Up bright and early this morning and headed off to the gym for a 45 minute stairmaster workout. Another 500 calories in the bank and another sufferfest.

It seems odd but considering what a great workout the stairmaster is, there is only one machine in the gym. Whereas there are rows and rows of bikes and cross trainers, just one stairmaster.

This stairmaster has a fat burn program that ramps it up in the first fifteen minutes to get you really pumped up and then drops off to an easy pace to let you get yourself together before slowly going climbing up through the gears until at it's peak you are burning over 700 calories an hour. This is a great workout and I recommend it for anyone that needs to lose pounds. Especially if you have any history of back problems and the like, this is a very low impact workout but incredibly demanding  - when I finished this morning I looked like I'd just climbed out of the swimming pool. Drenched.

Fitness First is also great for anyone with attention deficit disorder.

Or the attention span of a gnat.

Whilst working out you can watch Sri Lanka destroying the Indians in the test match; some crappy Jeremy Kyle interview with baywatch babe Pamela Anderson; Someone trying to buy a house at auction in one of those endless awful property programs; get all the news headlines flashed in front of you every couple of minutes all the while whilst being bombarded with the latest MTV tunes broadcast over the entire studio watching all the videos you really want to see in muted silence on Kerrang.

Have to get myself some headphones I guess.

Had a nice sauna to finish off with, remembered my pound for a change and retrieved it from the locker and headed off to the office.

My inbox is flooded with requests for text advertising.

I don't know about you guys but I'm pretty loathe to start giving away traffic from my best sites to paid for advertisements. However as everything becomes more and more competitive and more surfers come to the party, so the rewards for success are becoming ever greater. Which means the top players are starting to offer a lot of money for placing text links on relevant sites.

Recently I've been offered anywhere between £75 to £200 per month to place an article on a site with a link from the homepage. That's it! All you have to do is place their articles on your site and start raking in the cash! This is evolvement from the textlinkads way of selling inventory.

Folks have realised that hyperlinks with anchor text surrounded by oodles of text is a lot more subtle and looks more realistic to search engine spiders than simply placing a link in the footer. So to get webmasters to co operate the advertisers are starting to offer enticing sums for placing articles.

Do you want to be somebodys link bitch though?

If you do that's great. If you are good at building sites you could make a comfortable living from selling text links in this way on your sites. It would take you about a year to build four sites. Four or five months for the first with subsequent sites coming online at a faster pace as you learn the ropes.

However the guidelines for advertisers is that they must be quality sites. For example the bingo operator gives a search engine company £100k to spend as advertising budget. The SEO then seeks out sites that they can get relevant backlinks from and start spending the budget.

Once the links are placed then they can be found by the operator in a search engine and if they see crappy sites being used to spend their advertising budget they'll not be happy campers.

If you are going to do this then my advice is to avoid wordpress as every man and his dog can build a wordpress site and any trawl of the bingo listings (for example) will show you that they are all built on very similar templates. So to stand out from the crowd you are going to have to go the extra mile. You need to be above average to make it work.

It all comes back to the same thing. Building quality sites gives you more opportunities to make revenue. Building mini sites just gives you a few pages on a domain with little traffic.

Building quality sites gives you all of the advantages that screwing around with puny little sites does not. You get to see proper google analytical data, you can spot where people are falling out of the sales funnel and fix it. You get affiliate opportunities, mail list building ideas, chances to try squeeze pages and if at the end of the day you can't make money out of any of the traditional methods you simply sell the advertising space.

But that was always the same with any business. Build quality and you always stand a chance. Build shit and it usually ends up in a small pile on the floor.

Made the gym nice and early this morning and after yesterdays reasonably easy session I upped the ante on the Stairmaster to level five for 45 minutes. This is becoming a torture fest.

I managed it ok and though I finished with some left in the tank I won't be upping the level for another week or so whilst I build up enough energy to hit the circuit training as well. Burnt just over 500 calories for two mars bars worth and chocolate bars are really beginning to lose their appeal! Working this hard just to burn off three cans of stella makes you realise it's much easier to lay off them in the first place.

I've not been cycling into the office since the bad weather started as I don't feel comfortable making the turns at several of the roundabouts, I've come close to severe road rash a couple of times and I think I'll get something a bit closer to a mountain bike for the winter season. It's not the combination of skinny wheels and wet roads, although that's bad enough in itself. It's the diesel that's spilt all over the roads that makes them treacherous for road bike users.

As you can see I've been playing around with the new rockettheme template and it's taken me ages to work out how to simplify the styling. But instead of keep pressing the buttons and looking so deeply at file permissions etc if I'd just taken five minutes to read the accompanying documentation I would have saved hours of time. Everything is right there in the help! Doh!

I'm happy with the new design so I'll stop arsing around with it. Just need to colour code a few of the graphics and it's all set.

Tonight we are off to watch Telford take on Shrewsbury in the shropshire trophy final. According to the website the game is definitley on after a pitch inspection earlier today. Go Bucks!