a million dollars? 

I was pointed to a great lens -

It made me wonder - what would you be willing to do for a million dollars?

So what would you do for a million? Me now I’m in to hard work - ok really I’m lazy but I know there’s no short cuts…..

Read some of the suggestions - would you?

Remember if it inspires you to make a lens - do sign up using this link - you get an extra $5 when you make $15! Mail me so I know  

Well I’ve been playing with Bum Marketing and tried an idea out on squidoo the other week.

I created a World of Warcraft Lens and made a sale pretty quick and it seems its doing well in the google index?

If your into free listings - then squidoo is an interesting place. Its pretty user friendly - no html to worry about and you can get a lens up just a few minutes. They have added some nice feathures to allow you to interface to amazon, itunes and other online stores really easy!

They also have an interesting offer on at the moment :-   

Refer a friend to be a Squidoo lensmaster. When your friend’s lens earns its first $15, you AND your friend will each get $5, free!

So if you fancy having a go (remember its completly free!) and you sign up using the above link - then contact me on squidoo and I will pass on any tips I’ve found along the way

 Have fun and a money making New Year to all

I wanted to send some sort of holiday greeting to my
friends and colleagues, but it is so difficult in
today’s world to know exactly what to say without
offending someone. So I met with my solicitor
yesterday, and on their advice I wish to say the
following:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit,
my best wishes for an environmentally conscious,
socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive,
gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice
holiday, practiced with the most enjoyable traditions
of religious persuasion or secular practices of your
choice with respect for the religious/secular
persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their
choice not to practice religious or secular traditions
at all.

I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally
fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of
the onset of the generally accepted Gregorian
calendar year 2007, but not without due respect for
the calendars of choice of other cultures whose
contributions to society have helped make our country
great and without regard to the race, creed, colour,
age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual
preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these
terms:

This greeting is subject to clarification or
withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no
alteration to the original greeting. It implies no
promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the
wishes for her/himself or others and is void where
prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole
discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to
perform as expected within the usual application of
good tidings for a period of one year or until the
issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever
comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of
this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole
discretion of the wisher.

Well I signed up with squidoo last year while it was in beta for another blog I had. Never got a useful back link for it and looking at its lens rank even with the weight I sent it - its really not doing much good at the moment?

But now everyone is talking about how great it is for SEO purposes….. Looking - it seems google does like anything on it thats long tail - much like other high PR sites which if like me you have been building sites for a long time will have anyway. If not blogger and articles will do you well and still are free - always use the free stuff. Also looking at how much people are making on squidoo it seems theres not much gold in those hills yet - don’t give up that day job. And as for links - well as I said I didn’t really get anything for my lens thats now over a year old. Traffic is in the low digits and I’m not sure if it is in any shape or form targetted. Seems more random - but thats the rub too - no real stats in your lens so its hard to tell - you can’t even use statcounter as no javascript can be used

So do watch out for those squidoo ebooks - they maybe just cashing in on the next ‘new old idea’. If I’m wrong do mail me here ‘info’ at this address.

I plan to explore it for 2007 along with a few other hubs and will have some fun adding a few lens on things I’ve found or the stuff I love to talk about - all those pennies help towards the million…

The Million Dollar Blogger Lens

Imagine not being able to see you favourite blog. Imagine having ad breaks while you surf. Imagine having to pay for a good speed and access. Join the Internets First Amendment:-

web site marketing

Ingenious and Innovative offer

How about “The King Of All Offers“

An interesting book. Has some wonderful ideas on content creation and worth a look. Don’t want to give too much away.

 Yahoo! for Dummies

I’ve not used myspace other than for a real profile for one of my political blogs. It just seemed the right place for it… Alas the song I had in mind never happened and so the blog died… I have been adding videos of late for my problem and that seems to be working quite well…

But as you know lots of people have been creating spam profiles.  

In case you didn’t know the plan of attack was easy. Upload a pretty girl photo to a fake profile. Run a whore script to gather friends and if the photo is really HOT then you will get a lot of requests too. Once you have a good list then you can SPAM away.

There are two methods.

a) Send out a bulletin to all your friends in one hit - if done right you get instant traffic. Lots of people have many many accounts with 100k of people. I always wondered how many of those were real

b) Comment spam your friends - create long term backlinks and some traffic if used right.

The system allowed up to 50 commenst a day - thats 50 back links a day - some on high PR sites….

OK I hear you say great how do I do that - NOOOO - its spam - you know SPAM - the stuff we spend hours deleting a day from our email, forums and blogs. Don’t do it….

Bulletins and messages are considered electronic messages (i.e the same as e-mails), they all fall under the CAN-SPAM act and you are spamming. Yes spamming. The Porn sites and gaming sites have been flooding MYSPACE with complete rubbish - so have the new flocks of IM spammers thinking they have found the next big thing.

It seems that People that sent unsolicited messages and that did not identify themselves as advertisements are brekaing CAN-SPAM rules. Yes all those guys selling you automated programs (”crawlers”) to gather address have found they are against the CAN-SPAM rules too!

Insider reports say they are now getting targeted by MySpace and that maybe MYSPACE will be getting the courts to look at some of the bigger sites. As so many were exploiting the network (MySpace) by sending out mass private messages (pms) and some were getting 1000s of friends by posting spam in the form of hot looking girls - MYSPACE started to fill up with crud pretty quick and MYSPACE got p*ssed off for some reason.

A loophole in the commenting system of Myspace profiles allowed users to spam 50+ comments on a friend’s profile with a little help from a php application. Also an online program that can spam 100+ messages to anyone’s Myspace inbox was also created.

Poker Gaming sites/Porn Sites were posting hot chicks up and getting 1000s of people to become their friends. Their pagerank/traffic went through the roof, and they benefit from the oodles of PR kudos and traffic by having the MYSPACE links. Crazy crazy stuff… who wants to think they have a hot chick as their friend to only find out its a middle aged guy in boxer shorts selling penis extendors for a living…

As MySpace grows I would be careful trying to play them. A few people have been milking MySpace and the ebooks and other rubbish products are hitting the forums - Buyer beware. Ok the PR of some pages are high, the traffic volume is great although the traffic is really hard to convert.

Many of the real profiles are young, don’t have credit cards and don’t spend a lot of money on the net. They are also the people MYSPACE wants to protect and so if you cross the line they may come after you - worse case is that they tar everyone with a large number of links as spammers… I’m sure google is looking at the problem at thier end too and so spam links from MYSPACE maybe seen as bad news…