I have finally broke down and decided to get a credit card.  This past weekend made me realize that I needed one - you see, my car broke down and I needed a tow truck.  Being between paychecks, I didn’t have a lot of money.  In the end I had enough to pay for the tow, but I had to each macaroni and cheese all weekend.  That sucks.

So, I went to the bank today to talk to someone about credit cards.  I was looking for something better than average - in fact I was looking for the best credit card for me.  She started out by explaining the basics including repayment, credit limit and the interest rate.

Then she started to show me credit card offers.  Her first selection was a 0% credit card - it would give me 0% interest for the first six months.  She explained that it was good for people who already carried a balance on their other cards - they could transfer it to this one and save the interest.  Since it would be my first card, this one really wasn’t interesting.

She showed me a few more.  One that you could get reward miles, one that you could get money towards a new car, and one that I could get free electronics.  Most of these cards were to gimmicky for me - I just wanted something simple.

The last thing she showed me was a cashback credit card offer.  With this card you would get a percentage of all your purchases back - either you could consider it getting paid to shop, or as getting a discount wherever you went.  My bank had an offering with no fees that got me really excited.

We filled out the paperwork and I find out in the next few days whether I am approved or not.  It will be nice to have some “insurance” in case something goes wrong.

Sometimes it can be tough to get everything done in a day as a webmaster.  In lots of cases you are the content writer, marketer, tech support, and customer support.

One way that some websites make money is by selling links on their websites.  This can be a daunting task as it is not easy to find other webmasters that want to buy links.

Due to this difficulty in selling links, there have been text link brokerage websites that have sprung up creating centralized places where you can buy and sell links for your websites.

The newest link marketplace is TNX.net.  Just recently launched it provides a good medium that allows you to sell text links on your site.  The best part?  You don’t have to look for buyers - they come to you.  Fully automated, this is the webmasters best friend - you can make money while you are doing other things.

The cost is reasonable, at just 12.5% commission per sale at the time of this writing.  The only drawback is that link sales are in TNX points, so you have to sell your points to convert them to cash, but otherwise this is an excellent program.

If you would like to give them a test drive, check you will find their signup offer on forums in the text links ads section.

It has been interesting to watch the last few years as my brother has grown up.  You see, he just turned 22 now and for the last four years he has been on a roller coaster ride.  Let me tell you the story.

At 18, Mike got his first job.  He was working at a local retailer full time and making ok money for an eighteen year old.  I remember him opening his own bank account and coming home with an $18,000 line of credit.  They told him he could buy everything he wanted because he had a full time job.  Do you see a problem on the horizon?

I tried to tell him to be careful, but at his age, you are maybe not wise enough to see the consequences of your actions.  He took advantage of his personal loan and bought electronics, a car, a computer, games, food, and other useless stuff.  In less than two year he had hit the $18,000 mark and couldn’t even afford to make his minimum payments.

He was forced to go bankrupt at 20.  Now just two years later, his car is on its’ last legs and he needs a new one.  He went to his new bank to ask if he could get a loan for a car, but all they will offer him is a secured personal loan - he needs some asset to pledge against the loan in case he doesn’t make payments.  Catch is the car he wants is not enough to count as his security and he has nothing else.  He even went online to compare loans from other institutions but they all have the same policy for people who went bankrupt.  He is so worried about what he is going to do.

So learn from this story and be careful with your money - especially when you are young - as if you do go bankrupt, you will be paying for your choices for a long time.

I wish my son was born healthy.

Unfortunately I was not so lucky.  You see, William was born with Asthma.  So we take him to a specialist every six months or so to get checked out.  That is quite alright, though lately we have been looking for someone here in Ridgefield that would offer primary care for our son.

This has been an uphill battle.  It would help if we knew someone that could recommend to us a doctor that they have used, but unfortunately we recently moved here and don’t really know anyone.

So, I grabbed the trusty yellow pages and looked under "Ridgefield Pediatricians".  I found a few prospects and will be calling them later today.  I just have a few questions I would like to ask them about their practice, experience and history in their office for the care of children.  Not unlike a job interview, I just need to ask them some questions so that I feel ok with the advice they give me about my child’s health.

I hope it all works out as not having a doctor for your child is so stressful for me…

Today for me was a pretty slow day.  I didn’t have much to do and the wife took the kids out so I could have a well deserved break.  Inadvertently I ended up sitting here, at my computer with not much to do.  I thought maybe I should blog a bit today, so I sat here all ready to blog about something.

The catch is I didn’t really have any good ideas.

So, when it doubt, do a web search and find something useful to write about.  I decided to look for something that would educate me about another part of the world.  Why?  Well, I am a firm believer that we should learn something new everyday.

So, I ended up at a strange news blog.  Now, if you know me at all, I can’t really be bothered reading a newspaper, so this site had to be good.  Digging around a bit, I did find a number of good articles.  Well, one in particular caught my eye:

“China Takes Stand Against Social Pollution”

Now for me, this is probably the best out of all the weird news headlines I found.  Why?  For me living in Canada where freedom of speech and rights is the norm, censorship is foreign to us.  Here we can speak our mind, share our opinions without fear of retribution.  I would find it sad if my choices of what I thought or what I did with my free time was monitored and limited.

It also reminds me of what it is like to be a parent.  How many of you have told your child not to do something or not to go somewhere only to find that they do it anyway’s?  I would think that the Chinese government would run into the same problems as parents do:  their people would just be doing what they are not supposed to do behind the governments back.  Granted, there could be more dire consequences for them compared to being grounded as a child.

All I can say is that I am thankful that I live here in Canada and that I do have more choices than other places in the world.  It seems that I often take that for granted, but today has reminded me of what I have.

If you are looking for ways to get your website noticed, you may have tired submitting your sites to search engines, web directories and maybe in a signature in a forum.

Have you tried using blogs to promote your websites?

If you haven’t, you are missing out on one of the easiest ways to get traffic.  You see, if you announce your website through a blog search engines tend to pick it up faster.  Also, if the article about your site is interesting, it may get submitted to the social bookmarking sites resulting in more traffic.

What is even better that it is easy to setup a blog.  There are many free providers that provide free blogs, or your can easily setup your own for under $20.

You can also work as a guest blogger.  What you do in this case is write an article for a blog and you are allowed to put some links in your byline.  This way, if they like your article, they will come check out your blog through those links in your byline.

You will find that blogging is one of the most effective and cost effective ways to market your website.