Real estate over the past 7 years has gotten absolutely crazy. While it has come down some, it still seems as if prices are still at ridiculous prices. A condo should not cost well over $300,000! Richard Hodge from SpeculativeBubble.com created a rollercoaster simulation based on percentages of pricing that US housing has gone up or down since 1890. It’s an excellent simulation, but the chart after the video really shows how drastic this pricing has been. It makes you think that prices have to come down…and come down hard. Whatever goes up, must come down, right?? How have prices been in your area?

Here is the chart that shows the actual pricing:

Instead of checking your basic stats like Alexa, Technorati, backlinks, etc by going to each source individually, you can save time with popuri.us. You simply enter your URL, and the tool will list:

• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rank
• Complete Rank
• Google, Yahoo, and Live backlinks
• Technorati Links
• Bloglines Subscribers

It’s a nice, easy to use interface, that shows all your stats in one place. If they continue to add more dynamic stats, it will get even better. I did notice that for some sites it doesn’t give you all of the stats, for example my blog didn’t show Technorati links (kept trying to load).

For anybody interested, it looks like the site is for sale.

Just a note to all of you folks running Wordpress. There is a new update that mainly is a security patch. The Wordpress people are being a lot more careful about the download files so there is no security issues as there was in the past.

I am a huge car buff, and since before I could drive I had a timeline of cars that I had to have in my lifetime. They were:

1. BMW M3
2. Dodge Viper
3. Ferrari
4. Lamborghini

I have already had Dodge Viper, but I would like to get a GTS at some point…so I keep that on the list. I could have easily had an M3 by now, but my ActiveTuning company specializes in Nissan and Infiniti. This means that by me buying and driving a Nissan or Infiniti, I am promoting my business, and also using the expenses as a write-off for tax purposes…drastically reducing my overall cost in automotive expenses. I am thinking that in the next year or so I will be switching out my Infiniti G35 Coupe with something else…and an M3 is at the top of my list right now.

The version of the M3 (the E92) is set to be released in the US mid-next year, and all we got so far were concept pictures. Autoweek finally got a hold of a few production picture, which gives us a look at exactly how the car will look in real life. The new M3 will now have a V8 with 420hp at 8,300 rpm. There are many other new technologies which make the car very exciting, read more about it in the Autoweek article if you want to know more.

I think the car looks great, and very agressive…which is how an M3 should look. I personally think from an exterior-standpoint, the older E46 looks better (but maybe that will change when I see it in person). Here’s a picture of the current E46 M3:

I think the interior on the new one definitely looks much more refined though. As of right now, I’m leaning more towards getting a used E46. For those of you that want similar E92 looks, but for a better price, consider the 335i coupe. It’s not as aggressive, but does feature twin turbos and an underrated 300hp starting at $40,000.

Update 4/7/2007: A new batch of official pictures has been posted at Autoblog.

Introduction

I officially launched this blog on March 9th, which gave it 22 days to show some results for the month. Overall it did fairly well for the amount of time I have to spend on it. This blog is not my very top priority as I have other businesses that I run, which do require a lot of my time. I’ll take you through the various parts of the blog to show how they did. You can learn from some of the things that I did, and compare to see how the results actually looked. We’ll start off with traffic:

Traffic

March generated 6,323 unique visitors, 10,1272 pageviews, averaging 1.61 pageviews per visitor.

One of the most important statistics you can look at is your new visitor vs. returning visitor report. This will show you if you are able to retain your readers or not. The only thing you need to make sure to account for is spikes in traffic on days where something may have been linked on a bunch of other sites. More than likely most of that traffic is new, and will bring down the monthly average. A good thing to do is look at a few days where your traffic is pretty stable. Your returning visitor rate should be more accurate in terms of average traffic flow.

Monetization

My purpose of this blog is not to subsidize any sort of income really, but anything extra is always nice. At this time, I’m more worried about generating traffic then actually making money. With traffic comes money, so worry about the first before worrying about the latter. During March I was running just Google AdSense. I did a few things to better optimize the ads, and still plan on doing some more obvious things in the near future. March brought in $5.28 on 15,360 impressions for just a $0.34 eCPM. There is much room for improvement on this, so it will be interesting to watch and see as this hopefully grows.

I have also added Kontera in-text links for April, so I’ll be looking forward to seeing how that does at the end of the month.

RSS Subscribers

My RSS subscriber count is averaging close to 50 by the end of the month. That’s not bad considering it was 0 less than a month ago. A huge help was the site of the month article John Chow had written about. Since many of his readers have similar interests, they seemed to show a liking over here as well. My goal for April is to have my RSS subscribers averaging over 100 by the end of the month.

The one trend that is noticeable, and will continue to be noticeable, is the drop in subscribers on Saturday and Sunday’s. I purposely try not to post content on these days, so there will obviously be a drop in traffic and subscriptions.

Search Engine Goodness

I was seeing search engine results very early on in this blog, so it’s interesting to see what people are searching for to get here. This can also drastically help with the direction that you can write your content to maximize the amount of traffic that comes in. Search engine traffic is very valuable because it’s targeted traffic. Readers searched for something specifically, and the hope is that they came to your site looking for just that. I had 176 visits from organic search engines (Google, MSN, search, and AOL). The top 10 keywords that were searched to get to my blog in March are as follows:

1. 2008 infiniti g37 coupe
2. 2008 g37 coupe
3. www.nevblog.com
4. david pitlyuk
5. 2008 infiniti g37
6. infiniti g37
7. powercast ipo
8. mercedes mansions
9. heli expo
10. www.davidpitlyuk.com

We can obviously see here that the keyword which brought the most traffic was in regards to my post about the new 2008 Infiniti G37 Coupe. I wrote this post early on when the car was just released and before many other sites had written about it. This gave me an advantage in the Google SERP, and put me on the top of results for some time before some of the bigger sites were able to get their content in. Just doing a preliminary look at April stats, I can see that not as much traffic is coming in from the same article, but I’m seeing a ton of traffic coming from my post on the next multi-BILLION dollar idea. In that post I talked about a company called Powercast, and how I would love to invest in them. While many other articles have been written about Powercast, not many have written about investing in it. This gave me a powerful advantage in search results, as it is a company which many people are seeing the potential for making some money on. In fact the top 5 keyword referrals in April so far all have to do with investing in Powercast. Just some food for thought.

Popular Pages/Content

It’s important to look at the most popular pages, as it can give you a few clues to make your blog better. It can tell you what articles people are most interested in reading and what articles are getting the most linkbacks. This way when you sit down and think about what you should write about, you should have a general direction to lead you in. This can also help you create a niche for your site if you do not already have one. Here’s a list of the top 10 most popular pages on this site for March:

1. Lamborghini As A Piece Of Art
2. Dodge Viper Coupe With Matching Helicopter
3. An Ugly Lamborghini?
4. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
5. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
6. Mansion Hunting In Northern Virginia
7. How I Got Over 2,000 Visitors In The First Week With $0
8. The Next Multi-BILLION Dollar Idea
9. Who Is David Pitlyuk?
10. Cars (Category)

The top 3 posts were fairly popular on a few of the automotive forums that I am a part of, and therefore generated a good amount of traffic. Take a look at the top referrals analysis below to get more of an idea where my traffic came from.

I had 38 posts in the Month of March averaging 1.7 posts per day. According to my article on the number of optimal posts per day, I’m right in line! Keep in mind that I try not to post content on the weekends as I believe that’s time to try and do some relaxing.

Top Referrals

1. StumbleUpon
2. My350Z
3. Autoblog
4. G35Drive
5. JohnChow
6. Maxima.org
7. NissanClub
8. ViperClub
9. Digg
10. Google Reader

StumbleUpon brought 1,067 visitors that averaged 1.91 pages per visit. The majority of the traffic came from two articles that were “stumbled”. I didn’t learn about StumbleUpon until this month, but it’s a great concept…look for a post specifically about this in the near future. My350Z, G35Drive, Maxima.org, NissanClub, and ViperClub are all forum communities that I’m a part of. You can read more about generating traffic from forums in my post How I got over 2,000 visitors in the first week with $0.

If you don’t already know, in-text advertising are those links that display an ad when you hover over them with your mouse. I’m not a huge fan of this type of advertising, but I’d like to see how they perform on my blog. You will notice that my real links are blue, and sponsored links are green with a double underline.

Kontera used to only accept publishers that generated at least 500,000 pageviews a month. This blog is new, and not doing anywhere near that, but Kontera decided to let smaller sites into their network. Their main concern is accepting sites with quality content, which mine passed their test.

John Chow has Kontera implemented on his site and generated over $300 in 12 days. Keep in mind his blog generated 313,000 pageviews in the same month. I’ll recap how it does on here for the April review in early May. Stay tuned.

If you have been running Kontera, or even IntelliTXT, how has it worked out?

Have you ever gone to a sports game or the beach, but not had a way to bring a drink with you? Never fear, just pick up some Reef Dram sandals. Doesn’t make sense to you yet? The sandals have a built-in flask that can fit 3 ounces (or 3 shots) of whatever liquid your heart desires.

The sandals feature a canteen with a screw that can be opened up using an included key, a mini-funnel, and measuring bar to see how much liquid you have left. You can pick a pair of these up for about $45.

These are in succession to the Fanning’s which feature a bottle opener on the bottom of the sandals. My roommate has these, and loves them.

This is a great example of a company thinking outside of the box. While the products aren’t the most intuitive thing in the world, it’s enough to create a buzz and generate a ton of sales that otherwise would not have had any attention.

There hasn’t been an idea out there for a while that I’ve gotten truly excited about. That has all changed with the introduction of a new business started by an entrepreneur named Shearer. The company name? Powercast. If you haven’t heard of them yet, trust me, you will.

What Is It?

Wireless technology has really developed over the last 10 years, its made our lives easier and cleaner…but there has always been one wire left over, the power plug. That’s where a new patented, FCC-approved technology comes in that was invented by Powercast. The technology is wireless power. By utilizing a receiver plugged into the wall, and a receiver chip on the unit, it can act as if it is plugged in up to 3 feet away. The receiver converts radio waves in to DC electricity.

So imagine having your PDA/Cell phone in your pocket, and as soon as you sit down or get in the car it’s automatically charging. Imagine LED lighting in your house with no wires. Imagine medical devices such as pacemakers, that never have to be replaced. I think you can see where I’m going here, the technology is limitless in applications.

Limitations

I’ve already mentioned the 3-foot limitation, but there is also a power limitation. At this time, the technology can only power smaller devices up such as phones, PDAs, LED lights, etc. Something like a TV, computer monitor, or laptop cannot be utilize this technology…yet. The amount of power consumption by devices is getting better by the year. As power consumption goes down, the possibility of wireless power for that device goes up. Lets say I’m Dell. I’m going to do everything in my power to create a laptop that will only need enough power that it can work through wireless power, because I know my laptop will have the edge over other companies, which means it will sell. This thought process will drive many companies to work harder and faster to use less energy for their devices. This is a good thing!

When & How Much?

It sounds like something out of the future, but we’re going to start seeing products released this year, yes, 2007. Powercast has already signed over 100 nondisclosure agreements with companies to develop products. One of the first products will be an LED stick from Phillips. We should expect to see many more products in 2008, such as computer peripherals.

It gets better. The technology is cheap to manufacturer! The actual chip in the product (the whole bread and butter) only costs about $5 to make. I’m sure products will bring a premium because the technology is so new, but we shouldn’t expect to see something like a $1,000 cellphone that can do this…expect your normal prices.

How Do I Plan On Monetizing?

I will be closely watching this company, and I hope that they get an IPO. I just dabble in the stock market, but I only invest in companies which I personally believe in. Powercast has the opportunity to easily be one of the richest companies in the world, it will be very exciting to watch their growth.

I was reading a post over at ProBlogger in regards to the debate between disabling comments or not on low traffic blogs. Should sites with low traffic disable their comments? There are two main arguments for each side.

Enable

You don’t want to promote the fact that your blog has low traffic. People will see “0 comments” on a lot of posts and think just this. This negative affect could keep people from coming back or from posting comments at all. It’s a known fact that discussion will likely cause more discussion.

Disable

If you disable comments you are obviously losing the ability for users to interact with you and readers through the site, plus you are losing valuable content. The main goal is to turn somebody who is just reading a post on your site into a dedicated reader, and comments definitely help do that.

I believe that there are two options to choose from in terms of the best thing to do:

1) You can turn your comments off completely until you are at the point where you are generating 100-200 unique visitors/day. By the time you are consistently generating this amount of traffic, it should be enough that people will naturally make comments in key posts.

2) This option ties into option 1, as you should do this as well. Rather than your comments link saying something like “0 comments” or “No comments”, change it to “Post a comment” when there are no comments. This method doesn’t advertise the fact that nobody has commented on your post. Another option (the route I chose) is to choose something like “Be the first to comment” which does advertise that you have no comments, but also entices your readers to be the first to add their thoughts.

How Do I Change The Text?

This method works for Wordpress. Simply go to your theme editor, and edit your main index template. Depending on the theme that you are using, there may be some variations…so feel free to post comments with questions, and I can help you out. Search for the word comments, and you should be able to find the line of code that displays the output. I changed mine to this:

<?php comments_popup_link(‘Be the first to comment &#187;‘, ‘1 Comment &#187;’, ‘% Comments &#187;’); ?>

The first line there between the ‘?? ‘ is what Wordpress will output when there are 0 comments. Simply editing that text can make a powerful change on your blog.

Update: Part 2 has been posted where I look at companies that start with H-O. Part 3 has also been posted where I look at companies that start with P-Z. I have also compiled a best of the best list.

I spent the time to look through 414 websites of publicly traded companies in the technology sector starting with the letters A-G, and chose the 45 best designs. This is part 1 of 5, covering each range of letters, and then I plan on having the best of all designs to come up with a final list of best corporate designs in the tech sector. These companies obviously all have money and a budget to make a killer site, lets see what can be done. More site after the jump:

3COM

Activision

Actuate

Adobe

Akamai

Aladdin

Alcatel-Lucent

Apple

Applied Innovation Inc.

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