I’ve released a new free WordPress theme today. It’s called Green Piece and there’s a preview available for those of you interested in checking it out before downloading. Green Piece is widget ready and uses a fixed width (that’s probably wider than most) and uses some of the excellent Silk icons from famfamfam.

I’ve submitted the theme to a handful of the more popular WordPress theme sites but that process was proving to be so frustrating that I had to stop. I’ll definitely be writing about that later on this week.

This was a project that was, quite literally, months in the making for me. It was my first serious foray into outsourcing a design project from start to finish although that wasn’t the intention from the start. I’ll be writing more about the whole process later as well. It should prove to be interesting for anyone looking to outsource their extra work.

Anyway, hop on over to WordPressings and check out the new theme and, if you haven’t seen it yet, my first release Bruise.

It’s that time again. Here’s the latest PageRank results from throughout Jack’s Empire. Just like last update, I’ll only be showing results for my side projects and not my clients.

We can argue all day about the real value of PageRank but I absolutely love update days. I just find the whole system incredibly fascinating and this update is no exception. There are four changes to note this time around:

• This blog went from a 3 to a 4 which is nice because I’ve been putting more effort into it lately than I have in a long time. So a +1 bump is at least some acknowledgment of my work.
• iamjackscompany.com is a one page, 25 word site that somehow went from a 2 to a 4 with absolutely no backlinks short of footer links on some of my other sites. Strange.
• The Ohio Sports Report actually bottomed out to a 0 several weeks back. Again, like last update, the reasons are pretty obvious if you just visit the site. This one is no surprise at all.
• The last site worth mentioning is Web Auctions Daily and it’s first PageRank of 2. I’ve done some small advertising runs on a few “make money online” sites with absolutely abysmal results so, again, I’m assuming this PageRank juice is generated from links on my own sites (mostly this blog).

So there you have it. I was kind of expecting a nuclear PageRank disaster so it was a nice surprise to wake up today and see some positive shifts on my sites. What kind of effect did the PageRank have on you?

I’m on the hunt for established sites and blogs about golf. I’ve been looking around forums and monitoring auctions with Web Auctions Daily for anything matching my criteria below and haven’t had much luck. If you happen to have a golf-related site that meets some of my requirements please send me some site details and your asking price. Even if you aren’t in the market to sell right at this moment but might be willing to reconsider, now or in the future, let me know.

Here’s what I’m really hoping to find:

• Blogs. If you have a golf blog with content written by an actual human being I’d really like to hear from you. I’d even entertain the idea of hiring you to continue to maintain the blog after the sale if you’d be interested.
• Have some level of consistent traffic. It doesn’t have to be a lot but it has to be steady.
• At least some PageRank and/or backlinks. That’s the established part I’m being so annoyingly insistent on. Again, it doesn’t have to be high PR or a ton of backlinks but some must exist.

Now, here’s what I’m NOT looking for:

• Any sites using the course database you bought for $7 online
• Turnkey sites with “amazing potential” and “multiple sources of income” with AdSense, Clickbank ebooks and eBay commissions
• Parked domains with golf keywords
• Sites selling PLR golf articles
• Auto-updating sites using RSS feeds (I’ve got my own crawler for that kind of stuff already, so thanks)

I’m not concerned with current revenue so if you have a nice golf blog that’s semi-regularly updated but isn’t making you a financial killing I’d still like to hear about it. I know I’m being awfully particular with this but, quite frankly, I just know what I do and do not want to spend my money on. So if you’ve read the above and think you have something that might interest me please let me know.

A few months back, a friend and I bought the domain name webauctionsdaily.com with the intent of turning it into a blog featuring the best website auction online each day. It was a decent idea that ran out of steam after about two weeks of posts. We just didn’t have the time or motivation to keep the site updated each day.

In a spurt of boredom last weekend, I decided to take the same simple spidering technology behind Jack’s Sports Report and build an automated site of the latest online website, domain and template auctions. About three hours after the initial idea the new version of Web Auctions Daily was launched.

The site is brutally simple but, in my opinion, incredibly useful to those of you who like Internet marketing. The latest auctions are posted throughout the hour and each type of auction (site, domain and template) has its own dedicated RSS feed updated at the same time. In addition, there is an archive for each section that goes back seven days. I’ll be adding a search feature as soon as I get a chance.

In the spirit of my StumbleUpon Advertising experiment, I’ll be using some new and different forms of advertising to try and get the word out about Web Auctions Daily. I’ll write a follow-up post in a month or two about how successful (or unsuccessful) I was.

I’m sure by now most of the readers of this site are familiar with the social bookmarking site called StumbleUpon. However, everyone might not be aware of their StumbleUpon Advertising program. When you sign up for the program, StumbleUpon allows you to have users driven to your site when they click the “Stumble!” button on their toolbar. Each visits costs $0.05. The best part is that you can pinpoint the type of users you want coming to your site with a great degree of specificity.

At the tail end of the summer, I decided to give StumbleUpon Advertising a shot with my golf stat tracking site. I chose men and women, ages 18-99 living in the United States with an interest in golf and drove them to the front page of Fore Score Golf Stats.

The Results

I ran a handful of campaigns over the course of three weeks with the same demographics that I mentioned above. The very first visit from my very first campaign resulted in a new account signup on Fore Score and I thought we were off to the races. Approximately 360 clicks later, that initial success was about as good as it was going to get for me with StumbleUpon.
The number of new accounts that signed up from StumbleUpon has been insignificant in comparison to the number of new users Fore Score has gained from every other traffic method known to modern man. Here are some of the really gory particulars from the three weeks:

Pages/Visit: 1.31
Avg. Time on Site: 00:00:16
Bounce Rate: 88.98%

My Conclusions

The bounce rate of StumbleUpon users is nasty. I had read around a bit before I got into this and most of the reports similar to this one had stats in line with what I received. The attention span of a StumbleUpon user is terrible and using their advertising to lead to direct conversions of traffic is probably not a very good strategy. My biggest mistake was pushing people straight to the front page of Fore Score instead of the page describing the site’s features or a page built specifically for StumbleUpon users to try and grab their attention better.

Would I ever use StumbleUpon Advertising again? Actually, maybe. There’s something to be said for the instant traffic gratification it gives you. In addition to that, the one main benefit I can see with StumbleUpon Advertising is that it increases the chance of more people marking your site as “I like It!” which, down the line, will bring in more natural traffic that you don’t need to pay for.