Good afternoon everyone,

Those of you who decided to participate in last month’s contest, I want to thank you for such great support. Despite the relatively low number of entrants, the field was extremely competitive for the top two finishers. This contest was really used as a social experiment on my behalf more than anything else. Despite the doubters, this competition managed to add in 108 active RSS subscribers to my numbers. I feel that word-of-mouth advertising is better than anything that money alone can buy… and with two big competitors that had their eye on the prize (FREE Flip Mino Video Camera), this experiment was definitely a success.

Before I announce winners, I want to give a big thanks to Market Leverage for once again sponsoring the monthly contest here at Jimvesting dot com. They are clearly dominating the “make money online” niche of blogs, as has been noted time and time again. Market Leverage is my go-to affiliate network whenever I want to run an ad campaign to make some money on the internet… so try them out. The least you can do is sign up for their generosity… it’s completely free and you can see what the program is all about!

So how did I decide the winner of the $200 Flip? Quite simply, I made this a competition rather than a contest. This means that whoever actually went out and got the most recruits would win the camera, taking the “luck” element almost completely out of the event. I feel that this is the correct way to run such a referral contest.

In order to get referrals recorded in your name, you had to use the contact form that I set up to email your friends the subscription link. I then got a carbon copy of the referral script, and was able to record the names (along with the sender) and compare that list to my official feed subscriber list to add up the correct number of referrals for each contestant. Now, I understand that this would have been made a LOT easier with some sort of program or mailing list; however, when I’m capable of doing a decent job for free… I’m taking the zero-expense route and doing things myself.

Now… on to the results.

As I said before, there were a decent amount of people that used the form provided to email a few friends, but two people in particular went way over the top: Enkay from EnkayBlog.com and M. Dinesh from Contest Winner. The lead actually changed hands several times over the course of the last week of action, so I figured I would give both of you a backlink to make it not entirely a waste of the runner-ups time.

So without further ado…

Winner of a Flip Mino Video Camera
M. Dinesh from Contest Winner! (51 Referrals)

Runner Up
Enkay from EnkayBlog.com (44 Referrals)

Honorable Mentions
Hinpaki, The Blogote, Jay Bigley

A big thanks to everyone that participated! The August contest is going to be a bit smaller and easier to enter, I am anticipating a contest focused on handing out advertising spots across the web… so be sure to stay on the lookout for that post!

That’s all for today, I’ll be emailing the winner for some contact information and shipping prizes as soon as I can. Once again, congratulations and thanks for all the hard work everybody that participated!

-Jimvesting

Sunday is here…
Time to spread around some link love!

As is tradition here at theNetFool.com, it’s time for that all important weekly run-down of updates and some of the best articles that I’ve seen out there in the blogging world for the week ending August 2nd, 2008. August really crept up on me, and I really think that my summer has flown by. Now that we are solidly over 550 RSS subscribers, the growth rate here is staggering. After earning over $2,200 in the month of July… the sky is the limit! Miss my earnings call? Catch the re-cap.

First things first, let’s share around what I felt were five of the best articles inside the “make money online” niche this week.

• 45n5.com – Tips for Buying and Selling Websites
• Click Consultants – Split Testing Offers and Networks
• Everybody Go To – Idea Building: Developing Your Ideas
• Courtney Tuttle – 11 Killer Research Strings to Find Stuff On Google
• One Man’s Goal – Make Money Blogging: Examining Current Trends

I decided to go with some more abstract articles this week, as I feel it’s important to take a step back every now and then and not be bogged down with ideas all the time. With that in mind, the Idea Building article was definitely interesting… and it got me some great new creative thoughts. I thought I’d give Marc from OneMansGoal.com a shout out as well because he was really unfairly hit with a PR0 and writes some great stuff. Check out these articles for some awesome tips!

Stock Market Update
Wall Street ended the week down on Friday when the first major reports of the third quarter were released, casting a small shadow over the investing world. A combination of a rise in the unemployment rate, a flat reading on manufacturing activity and a massive loss posted at General Motors did us in for a slight dip to close things out. The reports actually came in better than expected, but bad news is bad news so that market was held back from staging any sort of rally.

The past few sessions of trading have been jumpy as heck, and sometimes it would be best to just turn off the newswire as investors are seeing rallies one day, plunges the next, in a seemingly endless cycle of confusion as people try to discern whether we have yet to see a bottom.

Some interesting events happened this week that many see as signals that we may have actually seen the worse. Investment banking firm Merrill Lynch announced a surprise biggest ever stock offering of several billions of dollars. What a stock offering essentially does is dilutes everyone’s holdings by putting more shares on the table… so everything you hold is worth less. Makes sense that the stock would go DOWN after this, right? Well MER traded UP on that day… which is entirely counter-intuitive.

Small event-triggers like those mentioned have the markets in a virtual stand still, as bulls and bears fight for positioning. For those of you who are interested in investing, I continue to recommend that you at least wait until late-October before jumping in to the market; however, I’d like to see all of you give some patience until the first quarter of 2009 unless you are investing with caution & for purposes of value rather than growth.

What’s Happening in the Blogosphere?
If you have the time, I’d suggest checking out some earnings reports that most major bloggers are posting throughout the first week of August. I feel that checking in on how some of the major players in this industry are running their blogs is the best way to optimize your own blogging experience to get the most out of your time.

Other than the earnings announcements, that popular “Blogging Idol” competition came to a close this weekend as Stock Market India took first prize. I wasn’t surprised to see this guy win because of his insane marketing scheme, but there were a lot of great showings and I believe I placed somewhere in the top five of the contest results.

It’s going to be interesting to see what the next big contest of the month of August will be, though I have already seen what I feel as one terrible contest in the so called “largest blogging contest ever” hosted by BigMarketingOnline.com. I’ve talked about it before, but give me a break. I don’t see how you can honestly justify $30,000 in prizes when $19,100 of it is “blog consultations”… something that is really worth only a few bucks, despite the fact that they are calling an hour of talking on the phone a $1,000+ value in multiple cases.

This Week In Focus
As you can see… August is clearly building up to be one heck of a month. With the stock market teetering in the balance and the blogging world on the brink of all out contest warfare… I’m excited to see how things will turn out. As for Jimvesting dot com, I’ve got some cool interviews lined up, including an appearance on a radio talk show. For the website, I am going to get to the results of my July contest as soon as I get home and am able to tally up the final count (post on Monday!).

I’ve mentioned this before, but I am going to be starting up a marketing giveaway contest this month, so if you are willing to donate a 125×125 (or other) advertisement on your popular blog, please let me know! You’ll get some great publicity and much needed backlink power to juice up your Google Pagerank if you are feeling the burn after their second-quarter update.

As far as posts being planned for this week, I am going to be giving away some prizes here just for your readers that check often, so pay attention and keep reading for clues! I need to celebrate the 500-subscriber benchmark in some way, so I’ll figure out a fun inner-blog competition so that you can all try to win some cool free stuff! We’re talking ad spots, apparel and other merchandise… so stay tuned for more updates from theNetFool.com and I’ll get you the goods.

-Jimvesting

July proved to be one of the best months that Jimvesting dot com has ever seen. Despite a slow start, things really started to kick into high gear and I am proud to announce that not only did I gain the largest amount of RSS subscribers in one month ever, but July also proved to be the biggest month of revenue. I honestly didn’t expect too much from a month riddled with work, side projects and travel… yet this blog has shown its resilience once more by turning out some real eye popping statistics that will be hard to match for a long while. This report will cover growth strategies and catalysts over the course of July, a record breaking month despite initially downcast estimates.

Made available to you once more is my free 55-page eBook “Creating A Blog,” compliments of the Net Fool! If you want to know how to start your own blog or fine tune one you already have in place, this is definitely a must-read. Getting back to the numbers, things really picked up toward the end of the month. With a whopping last-week rally of 127 RSS subscribers, we have surpassed the 500-subscriber mark in style! Let’s see how our numbers improved in July 2008.

June Results

• RSS Subscriber Count: 333 Readers
• Average Unique Visitors: 299
• Average Returning Visitors:52
• Average Page Loads:468
• Alexa.com Ranking: 95,308
• Technorati Ranking: 13,851
• 45n5 Top 100 Rank: 35
• Google PageRank: 4

July Results

• RSS Subscriber Count: 547 Readers (64.26%+)
• Average Unique Visitors: 369 (23.41%+)
• Average Returning Visitors:67 (28.85%+)
• Average Page Loads:573 (22.44%+)
• Alexa.com Ranking: 95,501 (0.20%-)
• Technorati Ranking: 11,324 (18.24%+)
• 45n5 Top 100 Rank: 29 (17.14%+)
• Google PageRank: 4

Monthly Review and Growth Strategy
Looking back on the month, it seems that all of the traffic numbers have continued to grow strongly in the mid-twenties range. I am not concerned with Alexa.com results as the loss was negligible and the system is known for being a bit off now and then. I had planned to pass 400 subscribers this month, as 100 subscribers per month is generally a solid goal. However, I was able to drive in a whopping 214 added readers to bump us all the way past 500 (nearing 550) as this month was certainly a thriller. Other than subscriber numbers alone, the growth in traffic was generally consistent with prior months. We managed to keep everything in line here with no noticeable movements to the upside.

After adjusting estimates downward for the month, a superior execution of my growth strategy allowed for consensus estimate beats across the board. The main catalysts in this month were focused on picking up subscribers for the Blogging Idol competition that ran the month of July. The full results aren’t out yet, but I definitely finished in the top ten and more than likely in the top 4-7 range! While I didn’t actively promote my participation, and actually ranted against the basis of the competition, it was a nice motivator beyond any doubt. My first strategy was essentially an active marketing campaign where I intentionally sought out subscribers through emailing, commenting and linking. The other big driver was Jimvesting’s July Referral Extravaganza which pulled in a great deal of subscribers as I gave away a Flip Mino to the most active referrer (results pending).

One of my strategies for campaigning was especially devious. You may have noticed many people in Blogging Idol just giving away links on their blogs for subscribers. The exploit here is obvious. People that made these exchanges are obviously interested in traffic, so I simply made lists of people who were in the exchanges and emailed them. In the emails, I essentially wrote that I had subscribed to their blogs (I did, of course), and would love for them to subscribe to mine. This is an example of no-pressure marketing scheme that usually results in a subscription and a happy returning reader. Just another lesson in business from Jim.

July 2008 Revenue Breakdown
Last month I earned a pretty solid $370.26 from theNetFool.com and related activities. This month completely blew this out of the water, despite a lowered advertising plan, due to a major bonus upgrade from my still-favorite GPT website SWATcash. Over $1,800 of revenue came in from the site this month alone, and I continue to maintain a healthy business relationship with them made possible by the continued stream of subscribers that I throw their way. I strongly encourage you to check out my review of SWATcash to clear any doubt. Still sales coming in for my eBook that I haven’t mentioned in a long time, which is sort of funny to me as a marketer. Let’s get to the full results, shall we?

• Private Advertising Sales – $159.00
• Sponsored Reviews – $70.00
• ReviewMe reviews – $50.00
• eBook Sales – $30.00
• SWATcash Referrals – $53.86
• SWATcash Bonuses – $1,803.00
• CashCrate Referrals – $24.22
• ThisSiteIsForReal Referrals – $14.27
• Total July Blog & Referred Revenue = $2,204.35

This month was by far the biggest revenue this blog has ever seen, and ever will see for quite some time. Before you call me out for the insane accrued revenue in the books from SWATcash, please keep in mind that the GPT offers incentives which I have been saving virtually since the blog started. All of the revenue you see above directly stems from activity on theNetFool.com, as all of the sales and referrals leads are directly from traffic on this blog. I hope this $2k+ income report proves how powerful reputation leveraging can be!

In July, I published just three sponsored reviews. While I believe in saving review posts for a once-a-week at most occasion, I would still like to see a bit more like five come out. I have decided to bump rates on these to $40, as I have seen continued reports of feedback, commenting, clicks and sign-ups all brought by my lengthy and detailed reviews. Most of these are around 1,000 words… which is more than you’ll get anywhere else… and I now have over 500 RSS subscribers active to read up on things. I feel that a $5 increase is totally justified as most advertisers have huge budgets regardless.

Once again, spending here was extremely limited. I have not formally checked my books, but I believe that I spent less than $50 promoting theNetFool.com. I don’t believe in capital spending very much I suppose, and maybe I’m getting a bit too greedy pushing funds into my stock brokerage account (haha), so I am planning on spending more this month to balance things out.

August 2008 Outlook
It’s strange how fast the summer has gone away, I’ll even be moving back into the dorms at Penn State in a few weeks… so who knows how this month will pan out! Definitely check out my new stock market blog Bullish Bankers if you haven’t already. I’ll be doing a fair amount of posting there, but definitely not anything that would detract from the attention I spend on Jimvesting, so don’t you worry!

After being contacted by a few people about blog competitions, I think I may throw together a quick advertising spree this month and focus on website advertising as prizes. I know that a lot of these prizes are often worthless to some, but I feel that if the contest is clearly labeled to be giving away solely advertising, than it is much more effective. Please contact me if you have a popular blog and you’d like to get some exposure by contributing to the August contest here at Jimvesting!

I hope that you enjoyed this lengthy earnings & traffic run down, as it was definitely the best month so far. I’m looking forward to making you some more money online… so stay bullish on the net!

-Jimvesting