www.affiliateconfession.com

I wanted to take the time today to thank all of the readers of Affiliate Confession and I especially want to thank those that comment and carry on a discussion here. This blog has reached a significant milestone. As of last week, 1,000 comments have been left by readers other than myself.

I had been watching the comments rather closely and was going to make a big deal of it when it actually happened, but the 1,000th comment came in on April 4th and somehow I missed it. Friday’s are usually a very busy day for us and consequently I don’t spend much time online that day and I also didn’t bother to check the totals on Saturday or Sunday either. Today I checked and found that  I was actually a bit over the 1,000 comment mark.

I am immensely grateful for those of you that take the time to read Affiliate Confession and kind of awed by the fact that people would really give a rip about what I have to say. A heartfelt thank you goes out to all those that contribute to the interaction that goes on here. Please continue to tell others about the information you find on this blog.

So, who actually left the 1,000 comment? It turns out to be a friend of mine, Lawrence Salberg of Salberg.org who writes on a variety of subjects over at his blog. One subject Lawrence (Lonny to his closest friends) likes to cover is dumb job ads and in this one he pokes a little fun at a recent ad by PayPerPost founder Ted Murphy seeking candidates for his new venture IZEA. Lawrence has even been fortunate enough to get a writeup by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch because of his interactions with a headhunter recruiting for PayPerPost. I would personally agree to hallucinogenic drug experimentation by the CIA to get exposure and a link such as this, but Lawrence gets it for free. Anyway, thanks for contributing.

And thanks again for everyone else who posted 999 comments before Lawrence. I appreciate you adding to the discussion.

Affiliate Confession is changing. As I write this post there is a new custom design being created for the blog and as you can see to the left the designer I’ve hired is getting his hands wet and is hard at work. The BloggingPro theme worked good to get things up and running and bring in readers, but it’s time for this blog to take the next step.

There are thousands of free WordPress themes available on the net, but if you want to distinguish yourself from the crowd, you must get a unique and custom design. I found this out by scouring the web looking at probably a few thousand free templates and none of them seemed to appeal to me. There were several that looked pretty decent and I thought about trying to tweak a bit, but I know just enough CSS and php to keep from drowning and I’d probably end up destroying the template.

All the major blogs like Problogger, John Chow, Shoemoney, TechCrunch, CopyBlogger and others have custom themes. You know exactly where you are when you visit their blogs because they don’t look like anyone else’s blog, they look unique. That’s part of branding yourself as a blogger and being immediately recognizable to your visitors. Even for the visitors that bounce off your blog coming from the search engines or other sources, they may bounce 10 times before they stick, but when they do stick, they won’t confuse you for any of the other 5,000 blogs that have the same theme you do.

Getting a custom theme done is not cheap, but at some point in your blogging journey you may decide it is necessary.

It was necessary for Affiliate Confession several weeks ago.

Alan