Gary, who operates the blog mrgarylee.com lives in California and I met him through the blogging scope of things. He used to be a comment whore just like myself on Johnchow.com, and we sort of hang out within the same ring of blogs so to speak. It’s one of the better blogs that I do visit on a regular basis (at least twice a week, which is quite a bit for my schedule! That says a lot), and his experience as a projecct manager for web marketing projects of various types is another great asset to his knowledge and his blog as well.

Gary and I have been sharing some great blogging ideas as well as programming ideas (details confidential!) and it’s interesting to exchange great ideas like that. The internet does make us all powerful!

Some of Gary’s recent articles include :

10 Steps to Getting Links for Non-bloggers
10 Things to Remember in Web Marketing
Yahoo Music Downfall - Signs to Come
Content is great but a useful site is better

Gary also started the “Technorati Faves Train” which I should probably jump on before it’s too late. Although I never added the post (I don’t do much trains) I added him to my Faves on Technorati.

So there it is. Gary Lee’s Blog in a nutshell.

Tyler Cruz is a well-known blogger with a blog that is much more successful than mine (nearly 500 feedburner subscribers is what I saw). Tyler is a web-entrepreneur, as I’d like to put it. He owns websites, publishes his blog and some other content, and he also flips domains. He averages an average income of $256/day from his websites and what not. That’s pretty decent. That’s more than great, actually.

The world of business simply comes down to that - who is pulling in the dough, and he is - no more questions asked, I will consider him a successful web enterpreneur.

His blog, TylerCruz.com, is a PR5 blog with nearly 500 RSS Feed subscribers (add 1 more for me now), and it includes a great collage of posts regarding online money making, work habits, taxes and finances, and much more. As I said, his figures simply prove his success and his mindset - so his blog content must be worth reading.

Tyler isn’t very far from me - he lives on Vancouver Island (I’m in Vancouver, so that’s a ferry ride away). He’s 23 years old (only 2 years older than me) and obviously well ahead of the game. I wonder if I can be at that stage when I’m his age? Although, I’m pursuing different avenues of business these days, and this blog is becoming more of a hobby that brings in $10/month in Google adsense revenue.

Here are some of the most interesing posts I found on Tyler’s Blog :

• 2006 Income Tax Results - Thats’ right. You need to do it, and I will start on it as soon as I have my paperwork straightened out.
• Deal or No Deal Break Your Legs - A blog post that is more casual, about the famous TV show Deal or No Deal (which I find to be an extremely irritating show)
• Backing up, Better Safe than Sorry - I recently had my ass saved because my web hosting company had backups for me. Back ups are so important, I cannot emphasize it more, and neither can Tyler.
• The 40 Hour Challenge - I guess he’s at an ample enough income bracket that he doesn’t work as much as I have to haha. He challenged himself to work a 40 hour week for once - and here are his results. Check it out.

I found his blog very entertaining overall as I read/skimmed through his posts, and he seems to have quite a lifestyle with his business.

Now, I’m never afraid to speak my mind openly, and I do have one criticism - the top banner design of his websites is simply ugly in my opinion. Maybe Tyler will put me on his blogroll if I design a header for him? We’ll see!

By courtesy of a high-profile contact I have, I got approved for the Kontera Text Ads Program although my pageview threshold is below the minimum requirements. As you can see there are blue links being generated - apparantly this thing optimizes better over time, so it’ll take some time to work perfectly well, but it’s working now, and it makes my site look cool.

Although, some of the context links generated are total bogus, for example, this one that tells me to buy IE6 - it’s a free software anyhow.

In any case, I’ll let you posted on what this does to my website revenues.

Right now, it shows up sometimes, and other times it doesn’t - but Kontera did advise me it will take a few days to optimize completely to my site.

Canon has a good reputation for good printers, although I stick with my Lexmark P6250, which is cheap, versatile, and gives me great value. All I ever do is print out documentation I need to read so I can read it on the bicycle at the gym, or print out invoices.

However, if you did want a high-quality printer, here’s a chance, because my friend Broc is holding a contest on his blog where you can enter to win this prize! You have a 1/500 chance to win, which is a hell of a lot better than the lotteries. Hey, it’s not a $30,000,000 prize but it’s something you can smile about.

Broc is marketing his blog through the MyBlogLog community, which I find is a great idea. I’m interested to see where he takes this campaign, and how the results are.

When Google gives me a pagerank (which is expected to be updated in April, so I will finally be given a pagerank), they determine the quality of my outbound links as a factor.

So far, because my blog was so new and I’m such a nice guy, I just exchanged blog links with everybody who asked, basically. I had an interesting chat with John Chow today over lunch, and he pointed out a few things to me. When Google gives me a pagerank (which is expected to be updated in April, so I will finally be given a pagerank), they determine the quality of my outbound links as a factor. My pagerank is forecasted to be 4/10 according to a somewhat-trustworthy 3rd party engine I found somewhere, and I don’t want to ruin that opportunity.

Starting today I am cropping out the following type of blogs from my blogroll :

1. Does not update regularly (I’m not asking for once a day - just regularly. I don’t care if it’s once a week).
2. Has no valid content. By valid content I mean it generates its own content (instead of gathering posts from other blogs and putting it all in one blog), and is not commercial (i.e. if your blog exists for the sole purpose of selling things for your affiliates). I will only link to blogs that have valid content that have valid information for surfers.
3. Has no relevancy to my blog. There are great logs out there that have great content that I do read, but it’s bad for my pagerank if that other blog does not have anything that is related to mine. I will do blog reviews of these type of blogs, but no links will be posted on a permanent basis.

For other bloggers out there - I suggest you do the same.

When I read through a magazine, I usually skim through it. I take a glance at this and that, read the bolder font here and there. When I find something catchy, then I’ll delve into the article. But even then, a lot of articles are skimmed over.

“In a recent survey, 3 out of 4 men answered that they feel vaguely uncomfortable when eating a banana in public.”

(more…)

As far as I can remember, Robb DeVore was a guy who left some meaningful and encouraging comments on my blog, and I did my best to return the same favour. Many of you probably I’ve been posting, on average, once a day for the last few days which is very abnormal for me, and I’ve been kind of lazy on leaving him his well-deserved comments.

Robb and I are both in the web-design industry (or at least part of our businesses revolve around it) and we have a certain understanding for the following areas :

• Enterpreneurship
• Time Management
• Business Ethics
• Technology, and Web Design talk
• And now, Blogging

I’d like to point out that I’m a hard person to satisfy - for me to like somebody from a business perspective, and for me to be able to praise them as intelligent and valuable people, it takes some time and effort, and Robb has definitely been on my good radars since I first exchanged a few comments and posts with him. Also, I love his designs. Yes, it’s true I came up with some good designs (not this site, I know) for my clients, but his design is simply impeccable on his blog. It’s clean, professional and simply looks amazing. I need to make the time to do that to my own blog after I get some contracts out of the way.

His insight for running a business is something that guys like me (and you) should all read into and think about. His latest series includes the “Bootstrapping Your Business” series.  He discusses leadership, attitude, ambition, decision making, and organizational skills which are critical to any businesspeople.

Other posts that I found noticeable are the following :

• Why Most Blogs Fail

• Succeeding Like the Genius

• Web Two Point Oh

Take a look at his posts - he is a valuable business coach, and you’ll find it very useful to add his RSS feed to your blog.