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Today is the first day of The AdSpace Contest, and I’m proud to announce that I am one of 10 co-hosts.

The idea is simple and easy: Get as many entries as you can (very easy to do) over the next 30 days. The more entries you get, the better chance you have of winning! At the end of the 30 days, we’ll announce the winner.

The prize?

A 125×125 pixel ad spot (above the fold) on at least TEN DIFFERENT BLOGS that will run for one month. That’s at least a $100 value!

Who else is co-hosting?

• Geek Mom Mashup
• Vrtualme
• Jamaipanese
• Best of Stupid
• AxioBlog
• The Big Bald Blog
• Jason Boom
• Unconventional Marketing Blog
• Offended Blogger
• GorillaSushi

How do you enter to win?

1 Entry - Subscribe to any one of the blogs above via email.

10 Entries - Write a post about the contest (must include links to all 10 hosts OR use our suggested text)

25 Entries - Offer up an ad spot on your own blog for one month as part of the prize package (links will be listed above)

Simply put, you could subscribe to all 10 blogs, write a post and offer up your own ad spot for a grand total of 45 entries! Be sure to tell us in the comments below when and how you’ve entered to ensure that your entries get counted.

Good Luck!

Welcome to TEABERRY Fargo! As some of you know, I write to you primarily from Fargo, North Dakota, and like to share some marketing ideas I can easily take pictures of. This brings us back to TEABERRY in downtown Fargo.

If you aren’t familiar with Fargo, during the winter it gets very VERY cool here. As you would expect, coffee is quite the staple drink for about 6 months of the year out of the necessity of staying warm. What Fargo doesn’t have is a lot of varieties of tea outside of Starbucks or Dunn Bros. Some astute people felt that not everyone likes coffee but still like to share in the experience of those delirious hot and cold beverages, so they created TEABERRY.

TEABERRY is owned and operated by a man named Trung. He was quite busy when I stopped by so I only got a few words (that’s a good sign for a new business). By my estimate, they have about 40+ different flavors of tea and hundreds of possible combination of different flavors by adding jelly (basically a jelly bean added for a different flavor) or pearls (like a taffy that adds a little kick of sugar). My favorite tea so far has been the Aloe Vera. You can taste the chunks of aloe along with some amazing bursts of other fruit flavors such as strawberries, orange and lemon. It is quite the combination. I also hear they do serve one type of Vietnamese coffee that is super strong and dark as night. I will have to try it sometime.

The beauty of the whole TEABERRY idea is the simplicity of the idea and providing something to people that doesn’t currently exist. What a concept! Never forget that it is OK to be the only one in town, or in your niche that is doing what you are doing. When you are the only one around, people will naturally refer others to you. A while back I was looking to have some engraving work done on something other than jewelry and ended up at a very nice trophy shop at the suggestion of the jeweler. It worked out very well for me and I am pretty sure there can only be 1-2 of these in town to begin with.

Cheers!

Whats new at the Unconventional Marketing Blog?

Well last week I did a featured series for a blogger appreciation week, where I made mention of those who wanted to be recognized. I believe I got everyone. If you slipped through, send me a message and I will make up for it. Here are the posts:

• AlmostFit.com takes the stage
• The Big Bald Blog, a Big Pappa creation
• The MLM’s best friend, John Leonard
• Four blogs worth checking out featuring…
  • That’s Great PR
  • Down On Our Luck
  • It Might Be Love
  • The Blue Workhors

Overall I feel it went very well and I really enjoyed talking and sharing some of my reader’s blogs with the rest of my readers. From time to time I really like to give back and make a mention the best I can for those who help support my blog. I wish I could shower you with lavish prizes and tons of cash but not quite yet ;).

Guest Posters

I have offered up guest posting in the past and have not received much attention until out of the blue Shaun Connell stepped up to the plate and shared his thoughts on Google Adsense. I would like to thank Shaun and welcome him to guest post anytime.

Also, you might have noticed a new guest poster page at the top of the blog. To encourage some more guest posting and share a little more about those who do guest posts, I created a page to show off a mug shot and brief bio for all to see. Shaun is lonely on that page and is looking for some more company. If you are interested, feel free to use the contact page to let me know of your interest to join Shaun.

Goals

I am a big fan of goals for both this blog and my personal life, and this month was a great month for goals on this blog.

Here were my goals:

Page Views : 70,000
Alexa: under 125,000
Technorati Rank: 30,000
Technorati Authority: 200
RSS Subscribers : 250

Here is what I got:

Page Views : 106,953 Unique Visits 53,000
Alexa: under 122,000
Technorati Rank: 26,138
Technorati Authority: 193 (just missed)
RSS Subscribers : 308 (last day of the month)

As you can see, I made all but one of my goals of the month with which I am really pleased. I didn’t meet all my goals in the last two months and so I did not set July goals as out of reach as the others. I also was not anticipating all of the new subscribers to the blog but would like to welcome all of you. Seeing that I just missed the Technorati goal by a few, if you would like to add my blog to your favorites to help me meet my goal, I would be eternally grateful. Heres the link.

Well this has been a busy week for me and this blog. Yesterday I upgraded to the newest Wordpress and what an event that was. I first upgraded our dog blog without any major problems and then proceeded to upgrade my own. Thankfully I waited ’til about 10 p.m. because my blog was probably down for over an hour. After I did the upgrade, everything was fine until I started reactivating the plugins. When I reactivated the Top Commenter plugin, it threw everything out of whack and I didn’t know what to do. I eventually came to the conclusion I had to revert to my backup.

Thankfully I had the necessary files to re-upload, another reason to always run a backup before you do anything major with your website. That took some time and I had to redo the upgrade yet again, this time without enabling that plugin. Later I found out that you could just delete the plug from the plugin directory and that is the equivalent of disabling it. I wish I had known that before all of the issues, but since that note was on the plugin page that I could no longer see, it got overlooked.

I also installed the Sez-Who comment plugin to participate in the newly joined Entrecard Sez-Who partnership only to find that it added a full second to my already pitiful load time (3 seconds to over 4 seconds). I did some adjusting and also disabled the NextGen Gallery plugin (another really slow plugin I wasn’t using). So now the load times are a bit better but still something to be desired. Taking input

New to the Unconventional Marketing blog this week is also a Contact page and contact form. I know you are probably asking yourself what took so long? The answer to that question is I don’t know. So please check out and use the contact form whenever you feel it is necessary, otherwise leaving comments is also welcome at anytime.

Also, two days ago was the latest in the Internet land grabs when .me domains went up for sale. I tried to buy 5 .me domains only to get emails back on 4 of them saying that someone else had registered them before me. There was so much traffic and people trying to buy the same domains all at once that many people found that they had paid only to get a rejection email a short time later. I was fortunate enough to get JOSHING.ME the newest domain to add to my list. I haven’t quite figured out what I would like to do with the domain, but for now I will probably place a blog on it. If you have any ideas on what I should do with my newest domain I am all ears, shoot me a message on my new Contact Page.

P.S. Although everyone was bashing GoDaddy for screwing everything up, I think you should remind yourself that it wasn’t GoDaddy selling the domains they were only the facilitator. I ended up talking with their customer support about the refunds and we pleasantly surprised by how knowledgeable and professional they were through the process. (If you call ask for Dew).

Last Sunday I had an open offer to review anyone’s blog if they so wished. Macewan jumped at the review offer. I have been focused lately on building my blog and community, here and here. I realized about a month ago that numbers don’t really mean anything unless you have a community to support them, otherwise all you will ever do is keep chasing numbers. So before I get too off topic, I present to you Macewan’s Ideal Absolutes.

The first article that really grabbed my attention was titled Best Free Blog Services? For the many people out there that do not understand blogs or blogging, here is a great example of what one is:

“People blog to express their thoughts and opinions, market or promote something, help other people, establish yourself as an expert, connect with people similar to you, to make a difference, to stay active or knowledgeable in a certain field or topic, to stay connected to friends and family, and to make money from various forms of media…”

People love to blog and for many many different reasons. Whether they blog for the benefit of networking or to grow and express themselves in their field, blogging is a very personal thing. Often times I think too many people forget why they blog or never sat down to begin with to plan out their blogging strategy. A blog can either be like a personal or family diary, or it can be your own personal magazine to the world.

 “Whether you know it or not you run a magazine. It’s true. If you run a blog then you run a magazine. Worries of distribution, subscriptions, advertisers, graphics and articles. Grinding out content daily isn’t for the faint of heart.” 

 There is some great insight to that last statement. A blog can be many things, and depending on what you want out of blogging to begin with, you can treat it just like a magazine. Keeping and holding onto that focus is something everyone needs to do and Macawan.org is on it. If you haven’t taken a look yet, I would recommend stopping by and saying hi. Remember you get out what you put into your community.