Monthly Archives: September 2007

Articles/Editorials

Viagra traffic sign?!?

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Ok,. I drive by this sign at least once every day, and have done so for years, I finally decided to grab my camera and take a picture of it….

This sign looks like the stages of an Erection…  we like to call it the ‘Erection Sign’ for obvious reasons.. but almost every time I see it I have to sort of giggle… (yeah I know childish and all that, but you gotta admit it’s funny!)

If you click the pics they will open to a very large resolution picture of 2272×1704 .. I thought maybe someone might like to use it for their desktop wallpaper! heh!

SO now we need to come up with a caption for it to make it more interesting….

Maybe Viagra should use this sign for a new advertisement for their wonder drug!

Some slogans for them possibly:

‘On the road of life there’s only one way to go : Viagra’

‘The way to get ‘ahead’  in life’

Dunno… come up with some others.. I know you can!

SEO/Traffic

Ways to increase traffic to your site.

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Let’s face it, we blog for other people, sure we blog because we like it, but what’s the point really if no one reads it right?

So how do we bring traffic or visitors to our sites to read what we ramble about?

There are several ways to do this of course, and I’d like to touch on a few and maybe help others out who are trying to get traffic to their site.

This is by no means a complete list, just something off the top of my head that I compiled quickly for this post:

Contests and GiveAways:

This is probably one of the easier ways to get traffic to your site, and of course get link backs as well. Hold a contest and give something away like a prize or money even, people love to get free stuff and especially love money. The best thing to do is to do it randomly, have people link to you with an anchor text of your choice and just randomly draw a winner when the contest is over. The idea of the anchor text and link is essentially to bring traffic and also to help your search engine rankings by using that particular anchor text to identify your blog.

A couple examples would be:

Hey It’s Free – He blogs about free stuff you can find, including contests offering free stuff, if you have a contest then drop him a line

ContestBlogger – There are quite a few blogs that are just blogs about contest, but one that is becoming popular very fast is Contest Blogger, he’ll post about your contest and even have it featured for a price…

Reviews:

Have people review your site, especially if you are a higher ranking blog, you can offer to link back to other blogs if they review your site, this not only helps you with a bit more exposure but also helps out ‘the little guy’ who is trying to make a name for themselves and sends some quality traffic their way as well.

Community Traffic Generators:

There are a couple popular blogging community sites out there, these help to link blogs together and help individuals find out about new blogs as well that they might be interested in.

MyBlogLog – is by far the most popular blogging community out there, it’s easy to use and very well done.

BlogCatalog – is sort of MyBlogLogs competition, BlogCatalog works but just not as well as MyBlogLog, personally I just don’t like the feel of BlogCatalog, but if it helps to get more traffic then join either way right?

Technocrati – sort of falls under the community traffic generators, but it’s not quite as community oriented as the above two are, but it does work very well at bringing traffic and we all know that Technocrati is used for ranking your site.

BlogRush – not quite a community traffic generator, but they work with you displaying a widget on your site, like I have at the bottom right. Every time you get a page view, your site gets a link on someone another BlogRush widget. It’s listed under community because it takes the community of bloggers joining to make it work. It’s a very interesting and very new concept that I’m curious to see how it works…

Social Bookmarking Sites:

Social bookmarking sites are a lot harder to get into, but they can bring a bit of traffic to your site and if you’re VERY lucky they can bring a whole lot of traffic to your site and make you very popular overnight… but it doesn’t last long…

Digg – we all know what Digg is, no explanation needed

del.icio.us – another type of social bookmarking site that can work as well as Digg does

Reddit – it’s a different type of social bookmarking site, a bit more on the conservative side I think though..

The next three don’t quite fall under Social Bookmarking but they sort of work the same way..

StumbleUpon – has become very popular, it sort of works on the social bookmarking but you have a browser plugin or toolbar that allows you to essentially vote on sites or articles

DIY News – not many people really know about DIY News, but you can submit stories and users can vote on them. They have an interesting rating system where your story/article can be voted on and commented on as well.

Slashdot – Slashdot really isn’t social bookmarking as it is editorial bookmarking, you submit something and just hope it gets picked by one of their editors….

Feel free to comment on others out there, as I said this is by no means a complete list, just something I threw together that I thought might be a bit interesting to others out there…

Kids/Parents

Let’s Talk with Puppy Dog!

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A few of you out there who read my blog are parents, and even if you aren’t you may have a brother, sister, niece or nephew that might love these DVDs as much as my kid does!

I stop in the local Dollar Tree every once in a while to pick up little stuff, and they sometimes have DVD’s and such for $1 each. So last month I stopped in and saw these DVDs for little kids (ages infant to 3 years) called ‘Let’s Talk with Puppy Dog‘ so I thought they looked interesting and decided to grab a couple of them.

I brought them home and popped one of the DVDs in for my 2 year old and an amazing thing happened, for the first time ever I saw him sit on the couch and watch TV, he sat there and watched the entire episode of Puppy Dog. I was amazed by this, normally he couldn’t care less about TV, he does like Teletubbies sometimes, but he loses interest when the tubbies are not actually on, but with Puppy Dog he sat there just staring.

I ended up getting all of the episodes:

-All About ABC’s

-All About Animals

-All About Shapes

-All About Counting

-Baby Phonics

The ‘All About’ ones are just great and Vincent loves them, the ‘phonics’ one is totally different than the others and he’s not quite interested in it as the others.

I’ve never seem him really excited about something as he is with these DVDs now, I’ll pick him up from Daycare and he’ll be talking about Puppy Dog on the way home! He actually gets involved with the show and talks along repeating things and trying to do the things they do. Like hopping like a rabbit, or making shapes with your hands and other things they do. In the beginning of the DVDs it starts out with a big ‘Hi Puppy Dog!’ and Vincent is right along with it saying ‘Hi Puppy Dog’ and other parts he’s right along with them, he’s discovered DVDs now and he won’t let anyone watch anything else, we have to have Puppy Dog on.

The Animations are a bit kooky, and the entire thing is kinda goofy, for adults anyway, but for kids it’s great. It’s bright, colorful and lots of fun, as I said I’ve never seem my son involved in anything or as excited about anything as he is now with Puppy Dog!

If you’re a parent try and get these for you child, you will not regret it!

Here’s some info from the ‘Let’s Talk with Puppy Dog’ website:

At the Creative Learning Company, we treasure that magical moment in a child’s development when they speak their first words. The Let’s Talk! with Puppy Dog Videos nurture this precious time by engaging young children in cheerful language-focused play activities. This imaginative series is based on a unique Creative Learning Method that invites kids to speak up and play along. With each viewing, children learn more, speak more, and gain confidence.

Developed by educators and parents (and tested with kids!), the Puppy Dog series has already won several National Awards, including Dr. Toy’s 10 Best Audio Video Products and Dr. Toy’s 100 Best Children’s Products.

It truly is magic when children begin to talk. Join in the fun as they experience and delight in Puppy Dog’s fun-filled world of speaking!

and NO, this is not a paid advertisement… I just found something very cool that I felt really needed to be shared with other parents out there….

Articles/Editorials, Giveaways

Those crazy Japanese!

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Well I’ve just added another product to the list of things being given away at DragonSteelMods, actually 10 more things…

Ah yes, today we have another entry into the exciting and weird products category from our friends at Strapya World. A few days ago I took a look at some rather cool Anime related cellphone charms, today I’ve got another assortment of charms but these are a bit different and possibly risque, depending on your attitudes towards these things. Me, eh, I just thing they’re pretty cool, and of course I’m giving them all away as well. They are called Erokawa Lingerie, or for us we’ll just call them Sexy Underwear, so read on…

 Review and Giveaway: Sexy Underwear Cell Phone Strap Erokawa Lingerie @ DragonSteelMods

Giveaways

Contest 2.0

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Ok, I’m thinking doing it this way.

On your blog make a post about and link to my contest at DSM and my blog to this post .

At the end of the month I will choose 2 people who posted about my contest and let them choose any two things from the list, and I will choose 5 more people to send one of the Super Mario Brother key chains to.

Here’s the list:

Futura Laptop Desk from LapWorks

Slim Keyboard + Num Pad from Brando WorkShop

Thermaltake iXoft Notebook Cooling Pad

Apiotek InnerOne Shock-proof Notebook Inner Bag

USB Retractable Fish Mouse from USBGeek

CoolerMaster Notepal S

Antec NoteBook Cooler S

USB Chess Game from USBGeek

SteelPad QcK heavy Pro mousepad

HUMPING DOG USB Gadget from Strapya World

USB Missile Launcher from Brando WorkShop

X-Gene Biometric Keyboard

So.. to recap… to enter link to my Contest over at DragonSteelMods, and link back to this post. To be sure you are entered please leave a comment here as well. At the end of September, 7 winners will be drawn, two of which will get to choose TWO things from the list and the other five winners will get a Super Mario Brother Squishy Keychain!!

Pretty easy right?

But, somewhere in there I want the anchor text ‘gadgets’ linking to www.dragonsteelmods.com and the anchor text ‘blog contest’ linking to this post. You can use whatever you want to link to the contest at DSM, like ‘September Giveaway at DragonSteelMods’ would work fine

Articles/Editorials, Giveaways

Contest again!

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The winner of the R2-D2 contest has been emailed, but they haven’t got back to me yet, so check your spam boxes!!

And I think I’m going to do something a bit different now… I want to promote my big contest over at DSM, so I’m thinking of offering a couple prizes to bloggers to post about the contest on their blogs. Basically if you post about the contest for me and link to it, you’ll get an entry into the contest over here….

I’ve got a couple things in mind for prizes like:

X-Gene Biometric Keyboard -a little added security and of course the coolness factor

Thermaltake iXoft Notebook Cooling pad

Futura Laptop Desk from Lapworks

Slim Keyboard with Numpad

Retractable Fish Mouse

Apiotek InnerOne Shock-Proof, Waterproof Notebook bag

I’m thinking of just throwing this list out there and picking two winners to choose what prize they want from the list.

What ya think?