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As most of you already know, I have only been blogging for a little over a month but I have been developing websites and making money online for over a year. The first website I had ever developed was a web proxy. A web proxy allows you to bypass network firewalls and is commonly used to access websites that are normally restricted (like getting on myspace at school). I had a few ups and downs with my first proxy, but over the course of a few failures I learned a lot about how to build and market them effectively. My second attempt at making a web proxy was when I grabbed the keyword domain “unblock.cc” for a bargain at $30. Unblock Myspace was the most trafficked web proxy keyword at that time so I figured I would build a long term proxy for it. Things did not go entirely as planned, but in the course of two months I made $975.43 and then sold the website for $1300 (minus Escrow fees).

Recently a lot of people have been confused and asking why I used Mixed Market Arts as the name of my blog. I wanted to write this post to explain my reasoning just encase you have no idea what it means. The name is a word play off of the words “Mixed Martial Arts” which is a very popular combat sport in which a wide variety of fighting techniques are used. For example, it is very common to see a kick boxer fighting in an arena against a master of karate or jujitsu. Many different forms of martial arts are used such as grappling and striking.

One thing that really annoys me is KSD (keyword spamming disorder). I very rarely make HATE POSTS, so I wanted to start off saying that I absolutely love BloggingZoom, but one of the founders (Vic) is a former blackhat search engine optimizer (nothing is wrong with that) and has a new blog over at BloggerUnleashed.com.

With the dawn of the internet, more people are resorting to the web to find their daily dose of news, but for those of you whom are internet marketers and still buy print magazines, you can get a holiday discount on the Search Marketing Standard. The discount coupon code lets you sign up for one full year (4 issues) for only $4.95,  66% off retail price.  The coupon is from Search Engine Guide. For less than $1.25 per issue, I figured I would take the risk. If I read anything I like, I will let everyone know in a future blog post.

A little over a month ago I donated a business idea to the Business Idea of the Day and they donated a $400 laptop in my name. The idea that I donated was that someone should make a free online reference (Wikipedia competitor) that ran on a few small advertisements rather than donations. Unlike Wikipedia, the site idea would be for-profit, and would share 60% of the revenue with 6 of the writers per page. This would net 40% revenue from the ads on every single page of the website. Writers would be inclined to write and research the pages because they would get a profit from it.

One very simple tip that I overlooked when I first started blogging was to place a feedreader icon in the address bar for Firefox users.

A lot of old wordpress themes do not have this set as the standard, so if your rss feed does not show up in the address bar, make sure to add the one line of code to your blog. For demonstration purposes, I included the html code for you:
<link rel=“alternate” type=“application/rss+xml” title=“RSS feed” href=“http://feeds.feedburner.com/MixedMarketArts” />

Mixx is a brilliantly designed and developed social news aggregator that displays news related to your interests and the topics are voted on by the community. I am a big supporter of Mixx because it is like the currently popular Digg site, but features a much nicer system and has the potential to become much bigger than Digg. Digg has tons of faults, which has resulted in a mass movement of long time Digg supporters flocking over to Mixx. Right now Mixx is still only a few months old (since their public beta) and is growing rapidly. If you have not yet already, now is the perfect time to test the waters and if it is something you enjoy, become a founding member. I am not a fan of Digg because great stories can get buried for no good reasons, and excellent stories do not always hit the frontpage. In my opinion, the top 10% of Digg users control 90% of the site. With Mixx, even an average-Joe can hit the frontpage with a few keywords that do not have a super wide audience, and on the opposite end of that scale is that the big sites can benefit a lot by landing on the homepage for some big “tech news” keywords. Mixx is for everyone, and unlike Digg, does not focus solely on the tech-savvy users. They have already made landing deals with Reuters, LA times, and many more providers and I expect we will see lots more in the coming months.I also love Mixx because I find a lot of great blog posts on it, a few of which have inspired me to make blog posts about. If you are a blogger yourself, you may find lots of inspiration with Mixx.Now is your chance to get in on the Mixx movement early so that when the site has taken a big market share away from Digg, your account will have lots of karma to help you get your greatest posts promoted.  Update: A Mixx staff member left a comment saying that karma does not affect ranking, only votes.