Can’t Get Rich

Ok, I’ll admit it. Digital Point can be useful sometimes. Last night I was doing a little window shopping in their sites section, and someone sent me a PM, offering me an autogen video site script. He sent me to this page to look the product over and make a decision. Note that the sales page offers the script for $67. He offered it to me, with master reseller rights, for quite a bit less. I figured “hey, why not?” and bought it. I played around with it for a bit and this is what I got: Avenged Sevenfold Videos.

(Avenged Sevenfold rocks)

Anyway, I’m impressed with this nifty little script, and I plan on getting a lot of use out of it. Sure, the default template is pretty bare, but the code is easy enough to edit. The big draw of this script is how easy it is to churn out site after site. Here’s how it works:

1. Run the Wizard
2. Insert your Adsense publisher ID
3. Insert your Amazon affiliate ID
4. Pick a default keyword
5. Pick a site title
6. Pick a few tags
7. Insert the URL to the script
8. Save the output to a folder and upload it to your server

That’s it. It really couldn’t be much easier. I’m going to make a few of these sites per week, assuming I can come up with enough untapped niches.

Oh yeah, if anybody wants their own master reseller copy, just send me a message. You can have it for $10. I’d also be willing to trade a copy for another (useful) script. We can haggle, that’s always fun.

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I know the makers of Comment Kahuna probably created their tool with pure intentions, but unfortunately for them, it makes it so easy to spam your links all over the place. It also happens to be free to download and use, so if you’re partial to the darker side of SEO, you may want to give it a look.

Yes, I know it’s been around for months, but I hadn’t given it a try until today. Cry about it.

What it is

Comment Kahuna is a neat little program that goes out and finds blogs that don’t use the nofollow tag in their comments. Without the nofollow tag in place, comments you leave on blogs count as backlinks (assuming you include your URL). Anyway, you plug in a keyword, specify what platforms to search on (Wordpress, livejournal, etc), and it comes back with a nice list of blogs ranked from highest pagerank to lowest. You then select which blogs you want to leave comments on and Comment Kahuna queues them up for you to spam read.

Oh, I forgot to mention that it also lets you pre-populate the comment fields (name, URL, email address) and has a nice little area where you can copy and paste your comment. There’s no way this thing could be used for evil, right?

Giving it a try

If you can’t get backlinks honestly, go out and steal them. I’ve been trying to optimize one of my new websites, and so far the going has been slow. I’ve never tried blackhat stuff before, so I figured a few dozen PR5+ links from old, unused blogs wouldn’t hurt anybody. I fired up Comment Kahuna and went to work.

First of all, I noticed that it’s fairly useless for Livejournal. Secondly, I noticed that the free Wordpress service has close to no spam control. Several dozen high-PR backlinks later, I was pretty happy.

Then it stopped working

I don’t know what happened. The program crashes when I run it now. I’ve uninstalled/reinstalled it four times and I still get the same error. I’m a little disappointed. Maybe it’s a Vista thing.

Ruling

If you’re looking to do some small-time spamming, Comment Kahuna is your friend. Since it’s free, I can’t think of any reason you wouldn’t want to give it a try (other than ethics).

One more thing

While I’m on the subject of shady SEO, here’s another tactic I’m trying: Referrer Bombing. Nickycakes has written a couple of decent articles on the subject, and it’s pretty easy to implement so I’m giving it a try.

How to implement (short version):

1. Download the Stumbleupon toolbar.
2. Download Refcontrol.
3. Download AutoIT.
4. Write script for AutoIT to click your left mouse button once every three seconds five thousand times (it’s like five lines of code, go read their help documentation. If you have absolutely no familiarity with coding, send me a message).
5. Use Refcontrol to set your referrer to whatever site you’re trying to promote.
6. Run script, put mouse cursor over Stumble button.
7. Go to bed.

Doing this will put your site’s URL in the logs of every site you visit, and some of those logs are indexed by Google. This technique is not bullet proof. If whatever site you stumble upon resizes your browser, or you run into a site with an expired certificate, the whole thing grinds to a halt (this can be corrected with a more complex script). Also, if your girlfriend happens to sit down at your computer when it’s set to click once every three seconds, she will become very confused. Still, it’s something to try.

EDIT:  Comment Kahuna is suddenly working again.  Definitely an OS issue.

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Six hours in a car today with nothing but a few heavy metal and trance CDs has given me plenty of time to come up with ideas. I think I need to listen to more trance music, because I’ve come up with not one, but two good (in my opinion) topics for today’s post. Since yesterday’s entry was a thinly-veiled cop-out post, I’ll make up for it by writing about both.

Split Personalities

One of my clever readers asked a valid question the other day. It turns out that he found my Wickedfire username, which is alexb. He wanted to know which was my name: alexb or Geoff? Well, both. Alex is my first name, Geoff is my middle name. This brings up an important question: Why would I split my online identity? Well, there are two reasons:

1. I wanted to keep my personal blog separate from this one. It’s really not that interesting anyway, but I’d prefer to restrict that one only to friends and family.
2. I have split opinions about making money online. One side (Alex) wants to learn all he can about how to make money online, including blogging for bucks, affiliate marketing, pretty much anything. When I’m posting under my first name, I ask lots of questions and am not afraid to try new things. The other side of the coin (Geoff) hates the whole concept of making money online. That’s where this site comes into play. I created this site because I was sick of all of the John Chow wannabes, and I wanted to stomp all over their misguided optimism while explaining why their tactics and techniques would never work.

As you can see, I’ve got a Jekyll/Hyde thing going on here. Just like being arrogantly humble, I’m a walking oxymoron. I tried to keep things simple by just writing under both of my names and restricting one behavior to each name. Of course, that’s not working so well anymore, so I might as well get it out in the open. For the rest of you, I’d recommend keeping things simple and writing under only one name, or never, ever mixing your pseudonyms. At least I got this out in the open before I get supremely wealthy and famous. Can you imagine how embarrassing it would have been to bump into two people at the same time who knew me by different names?

A Blogging Experiment

I’ve mentioned before that I really, really want to take a trip to Japan. In fact, that’s one of the primary reasons I started investigating affiliate marketing. Since I’m not making much progress on it, I’ve decided to try a new approach. As soon as I can find a good domain name (iwanttogotojapan.com and sendmetojapan.com are taken), I’m going to start a new blog about just that: Sending me to Japan. I’ll just let the Internet pay for my trip.

I’ll try to find some related affiliate offers to promote on the site, but I’m going to try to get the majority of the money I need from donations. Of course, I don’t like getting something without giving something in return, so I figured I’d take 20% of whatever each person sends me and pick them up something while I’m over there. In other words, a $5 donation would get you something from a 100 Yen store (kinda like a dollar store, so probably some cheap trinket or chopsticks), while a donation of $100 would get you $20 worth of Japanese knickknacks. I’d also be updating 3-4 times a week with news on my feeble attempts to learn the language (I’m only going as far as speaking it. Squiggly lines are impossible to read), what I plan on packing, where I plan to visit, why I want to go to Japan, who I’m staying with while I’m there, etc. With a little bit of promotion, I think this idea could possibly work. Any thoughts?

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Special thanks to Jason for making me aware of this.

Check out this neat little tool I found today. It analyzes your Feedburner feed and outputs the data in a nice graphical format. It’s nice to see that my subscriber base is growing at an exponential rate.

There are a couple of other graphical outputs as well. I don’t know if this tool is useful on a practical level, but it’s certainly nice to see some good-looking graphs.

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Today’s post will be brief. You can blame Super Smash Brothers Brawl.

It’s nice to be able to charge $50-$100 an hour for my server administration skills. Unfortunately, there’s a big difference between being able to charge that much and actually charging that much. I actually have to find clients before I can start counting all of that money.

Luckily for me, I found Get a Freelancer. After signing up and browsing through the available offers, I’m pretty impressed. I check it on a daily basis now, always keeping my eyes open for jobs that I’d be able to preform. It’s a pretty decent system: Employers create jobs that they want done, file it under one of their several dozen categories, and set a budget range and due date. Freelancers find the job, bid on a price and completion time, and wait. There are job categories for nearly every online job you can think of, and projects range in budget from $25 to $25,000.

So, if you’re good at coding, web design, Photoshop, SEO, marketing, writing, or pretty much anything else that can be done online, head over and take a look (remember, the service is free for people looking for jobs). I’ve already bid on several available opportunities, so I’m going to sit back and wait (and play Smash Bros.). Good luck bidding against the hordes of overseas workers who can do it cheaper, faster, and better than you can.

My contest for five free somethings is still going. Go enter!

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