It’s good to see my friend Thord Daniel Hedengren back with a new template and energy on Bloggertalks …

Well, it’s just nice to read interviews about really interesting people once again.. like:

Skellie, a successful freelancer on freelancing

PS:

BloggerTalks.com is more than just interviews in 2008. It’s …

* INTERVIEWS – Talking to bloggers that matter
* THE RAG – Daily news from the Blogosphere
* PAGE TWO – Flip it for some blogging resources

Vote For Your Favorite Blogs in 2007

If you’re like me .. and over 2100 RSS feeds in your Bloglines is never enough *g* .. here is your chance to increase your feed count by adding some of the newer blogs that came onto the scene and made a splash in 2007. This is all according to the team at Performancing.com and its readership. They put a call out to its readership to submit blogs and then narrowed them down to 6 per category.

According to Performancing: If your blog hasn’t been selected, don’t worry! For each category, there is a “write-in” option on the ballot. Just have your readers stuff the ballet box with your blog’s name (legal stuffing only!). To get maximum response from your blog community, consider blogging about it and also offering reminders throughout the voting period

Voting is open from January 3rd through January 10th

Check it out!

Both the Reader’s Choice and Judges’ Choice Performancing 2007 Awards on Friday January 11th, 2008. Here are the categories!

Vote For Your Favorite Blog at Performancing

* Vote For The Best Overall Blog
* Vote For The Most Influential Blogger
* Vote For The Best Blog Design
* Vote For The Best Blog Typography
* Vote For The Best Blog Name
* Vote For The Best New Blog of 2007
* Vote For The Best Blog Community of 2007
* Vote For The Most Improved Blog of 2007
* Vote For The Best Blogs You’ve Never Heard Of
* Vote For The Best Use of a Corporate Blog
* Vote For The Best Blog Podcast
* Vote For The Best Video Blog
* Vote For The Best Writing/Blogging Blog
* Vote For The Best Science/Technology Blog
* Vote For The Most Controversial Blog
* Vote For The Best SEO Blog
* Vote For The Best Celeb/Style Blog
* Vote For The Best Business/Money Blogs
* Vote For The Best Photo Blog
* Vote For The Best Sports Blog
* Vote For The Best Blog WebHost
* Vote For The Best Family and Parenting Blog
* Vote For The Best Political Blog
* Vote For The Best Food/Health Blog
* Vote For The Funniest Blog
* Vote For The Best Travel Blog
* Vote For The Best Education Blog
* Vote For The Best Entertainment Blog

* I’m kept track of my 2007 HART-Empire Earnings Online ..

Here is the link: HART-Empire Network Earnings Spreadsheet Document

The earnings are on an “Accrual” basis, where I’m documenting what I’ve earned, but monies will usually come in the following month, or (if ever) when I reach the minimum threshold for release of my earnings for payment. The expenditures are on a “Cash” basis, as I pay something related to my online earnings, I just load up the spreadsheet and modify it.

Summary of Gross Earnings 2007

* January 2007 – $344.61
* February 2007 – $372.37
* March 2007 – $492.41
* April 2007 – $491.85
* May 2007 – $620.99
* June 2007 – $632.47
* July 2007 – $672.66
* August 2007 – $701.78
* September 2007 – $706.09
* October 2007 – $801.12
* November 2007 – $859.20
* December 2007 – $863.36

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Dec/2007) – $7,558.91
* Average (YTD) $20.71 per day or, $629.91 per month
*** Still not enough to quit my day job!~

Reflection

Year to date NET income shows me making $1,228.84 profit … *shrugs* .. I have no idea where it is now!

Analysis Of Revenues

On an accrual basis .. 7558.91/3665.00 .. it would seem that my revenues were 206.25% of 2006 in 2007. But the reality is that the private ads figure in 2006 was actually a pro-rata amount that I received in the fall of 2005 .. so, actual earnings GENERATED in 2007 was really 3665-1500 = $2,165.00 … So, in that case – my 2007 generated revenues were really 349% of 2006!!

So, I suppose I should be happy.

Analysis of Expenditures

I didn’t keep track of expenses ‘publicly’ for 2006, but I did for 2007. Here is a summary with an explanation and commentary.

* Domain Renewals – $306.40 – This was for renewing all my domains, in the month prior before they became due. I just renewed them for 1-year at a time, and the average cost was $8.95 each through Chuga Domains. I have a big hit every January April and October each year .. but in 2008 I might renew them for longer periods of time, like 2 years or 5 years.

* Domain Registrations – $256.86 – For this expenditure, I was actually registering MORE domains .. but, I think I’m done registering new domains now for 2008!

* ISP Host Providers – Old ISP’s – $229.95 – This was for Blackun and Acenet before I moved in June 2007 and in each case was for overages (blacksun $180.00 in May/07) and interim monthly (acenet) before I decided where to move to.

* Dedicated Server Costs – $1,482.51 – Ouch! But, Its now costing me $263/month to host all of my sites now. Per month. Every month. It’s definitely my highest fixed costs per month.

* EVDO Laptop Access – $674.19 – Pricelist! That is, while I’m out at the beach every summer and there is no internet access. This is basically like a Cell Phone Contract I am tied into – at $67.80/month for 6 months and $49.95 for 6 months in the off-season. It’s definitely a necessity during the summer months and quite a burden and aggravation reminder everytime I pay a bill every few months in the winter.

* Advertising – $428.67 – I don’t feel I got any benefit from buying text-link-ads on blogs around the ‘net – based on my refer stats. I might have received about 10 clicks. Although, I did spend $100.00 of this amount at StumbleUpon Ads .. which, at 5 cents per click (or 2000 stumbles) to my Halloween site that I received no sales or affiliated leads from them.

* Miscellaneous Business Opportunities – $511.83 – I call it this, for software plugins that I have purchased, maybe ebooks that I buy or seem worthwhile to support the author etc.

* Design & Sub-contract – $940.00 – This was towards the cost of a new Network wide Template .. it is not complete, and still in progress

* Content and Sub-contract – $1.118.94 – This was for external content or designs purchased for my network. For instance, would include private label articles (PLR) and designs or scripts or blogs that now basically make up the http://HARTmarket.com group of subdomains and sites. Sites were created to tie in directly with affiliated sites but, I have yet to really market them.

* Writers and Sub-Contract – $380.07 – This is for the writers representing 1-1/2 months and, no there will not be any future breakdowns. I foresee this section to be my biggest future expense, although I hope that some shared revenue payouts are added to this figure – which would make both myself and the bloggers very happy!

* Ebay Activity Fees – $5.65 – Can’t remember what this was all about, I suppose I paid off my ebay balance.

>>> Total Expenses $ 6,330.07

>>> Net Income from Blogging – $1,228.84 – or, 16.26%

Reflections about 2007

I feel that as much as I think I should have grown financially in some exponential way to make me rich beyond all my expectations (*g*) … I am happy the way the year finally progressed. In the month of June 2007 .. I moved and combined all of my blogs into one central location and obtained a Virtual Private Server (VPS). I thought that would solve all of my traffic and bandwidth issues but it was a lesson in Hard Knox learned that CPU and computer resources have little to do with the bandwidth and traffic – albeit, somewhat cause and effect related. Bottom line – the VPS wasn’t good enough and it took until the beginning of September 2007 to finally convert to a dedicated server. Since that time – I have double the traffic on all my blogs on the server.

As I mentioned last month .. I finally hired writers that were not related to me (or friends in real life) to write for blogs in the “Battling For Health” series. I hope to continue until all positions are filled .. and leave the content to more qualified writers!

In October 2007 .. I hired two writers .. Gloria Gamat for the Battling Arthritis Blog .. and Lesly Maranan for the Battling Cancer Blog. For January 2008 .. I hired another writer .. Michael Davidsen for the Battling Alzheimer Blog .. and another one starting prior to February 2008 (to be announced).

Predictions for 2008

I hope we are all prosperous, of course! However, in real terms at this time – I hope my traffic doubles every quarter (for the HART-Empire Network as a whole) and revenues double every two quarters!

So, in other words: In December 2007 .. we had 52,650 unique visitors with 83,979 page views (1.6) .. so that would mean that I would like to see the uniques grow to
(-0) 52650
(3) 52650+52650=105300
(6) 105300+105300=210600
(9) 210600+210600=421200
(12) 421200+421200=842400 uniques for the month of December 2008
>> and 842400×1.6= 1,347,840 pageviews or more actually, if we can better that ratio!

and
(-0) 7558.91
(6) 7558.91+7558.91=15,117.82
(12) 15117.82+15117.82= $30,235.64 total gross earnings for 2008!

>> Well, that would be nice – however, as we all know it’s not how much GROSS you make – it’s how much NET you keep! And, by the end of 2008 – well, I still dream and hope that I can make at least an extra $3500 saved savings to take my wife on a really great vacation after next year’s Christmas Celebrations.

(1) December 7, 2007 – First Day I Hit $10.00 Adsense Day

Yes .. I look at my adsense figures a few times in a day, but mostly because it is part of a tab of sites that open up as my start page. On December 7th, 2007 – as I was approaching $10.00 adsense earnings for the day .. I was actually staying up until the statistics reset (2:00am CST) clicking refresh until I did break the $10.00 high! As it turned out, I did not hit this $10.00 high per day since.

(2)December 28, 2007 – First Time I ever broke $200.00 Adsense Month!

I started blogging in May 2005 and it took until February 2007 that I finally broke the $100.00 per month level. I am glad I broke the $200.00 level in 2007! This includes all of my sites by the way .. not just one or two. Perhaps sad .. but, still a milestone to me 🙂

(3) We DOUBLED The Traffic since September 2007

The above is the sitemeter public stats collected from all the stats of all blogs in the HART-Empire Network. It is obvious that in June and July 2007 there was downtime when I consolidated all my efforts on two servers into one mega dedicated server. By the time I got my act together with the move and testing in August 2007 .. I considered September 2007 the first month on a dedicated server where I was able to consider to promote my blogs – instead of worrying about whether or not my efforts would overtax my server.

But – a picture is worth a thousand words, eh? Both the unique visitors and page views practically DOUBLED in the month of December 2007 over the figures from the month of September 2007.

I hope 2008 continues with this trend and HART-Empire Network continues to grow and provide continued value to our readership base and beyond!

Happy New Year and All The Best To Everyone in 2008 as well!

I was locked out of my blogs today … I received this message

Latest Activity
Error 403
We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for /wp-admin/index-extra.php?jax=incominglinks on this server.

Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity. See the listing below for more details on specific blacklists and removal procedures.

Your technical support key is: ce2d-4fe7-1366-73cd

You can use this key to fix this problem yourself.

If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, please contact hart (at) PetLvr (dot) com and be sure to provide the technical support key shown above.

The referral page how to fix this problem yourself .. reads

Technical Support
Your request was intercepted by security software which protects the Web site you visited from malicious activity, such as hackers, spam and viruses. We apologize for the inconvenience, but your request matched a profile of suspicious activity. This problem is usually quite easy to fix.

Your computer’s IP address was determined to have recently sent spam or engaged in malicious activity as reported by a third-party monitoring service. This means your computer is most likely infected with viruses or other malicious software. See below for more information and removal instructions.

Your request was blocked because of malicious automated requests received from your computer’s IP address.

This problem may be caused by viruses or spyware on your computer, or by malicious software that pretends to be anti-virus or anti-spyware software. Ensure that you have REAL anti-virus and anti-spyware software on your computer, that they are kept up-to-date, and that you have run a full system scan using each tool. Once your system is cleaned of viruses and spyware, please try your request again.

The free Google Pack provides trustworthy anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Get essential software with Google Pack.

Blacklist Reason(s):

If the above suggestions fail to resolve the problem, click Back and contact the e-mail address you were given for further assistance.

So I emailed the plugin writer

You see .. that key was quite confusing, because there is no logs table in MySQL database .. it’s just one bad_behavior log. And – where do you input this key? There is no place to input this key! Aaargh!! So, I emailed the author of the plugin, Michael Hampton .. and he pointed me to this:

www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/2007/12/06/bad-behavior-2011/

That’s correct. There is a solution – you need to upgrade to the latest Bad Behavior Version 2.0.11

WHY?

Well, according to Michael on that page ..

In brief, yesterday I moved all of my sites to a new dedicated server. In the process, I decommissioned an old blacklist I was running which I thought wasn’t being used, not realizing that Bad Behavior was still set to use it. Shortly afterward, I found myself locked out of my own blog, just as you all did. So therefore, this release.

* I’m keeping track of my HART-Empire Earnings for 2007 Online .. and yes .. I forgot to post my October 2007 earnings – (but, it’s included YTD)

Here is the link: HART-Empire Network Earnings Spreadsheet Document

After the decision to consolidate my network into a handful of sites back in September … October and November 2007 were rebuilding months for month. Although, I still haven’t completely reworked the consolidation of about half of my sites – but, it’s not out of mind.

In October 2007 .. I hired my first two blogger/writers that weren’t related to me! Woohoo! If you haven’t met these bloggers or visited their blog .. please do!

* Gloria Gamat has taken over my Battling Arthritis blog and
* Lesly Maranan has taken over my Battling Cancer blog.

I wish them all the best, quite happy with their work and results, and feel my blogs are in great hands! Feel free to go stumble their blogs or articles and leave them some comments! 😀

Besides writers, I have been expanding (and incurring expenses) in acquiring content – mostly sites that are or will be part of the HARTmarket.com ‘mega site’. I probably need a good portal site but, here are the current stores part of the “HART Market”:

* Animal Art @ HART Market new
* Birthday @ HART Market new
* Classifieds @ HART Market new
* Furniture @ HART Market
* Halloween @ HART Market
* Lingerie @ HART Market
* Medieval @ HART Market
* Pet Care @ HART Market new
* Pet Supplies @ HART Market new
* Vision @ HART Market new
* Wedding @ HART Market new

I have a few more stores or sites being implemented on this domain, but will probably not introduce them until 2008. Once these and other sites are at the level I imagine, I will be concentrating on expanding content by hiring more writers in 2008.

I feel that things are starting to become more stable and opportunities continue to exist for modest growth and minor expansion. I’m still spending waaaaaaay too much, in relation to my earnings – but it’s all part of growth. All my earnings are put back into the HART-Empire Network. I’ve been trying to implement a switchover to a network wide themed HART-Empire Network template that I hope will be in place before 2008 that might help speed up the loading of certain sites, and help with branding. This has been a long-time in coming and I’m at the mercy of my designer and implementation strategies and design. I’m not in a real rush, because I know once I finally get this in place I will have to upload them to all of my sites! This means downtime, final upgrading of sites, new plugins, delete old plugins, adding unique sidebar and footer codes to individual templates, etc. I will be tackling a ‘mega site’ at a time, starting with the Battling Series of sites hopefully!

If you are a blog owner monetizing your own site, I am assuming you are quite aware of Google’s PR downgrades around the ‘net. Most of my sites have been affected and were changed. My 1800HART site, which was a PR5 back in May07 is now a PR0 – but, I suspect that it has more to do with me posting all of the 2kbloggers links back in the month of August 2007, instead of the Text-Link-Ads issue. I’ve lost some sponsors, but generally I’ve also been picking up new sponsors and quite frankly, search engine traffic continues to grow for me and didn’t seem to be affected. And (knock on wood) nor was my earnings. I still consciously am looking for alternate ways to monetize, which has explained some of the growth in the HART Market series of site .. which are all affiliated-based instead of product-in-my-basement-based sites.

So – back to my earnings YTD to November 30, 2007. The earnings are on an “Accrual” basis, where I’m documenting what I’ve earned, but monies will usually come in the following month, or (if ever) when I reach the minimum threshold for release of my earnings for payment. The expenditures are on a “Cash” basis, as I pay something related to my online earnings, I just load up the spreadsheet and modify it.

Summary of Gross Earnings 2007

* January 2007 – $344.61
* February 2007 – $372.37
* March 2007 – $492.41
* April 2007 – $491.85
* May 2007 – $620.99
* June 2007 – $632.47
* July 2007 – $672.66
* August 2007 – $701.78
* September 2007 – $706.09
* October 2007 – $801.12
* November 2007 – $859.20

** Year-To-Date Gross Earnings (Jan-Nov/2007) – $6,695.55
* Average (YTD) $20.05 per day or, $608.09 per month
*** Still not enough to quit my day job!~

Reflection

Year to date NET income shows me making $1,128.65 profit. Based on my paypal account balance, which is basically -NIL- .. this is obviously the amount that I have spent foolishly paying bills. However, the reality is that 100% of the google adsense earnings ($1,316.90) automatically transfered directly into my bank account – so, I must have actually PUT BACK $188.25 from bank account to cover some paypal purchases during the year. I’m hoping that for 2008 it will only be one way – the first way – from paypal/google to my own bank account and not the other way around!

Season’s Greetings Everybody!

In the meantime, I would like to take this opportunity to wish everybody a Happy Holiday Season .. and, for all of you sites out there monetizing your blogs and have online stores .. a successful and profitable Holiday Season for you!

Take care
HART (1-800-HART)

There is a super “Typhoon Mina” currently headed for the Bicol Philippines region. Gloria Gamat from our Battling Arthritis blog .. currently resides in this region. Apparently, this Super Typhoon is expected to hit early tonight (GMT+8) if it doen’t change direction. (couple hours from now)

If the region is hit badly, there may not be electricity and a lot of damage and that could put a log of bloggers from the region without online access .. include Gloria.

BE SAFE GLORIA! OUR HEARTS AND THOUGHTS ARE WITH YOU AND YOURS!

We hope everything and everyone will be okay, and that goes to everybody in the region …

View Larger Map

Information Sites:
The Inquirer.net
The Manilla Times
ABS-CBN Interactive News

IMAGE SOURCE: ABS-CBN News

Between June and August 2007 the HART-Empire Network experienced growing pains and downtimes .. due to bandwidth issues, and CPU resource limits. Having many blogs affects the CPU resources by constantly accessing out MySQL database.

I started with a “mega corporate site” with Blacksun.ca, a Canadian server in Saskatchewan .. and was quite happy with them. My PetLvr site was on there, as well as my 1800HART site, the HARTandYVONNE site, the PapillonLvr site and the CorydonClock site. These were the most popular of my sites, and also used the most physical space to store videos, pictures, and other files.

I then obtained a “reseller Pro account” at Ace-Host.net which allowed me to create as many sites that I needed as I was growing and expanding ‘The Empire’. By June 2007, I had over 40 blogs on the reseller Pro account. I have a few friends on the site, but I wasn’t reselling anything. All sites created were for my own personal use.

In May 2007 my PetLvr site reached a combined bandwidth and traffic overage cost that made it financially out of my reach to continue hosting at the Canadian Site. There was a solution – and ultimately, I’m probably paying just as much for a comparable solution now – but, all it would have accomplished was to cover the initial 5 blogs and not leave me any room for growth, or independence in creating new accounts whenever the impulse urged me to do so.

So – June 2007 I moved to … MIDPHASE HOSTING.

Although it’s all related, when I say “Midphase” .. I really mean to include the 3 arms of Midphase.

(1) Midphase Hosting – this is for the individual shared account hosting
(2) An Hosting – this for the larger accounts and virtual private servers (larger shared accounts)
(3) Singlehop Hosting – this if for the dedicated servers and large accounts.

The HART-Empire Network is being hosted on Singlehop Hosting dedicated server right now. I had to upgrade the basic service to increase the RAM to 2GIG .. plus I have opted for a general management package. You can see my costs in my monthly “WooHoo” posts where I post my earnings each month.

Since September 1, 2007 .. everything seems to have been working smoothly, and nothing out of the ordinary has happened. I think my sites are loading fast, and I noone has really reported that any of my sites are hanging up or anything like. So, HI-FIVE to Singlehop for that.

And, it’s mid-November 2007 now .. so I think I feel confident in actually making a recommendation if you are looking for a new host provider .. at least, do not REMOVE Midphase and the other brands from consideration. And, as an affiliated user … they have brought to my attention some deals that may help you in your consideration and thought I would just post the banners in here:

MidPhase Hosting

AN Hosting

SingleHop Hosting

Remember that cool amazon plugin from days of old by Rich Manalang? It didn’t work after version 2.0 of wordpress. After a while, he managed to get it ‘sort-of’ work … if you used Firefox and the Visual Editor in your profile.

Well, I hate Firefox and Visual Editor, so I stopped using it altogether.

But .. I was browsing the WP-Amazon Google Group and noticed .. this plugin was broken when the 2.2 version of wordpress came out.

BUT IT CAN WORK ON 2.2 and even WORDPRESS v2.3!

This is thanks to Jacob Lundberg and if you used this program before, at least now you can use it again …

* INSTRUCTIONS:

1) download latest version 2.0 Beta 1.1 of the plugin – from Rich Manalang’s site
2) download and OVERWRITE files from – Jacob Lundberg’s site … that’s the following files:
../plugins/wp-amazon/wp-amazon.php
../plugins/wp-amazon/js/jquery.accordion.pack.js
../plugins/wp-amazon/js/jquery.dimensions.pack.js
../plugins/wp-amazon/js/wp-amazon.js

3) That’s pretty much it.

You have to use Firefox still, in visual editor .. where you can drag and drop product pictures .. and generally if you click the title of the amazon product it will open a new tab and you can copy/paste some of the information related to the product.

Alternatively, what I am using on a few sites .. is the Amazon Widget for randomly selected products (that I picked) that show up .. e.g. cancer.BattlingForHealth.com (see sidebar) .. or, there is certain code you can place in the footer that will try to place code on specifically named titles you might specify around your blog’s content.

I will not be adding this plugin to all of my sites, but it is nice to know that if I wanted to – I can.

October 16, 2007 marked our 2nd Anniversary

* The Year-0 Post October 2005
* The Year-1 post October 2006

Welcome to the Year-2 post of October 2007!

When I look at the stats over the past 12 months .. I definitely see a pattern and progress. I see a story .. and, that story is about me – HART. I tried to grow my network of sites and maintain the status quo – even during my busy income tax preparation time (February – April) months … and I started to document my earnings online since January 1, 2007 on a public google document.

Traffic wise, I was doing fine and going in the direction that I wanted (steadily upwards) .. but, I peaked in May 2007. Suddenly, out of the blue my bandwidth and traffic started to cost me an arm and a leg .. and I was desparately in need of an upgrade.

So – I decided to move everything June 1, 2007 (Q3) to a new host provider, that promised me better stability and growth potential that offered me hope in continued expansion of my network.

Here’s a summary of the past 12 months

* Nov/2006-May/2007 – steady growth, increased traffic, new sites!
* June/2007 – Upgraded to a Virtual Host Server (VHS) with MidPhase (AnHost brand) – Slowdown
* July/2007 – VHS not able to support my sites, and CPU Resources crashed the server constantly
* August/2007 – Upgraded to a Dedicated Server with MidPhase (Singlehop brand) – slowdown
* September/2007 – Uneventful blogging, even exceeded May/2007 levels
* October/2007 – Consolidation and Reorganization efforts were made and finally a ‘plan’ developed

Plans for Year 3 and Beyond

I decided that now is the time to consolidate my network. All this time, I have been trying to keep things organized into similar related themed channels (like, “Pet Related Channel”, “Health & Fitness Channel”, etc). The new look for 2008 will hopefully fall into a simpler network, with the following characteristics:

1) HART-Empire Network = HART Caricature = “HART” Brand

Although you wouldn’t know it, I have been trying to get a network wide theme developed so that all sites will basically look similar to the other. With wordpress upgrading their software every 3 months now, plugins coming and going … I want to brand my HART caricature face as the logo of the HART-Empire Network (beside just a funny comical picture of Hartley B Singer the person) .. and when one goes to one site, it should readily be identifiable as a HART-Empire Network site.

2) BattlingForHealth.com = “Battling For Health” Brand

All previous “Battling-Series” of blogs will now be created as a subdomains of this mega site. Currently, I do have longer term plans for the main domain .. however, in the meantime it will be a portal relaying all of the summary posts found from each of the health and fitness topical blogs. Having subdomains, instead of separate domains .. also allows for easier creation and expansion into newer health topics. I want to build this site into a sound health and fitness resource and library and possible support site.

3) AndYouWill.com = “And You Will” Brand

All previous “AndYou-Series” of blogs will now be created as subdomains of this mega site. I want this domain to grow into a sound do-it-yourself improvement site, and a resource to find tips and help about many different topics under the sun. I figure, I’ve yet to venture out into podcasting (sound) but if I ever do that .. or into vidcasting (video) .. I would probably start wetting my ears somewhere in this domain 🙂

4) PetLvr.com = “PetLvr” Brand

I will probably do this last, as I am currently trying to fix the archives, clean up and rearrange categories and tags, trying to figure out a way to stop spammers from creating FREE blogs at PetLvr.com/mypet ..etc. I haven’t decided yet if I will be moving the blog to the root directory, but I will be consolidating all of the support sites (which I segregated at the end of Year 1) back into the PetLvr domain .. the “LVR-Series” of blogs, as I like to call them … DogLvr.com CatLvr.com BirdLvr.com FishLvr.com HorseLvr.com and even PapillonLvr.com .. Consolidation will also allow me to segregate even further existing categories into new sites.

5) HARTmarket.com = “@ HART Market” Brand

I am experimenting converting sites strictly for affiliation and marketing purposes, that will ultimately have products to sell (versus monetization through advertising and other routes like that) and have setup a few sites already … pets.HARTmarket.com .. halloween.HARTmarket.com .. lingerie.HARTmarket.com and a few others that are still disjointed and I’ll leave out for now .. Oh, I did resurrect my old cafepress site (cafepress.com/1800HART) and am trying to figure out a way to mask this domain and redirect it to run through HARTmarket.com – but, haven’t figured that out yet ~

6) Everything Else – “HART (1-800-HART)” Brand

For now – I have ideas but, not convinced they are good ideas. With the many other sites that I have floating around this network .. consolidation might not be suitable and there is merit for having stand-alone sites. So, in this case .. I will just call this last group the “HART” group.

If you haven’t yet read how I consolidated all of these sites – from many domains to just a few subdomains – it took me a painstaking amount of time to do this and research my methods .. and if interested – check out my reorganization post and my reogranization post #2.

Help With The NEW PLAN for Year 3

On October 12, 2007 .. after many months thinking about it .. I finally put out a shout out that I am officially looking for new writers to help me take the HART-Empire Network to the next level. Deborah Ng kindly placed an ad on one of her sites .. Freelance Writing Gigs … and the response was enormous.

I received over 50 qualified applications and emails are still trickling in. I hired two new bloggers last weekand I could probably hire at least 10 more bloggers tomorrow – if I could afford it. And, after that .. I’m sure there are about 20 more in the lot of applications that I could find positions! I was very pleased, to say the least, with the results. I shouldn’t have to put out any new calls for writers until mid-2008 hopefully!

So .. Meet The New Bloggers!

I am so delighted to introduce, officially, two wonderful additions to the HART-Empire Network .. I am thrilled that they have come aboard to help kickstart Year 3, and in complete amazement that somebody actually wants to work with me 😀

Please check out the new blogs .. the new writers .. and join in their conversation! I’m sure they would like that!

* Gloria D. Gamat – Gloria takes over the “Battling Arthritis” blog (RSS), which is a *NEW* blog part of the newly consolidated .. “Battling For Health” site

* Lelsy Maranan – Lesly takes over the “Battling Cancer” blog (RSS), which was formerly known as the Battling-Cancer.com blog

AND NOW LET’S PARTY!

Today, October 24, 2007 .. I will be off to party with a bunch of party animals also celebrating their blogiversary this month … at Liz’s Successful-Blog.com running all day between 7am and 11pm CST