Desperate times call for desperate measures! My back is all sorts of messed up from countless hours of working at a less-than-ergonomic desk. The countless hours of work came back to haunt me last Monday when my back decided it needed some down time.

Days later I could still hardly get out of bed without severe pain, so I went to visit my chiropractor. After a couple days of excruciatingly painful adjustments, I had made some progress but was still pretty much unable to sit or stand without pain.

My wife suggested (once again) that I should try Yoga. She showed me the Cobra pose (who comes up with these names anyway?) and I figured what the hell - its worth a shot.

The key to this pose is to completely relax all of your muscles while you lay face down on the floor. Anyone who has experienced muscle spasms associated with back pain knows how hard it is to get them relax. After a few minutes of trial and error I was able to completely relax my back as I laid on the floor.

Next I placed my hands flat on the floor and VERY SLOWLY pushed my chest upward in a push-up like motion. Every step of the way I had back pain that would cause the muscles to cease up again and I would just hold the pose until I was able to relax into the pain. Then I went further.

Soon I was successfully into the pose and holding it. After about a minute I let myself down again, very slowly. The last part of the pose is to completely relax again and “melt into the floor.”

As I focused on relaxing I felt a pop around my L5 vertebrae. I was a little stunned because I am used to having to twist or contort my body to get my back to crack. After a minute or so I stood up and had noticeable less pain than when I started.

Over the next two days the pain and stiffness continued to subside. I still have some muscle pain from my back muscles contracting for days on end, but I am able to move again, work again, and most importantly blog again

I probably won’t become a Yogi anytime soon, but there is definitely something to gaining flexibility through Yoga. I have seen it for myself!

This week we have a lot to talk about on Compute This! We will share the highlights of our annual company BBQ from last night and take your calls!

Of course we will have a new Top Affiliate Challenge update for you with new sponsors and new developments in Lincoln’s own reality show.

Tune into the show at 10:00 CST on KFOR 1240 Am, or online at kfor1240.com You can call in at 489-1240 or #1240 on your Alltel wireless. We also have an 800 number available at 1-866-TALK-UNL.

We will talk to you then!

I didn’t want to leave my Apple readers out in the cold, so I have a prize for Mac this week! Parallels allows users run PC applications designed for Windows on the Mac.

The software is a $79.99 retail value and was donated by Parallels and Digital River. Thanks Guys!

By the way, if you don’t have a Mac this would make a great prize to give away on your own blog or forum Subscribe to the feed by clicking the icon on the top right and selecting a reader or by entering your email address in the subscribe via email form. For a bonus heads up, you should also follow me on Twitter.

Good luck!

That’s right folks! Its once again time to draw a winner in the RSS subscription contest. This post will also be syndicated on Twitter, so you might also consider following me at http://www.twitter.com/thorschrock.

The first person to post a comment here wins a free copy of Uniblue’s Registry Booster 2. The software will be instantly delivered to you via a coupon code in email.

Good luck!

In the past my blog has not had sufficient content to qualify me for some of the better text link advertising options on the market. But now with almost 600 posts in the can, I had enough to apply so I did.

After reading John Chow’s monthly income report I decided to sign up for Kontera. They took forever to approve my application (four days!) so in the mean time I also signed up with Text Link Ads. My Text-Link-Ads account was approved in minutes and I had their code installed on my blog that night.

For the next few days I eagerly checked my Text-Link-Ads account page to see if they had spidered my blog yet. Sure enough, every day a couple more of my posts came online. On day 4 Kontera approved my application and I thought to myself, sorry suckas! I am already with a different company.

But I might have spoken too soon. It has been just over three weeks since my Text-Link-Ads account was approved and tey only have spidered 32 posts on my blog. In addition, they have not placed a single ad anywhere on my site.

I understand they might not have had advertisers that lined up with my posts, but there is no excuse for not spidering the rest of my blog. If they would have hit my XML sitemap they might have found a post did line up.

\I am going to give Text-Link-Ads another week to see what comes of their service. If they haven’t spidered a good portion of my site by then, I am going to switch to Kontera and see what they can do.

Does anyone else have experience with Text-Link-Ads vs. Kontera?

Some of you might notice a new subscription form plunked in the middle of my blog. I promise I will get around to integrating it in a more appealing way, but after what I learned today, it was very important that I get the form up as soon as possible.

I was doing some research on how Feedburner calculates the subscriber count that is displayed in the Feedburner chicklet. It appears that subscribers who sign up through RSS readers are not counted in the same way as those who subscribe via email.

I was reading a very detailed post on how Feedburner calculates the number of subscribers to a feed and I learned that readers who subscribe through a feed reader are estimated each day, while those who subscribe via email are COUNTED every day.

That means that if you want a more reliable Feedburner subscriber count, you should encourage your readers to subscribe via email rather than in a reader.

To do this, you have to log into your Feedburner account and click on the feed you want people to subscribe too. Then turn on the subscribe through email function. You will then be able to copy and paste the subscribe code to your blog. It’s that simple.

Anyone else have some Feedburner words of wisdom?

Today on Compute This we will close out the Ultimate Upgrade Sale, let you know what might ne in Apple’s future (the rumor mill is churning again), and of course take your calls!

You can call in to the show between 10 and 11 CST at 1-800-TALK-UNL. Listen live online at http://www.kfor1240.com.

For those of you who missed it, here is the video of the previous show:

I will admit that I was a little slow getting on the Twitter bandwagon. I just didn’t understand how posting short little updates about what I was doing would benefit me or my business efforts in any way. After all, I hardly ever touch my MySpace, Facebook, or other social networking platforms as it is.

One day on a whim I set up a Twitter account and subscribed to a few friends like Shoemoney and Jenstar. I watched as Jeremy used twitter to bring additional traffic to his blog and connect with his readers in a new and interesting way.

When you use Twitter, you post very brief updates on what you are doing at the moment. The website supports mobile integration, so you can subscribe to SMS alerts on your favorite people or update your own twitter right form your cell phone.

The more I started using Twitter, the more I got to know about some of the people I follow online and the more I realized that this is something that could be HUGE in building my brand, building my traffic, and in turn building my business revenue.

I started manually syndicating my blog posts to twitter when I realized that there is a service called Twitterfeed that does it all for you automatically!

Twitterfeed monitors your blog’s RSS feed and then syndicated new entries to your feed directly to your Twitter. From what I can see online, usage of the service is growing rapidly - so rapidly their server can’t seem to keep up. I actually could not sign up for an account yesterday because their server was down.

Before every MLM freakaziod out there starts spamming people on Twitter, you should note that there is a right way and a wrong way to use Twitter and maintain the effectiveness of the platform. Technosailor posted about the Golden Rule of Twitter Marketing and it is a good read. He gives an example of how NBC’s Today Show has a spammy twitter that 700-some suckers follow for some reason.

I am loving Twitter, and by syndicating my blog posts to my Twitter followers, I am sure I will increase my readership as well. you can follow me on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/thorschrock.

I have spent the past couple days in Las Vegas at Leadscon 08. This is the first conference that separated lead generation from the affiliate marketing space. Some people don’t really think there is much of a difference between lead generation and affiliate marketing, and others say it’s about time that someone gave lead gen its own conference.

After two days of sessions, networking and learning, I can tell you first hand that Jay Weintraub’s Leadscon conference was a smashing success.

I arrived Wednesday morning and immediately went to work distributing the last of the Top Affiliate Challenge t-shirts to attendees (Leadscon put a Top Affiliate Challenge piece in their tote bag for us). With that bit of work out of the way, I hit a couple sessions to get a feel for how the conference was going to unfold.

Shortly thereafter I cruised the exhibition hall and talked to a bunch of companies that had some pretty innovative products.

One of the first booths I hit was the Mobile Messenger booth. They had some pretty cool technology that allows you to outsource the delivery of subscription content to mobile devices. If you want to start your own subscription service like horoscopes, jokes, ring tones or the like, Mobile Messenger sets up a $10/month revenue share between you, the mobile carrier, and Mobile Messenger. Lets just say that started my idea factory rolling!

The NeoHire booth looked like fun, even though I had no idea what they did. I introduced my self and learned that they are a professional headhunting service. If you want to hire a big-wig from another company to work for you, you tell these guys who you want and they go get it.

The guys in the booth were very interested in Top Affiliate Challenge and it would be awesome to find a way to work them into the show. I have the feeling we will be talking with them again soon.

Then I came across a booth that said they were an alternative to Yahoo and Google. Any alternatives to the Google monster always interest me, so I stopped to learn more. Reply.com is an alternative to Google Adwords. Rather than buying clicks on your ads, you buy qualified leads from them. The leads are vetted to ensure they are legit and then the marketplace determines the value of the lead through a real-time bidding process.

Their site launches this month. It’s an innovative idea that would probably work really well. Rather than trying to get a click and then convert that click, with Reply.com someone else does all of that work and all you have to do is close the lead. Personally, I would rather close sales than generate clicks any day

As I mingled about, I spotted a familiar face from Affiliate Summit West 08. Jessica Parnell from CXdigital was carrying one of the cool bags they gave away at the Summit (which my wife is STILL kicking herself for not getting while she was at ASW - send me another one :-p). I stopped her to say hi and she asked about Top Affiliate Challenge.

I told her some of the companies we had on board as sponsors and some other s that we are closing on this month. At this time we still have a team sponsorship available, so I encouraged her to snap it up. She seemed pretty interested so I got some follow up work to get done when I get home.

Of all the websites that were discussed in the sessions, I was most impressed with www.mint.com. Mint.com is a personal finance website that allows you to track all of your different bank accounts, credit card accounts, 401K accounts, and more from one interface. This is an awesome idea, as long as you are not a conspiracy theorist about having everything in one place.

Today is the first of many weekly giveaways we will be doing to build our RSS subscriber following back up. As soon as I publish this post, pings will go out to RSS readers everywhere and someone will be the first to place a comment below.

The first person to comment wins a $90 copy of Norton 360, sponsored by Symantec and Digital River.

If you have not subscribed to the RSS feed yet, do so now so you will have a shot at winning next week’s prize - a free copy of Uniblue RegistryBooster 2 (a $40 retail value!)

For those of you new to the blog, all you need to do is subscribe to the RSS feed and be the first to comment when I post a prize. The “prize post” can come at any time during the upcoming week (April 7-14). Keep your eyes peeled! Sometimes the post won’t be this transparent