The auction has started with a listing price of $5.00. 50% of the proceeds will be donated to the Crisis Pregnancy Center of Monrovia. A minimum of $5.00 will be donated, so if the auction only brings the initial $5.00 asking price, we will donate all of it.

Good things could be done with this domain.

The auction can be located at the following link: Charitable Domain Auction .

This charitable auction will end on May 20, 200902:30:18 PM PDT.

Well, it is live, so I guess we are going to find out soon. It’s just another pole in the water…

Site Traffic Idea

A light bulb (energy efficient of course) just went off tonight, as I was looking at a forum.

I noticed the classified section.  There are currently 5 people viewing that section of the forum.  I noticed some of the ads in this section of the forums are for websites very similar to BANS or PHP stores.  There are tons of forums out there for just about every niche.  So I just checked several of them, and read their rules.  Some allow you to post links and ads to your website, some don’t.  They may want something in return, like a link from somewhere on your site.

Why not get some website promotion ads listed in every forum (that allows it) related to your niche.

Here are the reasons that I think make this worth doing:

• Pre-qualified visitors
  Is there any better visitor you could get that someone on a niche-related forum looking at classified ads?  Since it’s a niche-related site, they should be interested in what you have to offer.  Since they are in a classifieds forum, they obviously are considering spending some money.  These visitors should be highly qualified.
• Links
  Although they may not be highly valued links, they are related and relevant links.
• Potential for Consistent Traffic
  The forum that I am looking at now allows your ads.  There are 12,275 users on this forum, and 1,374 users visited the forum today.  145 users have been on this site in the last hour.  These sites are getting traffic, and it would be nice to get a piece of it.

So I found a nice WordPress plugin that shows a calendar on all pages that you are writing or editing.   Days that have scheduled posts will be highlighted in different colors.  You can mouse over those days to see the name of the posting.  Another nice feature for new posts is that you can click the calendar date and it will set that date as the scheduled date.  Check it out here:  Future Posts Calendar Plugin.

Contact Form 7 can be downloaded, extracted, and easily installed by FTPing the entire contact-form-7 directory to your blog’s ../wp-content/plugins directory.

In your blog’s admin console, you need to go to the Plugins page to activate the plugin.  Once activated, you can use the Contact Form 7 link under your blog’s Tools menu to configure the plugin.

Next, copy the following code from the Contact form 1 section of the configuration page:

[contact-form 1 "Contact form 1"]

Add a New Page to your blog titled “Contact Us”, and paste the text above into the HTML editor.

Save it, and you have a functioning contact form allowing your users to email131913191319 you directly.

The nice thing about this plugin, is that you never expose your email131913191319 address to the end users.  This is completely hidden, and email131913191319 delivery is automated.

You also have the ability to add a Validation Question or Captia to the form to reduce the chance of automated form spam.  This allows you to ensure that a real person is sending you email131913191319 instead of an automated bot.

In the Contact Form 7 configuration page, select the dropdown option for Generate Tag.  Select Quiz as an option, and enter a question and response to be used for validation.  For example, this can be in the form of 5+5=?|10.  This will generate code that you can paste into your form on the left.  You can customize your message to the user with instructions on how to complete the form.  I set mine up as follows:

<p>To make sure you aren’t an automated SpamBot, please answer the following question<br />
[quiz quiz-755 "5+5=?|10"] </p>

Contact Form with Quiz

If the answer to your Quiz question is not entered correctly, the user is prompted to correct the answer.  None of the other information in the form is lost if an invalid answer is provided, so the user will not have to re-type their message.  If the answer to the Quiz is entered correctly, then the email131913191319 is sent by the system.

This plug-in also supports Captia, which is an image containing a word, or numbers.  The user would be required to enter the words or numbers displayed in the image into the validation field before the message could be sent.  This is an even more secure method of combating spammers, because automated bots have trouble converting image data to text.  I plan to test out the Captia next.  It involves changing the security on a couple of plug-in directories to make it work.  I will enable this feature after I have a chance to verify the security settings and will followup with the results and configuration options required.

This method only works for blog commenting systems that allow a Name/URL for commenting.

Don’t enter your real name in the Name field.  Find a good keyword rich phrase for your name.  Look for phrases that are tasteful and not too spammy if you want your comments to be approved.  You will find that some comments are held for moderation, and others are automatically approved.  While these links are typically ‘No Follow’ (meaning the SERPs won’t give you any juice) you will benefit from qualified visitors to your website.

So I just set up the Sociable plugin for one of my WordPress blogs tonight, and noticed that StumbleUpon.com was one of the bookmarking icons included.  So I headed over to StumbleUpon to bookmark a recent blog entry.  Soon after that I realized that I had burned 20 minutes aimlessly surfing websites.

I decided to Stumble my Niche.  The next thing you know, I’m stumbling websites and blogs in my niche area.  This has done two things for me.  It has gotten the creative writing juices flowing by seeing what others in my niche are doing.  It has also had me Stumbling onto blogs in my niche that I have been able to do some comment marketing on.  I realized that this could be a way to put comment marketing into overdrive.  StumbleUpon is known for driving traffic.  It has the ability to send large volumes of traffic to websites.

So it seems natural that you can benefit from a website’s StumbleUpon popularity by having your comment posts on those sites.  Once you comment, give it a thumbs up, and help kick it into overdrive.  The website owner will appreciate it, and so might you.  And want to increase your chances of having your comment approved?  After making an intelligent comment, tell the author it was a great post and that you gave him a thumbs up.

• Not seeing clearly the opportunities that present themselves
• Not taking full advantage of opportunities
• Not being positioned to act quickly when an opportunity presents itself

Online opportunities are all around us each day.  Simple ideas can be turned into profitable businesses.  Persistence is a key component to success.