Today, I received the following email. As I was about to press the delete button, I couldn’t help but ask myself if people actually respond to these type of messages. Have you received something similar to this?

Privet, gentleman
Sweetheart, if suddenly the Sun will stop shining, you will keep me warm!
If suddenly the Starts will hide behind the Moon, you will still give me so
much romance, which I never dreamt could be.  If the Seas and Oceans will
overflow, we will sail away together.  If our Earth will dry out and there
will be no single drop left, we will kill our thirst with our Love to each
other.  Dear, the Sun and Stars and the Oceans are smiling only to us. If we will be together:. No, WHEN we will be together, none of disasters
will separate us.  Because two of us will be the strongest power ever known.
I want to fall in love with you and have a family.  I want to love life and
everything around, I want to hear words of love and I dream that I could
make you and us happy.  Write to me to http://##### and don’t waste
our opportunity to be happy, dear.

Waiting for your response

Juliana K.

It literally takes five minutes just to read it due to all of the spelling and grammatical errors in the message. You’ve got to be a mind reader just to understand what the point of the message is.

SpamBully has been doing a great job of filtering out the junk mail that I receive on a daily basis. On average, I get about 60 SPAM messages per day, either from a “long lost lover”, a “Nigerian prince” who needs me to transfer his fortune through my bank account, or from a “Canadian pharmacy” website.

At first, you would think that there is no possible way anyone ever believes these messages or responds to them, but if that were true, why would so many people spend so much time and money sending out these messages?

What sort of SPAM do you usually receive? How many people do you think actually respond to them?

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5 people had something to say. What do you think?

Beginning today, SiteFever.com will offer RSS feed sponsorships to a maximum of five people per month. Here’s the details:

RSS sponsors will have their link displayed after every single post in our full content RSS feed along with a 30 word description of their site. No more than five RSS sponsors are allowed at any time.

The cost is only $5 per month!

To reserve your sponsorship, all you have to do is send $5 via PayPal to jrobinson@sitefever.com along with your URL, anchor text and up to 25 word description of your site.

Act fast- only five spots are available!

To read about all of our advertising opportunities, visit our advertising page.

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7 people had something to say. What do you think?

This is in follow-up of part 1 of our August monthly update.

Part 1 mostly covered the monetary aspect while this part will outline how things went from a traffic and popularity aspect.

First, let’s look at our monthly AwStats traffic report:

AwStats reported 8,123 unique visitors and 463,126 total pages viewed for August. Google Analytics was not installed on SiteFever until the end of the month. However, our AwStats vs. Google Analytics report on August 31 showed that Google showed an approximate 25.7% difference in traffic over AwStats. Using that percentage, we can estimate that if Google Analytics had been tracking our stats all month it would of reported approximately 6,035 unique visitors and 34,102 monthly page views.

In addition to traffic, I have also been tracking some other stats as well:

Technorati Authority

Technorati Rank

RSS Subscribers

Alexa Rank

MyBlogLog Community Members

All of the above stats showed a dramatic improvement throughout the month. Put into a percentage, here’s what I’ve come up with:

All of the stats showed over a 300% increase throughout the month while our RSS subscribers increased over 500%. We hope that our RSS subscribers continue to increase each day.

My purpose in showing all these stats and charts is twofold. First, some of you simply ask me to show them- a few are just curious and others are interested in advertising and would like to see how well the blog is doing. Secondly, I really want to stress the importance of tracking your progress over multiple channels.

So many blog owners have been caught up in the PageRank frenzy and have forgotten to pay attention to anything other than a number that Google assigns them 4 times per year. I strongly recommend that you make yourself a spreadsheet and track your stats on a daily basis. With just a few clicks, you can easily make yourself a chart to visualize how your blog is doing from day to day. This will help you quickly spot any areas of your blog that you may need to put a little more emphasis on.

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9 people had something to say. What do you think?

So, what do you think? Like our new theme? I’ve been playing around with some different layouts for some time now, and I think I’ve finally got it finished. As much as I enjoyed the previous look, there are some good reasons why I felt it was time to change. Here’s your last glimpse at the old theme:

It was a free theme, so SiteFever wasn’t the only kid on the block with that look. Judging by the popularity of this blog in its first two months, I felt that it needed its own “brandable” layout.

I think you will find that this theme along with some other improvements I’ve implemented will greatly improve this site. Here’s some stuff I did:

I moved the site wide 468×60 ad spot from the center of the screen to the top right. This still allows the banner to be displayed at the top of each page while leaving me enough room to place a really sweet logo that Julien from TheWebsiteProfessionals.com helped me to create. There’s also room for some decent sized RSS buttons and popular articles without having to bump the main content down too much.

Although “whitespace” is a good thing, the old theme was letting a TON of space go to waste. I widened not only the content area but also the sidebar, which now allows room for two 125×125 banner ads side by side.

As you may already know, I really like to push for reader participation on SiteFever, so I have done quite a few things to help. In addition to removing the nofollow attribute from the comment links, MyAvatars plugin and the top commentators plugin, I also added the subscribe to comments plugin which allows you to receive automatic email notifications when somebody replies to a topic you left a message on. Also, Brian’s threaded comments plugin allows you to reply to specific comments rather than having all the comments being grouped together, which will be a big help especially with the larger number of comments we have been seeing on SiteFever. To top things off, you will also notice that I added the recent comments plugin, which displays the most recent comments in the sidebar.

I decided to move the recent MyBlogLog avatar box down to the footer because as some of you already know, MyBlogLog can get a little goofy a few times a week and take a while to load- or not load at all. I did make the avatar box bigger so it will display more recent visitors than it did before.

There are some other tweaks I did to the site to make it load faster than it was- or would have with this theme. I will write a post on what steps I took to decrease my average page load time by almost 40%. Anyone who owns a website or a blog should check back to see these tips because speeding up your page load time is something that everyone should want to do.

As much as I might have thought this redesign was necessary, I am anxious to hear what everyone else thinks about the changes here at SiteFever.com. Please let me know what you think!

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28 people had something to say. What do you think?

I know there are a few days left in August, but I wanted to go ahead and give you an update on the in-house income report for this month.

The in-house advertising didn’t start until August 19, so there is really only ten days of income to report. We’ll see how we do in September with a full month to tally up. So, here’s the breakdown:

Sitewide header banner - $250
Site review - $50
125×125 sitewide sidebar ad - $40
In-content text ads - $180
200×200 in-content banner- $70

Total income: $590

Total ad impressions: 26,763
Total ad clicks: 234
Average CTR: 0.87%

The ad with the highest CTR was the sitewide header banner with a 1.80% CTR. My goal is to do all that I can to increase the average CTR on this blog to at least 2%, although much of that depends on your ad.

I’m sure when given an entire month to calculate, we will reach our goal of $1,000 per month without using ad networks or affiliate links. This sure beats the $6.78 received for the entire month of July using AdSense and Kontera!

Don’t forget that you still have two more days to take advantage of matched deposits for advertising on SiteFever.com.

Since I removed all ad networks from this site, I have seen a lot of talk going around from bloggers who are interested in doing the same. I strongly encourage you to give it a try! Just be sure to set a fair price for any ad space you offer.

As a side note, I am currently rounding up some contest sponsors to give out some valuable stuff on SiteFever in the near future. So far, the sponsors I’m talking to are willing to offer prizes such as software, t-shirts and some nerdy gadgets. If you’re interested in sponsoring a contest on this site, please contact me.

On September 1 I will post July’s traffic stats, so stay tuned.

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13 people had something to say. What do you think?

 Including today, there are 5 full days left in August. From right now up until the end of the month, I’m giving away money to anyone who places an ad on SiteFever.com. Here’s how it works:

Whatever money you set aside to advertise on SiteFever.com, I’ll match it 100% up to $100. The money will be deposited into an advertisers account for you to use on any future advertising on this site. For example:

You deposit $20 to use for advertising, you get $40. If you deposit $50, you get $100 and if you deposit $100, you get $200!

What you have to do is create an advertisers account. Using PayPal, you can deposit any amount of money you want into your account. You don’t have to use it right away. I will match any money deposited up to $100 per person until September 1.

From your advertisers account admin panel, you are able to purchase the following types of advertising on this site:

• In-content “AdSense style” text ads (CPC or CPM)
• In-content 200×200 banners (CPC or CPM)
• 125×125 sitewide sidebar banner (CPC or CPM)
• 468×60 sitewide header banner (available Sept. 21)

The funds in your advertisers account can also be withdrawn to purchase a site review.

You can read all the details about advertising on this blog from the advertising page. Once you deposit money into your account, please allow me a few hours to add the additional funds.

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6 people had something to say. What do you think?

Need I say more?

Blogging is not a one way street. In order to operate a successful blog, you’ve got to promote reader participation- commenting. What on earth would drive you to require anyone wishing to comment on your blog to create a Google account? I can’t even count the number of blogs I have visited in the past month that I went to leave a comment on, noticed the above message, then promptly exited the site.

Also, Blogger’s commenting form operates over an SSL encrypted page. This means, every time someone goes to comment on your blog, the first thing they see is this annoying pop-up:

Do yourself a favor and allow anonymous comments on you blog. As soon as you do, your reader participation will surely increase. As far as the http/https security pop-up goes, you can either ask all your readers to change their Internet security settings so they will no longer receive this notice, hope your readers don’t mind, or locate some other solution.

When designing their online stores, huge corporations will spend millions of dollars to develop their site to allow the customer to go from item selection to checkout in the fewest possible steps. When managing a blog, reader participation is the equivalent of an item checkout for an online store.

When developing your blog, make it a point to allow the reader to easily participate! If reader participation remains difficult, you will lose your visitors and your blog will turn into a ghost town.

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15 people had something to say. What do you think?