Well even engineers need a vacation.  I am going to be going away for a week starting the 26th.  Unlike the last time I left I am going to leave someone in charge of my sites.

So this leads me into the TIP OF THE WEEK:

Always keep track of your sites.  I know that sometimes it can get overwhelming when you have too many, but be sure to at the very least visit them once a week.  There was a time not that long ago that I left for vacation and made sure that I had no contact with the outside world.  And guess what happened….a major crack was found in both phpBB and PHP-NUKE.  This led to 5 of my sites being defaced, nothing lost but defaced, which meant that any of the traffic that I was getting from SEs and returning guests were being welcomed with a front page that said something along the lines of, “this site has been owned by…”.

To make things worse this happened at the beginning of the vacation so there was a 10 day period that they were defaced in this manner.  My traffic took a HUGE hit, I lost a lot of great contributors at the time and a lot of cred.

I had to work double as hard to get the great contributors back, even resorting to bribing a couple with free stuff.  It was around this time that I felt it was time to limit the sites that I had running for the time being.  I also relaized that if I was going to leave civilization for any amount of time I am going to be sure that there is someone else around that I trust to look over things.

I think that I have come up with my next theme for my website, its ….

HA!  I bet you thought that I was going to tell you.  Well it is not that big of a secret of one, and it is not really in a market that is THAT easy to break into, but it is something that I am sure going to enjoy writing about, so that makes the task that much easier.  Also I know few people that can give me some help, and the topic is one that most tech savvy people don’t really pay a lot of attention to, so that means it is more likely that these people will hit my ads

Anyway, I am going to start gathering my information in the next couple of weeks.  Maybe get a couple of good articles written from some people on elance and then get a press release written up.

I am going to set a limit on the money that I am going to spend on the site start-up and a specific amount of time before I earn that money back.

Enjoying what I am spending my time on is not enough, if all that I am making is a dollar for every hour of my time I am better off playing low limit poker online.

::EDIT::
Well I have the domain, set up a quick drupal site and am all ready to start adding some content. To do that I have to do some reading, and then do some more reading. However since it is something that I haven’t done a whole lot of reading on before it will be fun to re-learn everything about it.

One of my sites is a forum.  I have been running the site for sometime now, but since it is basically a hobby site I haven’t really done any good business work to it.  This is something that I am going to change.  There are a number of things that I am going to do to double the traffic by April, and double it again by this time next year.

1. Create a new front page. Currently the site looks like a forum, I need the site to look like a news source WITH a forum.  To do that I am going to re-create the front page.  The front page is going to have a number of “news” stories that I will pull for different sources, or write myself.  It will also have the recent links that were added to our News Links engine.

2. Create more content.  The next thing that I am going to do is write better stories.  These will be picked depending on what keywords I want to target.  Usually the keywords will be something someone searched for already or something that i think that people who will want to write in the forum would be interested in.  I am going to strive to create at least 1 page every 2 weeks.  These pages will be huge, with LOTs of information.  I will also be searching for links to these pages with wild abandon.

3. Make site SE friendly  This is one that I am not sure if I am ready for yet.  Currently the siet is as friendly to the SEs as I can make it without adding MOD-Rewrite support.  I may actually have to do this in the near future, but the best way to do that costs a fortune (for a site that makes little to nothing).

4. Write more posts.  The only way for the forum to become active is if it looks active.  To do that I am going to have to do more posting myself.  I am planning on  10 posts a day till April, and by then I should have enough to cut back and work more on promotion.

5. New look.  In April I am going to give the entire site a NEW and IMPROVED look, from a PAID designer.  Currently I am using free styles that really don’t fit my site.  I am also going to be working on a new logo, name and brand.  In the coming months I am going to brand the site like branding is going out of style.  I am going to make cards to give to all my friends, I am going to get T-shirts made to wear to the gym, in public, etc.

6. Contests, I am going to be running monthly contests and guess what 1st prize is going to be….A T-Shirt and a spot on the winners board.  That’s right I am going to have the community create my content and promotion and then for a prize they will get some more promotional material

So that is my plan, I will give you an update in April to let you know how it went.  I am hoping that everything goes smoothly from here on out.

What is Receive Links and why do I care? 

Those are two questions you are probably wondering about right now.  Well, simply put ReceiveLinks is a program that was developed to help website owners to promote their website.  The way that it works in a nutshell is like this.  You place links from the network on your site via a small php file that they provide.  You can place it on any or all of your pages.  depending on the quality of the page and the number of link spaces you supply, you will receive points.  These points go toward your ads being placed on other sites.

What makes ReceiveLinks better than the other existing systems is the level of control that they give you, right from the basic free to the paid accounts.  You are able to control both what type of ads are placed on your site and where you want to have your ads placed.  Some of the controls include, by language, by category, etc., and the links are all reviewed to enure that they conform to a set of guidelines that both the ads and the sites must conform  Also you can control how fast you place links up to 20 per day.  So you can place 1 link a day, or 10 links every 10 days, etc…

More –>

On my getting popular Link directory I have installed an article directory using the software provided by Article Dashboard.  I really like the look and the professionalism of the software.  There is still some work to get done, but in the meantime if you have an article or 100 that you would like to add to the directory the URL is articles.bluenoserlinks.com

So go ahead and add a few, I will be doing some work on the site in the coming days, confirming what the TOS should be and adding and deleting some categories.  There is only one more piece of software that I want to add and that is a bookstore, but I think that it is going to be a webmaster themed bookstore and will probably be attached to this site.  I don’t think that BluenoserLinks is really the place that needs a Book Store, however believe me that there will be a link from there to the Book Store on this site