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

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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…

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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..

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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

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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

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I have been playing with a few new networks and some new places to promote affiliate offers of late and something has become painfully clear.

To rely on the stats given by the network is the same as dangling your cash in a shredder and flicking the on / off switch.

Typically the logic goes something like, lets have a look at the EPC for this offer and to start default bids on traffic at about a qtr of that until we get enough data to refine that.

This is the result from a new network I am trying (Not naming which one)

Quality I am sure you will agree. In my defense I was on holiday and didnt stop the test when I should have but it was a brief test at low value.

So in future I am going to use the following method for setting my default bids. (New network only)

Work out what a 2% ctr would provide me and set my bids appropriately. So if I know that the offer I want to test is going to give me $10 per conversion on avg then I will need 500 clicks to get that and 500 clicks cant cost me more than 2cents each, run away run away….

I would therefore conclude that its best not to PPC test this offer but to throw some cheap organic seo traffic at the offer to see what their data integrity looks like instead.

Anything else is burning cash until you know the network better or you get data to support theirs.

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Its been about two weeks since I moved across from the .com version of my site across to the .co.uk version.

I did what most of us would do and 301′d the site across, some tweaking needed but fairly basic stuff.

I know whenever you do a full site 301 there are a few days when watching Google work it through can be a stressful experience but they are doing a good job so far.

Time yet for a major fekk up but so far so good…

Have you had any problems doing something similar?

Moves can go wrong…

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Over the past two weeks I have finally given into the pressure to use Twitter, its amazing how addictive it is.

So after just a few weeks I have come to a few conclusions about the best ways to Tweet.

1. Get a decent client
Many people use the basic web interface but that makes Tweeting a task like reading and replying to email. I have been using Tweetdeck which runs as a separate application and makes Tweeting quick easy and part of the days background.

2. Follow the people you like and some for promotional reasons
I mainly follow those that I am genuinely interested in but as I found these people by seeing who they followed its always a good idea to follow some influential people so others can find you too.

3. Make new followers welcome
Using a service like Tweetlater you can set up a welcome tweet to people who have started following you.

Try and make this message welcoming and natural sounding and where time allows make the effort to DM them soon afterwards if they tweet something interesting.

4. Tweet regular but not excessively
One of the main things I like about twitter is that you do get a more rounded picture of people from their daily tweets but if the urge to tweet ‘off for a poo’ hits you resist please…

Ohh and if you know whats good for you Follow me!!!!

**Update**
I have just finished coding a new welcome system using the Twitter API where if I am not around and someone follows me they get one of a number of hand crafted welcome messages. As per Mike’s comment below I have swapped these to now be sent as Direct Messages rather than public Tweets, far less annoying that way.

Wanna test it out? Hey Follow me already!

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If you use a free theme from a Google advert you are an idiot..

Yeah you are, admit it. You would have to be unless you knew what you were doing. Having spent some time recently helping out when people have had their blogs hacked I decided to take another look at the free theme scams and was shocked by what I found.

I say I was shocked, thats a lie really. I knew what to expect and I knew where to look. I have to also admit I know all this and how effective it can be as I have done some of this in the past too.

OK so what I did was nip over to Google and search for ‘Free wordpress themes’ and heres what we get: -

Now as you can see we have a few paid adwords ads for free themes, suspicious? Yeah me too…

We also have a couple of decent organic results from upstanding places like Smashing Magazine etc.

So what we will do is grab a random theme from the top adwords adverts and the top organic result and have a poke around to see whats there.

Themescore.com
I grabbed the iTheme theme as I know its a popular one.
The theme files that I would normally be most worried about are header.php, footer.php and functions.php

Aha! Subtle… They have an obvious problem with header.php as they have this code

Looks fun doesn’t it? Its encoded in Base64 so lets go decode it with a tool like this – Base64 Decoder

And this leaves us with: -

So in basic terms the spammer here has chosen to use an eval() in php and encode it in Base64. The php handler on the server using the theme will nip off and evaluate or execute the php it gets from the decoded base64 stuff. The upshot of all this is that the code above will insert links in the header of the blog using the theme. The spammer has also made efforts to use a number of domains that he controls so he can keep going if one or more gets killed and he has made the code as complicated as possible to make most users powerless to pick through what its doing.

As a side note, this guy has been doing this for over 2 years that I know of and Google have been getting paid by him all that time to help spam your blog!

Shocked yet? OK I can see you are a hardened SEO so lets get on with the next one

Freewordpressthemesite
Next adwords ad, random theme (Leaves this time) footer.php has a big base64 encoded eval that decodes to links for a bunch of spammy sites.

So it looks like the reason these people are paying for Adwords is that they get a spammy inserted link in every download. Now perhaps they are buying the ads and are unaware of the fact that the themes they offer have these easter eggs, I will let you make up your own mind.

The scandal here is that Google are happy to take the cash from these guys and have been doing for the past several years yet its obvious to anyone that this is whats happening. Greedy Google turn a blind eye it seems

Now perhaps the organic results will be better? Lets have a look at number one: -

Freewpthemes.net is top of the unpaid results for me here so I went and grabbed a random theme from them called Reference. After a quick look it appears clean, they have a footer link to themselves but hey so would I.

So whats the conclusion from this?

• Google are happy to take money to help spammers
• No free wordpress theme from an Adwords ad can be trusted
• Spamming links in free themes obviously still works

Anyone who wants to be sure that they are clean should consider using a service like PSD to Wordpress or at least only download from sites that you find in the organic results. If you have any doubts why not ping me a comment and ill check out the theme you are after for you.

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Like most people who make money from the internet I am always on the lookout for what might be an opportunity and testing things to see what works. I might do a test run of a new type of spam or I could hear about the launch of a new community or service and decide to do a few tests to see what potential it has for delivering adverts or leeching off visitors. This is the brief story of one of my experiments, a tame one but it nearly had a rather scary outcome.

Anyone making a living from the internet or even those using the net to supplement their day job should be testing all the time, it doesn’t have to be writing scripts and doing large runs just testing the water with various ideas can unearth a gem that will make you thousands. This time I decided to continue to mess around with Gumtree, a Craigslist like classified site with a large user base in the UK.

In the past I have done (Like so many others) simple dating spam to Gumtree where the purpose is to entice as many people as possible into signing up at a dating site where I will get an affiliate payout. An example of a longer term test I had been running is www.picdating.co.uk which goes several times a day an aggregates (Posh word for scrapes lol) the dating adverts that feature a photo into one easy to laugh look at page, when it works well it’s surprising how many people seem to find value in not having to read all the adverts when they could easily decide which of the people are sex offenders (I’m definitely not suggesting that any of them are though) from their picture. Anyone in any doubt should view this picture taken at random from a typical day

Why would any lady be worried at going on a date with this chap?

This experiment then was setup as more of a test in social manipulation. What I planned to try was a simple advert with a picture on Gumtree where the headline would be all I could use to entice the visitors into making contact. I had decided that there would be no advert or affiliate angle yet, just a test to see how many people would be curious enough to make contact based on the headline alone.

So first off I had to go get a picture, something that would be appealing yet I didn’t want anything trashy or suggestive. So a quick visit to one of the many places where people leave their photos lying around (Flickr, Facebook – any social site really) and I had a pic of someone that fitted the bill. I chose a pic of someone from Australia to ensure that they would be unlikely to see the advert.

Next we needed a headline that would draw in the curious Gumtree users so I decided I would run with
“Know my secret?” and a body text of simply “I have a secret”.
There, that should get someone curious enough to pop me an email.

Here is the actual ad

The advert on Gumtree

Next to make life easier I created a new Gmail account to collect the responses.

So once the ad was set up I forgot about it for a day or two and set a Google Calendar reminder to ping my forgetful ass when it was time to check the mailbox.

Ping… OK time to stop work as an SEO company and have a look. Woohoo there were some responses waiting for me, this should be amusing.
Here’s a few of the early responses, some people are curious and most just seem to be having a boring day at work: -

” wats ur secret
tell me please i will do wat ever u want me to do
thanks”

” yeh i know your secret, …..
your a tranny”

” tell me yr secret an i’ll tell u mine x”

“Hi,
OK,you have a very good secret.Would you like to see any my pics?What pics would you like to see?- body pics, cxxk pics or whatevever else pics.
Cheers
Dxxxxxx”

“s your secret that you are some kind of robot?

That would be sweeeet.

if this is _not_ your secret, then i have no interest in what your secret could be.

With love,(1001010010100101001010100101)

R2D2

*bleep!*”

“You’re part of a viral marketing campaign?”

Some people closer than others I think youll agree

So buoyed by the early replies I set another reminder for the end of my ten day experiment and went about my normal work.

Ping… Ten days was up, lets have a look at the total haul and draw some conclusions!

• 10 days experiment
• Responses received: 249 !!

A full mailbox of wierdness: -

And a few people even felt desperate strongly enough to send a photo! Quite what type of life you lead where you feel the need to send a photo of yourself to someones classified advert on the off chance is beyond me. I mean have you ever met anyone at a dinner party and said “So how did you meet your wife?” “Well she posted a picture of herself in the classified ads and so I emailed a picture of my manhood to her, the rest is history” – Not that often I bet!

It was then that I noticed something odd, something that would make me suddenly as curious as the Gumtree people. The second to last response that I got wasn’t from a lonely guy in his underwear but from a woman. A woman using her works email address (Dangerous thing to do – as my next post will show you)

With sudden suspicion I clicked on the email, here’s what I saw.

Quickly I googled the company and it appears they produce many reality TV shows in the UK and that their flagship show is one of the UK’s most popular daytime shows.

I cant ring that number, can I ?
Can I get someone else to do it for me ?
Hmmmmmm

OK as it seemed unlikely that I could do a good enough impression of a lady to pass even on the phone and saying “Yes the secret is in fact that I am a fat balding northerner called Paul” didn’t seem like a better plan so I pinged an email off asking what they wanted.

It seems that they were curious enough from seeing the advert that they wanted to discuss including me and my story in an upcoming show they had in development. I haven’t admitted to them that the person in the ad isn’t me and to be honest felt it was better to leave it there!

So what did I learn?

• A good advert headline will get results (If the amount of people that went to the trouble of emailing me was anything to go by, many more than that would click)
• Gumtree has a healthy if sceptical user base looking for dating (I think that there is plenty of opportunity to exploit there for someone)
• Its amazing what a simple classified advert could have lead to – A real person would now be on TV as a result.

Oh well there goes my glittering TV career!

So what do YOU think would be a good variation on this experiment and do you have any stories of tests you have run?

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