Within minutes I was browsing the Virtual Training Company (VTC.com). Not only does VTC.com offer Crystal Reports training, but they have thousands of other videos in hundreds of other course topics. I decided to run through the first few videos of the Crystal Reports training and was pleased with the quality and content.

The course I was looking at purchasing was $99.95.  Then I realized I would probably want to take the Advanced course also, which would be another $99.95. And after browsing through their video training library, I recognized that I would probably want to take several other courses. Next step… check out the various subscription options.

According to VTC’s website, “The VTC Online University gives unlimited access to over 98,729 tutorial videos (more than 1026 courses) in the library. You are billed according to your renewal selection – monthly $30, three months $90, six month $180, or yearly $250. For monthly subscription you will be billed every 30 days until you cancel.” The $250 annual subscription is the obvious best deal. I planned on spending $200 for two courses anyway, so why not spend the extra $50 and get unlimited access to the other 1024 courses? Seemed like an easy decision to me.

The bottom line, from a long-time lynda.com subscriber, is that I’m VERY pleased with my Virtual Training Company purchase. For more information, including a list of their huge library of training videos, visit VTC.com.

I stumbled onto the news report video of the guy (George Lindell) telling a very animated story about his car accident experience. I knew the video would go viral very quickly so I decided to buy the domain realityhitsyouhardbro.com and possibly pull some Google Adsense revenue from it.

The challenge was to see how quickly I could get a functioning website up and running, and more importantly, to make the site actually pull traffic from natural Google search results. My keyphrase, obviously… “Reality Hits You Hard Bro” was what I was targeting. My goal… make the entire website during my lunch break from my full-time job (1 hour).

First, I went to GoDaddy to make sure the domain was available. It was, so I snatched it up for one year for $14.49 including private registration (I’m not really sure why I did private registration… habit, I suppose).  This took about 10 minutes to make the purchase.

Next, I setup hosting through my Hostgator reseller account. Another 10 minutes.

Then, I logged into my new hosting account for realityhitsyouhardbro.com and setup a new MySQL database. I decided to use WordPress and the Genesis Framework. Since I already own all of the themes from Studiopress (the maker of Genesis), and WordPress is free, this was no extra cost and my familiarity with the software would make it the fastest way for me to get the site running.

After uploading the WordPress files to my web server (another 10 minutes), I logged in to the WordPress setup and configured the site. Adding my standard set up plugins including, Google Analytics, Google XML Sitemaps, Akismet, and a couple Genesis plugins, my site was ready for content.

I created my first post about 45 minutes after buying the domain name, and the only thing left was to add Adsense to start generating a little revenue through the site (another 5 minutes).

There was still some SEO tweaking to do, but the bottom line is, I had the full realityhitsyouhardbro.com website up and running in less than an hour and spent a grand total of $12.17. I’m not totally sure what I’ll do with the site in the future, but I’m leaning towards making it a viral video site where I can embed the most popular viral videos with a short SEO friendly description of each. I’m sure I’ll make my $12.17 back many times over if I continue to update the content.

Oh, and I decided to check Google search results a little while after I launched the site. Searching for the name of the site showed me that Google had already indexed the home page (see below)…

… and searching for my keyphrase “reality hits you hard bro” place my site on page 4. Not bad for an hour of work.

The next step is to build a few back links from some other site that are ranking higher than mine for the same keyphrase. And since robshambaugh.com has an acceptable pagerank, I might as well link to it from here, too.

UPDATE: Five minutes after posting this article to robshambaugh.com, the robshambaugh.com article jumped to page 2 of google for the keyword phrase. Google must really like this site

Cardcrafters.com contacted me about rebuilding their website from an old, outdated design to something more current.  They were looking for a site that allowed them to create “collections” of photos and display each collection on the site. With the large amount of photos they had, I knew I needed to give them the ability to update the site as often as they would like.

WordPress was the perfect solution for CardCrafters.com because it offers a variety of plugins that allow for photo collections. The design was fairly simple because they had already contacted a designer to create the new logo. So, thankfully, the colors for the site were already chosen by way of the logo design. They needed a handful of pages but nothing too fancy like a shopping cart.

I found a theme in the StudioPress collection that seemed to support all of the features CardCrafters and I wanted in the new website, and after some theme customization and configuring the site for photo uploads, the new CardCrafters website was born.

It’s time for a change. I’ll be updating my site over the next few weeks.

The old Drupal site was never really what I wanted, so I kinda let it sit idle for a couple of years.

This version… built on WordPress and the Genesis Theme Framework might actually motivate me to keep my site updated.

Does anyone even look at this site anyway?

I just realized it’s good to ask myself questions. It dawned on me that I’ve never setup up Google Analytics on this site. Way to go webmaster!

Step 1: Install essential WordPress plugins (including Analytics).