So as ya’ll know I haven’t been posting as much because I’ve been working on my Myspace layout site. I already have a shitload of layouts and stuff and I’ve already paid for everything, just waiting for the CMS (content management script - like the platform it runs on) and the design to be finished. Found an ultra badass graphic designer to do it and it’s gonna look about 1000000 times better than all the other layout sites on the net. It actually isn’t gonna take as much time as I thought it would to maintain it so I’m planning on starting another thing at the same time, I’ll have all my time right now to set it up and then it’ll be up and running by the time the Myspace site is done. I brainstormed a few ideas, my thought process when analyzing new ideas is something like - amount of initial investment, growth/scaling potential (how big it could grow - if you’re looking at a 50% return but it could only operate on a very small scale, its still a waste of time), profit expectations, how much time it’ll take to manage it (I usually disregard setup time because everything takes a long ass time to set up, the amount of time it takes to run it once it’s already up is what’s more important), marketing strategies and target markets as well as if I have experience with these markets. Here are some of my ideas:

• Dating blog: A blog about dating advice and how to hook up with hot girls, stuff like that. I’m in my junior year of college (yup pretty young if you didn’t already know) and I’ve dated so many girls, done pretty much everything, had threesomes, picked up girls on Myspace, all that shit and I’m pretty well qualified to give advice about it and tell other guys how to do shit. The market for shit like this is huge and people are paying big bucks for dating gurus and all that bullshit so I think a free-to-read blog about it would be a hit. I could have some guest posts from hot girls I know and shit like that, lots of possibilities.
• Animal video blog: Basically a video blog version of Cute Overload. Funny/cute videos of animals/pets mainly cats/dogs/rabbits stuff like that. Again the market for this stuff is huge, if I remember correctly Cute Overload became a million dollar site in less than a year and other sites like Lolcats and all that stuff are really popular. And I have two cats that are always doing goofy ass poses like sleeping on their backs and stuff like that lol.
• Model site: Something along the lines of Babe BLVD, it’s a site where you pay ~$30 a month to be a member, and they have about 30 site models who post their pictures/videos/bios/interviews on the site for members to look at. I was thinking about doing the same thing but with all college girls and organizing them by school (only problem is I’m not sure if even just writing the name of the school is a copyright violation, anyone know? like if I were to have categories listed as “Harvard” “USC” and then like 5 girls for each school for example). Scaling would be ridiculous, 1000 members = $30k a month and it would probably have a lot more than 1000 members.
• Facebook Babes site: I actually did this before, it was a blog where we just posted pictures of hot girls from Facebook/Myspace, it was extremely easy to maintain, could spend an hour on it and have 5-10 new posts every day. The first day it went up it had thousands of views with no paid advertising. Obviously the market for this is HUGE (every straight guy in the world lol) and there’s lots of promotion possibilities. The problem with the last site was that anyone could register as an author and post pics, and a bunch of girls got mad because their pics were being posted without them knowing. I don’t really understand why they’re mad because after all it just meant that they were hot, but we shut it down after awhile because of privacy violations and shit. I think if it did go up again we could just approve all the authors and ask girls before posting their pics. or get a paki host and do whatever we want
• Lottery site: You pay $10 a month to be a member of the site and every week there are raffles for items like laptops, ipods, etc. there are also raffles for insane shit like tickets to Playboy mansion parties, win a date with a supermodel, have Lil Wayne come to your bday party, shit like that (and yeah I can actually get ahold of those things I’m not just talking outta my ass lol). Initial investment would be larger than the other sites but still not too big (I don’t know how much it would cost to set up the CMS, maybe a couple thousand?). So once you’re a member you buy as many raffle tickets as you want and we have a counter under each item (multiple items are up for raffle at the same time) telling you how many tickets for that item have already been bought. Tickets would be $1 or something. I’d probably also make it so you just buy credits and then use the credits as your raffle tickets (that way people will buy more than just 1 ticket at a time, they’ll buy a pack of credits and maybe not use them all, so I make more money).

My favorite (by far) ideas are the dating blog and the Facebook babes blog. Initial investment is very small, easy to set up, easy to promote and I’m already familiar with the markets, and easy to maintain. The dating blog would probably be my favorite idea if ya’ll think the market for it is as big as the market for the Facebook babes site, because it would be so easy to write a post a day rather than looking for hot girls and/or paying people to look for them. could also possibly combine the ideas like a Facebook babes / dating advice all in one, who knows lol. I’d really like to hear your feedback, ideas, suggestions, or even entirely new ideas if you have any. I’m looking to do this asap so I can buy the 09 SL65 the day it appears lol. So hit me with some feedback!

I was talking to someone last night who was telling me about an awesome site she joined where she would visit a bunch of sites and click on their ads a bunch of times and then get paid a bunch of money. I was like, “Uhhh yeah, that’s illegal,” to which she replied, “Nah I’m pretty sure it’s not,” to which I replied, “Uhhh yeah it is, fuckin noob.” I’m sure a lot of you already know that this is what we like to refer to as “click fraud,” which basically consists of telling people to click on your ads or (in the uber noob case) clicking on your own ads in an attempt to artificially inflate your CTR. This is illegal because you’re getting paid for fraudulent clicks and wasting the advertiser’s money. This is a totally stupid way to get banned from all of your ad networks because it’s extremely easy for them to figure out you’re doing it.

There are lots of ways to commit click fraud, the simplest is by clicking on your own ads. The next step up is to tell your friends to click on your ads. The next step up involves joining forums where you click on someone else’s ads and they click on yours, paying people to click on your ads, etc. You always get caught, banned, and they take the money back anyway. But hey, let’s assume you do find a way to do this without your ad network finding out. You’re getting tens of thousands of fake clicks a day, they have no proof that you’re doing it, and you’re raking in the cash. You do that for a day or two and then you get banned anyway. But how???

Let’s take Adsense for example. They keep data on every keyword’s average CTR, determined by the average of every publisher’s CTR who is displaying ads for that keyword. So for example if there are three publishers displaying ads for “asdfasdfasdf,” one of them gets a 1% CTR, one gets a 3% CTR, and the other gets a 5% CTR, Adsense knows that the average CTR for “asdfasdfasdf” is 3%. So let’s say you’re running a site and “asdfasdfasdf” ads are displayed on your site, you generate huge amounts of fraudulent clicks and receive a 30% CTR. Google sees that your CTR is 10 times as much as the average, and even though they have no proof or evidence that you are cheating them, they say, “Well we’re just gonna assume he’s cheating, count those extra clicks as invalid clicks, and then ban him, just to be on the safe side.” And they’ll do that. So even if you “get away” with cheating, as soon as they even THINK you’re cheating, they’ll take the money back and you won’t get shit.

So as I was explaining this, she says “well you’re one to talk, you do all these blackhat things and scam people all the time.” Actually, I don’t. Blackhat marketing and scamming are totally separate things. Blackhat means “unethical but not illegal” and scamming means “unethical and illegal.” Even the “unethical” part of blackhat can be debated, and one person could think a certain method is unethical while another could think it perfectly ethical. And if you’re reading this site, you probably don’t care anyway. The point is that SCAMMING is bad, if you SCAM people you are a deuschebag and if you’re making any significant amount of money you’ll eventually get caught. BLACKHAT is not bad, and you can do it all you want.

I decided to try out some Entrecard advertising a few days ago to see how it performed. Up until then, I’d just been letting it sit in the sidebar and build up credits and I hadn’t even logged into my account in at least a week or so. I decided I wanted to advertise on John Chow’s site, seeing as thousands of people visit it every day I thought it would be a good investment. The cost of advertising on his site at the time was 2048 credits, and I was a little short so I bought some on eBay for $5 or so (who has time to actually drop their own cards??). I took out an ad on his site, let it sit for a day and checked that stats to see how many clicks it had generated: 53. Really? I guess it’s not THAT bad, seeing as CTR’s for these types of ads are always gonna be pretty low, but seriously it really seems like a waste of time.

If you’re one of those people who loves dropping cards, I’d like to hear from you as to how much traffic you’ve actually generated through Entrecard. To me, it seems like a waste of time, as the largest number of clicks I’ve received from any single widget has been just over 100. You might say “well I drop cards all day and don’t buy credits like you did so it doesn’t cost me anything,” but it actually does cost you something: your Continue Reading »

So I know I haven’t posted in a few days, summer is a very busy time for me and I don’t spend nearly as much time at the computer as I usually do. Don’t think I’m abandoning ya’ll though (lol!), I’m still here. Anyway, I wanted to talk about a few things that a lot of online businesses do wrong that really bug me, so hopefully none of this describes you:

• Being boring: There are so many blogs that rehash the same information that no one cares about. Why would you start a make money online blog and then cover the exact same topics that have already been covered on bigger blogs? Why would you start a celebrity gossip blog and then only update it once a day? It doesn’t make sense. You COULD do these things, but you need to be creative and find a way to separate yourself from the crowd and tell readers why they should visit your site instead of others. In the case of the MMO blog reusing topics, you could outline the topics but have a focus on examples and links to sites that have implemented those specific ideas. In the case of the celebrity gossip blog, you could focus it on celebrity sex scandals. Just be creative and don’t try to fit in, because fitting in is for deuschebags.
• Looking boring: If you have some amazing content but you do nothing to capture people’s attention, they won’t know you have this amazing content and it will be totally wasted. Whatever your site is about, you need to figure out some way to make it “pop” and get people interested in it BEFORE they even read anything. Stak Loaded was recently reviewed by Our Blog Review, who said “Stak Loaded has the subtitle ‘How to make money doing nothing.’ This was very appealing to me and I quickly read on.” So even before the reviewer looked at any of the articles, they were already interested. Not EVERY post on here is about making money doing nothing, but that’s the underlying theme and I used a very catchy slogan to capture readers’ interest immediately.
• Shitty appearance: This is a huge problem that I know for a fact prevents a lot of businesses from generating business that they otherwise would have had. If your website looks like it was designed by a first grader, no one will take you seriously, no matter how good your content is, because as soon as they see the terrible design they’ll assume you’re a noob and won’t even look further. You really expect me to believe you made $100,000 last year, yet you can’t dish out a few dollars for a professional to design your site? If your site looks like shit, that shittiness overrides your product or content quality and makes your business as a whole look unprofessional. Yeah, you’ll still get some business, but not nearly as much as you would have.
• Telling ridiculous lies: There is a saying “fake it til you make it.” Some people think Shoemoney faked his $100,000 Adsense check so he would get more traffic, which he obviously would because his site is about making money online, and if he’s making 100 grand a month it’s safe to assume that most people would be very eager to visit his site and listen to his advice. Let’s assume the check was fake - it generated enough interest in his site to boost up his traffic to a point where he actually would make that much money, so he basically “faked it til he made it.” I don’t know if he did or not, and I don’t really care. What I want to point out is that some people try to lie about things like this and it’s so obvious they’re lying that it’s totally ridiculous. Do you really expect people to believe you get hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, yet all your posts have 0 comments? Do you really expect people to believe you make six figures affiliate marketing, yet a reverse Adwords search shows you bidding on the stupidest keywords ever and you know nothing about PPC? Do you really expect people to believe your blog has made you a millionaire, yet you have no traffic? Let’s be serious.
• Just being stupid: People do stupid things all the time. I recently saw someone asking for opinions as to whether he should do paid reviews on his blog. I looked at his blog and it looks like it gets about ten visitors a day. How much do you really think you’ll get paid for a review? $1? Are you joking?

After reading this, I bet Continue Reading »

I think the most important thing when starting a new blog is to be original. I’ve seen so many “make money online” blogs that all contain the exact same information and half of them even have the same sponsor buttons. It’s such a waste of time and they wonder why they have no traffic. Stak Loaded is a make money blog but it’s definitely a lot different from the rest, and that’s why people read it. This is a very important concept that some bloggers don’t understand - you have to be original and give people a reason to read your site. This can be done a few ways:

• Narrow down your topic: If you’ve done any affiliate marketing, you’re probably familiar with narrowing down a niche. Let’s forget about keyword research and just do it - if you have a technology blog, instead of trying to rip off Engadget, you could focus on a specific field of technology, such as aircraft technology, videogame engine technology, or fringe developments (time travel, etc). Personally, I think that last one would be pretty cool, it caters to a specific niche and it’s not just a repeat of a million other blogs out there.
• Have a fresh take on an existing topic: Instead of a traditional SEO blog, you could do only reviews of SEO tools. If you’re writing a fitness blog, you could write it from the viewpoint of an arrogant motherfucker who posts videos of people with incorrect form and berates them. You could mash unrelated topics together - conspiracy theories and hot babes, math problems and hot babes, fitness advice and restaurant reviews. Get the idea?
• Appeal to a different audience: This is related to the last point, and it will help you expand your audience while still targeting your current audience. Let’s take the “conspiracy theories and hot babes” idea. Instead of just appealing to people who like conspiracy theories, you’re now appealing to every straight male in the world, AS WELL AS people who like conspiracies. You could use the “about” page to make it look like the blog is written by a hot girl, or you could have a laid back writing style like it’s written by a college kid and not a crazy conspiracy nut, or you could mix up personal stories about your life (make them up if you don’t have an interesting life, it doesn’t matter) and stuff about girls. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: sex sells. It really does. I always recommend appealing to horny guys because let’s face it, it works.

Continue Reading »