I’m off to sunny San Diego California for the Prudential Real Estate Convention. I get to work the trade show and talk blogging with Realtors. I plan on stepping up my game and getting some contracts signed this time. My skills in Vegas needed some honing, I’ve done that. Look out, I’m getting into sales guy mode.

I’m looking forward to San Diego. I’ve been to California 3 or 4 times, but never SD. Should be cool. Wish I had more free time, I’d love to check out Sea World. I’ll post some photos and a follow up post when I get back on Wednesday.

I just got back from the Realty Executives convention in Las Vegas. I was there as a representative of Blogging Systems, I got to work the trade show floor. The convention was held at Caesar’s Palace. Very nice hotel, little big for my tastes. Plus the service was a little on the poor side. You’d think for a hotel like that, they’d have their ducks in a row…not the case.

It was a pretty decent convention, the trade show room seemed a little small. Didn’t seem like there were as many exhibitors as there should have been. It was especially nice getting out of the Minnesota weather and into the Vegas 85 degrees. Especially since we got almost 3 feet of snow right before I left. Ugh.

I didn’t really get to enjoy the weather as much as I would’ve liked. Spent most of my time working the convention. I played a little at night, walked the strip, shopped, gambled and drank a few beers, ate good food, etc. Nothing special. I’m not really that big on Las Vegas any how.

We talked blogging with realtors for three days. I was glad to be home. The weirdest part of the entire trip was when I was flying out. Who should I run into (on the plane) the owner’s son from my last company and another guy. Bit awkward, but it was nice to tell them I was flying to Vegas for “business.”

I get to go to San Diego in a few days for the Prudential convention. California, here I come!

I have a blog that I created for American Idol. It’s called American Idol Stars. I share the profits with a 16 year old girl named Kylee Foley. She is the daughter of a friend of mine from my old job. She is an excellent writer and has been a great business partner. I think with her determination and skills she’ll be very successful in the future.

I’m proud to say that in a little over a year we’ve had 100,000 unique visitors. This is very exciting. I’m hoping we can continue American Idol Stars for years to come.

Matter of fact, as much as I hate to admit it, before I started American Idol Stars I didn’t care at all about the show…now I’m an American Idol nerd.

These are some sites I recently designed for BSG. I’m proud of some of these:

• Camelback Voice
• Vail Buzz
• The Philadelphia Mainline Blog
• Scottsdale Scoop
• St. Pete’s Voice
• Ridgefield Redding View
• Ashburn Blog
• Aces Home Guide
• Downtown Phoenix Journal

Check them out, some really great blogs!

I used to do a ton of side jobs and work on my blog network as well as a few other misc. items. Now that I’m working from home, I find that I don’t have any time to do these other things.

My new job has been keeping me very busy. Plus the other thing is, I now work here. Side stuff seems like such a chore now. I plan on keeping up my blog network and possibly starting a few new ventures very soon.

But I will no longer be doing any consulting or side work.

The longer I work online, the more I realize how many opportunities there are for bloggers like me. There’s always finding conulting gigs on elance, scriptlance, rent a coder, craigslist, etc.

You can always use the multi-user version of WordPress and build a blog network. Also, you can make quite a bit of money blogging and using Adsense.

The other great things about blogs, is everyone has heard of them, but are not really sure what they are. Corporations are suddenly seeing how valuable they can be. Only like 2% of corporations are using blogs.

That leaves guys like me a ton of prospects. I think I’ll stick with blogs until the bubble bursts. Who knows how long that will be, but I know I’ll clean up in the meantime.

I do a lot of freelance and consulting work. So I’m constantly scouring craigslist, scriptlance, rentacoder, etc. for side jobs. Often times I’ll find some pretty good leads.

But yesterday I was looking and I found this ad. They were looking for an HTML guy to help with some simple page coding. Nothing special right?

Then I noticed, the job payed $7 to $10 an hour! Are you kidding me, has it gotten that bad? I could flip burgers for that!

Luckily, what I do is in the realm of the web, but not necessarily building websites. I’m focusing on blogging, podcasting, affiliate advertising, keyword research, and driving traffic to sites. Lots of these can be very lucrative.

I’ll let the spider monkeys work for $7 an hour, no thanks.

Lately, I have doing a lot with WordPress. WordPress is an excellent blogging platform using PHP and MySQL. My latest endeavor has been integrating WordPress blogs into corporate websites. I’ve done a few now, all of them have been a huge success with not too many glitches.

The last one I did was for Apex Marketing Group. The biggest issue we had was moving the domain. Now looking back, I think just using the Microsoft server would have been easier.

But, now that everything is on the proper hosting environment, it’s working just fine. I still have a little tweaking to do. But I’m proud of the way it turned out.

The biggest thing I learned at Ad Tech was that I’m on the right track. Keep plugging away, keep focused and I’ll be just fine.

The other thing I learned is that most traditional advertisers and companies have no clue about internet marketing. Which is great for guys like me.

I discovered a few new opportunities, met some nice people and walk away feeling more confident as well as got a few offers for consulting to boot.

Just what I need, more sidework…

Recently I was hired by Family Matters Media to design several headers for their blog network. They blog about children, adoption, teens, pregnancy, etc. Lots of family stuff, hence the name Family Matters Media.

Anyway, I designed 12 headers for them. I’m quite proud of how they turned out. I’m a little leary doing work for the “competition” but sometimes you gotta put food on the table.

You can check out my beautiful work at Family Matters Media.