Email Spammer Arrested

Before I get into this post. I would like to clear up some things. Number 1, email spamming in and of itself is okay, in my opinion. Do I do it? No. Do I want to do it? No. There's just too many people who are stiff about it who will turn you in for doing so. Is it annoying? Yes. But so are these old people in Florida who like to drive 10 miles per hour in a 25 miles per hour zone. Is that illegal? No. While impeding the speed limit technically is, I've never seen anything done about it.

So what it all comes down to is money. See, the government puts so much money into stopping email spam, and it becomes a big deal if someone is doing it. Should they place alot of money into sending police officers out looking for old geezers who are impeding traffic, then they'd be pissy about that as well.

I think it should all be legalized, and let the companies who write spam prevention programs make revenue off of their products to stop it. Because frankly, the Govt is losing this battle. They have an entire universe of spam to fight, and only a United States sized army to fight it. That's like me fighting Mike Tyson. I'd get my ass kicked. So legalize it, and let everyone do their job to stop it. Things will work itself out in the end.

As far as this guy who's been arrested. There's much more into it than meets the eye. If you read, he's into alot more than just email spamming. So don't look at this guy as JUST an email spammer...

was indicted by a federal grand jury on 35 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, identity theft and money laundering in connection to advertising and sales of NIM's "broadcast e-mail" software product and services.

For a read on this subject, head over here.

Yahoo API Search Feeds

What a pain in the ass. My keyword research tool uses Yahoo search result descriptions to tell me info about each keyword I use. While the info is wonderful, my problem right now is getting it down promptly. What's standing in my way? 5,000 search queries per day. So I'm sure you're saying, "Rick, just set up your script to use different IP addresses!".. Yeah, I have 30+ of them left over from the "good ole days", and I've been there, done that. They're checking for something else, and I'm gonna find out what it is so I can get this scan done. I have 116,000 more to go, and at this point, I set up a temp script to scan each keyword 18 seconds apart, that should keep me within my limit of 5,000 a day, but, it'll take me 23 or 24 days to get it done completely if I don't find another solution.

Once I get this done, build my bulk upload spreadsheets to get these terms into Overture, MSN, and Adwords quickly and efficiently. Then I'll have to get my script running that scans the results to make sure my ads are running as planned (mainly Overture).

If I'm giving away too many ideas, let me know, I can stop. ;)

Myspace

Might I ask, what the hell is Google thinking? I know it's said all day long, and there is a quality issue. But why-o-why do they set max values of $5 or $10 per click on a keyword that is a penny term? Now think about this, from a business standpoint. If you were Google, and you had one term that had 10 million + searches per day. Why would you basically seize bidding on a term with that kind of volume, and make nothing? There are zero, zilch, absolutely no results for sponsored search. Does anyone know what kind of money that equates to if there was just one site bidding $0.05 per click? I do. $500,000 per day, from just 1 site at $0.05! Imagine if there was 5 sites bidding on page 1, or even 15 sites bidding through 2 pages. At some point, this quality score bullshit starts to hold your money hostage, Google. USE YOUR HEAD!!!

Not only is this happening with "myspace", but it's happening around the globe with tons of terms. Maybe it doesn't much matter to them? Who knows. Wasted potential...

Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool

It's amazing what junk the Overture Tool produces as far as keyword suggestions is concerned. What started out as a list of 23k loan terms that I ran. That turned into 200k suggestions from Overture. Then came the sifting through to see what kinda junk they returned. Oh man. I have about 148k left after filtering out all the crap they jammed into my list. That's 52k terms that I could have easily uploaded and wasted trashbags full of money on. What I initially thought would end up being 2/3's junk, ended up to be only about a 1/4 junk, nevertheless, could have been very costly.

Next time you use the Overture tool, think about this post, and scroll down and review my post regarding Keyword Research.

$3,500 Profit Per Day

What's so great about this number? Over a months' time, it equals out to over $100,000 a month of profits. Which just happens to be my new goal. Pretty tall order, but I only have $2,450 to go to reach my goal.

How am I going to do it? Stay tuned, I may just reveal my secrets.

Weight Loss

Not sure if anyone knows my history of weight loss/gain. But it's been busy.

When I was 17-18, I tipped the scales at 235lbs. Yeah, being 5'11" tall, it's not skinny. Went on a diet, lost 60lbs in roughly 6 months or so, then lost another 15lbs over the next 6 months, slowly. Weighing in at 160lbs, I was looking quite thin. Sickly thin. So I had to put on a few pounds, which I did and maintained 180lbs for the next 6-7 years.

Ha, then came Affiliate Marketing. Once I started making enough money to where I could quit my dayjob and work from home (bought a house in Florida). Got married, then the ultimate came. We had a baby. Well, she had the baby, I watched. All of a sudden, I got hungry. I blame my baby boy (Damien). He made me eat, and that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Hahaha!

Over the time period of quitting my dayjob, getting married, having a baby, I had regained my weight back, and tipped the scales at 231lbs. We bought another new house a few months after Damien was born, now that I had put on some weight. The stairs were absolutely dreadful.

So it was time for a diet. I tried the diet that lost me 70lbs in my teens, but the progress was so SLOW, and mostly ineffective. Then I was talking with my buddy who had done the Atkins thing. I always looked at that "fad" diet like it was junk. Well..... Not anymore. I pretty much started eating Atkins friendly foods, and the weight started melting off. I hit a wall around 210lbs and was there for quite a few weeks. In order to get going again I had to make a change, so I tried eating some hardboiled eggs for breakfast, lunch, and a nice chicken, turkey, steak, even hamburgers for dinner. May not sound like it's all that appetizing, but it is to me, and the eggs fill me up, and each one is only 20 calories per egg, no fat, all protein - minus the yolk.

Today, I tipped the scales at 193lbs. Feel great. Focused to get back to 180lbs again. I don't have that much further to go.

Hate to talk about things other than making money online, but I had to share this little story. :)

Keyword Research

It's been a while since I last posted something... Anyway, on to it.

Over the past year, my income is diminishing. It could be due to the increase on rejections from my one main merchant, then again it could be from my lack of upkeep on my campaigns. I'm going with the lack of my upkeep.

I'm not much for saying how much I make these days as it's not the $80k per month I was making last year around this time, but I'm certainly not heading out to the streets any time soon. I still am livin' large, sometimes a little larger than I should be. Heh

On to the real reason I'm posting for the first time in ages. With the falloff, I've desided to get on some keyword research, and boy, what a pain in the ass. I bought a HUGE list of company names for my UK loan campaign to bid on. I have a tool from Overture that I run my 18k list through, that produces another 200k terms, most of which are junk, and I was doing this all by hand.

That's great on one hand, because I get details, and other keywords off of it. But putting my hand through 200k keywords will take me 2 years to complete. So I wrote some scripts. Yummy, programming. If I was looking for a quick way to eliminate the junk from my list returned by Overture, where would I start? Well, best way I could think of was to spider Yahoo's search results for the descriptions of their first 10 results returned. Take those results and search for terms like "loanmortgagelendingetc......" and if finds a match, the term is most likely finance related. That cuts out TONS of time for me. I still need to hand pick terms, but this will remove about 2/3's of the junk.

Onwards to 100 grand a month of pure profits!