I have to tip my hat to Gyutae Park of Winning The Web, who has just created what is possibly the best contest ever.

There’s currently $6,113 in total prizes (and it may well go even higher before this thing is over), and a lot of it (over $1,500) is cold, hard cash!

Take a look at what you can win….

• $650 Cash from Azoogle Ads
• $500 Cash from PepperJam Network
• $250 Cash from NeverblueAds
• $200 Cash from BidVertiser
• 1 Full Conference Pass to Affiliate Summit East ($949 value)
• 3 Month Membership to Aaron Wall’s SEO Training Program ($300 value)
• 6 Month Membership to SEOmoz Pro ($249 value)
• 12 Month Subscription to RankSense Professional ($630 value)
• 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan from Purple Internet Marketing ($800 value)
• Autographed Copy of Kris’ Jones Upcoming Book on SEO ($20 value)
• Copy of the SEO Handbook 2008 from HuoMah ($10 value)
• 8 PSD Custom Banner Designs from Banners Mall ($275 value)
• 2 Exclusive Blog Themes from Unique Blog Designs (2 winners - $100 value each)
• 2 Revolution Wordpress Blog Themes from Brian Gardner (2 winners -$80 value each)
• 1 Year Swamp Plan Web Hosting from Host Gator ($150 value)
• 1 Hour Blog Optimization Consulting from Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips ($175 value)
• 3 Month 125×125 Banner Ad on AndyBeard.eu ($100 value)
• 1 Month Text Link Ad on Ades Blog ($90 value)
• 1 Month 125×125 Banner Ad on John Cow ($125 value)
• 1 Paid Review on Winning the Web - sponsored by 1 Cool File ($100 value)
• 20 Winning the Web T-shirts (20 winners - $9 value each)

Crazy, right? Odds of winning depend on the number of entries that you get, so go read the post at Gyutae’s site for the full details and enter today!

No, not for this site. Haven’t you been paying attention to my sporadic posting here?

The new theme for The Coolest Gifts is now up and running. Go take a look. Do you love it? I sure do!

Let’s have a quick comparison between the old and the new…

THE OLD THEME:

THE NEW THEME:

Sweet, right?

Believe it or not, there’s double the number of posts displayed on the page now. Instead of having the 10 most recent posts, I have the 20 most recent because I’m using 125×125 thumbnails to represent each post.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s how it went down…

The Idea

My thought process behind the design went something like this…I’ve always admired the design of some of the larger t-shirt sites (Busted Tees and Snorg Tees, for example). They’re very clean and simple, and everything is right where you’d expect it to be. It’s a huge contrast from a LOT of blogs, which tend to be extremely cluttered with content and ads all over the place.

Since The Coolest Gifts is a blog about products (and since every single post will be about a different product), I decided I wanted my site to look like the combination of 1) a normal blog and 2) one of the above-mentioned t-shirt sites.

After thinking about it for a while, and doing some preliminary sketches on paper, I came up with the layout for the homepage. It would have 125×125 images (like an ecommerce site) that represent the individual posts and take up the majority of the page, but it would also have a widget-ready sidebar on the left (like a blog).

As for the single post pages, I again drew inspiration from the t-shirt sites, and decided to have a 400×400 image in every single post, where I would place the image of the product. The description would be to the right.

I also knew that I wanted to have a list of Similar Items, Popular Posts, and room for Direct Ads. Because visuals are at least as important (if not more so) than text on this site, I dediced that I wanted 3 rows of 125×125 images to represent those 3 groups. I also thought that it would be great for advertisers, since their 125×125 ads, while clearly labeled as such, would blend right in with my content and add to the site, rather than distract from it.

Once I knew what I wanted, I opened Photoshop to make some mockups. Now I should stress that I have almost no Photoshop skills…it’s entirely self-taught and a lot of trial-and-error. So while I knew that these mockups would be far from perfect, I wanted to have something visual to show to whoever was going to be doing the coding. The images of my mockups are below.

Now that I had the concept and the design outlined, I needed to find somebody who could make it a reality. I put up a job request on jobs.wordpress.net and Elance. I also filled out price quote forms at some of the more well-known WordPress design companies online. I had a lot of people contact me from the jobs.wordpress.net posting, I got prompt price quotes from the companies I contacted, and I got had one response to my Elance posting (in fairness, I might have had more, but I ended the posting within about 2 days). In the end, I chose to use the bidder from Elance (Adevox, which just so happens to be a design firm from Romania) for a number of reasons…

• Reputation (they had 100% positive feedback on Elance with almost $100k in earnings)
• Experience (they showed me some examples in their portfolio which gave me confidence they’d be able to do this one)
• Terms (I could use Elance’s escrow system, which would ensure that I didn’t get ripped off)
• Price (incredibly, it was the same or lower than everybody else!)

Once we agreed to the Business Terms, they gave me a detailed questionnaire which I answered and quickly returned. A day or two later, they sent me mockups (much better looking than the ones I made!). I loved the way they looked, but I had a few changes for them, which they took care of the very next day. I approved ‘em, and they got to work on turning the images into a theme.

3 or 4 days later, they had a working demo for me hosted on their servers. Oh it was so fun to play with! There were a few things that needed to be changed and we went back and forth for a few days until they were fixed.

My Concept Of The Homepage:

The Finished Homepage:

My Concept Of The Single Post Page:

The Finished Single Post Page:

After some testing and tweaking, it’s now live!

Just a few weeks ago, this theme was nothing but a concept in my head. It’s so exhilarating and gratifying to see it up and running, and looking even better than I had imagined.

An Eye Towards The Future

One other thing that I have in the back of my mind (waaaaaaay in the back) is that I could sell the occasional product of my own with this site. It’s possible that, if I get my hands on some awesome products wholesale, I could post about it as usual, but instead of linking to a product page, use the “Buy It Here” image to link directly to a PayPal payment form.

Another potential direction that I can do with is to add on to the site by having a full fledged ecommerce store (perhaps at shop.thecoolestgifts.com) and use the blog part of it to feature my own products

To be clear, I have no definitive plans in place to do either of those things, and if they do happen they’ll probably be at least a few years down the road. But it’s really nice to know that I’m already positioning myself for future expansion in a way that will fit in with my existing site, and feel like a natural product extension to my readers.

One Thing’s Still Missing

Can you guess what it is? If you said a great logo, you’re correct. What you see now is a simple logo that I made myself. Logo design was never part of my deal with them, because it made it cheaper, and I would rather spend that part of my budget by outsourcing that job to a logo designer. I’m not in a huge rush with that, but expect it to be done by the end of March.

Okay…Time For Me To Get Moving!

I think it’s only fitting that “The Coolest Gifts” has the coolest theme, and now that it’s live I’m really going to start putting everything I have into providing great content and promoting the site as much as I possibly can.

So What Do You Think?

Go ahead, the floor is yours. Be brutally honest…I can take it!

Earnings Breakdown

AdSense: $2.80
Commission Junction: $2.71
NeverBlueAds: $4.20
Project Wonderful: $6.87
Network Marketing: $995

TOTAL: $1,011.58

Again, all numbers reported here are net figures (after expenses).

The AdSense came from John Chow Graphs, the NeverBlueAds came from the Pure Play Poker ads on Awesomeology, and both the Project Wonderful income and the Commission Junction income came from Power Dropping. The network marketing income, as usual, is from Carbon Copy Pro.

I’m not exactly thrilled with how February turned out, but I guess any month that you make 4 figures online is something to be happy about, right?

At this point, when 99% of my income comes from two sales, I really can’t say that I’m making money online. If just a few things went differently, I could easily be sitting here reporting about $10 worth of income. That’s not acceptable, and here’s what I’m doing to change it…

I mentioned in my last post that I was quitting regular posting on this (and some other of my sites) to focus on The Coolest Gifts. For the past two weeks, I’ve been having a custom theme designed, and it’s about two days away from being released. I’m extremely excited about it. It’s pretty much exactly as I had pictured it. I really think you’re going to love it. It’s going to look like an ecommerce site, but it’s powered by WordPress. So cool.

Anyway, while I’ve been waiting for the new theme to be finished, I haven’t done much with the site. I haven’t promoted it at all. I have been publishing two posts per day, but I’ve been writing a bunch of other posts to try to determine what kind of posting schedule I’ll be able to consistently keep. I think I’m going to start at 2 posts per weekday (M-F), and gradually work up to 4 or 5 posts per weekday. With the new site, it’s going to be very important to me to stick with a posting schedule.

That’s enough about the new theme for now. When it goes live (some time on Friday) I’ll post about it here along with all of the little details that only you, my fellow bloggers, will appreciate

Because I’m essentially starting from scratch (The Coolest Gifts only has 10 RSS subscribers!), and because I’ll be focusing all my time and effort there, I really wouldn’t be surprised if my income drops below $100 for March. But I’m focused on the bigger picture. I love the niche that I’ll be blogging about. I know that the niche is profitable (this gadget blog made over $50k in December 2007). I have a great URL. I’ll have a cool and unique look to my site. And I’m determined.

60 of my 365 days may have already passed, but I’m feeling better than ever about my chances of meeting my goal.

Check back in a few days for the details of my new theme!