• 1 pair of tickets to see Cirque Du Soleil’s Ka
• 1 pair of tickets to see Cirque Du Soleil’s Mystere
• 3 Pro Plus Theme packs from Revolution
• 3 copies of SnagIt software from TechSmith
• 3 copies of Camtasia Studio software from TechSmith
• Several WordPress t-shirts

Pretty sweet deal if you ask me. Add this to all the hoopla I told you about yesterday and it cost you less than a single round of roulette!

I have to give major credit to both John Hawkins and his wife Chris for putting on this show. I may not be attending, but I’m on meebo with John on a daily basis and know how much effort he and Chris have put into organizing this event and coordinating all the details. I am in awe and much inspired by how well they have done at securing speakers and sponsors for the 2-day event, and at how well they have held it together while picking up all the last minute detail pieces. I really am bummed that I won’t be able to attend to see this event in person (that’s a major understatement), an event which I feel is probably the pinnacle event of John’s online marketing career. My only hope is that it is such a huge success that there will be many more WordCamp Las Vegas events to come!

To those fence sitter friends of mine in Vegas and Utah wondering whether or not to attend, to all those from my affiliate marketing past who will be there for Affiliate Summit, and to all those gadget junkies I’ve met over the years from my portagame days who will be at CES:

THIS IS A MUST ATTEND EVENT!

Here’s the deal, for less than the cost of a single hand of BlackJack* you can attend a 2 day event that will:

1. Get you 1-on-1 access to 15 high profile speakers that are A-List bloggers and designers!
2. Give you access to a list of of over 100 attendees who are passionate wordpress nuts
3. An awesome agenda full of wordpress goodies, as well as basic marketing, seo, and design sessions.
4. Opportunity to win some fantastic door prizes! (Ahem, John, you might want to make a small post mentioning what prizes are up for grabs and who sponsored them…if you haven’t already).
5. A weekend in Vegas where you’ll most likely learn how to make money instead of lose it.

The speaker list is crazy packed. How John pulled off getting all these people together in the same room, I’ll never know. The WordPress and/or Vegas gods must be smiling on him (I haven’t heard of a poker tourney win lately, so I assume its the WordPress karma spreading wildly). The speakers include:

• Matt Mullenwag
• Joseph Scott
• Aaron Hockley
• Lorelle VanFossen
• Jim Kukral
• Geoff Kleinman
• Liz Strauss
• Michael Dorausch
• Dave Taylor
• Micah Baldwin
• Shayne Sanderson
• Ethan Gahng
• Chris Brogan
• Jim Turner
• Niran Amir

With speakers like above, you are already getting a much better return for your $20 than any table game would give you.

BUT, and this is a huge but, since this is happening pre-Affiliate Summit, and smack in the middle of of CES and AVN’s AEE, don’t be surprised if you see some major cameo’s happening during the event. I know many big players who will be in Vegas were invited to the event. Of the definite maybe’s, I’m really curious to know who shows up.

Even if you use Blogger, TypePad, MoveableType, LiveJournal, or MySpace as your major blogging platform, the WordCamp show will still be a huge value to you and get networking with some great people.

And all this for $20.

Register now. There won’t be any onsite registration, and the ticket booths close friday at noon.

I repeat: register now!

To the speakers, staff, and especially the Hawkins: Good Luck and may this be the best WordCamp Ever!

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).

But when it comes to WordPress themes, I’m a whole different being. I scrutinize EVERYTHING. The color scheme, the layout, the “extended options”, the fonts used, how many images load, what the sidebar is doing, where the navigation rests, how it handles subpages; basically whatever the template handles, I’m on top of it with a microscope.

To help you understand how anal I am about this: picking my children’s names was an easier task than picking a new template. I’ve spent months looking at new templates that can handle the latest version of WordPress, and have been reluctant to upgrade to the 2.6.x series until I found the right visual vehicle that would allow me to do so. After all is said and done, I narrowed the choice down to three “free” themes. There were many paid themes that interested me, but I shied away from them because I could see myself changing my mind a couple of times after I paid for a theme and ultimately costing me a couple hundred of dollars.

The final choices for new wordpress themes were the following:

Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace theme

Statement Theme

Statement Theme

DailyPress

DailyPress theme

In the future, I do plan on experimenting with a couple of paid themes that I’ve found that I like more than the above. But for the time being, these three themes are high quality AND free. Thus they are perfect for my means.

This post is part of My Own 30 Day Challenge, Numero Dos