Random Order Weblog - Nothing’s too random!

The other day I took some time out to figure out exactly what it was I am doing with the money I earn. I know it’s bad, but usually I keep very poor records and just sort of deposit funds as I get them without doing a lot of personal finance research and planning. When I started reading online, I found out that there are tons of resources that take a lot of the work of personal finance planning out of your hands. For example, there are actually personal finance news websites that are entirely dedicated to helping keep people informed of personal finance issues, possibilities, and developments.

While some of these sites are informational only, others offer useful tools that can help you plan out your goals and aspirations, and then calculate what it will actually take for you to get from point A to point B. One really neat tool I found was called the Millionaire Calculator—what it does is it lets you enter in some basic information, like what your initial deposit will be, how much you plan on depositing on a recurring basis (and you can also specify the time interval for the recurring deposits), the annual interest rate you expect to earn, and finally the average inflation rate. You can then click compute and the program will tell you how many years it would take you to reach a million dollars at the rate you entered, and also what that one million dollars will actually be worth in comparison today’s dollars (PV, or present value, of that money). Remember, a million bucks in 10 years isn’t the same as a million bucks today, because I you got it today you could be earning interest on it for 10 years. Econ 1 . Anyway, there are some very cool personal finance websites out there like this one that help you with everything from 401k plans to personal accounting. Lots of useful, and free, tools out there!

With the growing popularity of social networking sites like My Space, people are looking all over the place for ideas to make their individual site stand out among all the thousands of others. One of the ways people are accomplishing this is by finding cool sites that will help you post fun things like MySpace games and other stuff that is fun and interesting on your page. Most of these are free games where you basically just copy a bit of code and paste it on your My Space page and voilla, you have a game ready to go.

Some of these are cooler than others, and the ones I like best are the ones that offer arcade games . I have always been a big fan of arcades and this is a cool way to get to play some of your favorite games without actually getting in your car and driving to the arcade. On top of that, you can share the games with your friends so they can play too, so they can play a free online game, and on many of these arcades you can actually save high scores, etc., so that you can see who is the resident champion at a given game and how you yourself stand up to the competition.

The concept of putting a free online game on a website to get people to spend time there is not a new one. It has been around on many a forum site for literally years, but what is new is that you can now actually put them on your individual page at almost any of the major popular social networking websites and share them that way. Also, some of these new arcades offer really cool ones, like this maffia game I’ve been playing. This is a different concept because it is more personal and enables a larger number of people to actually host their own web based arcade without being a skilled web developer.

Lately I’ve been considering a number of companies to outsource search engine optimization work to for my new outdoor store site. The question is really two pronged: I’m looking for a good price and a good service combination (who isn’t, right?). Well there have been a number of companies that I’ve looked at, and a few of them stand out above the rest. The first is M4M | Multi for Media. M4M is a search engine marketing company that specializes in organic search engine optimization. Basically, for those of you new to search engine optimization, this means that they get your website to rank well in the normal results as opposed to the paid results you see on the right hand side of the SERPs.

As I evaluate all my options, I also spend quite a bit of time at the SEMPO page. SEMPO is the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, and they basically try to promote the SEO industry. They are a non-profit, so I feel it is relatively safe to assume their motives are good ones and that they will not push a bad SEO on me.

As I continue to look at other SEO companies, M4M looks more and more attractive. Their pricing structure is very straightforward and beats much of the competition. In addition, it seems they really know their stuff and would likely do a better job than most of the competition. This is, like I said at the start, what I’ve been looking for: an SEO company that does good work, and at a low or at least comparatively low price. Still, purchasing SEO services is so crucial to an online business venture that I want to make sure I’ve spent adequate time consider all of the possible options out there (and as you may know, there are a lot!).

Lately I have had a bunch of new business ideas and been starting numerous new websites.  When I’m doing this, I know that in order to make a profit the website will ultimately need to get traffic from search engines.   The big question is, then, whether I should try to do this myself or if I should hire someone else or even a search engine marketing company to do it for me.  The benefit to a search engine marketing company is the fact that they are experts in their field and they will undoubtedly know how to do the job better than I could.

On the other hand, I could save quite a bit by doing it myself.  The question, therefore, is whether or not I will be able to get as good of results by doing it myself.  If I could, it would probably be in my best interest to do so, because search engine marketing companies usually charge quite a bit for their services.  Sometimes, though, you can find a good one that will get the job done at a low price.

In the long run, at least in my opinion, this is a vastly superior option to paying for every single visitor you get.  If you go that route, the costs really never end.  If you have naturally search engine rankings the visitors come without a continuous or recurring price, other than building more links or paying any monthly fees required by your search engine marketing company.

In addition to this, there is a stability benefit.  When your traffic is coming naturally, I would expect it to be more stable.  This has, in reality, been my experience.  When I have bought traffic it has varied dramatically depending on market conditions and what my competitors have done.  For that reason, I’ve decided to allocate my search engine work to a search engine marketing company.

If there’s one thing you can count, it is that fashion never stops changing.  It seems like everything I buy is out of “style” in just a few weeks or months.  That’s why I have stopped caring so much and switched to Costco’s Kirkland white t-shirts and khaki pants.  It’s easier.  But, even though I can switch my own style preferences, I can’t change my friends.  With Christmas time just around the corner, I’ve been getting a lot of requests for clothing and other items where style is really important.

Shopping around online I’ve found quite a few cool sites that offer unique and stylish clothing at low prices.  One of my favorite types so far, when it comes to accessories and handbags, is the Golddigga product line.  They offer Golddigga handbags and other Golddigga accessories that are really cool looking and which, hopefully, will not be going out of style any time soon.  I’m thinking specifically of Jenny for the handbags and accessories, since that’s the kind of thing she likes so much.  Actually, believe it or not, after looking around on the internet and finding the Golddigga product line, I heard Jenny talking about it!  That’s how you know you’ve done a good job shopping   When you hear the soon to be recipient talking about the exact gift you had in mind.

Now that I know she will like it, my main fear is that someone else will get it for her.  We all know she likes handbags and accessories more than just about anything else (except maybe chocolate, just kidding  ).  Especially since she has been talking about Golddigga specifically, I think I will ask around and make sure none of our mutual friends are already going the Golddigga route.

Car insurance is an incredibly important thing to have—something that was confirmed for one of my friends who recently got into an accident while driving an uninsured car. What an idiot, right? Well it turns out the person who he crashed into was very laid back / cool—actually a fellow student at UCSC, and did not milk the incident for all it was worth. If he had, he could have started claiming neck injuries and all that other crap that seems to come up every time someone is without auto insurence. Still, my friend is going to have to pay for all the damage done straight out of his pocket and it is looking like it is going to be a price of something like fifteen hundred dollars per vehicle, and at that rate his car will not even be restored to the condition it was at before the accident. The basic lesson here is: get auot insurance! It is so easy to get a car insurance rate quote that there is no excuse not to. It is just not worth it to go without it. And, if you are like my friend, you should also remember not to drive cars that are uninsured. My buddy actually does have car insuranc but the specific vehicle he was driving at the time was not covered by his insurance policy, so that is something you should be aware of as well. Just because you have insurance does not necessarily mean that your insurance will cover whatever vehicle you may be driving. You have to make sure that your insurance policy or the policy of the vehicle owner actually covers you as a driver of the vehicle in question.

Well, Chad has convinced me to give things a second shot. As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, Matt, Chris and I all quit playing poker online after our little taste of failure. I ended up out about $60, and Matt and Chris were both down $80 when we stopped playing last time. Chad was up $100, the bastard! The actual reason that he was able to get me started again is just that he has some really cool bonus codes that I can use to get a huge poker bonus right off the bat. Like I said before, some poker bonuses are better than others, but this one seems to be pretty much the best I have seen so far. It double my initial deposit, and it also lets me play in a few major tournaments that have million dollar first place prizes for free. Am I the next Chris moneymaker?

Only time will tell . To be honest, I’ll be content as long as Chad doesn’t win, just because he has been rubbing our embarrassing episodes of addiction and defeat in our faces for over a week now and I’m getting pretty sick of it. Lasting longer than him in a major tournament would make me feel a lot better about the whole incident, since now the score is pretty heavily stacked in Chad’s favor. I’m also making a big initial deposit on this poker site because of the bonus codes I’m able to use. I’m not going to give them out on the blog here because I don’t want to get anyone else sucked into anything, but you can check out the sites on your own and they are usually pretty forthcoming with their bonus codes, as that’s the main incentive that seems to get people to click the sign up button.

We’ve all been trying to get Chad to quit his love affair with online gaming.  It’s either bingo, or it is Poker.  He plays nonstop, even when we are all hanging out and watching TV or a movie.  Finally, we (when I say we I mean Matt, Chris and I) thought we should give it a try and see if it’s as great as Chad makes it out to be.  One thing I will say—it is very, very fun and addictive.  I myself, even after all the criticism I dished out to Chad, couldn’t stop playing for a few days.  But (luckily) for me, I wound up losing about $60 at which point I decided to stop playing just because my bankroll couldn’t really take it anymore.

Chad on the other hand sort of proved us wrong by consistently winning in tournaments.  He hooked us up with some cool bonus codes that we all used, and those got us off to a good start, but even with all the casino bonus benefits Matt, Chris and I all ended up in the hole.  Which reminds me—if anyone here is thinking of signing up an online poker site, you should really take a minute to find a good online casino bonus code so that you can start off with extra money.  Some of them double your initial deposit, others let you enter tournaments for free, etc. etc.—it’s very cool stuff.

In the end though, Chad had the last laugh.  We all told him to quit playing, but he got us to try it ourselves and all got addicted for a few days.  Then we lost our money and finally quit because of that.  He was winning while we were losing, so, following our logic, he didn’t really have any reason to quit playing.

Lately I’ve been submitting to a lot of paid directories in addition to the normal free ones I use. The question with paid directories is, quite simply, whether or not they are cost effective. Well, as you would probably have guessed, some are, and some aren’t. It really depends on the price, and the quality of the back link you will be getting from the directory.

I found a post about the Strongest Directories in which the author looks at a couple of systems for ranking directory strength. The first system looked at the IBLs pointing to the directories and then checked how many of them were from apparent authority sites—this was based on whether or not the link came from the Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, or an .edu/.gov site. This metric lost much of its support after Matt Cutts publicly stated that .gov and .edu sites don’t inherently carry more linking power than other sites.

The author then looks at a new system designed by the good people at Seomoz. They have created a more comprehensive back link analysis tool that they use to assign sites a rating (termed Page Strength Score). This system actually seems to be a fairly decent representation of how Google might actually judge pages. How does this all tie in to the directory worthiness question? Well, the author of the post I referred to previously has used the Seomoz tool to check the Page Strength of all the directories from Bob Mutch’s popular comprehensive directory listing, and he then ranks them on his site in order of Page Strength. This way, someone like me who is trying to decide which directories to submit to can just run down the list, looking at the combinations of Page Strength and price, and make a decision on whether or not the directory measures up. It’s a cool tool that I’ve bookmarked and will use in the future.

Tomorrow Karla is getting home from her trip to Los Angeles and Disneyland with her friends. She has already made me promise that I won’t work, and that I’ll spend her first night back focusing on just her :). I decided that if I’m going to be spending all my time focusing on just her tomorrow night, I might as well do a good job at it and make her happy. With that in mind, I’ve been trying to come up with a romantic date idea that will score me some major points and show what a thoughtful and great boyfriend I am.

The problem is, if you leave me to my own devices, the date tomorrow will be a few episodes of Sopranos and then bed. I don’t think that would go over too well with her, so I’ve started looking around on the internet trying to come up with some cool ideas. Luckily for me, I live in San Francisco, so there is almost always a ton of stuff to do if you know about it. Looking around online, I’ve found that there are actually some websites that will help you plan out a date. The sites have cool ideas like ice skating, horseback right, etc., and actually link you up with local service providers. Using tools like this even someone like me can plan a nice date .

Because Karla is so into the whole ranching and cowgirl thing, I’m thinking about going the horseback riding route for the afternoon. The problem is that she is probably a lot better than I am at horseback riding, particularly since I haven’t been since I was about twelve years old… hopefully I can find some good websites that can also teach me how to ride the horse and look like a pro… not likely, though :).