Tour of shameless self promotion

So yeah, I did it. I joined a mommy blog directory. I don't know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Although many ideas DO sound good after 3 glasses of wine. But alas, now I find myself in the arena of marketing and advertising. Both of which I did not study or obtain a degree in college. Now here I am reading "marketing for dummies" and watching a lot of Charlie's Sheen's tour clips. So far I've learned-



Rule #1: remind your readers that you are trying to gain readers, NEW readers, votes and clicks.  Daily reminders will serve this purpose
Rule #2: blast it all over your Facebook, myspace and twitter accounts. Send texts, emails, phone calls, faxes and pigeon couriers.
Rule #3: Do not bribe anyone, or create a contest for votes as this is an automatic DQ from the system. (no, not a delicious peanut butter and chocolate blizzard. Damn.)
Rule #4: Inform your audience that they can (and should) vote and click EVERY DAY and that is, in fact, the desired effect.
Rule #5: makes links highly visible on your page. Your audience can't click it if they don't see it.
Rule #6: do a blog entry about how you're trying to get your ranking up and how your readers can help  you.

I'm pretty sure I can do this. All I need are some sweet banners and a great header picture, and someone who knows about websites and how to make them great. Someone who understands the ins and outs of internet marketing and advertising... someone I know personally. Someone who possibly has a team of designers and creative artists and advertising portals. If only I knew such a person.....

I'm still tweaking out my website so be patient and don't freak out of things change.

So let's recap:

so when you see this button on my page 

<------------  click it and i'll automatically

                   get the vote. 

(go ahead... click it)

    when you see this button it's to rate me. I'll put both of them at the end of my posts. 

You know it took me 45 minutes to do this post trying to figure everything out? i'm not even sure if it's all going to work. If it's wrong, well, my feelings did it.