Who needs money? Well if you could use an extra $250 then I suggest that you head over to John’s weight loss blog at Johnisfit.com. He is having a blog contest for the month of June with the top prize being $250 cash plus other great prizes. Entering is easy, go to John’s weight loss contest for all the details.

Follow Me on Twitter

Twitter has been exploding recently and everyone is using it including myself. I mainly use it as a tool for social interaction to ask questions and to find interesting new sites and stories. Most of my tweets are about what I am doing in my daily life as well as my latest posts on weight loss weapons and some of the other sites I run.

I go under the name @steve_wlw and I invite you to follow me. If you are interested in deals and saving money I am just starting to tweet about these exclusively under @debtslaying you can follow that as well.

I look forward to chatting with you

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this blog and what I want to achieve with it. I’ve been offered $2700 to sell this site. That’s decent money but somehow I know with a name like Weight Loss Weapons it will get turned into a diet pill site. Something that I am strongly against.

To date this has been a place where I get my ideas out about weight loss and weight related issues. But its been more of me talking at you instead of with you. As you can tell with the lack of comments I’ve been posting.

I’m going to make this blog a more personal space to interact with me and blog about my personal weight loss successes and struggles plus other health and fitness stuff too. As Jason from Run4change put it, this blog is going to have more heart. Although the post frequency will be nowhere close to his. (seriously he has more posts in January than I have on this whole site

3 guys with blogs that have heart are Andrew from Andrew is getting fit, Israel from Fat Man Unleashed and John from John is Fit. I aspire to be like them.

This past Fall and Winter have been rough personally for me. I have gained weight quickly and no it’s not muscle. I have a ton of reasons why I’ve gained but they honestly amount to nothing more than lame excuses.

Getting To Know Who Am I?

You know it’s funny, I get about 10,000 to 12,000 visitors a month and only a handful of them really know who I am. My “About Me” page is really nothing special and doesn’t let you know what I am all about.

This is the picture from my about page. (The sun was in my eyes, not trying to look cool) and I would love to post more except I don’t have that many. I am the guy taking the pictures, not in them.

It’s pretty close to what I look like right now and somewhere in between my heaviest and my peak.

My peak being my wedding day about 7 years ago. I worked really hard to get into shape and hit the 175lbs mark the day before. This is what I looked like, not bad eh?

Over the last 7 years I’ve gained and lost more than 40Lbs. In that time I’ve had 2 children (well my wife did) and settled into a nice cushy desk job. A very common lifestyle pattern that has contributed to the gains.

Here is a picture of me at my heaviest or pretty damn close to it.

Vital Stats

Here are some quick “stats” about me:

Age:31
Marital Status: Married
Weight: 198lbs depending on the Scale
Height: 5′9
Hobbies: Spending Time With the Family, Sports, Reading, Making Money Online.

Who I am Online

I am pretty active online and frequent a lot of other blogs and social networking sites. Here are some of my “Ids”

Twitter: Steve_WLW
Stumbleupon: mclintst
Digg: mclintst
Blogcatalog: mclintst

When I comment on other blogs I use the name Steve@weightlossweapons.com most of the time. Feel free to add me as a contact.

Sites I own

I am fairly new at building websites but I’m enjoying what I am learning and it provides some extra income, with the economy the way it is every little bit helps. One of my goals is to eventually earn a full-time income online. Here are some of the sites I own at the moment:

Weightlossweapons.com and Weightlossweapons.com/blog

These are my first self hosted sites that I created almost 2 years ago. They have come along way from the when I started them.

Debtslaying.com

I started this site about 8 months ago when I became debt free and have changed the focus so many times since then it is ridiculous. I’ve settled on it being a place where I can post about deals and discounts that I find online as well as hot topics, financial issues and other related things that I find interesting. I also make money with this site through the adsense ads and my affiliation with Amazon.com (basically if you follow the link and buy items from Amazon I get a commission).

The current Debtslaying theme was inspired by Garry Conn, for anyone looking to make an honest dollar online blogging Garry is definately someone you should be taking advice from. The guy knows his stuff and will even help you set up a free wordpress blog if you open a new hostgator account.

Sealingyourdriveway.com

This is a site I started to post about all things related to your driveway. I was a driveway sealer for a few years and did a lot of sealing, rebuilding and driveway repairing.

Bissell-Carpet-Cleaner.com

I actually bought this from a friend of mine. Since I own a few Bissell products I thought it would be fun to see what I can do with it. So more changes are coming soon.

Contacting Me

If you want to get in touch with me about any of my sites, questions about general stuff or even if you want to send me products to review (which I do from time to time) you can email me steve@weightlossweapons.com.

Now that you know more about me, who I am and what I do. Let me know who you are? Leave a comment and I’ll be sure to reply, going forward that will be my new comment policy.

Take Care,
Steve

Here are just a couple of quick updates as to what I have been adding and trying out at my main site www.weightlossweapons.com as well as here on the blog.

I have added a new page called Strength Training. It basically outlines the best exercises to build strength using just your bodyweight. I am a big fan of bodyweight exercises mainly because anyone can do them, you don’t need to go to a gym and they get results. So check it out and let me know what you think. 

Increased Traffic

The Traffic on the blog has picked up quite a bit since I added the FREE Blogrush link widget.

The idea behind this is that you show blog posts from other sites on your related subject (here would be health, weight loss and fitness related posts). You earn credits based on the amount of traffic you have.  Every credit you earn means that one of your posts will show up in the widget on someone else’s blog. This can really increase your sites exposure.

The best part is the referral program. If another blogger adds the widget to their site using your referral code, you will earn more credits based on how much traffic they receive as well. It goes 10 levels deep.

I’ve had a couple of people sign up under me already which is great, but I can always use more. If you want to add Blogrush to your site you can sign-up here.

New Advertising

Now I’ll admit that I didn’t start this site/blog to make money. My financial goal has always been to make enough just to cover the hosting and domain costs. Allowing me to write about what I love for free. That being said, the Google ads just aren’t doing it for me. My click through rate (CTR) is decent but as Google looks to make more money for them and payout less to the publishers I need to experiment with other forms of advertising.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be testing some new CPC providers. The first will be WidgetBucks which should appear at the end of this post. They have a huge advertising network and will hopefully bring some products and services that will prove useful to my readers.

Bonus, it’s free to sign-up and they will actually give you $25 just for using them. Can’t beat that.

The other ad system is FAN (Fair Ad Network) that will show later this month. Another CPC ad network. They also offer targeted ads relating to health and fitness.

Affiliate Programs

None yet. I haven’t found anything good enough that I would recommend to anyone yet. I won’t post any links unless I’ve tried it and it actually does what it claims to do.

Remember if you have any questions about weight loss, or anything health/fitness related either leave me a comment or send me an email. I’ve received a dozen or so in the past couple of weeks and I’ll be posting some of the better ones later on.  (I will never give out your email or other personal info)