Who wins with a design contest? Sites such as SitePoint, DigitalPoint, NamePros, DNF, etc all seem to be full of people who enjoy holding “design contests”. A design contest is when somebody posts a description or idea of a logo or graphic of some sort and then states a price they are willing to pay to whoever comes up with the best design. Hence the term contest. I’m not a fan of these at all. I wouldn’t host one, nor would I generally participate in one. Here’s why:

9 times out of 10 the “prize” amount is around $20-40. Many times I see people looking to get by with just $10 out of pocket. Somehow hundreds if not thousands of web designers pour into such threads on these forums day after day scrambling to come up with the best design. I’ve visited these threads often to see what types of graphics people come up with. I am usually shocked to see that in many cases what I consider the best looking graphic is not always the winner.

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I’ve sold my fair share of items on eBay and the feedback game never gets old. Personally I think the feedback system is worthless and here’s why. Say you buy an item from somebody, pay instantly, and overall do everything a good buyer needs to do. Basically you have gone through the motions and now you are waiting for your precious feedback. Well, the item shows up not as described or damaged. Yes, you got screwed. So, what do you do? Leave a negative? Try to work it out? None of the above?

It’s a well known fact that most people will do anything to avoid a fight. Most eBayers would rather eat the loss than have to confront the seller. Leaving a negative feedback doesn’t always have the right effect. Plus, there’s no stopping the seller from leaving YOU a negative in return just to “teach you a lesson”. That’s called holding somebody’s feedback hostage. There are some sellers who won’t even leave ANY feedback until you first leave feedback for them. This is not only ridiculous, but, very unfair. As the buyer, once you have paid for the item your part is over. If you paid quickly and provided the seller with a legitimate physical shipping address, you deserve a positive feedback. Most sellers are scared of negative feedback so they would rather force you to either leave nothing, or leave a positive just so you can get a positive in return and in turn avoid a possible negative that wouldn’t even be your fault.

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It’s old news that people can make money by blogging, but it seems USA Today has finally taken notice as well. Most tech junkies have heard of and most likely have been to TechCrunch.com. What you probably do not realize is that its’ owner Michael Arrington is bringing in $200,000 a month in revenue. Now THAT’S what I’m talking about. That should be enough to catch the attention of anybody with a mind for money.

He only started the site in 2005 and now it’s one of the most popular tech blogs on the net, not to mention the planet. With a Feedburner rating of 432K readers it’s also one of the most popular blogs PERIOD. It’s full of ads. It’s hard to find what you are looking for right away, but none of that matters if the traffic keeps coming in. Right off the bat I see 13 ads just on their homepage. Sure it’s cluttered, but, it works.

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So I’ve been blogging here for almost three months straight on a daily basis without fail. I thought I’d take today and reiterate and explain how I expect things to function around here.

First, if you are a regular reader, feel free to comment on any posts that interest you. You’ll notice in the right navigation menu there is a heading called “Top Commentators”. This allows anybody who posts a comment to be ranked in order of how many comments they have posted in the last 30 days. Just enter your website url when commenting and use the same name each time and you will get free backlinks from every page on this site. This site is expected to be a PR5 after the next Google Page Rank update next month, so backlinks will certainly help you out.

You’ve probably seen the small “BumpZee” links in each blog post I make. This is a popular system similar to Digg but for blogs. Basically if you like one of my posts, feel free to click “Bump It”  and it should help to bring some traffic here from BumpZee. It also helps me see which types of posts people like and what ones I should stay away from in the future.

Now, scroll down and take a look at the bottom of the right column. You’ll see a “Recent Readers” area. If you log into your “MyBlogLog” account you can have your picture and a link to your profile show up here on Money Complex.

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So earlier tonight I was watching TV and I saw a familiar face. The face was this guy, who has several awesome videos on YouTube. Apparently Geico liked what they saw and decided to use him in a commercial.

The funny thing is that while he has a lot of very cool displays of his acting style and ability, the video they chose was one of his more random videos.. this video, to be exact. “Strange Faces and Noises I can Make III”. After 15 seconds of barking like a dog, and just generally making strange noises, he is cut off by “There are better ways to spend 15 seconds. 15 seconds can save you money on your car insurance.” (Or something like that)

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Not all investors and business people follow basketball, so you may or may not know who LeBron James is. For those who don’t know, he is the 22-year old “Michael Jordan” of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Just recently he took his team to the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs. Cleveland was knocked out after 4 games, and the Spurs took the championship, but, don’t worry, I’m not going to write a play by play on my money blog. Instead, let’s talk about LeBron James some more.

He is perhaps one of the most business oriented guys in professional sports right now. Most athletes are happy with the millions upon millions of dollars.  LeBron James has set his sights a little higher.. well a LOT higher. He’s aiming to become the first professional athlete to be worth a billion dollars. How will he do this? Well it’s safe to say that even Michael Jordan with all of his sponsorships and product lines, not to mention the $300 and some thousand dollars he earned every game, has not yet reached the billion dollar mark. LeBron James understands that sports alone will not bring him to this goal. Instead he has turned to people like Warren Buffet for advice. He has a sizable amount of expendable income. Instead of just putting his money in the bank, James wants to invest in companies, businesses, and other endeavors outside of basketball.

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There comes a time when every webmaster has to think about expanding their reach. When I first started out I ran a few videogame related websites. Down the road as I became involved with other things I ended up having opportunities to expand to other markets. There are some webmasters who prefer to focus in one one niche and just build build build. I’ve had some experience doing this back when I had just one site, but, as my interest grew I found it very hard to keep the one site focused while also trying to branch out. Eventually the site was becoming cluttered due to unrelated sections that I added. The only reason I did this was because I wanted to save some time by not having to set up a new site. I quickly found out that I had lost my niche traffic and had replaced it with untargetted traffic.

My advice to anyone considering expanding into new areas of interest is to carefully plan your “new construction”. First of all, if you can, it’s really smart to expand into markets that are related or similar to what you already have going. Why is this? Well, think about it. If you have a videogame website, for example, expanding into a movie review site would be a positive step because chances are that most of your videogame site visitors will also be interested in movies. You can use your videogame site as a launch pad to help get your new movies site off the ground. What if you go from videogames to a home and garden site? Sure there is a market for home and garden sites, BUT, you’ll have to start from scratch. Chances are MOST of the people on your videogame site are not going to care about home and garden things. Launching a home and garden site after your movie review site picks up could be a much better alternative. Everybody likes movies. You’ll be targeting your home and garden site to a much better audience that way.

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Who would have thought it was possible to have big plans for a day and wake up and end up doing everything BUT what you had planned to do? Well that happened to me today. I was planing to work on several sites all day long and instead I woke up to a computer that pretty much decided to take the day off. To make a long story short, my computer is now twice as fast as it was this morning and I have a bunch of spare parts lieing around now.

It’s funny because I don’t usually upgrade my PC very often but I try to keep things fresh every two years. Well ironically, it’s been around two years since my last major overhaul and as everything turned out today I ended up replacing 95% of the hardware in my computer. The case is the same and the DVD-R drive is the same, but, that’s about it.

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According to Alexa Digg traffic is not headed in the right direction. They are down 20% in the past 3 months. This isn’t surprising considering a lot of people are all “dugg” up when it comes to Digg. Ever since the content fights with members vs. admins a few months back it seems that everything has started to slide downwards. Not to mention Digg’s new layout is (how do you say) lacking in many ways. It was fine before so why did they change it? Who knows. One thing is for sure. I’ve heard from several Digg users who have quit Digg altogether now. The site is just starting to lose it’s luster. The big thing on the web right now is user submitted videos, not news. That’s why we see sites like YouTube continuing to grow daily. YouTube traffic is up 24% in the past 3 months according to Alexa.

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Just when we thought we had SEO in the bag Google announces a big change. They have just announced that they will soon be unveiling a whole new look to their search results page. This will be influenced by several factors but will include multiple search items in the results such as images, news, video, etc. This means that SEO will now expand into video SEO and image SEO, as you can now legitimately count on some traffic from normal Google searches if your images or videos show up.

Do I like this idea? Not really. I hope they have an option for “classic” search because I don’t really want to see images and other media items in my search results. 10 times out of 10 I am searching for a web page. 1 time out of 100 I want to find an image or video. Either way, time will be the judge of this. A change this big could make or break Google if they aren’t careful. By “break” I most definitely do not mean “kill”. If it doesn’t work I’m sure they have a plan B for making people happy again but we’ll see.

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