Ok - I have seen like 10 blogs down today for up to an hour at times. I am pretty sure it is not my connection because 99% of other websites are working.

Does anyone know of a blog monitoring service? I have my own monitoring tools that text messages my cell phone if any of my servers are down.

Was just wondering if anyone knows of anything to monitor if their website/blog is down?

Today I read an article from the New York Times about how blogging is causing a lot of stress and may have even lead to the deaths of bloggers Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant.

So what about blogging is stressful and can lead to sleep deprivation, weight gain/loss and even heart attacks? The root cause is creating new content in real time to match their readers’ needs.

The problem from the reader perspective is we sometimes feel it is necessary to know everything that is happening pertaining to our industry in real time. For example in my case I am involved in the internet startup scene so I read Techcrunch and Gigaom multiple times per day and I receive notifications come in as new posts are made.

But not anymore!

I realized after reading the New York Times article that I do not need to be hooked into those or any blogs 24/7 because I am only fueling the fire. Knowing that Facebook is now valued at $15 billion or the Wireless Spectrum was purchased by Verzion really does not affect me. If anything it just throws me off focus!

If you think my points above make sense try boycotting your favorite blogs for a day and see if you become more productive and are able to live without them.

Lots of fun stuff on the web today because of Aprils Fool.

Here are some of the links:

• Digg
• Google
• YouTube
• TechCrunch

If you have seen more today please leave them in the comments.

If you are struggling to get more traffic to your website then check out these 21 ways to get free traffic.

1. Blog Comments
2. Blog Trackbacks
3. Blogroll
4. Blog Widgets: MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog
5. Guest Blogging
6. Forum Posts/Signature
7. Directories: DMoz
8. Viral Components: Tell a friend script
9. Review websites: KillerStartups.com
10. Interviews
11. Link Exchanges
12. Contests
13. Affiliate Program
14. Joint Ventures
15. SEO
16. Press
17. Article Marketing
18. Radio Shows
19. Podcasts
20. Magazines
21. Local Newspapers

Do you know any other ways to get free traffic if so leave a comment and I will add it with a link to your website.

If you like this post, Digg it up!

From the beginning of this website I have been purchasing reviews from websites. To date they have been from Jonathan Volk, John Cow and John Chow.

Everyone of those websites has brought visitors, sales and left everyone  thinking - “I should buy a review from those websites”. I have never seen a blog post results from a review so I thought I would be a first.

Top Converting Reviews:
1. John Cow - 3.46%
2. John Chow - 3.06%
3. Jonathan Volk - 2.97%

But - what amazed me the most was when I included the viral effect. The viral effect is what I describe as other blogs picking up on the story and writing about it.

Top Converting Viral Effect Reviews:
1. Jonathan Volk
2. John Cow
3. John Chow

Interesting stuff!

These reviews are not even my top converting source but I thought I would share these results with you.

Ok - I have been reading a lot of comments on a lot of the blogs and even message boards about The Social Millionaire. I am seeing the same thing over and over again!

Google will block his website so fast.
It’s just another link directory which offers no value.

First off - I am not here to build my website to Google’s terms. They take people’s content without their permission, make it search friendly, monetize it and then tell me to change my website to make their searching easier? I do not think so Larry and Sergery.

Many of you do not know that I have actually been making money online as an internet marketer for a couple of years now. I have never relied on SEO. I realize the foundation and potential SEO provides but there are so many other ways I could be seeing a return on investment now rather than later.

These methods eventually will help your SEO over time. That is why I find it pointless to focus on SEO. Just get out there and do what ever it takes to get your name to the masses and eventually over time the SEO will build up. Some of the methods I use are: article marketing, guest blogging, social media and press.

Once you are out there hopefully some bloggers will pick up on your message and create a post around it linking to your website. Eventually you are letting other people do your SEO for you!

But this is not really why I wanted to write this post!

I want to explain the value of The Social Millionaire. When anyone visits this website for the first time they will see a huge list of keywords. Naturally you would think they would click on a random keyword and maybe visit the advertisers website resulting in some sort of conversion.

I am no psychology expert but already from my stats I can see something interesting. The term “affiliate marketing” has actualy had the most visits and delivered the most clicks. It makes sense - all of the blogs I have been mentioned in are all related to making money online. If my visitors have been thinking about Dog Training they will more likely see that keyword rather then all of the other keywords in the cloud and likely end up becoming a very good prospect for any dog training book or service.

Once this website becomes more mainstream more general keywords will start to have the most traffic. I imagine keywords like Facebook, Ringtones, Business, Celebrities, Gossip, News and other keywords will be the most popular.

These are all the reasons why I feel my website provides value! If you disagree or agree feel free to leave it the comments and I will reply.

My last post was geared towards how Web 2.0 Makes the world a better place. Today I saw a video posted on TechCrunch of Chris Anderson the editor and chief of Wired Magazine that I felt I should share.

This blogging job is a lot harder than I thought so I give props to John Chow, Shoe Money and Michael Arrington who make it look so easy!

While I was running tonight I was trying to think of an interesting blog topic. This is what I came up with: Web 2.0, Making The World a Better Place?

Early entrepreneurs were involved in creating businesses that could create profits right away. Entrepreneurs like K. C. Irving and Sam Walton knew they had to create a business where there would be some return in investment quickly. Most people would agree this is the foundation of business, start a company that can make you lots of money.

When the internet first was born entrepreneurs were trying to gage how they could bring existing bricks and mortar companies to the online world. This created some of the most valuable internet companies like Amazon and eBay. Then came along a company called Google. They did not have any real plans of monetizing their service but they knew money would help them create a central place for the worlds information.

Investors and Venture Capitalists now realize how big of behemoth Google has become after their IPO. Investors try to focus on these services that have no real current monetization model in the hopes they eventually find one.

Investors do not want to miss out on another Google hence why Facebook is so highly valued and easily got funding. They are having current troubles monetizing though.

This began the real Web 2.o funding as I call it. Build a service that tailors to people then find a way to monetize it. Be people-centric not money-centric. Unfortunately a lot of entrepreneurs have problems monetizing their service once they have become popular with the ease of viral marketing in the Web 2.0 world.

Since the web is all about being people-centric now with no censorship (except in China and Australia) people can see the media in an unbiased or really biased opinion. They are now able to engage in comments and give their thoughts about news or articles. It has enabled Wikipedia to have some of the most updated Wikis on anything and monitored by anyone. So when your university professor tells you not to use Wikipedia for that reason be sure to mention to him that before Wikipedia anyone could write a book and have anyone from a publishing company read it and publish it. Don’t you think having millions of people reading and reviewing does a much better job? This in my opinion is why Web 2.0 helps make the world a better place.

The companies who will really cash out in the next 5 to 10 years are the ones who have spent the last 5 to 10 years acquiring a huge amount of users. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are among them, as the world embraces Web 3.0 (semantic web) and OpenID.

Now services will be built around OpenID and the privacy of the users will rest in these big companies hands.

You may agree or disagree with my post but I would love to hear your points so please comment.

You may notice on the right of this blog I have added two non-profit widgets to help bring in some traffic to this website.

The widgets are Entrecard and Spottt. These two widgets were not apart of my marketing strategy but some other bloggers were mentioning the amounts of traffic they were getting. I was intrigued so I signed up! I am starting to see a  surge of traffic from Entrecard. Not from Spottt yet because they need to approve this website.

Unfortunately the traffic from Entrecard is questionable. My statistics are showing very low readership and time spent on the website but that is besides the point. I am getting “free” traffic and even if any of those visitors convert it is worth it. Plus I earn credits which I can use to get an advertisements on websites like JohnChow and ProBlogger.