California Calling

Recently California has been in the news for an unfortunate reason – a wildfire that spread like, well, wildfire which destroyed homes and livelihoods of many Californians.

Photo source: National Geographic News

In the midst of all the smoky gloom and ashen doom, emerged a silver lining in the form of a new blog that talks about California, for all the good reasons.

In fact, it is Everything You Want To Know about California And More! This new blog was started by a California native named Jeff Irvin who resides in Long Beach, CA. Jeff had lived in California his whole life and want to spread the good words (and not so good) of California and the surrounding states, from the perspective of a California native.

As the blog title suggests, it is about all things Californian. For the month of October, Jeff is doing a special feature on his blog called Haunted Places In California, and he had posted some interesting write-ups which were accompanied by images of the mentioned places. Do you know that Disney Land is HAUNTED? Yes, the happiest place on Earth wasn’t spared the spooky stuffs and Jeff brings you the story! Be sure to check out the post if you're planning a vacation to ANY Disney theme park anytime soon.

Jeff is holding a blog review competition where the blog with the best review posted by November 1 2007 will get $50 Dollars by paypal! It is a nice and simple contest, so go check out the contest rules.

God bless all Californians and Happy Halloween!

Here Comes The White Elephant!

Having won herself the new "white elehpant" gift from John Chow's contest, who incidentally also re-gifted after winning it himself at a networking event. Ms Danielle has no need for the "piece of crap" since she's already got 2 iPods, she is re-gifting the 30GB Microsft Zune in her own back link promotion contest to promote her new blog site.

Since she received the "white elephant" (disguised in doo-doo brown color) prize in mid May, Ms Danielle had been busy getting her swing right on the greens(or is it the range) and also busy hosting a flying trapeze artist from down under. She finally got down to postingthis contest and offering the Zune up for grabs!

To enter the contest, simply create a new post in your blog linking to both her home page and one other post on her popular site — pick any post you want. Use anchor text that includes the phrase “blog site.” Examples include Danielle’s blog site, popular blog site, blog site about marketing, golf beginner’s blog site, ppc blog site, etc.

The "white elephant" is starting its "world tour" soon, hope it makes a cross-continental trip to the far east and make a permanent stop at my doorstep! I'll make sure it is "white elephant" no more!

Review of Online Opportunity

If you stumbled upon Online Opportunity.org, then you have found yourself a blog about making money online. What's so special about Online Opportunity that differentiate itself from the tons of blogs out there about making money online these days. Well, for a start, this blog not only is about making money online, but is also about how to not make money online. Yes, you heard right, there's no typo erorr. Have I pique your interest already with that last statement?

Jay, who author this blog, confessed that he fit into the profile of most people who are looking to make money online, myself included. We have day jobs, and probably don’t like them much. So we’re looking for a way to make a living online. Most of us are juggling our day job with running a household, supporting a family and trying to make money online with what little time and energy we have left.

There are countless opporunities and online programs for people wanting to make a living online, but unfortunately, some of them are scams targetted at the gullible trying to make a quick buck. Most of the legitimate programs that promise people will make residual income and making auto-pilotincome even while they are on holiday or sleeping, required payments upfront before they'll show you the secrets!

If you are skeptical about such paid programs, this is where Jay come in. He’ll spend the money and take the risk, so you don’t have to! Where on earth can you find such help for free? Through his blog, Jay hope to steer readers in the direction of opportunities that have a better chance of realizing its promise, so that you won’t make the same mistake like so many people who get lured in by the hype and then fail at programs. If you come across an opportunity you’re interested about, but and can’t find a review of it on his site, let him know the details and he'll do the sleuth work.

To promote his blog using the link bait startegy, Jay is holding a review contest, where he'll pick the best review (whether positive or negative) and award the author $100! To enter the contest, see the rules here.

Inside The Secret Life of a Super Affiliate

The first thing that attracted my attention to Zac Johnson's blog is the super geeky cartoon of a crown-wearing geek holding some greenbacks! The cartoon did no justice to Zac's real look(check out his pics in photo gallery), but it does a good job making an impression on my mind! The image is also use as "Zac's stamp of approval" for his posts on network reviews, very unique!

Zac Johnson calls himself a super affiliate marketer as he has been making money online for over 10 years now and specializes in affiliate marketing. Through Zac’s personal blog, he'll share with you his secrets, successes and failures of a true life super affiliate and how you can start to making money online. He was even featured in Revenue magazine in his MoneyReignNetwork days. That is online credibility for you.

Zac's blog is very content focused and gives a "clean" feel with no advertising, a rare find these days, where plastering all kinds of ads on one's blog seems to be the order of the day.
Inspired by John Chow's success in "review my blog" link bait, Zac is starting his own "Review Me & Make Money" contest. Not only will he link back to you for reviewing his fast growing blog (predicted PR4 on next update), but also one lucky winner will be draw randomlyto win $50(pay via PayPal) for every 10 reviews he gets. Click here for his review rules.

Review of RandLife.com

By his own account, Randall Cornett of RandLife.com professed that "...I’m not the most experienced person on the net. Actually, I’ve had very minimal success on the internet. Which, is why I’ve started this latest venture of trying to maintain a blog, that at least is worth something..."

Digging a little deeper into his blog to verified those humble confessions, I find no justifiable cause that points to his claims. On the contrary, I find it to be a cool blog with great blogging resources, and informative articles, written in a very professional yet personal way, which I beleive will easily connect with his readers.

Randall is a 17 years old native from Las Vegas, Nevada - a.k.a "Sin City", the place where CSI orignated. He will be finishing high school soon and is planning on getting his college education in Computer Science and later transferring to The University of Las Vegas Nevada to get a Business Degree. Randall is honest enough to let us in that school is really not his thing, his heart(besides belonging to his beautiful girlfriend Gabrielle Morales) really lies with computers. The Internet to be exact.

As far as his polished writing style is concern, Randall appears to me a 17 year-old going on 30! Randall blogs about his passion in topics like Search Engine Optimization, web development, affiliate marketing and blogging techniques.

Some of my favourite posts on his blog are:
1. 10 tips to make the Digg front page

2. What must you do to have a big traffic boom?

3. 10 Content Producing Tools

Having seen the success of fellow blogger's "review me" contest to bump up tons of traffic, Randall is upping the ante in his own contest, dangling a cash prize of $100, for a luckyblogger who review his blog. I really really hope this last minute submission will be accepted by Randall.

The blog's header graphic had just been tweaked recently, with a cartoon of a man greeting readers added next to the original blog title. Even though his avatar can be seen in his comment replies, his photo is missing from the "About Me" page, or anywhere on his blog. Randall's impersonal tone of blogging can really connects with his readers, but if he can put up a photo on his blog, it will give a different meaning to personal touch.

In conclusion, I highly recommend one and all to hop over and check out Randlife.com, it will be worth every minute of your time.

Pah-rum-pum-pum-pum, Me And My Drum!

To celebrate "MeAndMyDrum" 90days old birthday, the site owner, Mark Sierra, is running a contest to reward readers and drum up(no pun intended) some buzz and of course, more traffic!
A lucky winner stand a chance to win a Google Adwords coupon worth $25(only for new account and must be used within 14 days of its creation) plus a free banner ad space on his blog sidebar for 30days! To enter the contest, just make a post on your blog about MeAndMyDrum, link to the homepage and also link to the contest page. This contest will ends on midnight (central) 31 May. The winner will be determined by a random draw.

In his blog, Mark covers a variety of topics such as blogging tips, technology, politics, humor, and more. In the short space of 90days, MAMD had attained a PR3 ranking, roughly 300k in alexa rank and broken the 3 digit barrier in Technorati authority. These stats are remarkable and are constantly on the up, I'm sure. This blog has got great potential and is worth every minute of my time checking out.


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Shawn Knight Review Contest

One mighty Knight over at OverClock Intelligence Agency - OCIA.net for short,had an extension to this tech site by way of a blog and he is offering a lucky reader $25 for reviewing his blog.

I am of course referring to Shawn Knight, who at 24 years of age, is the CEO of OCIA.net(the site name never fails to connect my thoughts to CIA!), who plan on overclocking the world, one PC at a time! That's a herculean task, no less, even for a young knight, i must say.

As this is a review of his blog, I will try to limit my writing about OCIA.net and focus this review on Shawn-Knight.net instead. Shawn started this blog to reveal a slice of his daily life as a tech site owner. It is also a place to for him to showcase some of his photography works(amateur by his own standards), to network / meet new people, post random thoughts and generally just have a good time.

By his own account, Shawn had much experience and had learnt many lessons about Adsense ads in his hardware review site, which he readily shares in his ad-free blog. A most refreshing and rare finds, considering millions of blogs out there trying to "make money online" by slapping multiple ads all over the blog!

Photography posts featured highly on his blog, I sure had a good time, enjoying his many photo postings on "Photo-A-Day" and "Daily Ownage" - check out the Nemo sushi. Besides that, Shawn also shares photography tips and some how-to's tutorial in "Photography", and they do not appear amateurish at all. If photography is not your thing, there's always those hardware reviews to keep you wanting more!

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Blog Review Contest

Wanna stand a chance to be the proud winner of a new 8GB Apple iPod nano? Hop over to PureBlogging.com where its author, David Culpepper, is offering this fantastic prize for a lucky blogger who review his blog and submit the blog post url to him by 30 April, 2007.

David is a chemist by trade and owned a successful environmental laboratory in South Mississippi. He started PureBlogging.com as a place for sharing blogging news, tips, and tutorials and is intended for anyone who is interested in learning the secrets of attaining blogging success and monetization.

In his mission statement (yes! David's blog has a mission statement), his stated goal is to keep readers updated about breaking technology developments, strategies, and the general buzz of the blogosphere in a way that is easy to understand and implement.

David shows how a blog can score with a catchy title and good color matching scheme. The layout of this blog is neat and uncluttered, and most importantly, it regularly serve up useful tips and interesting articles related to blogging.

At the last update of this contest on 23rd April, David had only received 15 entries, so you can imagine the odds of actually winning the nano is very very good!

I hope I'm still on time to join the contest and be eligible for the lucky draw. Well, if I don't win, I still stand to benefit from some link love from PureBlogging.com