This may be a shock to some of you, but I’m closing down shop. I made the decision last night. I’m selling all of my domains and sites except for one. The only site I’m keeping at this time is my product site. My reasoning may seem pretty complex to some. Most of you know that I do children’s ministry for a living. Ministry is my life and my purpose. By doing children’s minsitry I’m making an eternal difference in the lives of others. Internet marketing only puts money in my pocket and half the time takes money out . I’ve been finding that most of my creative thoughts have been going towards starting websites and figuring out how to make money on them. My mental focus needs to be more on ministry and on my family when I’m at home, so giving up sites will help me to do that.

Secondly, ministry in itself keeps me a very busy person. The last thing I need to be doing is sitting on the computer for hours on end. You all know how it works, everything just takes time. I’m just a very driven person in everything I do so I just need to set my priorities.

I can’t say what the future holds. Will I ever blog again? Will I ever start another site? At this season in my life, I’m just going to run the one site. I had thoughts of starting a blog for children’s ministers before I made this decision. For right now everything will be sold. I enjoy developing sites and I’m going to miss it, but this is what I have to do for a time being. I’m not totally disappearing from the internet scene. You might see me around a bit on forums and I may comment on others blogs a bit, but not with the intensity that I have been. I’m either selling this blog on DP or I’m going to give it to my brother-n-law. A big thanks is in order to my 2 regular commentors Chris and Jimmy Lee and those who read on a regular basis, but haven’t commented. I will continue to answer comments on this blog until this blog is no longer mine.

Thanks,

Jon Lewis AKA Blonde Jon

I don’t blog about other blogs very much, but I joined up with text-linkads.com.  I just want to see if I can montenize this site a little more.  I set up an account and all that, but then I ran into their blog.  I came across their blog before, but never took the time to read it.  Well, they have some good stuff in their blog.  Their blog is hosted under a different domain, http://www.linkbuildingblog.com/.

The post that I read was dealing with Google Sandbox.  It’s a superb post.  Most people I talk to on forums can’t give me an explanation what the Google Sandbox is let alone how to get out of it.  Andy Hagans, who wrote the article, does a awesome job explaining both what the Google Sanbox is and how to get out of it.  The Link Building Blog will be a blog that I visit on a regular basis.

There’s a cool new tool that has just come out by Textlink-ads.com, called Feedvertising.  This free tool allows you to put ads in your RSS feed so you can montenize your feed.

Yesterday I ran out of time on my last article.  I had to get to work so here are some other free ways to promote your blog.

1. Submit your site to free directories.
2. Set your blog to ping other sites every time you write a new article.  A ping is just a notification to other sites that you wrote a new article.  Word Press does this automaticly.  You can set up who you ping to by going into your Word Press admin, click on options, click on writing, and type in what site you want to ping under Update Services and you are all set.  I only ping pingomatic and webmaster talk.  From my understanding pingomatic pings all the other blog pinging sites out there.  This is what someone told me a while back.  Please correct me if I’m wrong.
3. Tell your friends about your blog.  I know people who are always needing help with the “how to” side of starting a web buisness so I always refer them to my site.
4. Can you list any more?  I know there are a ton of ways to promote your blog for free, but I’m not going to discuss ways that I haven’t tried personally.

I’ve been blogging now for 7 months. In this amount of time, I have learned a lot on how to promote my blog for free. Below are a few things that I’ve learned.

1. Put your blog in your sig link when ever possible. Sig links give you immediate traffic while yo wait for your organic SEO to kick in.
2. Display your most recent blog post in every forum that you are a member of that gives you this option.
3. Give relevant comments on other blogs that are related to yours.  This can give you a few visitors.  Those visitors can become regular readers or commentors on your blog.
4. Trade links with other blogs related to your blog.  This will give you a few visitors.
5. Set your blog up to have search engine friendly URLs.  For Word Press this can be done under options and then permalinks.
6. Name your posts something creative.  People are more willing to read articles in a newspaper because they have a great title.  Do the same for your blog.

That’s it for the day.  Maybe all post more on this later.

There are a lot of people especially over at the DP who rent sig links. The other day I was thinking about this, why don’t bloggers rent out other people’s blog feeds? There are a lot of forums that allow you to show other people in the forum your recent blog. This usually shows up right under your user name. There are a lot of people in forums who don’t have blogs. They could make a little money each month by renting out that space.

I don’t know about you, but I have more of a tendancy to click on people’s most recent blog more so then their sig links. The reason why I click on it is because the title of the certain post was interesting to me. Blog post titles have the tendancy to be more descriptive and a little bit more eye catching than a sig link. So why don’t people rent out their most recent blog space? Why don’t bloggers ask to rent out other forum users blog space? That’s my question for the day. I’m going to post this question over at DP also see what kind of response people give.