Davinian

125Cards.com has landed

125Cards.com is about design, style and how we can improve those lovely little 125 x 125 Adverts and Cards that we so love to place (drop) on other peoples websites.

They are meant to advertise what we are selling, be it a product, service or even just ourselves. Yet, they really don’t do us justice, they are difficult to read, look gimmicky and hardy every relate to what we are trying to sell.

Remember, they should be driving traffic to your site - so come on, get serious… visit 12Cards.com, grab a free template and start designing a better Advert.

Tweaking a few things

After yesterdays stats overdose, I’m back on track - well I’m only checking stats every two hours and feel I can get myself back to only checking them twice a day again by the end of the week… I hope!

Anyway, just tweaked a few things here on Davinian:

1. Removed the over-sized RSS logo from the top of the sidebar - I have no idea why I made it so big, but it was taking up too much room - so its gone and in its place I’ve added the Feedburner feed stats.
2. After playing around with an additional ad on single posts, I’ve decided to move them from the top-right to the bottom of the post just above the comments area. I’ll continue to monitor its performance and see if it is really worth having a 3rd ad box at all.
3. You may have noticed that there is now Related Posts at the bottom of ever post. I meant to implement this from the start, but completely forgot to add in he necessary code when I re-designed everything on the 14th August (I’m wondering what else I forgot?).

OK, not a bad few hours this morning - especially as I’m a little hung-over!

Bla.st Cards - Free Adverts for everybody

I’ve been playing around with Bla.st cards for a few months now, well longer that that really - and have found it can bring in some extra traffic.

What is Bla.st? Put simply it’s an alternative form of online advertising that anybody can use. You can promote almost anything and pay as little (only pay if you want to) or as much as you like. The more you do pay means the higher up the page your advert(s) will go and the more likely it is to appear on other peoples websites, yes, they have a publishers program in the form of a widget (great for Wordpress sites) which doubles as a kind of referral program where you can earn credits for your own cards as well as 50% of the sale on any paid ads taken out by the referral.

Bla.st is extremely easy to use and has the added bonus of being free, and with hundreds of categories to choose from, you can target your advert to a specific market. If there isn’t already a category for the market you want, you can create one, but this means you will probably be the only advert in that category for a while, which could be good or bad depending on the way you look at it!

Traffic from my ads haven’t been that fantastic so far, but I have noticed that as Bla.st has grown, there has been an increase in visitors, so I am optimistic it will continue to be a valuable source of extra traffic over time.

Summary: If you are looking for an alternative way to advertise your product then I think Bla.st is a good idea, it’s not the only free option, but it does allow you to design and redesign your own ads as many times as you like, and if you place cards on your own website, you could earn credits to promote your own cards to the top slot, and maybe a few extra dollars along the way!

Will I make $10 in 30 days?

I was going to say that I didn’t know how I got myself involved with this, but then I remembered I read about it over on Yaro Starak’s site (Internet Business Blog) [link to post].

The thing is though, I’m not really sure what the hell I am supposed to be doing! Yeah ok, I have to try and make $10 in thirty days (August to be exact), but within what rules? as it’s not yet clear.

I guess all should be revelled on the 1st of August, well I hope it will…

If you want to have a go, or see what all the fuss is about, head over to thirtydaychallenge.com and sign up - it’s free… oh, and if you can’t find the link to the thirty day challege blog - it’s here [link].