I think every blogger at some point has the dream of getting paid for blogging. Most bloggers run across sites where the blog owner is doing just that. Let’s face it we are envious of that lifestyle. I mean wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to work from the local coffee shop via a wireless connection and your laptop? No boss, no designated work schedule. The freedom to set your own hours. Your salary only limited by how much you want to do.

Working for oneself is rewarding and working from the comfort of your own home is even better. But how exactly do you go about doing that? I am sure you have all seen the ads on the internet claiming to make you a millionaire or something crazy like that with no work and in a short period of time. Well you know the rule, if it sounds to go to be true it generally is.

Most of us bloggers sign up for a Google Adsense account and wait for that glorious Google money to start pouring in. But after weeks upon weeks of only receiving pennies from Adsense many people get discouraged. In fact I know many a person who has never even received their first payment from Google. Getting to that $100.00 mark can take a very long time. I have been fortunate, I generally receive around $120 US ever three months. But let’s face it that is not going to pay the mortgage.

At this point many people give up on the whole idea of being able to make money online. But what if I told you that in only three days you could be making some quick cash for Christmas from the internet? That’s right in three days you could actually be seeing some cash from the internet. I have caught your interest now I bet. If you are serious about doing three days worth of work to make some quick cash on the internet I guarantee you will succeed. Click here to find out how.

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Pod casts and pod casting is nothing new, and has been around for some time on the web. I have often thought that sometime I might try my hand at creating one. The problem you see is that I haven not really listened to many of them. That is until now. While using I-tunes at work the other day I had realized I had left my USB drive at home. Alas I had no music with me, so I decided to check out what I-Tunes had listed for pod casts.

Well I was pleasantly surprised to find hundreds if not thousands on interesting pod casts, in various categories. I was listening to health pod casts, business pod cats, and even some graphic design pod casts. I haven’t even begun to check out the video pod casts.

Some great pod casts I have found are below, check them out you might enjoy them too:

If you have suggestions of other pod casts I should check out please leave a comment.

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If you have been surfing the web for a while, or have a site on the web you have no doubt heard the term PageRank. If you own a web site and have not heard about PageRank now is a good time to learn.

What is PageRank?

Essentially PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by Google. PageRank was designed to make search results more relevant to the person using the search engine. It works by assigning a value to a web page based on what sites link to it. However it goes much deeper than that. PageRank also looks at the weight it has assigned to the linking pages. From the number of links to web page and the value of the pages linking to that site, PageRank determines the value it assigns for that page.

Sound complicated? That is because it is complicated. In fact my brief description does not really do it justice. Plus add in the fact that the engineers at Google are always updating the algorithm to prevent it from being abused. Not long ago Google rolled out a few changes that had dramatic effects across the web. Sites that had a PageRank of 7 (PageRank is out of 10) went to a PageRank of 3 overnight. needless to say it was a shock to a lot of people.

How does PageRank Affect a Website?

Well firstly PageRank will affect where the web site shows up in Google search results. As you probably already know the higher up a site appears in search results the more traffic it will get. But if you have or want to have advertising on your site it is also important. A lot of advertisers look at a websites PageRank when determining if they will advertise there or not. I also believe Google AdSense takes into account a sites Pagerank when determining which adds to place on the site.

At one time TenaciousCreations.com had a PageRank of 4. At the time I was upset that it was only 4, but now not having any PageRank I would gladly go back to having a PageRank of 4. However when this site had some PageRanking I consistently had Google placing higher paying ads on my site. As my PageRank decreased so did the price per click of the ads Google Adsense placed on my site.

How Do I Improve My Websites PageRank?

Okay so now we know what PageRank is and why it is important us. But how do we improve our sites PageRank? Well if you have followed my site at all you will know I always stress good content. If you have good content, that people can benefit from and want. You will have other websites deep linking to your site. More relevant links == more PageRank. Link exchanges can also work. However I feel Google has got smart on this and now puts less weight to a link exchange than they do a deep link with in another site. When ever i created a new Photo Shop tutorial I always submitted them to a bunch of tutorial sites. Most of these tutorial sites are nothing more than a collection of links. For a while I enjoyed a very good PageRank, however at the time of writing this article I have a pretty dismal PageRank.

You have to remember search engines are always trying to improve the way they work in order to provide better search results for their users (ie customers). A search engine wants to make sure when a user enters his or her search terms, the search engine will turn up the results they want. If you keep this in mind and provide quality content I am very confident that will also improve your PageRank.

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Well a lot has happen since my last post in April. I have moved to a different city, and taken on a different (but coolest in the world) job. However as I said in the last post I want to once again get tenacious Creations rolling.

Maybe even get some page ranking back. Although I am pretty impressed that even with an almost total lack of new content this site still attracts 200 or more visitors a day. Most of my visits are for my photoshop tutorials. With the one about making a better virtual tattoo receiving the most traffic right now.

I guess that goes to show that if you have content the traffic will come. I only wish I knew then what I know now about Search Engine Optimization. I am sure I could of made all those photoshop tutorials rank a fair bit higher in the search engines.

So what am I going to do to get traffic back?

If all goes well I hope that with in two months I can increase the traffic to this blog to 400 hits a day. Not to big of a goal, and one that should be easily accomplished. As always if you have ay suggestions on how I can increase the traffic to this blog please feel free to let me know.

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 Well after months and months of no activity here on Tenacious Creations I thought I should write a post of what has been happening. As well as maybe a glimpse into the future of Tenacious Creations. First off I want to thank all of you who keep coming back to this site even though there has been no new updates. Surprisingly my traffic has not dropped off as much as I thought it would.

 Secondly I want to apologize to all those whose blogs I used to regularly read and comment on. I just have not had the time to keep up with them. Although I have been able to rearrange my schedule a bit so I can start regularly reading a few blogs again. So look for my comments to start flowing once again.

 So what has been happening around here. Well I was running a small tech company on the side and that was taking up a lot of my time. However I have scaled back operations with it which has allowed me free time to start taking care of this blog some more.

 Here are some of the upcoming posts I am working on and which should be published soon, but not necessarily in this order:

 So those are a few of things I will be posting articles on in the near future. Hopefully you, my readers, will find them interesting and useful. If you are worried about missing these posts I suggest you subscribe to my RSS feed. I hope to hear comments from you all, and if you are a new reader I hope you will keep coming back for more.

Till the next post!

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 If you read about improving traffic to your site or selling a product you have no doubt heard about branding. When I think of branding I am remind of growing up on the farm. I can still smell the mixture of red hot metal and seared flesh. Just like the brand on cattle identifies them as some ones property establishing a brand for your web site or product does the same thing.

 Examples of this are the golden arches of McDonald’s, the apple of Apple and I am sure now that you think of it several more come to mind. An effective brand will create an emotional response in the consumer. Why an emotional response? Well research has proven that if an advertiser can create an emotional response in the consumer the consumer will have a great chance of remembering the message.

 I recently found this article from Microsoft about branding with in a piece of software. If you are a programmer this is really an interesting read and I would recommend reading it.

 Branding seems to be extremely important to marketing people. For some reason I never seem to fully grasp the marketing concepts. However now that I am building software as an independent developer this has become more important to me. If people do not know about my products they surely will not buy them.

 So how do you let people know about your products? Well that is an easy one to answer, you advertise. But wait a minute, how do you make sure you get the most effective advertising? How do you advertise on a budget? Should you focus your advertising to your potential market?

 These are important questions that need to be answered. To be honest I am not 100% sure on the answers to these questions. If you are a marketing guru please use the contact form at the bottom of that page to contact me. I do know I have to do some more research on marketing so that I can answer these questions. I would hate to invest more money into advertising than I am going to generate from software sales. But I guess it is a risk one has to take.

 My biggest decision has been if I should brand my software under the Tenacious Creations name or use a new name. To that extent I having even researched some over names. I was shocked to see how many of them already have domains registered with that name. No web site there, just people holding onto the domain name hoping to make a quick buck. That is where Tenacious Creations has an advantage, it has been registered for a few years and is easy to remember. The down side is it is difficult to spell and easy to misspell.

 Next is a logo, I don’t really have a logo for Tenacious Creations. Unless you count the coyote.

 In any case it looks like learning about marketing is going to be an interesting adventure. Plus it should make for some good blog posts. I plan to post what I learn so maybe other people can learn from my successes and failures. I hope I get a lot of comments and suggestions from you the readers.

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 If you have been following my blog, you know that I have repeatedly reported on how evil FaceBook is.

 You may also know that I had disabled my profile on FaceBook. Well if you know me on FaceBook you may of noticed that I did indeed re-enable my profile a couple months ago. Now I know this sounds a little bit hypocritical. Well the reason is I was coerced into developing a couple of FaceBook applications with a business partner.

 These applications (which I will not name) did quite well and generated some decent income. They derived most of their income from data mining and selling the information gathered from our users. All through the process i did not feel right about doing this. I tried to convince myself that this was okay. My partner would say things like “They are going to call you a prick anyways, they might as well call you a rich prick.”.

 For a while I somehow managed to settle my conscious on this. But always in the back of my mind I knew it was wrong. Hell I used to be one of those guys developing encryption software so people had the tools to protect their privacy. Now here I was invading the same privacy I once was trying to protect. In some ways I felt like I did indeed sell my soul.

 Now don’t get me wrong I do not think making money is evil. But I do think it should be done in an honourable way. I felt like a spammer by using peoples personal information in a profitable way. Sure I didn’t take their information, I didn’t force them to reveal so much about themselves. Its not my fault that they don’t know any better. I mean I don’t even know them so why should I care?

 Well I still do not know why I care and why it bothered me so much. However I am happy to annouce that as of 13:00 h today I have sold off all my interests in these FaceBook applications. I will no longer be developing FaceBook applications.

 Maybe it was dumb to get out of a money making enterprise. Maybe I just don’t want success. In any case I feel much better about myself now.

 I was tempted by the dark side, lured by the money. However I am a JEDI and will never turn to the dark side.

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 Contrary to the fact that there has not been a new post in a long time, Tenacious Creations is still alive. I was temporarily overwhelmed with the completion of several projects all at once. Not being the most organized person on the planet my life was completely overwhelmed.

 I was starting to feel like I was on the same road to burn out that I had followed once before. Things were going really well yet chaotic in my life. I could barely find my desk beneath the paper and other assorted items that had built up upon it. I seem to have the problem of once I get started into a field of work I get totally absorbed by it, and nothing else seems to matter. This in itself is a very unhealthy behavior.

 By chance I was talking with a friend of mine. My friend told me that he had this book and audio series that I really needed to read and listen to. I politely told him, “Hey man I don’t have time to brush my teeth let alone read a book.”. My friend being a very calm and collected individual calmly replied to me “That is exactly why you NEED to listen to this and read the book.”.

  The book was titled “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. It is known by many people on the web as “GTD“. Well I started reading it (still haven’t finished it completely), and listening to the audio CDs (I have finished these). Well I am not going to tell you things like it has revolutionalized my life or made me a millionaire. But I can tell you that it has allowed me to have a clean desk – everyday. I now also have an excellent reference filing system. In fact for the first time ever (that is with out having an executive assistant) I can find things that I have filed, and have an awesome method for filing things that I want for reference.

 The Getting Things Done Book has also allowed me to maintain an empty in box. Not only that it has trained me to not use my entire office as an in box. I not only get things done in my professional life but also things I want to get done around the house. It has taught me how to set up and use a tickler file (the best thing ever), to process items that need to be processed at a later date. But the best thing ever is it has doubled my ability to be creative and come up with new ideas. I highly recommend you check into it if you are constantly disorganized.

 Getting things done or “GTD” seems to be really popular in the techie geek world even though it emphasizes the use of low tech means. Now if you don’t know about GTD then the next little bit may not mean a lot to you. But currently all my list are paper based and the only high tech means I use is e-mail. David Allen recommends to start low tech. Complicated systems do nothing but steer you away from using the GTD system.

 So for about the past two weeks I have been using low tech means to follow the GTD system. It has worked great. I am getting more accomplished than I ever have before. My mind is much more free to come up with creative ideas. I don’t feel over burden by the enormous work load I have been shouldering. More important than all that I am now able to blog again.

 Whats next on my horizon. Well I am hoping to upgrade some of GTD practices to my old Tungsten E Palm Pilot while I await the arrival of my new Palm TX with wireless keyboard. I am in the process of giving Tenacious Creations a make over, so look for a new site look soon. I have a bunch of posts written that will begin appearing on Tenacious Creations. The Tenacious Creations Word Press AdSense Plug in will become publicly available in the next couple of weeks, as well as a couple other helpful word press plug ins that I have written. So in short the future looks bright for Tenacious Creations. I hope that you my loyal readers will continue to read and respond to my post. Sorry to the long absence of regular posting.

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 You may remembering my post FaceBook is pure evil that I deactivated my Facebook account. Now when one deactivates their account you would tend to think that all your information would be deleted. Not so with FaceBook.

All your messages, the stuff on your fun wall, super, wall your photos etc. are still there available to other FaceBook users. FaceBook maintains this is so you can seamlessly reactivate your account when you decided to go back to FaceBook. Lately this little feature of FaceBook has been prevalent in the news. Many newscasters referring to it like the song Hotel California “You can check out, but you can never leave.”.

 So what can you do to get out? Well if you are like me and have already deactivated your account you have to reactivate it. Go in and line by line delete all the information in your profile. Delete all the applications that you may have signed up for such as Fun Wall and Super Wall. Delete all your inbox and sent messages, delete all the photos you may have uploaded. Once you have done all that deleting once again deactivate your account.

 But your presence is still not completely gone. Facebook maintains back ups of this information on its servers. In order to have this removed you must e-mail FaceBook. From what I have read this is no easy process, and some people have even resorted to legal action in order to get themselves removed. Do you need more proof that FaceBook is evil?

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 While serving in the military I picked up a good number of sayings and expressions that I still use today. One of them was the 7 P’s rule.

 What exactly is the 7 P’s rule. Well it stands for Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. This rule can apply to anything you are doing from blogging to taking a trip some where. A little bit of planning can prevent a lot of frustration later.

 Lets’ take a blog post for example and apply the rule of the 7P’s. So in order to write this post I first have to choose a topic, in this case the 7P rule. Then I gather or create any images that I will use. From there I write a brief out line of what I want to say in the post. Now I know we all disliked writing outlines in school but it does help. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just out line the points you want to cover. This is my outline for this post.

 By planning what I need and locating resources before I write I am able to just write. I have every thing at my finger tips and I do not waste time looking for things. I often times have a great idea for a post, so I will write it down and do a quick outline. That way I can be on the look out for relevant resources for that post while doing other things. When I am ready to write my research time has been minimized. To me there is nothing more valuable than time, it is the one resource than I cannot replace no matter how hard I try.

 When you save time you are indeed becoming more productive. For example let us just say that you want to build some shelves in your home. Now you could just go to the hardware store and buy the material that you think you need. But I am quite confident that this will result in you having to make additional trips to the hardware store. This costs you in time, fuel and wear and tear on your vehicle.

 Now lets build the same shelves and employ the 7P rule. First we would take measurements so we know how much material we will need. Then we would make a list of the mounting hardware, screws etc. From this list we could also determine if we will need any additional tools to install these shelves and add that to our list. Now list in hand off we go to the hardware store to buy our supplies. If the store has knowledgeable staff (this is becoming harder and harder to find) we could ask them to go over our list and suggest anything we missed. If we properly planned our project we should not have to make any additional trips to the hardware store. We save the time, fuel and other associated costs. Not to mention the frustration caused by not having everything we need at our disposal.

 A little bit of planning before hand can save time, money and most of frustration. When you start any project remember the 7 P rule.

• Proper
• Previous
• Planning
• Prevents
• Piss
• Poor
• Performance

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 A short time ago I wrote a post on how much I love white boards or dry erase boards. Well Julia the founder of Kleen Slate got in touch with me to tell me about some products she has created for white boards / dry erase boards.

Julia saw a need and filled it with her revolutionary idea of having erasers attached right on the dry / erase marker. No more having to hunt around for the eraser when you make a bumble while writing, or worse yet using your fingers to wipe off the writing.

 Now before you go telling me that it is just easier to use your finger let me relate this anecdote to you. While attending a conference the presenter was making extensive use of the dry / erase board to explain some formulae. Well he occasionally made a blunder and would wipe it quickly off with his finger. However one time after doing this he wiped his face and left a green mark across his face. Well no one in attendance told him and he went the rest of the day with a green mark on his face. I am sure this made him lose some credibility in the eyes of his audience.

 The first product I want to discuss is the KwikChek II. This is essentially a paddle with a plain dry / erase side and a lined dry / erase side. My wife who works in a nursing home immediately saw the advantage of this when she saw it. She told me it would be an excellent tool for communicating with her patients who are hard of hearing or have difficulty speaking.

  I think it is really well designed for many applications. It is one of those items that once you have it in your hand you can think up endless possibilities for it. A few are listed on Kleen Slate’s web site. I do like the fact the it has a holder for the marker, this way you can always have the two together.

Other possible uses that I can think of right now are:

• To relay time information to runners / bikers in a race.
• To display the channel information for R/C enthusiasts.

 The erasers on the small markers are incorporated to the cap. This makes them extremely versatile. Once you remove the cap and place it on the end you have both your writing end and erasing end. Much like a pencil. The erasers perform better than any other dry / erase eraser I have used. They remove all the ink with no trace leaving a clean dry erase surface. As for odour from the dry / erase markers they are not any worse or any better than those already on the market.

 The big markers do not have the erasers attached to the caps. A feature I would of really liked to have seen as I tend to be a little bit absent minded and can fore see myself misplacing a cap from one of the markers. This can be an advantage as you will be able to easily reuse the erasers from these markers with new markers. Again the erasers perform exceptionally well and are very nice to use. The odour again is much like other dry / erase markers out there.

 All things considered if you regularly make use of white boards (dry / erase boards ) I would recommend using these products. The erasers perform better than any other dry / erase erasers I have ever used. I will make sure that all my dry /erase markers in the future are equipped with these erasers.

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 The other night I was talking with some colleagues and they were complaining about having to deal with so much e-mail every day. I naively asked them how much e-mail they get in a day. I was surprised when the answers ranged for 10 to 50. I sometime wish I only got 50 relevant important e-mails a day. The fact is I get close to 100 or more a day, and that is not including spam. They all require my attention, but thankfully not all of them require a response. So how do I deal with them?

 The most important tip that I cannot stress enough is to not deal with them as they arrive. Set a specified time when you will answer e-mails, and also be sure to set the amount of time you will devote to answering e-mails. I normally give myself two hours a day, one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening to answer my e-mails. When you get snail mail delivered you don’t immediately answer the mail. PLus the first thing most people do is sort their mail before opening it. If it works in the non digital world, what prevents it from working in the digital world.

 One of the hardest things I had to learn when dealing with large amounts of e-mail is to not feel compelled to answer each and every e-mail immediately upon reading it. After I read the e-mail I assign it to two different categories. The first being the nature of the e-mail. For example if it is an e-mail having to deal with this blog it is assign as “TCBlog”, if it has to do with Google Adsense I tag it as “Adsense”. The next category that I assign it is the priority it requires an answer.

 If you ever take an emergency responder or first aid course they always teach you to survey the situation. After your survey you perform triage and deal with the most life threaten situations first. This is similar to how I deal with e-mail. I have different levels of priority for my e-mails.

• Requires Immediate Action – These are e-mails that require urgent decisions and as the name says immediate action. I try to use this category sparingly. Things that would fall into this group would be responses to contract offers, emergency support etc. I will sometimes answers these right after reading them, if not the are top of the list when I am done sorting my e-mail.
• Requires Follow Up – These are e-mails that do require me to act on them but there is no urgency. If they get answered today or tomorrow all is well. Most of my business correspondence falls with in this category.
• Requires next day Follow Up – The e-mails that are tagged here are mostly of a personal nature.These will be the first e-mails I will answer tomorrow after sorting my e-mail and dealing with the R.A.T.S.
• No Follow Up – These are those e-mails that are alerting me to something, or from mailing lists that I follow. They don’t require an answer and are not time sensitive, but they are still of value to me. I read these at my leisure. Or something new that I have been trying is to have the computer read these out to me while I am performing other tasks. So far this is working very well, but I’ll save that for another post.
• Junk Mail – This is where I dump my spam, e-mail chain letters and any other e-mail that is of no value to me. Generally speaking this is my spam folder.

 Up front this may seem like a whole bunch of extra work just to answer e-mail. The hardest part is setting up the system and working with it. Once you get it going however you time savings is clearly evident. I have found I am more productive answering my e-mails this way. It has greatly reduced me stopping in the middle of something to answer an e-mail. Not completely however because there are times when after a phone call or something I am expecting an e-mail that require immediate attention. I have found the time it saves as well as the distraction it prevents to greatly increase my productivity.

Tell me your suggestions on how you deal with large amounts of e-mail.

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 After a lot of prodding from various online friends I finally relented and joined Project Wonderful.

 Project Wonderful is all about making online advertising more profitable and easier for everyone involved. They say it is a transparent system for both the advertiser and publisher. It eliminates click fraud by getting rid of paying for clicks. Basically the advertiser bids for space on the site or sites of their choice. While they are the high bid their ad is displayed on the site. Ads are bid on a per day basis. For example at the time of writing this post if you look to the top left corner you will see the project wonderful ad. Currently is costs $0.20 per day to advertise on Tenacious Creations.

 As a publisher I get $0.20 less 25% per day for that ad. But here is the thing, during the day some one may decide it is worth more than $0.20 to advertise on my site (I think it should be worth at least $2.00 a day). If they place a bid for higher and I accept their ad then their ad would replace the current one. So in theory I could make more for that day. Project Wonderful charges and pays by the second or that is at least what they say. I cannot confirm nor deny this at this time because I have not yet been paid.

 I should also state here that you can set minimum prices for your ads. Now after you have $10.00 in your project wonderful account you can with draw it and so by make money from your site. At this point I will be looking at 50 days before I can with draw anything. But I do not actually plan to with draw it. I am going to use it kind of like EntreCard and buy some ad space for Tenacious Creations. Reinvest the profits so to speak.

 If you are a stats freak like me you’ll like that project wonderful has good stats for both publishers and advertisers. As an advertiser you can set up a campaign to go across multiple sites all at the same time. You set what your max bids should be and you can set a limit to how much you spend. All in all it appears on the surface to be a good system.

 You can also add funds to your account through Pay Pal. This can be handy if you are planning on world wide dominance and launching a huge campaign. I look forward to buying a bunch of ad space to promote my new suite of AdSense Plug Ins through project wonderful. From my vantage point now I would recommend project wonderful for both publishers and advertisers. I think it can be a real cost effective method to advertise. If my vantage point changes you can be sure I will keep you informed. I would love to hear your comments on Project Wonderful good and bad.

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 If you have ever had one of your posts Stumbled Upon or Dugg you know how much traffic a social networking site can bring you. If you are a stats fanatic like me then you have seen first hand the results Stumble Upon can have on your posts. My photoshop tutorial on peeling an image away to reveal another image was Stumbled Upon and the traffic soared. A few other posts of mine have been linked by other social networking sites. You can definitely see the traffic increase from this. So of course you want your readers to use social networking sites to mark your posts. But how do we make it easy for our users/ readers to do this?

Well in steps Joost de Valk. I am really starting to like this guy, I would like to call him a friend but I have never met him. However he has breathed new life into the Sociable WordPress plug in. You can see it in action at the bottom of this post.

 The plug in is great and offers a huge selection of social networking sites to display icons for. Your users/readers can just click on the icon of their favorite social networking site and voila just like that add your post. Go ahead try it out with this post and your favorite social networking site. If your favorite social networking site is not displayed leave me a comment and I will make sure it is.

 Thanks again Mr. de Valk for another great plug in. By the way I am kind of weird because before I install a plug in I always look at the code. Mr. de Valk does an excellent job with his code.

Note: If you wonder why there are two equal signs in the title, let me tell you now that it is not a mistake. Other programmers will know what I mean.

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 Repetitive Stress Injury, or R.S.I. is something that most of us have heard about but tend to dismiss. Most of us know someone who has had to get surgery for carpotunnel syndrome. Or we have seen or heard of ergonomic designed chairs, desks, and computer keyboards. But it something that we general dismiss not give a second thought. However each year millions of man hours are lost due to preventable repetitive stress injuries.

 A lot of bloggers myself included spend vast amounts of time in front of their computer screens happily typing away. I am particularly bad for this because when I get coding (I feel there is a huge difference between programming and coding – perhaps this will be a future post) it is not all that uncommon for me to put in 20 + hours at the keyboard with out a break. In my younger days this never seemed to bother me. However as I age I notice that my eyes, fingers and even sometimes my arms feel the strain from these coding marathons. When you are in pain or uncomfortable it can make it difficult to concentrate and both your creativity and production drop. In today’s post I am going to give you some tips to prevent repetitive stress injuries when it come to working with a computer.

 First lets discuss the lighting in the area where you generally do most of your computer work. Fluorescent lights and computer monitors just don’t mix. If you are viewing a computer monitor under fluorescent lights you will find that you get tired much quicker than if you are using incandescent light. Some one once told me this had to do with the fact that the refresh rate of the monitor and the speed of the flicker of the fluorescent tubes work in concert to speed up your brain waves. While I am not sure if there is any truth to this I can tell you that by working in natural light (when available) or with incandescent lights I find I have less eye strain. Plus I feel better come the end of the day.

 What do I use for a light? Well I have a desk lamp with a 60 watt bulb in it. Plus I turn the lamp so that the bulb is facing the ceiling as opposed to the desk. This gives me more reflected soft light and a nicer atmosphere to work in.

 The next vital piece of office equipment to discuss is your chair. The most important factor to choosing a good chair to use while working at the computer is that it has arms for you to rest your arms on. Lets’ face it, you will spend the majority of your time sitting on that chair so choose a comfortable one. A chair with a high back is preferable as this will support your back more. You will notice a difference after a day sitting in a chair with a low back as opposed to sitting in a chair with a high back. While we are talking about chairs this a good time to bring up a foot rest.

 A footrest offers proper positioning of the feet in relation to the rest of the body. Use of a foot rest can help reduce the strain on back and neck muscles. Choose a foot rest either 3″ or 6″ high as best suits your needs. You can buy these, or if you are cheap like me just use an old box that some computer hardware came in.

 Now we got you set up to be comfortable but we are not finished yet. You need to take breaks and stretch through out your day. That is where workrave comes in. Workrave is an awesome little utility that you run in the background on windows and most UNIX machines. It has timers built in that remind you to take breaks. You set up the timers in accordance to what will suit you for micro breaks and rest breaks. First let us look at the the micro break, this is just a short pause. An alert sounds telling you it is time to take a micro break, you can take the break ignore it, or post pone it. Then there is the rest break, again you can ignore it, take it, or post pone it. The neat thing with the rest break is workrave also instructs you to do a couple simple exercises. You follow these to an animated character on screen and then go take your break.

 I have been using workrave for just over a week now. It took a little while for me to get the timers set to where I like them. But after that I must say it has dramatically improved the way I feel after a long day on the computer. The biggest thing I have noticed is that my eyes do not get near as tired as they used too. Now it should be mentioned that I have been working with a healing crushed finger the past little while. The first few days where murder to type. Now with the healing and taking the breaks I have noticed a great improvement too.

 So how much would you pay to feel better after a long day toil on the keyboard? $50.00, $100.00, $1000.00 ? that’s the best part workrave is free and open source. I highly recommend you give it an honest try. It might take a bit to get your timer settings right, but once you do and use it for a while I am sure you will thank me.

Note: if there is some one out there who reads my blog and has a new ergonomic high back office chair they would like to donate to me in exchange for a review of it go to my about page and contact me. Hey a guys got to try right?

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 Admit it you could not wait for Sexy Pirate Women – Lesson Two in Keywords. Well in this lesson we are going to look at how and why to use keywords. If you haven’t read the first part of this I suggest you do — Pirates are Sexy – Lesson One in Keywords.

 As I am a blogger and the majority of my readers are bloggers I am going to focus on using Keywords from a bloggers perspective (however if I keep doing Sexy Pirate Women posts my traffic demographic may change). It is still my belief that no matter what you do in your blog, in the end good content will get you more traffic and regular readers than anything else you can do. But you have to let people know that your content is there, and that is the job of the search engines. However if you use keywords properly you help the search engines along.

 Keywords however are not just for the search engines. If you are running adsense your ads are also based on the words you use in your posts. What it boils down to is that if you have keywords that attract the demographic of people you are after your ads will also be targeted to the same demographic.

 Most bloggers I know track their sites stats be it with Google Analytics or some other tracking system. This is a good way to gauge if what you are doing on your site to get traffic is working.

For example as illustrated in the graph to left only 10.58% of my traffic comes from search engines. This may not sound like a high number but compared to my November 2007 stats which indicated only 3.04% of my traffic came from search engines I have increased it significantly.

 Not only is my traffic up from search engines but I am also getting more adsense clicks. No it is not because the sexy pirate women are intimidating my readers to click on the ads. It is because the ads are becoming more tailored to my readers and offering them products and services they actually want.

 Now I know your saying to yourself “Okay thats great but tell me how to do that.”. Well the first step is to get to know your audience. Who are you targeting your writing to? What is your niche in the blogoshpere? For me these were hard questions to answer. Who am I writing for? Well anybody who is willing to read my blog. What is my target niche? Well I try to target people who enjoy being creative and are looking for resources to expand their creativity.

 For me each post I do is focusing on a unique group of people, kind of like sexy pirate women. So when I choose a topic to post on I ask my self these questions.

1. What am I providing in this post that will be deemed useful?
2. Who will this be useful to and in what way?

 Although this post mentions sexy pirate women a lot I doubt it would be of any benefit to them. My intention with this series of Pirates are Sexy – Lessons in Keywords is to inform my fellow bloggers on how I learned to use keywords to benefit me. Hopefully they can use what I have learned to benefit themselves.

 Knowing that my target audience is bloggers allows me to figure out which keywords to go after. There are terms that most bloggers are familiar with – traffic (in the sense of visitors to a web site), keywords (no not words that unlock things), post (not the kind you build fences with). Outside of the blogging world these terms mean different things, this is something you have to keep in mind when you write, or speak for that matter.

 I am an active member of my local Toastmasters club. If you don’t know Toastmasters is a group that helps you improve your public speaking by you giving speeches to your fellow Toastmasters. One thing that I have learned is terms that are familiar to me (baud, RAM, coder, EOD, HLVW, etc) are not to the majority of people. So to make my speeches appeal to a broader audience I make sure to explain these terms.

 Like wise when you are writing posts and trying to optimize your keywords you have to keep in mind you want to attract the larger audience. The classic example is with airlines. “Low fares” is more of an industry term in the airline industry, and although it is searched for, it is nowhere near searched for as much as “cheap flights”. My point – know your audience, and try to predict the terms that they would search for. Once you have determined that, then it is time to use resources like Googles Keyword Tool to see which terms are the most searched for. These are the terms your audience is using. By using them you are not only going to get some of those searches directed to your site, but you are also going to communicate with your audience better.

 In Pirates are Sexy – Lesson 3 I will discuss how placement of your keywords in your post affects there performance.

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 One thing I have really enjoy recently from being part of EntreCard is the community aspect of it. I have found several blogs that I read on a regular basis. After reading these blogs its like to kind of know these bloggers and even consider them friends.

 Well up until now I have never been “tagged” in a meme. That is until just recently when Geek Mom from Geek Mom Mashup tagged me with this meme.

Now a meme is kind of like a chain letter so for those of you I tag I hope you don’t get offended and I understand if you do not want to participate. But I would encourage you to give it a try who knows it might generate you some traffic.

Here is the Meme. I am not sure of the format the post should be in so I hope this is okay.

Rule #1: Copy all the links below and replace a single link under the appropriate letter of the alphabet. If your domain name, or even the title of your blog, starts with an “A,” you’d replace the link under that letter and put the replaced link at the bottom. Also, don’t forget to credit the tagger, or where you got the list from, at the end of the list with a full URL of the post so that a pingback gets generated.

1. acowboyswife.com
2. bloggingcents.com
3. caffeine-overload.com
4. delusionsofgrandeur.org
5. everythingandanythingblog.com
6. forumfinder.net
7. GeekMomMashup.com
8. happykeg.com
9. ipentimento.com
10. juliesjournal.com
11. kabalyero.com
12. ladylike4.com
13. michaelpark.net
14. notjustmama.net
15. originalmx5.net
16. peapodsquadstuff.com
17. qweddings.com
18. rowdigrl.com
19. shirleysdelight.com
20. TenaciousCreations.com
21. utada-online.net
22. valmg.com
23. wickedbabylon.com
24. xaviermedia.com
25. yimto.com
26. zbudapest.com

Replaced link:  thesocalledme.net
Previous tagger: Geek Mom Mash Up

Rule #2: You now have to “tag” at least five people and encourage them to participate so that this thing spreads like a virus. Remember, though, that not everyone’s into these kinds of things, so don’t be upset if they don’t participate. Just simply replace your tag. Remember to tag blogs only and no pornographic ones as we do want to keep the integrity as a blogging community. TIP: Tag your frequent EntreCard droppers via its messaging system.

Alright now the hard part, who to tag with this to pass it on. Well here are the people I have tagged:

• Red Vodka Jelly
  
• Nicole B Photography

• The Asian Economist
  
• Bioteck
  
• Wogan may
  

Rule #3: Just like any other “meme” out there, ask a question for your taggees to answer along with your own answer to the previous question. This is optional.

Here’s my question: What do you listen to while on the computer?

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 You are probably wondering what in the world do sexy pirate women have to do with keywords. Well in case you didn’t know sex, or anything to do with sex are most highly searched for terms on the internet. I am not a keyword expert but this is what I have learned on the web so far.

 Knowing what keywords people are searching for can help you help them find your site. Plus if you run adsense it can help you attract higher paying ads to your site. Keywords are important, but not as important as content. To understand keywords we first have to look at how a search engine works.

 A search engines primary goal is to provide the user with links relative to the keyword that they have searched for. Now it is in the best interest of a search engine to provide you with good content. If you get reliable results from the search engine you are going to use it again in most cases. How many times have you clicked on a link from a search engine that had nothing to do with what you had searched for? I am sure we have all done this at some time or another.

Search engine algorithms are designed to try and prevent that. Google’s being one of the most successful as it is based on how many times the content is linked to from other sites. The more the content is linked the higher the Google Page Rank and in theory the more relevant the content will be to your search.

 Now what does this have to do with sexy pirate women? Well nothing really other than I am targeting the keywords “sexy pirate women“. Actually as I write this post pretty much any word that I have in italics (save for italics) is a targeted keyword. Once adsense crawls this post I should be getting ads related to sexy pirate women costumes.

 If you do a Google Search for sexy pirate women you get tons of listings for women’s pirate costumes. When I write a post I use my new plug in (which is just about ready for beta release) to find out what are the most likely keywords in the post. Then I go and do a web search on them and see what turns up.

 For example with sexy pirate women I get a bunch of links for women’s pirate costumes. Now this is okay if my post is indeed about pirate costumes for women. In this case it isn’t, it is about keywords so it is going to be tough for this post to get search traffic who are looking for information on keywords.

 But never fear I do have a plan for that as well. After I see what a Google Search turns up, it is off to do some more keyword research. My next step is to use Googles keyword Tool. After entering the keywords “sexy pirate woman”, Google Search turns up, it is off to do some more keyword research. My next step is to use Googles keyword Tool gives me a listing with some valuable information.

Screen Capture from Googles keyword tool

 Not only is Google giving me suggestions for other keywords but it is showing me the highest cost per click, how much competition there is for that keyword as well as the average search volume for those keywords.

 A word of warning here for you Adsense publishers. Just because a certain keyword has a high cost per click it does not mean that you get a high pay out per click. The CPC you see here is just the maximum amount an advertiser will pay for that keyword. In my next post Pirates are Sexy – Lesson Two in Keywords I will go into how to use this keyword information to improve the money you make from Adsense.

Pirates are Sexy Lesson Two in Keywords will be posted in the next few days, stay tuned.

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 Lets’ face it just about everyone who runs a web site likes to keep track of what their visitors do on the site. There are many great tools out there that do this for us. Google Analytics is probably one of the more popular ones that people use. What these tools don’t really tell you is how your users actually interact with your site.

 That is why you should give Robot Replay try. Now don’t worry I am not trying to sell you something. Robot Replay is currently free and super easy to use.It as simple as installing a bit of java code into your pages header to use Robot Replay.

  Robot Replay tracks how your users interact with your site. Then you can view actual sessions and follow the users mouse pointer as they go through your site. This allows you to see where your user may encounter pit falls while interacting with your site. Plus for those of you who advertise on your site this can also tell you where your users are looking. Research has shown that a users eyes follow their mouse cursor 60% of the time. Robot Replay is a fantastic tool to have in your arsenal when improving your sites design.

 Well if a picture is worth a thousand words than a video must be worth at least a million. So give this video a view to see just how you can use Robot Replay to enhance your users experience with your site.

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 It seems every blog that runs EntreCard has a list of tips to gain more EntreCardcredits. So it would be like flogging a dead horse for me to do a post on EntreCard tips.

 That is why this post is on getting the most out of the time you invest into EntreCard. For those of you who do not know, EntreCard is a way of attracting traffic to your blog. It works like the business cards of the past. For more information on EntreCard and why you should look into it read my post here.

1. Use a RSS reader and subscribe to the feed for your card drops. This allows you to view all your card drops at the end of the day and return the favor by dropping cards on those sites. Doing this all at one time saves you more time then checking randomly through out the day and returning the card drops.
2. Use the Favorites feature in EntreCard to single out places where you want to advertise. This way when you go to do an ad campaign you can look to see if the blogs you want to advertise on are available.
3. Set a time limit for how much time you’ll spend card dropping and browsing sites. I set this at around one hour. This gives me ample time to send thank you notes to both those who have bought ads from and those who I have bought ads from. Now you could just use a form letter and copy and paste which would save you more time. But I prefer the personal touch.
4. Lets face it there are going to be some sites you’ll want to frequent every day. You can do this by subscribing to their feeds. Or what I do is book mark them in FireFox and put them all in the same folder. Then I can click on that folder and have FireFox open all the sites in individual tabs. As I drop my card and or leave my comments on the new post I close the tab. Again I do this with in the time limit I have set for EntreCard that day.
5. Start your ad campaigns and approve the ads purchased for site first thing in the day. I have noticed that price to advertise on my blog will always be cheaper first thing in the morning. This rings true for other blogs as well. I know it is tempting to approve ad requests all day. But if you do them all at one time it will end up- costing you less time.

 EntreCard is a great system and has brought my blog a lot of traffic and many RSS subscribers. The only draw back is it does cost a bit of your time. I hope these five tips will help you save a bit of time while using EntreCard. Time to me is my most valuable commodity. I never seem to have enough and I can’t replace what I have used of it. If you have some EntreCard time saving suggestions please leave them in the comments.

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 One of the good things about being part of the blogging community is that other bloggers tend to post things about new trends as they appear. Then they sort of propagate virally. Now one thing I have found that seems to pop up on every blog is new and better ways of getting traffic. This is almost as common as the get rich quick schemes that pop up.

 Well RSSHugger is another one of those sites promising to increase traffic. This is their spiel as to what they are about.

The Idea

rssHugger is a unique website that aims to bring bloggers and readers together. rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader. rssHugger aims to help visitors be able to easily find blogs that write about subjects they are interested in. These subjects include: internet marketing, making money online, charity, sports, gambling, and many more. If the visitors find a blog that they had not previously heard about, they can easily add it to their RSS readers or bookmark it.

 So it seems to be kind of like Stumble Upon but for RSS feeds. Now in order to get your blog listed you can pay a small fee or write a blog about them. Being cheap as I am I have opted for writing a blog about them. However it is kind of hard to review something that you have not yet tried. So I cannot make any reconmendations at this time. But I will keep you update.

 On another note EntreCard is still performing very well for me. Right now as I write this is will cost you 124 EC to advertise on this site, and there are currently spots open. Others who have had their card displayed on my site have reported to me that it has worked very well. So if you have an extra 124 EC buy some ad space here.

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  These are a few tips I have learned in my travels over the web to increase my earnings from Google’s AdSense. I am no expert at this, but by doing these things I have noticed an improvement in my revenue from AdSense. Hopefully it will help you improve your revenues. If it does be sure to tell me.

1. Too Much or Too Little – When I was building custom motorcycles we had this saying for chrome on a motorcycle “Chrome is like perfume, too little you can’t smell it, too much and you stink!“. This is very true when it come to ads on your website. Too few ads and you don’t capitalize on your traffic for clicks. Too many ads and your site just stinks. Readers are pushed away from a site that is 90% ads and 10% content. You have to find a happy medium, there is no set formula for this. Every site is different and it is only something you can determine by experimentation.
2. Variety and Channels – Don’t just run one style of ad. For example on this post you will see a couple banner ads, as well as some different sized box ads. For each different style of ad I have a channel set up in Google so I can determine what works and what doesn’t. This is very important to how you approach advertising on your site. From the stats generated in your channels you can determine which ads perform the best. This gives you direction in choosing what ads to run on your site.
3. Blend your ads into posts – This is one of the most important things I have learned about adsense. Sure ads in the columns of my site do get some clicks, but not near as many as the ads I have blended into my posts. I have found the best strategy is to have a banner ad at the beginning and end of my post. Then a couple of various size box ads through out the post. The key here is to have the ads displayed in such a way with in the post that it does not make it difficult to follow the content of the post. Once again content is king.
4. The Key is Keywords – The words you have in your post will ultimately determine what ads are served up with it. Some ads pay better than others for a click through. So you want to attract higher paying ads. One way of doing this is to research keywords for your particular post. To describe how to do this is another post in itself. I will be posting my methods of picking keywords soon.
5. More Traffic + More Content = More Clicks – They say the hardest thing with Google AdSense is to get that first check for $100.00. After that things are said to go better. What I have noticed with many people new to AdSense is they start out with virtually no content on their sites. lets face it if Blogger A has ads on 10 posts and Blogger B has ads on 100 posts, blogger B is going to get more clicks. Why? Simply because Blogger B’s ads are displayed in more places. basically he has a better chance of an ad intriguing one of his readers to click. The same goes with traffic, the more traffic = the more pages views which then equates to more ads being viewed. If you have just started with adsense and don’t have a lot of traffic or content just be patient. As your content increases so will your traffic. This will lead to more clicks which leads to more scratch in your pocket.

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 Are you blind when it comes to seeing ads on websites? Do you just read the content and not even see the ads? This was me before I started to run AdSense on this site.

 I would just surf along ignoring ads left and right. I did not need to run any specialize ad blocker for fire fox. I would just naturally turn a blind eye to any advertising. In fact I do the same thing while watching television. I even have an entire strategy for not watching commercials while watching TV.

 I find the program I want to watch, then I find another one that interests me and quickly turn the channel there. Then I can use the last button on my remote to switch between the two. When commercials start on the program I am watching I quickly turn to the other program. Most times this works well and I end up watching a bare minimum of commercials. Sometimes I get caught and there are commercials at the same time for both programs. It is then that I drive any one else watching TV with me nuts by channel surfing.

 I think this is a pretty common thing out there with people. You see the advertisements just do not provide any value for you. So you do other things while they are on or don’t even watch them at all. This was generally my mode d operandi while surfing the web too. Then I decided it would be nice to make a few bucks from this blog and I installed Google’s AdSense. Like many people new to AdSense I would check my stats every couple hours only to be disappointed that I had not made any money.

 Then came the day I had few clicks and made a whopping $0.45. I was excited and over joyed, even though I hadn’t made enough to buy a cup of coffee. That’s when I started to think about these ads in a whole new light. I thought to myself if this made me excited I bet it would make another blogger excited. Plus what really is Google selling from my site with these ads. It was then that I resolved I would from now on click on an ad if the site it was displayed on interested me.

 Clicking on these ads actually gave me a really good feeling. To me, I feel as though I am rewarding the blogger for a good post by clicking on their ads. Kind of like giving them a tip. An Adsense publisher cannot come out and ask you to click on their ads, its a big Google no no. Almost as bad as clicking on your own ads. So you will never see an author asking you click on their ads. But let me tell you by doing so, you are showing your support for that author. Plus what does it cost you? Just a bit of your time and who knows you may even find some great deals.

 I live in a small town and there is really no where to buy computer hardware. So I am used to having to order it online. Well I have noticed I am actually saving money by clicking through these ads on websites I frequent. Hopefully this is generating more revenue for the blog owners that I find the ad on. In order to spread the wealth I have changed how I buy computer hardware. First after I identify what I need/want I will research it to make sure it is indeed what I am after. Then I will check prices and write them down in my note pad (I always have a notepad on my desk). During my daily surfing if I find ads for these items, or ads for places that sell these items I will check the price. If I come up with a good price I will use that online merchant to make my purchase. There by giving some revenue to the blog or site I was reading when I found the ad.

 I don’t know maybe I am crazy or just turning into a hippie as I age. But I really like the idea of supporting the blogging community this way. My father was a small business man and during summer break from school I would accompany him to work. My father and a bunch of his friends who were also small business men got together every morning for coffee. It was a community of small business men, and they supported each other. If one sold an item the other needed, they would always buy from with in their community. My father would tell me that you have to support the community if you want the community to support you. Basically what goes around, comes around. That is what I feel I am doing by clicking on ads and buying items from them with in the blogging community.

 Hey maybe I am nuts. I am really interested in what you, other bloggers, think on this issue. Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

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 While I was surfing through numerous Word Press sites today I notice a bunch had this nifty Comment Luv Plug in. When you leave a comment at a site running this plug in it will automatically retrieve the commenter’s last post and place a link to it with their comment.

 What a great way to not only encourage comments but help send some traffic to your fellow bloggers. I am pleased to announce that Tenacious Creations now has this plug in enabled. Comments are still moderated so you can not simply post spam in order to get links. But if you leave a comment related to the post be it good or bad it is almost always approved. If you have left a comment that has not been approved it may of got caught in my spam filters. Feel free to use the contact form on the about page to ask me why your comment was not approved.

 I also noticed in my surfing that a lot of sites have a large number of links to other sites on them. This is something that Tenacious Creations is lacking. If you would like me to place a link from my site to yours please leave me a comment here. All I ask is for you to link to my site.

 Plus if you are running Word Press and Adsense or TTZ ads consider signing up to beta test my new ads optimizer plug in. On that note, I had a found a few bugs in it today so the beta won’t be available till early next week.

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 Well it seems from my posts on EntreCard, here and here. Most EntreCard users and users in general have not had much luck with BlogRush.

 Now it should be noted that unlike EntreCard, once you install the BlogRush code there is nothing more you have to do. With EntreCard, some user action is required. You have to place ads, approve ads, and drop a few cards at least. How ever the pay back from EntreCard is far greater. I have been receiving over 100 unique visitor’s from EntreCard a day now. That far out weighs the seven to ten I have been getting from Blog Rush. However I am not going to drop the ugly bulky BlogRush widget just yet. I have however moved it beneath the fold (a less prominent spot according to people who research ad placements).

 Eventually I will migrate the Blog Rush widget completely off the Tenacious Creations site. I am okay with spending 30 to 45 minutes a day promoting my blog with EntreCard. Yes it is more time than I would have to spend with Blog Rush (with Blog Rush I wouldn’t have to spend any) but I don’t look at it as unproductive time. Not only am I promoting my site but I am finding other interesting sites. Or at the very least interesting content. Plus I get the warm fuzzy feeling of participating in a Blogging community.

 I should also mention that I have become sort of an EntreCard evangelist. There are a few sites that I have found with BlogRush that I frequent that do not have EntreCard yet. I took it upon myself to drop them a note to try EntreCard. I hope they do, and if so it would be great if they could drop me a note here. I will be more than happy to write a recommendation of their sites for EntreCard.

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