Internet Business Daily

I have read countless stories about Bestbuy pulling some shady tactics, but I have never really experienced it for myself. That is until now. A few months ago I purchased a Xbox360 Bundle, which included Need For Speed: Most Wanted. The bundle cost about $25 more than the regular Xbox360 system (premium). I also bought an extra controller and 2 more games. Because I spent over $600, they gave me $20 gift card (yea thanks a lot Bestbuy). I used that gift card immediately towards the purchase of one more game. Many of my friends have had problems with their Xbox360’s and therefore it made sense to me to buy a 2-year protection plan.

Everything was good for about 2 months until about 2 days ago. I take great care of my Xbox, including not keeping it on the carpet or putting anything on top of it. So I went to turn it on 2 days ago and as I was about to play Fight Night, the screen went black and froze. I restarted the Xbox and all I saw from then on was the blinking red lights of death. I am not sure exactly what happened but I knew the Xbox was done for. Thank God I got the protection plan right?? Well, no.

I packed up the Xbox and drove to Bestbuy. I got to customer service with my Xbox and receipt and the representative started to process my return. I was then blown away when he told me that I had to return the game that came with it as well. I asked: “does that mean I will be getting another bundle Xbox system?” for which he answered NO!!! If I wanted my broken Xbox exchanged I would have to give up one of my games! How ridiculous is that? This is not a game that they just gave me, I payed extra for it as part of the bundle. I argued for about a half hour until he finally agreed to give me a $20 gift card, for which I can use to purchase the game again for $50. So they stole my game and wanted me to pay more to get it back. WTF???

That’s not the end of the story unfortunately. I did not have the game with me so I drove all the way back to my house during rush hour in Los Angeles (which is hell), grabbed the game and drove all the way back. I stood in line again and was ready to have my game stolen so I can get a working Xbox360. As they start to process my order once more, the customer service rep tells me I have to return the gift card they gave me also!!! I said “you mean the gift card that was GIVEN to me for spending so much money??” As I said before I had already spent the gift card, so they were going to charge me another $20, which canceled out the $20 they gave me for the game they stole. I was furious at this point.

The story has a good ending though. After arguing for about another hour with them trying to explain how f*ing ridiculous this whole thing is, they finally agreed to give me $20 and not charge me for their “gift” card and gave me a new Xbox360 (still minus Need for Speed). As I was walking out I realized that I did not include the controller when I returned the Xbox, and they did not say anything. So basically I came up an extra controller. It felt good to stick it to them even though it was unintentional. Any other time I would have returned the extra controller, but FU BESTBUY!!! What are they thinking sometimes??

Even though my birthday is actually today, I decided to have the “party” night this past Saturday. So much fun! Check it out. This is from a bar in Santa Monica called Busby’s.

Me and Emma.

I don’t remember why I was so happy here…

Damn I don’t remember any of these.

Why are you so angry Eric??

Ah it’s that time of year again. My birthday! I am 23 years old now and all I have to say is wow. I am getting old. I had a great time with my friends this past Saturday (I will post those pictures eventually), and I am going to a very nice restaurant tonight for my actual birthday night. The place we are going is called Gyu-Kaku. It is a Japanese BBQ place where you cook your own food. It is very fancy and I can’t wait to go. I will take plenty of pictures tonight as well and post them soon.

I know I have been lazy about posting this month, it’s just been a hectic time for me right now. We have finally launched Juicefeed 2.0 (Celebrity Gossip) and I personally think it looks great! Brandon (the programmer) has been working very hard on getting everything up and running and has done a great job.

New Features
There are many new features on Juice2.0. We have taken out the numbered pages and replaced them with a much simpler system. Every day all the posts are put on one page, and if you want to see previous days you can just click on the calender and see all the news from that day. This is a much simpler format that our previous pagination format. Another new addition to Juice is many more feeds. We are now taking content from about 10 different celebrity gossip news sources. There are now dozens of stories per day to feed your every gossip desire. We have also added friends links and changed the ads around so that more content is viewable above the fold. The most noticeable change still has to be the background. It is no longer plain gray, we have added a new pink striped background to attract the female audience.

Looking Forward
We are always looking for suggestions for Juicefeed. There are many more features that we have thought about and will probably add eventually, but for now I think the site looks great. We will be adding more filtering options and more customization options. Eventually I would like to move to writing our own content, or having our users write their own content. Please let me know if anyone has suggestions, they are very appreciated.

** EDIT: The rules have changed, it’s now MUCH easier to win.

So I was thinking of different ways I could increase the traffic to my blog and had a great idea: a blog contest! I am somewhat going to copy John Chow’s review my blog for a linkback idea, but put my own little twist on it. Instead of only giving a linkback (which unfortunately doesn’t mean too much right now), I am going to give away a great pair of Gucci sunglasses to one lucky winner, but everyone will get a linkback who enters. The original sale price of the glasses was $250, but they are an older model so are probably worth a bit less now.

How It Works
The requirement to be entered into the contest is as follows. Create a link to the homepage of this site with anchor text “make money online.” The link must be up for 4 weeks and then it’s up to you if you want to leave it up:). The link must also be on your homepage. For doing this you will automatically receive a linkback from my site.

How To Win
I will let the contest run for 4 weeks after 20 entires have been submitted. At the end of the four weeks, a winner will be drawn! It’s that easy. The winner will also receive another linkback and a review of their site in a short post by me.

How To Enter
After doing everything stated above, you will need to comment to this post with a link to the page on your site containing the link. That’s it! Good luck to all and i’m very excited to read the reviews.

Tracking Progress
We have reached part four of the SEO tips segment. This is just a quick little tip I picked up today. I have always wondered the best way to track a site’s SEO performance, and now I know what that is. The first thing to consider is the research: how are we going to determine how well our site is doing with regards to a specific keyword? The site I was shown is McDar Internet Marketing Consultants. They have many useful tools but we are going to only focus on one: Datacenter Q- Check.

The Tool to Use
The Datacenter Q- Check (located on the left side of the page in the menu) basically checks a website’s SERPS (search engine results page) for a given keyword. It goes out and checks Google’s data centers for a sites ranking. So to get an accurate reading of how well your SEO efforts are doing, I would keep an excel document recording the information given by this tool. Focus on a few keywords and track their progress. When using this tool always use “Check across Datacenter IP C-Block(Group A)” because that will include the most data centers from Google (different data centers means different results). Check out this tool and the rest of the website, it is very helpful.

Read the rest of the SEO Tips here:

• SEO Tips (Part 1)
• SEO Tips (Part 2)
• SEO Tips (Part 3)

I just can’t get enough of Lisa Nova. I watch her on MadTV and still follow her on YouTube. Here is her latest video:

I have been working on a site lately with some of my buddies: Juicefeed.com. The idea behind the site is simple, it’s a celebrity blog aggregator (not sure if that is a real word) that feeds from many different gossip news sources. I came up with the idea after watching the surfing habits of one of my close friends.

Obsessive Habits Means $$$ for Me
The first thing she would do when she got home from work was check each of her gossip blogs, which totaled to about 7 or 8 different sites she checked. She is not unique in this sense. Everyone who is into celebrity gossip obsessively keeps up with the news relating to their favorite celebrities. This is where the idea popped into my head. Instead of checking a bunch of different sites, there could be one site that aggregates all the news feeds from the different celeb gossip sites. And this is what my site does.

More Than Just News
One thing I am trying to avoid with Juicefeed is only making it a news feed. There are a million news feeds out there and even more news aggregate sites. Eventually we are going to start rolling out features that give the site more of a community feeling. Things like voting, users, and ways to write your own dialog are just some of the ideas being thrown around. The point is we need to make it more than just a news feed.

Looking Forward
I really do think Juicefeed will be successful. It is a great looking site and is a simple idea. I have never marketed a site like this, so it will be a challenge. I am going to do all my normal publicizing techniques but I think I need to do something special to get this site off the ground. If anyone has any ideas they would be much appreciated. So check out the site when you get a chance. Now for a shameless SEO link plug: Juicefeed - Celebrity Gossip.