Luke’s $10k A Week Blog

The most reliable and effective way to make money is to build a list. It can be email addresses, phone numbers, or mailing addresses — but the key with all of these is to not only collect the information, but also have a valid business relationship with people you have this information about.

Lacking a valid business relationship, you will find yourself guilty of spam. Email spam, telephone spam, direct-mail spam, it’s all spam if you don’t have their permission (however implicit that may be) to contact them.

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Blogging about yourself is easy. It encourages you to give personal opinions and open up about your feelings. Unfortunately, this means less time spent talking about facts that you know for certain, or that are useful for the readers. Furthermore, it can easily detract from your sense of authority. There’s a reason scientific papers don’t start out with “In my opinion…”

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Today marks the 31st day of daily posting on this blog. I have decided to give myself a break, as a psychological reward and to prevent burn-out. For the next 7 days I will not be publishing any new posts on this blog. From the 6th through 12th of April, 2008, there will be a blank spot in the calender. Then it’s back to the daily grind!

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Some people are apparently born heartless. They focus so hard on their own ego that they don’t have a clue how to treat others. Some of them are the most wealthy in the world. Jon writes:

Frequently, they’ll:

• Leave behind a trail of broken marriages and forgotten children
• Lose the life savings of their friends and relatives on an ingenious but doomed business
• Refuse to lend anyone money or give to charity
• Avoid unnecessary expenses to the point of miserliness
• Treat everyone that can’t help them as if they’re expendable

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If you watched the season finale of The Celebrity Apprentice the other day, you may have noticed some things. Maybe you didn’t want to know all of them…

1. Nice guys don’t finish last. Just second-place.

   Trace is awesome, right? So are Tito and all those cool guys. But they all lost. Trump called them “special” and kicked them to the curb.

2. Mean isn’t always evil. It just seems that way.

   Yeah, that Piers fellow. Total jerk! Same with Trump. But they have lots to donate to charity, so they can’t be all bad, right?

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Recently, a mixture of European Night Crawlers and Red Wrigglers came in the mail. They arrived on Tuesday, a writhing 1-lb mass of the delightful little squirmers mixed with some shredded newspaper.

They have been given a rather sizable bed, which is about 4×8 feet, or 32 square feet. That’s quite a lot of surface area for a single pound of worms. Since I plan to raise them commercially, I want them to reproduce as fast as possible. Hopefully a nice, large bed will encourage them. Given enough space and the right temperature, they can double in mass every 30 days.

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I was looking through some Digg posts and noticed this from OIBO. It’s an interesting, simple idea, for a blogger like me who posts daily: Recycle your old posts by rewriting them better and in different words.

It’s less work than staring at a blank page and writing a completely new article from scratch. The ideas are already in written form — they just need put into different words, hopefully better words. And it’s not really the same as copying and pasting; entire new content actually ends up being created.

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I’ve been educating myself (slowly but surely) on how to get more traffic on my blog — or any site for that matter. One of the most important things of course is to get Google to turn my pages up first on a search. The key factor in this is Page Rank.

I figured out how to give away page rank to valued readers who post comments. However, there are hazzards to giving away links indiscriminately. Whenever you link from one page to another, you automatically reduce the value of the one and increase the value of the other, to some degree.

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SEO, the acronym for search engine optimization, is a popular buzzword these days. Google and other search engines prefer well-ordered content with certain attributes. It turns out wordpress contains several built-in features that favor this.

SEO for WordPress Blogs White Paper

It’s rather interesting for someone new to SEO and blogging. Some points:

• Always fill in the “optional excerpt” field for each post. Search engines hate redundancy, so if you don’t type something unique here your categories page will look cheezy to them. So don’t actually put an excerpt — put a description.
• You can customize the permalink style to  /%category%/%postname%/. This makes every link to the articles look like it is inherently sorted for relavence.
• There’s tons of plugins for SEO-related stuff. For example, you can place links to those social bookmarking places at the end of each post.

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