Shaun Low

Sarah over at BlueJar.com is holding a sweet ass contest. The rules are really simple, make a post in the form of “How to” and let her know you’ve entered into the contest and that’s pretty much it. The prizes:

-1st Place: $100
-2nd Place: $75
-3rd Place: $50

Also all of the top 3 winners get a 125×125 banner on her site for a whole month. You’ve got nothing to lose! Nothing is off topic and the entrants get to pick the winners by voting.

The Guide To A Perfect Date

So lets say you’ve snagged a date with that “special girl or guy” and you realize this is your one and only chance to make your best first impression. The preparations leading up to the date are of the utmost importance because this is the most nerve racking part. Follow my step by step guide and I promise success on your first date!

1 ) Put yourself in the right frame of mind right from the beginning. Remember this is only a date and there are always plenty of more fish in the sea. If you are constantly worrying before the date you are just digging yourself a hole and you will inevitably make the date end horribly because you are over-stressed.

2 ) The famous clothing assembly. Have your clothes picked out before the date. This will ensure you will avoid any last-minute panic attacks about your choice of attire. To be on the safe side have 2 or 3 backup outfits picked out just in case you change your mind last minute. Don’t dress yourself up too much try to keep it fairly casual yet still appropriate for a date.

3 ) While you might intend on just “smelling good” on the first try not to make it over-kill with the perfume or cologne. Make it a 2 spray maximum for your fragrance, let your date know you keep yourself clean and smelling good but not don’t over-do it.

4 ) Preparing yourself is one thing but here’s a little tip most people fail to give attention to. Know where your going the day before. If your meeting somewhere at a nice little Italian restaunt downtown then head down there the night before and familiarize yourself with the area. You might be looking your best but this little tip is one less thing you have to stress about before the date. Hop on map quest if you have no idea where how to get to the date rendezvous.

5 ) Sometimes no matter how well prepared you are you will always be nervous, it’s human nature don’t worry too much. Do some exercise, sining, dancing, screaming in the shower or anything else you can think of. Expose yourself of that extra energy built up inside an hour or so before the date. Relax yourself any way possible, I hear yoga is very relaxing and creates positive energy inside you, (I’ve never done yoga I swear lol).

6 ) Have a few topics of discussion picked out before the date. I don’t mean have a 5 page essay memorized so you can keep the conversation going. Sometimes it’s best to have some backup topics of discussion picked out in case you ever run into that “awkward silence” phase of the date. Avoid at all costs talking about yourself too much. Don’t talk about your fancy sports car you drive or how much money you make at work, keep the ideas general and don’t brag about anything. While it is mandatory of first dates for the guy and girl to get to know each other which includes talking about your work and things related, just don’t get caught talking about yourself too much. The best way to impress the guy or girl is to show more interest in them rather than yourself.

7 ) Be clean for the date!

-An hour before the date take that extra long shower using your favorite smelling soaps which you have saved under the sink.

-Guys clean and clip your dirty long nails, girls… do what girls do to make them look pretty.

-Guys trim or shave your facial hair, at least don’t have that Grizzly Adams beard thing going on. Girls shave your legs if your wearing a skirt or have exposed legs.

-Brush your teeth, floss, and use mouth wash right before you leave your house to ensure maximum freshness. Also bring a pack of gum and stick in your pocket. Bad breath is a major turn off and you can forget about a first kiss if your breath smells like parmesan cheese.

-Get rid of grose nose hairs and the ugly unibrow. I don’t care how just do it.

8 ) Have a drink or two during the supper with your date. A drink or two nothing more. Alcohol does relax you and you might find the words just coming out easier after a drink. You don’t want to show her your a fool by getting hammered on the first date. Make sure you know your limits and if you never drink then avoid doing it on the first date.

9 ) Be confident, but not too confident, be a little bit shy but not too shy. Girls love guys who can take control of situations but not guys who are complete control freaks. Just let the date flow and let everything naturally happen. Being shy is a great way of showing your affection towards the other person but you have to keep in mind your not a scared puppy walking around with your tail behind your legs.

10 ) Remember why your going on this date in the first place: to meet someone nice and to have fun. This shouldn’t be a painstaking process that always ends bad on your part. Go there do your best and that’s all you can do!

Please enter in this contest it’s an easy chance to win $100 bucks and have your banner placed up on one of my favorite blogs. For full contest details go here.

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Well my summer holidays are pretty much over, I have to go back to school on September 5th so I can continue my journey to getting my MBA over at the University of Alberta. Back to school means no summer job which means no more income. We all know that blogging is a lot of work and requires a large time investment if you want to run a successful blog. Going to school full time requires at least 5 hours of classes a day and 2-3 hours of studying per day. That’s basically a full time job. We all know that going to university is expensive as hell and the amount of debt you can rack up is enormous.

Over the course of summer and all of my working experience I have basically saved up enough money to pay for my own tuition, including books, bus fair, and the normal school fees. I haven’t saved up any spending money for the course of the year so if I want to have a life during school and not be a hermit I need some money so I can have a good time during school. That would mean getting a part time job during school so I can have some extra spending money. I don’t think I would be able to juggle school, part time job, and blogging so I have to drop one of the 3 options…I think I would prefer to drop the job and continue Shaunlow.com. I still need to have some cash in my pocket during school so I will have to look towards blogging as my only source of income.

How will I make money bloggging?

No I am not going to turn this blog into another “Make Money Online” blog like the other million of them out there, but I will be taking some ideas from the famous John Chow and learn on how to make some extra money with this blog.

-I will be participating in some sponsored reviews from Pay Per Post. I know sponsored reviews SUCK and they are boring as hell to read but in order to keep this site alive I will have to be doing a few reviews if I want to survive university. I personally NEVER read sponsored reviews because I have never once found anything worth while reading in them. If I don’t read sponsored reviews I most definitely don’t expect my own readers to read them as well. Just to let you know my regular posting schedule will not change at all, (I will still publish around one normal article per day), and maybe 2 reviews per week. I will try my best to keep the reviews relevant to the topic of this blog so I hope you guys can manage a few sponsored reviews per week!

-Also I will be implementing some affiliate programs on this site. I know many bloggers make some really good cash selling affiliate deals for other companies. I will talk more about affiliate programs in a later post.

-I’ll also toss up Google Adsense back on this blog, I had it on before and made $20-$30 bucks a month so this is another good source of easy income.

School, my personal life and blogging is a lot of work. Do any of you guys go to school and blog at the same time? If so, how do you manage to make money and go to school at the same time? Any suggestions on time management and making money would be much appreciated!!!

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Here is a perfect example of internet marketing at its best. Everyone knows the old mentos and Diet Coke experiment. Well if not I will quickly explain it, put a mentos tab into a 2 litre Diet Coke bottle, sit back and watch it fizz like Old Faithful. Well this video basically makes fun of that experiment..you’ll understand once you see the video. The guy puts a mentos in the beer (Carlsberg) and waits to see what happens.

This video is really funny but at the same time it is a great marketing ploy on Carlsberg’s behalf. They made a funny video with the center of attention being around their product, (their beer). This video has already been viewed over one million times. Thats basically one million impressions of free advertising. This silly 40 second video probably cost Carlsberg nothing to make and now has been seen by over one million viewers. Nothing new in the internet world just thought I would like to share this.

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One of my favorite blogs I really enjoy reading every day changed the look of the site. On August 10th Problobber.net went through a new website design. Personally I think it was time for a new design, the old one had hideous orange colors and the template wasn’t too pleasing to look at either.

Problogger is one of the most reputable blogs about blogging. He gives insight on how to make a blog, what it takes to make your blog popular, and how to make money online with your blog. His blogging tips are some of the best out there and I highly recommend anyone who has a blog to check out his site. Check out his new site and let me know what you think!

 New Design               

Old Design

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I like to check my Technorati stats every once and a while, (ok ok maybe everyday lol), and I normally like to visit any site that linked to me and give my appreciation. Well the other day I received a link from a suspicious site so I decided to check it out. It turns out it wasn’t even a real link from that site. It was one of my posts copied exactly word for word and the link came within the post from my own internal linking.

Well I wasn’t too pleased about this for a number of reasons: I will be tagged for duplicate content by Google. Duplicate content greatly affects your search engine ranking and will have a negative impact on this blog. My content was basically stolen without any form of permission and no credit to my site.

I have no experience with plagiarism and I really had no idea how to handle the situation, so I decided to do a little bit a research to see what can be done with this matter. After reading a few sites and blogs it really seemed like there was not too much I could do unless I wanted to pursue legal matters, (definitely not worth the time and money). It appeared I was basically shit outa luck until I found an interesting post on Smart Wealthy Rich. The author, Jonathan Phillips, had this happen to him back in July where someone had completely stolen an article from him and he made an excellent post on dealing with plagiarism.

How did Smart Wealthy Rich handle the situation?

Like I said there is no internet police you can report this to and basically nobody is willing to help you except you! You must act professionally and get this matter resolved on your own if you want something done.

• - Jonathan’s first reaction was to contact the blog owner via e-mail. The e-mail was basically a formal request to remove the post or modify the post to correctly give credit to Smart Wealthy Rich. He gave the site 48 hours to respond and did not get any answer.
• - Since the e-mail approach didn’t exactly work out in his favor he decided to take the next step of action and that was to contact the advertisers on the site that had stolen the article from Smart Wealthy Rich. The site had banners and text links so Jonathan followed the ads and contacted the advertisers. He let them know that the site they were advertising on was stealing content and they were basically doing business with a thief. Within 24 hours he got responses from all of the advertisers. All of the advertisers said they would stop doing business with the blog owner.

The idea behind the story is to act professionaly. Don’t e-mail the blog owner threatening legal actions and do NOT use profanity. Deal with the situation like an adult, do some reasearch to see what can be done and most of all be polite. You can monitor your content on your site using Copyscape which lets you search the web for copies of your content.

I just briefly touched on some of the things you can do to handle plagiarism but there are many other approaches to the situation that I didn’t cover. Check out Jonathan’s full post here for more details on the matter.

I have already e-mailed the blog owner asking for the removal of the post that was copied from my site. Somehow I don’t think that will get the job done. Unfortunately the blog that stole my information only runs Google Adsense on his blog and no other advertisements therefor I can’t go directly to his advertisers. I am not too worried about this situation and I don’t think that it will affect my search engine rankings very much either. I just wanted to share some ideas on how to deal with plagiarism.

Over the next little while here I will be working on a copyright page of my own in attempts to prevent this issue from happening again. You can check out Smart Wealthy Rich’s copyright page here for some ideas. Notice how I gave full credit to SWR and linked to his site several times. I didn’t want to piss him off or lose any of my advertisers . Make sure you always give credit when it is deserved.

Do you guys think a copyright page is necessary for blogs? Do you guys have any suggestions on what I can do with this matter? Please share your ideas with us all I would love to hear from you!

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Last month I wrote a post called After one month of blogging, and I just briefly touched on some of this blogs accomplishments. Well its been another month and I think it’s time to update my readers of where Shaunlow.com stands. Please keep in mind this review is from July 5th to August 5th.

What has this blog accomplished over this past month?

• -RSS feed subscription count is at 39 currently. Was 23 last month.
• -Page views this month is 4890. Last month was 2846.
• -Absolute unique visitors this month was 1823. Last month was 832.
• -Published 45 posts since last month. I have published 88 posts in total with 338 comments.
• -Gained 63 MyBlogLog community members. Thats 3 more than last month!
• -Favorited 9 times on technorati during the month of July, 19 in total.
• -Alexa rank jumped to 420,744. Last month I was ranked 639,055.
• -My Technorati rank after two months is already at 45,592.

I am very pleased with the success of this blog so far. I have gained relationships with many bloggers that are in the similar industry as this blog. I am also very please with the posting frequency of this blog I have only missed one day of posting because I was lazy and went on holidays.

What are the plans for this blog in the future?

I will be completely redesigning this blog. I found that there are just too many similar looking blogs with the same them as mine. I hope to have this site completely redone within the next two weeks here. I would also like to try to get some guest blogging done on other blogs and maybe have a few guest bloggers here so if anyone is interested please let me know!

I would also like to thank all of my readers who take the time to comment and visit this blog frequently. If anyone is interested in helping contribute to this blog please feel free to:

Subscribe to shaunlow.com

or Join MyBlogLog community

or add me to your Technorati Favorites.

Anyone who adds me to their technorati favorites I always return the favor . Also if you are interested in any link exchanges, guest blogging, or anything similar please feel free to let me know. You can reach me through my Contact Page or just leave a comment and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

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Do you believe in God? This guy sure as hell does after what just happened. Take a look at the first picture, notice where he broke through the guard rail (on the right side where the people are standing on the road). His truck left the road traveling from right to left. He then flipped end-over-end, across the drainage outlet and landed on the left side of it.

Now take a good look at the second picture:

If he didn’t believe in God before he probably believes in him now!!!

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Here is a list of really unfortunately named people that probably get a hard time just being who they are. I would go for a name change if I was stuck with any of these names… Yuppie Punk has gone one step further and gathered information about each of these people and linked to the source that he found them at.

Robert Fagot

Anurag Dikshit

Sally Mangina

Ben Dova

Dick Payne

James Niggermeyer

Kim Twatt and Jonathan Gash

Dr. Reinhardt Aldofo Fuck

 Dr. Richard Chopp

Lucious Pusey

Source: Yuppie Punk.

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Isnichwah has come up with a cool program which offers many world statistics to us which are also updated in real time. You can actually see the numbers going up and down right from the website. Some of the stats that are constantly being updated every second include:

• Current earth population
• Births this year
• Deaths this year
• Absolute population growth for today (Births minus deaths)

Other stats that are included are Government and economics, education, environment, food, water, health, energy, and consumtion.

I’m not sure how accurate this chart is but it’s interesting to look at. Get a full look at the chart here.

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I’m sure everyone was familiar with John Chows backlink give away. All you had to do was make a post which was a review of John’s site and he would then give you a link back of your choice of anchor text. Well John Cow has made it even easier to get a back link, all you have to do is link to his site anywhere. It doesn’t even have to be a dedicated post or even a review. All that is required is that you sneak a link to John Cow somewhere in anyone of your posts even if the post is a month old. 

The Google page rank is coming up very soon so I recommend you get those free backlinks in while you still have the time. I also wrote 2 other posts explaining how to get other free backlinks here and here.

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