Recently I made an upgrade to the header on my blog, and it was a BIG update at that! Not only did I enhance the looks of the most-viewed area of my blog, but I added a newsletter opt-in box which could potentially boost my subscribers tremendously.

But was my excitement premature!?

One of my readers, Rob from myTTOOS.com, pointed out the following:

Rob: “Really cool, but i bet it will be overseen a lot = bad conversion. Let us know if i am right.”

Jim: “Could be true… but then again I am not trying to spam people like typical marketers, haha”

Rob: “at least put the focus on the chalk board, put a few blinking stars around it or something lol”

Though it sounded silly at first, I started thinking about just how right he was! While I was all concerned with making the new opt-in newsletter box look at good as possible… I made it flow TOO WELL! Therefore, I needed a little something to get people to notice it (though I won’t be putting blinking stars on my header anytime soon, haha). So what did I do? I added a big ol’ floating arrow! Read the rest of this entry »

When you visit a website… what is the first thing you see?
The answer (to this “lay-up” question) is THE HEADER!

While it may be an overstatement to say that theNetFool.com is now sporting the greatest header that has ever been created for a weblog (and I do this simply for a great post topic ), I’ve made some more changes that I am sure you have noticed by now. By adding a clever opt-in newsletter subscription box, and in a very aesthetically pleasing manner, I will be boosting the amount of turnover this blog generates… and we all know that more subscribers = more POWER.

The Inspiration for Change?
My inspiration was actually a video I saw a week ago from one of the most famous MMO bloggers of all time, John Chow. Now, John takes a lot of heat from people who claim that all of his material is either 1) fluffy and unimportant; or 2) wrong or misleading. I feel that most of this is coming from the fact that he is a top dog, and people love to hate the champ. In summary, the video is about how he makes money blogging… and a lot of his success revolved around the fact that he used his blog as a machine to capture email addresses. I noticed that I wasn’t doing this currently, and I have Read the rest of this entry »

I’d like to set some time aside today to talk about one of my latest projects that is currently in final testing: Pirate Cash! This is going to be a new competitor in the “Get Paid To (GPT)” industry, which has had a long history of many boom-and-bust companies. However, I feel that my unique position as a former watchdog of the businesses in this niche gives PirateCash.com all the advantages in the world.

But Why GPT?

There are many reasons why I have chosen this niche to start a new project, but at the very core I would say that the reason is purely passion. When I was growing up, I remember that I wanted nothing more than to score $10-20 for free online… I had a lot of time on my hands and wasn’t eligible to get a job anywhere. Nowadays, many demographics… from teenagers, to work at home moms, to the unemployed looking to re-enter the workforce… are heavily active in this industry. The role of a “get paid to” website is literally to provide a means of profit for people that have a bit of spare time on their hands, and it really works out quite well. Read the rest of this entry »