Posted 10/31/08
Posted 10/30/08
Posted 10/30/08
The SD has been around long enough that I get a few random emails from time to time offering me or my readers services or products. Usually, I just delete them as they are either not relevant or are complete spam. So this week, I got an email from Discount Sports Tickets and they offered me a coupon code that will give you all a 5% discount on their "already discounted tickets."
This is not some affiliate thing and as far as I can tell I'm not making any money off of this, so don't feel weird about clicking on these links and purchasing anything.
They appear to actually have tickets to quite a few games so check it out if you are looking. After browsing for just a couple of minutes for Blazer tickets, it looks like you can buy some pretty nice seats that season ticket holders must be hawking.
So the 5% coupon code is: THR374
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Posted 10/30/08
Last but not least I want to say that I hope the failure of this service doesn't in any way discourage other entrepreneurs from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM (like I did with this one) and from "going for it" to just try and see if something will work. Without trying there can be no success. And as we all know, ideas are worthless without action. The Web wouldn't be what it is today without entrepreneurs trying all sorts of crazy ideas.That's right people! Keep inventing things, and NEVER, EVER follow the BlogRush formula as it sucked.
Posted 10/30/08
Last night, I checked into an ad-links service called Triggit that so far I really like. You may have heard of sites like Kontera and Infolinks or at least seen the links pop up on people's sites. Some of the other ad-link sites use double underlined, semi-spammy looking links that hardly blend into your content. There are obvious pluses and minuses to these, but Triggit definitely goes more on the conservative side, which is what I like.
Easy Sign-up and Install
To sign-up, you need about 2 minutes. It's a click, a mini-form filled out, a quick script installed, and finished off with some simple payment information. I'm actually not sure that I've found anything easier to install than this.
What Should you Expect?
Supposedly the service actually reads what you've got on your page and then fully blends its links into your text. In fact, you almost can't tell that the links are installed on your site unless you hover over one and see that it has a "triggit" URL attached. There is no weird pop-up or big bold double underline; it just matches your other links perfectly.
How does it Pay?
Still pending on this one...
It should pay similar to the other ad-link services, but without having used it for more than a few hours, I really have no idea. Hopefully within the next month I can report on earnings and if its blended links really work.
Oh, and the best part? There doesn't seem to be any form of approval, so ANYONE can sign up for it.
Sell your 125x125 ads easier with Performancing Ads!
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Posted 10/28/08
Posted 10/27/08
I know that this is way old news, but for some reason I just never got around to doing it. Of course, the new draft.blogger.com is all the rave with Blogger users and one of their biggest new options is the setting for an embedded comment form.
Here are the quick steps to setting it up:
1. Login into your Blogger account and go to Settings>Comments
2. Select the option for "Embedded below post" and don't forget to click save.
3. From there go to Layout>Edit HTML
4. Check the box for "Expand Widget Templates"
5. Do a search for the following code:
<b:include data='post' name='comments'/><b:include data='post' name='comment-form'/>Posted 10/27/08
Posted 10/26/08
The Week 9 BCS Standings are out! No surprises here with the top 3 teams all showing up this weekend and taking care of business.
Penn State didn't put on much of a show offensively, but they sure did take care of Ohio State on the defensive end of things. I will say that Florida and Texas Tech both looked like "world beaters" while teams like USC struggled to beat middle of the road Pac-10 teams like Arizona. The final weeks should really make things quite sticky as they always do. And Oregon creeped back in! (Not that I really care, but I do live in Portland.)
BCS Standings
1. Texas 8-0
2. Alabama 8-0
3. Penn State 9-0
4. Oklahoma 7-1
5. USC 6-1
6. Georgia 7-1
7. Texas Tech 8-0
8. Florida 6-1
9. Oklahoma State 7-1
10. Utah 8-0
11. Boise State 7-0
12. Ohio State 7-2
13. TCU 8-1
14. Missouri 6-2
15. Florida State 6-1
16. Ball State 8-0
17. Minnesota 7-1
18. Tulsa 7-0
19. LSU 5-2
20. BYU 7-1
21. Michigan State 7-2
22. North Carolina 6-2
23. South Florida 6-2
24. Oregon 6-2
25. UConn 6-2
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Posted 10/26/08
Many of you appear to have had the same exact thought I had today around 4 PST when we flipped through our cable guide to see if the usual Sunday Night Football game would be starting promptly at 5:15. And many of you also appear to have been completely surprised to find that there was no game on the schedule!
Google trends shows our proof.
Posted 10/26/08
Since we are very into ranking blogs (Top 50 Sports Blogs!), we thought we should point out another set of rankings that many of you may not know about but may be beneficial to you.
45n5 is a sort-of, make money blog that put together a list of the top 100 make money blogs from around the globe. The list has actually been around for quite some time and we thought that since we tend to lean towards that niche at times, that maybe we should suggest our site and see where we stack up. Sure enough, we were added and we are currently sitting at #45 in the world!
Our ranking will continue to change as this blog seems to really want to grow these days. Our Compete.com numbers continue to amaze me as well as our Alexa ranking which has dropped another 4,000 points in the last week.
Posted 10/24/08
I haven't done a regular old DollarBall in a while, meaning I haven't dished out a bunch of links to the "make money" industry. Well there has been a ton of good stuff to have come out in the last couple of weeks that I should let you all know about.
Posted 10/24/08
Posted 10/22/08
The rumors have been flying around for quite some time now about the possibility of Google Adsense information being available on Analytics with of course, a ton more information. Well the time has finally come!
Google will roll this out to publishers gradually and hopefully will notify you somehow if you are up next. Supposedly somewhere in your main Google Adsense page will be a notice or sticky letting you know that you can migrate your Adsense over.
Please pay close attention, and everyone go log in to your Adsense account! It's like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but for real...or something. Please let me know if you are able to participate in the early migration as I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.
Google's take:
You’ll now have access to granular reports that break down AdSense performance both by page and by referring site. Armed with this new data about user behavior, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions on how to improve the user experience on your site and optimize your AdSense units to increase your revenue potential.And here is a link with pictures of the new set-up once you've migrated over. Pretty damn exciting I'd say, even if I hate Adsense.
Posted 10/21/08
Big college football fan? Have a favorite school or coach? The Liberty Mutual Coach of the Year Award is something you can get involved in for your school of choice and feel good about it. This award is not your regular Heisman "all about me" type of award, and in fact it's much the opposite.
The winning coach is given $50,000 to donate to a charity of choice and another $20,000 to give to the school's alumni association to help enhance scholarships and other activities. The Liberty Mutual Coach of the Year is all about communities and how closely college football coaches work within them.
The award recognizes the college football coach in each NCAA division that best demonstrates sportsmanship, integrity, responsibility and excellence. Unlike other coaching awards given out in college football, the Liberty Mutual Coach of the Year Award allows fans to have a say in who wins, and truly focuses on a coach's actions off the field as much as on.
You can head over to the website to vote for your favorite coach once per day, comment to others, grab banners to promote your coach of choice, and see real-time standings on who's leading the charge.
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Posted 10/21/08
The other day, a buddy introduced me to a newish review service called Snapbomb which actually turned out to be a site worth checking out. It sort of follows along the lines of other review sites although it works some special magic behind the scenes to decide how much you should be paid for each review. The site comes off as typical by offering you either an advertising option or a blogging option.
So far, it seems to be non-intrusive and also looks to match you up immediately with offers that appeal to your expertise and interests. The set up involves a quick script (one similar to Google Analytics) that ranks your site in about 24 hours. After you've been ranked, you can start writing reviews within minutes. One thing to note, is that once you've accepted a review, you have to complete it in 12 hours or someting like that.
Now I wouldn't look at Snapbomb as a site to get completely rich off of, but it is a site that will pay you a fair amount for doing up a quick review on a product, service or website. You can always use some more beer money right?
(And by the way, those aren't affiliate links even though they may look like it. I'm assuming they are to track the fact that I did this review.)
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Posted 10/20/08
Posted 10/20/08
In case many of you have forgotten, we still have a sports blogging job board that is live and as eager to post your jobs as ever!
Well one interesting thing we noticed on it today, was the posting of a Sports Paparazzi position with a company called AAVMedia.com. Here is a direct link to the posting on a college job board.
It's very interesting and also a little scary to see where sports jobs have grown to over the last 5-10 years.
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Posted 10/20/08
Sticking to my theme right now of upgrading your Blogger blog, I'd like to point out what I would consider as the top template site out there today. OurBlogTemplates.com seems to be putting on the highest quality of Blogger templates I've seen since I began blogging.
Obviously these can't compare to a WordPress theme, but they are starting to come pretty close with Google and Blogger making a ton of advancements to the service. And now with template sites like OurBloggerTemplates.com, you are really able to create a pretty damn solid and professional looking blog without forking out more than a few dollars.
Sell your 125x125 ads easier with Performancing Ads!
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Posted 10/19/08
I know that many of you are WordPress pros, but I also know that many of you continue to choose the free route for blogging by going with Blogger. If that is the case, and you haven't taken my advice to purchase your own domain, then this is another reminder followed by a quick tip to set it up.
Your own domain will give you instant credibility especially since other bloggers and advertisers highly frown upon those nasty little blogspot addresses. In fact, I know of at least 4 affiliate companies that will deny you immediately if you do not have a custom domain which is putting a considerably small ceiling on your earnings potential. So go get a damn domain and then follow this tip to set it up in just a few minutes!
Here are the steps for an easy setup!
Once you have purchased your custom domain, you should start first with the Blogger side of things.
Blogger set-up instructions:
1. Login to your Blogger account and go to "Settings"
2. From there choose "Publishing" and click on "Custom Domain"
3. Then click on "Switch to Advanced Settings"
4. In the empty box provided you will then type your preferred URL such as "www.thesportsdollar.com" or "thesportsdollar.com"
5. After clicking "Save" you will have another option appear via checkbox that will give you the chance to forward either your "www" URL or your URL without "www" to your preferred domain. Check this box and save again.
Your Blogger account is now set up and we can head over to your domain settings to finish it up. I use GoDaddy.com for all of my domains so these steps work specifically for it, but should work with any other domain seller.
GoDaddy set-up instructions:
1. Login to your account and click on "My Domains".
2. From there select the domain you would like to edit and then choose "Total DNS Control and MX Records"
3. Once your screen changes, you'll need to add 3 "@" records and update your "www" record as follows.
Posted 10/16/08
It's been a slow week at the SD and that's because we have a new project in the works that is taking up some of our extra time. We'll hopefully be able to announce it to you all in the next week once it's gone live. For now, just bear with us through this slow patch! Posting may be more sporadic than ever over the next few days, but everything will be fine.
The Sports Dollar is here to stay, and will be back in full force shortly.
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Posted 10/16/08
So my feed was finally switched over to Google’s new feed server the other day which now allows me to run Google Adsense in my feeds. (Woohoo?) Initially, I was a little frustrated and wrote up this quick post on the process, which didn’t come off all that hot. Well once I let Google actually continue to work out the bugs on that first day after receiving notification, it actually ended up going through pretty flawlessly. With it all complete, here are my thoughts on the service.Posted 10/14/08
Posted 10/14/08
10/13/08
If you don't agree that this is the most annoying ridiculous NFL season ever, then you must be a hockey fan. What else can possibly NOT go as planned and cost me hundreds of dollars each week? How many times can my top pick in a football pool lose to the worst team in the NFL?
Here are some reasons to better illustrate my frustrations...
Reason 1. Jon Kitna knew that week 6 would be a good week to take off.
Why? Well not only was it a Sunday and he's about as religious as that whack-job VP hopeful from Alaska, but he must have had a vision from God that his back-up would do something absolutely absurd.
Posted 10/13/08
Posted 10/12/08
Posted 10/10/08
Posted 10/10/08
So I finally received my email from Google stating that my Feedburner account had been migrated over to Google so that I can include Adsense ads in my feed now. At first I was excited, and then I started noticing issues.
1. My chicklet now looks different and is displaying 11 less subscribers than yesterday. (That sucks.)
2. My feed is also not updating. (I'm subscribed to my own feed and the post I did on "bounce rate" is not showing yet)
3. I can't see if ads are on there yet because I'm at work, and our network has EVERYTHING blocked.
4. No idea when any of this will be straightened out.
**If any of you can see ads coming through in your feed or have updated feeds please let me know!
For now, here is an alternate or new feed URL that has up to date info: http://feedproxy.google.com/TheSportsDollar
Of course, you shouldn't have to subscribe to that, as the migration was supposed to work and transfer you all over. Let's just hope by the end of the weekend it has magically fixed itself!
Fan of the Sports Dollar? Subscribe to our feed!
Posted 10/10/08
One of those nasty little stats Google Analytics help track for you is the bounce rate of your site. You should be checking yours regularly to see that your blog is becoming sticky enough to have people actually hang around for a while on your site.
What is a bounce rate?
A bounce rate is essentially the percentage of people that land on a page of your site and then leave immediately after reading it. Not a good thing to have a high bounce rate, folks! The goal is to have an extremely low bounce rate which in turn means people are reading more than one article or viewing more than one page every time they land on your site.
A quick tip to lower that bounce rate!
Link to your other pages constantly! You'll notice that in almost all of our posts, we try to link to another relevant topic or post we had made in the past. Our favorite spot? Right at the bottom of the post! If you end with that relevant link at the bottom of your post, your chances are fairly high at getting the reader to continue on. Of course, your original article has to be interesting enough to get them that far.
Sell your 125x125 ads easier with Performancing Ads!
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Posted 10/9/08
Posted 10/8/08
Posted 10/7/08
Woohoo!!! After just 7 months, Google has hit us with our own "sitelinks" or whatever people are calling them these days. Are you wondering what the hell I'm talking about?
Go to Google and run a search for "sports dollar" or "the sports dollar" and you'll see our site listed now with mini "sitelinks" underneath.
Check this out:
Posted 10/7/08
Posted 10/6/08
This may be old news but I just found the damn thing, OK? You can change your Gmail to be black and look much sexier than it ever has before!
Check out this fairly new add-on for Firefox called Google Redesigned.
Posted 10/6/08
Seen the "Don't Vote" campaign/video/meme/thing-a-ma-jigg? Make sure you register to vote. Whatever your political preferences may be, this election year marks a pretty damn important time in all our lives.
The video will tell you to send this video to 5 people in hopes of making the thing "viral" so that a ton of damn people will register. Well bloggers are using it to link to 5 other blogs as a way to let 5 people know that they should be voting. Here is my 5:
Posted 10/6/08
Welcome to the third edition of our Top 50 Sports Blogs! We're still running with the Google Ad Planner uniques over the Alexa rankings as it seemed to be a big hit last time around. Some of the rankings have definitely dropped since last month; was there nothing to write about this last quarter people? Oh yeah, it was the summer.
Oh, and here are the 1st Quarter Rankings and 2nd Quarter Rankings...
Enjoy!
Posted 10/3/08
Posted 10/2/08
Posted 10/1/08
Posted 10/1/08
This morning, I was looking back through old posts to see if there were old topics that needed updates and I realized we had done 313 posts! I can’t believe it has been that many and that this blog has been up for so long. It seriously seems like yesterday that this idea came to fruition and the SD was born.
Anyway, while looking back through old posts, we noticed a handful of posts talking about products and services that we suggested people should check out. Sure enough, more than a few of these I would call complete flops or on the verge of becoming flops. Some of these services preached big things and slowly fizzled and died off.
TNX.net
Remember this one? I think this was some paid review we did and while doing the review realized how intrusive the service was. They basically wanted you to completely manipulate your template code in order to get their whacky service up and running. It may have changed now, and possibly became easier to use but we still don’t feel good about it. Plus, Google hates these text-link-widget-selling site things.
BlogRush
Was this thing the scam of the year or what? The BlogRush widget was everywhere! Every blog on the planet bit on their idea to send you relevant traffic without having to do extra work and all that. Of course, no one saw anything from it except the revenues of BlogRush growing exponentially.
Top Hosting Center
We thought about using them to host us and even gave their affiliate program a shot, and then a close friend of ours actually moved over to them for hosting and things went immediately downhill. A front page digg submission followed by and Extra Mustard hit and their site blew up on the first day! Or better said, the Top Hosting Center server blew the hell up. Another small company talking way too much game.
BlogRolled
Remember this one? This was the site created by the ReviewME folks which was going to be a link buying exchange sort of program. Instead of installing some nasty widget that Google would hate on, they claimed they would sell text links for you and then it was your responsibility to actually place them on your site. Seemed great, and then no one had any links sold. Flop.
Entrecard
We used it and so did you! Has anything been a bigger waste of bloggers’ time than this site? I would argue, “hell no.” The site is about to completely crash in the next month or 2 after the owner flip flopped on a possible sale only to regain his motivation for making it great. Yeah, failure is around the corner.
Performancing Ads
Ok, so not a complete flop but it is inching close to it. Initially, it started off well with so much buzz being generated from top blogs on the service around the blogworld. Well, like all things, the buzz died off and now, no one cares about the site. I think I sold 2 ads total through it and purchased a few more? I’ve basically gone back to selling ads on my own, which works a hell of a lot better.
Any services you can recall that are/were complete flops? I know we’ve touched on quite a few of them!
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