Can’t Get Rich

I can’t waste time with a post today. Why? I found this (someone was trying to sell it on DP). I am simply in awe. Why didn’t I ever think of that?

It’s so simple that it’s beautiful. The ultimate method to unlock the power of thousands of idiots, all without wasting more than half an hour on the initial startup. I have seen the future, and it’s made of money.

Read and learn, young padawans. Embrace the dark side, and your pockets shall be full of cash.

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If you’ve never read the blog ‘Mixed Market Arts’, you’re missing out. I was browsing around today, looking for some ways to promote a new site of mine when I stumbled across his Link Building Cookbook.  Specifically, I found parts one and fourteen.

Those stupid shout boxes

I’m sure you’ve seen them before.  Shout boxes like CBox and Oggix are all over the place, although they seem to be most common on message boards and angsty ‘life-is-pain’ livejournals.  It never occurred to me that they could be used for good (or evil, depending on which side you’re on).  For example, did you know that CBox has zero spam control?  Or that Oggix only has a simple three digit captcha?  Did you know that, depending on how they’re implemented, comments you leave in those chat boxes can count as backlinks?  Did you know that it’s relatively simple to find thousands of sites that use those two widgets using Google?  Are the gears turning yet?

So, yeah.  After reading through those two entries, I decided to give it a try.  Fourty-five pages of Google results and a few hundred sites later, I realized that I was a spammer.  Oddly enough, it didn’t bother me. That may be because the two-day old site I was promoting has had seven conversions since I started my little campaign.  It also helped that a good percentage of the sites that I left comments on were Harry Potter fanfiction message boards.  Those people scare me.

Oh yeah, message boards.  Those were an added bonus.  Some of them had hundreds of active members (again, you’d be surprised at the number of Pokemon/Harry Potter crossover groups there are), and judging by the impression statistics I’m seeing, a lot of them clicked through to my site.  I even came across a few PR6 sites while rummaging around.  Hooray for high PR backlinks (for free!).

Shady?  Yes.  Mean?  Absolutely.  Effective?  Hell yes.  Do yourself a favor and go read Colin’s cookbook.

Completely unrelated note

Do any of you know anything about capoeira?  I found a club that meets twice a week where I live and I’m thinking of giving it a try.

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A friend of mine is starting a little online business. This post is partly to plug his site, and partly to talk about everything that he’s doing wrong.

The business

Are you a fan of classic video games? You know, the ones that were made before they started putting games on CDs? If so, then you probably know what a sprite is. If not, a sprite is one frame of animation for a pixel-based character model. My friend, and a couple others, are starting a business they call Bead Sprites. I think it’s a pretty cool idea, but it certainly has a few problems with the business model (I’ll go into that later). If you’re interested, check out some of his example work. I really like them, and I’ve already bought a couple:

Right now he’s taking commissions, so if you have a favorite character, feel free to ask him if he’ll make you one. I’m not sure what he’s charging right now, but my Megaman and Cutman magnets (pictured above) cost me $9 (that’s with no delivery charge and friend discount). They’re about the size of my hand.

Now, on to the problems.

Legal issues

Both Megaman and Cutman are trademarks of Capcom Entertainment. The Final Fantasy crews pictured in his example gallery are trademarks of Square Enix. Mario is Nintendo’s beloved mascot. See where I’m going with this? My guess is that it won’t be long until he gets a cease and desist letter from one of the big video game companies. I advised him to stay small and not make an official business out of it.

The labor

Let’s say he charges $8 for one sprite. Each sprite takes, oh, $1.50 worth of materials and 30 minutes to make. Then there’s the packaging and shipping for customers that are more than walking distance away. That cuts down profits to somewhere around $10-$14/hour. Not bad, but not something that’ll make you rich. If anything, it’s a nice hobby that he can make some spare cash off of. He’s told me that he’s really not concerned about that, so oh well.

The timing

College tends to eat up a lot of time, what with all of the studying and group projects. Add that to the fact that he’s only stocking really recognizable sprites (Mario, Final Fantasy characters, mushrooms), and you realize that commissioned sprites will take awhile to make. If customers are ok with that, fine. If not, there might be some problems.

The bottom line

I doubt his business will get huge, but it’s an interesting idea. Plus, it’s something he enjoys doing, so that’s always good. Go check out his site (still under construction at the time of this writing) and buy a few if you’re a big fan of classic gaming.

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Can somebody please explain to me the point of paying for a wiki page? The Million Dollar Wiki. The Million Euro Wiki. The One Buck Wiki. There’s dozens of them, and I just don’t get it.

The original

As far as I know, the Million Dollar Wiki came first. The concept was pretty simple, and along the same lines as the Million Dollar Homepage: There are 10,000 wiki articles available. You pay $100 for one, and you’re the only person who can ever edit it. What you do with it is up to you. After browsing the site for awhile (via the random page link), it looks like most of the ‘articles’ are 90% ads and 10% content. Basically, very expensive landing pages.

Hats off to the owner though. At the time of this writing, he’s sold 1,079 pages (or $107,900). It pays to be the first.

The copycats

The Million Euro Wiki, aside from being a blatant ripoff of the Million Dollar Wiki, makes sense in a way. The Euro IS worth more than the Dollar, so technically he should be making more. Also, it would make sense that the Euro Wiki would have more of an appeal to Europeans. Unfortunately for the owner, the Million Euro Wiki is being drastically overshadowed by the Million Dollar Wiki, having only sold 75 pages.

Then there’s the One Buck Wiki. He’s stuck with the good old dollar, and he’s even outdone the Million Euro Wiki in terms of pages sold (1,529 at the time of this writing). Good for him, but I doubt he’ll ever see $10k.

Hmmm…I wonder…

I’m taking a trip to Japan in August. I wonder…nope, millionyenwiki.com is taken.

I still don’t get it

Why would anyone pay $100 for a Wiki page? I can see paying $1, as it’s essentially cheaper than registering a domain name for use as a landing page. On the other hand, it’s still only one page, and it’s pretty obvious that the parent site isn’t yours. Maybe I’m missing something here, but I can’t ever see myself paying for a wiki page.

If you’ve bought a page from any of these sites and have managed to recoup your initial investment, please let me know. I’m dying to know why anybody would find them desirable.

EDIT 12-14-07: Alright, I dropped a zero somewhere and seriously screwed up my math. Million Euro Wiki’s revenue at 75 pages sold would be $7,500 (5,625 Euro) because they too sell their pages for $100 (75 Euro) per page. I have corrected the article and I apologize for the error.

The ip phones use RJ45 connector instead of normal POTS to connect into routers and use different protocols to make telephone calls over the internet. Asterrisk is multifaceted voip software, which is not only offering unique services but also inexpensive to use. This software can help in managing voip conference and organizing voip company meetings. The internet telephony voip uses different protocols that allow transmission of calls over the internet as ip packets. The vonage, a wireless service provider, is also offering free online skype download for voip service.

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It’s embarrassing to admit, but One Red Paperclip flew right under my radar. I first heard about it a couple of weeks ago while reading The Something Store’s blog, over a year after the whole thing was finished. After reading the wiki article and website, I’m ready to crown this guy the King of lucky bastards.

What he did

As the title suggests, he started with one red paperclip. Then he traded the paperclip for a pen. Then he traded the pen for a door knob. He kept trading, up and up, until he finally traded a movie role for a two-story farmhouse. Then he got his paperclip back and used it to propose to his girlfriend. He went from paperclip to house in 14 trades. That’s pretty amazing.

Why you want it

Who wouldn’t want to trade a paperclip for a house? Ignoring the inevitable tax nightmare, that’s a pretty good deal. Plus, he got to travel all over North America while trading. On top of all that, he was famous, he got a book deal, and he got engaged. He is the very definition of creative success.

Why you’ll never get it

I noticed that his site has a forum encouraging other people to start their own paperclip adventures. Anybody who believes that they can copy his success is just fooling themselves. People just can’t seem to grasp the value of novelty. Not only was this guy creative, he was a marketing genius. He sold his unique idea to the Internet, and the only reason he was successful was because the people he traded with knew that they were part of something big. Really, some of those trades were just ridiculous (a keg for a snowmobile?). He wasn’t just trading items, he was trading fame and publicity.

The bottom line

The guy behind One Red Paperclip is probably the luckiest bastard on the entire Internet. He took an idea and ran with it, and it paid off a million times over. If you want to make it big like him, do what he did: Think of something new.

My $100 Apple gift certificate contest is still going! Go enter!

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