Welcome to Smuggle Me

A week or so ago I got an interesting email from my little sister. She wanted to borrow our Asus eee (basically a little computer) since she really wanted to finish a novel she’s been working on for a while. I don’t know if my sister knows what she’s getting herself into. I think I might need to ask my friend in New Orleans to talk to her about writing a novel.

Anyway, my sister isn’t giving me many details about the novel. I think it’s because she’s writing some smutty romance that she knows I won’t like. That said, I do love seeing people live out their dreams. So, we sent our little computer to her. This should be interesting. I’m going to tell her that in return for borrowing the computer I want 20% of her book sale royalties. Seems reasonable to me. I wonder what she’ll think.

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!!

I have a friend that is really good at scouring the internet to find all sorts of ways to save money or even make money in many cases. His wife would always make fun of him for how much time he spends online looking for deals and ways to make money.

My favorite is when he combined a whole bunch of deals from credit cards and ended up with a stack of cash, miles and other benefits. Although, the funniest one was when he made his wife wait 30 minutes to go to dinner so that he could get a discount which would save him $0.80. Shows you how serious he is about saving money.

Well, I was talking to him the other day and told him he should start a blog about all the various deals he finds. After our discussion, I helped him out and setup Mound of Money. He’s already created a post talking about getting discount hotels and Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program. Watch that site and I think you’re going to really like what he posts.

Also, if you like what he’s written do him a favor and stumble some of his posts. Thanks!

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 got the following email today:

Dear Customer,
At Vonage, we’re committed to providing our valued customers with the best experience possible through meaningful updates to our services. To ensure that we continue to deliver top-notch service and quality, we will modify two of our existing fees as follows:
The Emergency 911 Cost Recovery will become the Emergency 911 Service Fee, which ensures we maintain nationwide E911 service in compliance with FCC regulations. Our customers’ safety in an emergency is our primary concern and this update allows us to continue delivering reliable emergency services.

The Regulatory Recovery Fee will become the Regulatory and Compliance Fee, which covers our regulatory-related and legal compliance expenses. For example, this fee pays for charges associated with benefits like procedures to ensure customer privacy, identity theft protection measures and phone number porting.
These fees will each increase from $0.99 to $1.49, effective July 15, 2009. This change allows Vonage to maintain our commitment to safety, innovation and customer service.

If you have any questions, call 1-VONAGE-HELP and speak to a customer service representative. We’re always available, 24 hours a day, everyday.

Thank you for your business,
Vonage

Does Vonage really think I’m that stupid? They aren’t raising prices in order to “deliver top-notch service and quality.” They’re raising the prices so that they can make more money. Call it what it is. Don’t try to blow wind up my skirt.

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 really hate when people forwarded me an email. Most people only do it once, because when they do I politely ask them to stop sending me a forward. Some people don’t like it, but luckily most of them are good with it. I just don’t usually have time to read forwards. Not to mention, I hate getting duplicates of something I’ve seen before.

I’ve always thought a nice alternative to the email forward would be to create a website which took the best things from these forwards (since some of them really are funny, interesting and enjoyable). Turns out someone else had the same thought and created a website called Mostly Safe For Work: A compendium of interesting miscellany from around the world.

Turns out it’s a great idea. As a website you can go when you want to take a break so it doesn’t interrupt your work like a forward could. You can also get it through RSS if you’d like. You also don’t have to worry about getting the same thing over and over.

As a side note, anyone that would like to buy me this blogging house, I’d appreciate it.

This came across my twitter stream and I just had to post it. In the same kind of theme as Where the Hell is Matt?, this video shows a little girl playing the violin all over the world.

I bet the stories they can tell are even better than the video. You can read more about the video and this little girl on the soultravelers3 website.

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.

Do you like clearance sales? Well I just found out about a great one! Sears is having a HUGE clearance sale until Saturday, April 18, 2009. They are offering 75-80% off original prices on most fall and winter apparel.

I know that fall has been over for a while now and we are at the end of winter, but now is a great time to buy clothes for the next fall and winter seasons, especially when the clearance sale is this huge. The apparel can also be a great birthday present for someone who has an early fall/winter birthday.

I was quite impressed as I was looking through the online catalog. Every time I have shopped at a huge clearance sale, there was never a wide variety of clothing. However Sears is offering a “Clearance Clothing for the Family.” Their featured categories are for women, women’s plus, men, juniors, young boys and girls, and infants.

My favorite outfit was the Apostrophe Tunic top and pants.

It is on sale for $5.99 each, but is normally $36.00 each. This was my favorite outfit because it can be a casual outfit, yet it can also be considered business attire too. It also has a squareneck design and fits loosely, so it could possibly be worn during the summer as well. My wife will love it.

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