This is why people don’t like Myspace.

I’d also like to reiterate that Host Gator is the worst hosting company in the history of the internet. They decided to reset my password for their own amusement again, without prior notification of course, and then made me change it to something new, saying I couldn’t use any of the passwords I had used in the past. This happened a little while ago and today I tried logging into my FTP account but of course I couldn’t remember the new password they had given me. So now I can’t login to my FTP which also means I can’t login to my cpanel. If you try to visit this site and it doesn’t show up one day, you now know the reason: Host Gator = FAIL.

You work all the time, you risk money, you lose money, you struggle with important decisions, and you’re just stressed the fuck out all the time. Too much stress is very unhealthy not only because it makes you age a lot faster (it does), but also because it makes you not think straight and you might end up making the wrong decisions, or playing it too safe. When I start a new venture, be it a new site, a new ad campaign, or whatever, I definitely spend a lot of time planning it out and making sure everything looks good, but I don’t think, “Oh shit this is so huge, if it fucks up, I’m gonna lose a lotta money and be pissed as hell.” I took a risk awhile ago with a really obscure offer that I thought I could push, spent about $1000 total and made less than half of it back, but I really didn’t care, just said fuck it and called it a day. A couple of my friends thought I was crazy and they said they’d never have spent so much money like that right off the bat, and if they had, they’d have been extremely pissed and stressed out that it didn’t work out. But here’s what I think - it doesn’t really matter. Losing a few dollars really doesn’t impact my life or ruin any of my other campaigns. It’s not like I gambled away my life savings. So it’s not really that big a deal. If you get into the mindstate “oh I can’t do this, I can’t do that, it’s too risky” you’ll never make any money.

If you’ve ever taken a test skills or study skills class, they also tell you not to stress too much about tests. It’s been proven that if you go into it thinking “holy shit this is a huge test, if I fail it my life is fucked” you’ll do worse than if you go into it thinking “this is important so I need to do a good job, but if I get a C instead of an A it’s not like it’s gonna kill me.”

If you’re way too stressed, you might want to try changing up the way you think. The next best cure for stress is comedy (not sex, surprisingly), so hit up those torrents and download a few movies and just sit back and have fun. I also recently had a funny conversation with some chick who messaged me on Myspace (yeah I have a Myspace, sue me lol … seriously Myspace is a great place to meet girls, and HOT ones, if you haven’t tried it I definitely recommend it ). At first I just blew her off but I was with one of my buddies from highschool and he thought it would be funny to be really mean to her, just for kicks (lol). Here’s the convo, along with a little commentary, hopefully it gives you a few laughs:

random slut: hey stud i answered your paper
me: lol thanks
her: im hannah did you see my pic yet?
me: nah im at work
her: ok but im very hot so you might want to put some shades on or you’ll burn up im all for making a man horny
me: [ignores her]
her: if you want ill give you pleasure before bed
me: lol wtf
her: well you know how it is you tell me what you want to do to me and ill respond in that way
me: wtf you talkin about
her: what do you mean wtf i was talking about making you horny
me: [ignores and hopes she wont say anything else]
her: [waits awhile]
her: whats happenin babe?
me: yo bitch i just made a fatass sandwich and stuck it in my ass and farted real loud bet u still wanna eat it
her: ohh baby i woulnt eat it but i’m horny and in need of a sex mate i wana fuck till i cant fuck nomore
me: ur so fuckin ugly i cant stand lookin at u bitch dig a hole and bury ur fat ugly ass
her: what happened 2 whats happenin babe an hey sexy no writin no see i really want u
me: yo i tell you what you should do, take a shit and put it between some bread and eat it like a fuckin sandwich. do that shit bitch
her: knw what youre an ass an 2 think i was interested in u .ughh
me: hell to the yeah bitch

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’m back! I haven’t posted in awhile because I’ve been researching a few new ideas and trying to decide what to do next. I started peddling ringtones a little while ago, something that most people don’t want to get into because it’s ultra competitive and there’s literally no way to rank for it unless you have a million dollar budget, which makes all your SEO knowledge useless and leaves you to just PPC and social networks. But at the same time, a lot of advertisers don’t like social network traffic (read: “Myspace”) so that leaves you with just PPC. And with millions of other people PPC’ing the same ringtone offers as you, it doesn’t seem very appealing. So I knew I didn’t want to drop six figures into a PPC campaign for something I had no experience with, but I wanted to try it anyway and see how I’d fair.

I picked a couple offers from different networks and started running basic ads, including a few different artist and song names and targeting those keywords rather than just “ringtones” or “hiphop ringtones” in general, which would have been way too expensive. That’s about it really, I redirected them through a domain I had sitting around, didn’t even buy a new one or create a landing page or anything. And while I’m not gonna be able to buy a new Benz after doing this, it’s surprisingly easy to pull in an extra $50-100 a day for literally ten minutes of work. I’d say that’s definitely worth it.

But ringtones aren’t the only thing I’ve been doing. I was checking out DN Scoop a couple weeks ago and saw a Myspace layout site going for $600,000. Yeah, you read that right. If I had been drinking milk it would have shot out of my nose, so I decided to do a little research and see exactly how the fuck this site was worth the price of a new house. Apparently the guy who owns it is an 18 year old CS addict making $30k a month because of the sheer volume of traffic he receives and the huge number of ads slapped up in the most blatantly ridiculous places. So I thought, “Hey, I’m the motherfucking king of Myspace marketing, maybe I should look into starting a Myspace layout site … LOL!” I started talking to a few people who ran layout sites and learned a lot about how to start one and how they generate traffic, and THAT’S when I decided I wanted to do it. Why? Because the huge majority of these guys have no idea what SEO is. They barely understand link building. And shit, I know my SEO, I know my social network marketing, I should be able to rape these fuckers and rank in no time.

Most of these sites buy a script that basically generates the site for them and all they have to do is upload layouts into a folder on their server and it displays them on the site (like uploading themes to Wordpress). My first idea was to scrap that idea and customize a Wordpress theme to look like a layout site, since we all know Wordpress is the king of SEO’ing itself (grammar? lol). I could also have an RSS feed where people can subscribe to be notified of new layouts. It would also be pretty easy to buy some bullshit links on DP as well as network with other Myspace layout sites, since there are just SO MANY of them. Most of them don’t understand the concept of anchor text and they just link to each other using whatever the fuck they feel like, such as “Joe Blow’s Site!” And yeah that helps if you have a shitload of links but if he had just added the word “layout” in there it would have taken an extra half a second to type and generated a lot more traffic. It actually seems pretty easy, and the costs are extremely low (I could set up the entire thing and have thousands of layouts on there for less than $1000), so I’m pretty sure I’m gonna go ahead and do it. If anyone has any ideas (or sites somewhat related to Myspace / layouts and you want to trade links), let me know!

A lot of Facebook groups related to making money, affiliate marketing, network building, etc have been popping up lately, and judging by the number of group invitations I get, every time someone creates a new group they go through the member list of every other group and invite every single person they see. Facebook is a great tool for networking as well as keeping in touch with people, but it’s getting harder and harder to filter through all the bullshit. Every other Facebook group looks like a copy and paste of a poorly written landing page offering something like “join my group and I’ll teach you how to make $100k a month!” Hopefully no one here has been sucked into any of these ridiculous scams.

Facebook groups are actually a very good way to build a network because people are a lot more prone to accept a group invitation than they are to join a mailing list, and groups work in essentially the same way as lists because they give you the ability to post updates and message all of the members whenever you want. If anyone here has or is planning on starting a Facebook group (I’m talking about something for the purposes of networking or making money, not a “class of 08 rocks!” group), here’s a couple tips for maximizing your ROI:

• Don’t send millions of messages a day. I joined about 15 groups and left all but 3 of them because a lot of them were sending out multiple messages every single day, and they were all spam messages reiterating the same information and sending me to poorly designed landing pages for shitty products. Send mass messages 2 or 3 times a week at the most, or people will get fed up with them and leave, and you’ve just turned away a potential lead. If you have small updates you’d like to share, just update your page to add the new information, and save the mass messaging for really important news.
• Make it believable. I’ve talked about this before and now I’m talking about it again. If you want people to believe you actually know what you’re talking about, you need to show some credentials. A good example of what NOT to do is 100k Dream Team. I saw someone advertising this on Facebook and since the girl posting it looked pretty hot, I clicked it to see what it was, and I was greeted with the most ridiculous bullshit I’d ever seen in my life. She makes $100k a month, yet for some reason she decided not to hire a professional designer and instead to design the entire site herself in Microsoft Paint. And I’m sure that yellow Lambo actually belongs to her and she didn’t just steal the picture from Google Images. Let’s be serious - if you want people to believe you’re making money, at least make yourself reasonably believable.
• Don’t steal. At least half of the groups that I left due to spam messaging were actually copying each other’s messages and sending them to their own groups. I received the exact same message multiple times, just from different people. Even if I were interested in their bullshit, there would have been no point staying in more than one of the groups if they’re just going to repeat the same information. That’s another problem I see with a lot of these “make money online” blogs - all their topics have already been discussed hundreds of times and they don’t have any fresh info or even an original take on old info. Come on now.

Another thing you need to know is that the Facebook Continue Reading »