Yes, I had an epiphany and I’m not ashamed of it. Like the epiphanies before, this gem was so obvious it was stupidly beautiful (or beautifully stupid).

I don’t know if I have the ability to describe the full diorama of the idea, but I’ll try. Lately I’ve been registering domains like a fool. Any niche or meme that I feel like I can one day profit off of, I think “Hey I need 10 domains for that!” and hastily buy them, then just let them sit and park (much to Google’s content). Many many domains sitting unused. No traffic, therefore no revenue. And I’ve been getting more and more niche ideas lately. So my dilemma was: lots of ideas * lots of ideas = almost zero revenue – lots of costs. So basically I’ve been losing a lot of money on parked domains. Yet I still want to play and get more.

So the epiphany I had isn’t new to most people, just me. It’s simply this: you don’t need a damn domain for every niche play you enter! Get a wordpress, tumblr, google pages, blogger, or whatever free site/hosting account, build up your content there, drive some traffic, and THEN when something starts to stick grab a domain and start point links to it from all your free pages. OR, and this is where it comes in handy for me, create that page of content for your new niche on an existing domain that ALREADY has the trust and age going for it. You’ll be able to rank faster and longer. (that’s what she said! hehehe).

Are you an Awesome SEM? If you didn’t take the time to answer the question, then you are. Let me break your silent focus for one moment, then you can get back to your A/B testing. By showing your PPC awesomeness, you can win free tickets and accommodations to Elite Retreat! Simply do what you do, but do it better than anyone else. PepperjamNETWORK is hosting the contest. And no, they didn’t pay me to post this. I just thought I’d pass it on since I know some of my readers would love to attend the event and this is one way how to do it on someone else’s dollar.

Find out more details about the PepperjamNETWORK / Elite Retreat contest here.

Now I think there is an unwritten law, a code of blogging ethics, that says “If you are a blogger, and win something big, you must blog about it rub it in show how appreciative you are to the sponsors.” So here it is. My “I WON! I WON!” post!

Here’s everything I won (and the sponsors that supplied them):

• $550 – 1 Xbox 360/Guitar Hero Package or Cash depending on availability
  - From Groovle
• $804 – 1 year subscription to www.plrproebooks.com
  - From PLRPro Ebooks
• $1,164 – 1 year subscription to plrpro.com
  - From PLRPro
• $1,500 – 1 drupal customized site. You pick the niche, and they will create a 15 page site loaded with some really cool drupal features
  - From Swimming Pool Knowledge
• $1,895 – 1 full conference pass to SES Chicago
  - From Incisive Media

I’m still kinda shell shocked and trying to figure out the best way to use each of the prizes. Some I’ll enjoy and others I’ll leverage hoping to improve some of my marketing skills (much improvement is needed). Looking over the prize list, I can’t say there isn’t one prize I’m more excited about than the others, all of them are great prizes.

So a huge “Thank You” to Shoe, Tigh (Manager at Shoemoney Media) and all the sponsors! You ROCK!

Not that kind of tripping.

Have you ever tripped (see that’s how) upon a thought so powerful that it made you shake? I just came across something so powerful and so undiscovered that I almost don’t know what to do with it.

It’s not fair. I wasn’t ready for it. Now I have to make use of it.

And it’s all good. I just wasn’t prepared. I almost don’t feel worthy of this idea.

We’ll see.

Here’s what others are saying about BlogRush after they’ve had a taste:

Blogrush is at once an ingenious idea and a bit of a throwback to “Web 1.0″ affiliate schemes.
- Mashable at Blogrush: Traffic Generator or Pyramid Scheme?

While we’re skeptical, BlogRush might be “worth a try”. Although traffic exchanges are notorious for driving poor traffic, BlogRush’s targeting means you may get more interested readers, not just passers by.
- Mashable again at BlogRush: 8 Reasons to Be Wary…and Optimistic

So why do I like Blog Rush so much?

Well first of all read my disclaimer. John Reese is one of my best friends in this industry and was a guy who was very instrumental to me as a mentor in launching AuctionAds. John has the financial resources and the technical resources to make this thing fly.

Also several months ago when John was designing Blog Rush I came up with the idea of doing a friend roll. I can tell you this is working really well and I have heard nothing but positive comments about it. The only downfall with my friend roll is that I get nothing in return for giving traffic to my friends. Blog Rush is the answer to people who want reciprocal traffic.
- Shoemoney at How To Get 45k Impressions A Day From Blogrush

Not another fanfare of recycled junk, which is often the case online!
- Direct Response Web Media at Congrats To John Reese!

The base idea behind this isn’t new. This is the Web 2.0 version of a Banner Exchange network. The different being, rather than being stuck with 1 banner to display in a network across thousands of sites, instead your headlines and your site name get displayed on like minded sites. It looks to be quite powerful. Like so many others, I’m testing it out to see how much extra traffic it will bring to the site.
- Geeeek on Why aren’t you Blog Rushing?

Traffic Equals Money

Let’s face it, without traffic it’s pretty hard for a blog to make any money. The more traffic you have, the more money you make. Everyone wants more traffic and we’re always looking for more ways to get it. Internet Marketing kingpin, John Reese, has came up a great way to help your blog get more traffic.

BlogRush is a “Cooperative Syndication network” that rewards its users for their contributions to the network. BlogRush was designed to be incredibly viral and to provide its users with tremendous distribution leverage to receive exposure for their blog content that they could never achieve on their own; at least without a massive advertising budget.
- John Chow on Increase Your Blog Traffic With BlogRush

It at least sounds like something worth testing so I have added to MP. While it’s always nice to earn additional traffic, you can trust that if the widget spews nothing but spam, it will be removed faster than you can say “BlogRush”.
- Andy Beal on BlogRush Offers Free Syndicated Blog Traffic

My initial impressions of the system is that it’s worth exploring.

While I’m not a fan of traffic exchange programs – this one is a little different because it attempts to promote your blog on relevant blogs.
- Darren Rowse on Find New Readers for Your Blog – BlogRush First Impression Review

As I’ve been pondering the new BlogRush traffic building service (which I did a first impression review of earlier) over the last few hours I am increasingly thinking that it has potential to help bloggers find new traffic.

The bones are there for it to work – but how can you leverage it to increase your chances of converting for you and squeeze out some extra traffic for your blog.
- Darren Rowse does a second helping at Tips for Using BlogRush to Generate Traffic for Your Blog

But at the very least, having impressions on some high exposure blogs, such as those mentioned above, equals a free branding opportunity. One would normally have to pay hundreds of dollars to get seen on those sites. To me, this benefit alone is worth trying out BlogRush.
- me at What Is A BlogRush?

Some of the reviews seem to be pulling from the energy of the launch campaign. Others appear to have really taken a look at what BlogRush is promising and what it can currently do. The majority, such as myself, have a general attitude of “ok, I’ll try it this once.” John Reese must be known as the pusher, because I’ve never seen this many bloggers “try something” in such swarms before.

And…yeah…I quoted myself. Seemed appropriate with all the self-promotion that will continue to occur in the next few weeks as bloggers try to scoop up the remaining few who haven’t heard of BlogRush.

But not everyone licking the belly of this toad. Some have thrown up red flags that BlogRush might not appear all it seems to be:

Does BlogRush violate the adsense terms of service? I’m not 100% sure, but my opinion is you are on thin ice using any traffic exchange program on a site with adsense. I for sure don’t want to risk my adsense account for some flavor of the day traffic exchange.
- 45n5 at Warning – BlogRush May Violate The Adsense Terms Of Service

I’m really not a fan of blog widgets. There’s a lot of hype about BlogRush at the moment and I am personally a little doubtful that it’ll actually generate traffic that’s worth the real estate on my blog. Why? Because the click through rate may not be fantastic as it will also depend on where the widget is placed on other blogs.
- DoshDosh on BlogRush Review: Using Widgets to Get Traffic to Your Blog

5. These services typically benefit the first members the most. Those that fail to join early lose out. This leads to disenchantment and eventually the lessening of network effects.

6. Too Easily Abused. Refresh your blog 100 times, and you’ve earned 100 credits. This can be fixed partially by BlogRush by only tracking clickthroughs, not exposures, or some kind of IP tracking. There’s no mention on the site as to whether this is already in place.
- Mashable on BlogRush: 8 Reasons to Be Wary…and Optimistic

It’s still to early to tell if BlogRush is a long term strategy or not. In the meantime, you’re best strategy to capitalize on the traffic is to, of course, join BlogRush, and then write a few blog posts about it and hope that bloggers like me link to you because you had a quotable quote. Just don’t ping me, I’m done talking about BR for a few weeks while the waters calm.

BlogRush is to RSS feeds what BannerExchanges were to banners in 5 years ago. I used to run a very large and profitable traffic exchange, and you could almost say that BlogRush is a traffic generator. Basically, you display a widget, like the one I have in the sidebar, that will display recent headlines in the category you select. I wasn’t sure whether to select “business”, “marketing” or “technology” for my blog, so I’m testing it under marketing for now. BlogRush then aggregates headlines from related blogs and uses a formula to select which headlines from other blogs to display on your site. The formula is part relevancy, part recency, and a big part pyramid scheme to determine which ads get displayed where. Let’s not put a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This is definitely a referral based program. The more people you refer, and the more people their referrals refer, the more impressions you earn. BlogRush uses your impression balance to place your most recent blog post title in other blogger’s widgets.

The headline titles under marketing have so far ranged from all out spammy to informative and helpful. I’ve seen pure spam-blogs (or “splogs” if you’re so desperate to use an poorly coigned term) to extremely popular blogs such as John Chow, Problogger and Mashable. The cool thing about BlogRush is that you can filter out URLs that you don’t want displayed on your site, or even go so far as to filter out keywords that you’d rather not include. Problem is that this is a very manual process. If you don’t keep tabs on it, you’ll get overwhelmed badly, just like the early days of comment spam. If BlogRush is truly going to work for the masses, they should pre-filter content using a corporate Akismet account. This will at least reduce the amount of moderation needed by individuals.

As with any new memes, I’m willing to give a try. I don’t have to worry about getting Google bitch-slapped for creating artificial links either. First, this is a javascript widget. Each of those links are found only within the widget and not crawled by any bots visiting my site. Second, if the bots could follow JS (oh the consipiracy!) the blogs are indeed relevant to my site and targetted to my audience. But I’ll stick with the first since it deems most true.

I’ll report back in a week or so to show some of the results of any traffic that BlogRush generated. You have to remember that BlogRush doesn’t deliver hits, they only deliver impressions on other peoples sites. So just because you’re earning massive amounts of impressions, that doesn’t necessarily convert to click thrus to your site. If that’s the case, then I’ll brush this off as a gimmick and try something else. But at the very least, having impressions on some high exposure blogs, such as those mentioned above, equals a free branding opportunity. One would normally have to pay hundreds of dollars to get seen on those sites. To me, this benefit alone is worth trying out BlogRush.

BlogRush.com

The How:

Dumb little man writes a great article to show new readers How to Blog. (Thanks John for the link!) He makes it look simple, but actually provides some profound advice on how to create a quality blog with a solid audience. His list provides great tips on writing, where to find topics, time management, monetization and optimization, etc. If you didn’t get your fix there, Darren rounded up an additional 113 blogging hints to get your blog on. Still not enough? Mashable, which is lately becoming more of “top 10″ lists type of blog than a web 2.0 industry blog (I bet more traffic is suspect), gave us a monolithic 300+ wordpress tips including a few nice themes to try. Need help keeping track of everything? Give MyProgress a try. I just created an account myself (verdict: kickass awesome!!).

The What:

So now that we’ve all relearned how to blog, the question most n00bs ask is “what do I talk about?” The generic answers usually involve “blog about something you love” or “find a niche” or “whatever you’re an expert on”. Well, those seem good in theory, but I doubt there is any money to be made in learning “How to Divert Your Angry Wife’s Attention Away From You So You Can Finish Watching the Fourth Quarter of The Bronco’s Pre-season Game”. Reality is, if you want to make money doing this thing online (maybe you don’t), you need to have a topic that could easily be supported by paying advertisers or a CPA affiliate program (where they pay you a percentage for each sale you bring in). So where do you find such a topic? You can research for trends yourself using Google Trends, Ebay, eHow, Wordtracker, etc. Or you could cheat and piggyback off of hundreds of users worth of research for the Thirty Day Challenge. Hey look, there’s even more!

The Why:

Why one would want to blog is really up to the blogger. One could be worried about his/her reputation and want to be their own official voice. One could be in it for the money. Or one might be required to as part of their job. A blogger might be an over zealous fan of a product or brand. Or they may be someone who just loves to write.

Whatever your reason, I would like to point you towards a worthwhile cause. On October 15th, thousands of bloggers (including many A-listers) will take part in Blog Action Day. This is simply a day in which every blogger is asked to post an awareness piece on a single topic. This year, the event will focus on the environment.

So maybe some bloggers will blog just because doing so feels so right.

• Today is Day 11 out of 30 for My Own Thirty Day Challenge.

Coincidentally, I read a post about being new to affiliate marketing at Super Affiliate Mindset today. Ever since Amit Mehta appeared on the affiliate marketing blog scene, I’ve been soaking up his writings like a dry sponge. He has a very human approach to affiliate marketing. To him, it’s not just a job, it’s a lifestyle! And he has a very fun way of showing off the lifestyle that his marketing efforts let him afford too. His whole philosophy is on creating the “mindset” to be successful. I couldn’t agree more with his theory. To be a successful affiliate, a “Super Affiliate”, you need to eat, live, sleep and breathe like a successful affiliate. This doesn’t necessarily mean working harder, but it definitely means working smarter and synergizing and networking with other successful marketers. That’s the key when you are new.

So what would I do to create a challenge for experienced and new marketers alike? I think that I would focus a lot of time and efforts on the “mindset” of affiliate marketing. This is something that n00bs need to learn and something that veterans always need to be reminded of. To spark having the mindset as the core of the challenge, I’d require each new marketer to pair up with a successful/experienced marketer. Then the challenge would be team based. This would be a step further than the TDC’s “mentors”, as it would be a true 1-on-1 coaching experience for both parties of the team. There may need to be a recommended agenda or curriculum for the coaches to follow since most of them would be new to coaching together. A lot of details to trick out, but that’s the general idea. By having experienced marketers team up with inexperienced marketers, you end up not only creating an environment for a lot of energy and motivation, but you also will help form partnerships and friendships that may (or may not) last well beyond the challenge.

I’m not sure if something like this would work or not, but it’s what I’ve been thinking about at the moment.

• Today is Day 3 out of 30 for My Own Thirty Day Challenge.
• This post is also part of the 30 Day Challenge Series.

So to celebrate a successful Day 1 of Affiliate Summit, I’d like to fire out a few shout outs to the many people I met today (check it out, free linkage!). This will also be a good BUZZ monitor to see who’s tracking their reputation. So, here goes:

First to a good friend in the industry Michael Stark from PostYourProperty.com and LookForProperty.com. Once again Michael provided me with a great dinner and an intellectually stimulating conversation about the industry, politics, business, and our families. Thanks again Michael. Cheers.

Next to Brandon Phillips and Tim Kastner from Lashback. For those who don’t know, Lashback is a brilliant compliance monitoring service that tracks live email campaigns for CAN-SPAM compliance and suppression file abuse. Through my employer I’ve been a Lashback client for 3 months now and they have been a crucial support lifeline for my job function. I don’t know how we ever managed without them.

Now a shout out to my peeps from Virtumundo, where I used to work, in Kansas City. I was able to visit with Robyn Gearheart and Dena Ocampo, two fantastic ladies who are big-time movers and shakers in the affiliate industry. If you are in affiliate marketing and you haven’t worked with them at one point, I’m sure your time isn’t too far away. There was also several new faces at the company and it’s great to see the growth that is occurring there. I also bumped into Greg Loeffelholz in the hall, whom for whatever reason I keep calling Brian (I always knew him as “Loeffelholz”), who is now the president of FreeScholarshipGuide.com. It was nice to bump into you Brian, I mean Greg, hope to talk with you a bit more tomorrow.

A shout to Brent and Erik (hope I recall your names correctly) from CSN Stores from Boston, who’s Superbowl dreams were smashed when Manning decided to start playing like a pro on Sunday. I’d wish you luck next year, but my Broncos are taking the AFC Championship game. Sorry, you might as well accept it now. It was still cool to meet up with you guys and I hope we can do some business in the near future.

And last, but definitely not least, are the speakers from the Super Affiliate session. It was a Q&A session with Jon F. (mook_jon) from WickedFire, Jeremy Shoemaker from ShoeMoney Media Group and a ton of other projects like Elite Retreat, and Andrew Johnson from Web Publishing Blog. They all did great job, especially considering the cannon-fodder questions that were lobbed their way from the audience. I enjoyed visiting with each of them one-on-one after or before the panel. I’ve had online discussions with a couple of them, but finally was able to put a face to the name. They’re all great guys with a lot of energy for this industry. They each have a very wide array of different projects going on, but what was defining of this group is they “get” self-branding. They each have a fairly decent following of readers and subscribers that eat up any information that is thrown their ways. Shout to Shoemoney’s sister, Andrea from Planet Andrea who is become a big leaguer pretty fast in this industry. She’s now the director of sales for WickedFire, but you know she’s still lurking on DigitalPoint and I’m sure she’ll be involved in Elite Retreat still. I also met with SEO_Mike who’s a crazy WF member who is getting the WF logo tattooed on his forearm. That’s hardcore dedication bro! It’s good publicity for the WF community and a new definition of “brand loyalty”. I always knew that WF members were a crazy crowd.

I met many other faces at the show, but if I didn’t collect your business card it makes it difficult to remember who was where with what company. This show has been great so far, and I’ll do another series of shouts tomorrow for sure (so bury me with your business cards please). I’ll see everyone tomorrow!