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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).

Lucid dreaming is defined as a dream where the dreamer is aware of the fact that they are dreaming. Often, the dreamer can exert conscious control over the dream as well. If you have ever controlled your dreams before, then you may have experienced lucid dreaming.

The only prerequisite to being able to control your dreams is that you realize a few things:
1) that you realize that you are dreaming
2) that you realize that everything that occurs in this world occurs because your mind invents it
3) that you realize that you have control over this world because this world was built by your mind.

Essentially once you realize that its all in your head, you realize that you can do whatever you want. Often the only limitation is your ability to suspend your own mind’s concept of reality. For instance, we all know that walls are solid. If you run straight at a wall you brain will expect you to hit it and it will react on instinct. In the dream world, you must override that instinct in order to run through that wall.

First I’m going to start off with an anecdote, then I’ll give some tips.
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I remember back when I was going to college in Phoenix AZ that all of my friends and classmates had myspace accounts. I sat there thinking “This is some messed up fad, I can’t believe they all bought into this.” I promised myself that I would never get a myspace account.

However, I did eventually get an account simply to find an old friend (which I did). The cool thing was that I discovered how important social networking sites are for targeted traffic generation… at least for personal sites. This website is full of my artwork and opinions. Thusly, it is something that many of my friends may be interested in. Admitedly, I don’t have much of a social life and I find social networking sites like MySpace, Elftown, and Zaadz to be great ways to make friends online.

Now, that being said, don’t spam your friends. They don’t appreciate it. I post information in relevent forums and I also post bullitns/blog entries that my friends can see. That’s it. Still, it starts you off with a decent visitor base to work from.

For artists, I would definately suggest getting Elfwood and Deviantart accounts. These sites are ranked very highly in the search engines. Getting accounts with them and posting a few “teaser” pieces can only increase your traffic. However, you have to stay active. You have to get out there and comment on people’s artwork. You have to respond to comments on yours. Get out there and get involved, it’s fun and it is very rewarding.

For bloggers it is important that you visit other blogs and comment on them. Every comment you leave provides a link back to you. This is important because it not only increases search engine ranking but also, if your comment is provocative enough, will prompt people to come visit your blog. BlogRush is also useful in this capacity. Read this article to find out how.

My advice boils down to this:
Get out there and get involved. Make your presence known in the web community. At the same time, don’t spam. I happen to think Spam tastes good in person… but I hate it online. If you are an unknown on the web, your website will also remain unknown. I see far too many blogs with no comments in them. I try to make a point to try and comment on something.

An invitation to all bloggers!

If you have a blog and no comments, comment on this post here and I will be more than happy to drop you a line. Feel free to look around my site in the meantime. I’ve got ADD pretty bad, and if I could sit down long enough write out all of this stuff, you shouldn’t be too bored reading through it.

Get out there, mix it up, have some fun. That’s what this is all about anyway. Oh… and I wouldn’t mind selling a few T-shirts while I’m at it. :P

Type to you later,
~Nathaniel

Another strange dream this morning. Let me start off by saying that I have crazy abilities in my dreams. One of which is the ability to teleport/time travel. In this particular dream I was trying to get somewhere else, anywhere else. So I went into my closet. There was a door at the back of it that was supposed to lead to another room. I turned my back to it, closed my eyes, opened the door and fell backwards through it. I fell like nothing was there to stop me. I fell through the floor and tumbled through space. I eventually landed on a smooth carpeted surface, very gently I might add. I stood up and looked through the door through which I had passed, I could see the closet and the room from which I came. However, turning around I realized that I was indeed somewhere else. I had created a portal that bridged two places by this doorway.
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Alright, I’ve already laid out how traffic exchanges can help produce traffic in this article. The main problem with most traffic exchanges is that the traffic is not targeted… or it’s fake. In other words, people click on the links to see your site simply to earn credits. When their time limit is up, they’ll move on and repeat the process so that they can get more traffic. This isn’t really a problem though. You can use banner exchanges and, if you’re blogging, BlogRush to reclaim those untargeted hits and turn them into targeted hits. Now, I get a fair amount of traffic from TrafficSwarm. This traffic is somewhat targeted. If I can manage to grab their attention long enough to keep them looking around then that’s awesome. However, even if they don’t stick around I’ve got both a banner exchange through BannersGoMLM and I’ve got the BlogRush widget. This way, even the untargeted traffic has the potential to earn me some targeted traffic. I call this “reclaiming hits.” It’s a way to transform even the bad traffic into good traffic. Even then, you don’t have to be getting “bad” traffic if you follow the suggestions in this article.

The fun part is, if You’re also advertising your BannersGoMLM and BlogRush affiliate links then you can get people to sign up under you and build up your downline that can bring you even more traffic. In fact, even TrafficSwarm is set up so that you can earn credits from your downline. I know that MLM is considered shady in the eyes of most. It mostly just gets really bad PR. But that’s beside the point. All the free traffic programs I’ve chosen have MLM aspects, but they can all work fairly well without any recruiting. In other words, you can just do what you do and earn some traffic, or you can recruit some more people and earn a bit more.

Essentially what this article is about, is overcoming the shortcomings of traffic exchanges. Using this method in combination with traffic exchanges is very powerful. It’s at least worth a shot. The cool thing about banner exchanges and BlogRush is that they’re essentially “set and forget” traffic builders. You don’t really have to do anything after you’ve installed their scripts.

Hope this helps anyone interested in free traffic,
Type to you later,
~Nathaniel

I just found something funny. I was looking at my stats and I noticed that someone got to my site by searching for “We are all pink inside shirt”. I thought I was the only one with “We’re all Pink on the Inside” merchandise but as it turns out there is a gay pride ad campaign that uses a similar slogan. That doesn’t bother me one bit but I found it interesting that two people came up with similar concepts as solutions to two separate design challenges. They wanted to generate acceptance with a clever little truth about the color of our guts. I wanted to offend a few people and make them realize their vanity with a clever little truth about the color of our guts.

I do want to state that I have nothing to do with them, or the individual who came up with the slogan. My concept is legally distinct from theirs. Still, I think it’s awesome that two people would come up with something so similar and be so far removed from each other. Even if one promotes gay pride and the other seeks to offend the particularly vain skin goths!

I thought I was worth sharing.
Type to you later,
~Nathaniel

This morning, I had a rather messed up dream. Essentially we where in a plane and flying north when all of a sudden we where hit by a couple of missiles and two fighter jets swooped down on us. Somehow we had entered restricted airspace. I noticed what looked to be a missile base with a landing strip and figured we should try to land there. I remember being able to read something on one of the buildings, from the air: “CPAT” which I’m sure means nothing.
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Another installment in my “free traffic” series, I’m now going to highlight one of my favorites, TrafficSwarm.
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This is just a rigging test of a fairy I’m going to be animating. There are some issues with the way her butt behaves but since you can’t see it when the issues occur, it doesn’t really matter. It was also an assignment for my Advanced Animation class. The subject simply had to sit, come to a rest, then stand and come to a rest. I decided to add a bit of a lift off as well since I would have to be doing this for my final project anyway. I thought my fellow fantasy nuts out there might get a kick out of it. So here it is. I’ll definitely post the final project when it’s done. It should be rather humorous… but I won’t spoil it.

Type to you later,
~Nathaniel