It all started when I searched Balkhis in google, and found one of these sites ranking at #10 saying Balkhis is worth some thousand dollars. So I started playing around today, and wondering how much is Balkhis worth, so I started looking into these automated calculators. I got a chuckle out of those. While I looked at the numbers, I thought it would be nice to share it here and ask you guys a question. So I have a question for you guys. How do you evaluate how much is your site worth? Well while you are thinking the answer to that enjoy some of the funny numbers the sites I found gave me.

Note: These are all automated calculators feel free to put your site value in the comment.

According to Website Outlook Balkhis is worth $33,580

According to dnScoop Balkhis is worth $104,236

According to Cubestat Balkhis is worth $29,113.86

According to Smart PageRank Balkhis is worth $66,959

So now these numbers are pretty high specially the dnscoop one. Website outlook ranked in the top 10 for the keyword balkhis in google, so I will use them to get the results of some other cool sites that are my regular readers.

Enkay Blog – $26009.9
TheWWWBlog – $33930.4
QuickPWN – $21768.6
Linkers Blog – $6029.8
Otooo – $8044.6
Authority Directory – $20016.6
Blogging Buzz – $3971.2

So if I didn’t get to yours then post yours here. Sorry I couldn’t search all of my readers, I know you guys are still here, so don’t get any hard feelings.

Alright I know you all have been waiting for this one. Pimp My Blog August 2008 winner was indocontest. I was giving him time to upload the design, but apparently he hasn’t uploaded it. I am very upset with the way Pimp My Blog is going because the only site that is using the pimped theme is Vol Cars Blog. Last month’s winner still hasn’t uploaded the site.

So I think I will stop the random picks!!! Yes, it sounds fair to me because I don’t want to give this opportunity to those who will not use it. Because some people are undecided with what they want. Like last month’s winner had multiple mind sets change. So if you get pick remember, you only get one chance to explain. You cannot come later on and say you want an entirely different thing. The rules I will be changing for the future.

The following rules are:

Must be subscribed to Balkhis.com via email. Which is kept the same. So if you haven’t subscribe, subscribe right now because this is a must.

Next factor that will play is you need to explain to me why you need the pimped blog. So I will be strongly considering my top commentators for the pick now because I would rather reward my active users then the ones who just subscribe and never come back again. Trust me I will know with the email who is active and who is not. So Top Commentators will be a heavily focused.

If you are interested in checking out the video for the last month’s pimped up blog then watch it below:

I shall be drawing within the next few days.

This is a guest blog post by Dr. Teeth from Blogging Buzz

So you want to make money from your blog, well you are certainly not alone but you are probably finding that to make money, you need traffic and you are also not alone there either. Millions of bloggers want traffic but you need to learn how to get it to your blog and not it let pass you by.

One of the most important things to consider is your content. Your blog content needs to be quality content that is updated regularly. Creating your blog and then leaving it to fade into the background is certainly not going to bring you any traffic. Search engine crawlers are always looking for fresh, quality content. Keywords are important when writing content on your blog and so make sure that you are choosing the right content with the right keywords to attract those crawlers.

Not only will this attract the search engine crawlers to your blog, but it will also encourage your viewers and subscribers to return often to your site, boost your comments and get more referrals to your blog. Your readers want to see dedication to a blog that is regularly updated and is full of quality content.

Next, you need to tag it, make use of the tags on your blog and every time you write a new post remember to use your tags. You can do this manually in your blog or if you are using a platform such as Wordpress then make use of the plug-ins they have available, such as their SimpleTags plug-in. Make sure, that you tag every keyword in your post, by using tags effectively, you will see an increase in quality traffic, very quickly.

As with all things, if you want to make money with your blog and get traffic, you can not just sit back and wait for it to land on your lap, you need to get your blog out there.

Millions of bloggers are writing similar posts and creating similar blogs to yours and so use that to your advantage. Comment on their blog posts and leave a link to your blog, there is a massive community for bloggers and so you need to become a part of that. Not only add your link to other blogs, anywhere and everywhere you possibly can. Whether it is online around various forums or as a signature in your email, also do it offline especially if you have business cards, then add your blog address to them.

Another way to get traffic to your blog and a way that many bloggers are starting to jump on the band wagon with is pinging. Using pinging software such as Ping-O-Matic can benefit your blog no end when it comes to driving traffic to it, pinging is basically sending out a signal to search engines and weblog tracking sites that you have new content on your blog. So, every time you update your blog and add new content, ping it.

There are many other ways to drive traffic to your blog, such as adding your blog to traditional search engines, article directories and social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon are becoming a popular choice for bloggers to drive traffic to their blog.

You may come across offers and various types of software that can increase your traffic, there are many programs that people are offering bloggers at a cost, with a promise to increase their traffic with automated traffic generators. Though many of them can do this and no doubt work effectively for some bloggers, proceed with caution. There is really no need to be parting with your hard earned cash for a promise of traffic when with a little time and effort you can get your own traffic for free.

Thanks Dr. Teeth for providing this article to Balkhis users. Check out his site Blogging Buzz

Another week with Balkhis Sweet Monday Link Love. Last week was good. I spent a lot of money. It was a religious holiday for Muslims called Eid-ul-Fitr. So to all Muslims Eid Mubarak. Okay lets begin with some of the cool reads that I found last week.

How to Get Featured on NY Times, CNN and more…

Comments Auto-Approve or not?

Ways to Attract more readers to your blog

Case Study – Blog Commenting

Aside from those above reads, I along with the Uzzz crew have been busy with a lot of custom design orders. I went to the doctor regarding my finger sprain, and it turned out to be a fracture. So now I have to be very careful with it, and do some range of motion exercises….

If you think you want to Guest Blog on this blog feel free to send me a post as I can use some this week and the next.

Did you guys ever wonder, how people display feedburner stats in text? If you remember, I even did it a while back and then I took it off. Well a lot of people display it in text and have their own styling on it. In this post, I will show you how to display feedburner subscriber count as text on your site.

Why Feedburner Count as Text?

Simple, feedburner buttons are ugly. They don’t match with all the designs, and on most designs they just look ugly. This is the way you can style it and make it look like a part of a design rather than a copy and paste.

How to add Feedburner Count as Text?

This is a two step process.

Step 1

Paste the following codes in your template file where you want to display the count. And make sure you change the feed burner id from balkhis to your feedburner id.

<?php
//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=rss4real";

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();

//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);
//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];

//end get cool feedburner count
?>

Step 2

Now paste the following codes to display the count wherever you like. Wrap it around the div tags to style it the way you want.

<?php echo $fb;?>

This will allow you to display feedburner subscriber count as text on your site. Credit of these codes goes to 45n5