I will be at SMX West this week. It is closer to my house then the office, so it is a no brainer. If you will be there and spot me in the crowd please stop by and say Hi!

I am not planning on live blogging for the conference, there are way to many other folks doing that.

Being somewhat “advanced” these tend to be refresher courses for me, but I am hoping with Danny’s great schedule I will pick up at least a few great new tidbits at SMX West (session list).

I read an old interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger awhile ago. It is something he said back in the day when he was Mr. Olympia 6 times in a row in the 70’s. It goes something like this…. Arnold, how do you keep winning this year after year? What do you do to gain that extra edge? - Arnold replies (insert your favorite Arnold voice here) “It is the extra 3 push ups”.

Well I am hoping SMX will be my extra 3 pushups.

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As you might know from scanning my blog, I have only been blogging for a few weeks now. But I am certainly not a newbie. I’ve been SEOing for 6 years, and I think I am starting to understand what it is like to blog on the side while trying to make money during the day. Maybe it gets easier when you are not tweaking your layout and getting things set up, but my guess is it does not get easier over time.

I was driving home the other day, and while “talking web” with my carpool mate, Mike, he mentioned how last year Rand over at SEOMoz posted their 2006 financials and they recently posted an update for 2007. I took a look and sure enough, he did. It was interesting to note that the revenues were less then both of our perceptions considering how front and center they are in the search community. Now, with the launch of the SEOMoz paid membership area in 2007, along with taking on funding - I am sure things have changed drastically this past year - but that’s besides the point. SEOMoz has been pumping out some of the best, more informative, must read posts in the industry for the last 4 years. So how is it that Rand was releasing so much great content but not pulling seven figures? Maybe back then he was pushing out TOO MUCH great content!

I’ve been following tons of industry blogs during my “lurker” phase (pre blogging), as well as listening to quite a few podcasts over at WebmasterRadio.fm and I have noticed that some people like Shoemoney drop new posts all the time (10 a week or so), while others like Oilman and WebGuerrilla Greg Boser of (SEO Rockstars fame) are lucky to get off 1 or 2 posts a month. Is it because these guys were are too busy adding to their bankroll hand over fist to post more often?

It is going on 3 years since the famous Shoemoney check, I wonder if revenues have matched the curve at the same rate as his readership? Shoemoney & team built Auction Ads, and from this post it sounds like they really started focusing on it in Feb 2007. Notice in this graph when the traffic peaked and started declining.

SEOMoz’s traffic started to decline right around the same time; Feb 2007 - right when they launched their premium services.

(Yes, I know Alexa is complete garbage and the numbers don’t exactly match Rand’s numbers, but I am too lazy to dig further…so stick with me here)

How many hours a week are you spending blogging and commenting on blogs?
I pose the question to you….are you making less money every time you pump out a new post?

- Jim

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Barry Schwartz posted about how to add a desktop icon to your iphone bookmarks that is now available with the latest iPhone update. I thought it would be pretty cool to have a page with a bunch of my favorite blogs in our industry. I am not sure what percentage of folks in our industry are running an iPhone (I’ve heard how Danny feels), so I went ahead and created icons for a dozen or so sites.

Here is a shot of my Search Blogs iPhone page.

Hopefully nobody takes offense to me grabbing their logos (or in the case of Eli just doing a quick Google Images Search). Instead I did it in hopes that this will motivate folks to starting making their own desktop logos. So if you have an issue, please let me know.

I could not figure out an easy way to do this off the top of my head, so I just created a directory/page for each site with a link over to their blog/site. Now that I have it saved in my iPhone I think I can set up redirects, but I am not sure if there is an easy way for others to save the bookmark on their iPhone. Any know a better way to do this from a 3rd party standpoint?

- Jim

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Well after monitoring blogs for years, but keeping my head down in the corporate world and building and marketing sites in my spare time I thought I’d finally get off my butt and start blogging. I’ve wanted to join the crowd, but hey I just stopped pegging my pants last year. (more…)

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