Alright, we all know that having your own RSS feed is great for building traffic. What could be better than automatically letting your subscribers know that you’ve got something new? But I just found out quite another interesting use for them. They’re great to subscribe to in order to find interesting articles to comment on. These comments, in turn, end up driving traffic back to your site.

I’m sure you all know by now that I am really insistant that commenting creates traffic. It just does. You leave comments on other people’s blog and they (and often their readers) will come and check you out. If you leave something particularly useful/interesting that is. In the mean time, you’re building links back to your site which drastically improves search engine ranking.

I’m currently using Mozilla Firefox, which I adore by the way, and a plugin that scrolls my RSS feeds randomly across the bottom of the browser. This way, I can easily find interesting articles from the… many blogs that I subscribe to. From there I am able to comment the heck out of these very deserving bloggers and… in the process I get links back to my site and possibly get a few people interested in following those links.

Now, that being said, I do not comment simply to get traffic. The real reason is that I’m just bored out of my mind… and it takes up some of my time. I figure, if I’m going to just being blowing my time surfing the net, then I might as well get out there, read some interesting articles, comment on them, and perhaps generate a little bit of traffic for myself while I’m at it.

As has been said before. If you want to be part of the internet community, get out there are participate!

A couple days ago I got an email that informed me that it was against the TOS of Google Adsense to use traffic exchanges and adsense. I was floored by this because I didn’t see anything about that stated in the TOS. I actually went back and checked! That being said, I actually agree. It doesn’t seem fair to waste someone’s ad money on a page that is being loaded in return from credit. It just makes sense. I certainly wouldn’t want to be taking anyone’s money.
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I have always loved Halloween. My wife and I go all out every year. this year was no exception. We laid down quite a bit of money on our costumes but it paid off. We also managed to get some clothes that we’ll use over and over again.

This is a photo that I’ve manipulated of Mary and I in our Halloween costumes. I just put us in a different background and added a glowing effect so that our dark features could still be readible. We spent a fair amount of money on these costumes. But we love the clothes and are likely to continue to wear them. Mary got most of her outfit at Hot Topic. I was suprised that they actually are one big “goth kit” store. They’re your one-stop-shop intant-goth store. I couldn’t bring myself to purchase anything from them and instead borrowed a shirt from friend and bought a leather overcoat from burlington coat factory.

As for the wings, Mary’s where purchased at Hot topic to save some time and money. Mine are made out of cardboard, 3 wire hangers, almost two rolls of black duct tape, black pantihose, elastic bands, 250 turkey feathers, 20 goose feathers, and three sets of rooster hackle (all purchsed here).