If you are in Maple Ridge, BC (about 40 minutes east outside downtown Vancouver) and the skies are clear with a warm day you should head up to Golden Ears Provincial Park. Golden Ears Provincial Park encompasses approximately 55,590 hectares of undeveloped wilderness. They also offer 353 well-spaced campsites (one of the largest campsites in BC) which are only a short distance to Alouette Lake. They actually get their own private beach so traffic can be fairly minimal.

Golden Ears is also home to many trails such as the Golden Ears Peak trail and of course the more popular one Gold Creek. Gold Creek offers two trails, one that heads north towards the lower falls (about 40 minutes each way) and the other that travels a short distance east towards Alouette Lake.

The other day Robyn and I ventured over to the Gold Creek beach area. The trail is roughly a 20 minute walk through the woods and alongside Gold Creek, which is odd because Gold Creek is more like a river than a creek. The park also seems to be slowly fixing up the trail to work with a volume of people.

In a much earlier post of mine about Gold Creek I show a photo I took when the lake was high and flooding the Gold Creek beach area. As you can see from that photo (yes you will have to follow the link to view it) it looks fairly flooded.

From the photo I took above from a few days ago they have been filming something called ‘I Love Emily’ or something to that name. The crew member I asked wasn’t very helpful when I inquired about it though they all seemed friendly and allowed us to walk through.

The most interesting part that caught my attention was the rustic house they built. It looks like it was there for years. Though it smelled of new cedar, it definitely looked like it belonged there. I wonder if they will keep it there or tear it down after they are done. If they leave it I am sure it will be vandalized while unattended.

Once you get to the beach area of Gold Creek you are offered a spectacular view of Alouette Lake. The beach itself is a bit pebbly and the water isn’t the warmest but in the summer it is nice to dunk yourself into. It is also a spot where a younger crowd will gather since it is further away from the main beach at Alouette Lake where majority of families gather. The only thing you need to remember is that being a Provincial Park you do have to pay for parking, though when we got to the Gold Creek parking lot the ticket machine was covered up. Parking normally was $5 per day which is to help pay for park maintenance since the Government either stopped funding the parks or lowered the amount they received.

I would like to thank everyone who entered the contest to win the Samsung Bluetooth Stereo Headset that I have been running for the past two weeks. After mathematically and scientifically drawing a number (randomly drawn) cross referenced against a MySQL result query of mine to see all those who left comments on the particular post I have come up with a winner!

Congratulations to Damien Riley of PostcardsFromTheFunnyFarm.com. Damien has been selected as the winner of the Samsung Bluetooth Stereo Headset. Enjoy your headset Damien!

I have contacted Damien about winning and he seems very excited to receive his headset. I will be shipping it out tomorrow to the address he supplied me with and he should (hopefully) receive it soon!

Survey Says….

Originally I had my contest set up so that people would have to link back to me and write a brief review. After one week I had only 2 entries and I did not think that was enough, nor what I expected. After someone mentioned that they could not enter the contest because they did not have a blog or access to one, I changed and extended the contest another week and asked that they only need to leave a comment to be entered. This change received more comments and helped hype the contest a bit better.

The next contest I run will be similar, you’ll just need to leave a comment and you’re entered. This seems to get the best results for generating hype about something. Creating link backs can be a bit trickier, after all this blog is a learning tool of mine and this has been a bit of a learning experience on my part.

If I had perhaps a cooler gadget than the Samsung Bluetooth Stereo Headset (which I thought was pretty cool) perhaps that would attract more people. I guess not everyone wants something free, weird huh? From my experience I always thought people loved to win free stuff even if they had no use for it. I guess this contest disproves that theory of mine.

Thom of Life In The Internet brought up an interesting point this morning as I scanned through my list of daily RSS feeds (yes I subscribe to my own RSS feed for both posts and comments).

I may have missed it but I don’t see any revenue generators on your site other than ads (please correct me if I’m wrong). If that’s the case, you only make money when they click the ads (i.e. bounce) so why to you want them to stay on your site? Wouldn’t the whole idea be to get them to click an ad and bounce?

This got me thinking, why is it I want my Bounce Rate to decrease, why do I want people to stay on my site when the point of the ads is to have people click on them and move on? I guess I want to keep people interested and coming back. If they come back, then I know what I have to write is interesting to them (as it is to me). It is also allowing me to see what sort of topics people tend to like most though I base this on page views mainly. I know if I see a link I want to click on, I’ll click on it to open it in another tab and go through it later (like daily bookmarking) so that I can continue reading the site I am currently on. Perhaps, if I am in it to make money, I am then going about it the wrong way. After all I’ve been blogging for over a year and I really do not make money on it.

What are my goals for Tyler Ingram dot Com?

My ultimate goal is to increase my writing skill by reporting about the things that happen around me on a daily basis. I have had people comment that my writing quality has increased since I have started my blog (as well as the hardware reviews I do) but I do know I am not perfect. In fact English was my worse subject in High School and I still tend to struggle with it. I don’t mean the spoken aspect of it (though I do have my moments), but the writing portion of the language. You know things like sentence fragments, incorrect use of punctuation and/or grammar.

Social Networking would be another part of my goal, to get my name out there on the internet. I don’t go around saying I am a perfect source of knowledge but to get to know people around the world with similar interests and that is what I believe the blogging industry to be about. Though this would go hand-in-hand with self branding right? You see photos of people like Shoemoney or John Chow and you recognize them. Wouldn’t the majority of bloggers like to have that sort of recognition?

Monetization isn’t really a goal in this current time. I am sure I could do more in an effort to earn more income on my blog. Couldn’t you? Wouldn’t you like to make those monthly incomes in which the Dot Com Moguls make? You know like 20k-30k per month. What I like to do is look into the various aspects of monetizing a blog and I have tried most of them (AdSense, AdVolcano, TextLinkAds, TTZ Media to name a view). Though being majority of click-thru type affiliates I would follow the rest of the crowd saying those are the sites with larger traffic rates.

Another comment Thom made was:

Certainly with a low click thru that logic would seem to make sense, and it is what everyone preaches. But what if you could get 10 visits a day and make just $1 off each one? Wouldn’t that be better? And with only 10 visits, not thousands! I’d rather have one visit a day from a buyer than 1000 visits a day from readers.

Sure having a $1 per person that visited would be great! I’d even settle for $0.25 to $0.50 per person. It would definitely help out on the income front. The question would be; how would you do something like that? Perhaps that can be my next task, looking into what sort of method would allow me to bring in $0.50 per person per visit as opposed to looking at Page Impressions and the percentage rate at which they click on ads to generate a source of income right?

So the goal for my blog is to become more confident in writing. Afterwards I could look at learning how to better monetize the site (or other types of sites). I could also look at enrolling in some writing courses but I would have to look at the reason for why I wish to write better first, in order for me to justify paying crazy amounts of tuition fees since I already am planning on taking some graphic design courses to help increase my confidence in web design and development.

Thom I thank you for your comments. They definitely have been thought provoking and I appreciate them.