With a brand spanking new contest that’s how!!

One of the things I’ve been pondering over the past few days is how to attract as many visitors as I can to my site. I’m pretty sure I can produce decent content after all I’ve been using the King’s English since I was a wittle kid. I have a very active over imagination and a devotion to sharing those thoughts with others. These are just a few of the reasons I think this thing called blog could be such a fun thing to do but as we all know business is still business. Starting a blog as a business means you need to know what you are talking about, as well as making it fun for both you and your readers. I like to refer to this as the mullet experience. Yes, much like the haircut of many in my neighborhood its business up front, party in the back. So on to business. As I said in a previous rather generic post at the time contests are one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site. Being new what could I possibly give away that would make my readers want to keep coming back? A meticulously worded review of your site? A brand new shiny gadget? Advertising for 6 months? Well all these would be great to have but last time I tried to pay my utilities bill with a free review my water got shut off. So get ready to pass go and collect a bunch of dollars.

50% off all blog profits will go to one winner a month for a minimum of 6 months. That’s right ladies and gentlemen every penny every month will be split fity-fity with one lucky winner picked at random every month! All you have to do is write a small post telling what you would do with the money won and link it to the contest page. Simple, sweet, and hands down the easiest money you ever made.

Now even though I will run the contest monthly you only have to enter once because that’s how we roll at The Running Total dot com. I’ll be announcing the winner via me feed so make sure to sign up. The winner will have 48 hours to claim their prize once announced. In the event that the winner doesn’t contact me another name will be randomly drawn until a winner is picked. To make it easy to track all the entries either email me at contest@therunningtotal.com or just leave a comment in this post. I’ll post a video of the drawing to show everything is fair.

Now get out there and get your contest on. I’m looking forward to seeing how this little experiment turns out.

Welcome to the Main Event!

The Running Total so far = $0

Wow how anti-climactic…and to think I almost put in a drumroll for that. Today is February 8th, 2008. This is my first post on this page so there isn’t much to talk about yet. However starting off at $0 isn’t a bad thing, it means I haven’t lost a penny! Problem is I still have some work to do to get to $0. The expenses on setting up this site weren’t a whole lot but I’m not going to be able to inspire many people with my huge bankroll. Oh well, I promised the nitty-gritty so here it goes.

Setting up the site

What’s a website without a catchy domain name and a gimmick? Well it’s just another face in the ever growing crowd. For many this is the hardest part of all. I have the uncanny ability of generating an idea and holding onto it for those few precious seconds before having it fizzle out. As a side note a big thanks go out to the inventor of the pen and paper. If it wasn’t for those babies this might have just been another fluttering thought lost in the random misfiring of my neurons.

Domain registraion through GoDaddy = $9.95

I initially also set up my hosting on GoDaddy but then realized that there are better sites for hosting a WordPress Blog. After doing some research and comparisons on webhosting I found that multi-award winning AN Hosting has extremely competitive prices, video tutorials, 24-hour assistance, and best of all automatic WordPress setup. What else could you ask for?

1 year of AN Hosting at $6.95 per month = $83.40

The last and the hardest part now belonged to creating my blog. After several frustrating nights working on making my own theme, I realized something. There is a reason that very few people can read or write Latin. Certain words or parts of words can be extracted and the meaning can be figured out however it’s usually best to leave it to the experts. This is also the case with designing a custom WordPress Theme. My certificate in web design from 8 years ago doesn’t mean squat in today’s web languages but at least I can still make the pictures pretty. As luck would have it I ran across a design I really liked that wasn’t too hard to edit. Another big thanks to Ben Cook at bloggingexperiment.com. I bought their basic theme which was a huge timesaver. You can get the theme right here.

WordPress Theme = $75

Thoughts

You probably noticed that my current running total is $0 but my overall expenses this month were $168.35! I know, I know The Running Total should be less than $0 but how can I let myself start behind the 8 ball? As soon as the first full month is over I’ll post the real total minus expenses. Overall $168.35 is not bad considering the site is now up and running and all of my operating expenses are covered for the rest of the year. So with this in mind my goal this month is to generate enough income to cover my years operating expenses. While it’s not a lofty goal it’s still a goal. I better get cracking! If you have any comments please leave them. I’m looking forward to meeting my future readers.