here’s my original tweet announcing the Las Vegas lunch tweetup.

Here are the details:
Location: Paymon’s Mediterranean Cafe Map – website
Time: Noon
Date: Tuesday, February 10th

Send me a tweet or leave a comment if you’d like to come. Everyone’s welcome as long as we don’t get too big for Paymon’s.

Just for my reference more than anything. Here’s the list of people who are planning to attend (with a link to their twitter account of course):
techguy
roadup
lollieshopping
JustJulie
vegasgeek
nothus
JessBerlin
fostermatt – Tentative maybe
courvo
ghp2006 - Try to make it