If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to myRSS feed. Thanks for visiting and stop by often!

Outsourcing is key in todays business world as a manner of optimizing time and saving costs and should be something that you incorporate into your own life. 

Hiring an expert saves time

Have you ever spent hours trying to figure something out that could have been done by a professional in a fraction of the time?  That’s likely a sign that you should hire an expert. 

What do I mean by outsourcing? 

Outsourcing is when you hire someone else to do a task that either you don’t have time to do, you don’t know how to do or you simply think that your time could be better spent doing something else.  For example, I’m not the handiest guy around the house.  I could spend hour upon hour painting our new apartment but have chosen to hire a painter and save myself the time and aggrevation.  Sure I could paint and likely do a fine job, but is it worth it?

How much is your time worth?

You may recall from a previous post that I had some php issues with my blog after I upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress.  I’m not familiar with PHP but I’m sure if I had spent a few hours researching forums, I would have figured it out.  Would that have been the best use of my time?  In the blogging world, what can you do with 2 or 3 hours?  That time could be used to promote your blog, generate traffic, network with other bloggers and writing posts.  Depending on your blog traffic, a two or three hour investment could translate into substantial earnings.  I chose to spend $5 to hire a PHP expert online and he fixed it in a matter of minutes. 

Why I will hire another expert soon

You may have noticed that this blog needs a bit of TLC when it comes to appearance.  I’m not an artist and I don’t know how to use the software to create a nice header image for this blog.  Again, I could spend time doing research and eventually figure it out, however I could likely hire someone to make a simple header in a fraction of the time.  Then I can devote my time to writing and generating traffic.

I heard about Google Trends a while back but never saw any reason why I would need to use it until this past week. I have read a number of bloggers over the past few weeks say that Google Trends helps them to find inspiration in writing so I decided to stop by and was I ever glad that I did. My previous post on the Hotmail outage was courtesy of the inspiration received from Google Trends. I noticed a trend of people searching for Hotmail outage and similar search terms so I decided to do a news search myself only to find that many Hotmail users could not login to check their email. I would never have known this because I don’t use Hotmail. Thanks Google Trends for coming through for me during my lapse of inspiration.

If you’ve been here before you may have noticed a few changes to the site.  I’m learning about generating traffic and monetizing my blog and have recently installed a Scratchback Topspot Widget and have also signed up with Project Wonderful.

Scratchback

This program allows you to purchase a text link on this blog for a low daily rate.  You will notice it placed on the top left sidebar above the fold so that you get as much exposure as possible.  It’s currently set at a low $1.00 and buyers use Paypal to pay for their ad.  The great thing about this widget is that it’s customizable to look like your site and you can set the starting bid.

Project Wonderful

You will noticed that I’ve placed this on the top right sidebar.  If you see a 125 x 125 ad that says “your ad here” this means that the space is available for rent for only 15 cents per day.  You will have to keep an eye on the bids as they go up you may get bumped off and need to bid more to keep your space.  If you’re installing Project Wonderful for the first time watch out that you don’t leave your minimum bid set at $0.00, unless you want to offer advertising for free.  Project Wonderful is “wonderful” if you don’t know much about design and layout.  You can customize your ad unit to include different sizes of ads and also specify a number of columns and rows.  I have installed 125 x 125 ads since they seem to be most in demand and they are quite attractive.

I will keep you updated on the performance of both Project Wonderful and Scratchback.  Stay tuned…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Random-Thoughts-Blog.com

In celebration of this blog turning 1 month old I’m giving away 100 Entrecards per participant to the first ten people (a total of 1000 Entrecards) who do one of the following:

1. Make mention of my blog or one of my posts on your blog and include a link back.

                                                        OR

2. Using StumbleUpon, review any post on my blog that has not yet been reviewed.

Once you have completed one of the above, leave a comment on this post letting me know that you’ve done either of the above and I will be in contact with you to send you the Entrecards.  Remember that only 10 people will be chosen and this will be based on the sequence of the comments received.   The contest will stay open until 1000 Entrecards are given away.

Apparently users of the once very popular Microsoft Hotmail are having issues logging in to check their email today.  It’s not immediately known what the issue is and how many users are affected but rest assured that Microsoft is working on it.  I used Hotmail back in the days when it was cool to have a hotmail account; everyone had one.  Then came the spam and without a decent spam filter in it’s early days, I left hotmail for something better.  At first I used ISP email addresses however everytime I moved or changed ISP’s, I lost my email address.  One thing to Microsoft’s credit is MSN Messenger.  It’s still useful, easy to use and seems to be the one that most of my friends are still using.

Today I use both Yahoo Mail and Gmail and am very happy with their performance and I’m also happy that when giving out my email address I don’t have to say “@hotmail.com”.  I almost view hotmail as a sort of email for “light” email users.  The kind that log into their email to send a few forwards twice per week.  Now, Gmail…that’s a real email solution.  Incredible amount of storage and growing daily as well as a great feature that allows you to keep replies back and forth to the same person during a conversation as one email thread.  That’s so handy and when retrieving archived mail, Gmail has a helpful search feature much like using their search engine.  All in all I’m happy that I moved from being a Hotmail user to being a Gmail user and today I’m even happier since I can access my email!

For the past two weeks I’ve been testing Adgridwork, a free text ad exchange to see if it might generate some traffic without cost. It seemed like a great idea, but unfortunately what I thought would bring tons of traffic my way has turned into another disappointing program. My ads had been viewed more than 500 times with only 2 click which I thought was pretty low. Even though it didn’t take up a lot of space in my sidebar, I have still removed it and will try something else. There are plenty of other similar programs out there that may provide better results.

Because my blog is a 3 column theme, I don’t think that having too many text ads look very nice in the sidebar anyway. I’m toying with the idea of getting a new wordpress theme soon, but am just trying to figure out exactly what I want. When I first setup the blog I had no idea what I wanted in a theme. I didn’t know anything about widgets or plugins so I just grabbed one that seemed to work. Now that I know a bit more, I’m realizing that I need a theme that can do a little bit more for me, as well as look a little “sexier”…If a blog can really be called “sexy”. Bill Gates uses the term so I figure I can use it as well.