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.

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’ve been seeing a lot of people bragging about how much money they’re making blogging, affiliate marketing, selling ebooks, whatever. The people doing this bragging are almost always in the $100-3000 a month bracket, and they are so proud of this accomplishment that they feel the need to brag about it and act like they’re the ultimate badasses. Now, I’m not writing this to criticize people making $100 a month, I’m writing it for two reasons:

• To encourage you to shoot a lot higher. If you’re making a few hundred or a few thousand a month, you now need to reassess your goals and set the bar higher. Consistently making the exact same amount every single month is not nearly as impressive as learning more and expanding your businesses to continuously increase your earnings.
• To tell these people to shut the fuck up. If you’ve taken economics you know about “opportunity cost,” which is basically what you have to sacrifice to get something else, for example the opportunity cost of getting an A on tomorrow’s test would be not going out with your buddies tonight. The rest of this post will be about how to analyze opportunity costs and risks of business models and campaigns to see if you are actually “profiting” as much as you think you are.

Opportunity cost is very closely related to what we usually think of as “risks.” You might have two great business ideas but only enough time to work on one. The opportunity cost of working on one is not working on the other, and you are taking a risk - hoping the idea you choose to work on will be more profitable than the other would have been. There are three main things you have to “risk”:

• Time: A “problem” I frequently encounter is I’ll have lots of great ideas, enough money to fund all of them, but not enough time to work on more than one or two. I’m taking a huge risk when I decide what to do because if something fails, I’ve wasted a lot of time that I could have used to work on something else.
• Money: When most people think of costs and risks, they think about money. THIS IS THE NUMBER ONE PLACE PEOPLE TOTALLY FUCK UP. If you’re making $50 a day from Adsense, good for you, but if you’re working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, not so good for you, because if you’re willing to work all day, there are many many jobs that will net you a lot more than $50. Even if you’re making $100,000 a month, you might still be suffering a non-monetary loss, such as sacrificing your health, hobbies, friends, social life, or maybe you dropped out of school to pursue something that was extremely profitable for a few months but then went out of business. I could probably double my bank account if I wanted to, but there are things in my life that I’m not willing to sacrifice for that extra money.
• Legal: Depending on what kind of business you’re running, you need to analyze the legal issues and risks before rushing into it. Talking to lawyers and making sure everything is legally set is always a good investment. Obviously there are cases when you know there is a legal risk, but the monetary reward is so high that you don’t care. You need to be able to assess all aspects of possible risks to decide if what you’re doing is really worth it.

Whenever you’re brainstorming a new business plan Continue Reading »

Shoemoney, the man behind the $132,000 Adsense check and the $700,000 CJ screenshot (hit the “continue reading” link to see it), recently had a “Q&A” session where you could ask him whatever you wanted and he’d give you an answer. I of course used this opportunity for some shameless self promotion and asked him:

Do you like my site? www.stakloaded.net

and he answered “sure look like a decent start.” Sweet, so the Shoe likes this site. But let’s look at the bigger picture: my question is right there at the top of the page, so everyone who reads that post will read my question, see my URL, and a decent percentage of them will click it to see what it is. In fact, Shoemoney was my #1 traffic source that day. I also decided to answer a couple questions people had left in his comments that he hadn’t had time to answer, along with a link to this site if they wanted to find out more . So jump on opportunities and be creative with your marketing. Shoe sent me a nice amount of traffic in return for the ten seconds it took me to type that question and submit it.

I’d also like to add that commenting on other blogs within your niche is one of THE BEST ways to Continue Reading »