Impressive Thoughts

Arlen Spector To Blow Taxpayer Dollars On Football

2008-05-14T13:58:00.005-05:00

Ok, so you don't like how the investigation has gone with the Patriots and Spygate. Let me take some of the focus off of that for just a second, and bring some realization to the world here.

1) The economy has just about hit rock bottom.
2) We're spending $100 billion MORE dollars in defense than all the other countries combined, and no one is scared of us like they are North Korea who spend 0.5% of what we spend on defense.
3) We have more poverty than any other country on this planet.
4) We're spending 19 million on the drug wars annually.
5) Our government just sent rebate checks to all the taxpayers, I don't know, to gain their trust. At least the general population would spend the money better..

Apparently to Senator Arlen Spector, all this pales in comparison to the fact that the New England Patriots broke a rule of the NFL. I'm going to repeat. "Broke a rule in the NFL."

Arlen Spector wants to conduct an investigation of the New England Patriots now, and guess on who's tab? Yours! Mine! OURS! That's right, because he doesn't like how a football game ruling has turned out, he's going to conduct an investigation on our dime. Absolutely incredible. I could understand if it had something to do with what baseball just went through with steriods, where an illegal drug was used. This is football, this is a little broken rule. Get over it, and don't spend my money on it!

Senator, what are you thinking? Seriously.

Arlen Spector, you are a prime example of what's wrong with this country.

Email Spammer Arrested

2007-05-31T21:50:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-21T20:02:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-19T20:01:00.001-05:00

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

2007-05-18T19:50:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-18T08:17:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-16T18:42:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-16T17:56:00.000-05:00

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!

What's The Point Of WebmasterWorld Now? None!

2007-01-27T19:56:00.000-05:00

My own post.
Brett, I find your post a little off base when talking about showing affiliate marketers how to sell stuff, creating spammers. So not the case. Because when you show someone to do something the "right" way, you eliminate their "desperation" of turning to the dark art of spamming. If they're making money the moral way, then there is no need to spam. If you allowed people to post specifics, chances are, you'll cut down on the "cheat the system" posts. And creating a paid forum for the so called "secrets" is a joke. It's almost like you're trying to hide the secrets for the benefit of lining your own pockets. I'm sorry if I'm a bit too blunt with my post, but that's how I see it in my eyes. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

>>>So what is the point of this forum now?
>>>Dynamite posts in the forum Library teaching people "how to fish" for themselves, rather than people promoting their own fishing holes to send newbie fishermen to.

That's because the one's showing "how to fish" are scared they will canibalize their biznesses. And personally, if the market they are in is "really good", then there is no need to hide it from others.

>>>Why? because the affiliates with wasted traffic weren't taught how to fish and never learned that you can't go out in a rowboat on a pond and expect to catch 20 pound yellowtails.

Show them "where" to fish, and they'll eat faster, and forever.

Bottom line is, I visit a forum that was started by Michael, and him and I built that forum up over the course of a few months, and everything snowballed. And you know what? I've been making on the higher side of 6 figures a year for a while now, and no matter how many people I give advice to, I still can acheive those numbers. That's what I think everyone is scared of, posting their secrets, losing their business, but guess what? Your competition will catch up with you eventually. So if everyone wants to keep those closely guarded secrets private, then guess what? There's no point to this forum. Everyone's interested in details, to hell with beating around the bush, which is what most people here do, and still get their posts deleted. Go figure. Reason I don't spend as much time here is because our forum gives me a HUGE useful amount of information for free, and I don't have to worry about my posts being deleted for releasing "specifics".

Catch all the details here. What's The Point Of WebmasterWorld Now?

Flaw In Google Adwords Algo

2006-12-28T17:55:00.000-05:00

When it comes to making sense, Google is way off on this one. I ran a tiny test with a ringtone campaign using the term "eminem" broad matched.
So I was staring at a perfect Quality Score the moment my ad started running. Then I got a few thousand impressions and my CTR was extremely low. One, because my ad was down the right side of the page. And from the looks of it, there are ZERO Premium ads up top. This tells me one thing. This term has way too many searches with too little click volume overall. So right now I'm looking at 33,228 Impressions and 59 clicks. I'm 100% certain that Google must change their algo to include some weight system based on volume of impressions vs overall Adwords CTR on certain keywords. As it stand now, they have a bottom line of like 3% CTR in order to get a Premium listing above the organic results, this term, along with millions of other high traffic terms simply will NEVER receive this sort of CTR. Period.

Ringtones and Yahoo Search Marketing

2006-12-26T18:30:00.000-05:00

For anyone working with Yahoo Search Marketings old platform, you'll feel my pain on this, and may not even know it.
Few weeks ago, I was checking out some stats on my ringtone sites. Looking at logs, and found some sickening info. 30% of my unique clicks are coming from outside of the USA. And to make matters worse, I'm using Azoogle, and in their geotargetting, they send non USA clicks to other places, some go to a UK ringtone program, some to an Australian program, and the rest go to a little program that produces about a $0.0000001 earnings per click. So what I did was start geotargetting myself. And what a change it made. So instead of making a very small fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a cent, I've turned that into $0.05 per click redirecting all my non-USA traffic to an Adsense page, and while it may not sound like alot, it sure is making a difference on the ROI. But here's my gripe about it. I'm still losting money on those clicks even with this geotracking. I'm still paying a max of $0.10 per click, and I'm earning $0.05 back on it. And this is about where it stays, they still send that junk traffic, and I have to put up with it. Good thing about it though is they have their new console they're coming out with, so I hope Yahoo's geotargetting really takes a turn for the better after ALL my accounts are upgraded to this new version. I only have one account upgraded, and I haven't checked it yet. So we'll see.

Christmas

2006-12-26T18:08:00.000-05:00

So it's xmas time, and all went well. Wife got her $3,000 diamond earrings. Kids got everything they wanted. And on that note, so did Yahoo. Luckily for me I was able to get enough clicks for them to charge my card 1,000 British Pounds. Good thing? Dunno haven't seen too much revenue on that account to make it look like a great ROI.