Mr. Gary Lee

First, I’d like to tell everyone that I’m alive and well. Thank you to those who wrote in and for your some times hilarious emails asking if I was ok! A lot has been going on in the world of Mr. Gary Lee and obviously, blogging has not been one of them. I hope to make ammends for now by letting you all know what’s been going on.

To kick off my August, I let my employer know that I would be stepping down as the Business Development and Marketing Director for PokerLetter.org. I have been working on this site for the past 2 years and along with Ms. Danielle, have helped it grow into very successful email marketing business. I was proud to be part of a team that grew a high quality email list to over 375,000, generated more than $1M in a 12 month span and overall, learn how to succeed in one of the toughest markets in online advertising. Some may ask why I’m stepping down from such a lucrative business, but after months of trying to adapt to the new law changes the US have placed in the online gaming world, I recognized that it was time for me see what else was out there for me. Coincidentally, the owner of PokerLetter.org also felt the same as I did and a few days after my last day, asked me to help him sell Poker Letter to any interested party. So, if you’re an interested party and think you can leverage this large database, then by all means, contact me at your earliest convenience.

Other than that outside piece of news, I know many of you are very interested in the iPhone Contest. Originally, the plan for the iPhone contest was to generate some buzz around my blog and get some quality backlinks from participants with high quality page rankings for some of my other side projects. Well, I think I’ve definitely gotten the buzz as I’ve done a couple of interviews for some books coming up in the fall. I will definitely be letting you guys know of those once they come out. As a result of the increased exposure, some of you may have noticed that the Technorati Faves Train came back to life for a couple of weeks and as a result, I finally passed John Chow on the Technorati’s Most Popular Blogs (aren’t you proud of me John? muhahaha)!  As for the quality banklinks, I originally timed the contest to end around now because I thought Google would be done with their page ranking by now and obviously they still haven’t. As for the keywords I have chosen to promote the site, here’s where they’re ranking right now on Google:

• free online coupon - #5 : PinkDeals.net which is a site I work on with Ms. Danielle
• golf equipment - #13 : My Golf Site Project which I have high hopes for. Still in the works so reserve judgement until late September.
• free iphone - #137

Of course, the “free iphone” keyword is a little disappointing, but the success of the other two more than makes up for it. The long tail effect of ranking for those keywords have been tremendous and I hope to continue getting links for those sites. Also, I must give Yahoo credit for actually catching onto this promotion as I was ranking in the Top 5 for “Free iphone” for a couple of weeks, then they banned my post all together from their listings. Someone’s going to have to tell Yahoo to get off their high horse and just be glad I use their search engine! hahaha . . and ya, that’s exactly what I would say to Mr. Jerry Yang if he were in front of me right now!

Since Google is taking their sweet time with the Page Rank update, the only choice I have is to say that I will be annoucning the winner of the iPhone as soon as the Page Ranks are out so that people can get multiple entries for their newly ranked blogs. I apologize for the delay, but don’t you want your extra ticket?

If you haven’t entered the iPhone Contest yet, what are you waiting for? I made a huge banner at the top of this blog for you to click on!

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