I have been blogging and doing affiliate advertising for almost a year now. It has been a roller coaster ride and I have gained a ton of knowledge on the subject.

This last month, I have watched my earnings double. This is very exciting. It’s mostly due to the popularity of American Idol. My American Idol blog has gone thru the roof!! So I’m enjoying it while I can. This blog has been up since October, 2005, and has a writer. It has done really well, especially this month.

I’m sure now that the show is over the traffic will slow again, but it’s amazing how much stuff starts to happen when you have good traffic. I can’t imagine how I’ll do next American Idol season.

Recently my geek friend Lucas and I have been kicking around a few ideas. Lots of them good, some of them bad. But brainstorming with other people really helps. I also meet with my father quite often to share ideas.

Everyone I’ve talked to who has gone to Pub Con has said the best part is just rubbing elbows in the bar with other webmasters. So, Lucas and I decided we should try and get a bunch of local Minneapolis webmasters together.

We’ve created mn-eGeeks. It’s a portal built with Xoops that includes a forum, downloads, links and polls. The idea is to have people share links, ideas and tricks online and then we’ll meet every so often. The polls are for meeting frequency, place, and times. So everyone gets a vote.
Another idea we had was to try and turn each meeting into a podcast. So even if you don’t go to the meeting, you can still get something out of it.

mn-eGeeks is still in it’s infancy. We still have not started spreading the word. But once we get the kinks worked out of the site, we will do a full scale launch.

It should be exciting, keep your eye out for mn-eGeeks.

About a year ago, I had an idea. My idea was if I have one blog, I can make a bunch of money. If I have multiple blogs, I can make a whole bunch of Money. The problem was, writing for multiple blogs would be way too time consuming.

So my solution was to hire writers and split all earnings with them and create a blog network. It has been a huge success. Right now I have eight writers working for me and we have eleven blogs up and running.

I cover topics such as Home Music Recording, American Idol, Job Interviewing, Autism, Scrapbooking, Real Estate, Credit Repair, Blogging, and Rock Music to name a few.

All of the sites are search engine optimized. All of the sites have unique affiliate advertising programs. I have automated reporting to each writer. My American Idol writer is a fifteen year old girl who earns over a hundred a month from her blog.

Managing all of the sites can get very time consuming. But I’m learning a lot about the industry. I’m hoping to eventually have enough writers to turn this into a career.

I am 36 years old. I’ve lived in Minnesota my entire life. I grew up in New Brighton, moved to Minnetonka in sixth grade. Graduated from Hopkins High School. I’ve lived in Richfield, Northeast Minneapolis, Mounds View, Crystal, St. Francis and now I live in East Bethel.

East Bethel is up highway 65 about a half hour north of Minneapolis. It’s a nice place to live. It is very quiet. We have a house on 3 acres.

I was just married two years ago to my lovely wife Christina. I am the father of a boy named Houston. Being and husband and a father have both been rewarding experiences.

I also love animals. We have a boston terrier named Cujo, who is just about two. We have three cats. Homer, Boris and Socks. We’ve also toyed with the idea of alpachas, goats and chickens. But I haven’t yet convinced the wife on those yet.

I have been working for the last fourteen years at a collection agency as their network administrator. I have been attending college at night to learn web development, programming and databases. I’d like to study business and graphic design as well. Too much to learn, so little time.

I have several hobbies. My number one hobby is my computer. I spend almost all of my free time on the computer. Is it work or is it a hobby. It’s a hobby that has turned into work.

When I’m not geeking out, I like to play music. I like to write and record songs. I have two cd’s under my belt. I recorded them at home with a computer and Pro Tools. I was an intern at a recording studio for quite a while, so I’ve learned a ton about audio production.

I’m also an artist. I love to do black and white pen and ink abstract drawings. As well as paint. I like to think that my artistic skills translate well to computer/web design.

I love the outdoors. I go biking, camping and fishing every chance I get. I love northern Minnesota. I also like to ski and snowmobile during the winter.

Another hobby of mine is music. Not only playing it. But listening and collecting. I have been trading live and rare music online for almost ten years. I have a cd collection that would blow your mind. I also have a ton of old albums as well as tons of other collectables. I’m quite a music junky.

I also like to collect toys. I have a ton of toys, still in the box. I have mainly focused on Stars and Simpsons toys. I do have quite a few other things, but these two are my main focus. Everyone who sees my basement says…Ebay! But it would kill me to sell all of my toys. Someday?

I like to watch animated shows. I’m fascinated by animation. My wife says I watch too many “cartoons.” I love old movies and comedies as well.

Ultimately, I like to laugh and have fun.

I know a lot of people these days are making really good money the sleazy way. There are spammers, scrapers, porn, popups and popunders, cloakers, etc. you name there’s people trying to make money at it.

I do not believe in black hat techniques. My philosophy is, you can make very good money by being honest and by trying to give the user a positive experience. Why would you want to do things the hard way?

To me, if I do black hat stuff and get banned or a bad reputation, etc. I’m only hurting myself.

I keep everything as white hat as possible.

I consider my self a successful SEO guy when I can write an article or create a page and have it show up on the first page of Google. And I hold many positions on Google’s first page. So does that make me a success? You decide.

To me, content is everything. You can have all of your meta information, all of your alt’s and title’s, all of your link backs, but if you do not have keyword rich conent, you’ll land on page 58.

I like to focus on SEO as I’m developing the site. Keeping SEO in mind right from the start will help your site to be a success. I feel I’ve done pretty well, right now I have nine PR4 sites, one PR5, and numerous PR3 sites. The PR5 site is only four months old.

I have been trying to read as many articles as I can on SEO. I’m still searching for that one “Magic Trick” that no one shares. The more I read, the more I feel like I know quite a bit. As long as you look at each site differently, no two sites are the same.

SEO is constantly changing. If you read something today, tomorrow the search engines will be doing soemthing different. Today link exhanges are in, tomorrow reciprocal linking is dead.

My SEO trick is to just try and stay on top of the ever-changing web. Read and follow the changes. Arm myself with as much knowledge and hope I can use it on each of my sites. As well as, understanding that good old fashioned time and organic traffic will also be vital in the long run.

For the last year, I have been spending all of my spare time learning about affiliate advertising. It’s really interesting to see how much money is out on the web just waiting for you to grab it.

I have learned and studied Google AdSense and AdWords, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Amazon, Linkshare, Chitika, Commission Junction, Azoogle Ads, zZounds, plus numerous other programs.I have also been learning lots of great SEO techniques. As well as mastering the art of ad placement and site design for high click through rates.

I know several people who are making six figures with their sites. I am also amazed at how fast my earnings have exploded in only one year.

Luckily, I have numerous people to share information and new ideas with. Not to mention my father who is also extremely successful from the web has been my mentor.

I’m also planning to create an ebusiness community for developers in the Twin Cities. I plan to have a forum as well as frequent face-to-face meetings to discuss and share ebusiness ideas.

I plan to continue to learn as much as I can about online advertising and ebusiness. It is a very exciting opportunity!

In July, I will be going to Chicago to the Ad-Tech Conference. Unfortunately, I missed the Boston Webmaster World Pub Con. I do plan to attend in November in Vegas!

I usually read nothing but computer books. I don’t read anything else. But lately, the best way for me to learn has been just rolling up my sleeves and doing stuff.

There is so many new and exciting things happening on the web today, you have to keep up as much as possible. It seems that now days there is a script or plugin or module to do anything you need.

So I’ve been trying as much software and scripts as I can. I enjoy getting them customized and doing what I want. Very exciting!

I’ll continue to read, but experience has proven to be a lot more valuable.

I have fallen in love with WordPress. Open source rules! There are so many plugins available, it makes me think that there isn’t anything you can’t do with it. Plus you can virtually set up a brand new site in about five minutes without touching a line of code. And the Themes available, oooweee.

I do all of my hosting on servers that use cpanel and fantastico, it makes installation and configuration such a breeze. I have also done several installs of WordPress manually, piece of cake.

I feel I’ve gotten very comfortable changing the style sheets as well as modifying all elements. I’ve also been very successful troubleshooting issues.

It’s hard not to like WordPress.