Well its that time of year again where we all plan what we are going to tackle this coming 12 months…. sigh…

For this blog however we are going to see a change in the content.

Most of my personal ramblings will head off onto Posterous
This blog will be far more focussed on the following subjects: -

Practical SEO
Guides, tips, advice

Experiments
Some fun, some serious

And above all…

The business of making your living online

Automation
Outsourcing
How to’s

Anyway.. Thats the road we are headed on this year

Just read this post about how to spot people with fake follower counts on twitter.

Interesting article but as usual the boy scout brigade arent thinking it through.

Its not as easy as they make out, to illustrate that let me show you three graphs from twittercounter then ask you to guess which is faked…

I know these stats because I am in control of all three accounts here (and many more hehe)

OK now 1 of those is real… but its not necessarily the one you think…

I miss the old days of creating made for Adsense sites then sitting back and watching the free money roll in. The reason most of us had to slow down from doing that was that Google started banning accounts for very soft reasons and taking all the money back.

But today they opened up a new way for us to get free cash…

Google have announced that they have opened up their Adsense for Domains to normal publishers

And now ill show you what I will be testing so you too can have some free Google cash…

One of the reasons why Google may have banned accounts in the past was that the traffic didnt have any referrer (so Google didnt know where it came from) or it took a spammy path to get to the ad page.

Now Google lets us chumps in their Adsense for domains programme we have some advantages again: -

They expect ‘undeveloped’ sites so we dont have to have anything other than a crappy holding page with reference to the domains subject
We dont have to create crappy MFA style content anymore
Many people reach parked domains through a simple type in method – thats where people type in something like “cheapcarinsurance.com” in the address bar rather than searching for it.
So we can ‘gather’ our traffic from any crappy source (spam spam spam) and then as long as we clean off the referrer we make it look like type in traffic

So heres the plan
Have a look through your domains or buy a new domain like iwantacheapmortgage.com
Put a parking message on the page that includes the line “i want a cheap mortgage”
Add Googles Adsense for Domains code.
Hope their targetting doesnt blow as much as it did
Send traffic from any spam you can through a page that ‘cleans’ it

I would also keep your CTR down to something low for a while as Parked domains will have a really low CTR – we will have to find the level that gets us in trouble..

Let me know how you get on but thanks to Google we are back in the Adsense easy money game..

When Esrun told me his macbook had died I assumed he would go out and buy another.

But he decided to do what Steve always does and throw a surprise… He built his own Quad Core Mac!

I noticed Rob tweeting about it today again and it looks as if a few people will be following his lead.

Personally I am not sure ill be able to do it, heres how mine would end up

Im looking for your suggestions on what I should write about. To make it easy for you to tell me I have added Skribit to the sidebar on the homepage here.

Its a simple service where you can suggest topics for me to cover and ill do my best to write content that matches those suggestions.

Some things I have been thinking of writing about include: -

Scraping – basic principles and technique
Making your on page links less attractive than the links that pay
Link bait starters guide