Feel Reality

Best Buy sells Ubuntu for just $19.99

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Best Buy has always left a bad taste in my mouth. First off, they charge a 15% “restocking fee” on all opened electronics returns. They do make an exception for defects, but that is where the problem lies… A super genius, expert geek squad staff member has to inspect your product and determine if he/she thinks it is defective. This is like handing a gameboy to a monkey; they turn it in awkward directions, paw at it, flip it on (if they get that far), while giving you a fishy stare.  I hate returning things to Best Buy almost as much as I hate buying things from Best Buy. I would abandon them all together, but I’m impulsive and sometimes my electronics purchases just can’t wait.

Today I read a headline on Digg that made me chuckle. Best Buy, in their ever expanding efforts to support their customer during a dying retail age, has decided to sell Ubuntu for just $19.99 USD. What a great deal?! Anyone stupid enough to pay twenty bucks for free software is CERTAINLY not going to understand how to install Linux. Ubuntu is very user friendly, but it’s not plug and play. Best Buy is sure to make money on this new plan though… the geek squad will be booked solid. If you can’t figure it out, and you don’t want to pay the geek squad, of course you have the option of returning the software… Oh wait, opened software is a nonrefundable. Sorry.

Projects in the Pipeline (and a note on staging)

Monday, July 07, 2008

It’s probably not good for a new blogger to skip 3 days of posts. I did however, have 3 posts on the 3rd, so maybe that will make up for my lull. 

I spent the weekend of the 4th working on a new project. I mentioned in one of my first posts that I’m starting to piece things together in order to go after the big picture. I was a little surprised by the amount of traffic and interest this blog was getting and I got sidetracked. Back to business. 

First things first, I am succumbing to the fact that it takes money to make money.  We have all heard it a million times, but actually spending that money sucks. Experienced MMO bloggers will gladly show you how they turn $100 into $3,000 but it takes a while (and a strong network) to get that touch. So this past weekend I laid the groundwork for the things that I will be working on over the next couple of months in my “off” time.  I will elaborate more as I progress and hopefully I’ll be able to share some lessons learned (and maybe even a bit of code) to help you build a strong internet marketing foundation as well. If that is something you would be interested in. 

As Shoemoney pointed out in his STFU post , you can’t show your cards up front. However, I think that the super affiliates leave a little too much unsaid. I guess there are little morsels of usefulness if you read between the lines, but the real juice is left for you to discover on your own. Maybe that is the way it should be? Just keep in mind that you can’t make money buying ebooks and trolling forums while you wait for your ship to come in.

I don’t want to digress but did anyone else notice that the people on the winning team of the top affiliate challenge aren’t masking or obfuscating their links?  Are they on their best behavior because of the affiliate programs attention or is this just carelessness?

I’ll start you off with one little word of advice that I learned from creating this blog (my first endeavor into blogging).  Don’t put together your blog engine and leave it for months untouched without a robots.txt, and for that matter, meta nofollows. You will end up with a fat zero page rank like I have. When I build sites professionally, the first thing I do after purchasing the domain is drop a robots.txt with a user agent *, disallow * in the root. Then I set up an index w/ meta nofollows and a dummy landing page. The normal site development process is done in stages (apply named staging) where you build the site locally, push it to a dev site and then when everything is polished and ready to go, you send it live.  Just don’t forget to delete the disallow * when you’re done.

Top Affiliate Challenge Episode 3 Spoiler

Friday, July 04, 2008

I caught a glimpse of Episode 3 which is still being leaked.  Here is a recap for those of you who should miss it.

Day 2 Earnings…

John Chow’s Team: $220.40
Ken’s Team: $791.63
Shoemoney Team: -7.00 (yes that is a negative)

Shoe Money calls in a favor and gets $2,000 to spend on PPC for the next challenge.

TAC votes off Ian Fernando because he doesn’t like spending his own money to win (what a concept). But, then Monica decides to not vote anyone off, forcing him to stay on.

John Chow suggests leveraging your own network (aka spamming your friends) to raise capital without having any start up budget.

Jonathan Van Clute admits to spending his own money to drive large amounts of targeted traffic to their contest sites. In a egotistical rant he brags about his ability to be net profitable. The show producers kindly show us the figures on the screen, but leave one important component out… I’ll fill in the gaps for you.

Jonathan spent $2-3 CPM on 200,000 targeted leads

at the low end that is $200 spent (which they show)

at the high end that is $300 spent…

John Chow’s team brought in $220.40. Van Clute asked you to do the Math, now I’m going to ask you to connect A to B.  If Van Clute spent $200-300 and his team brought in $220.40, then his net profit was $20.40 at best and -79.60 at the least. Definitely not anything to write home about.

Tips shared:

Blog in your own voice

If you could date any celebrity, who would it be?

Thursday, July 03, 2008

As a last minute effort to gain entry into the datmoney.com market leverage contests I bring you this entry.

I want a flip mino and if I don’t have to pay for it, well, that is even better. So the answer… If I could date any celebrity I would probably date an internet celebrity. I think we would have the most in common since I have passion for internet marketing, and I make my living on, the world wide web. Is that lame? I also have a thing for cute blondes and I like people who aren’t afraid to be themselves. 

So, I would have to go w/ iJustine. Even though I think she is dating that guy from the oreo cookie video? She seems like she would be unpredictable, spontaneous and entertaining.  However, I do think it might be a little uncomfortable being around someone who is constantly immersed in filming and photographing themselves. None the less, she would make life interesting, she is intelligent and she is has super sweet marketing skills.

in reference to:

The contest post - Market Leverage Sponsored Contest: Win a iPod, Flip Mino, $200 Gift Card or USB Pen, MarketLeverage.com and iBlogtoBlog.com.

Technorati Link Juice

I finally added myself to technorati in response to Ty Hurd’s drive to increase Authority and Rank.  If you have a blog and you are yet to join Technorati, I encourage you to do so, and to participate in Ty’s initiative.  If it kicks off we should all gain some technorati traction fairly quickly.

Here is my new Technorati profile: Technorati Profile

and here is Ty Hurd’s link exchange drive blog post: http://www.tysblog.com/2008/07/03/technorati-exchange

I will be adding a link to everyone else’s blog that participates in this exchange below. Straight links, NO nofollows, a little link juice: 

http://www.technorati.com/blogs/foolsville.net
http://www.technorati.com/blogs/www.tysblog.com

http://www.technorati.com/people/technorati/mommyto2
http://casualdiningout.bravejournal.com/

http://technorati.com/blogs/teasastipstechniques.blogspot.com
http://teasastipstechniques.blogspot.com

http://potpolitics.com
http://www.technorati.com/blogs/www.potpolitics.com

http://milliondollablog.com
http://www.technorati.com/blogs/milliondollablog.com

What happened to the Top Affiliate Challenge?

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

The first episode of the ”Top Affiliate Challenge” aired today and it was quite abysmal.  I tried to give it a chance but the production quality… scratch that… the whole effort was crap.  As you can tell from my previous posts I wasn’t expecting much. Unfortunately (or should it be fortunately?) I wasn’t able to make it through the Top Affiliate Challenge broadcast. Not because I turned it off, but because it just didn’t work. 

Was anyone able to watch the entire show without fail?

Shoemoney claims that it was because their server was bombarded and he says Thor was working on it. It’s now 12:00am and I’m still unable to get past the 15 min mark. We certainly aren’t looking at an overload or “digg” effect. More than likely it’s 10 Shoe and Chow pole smokers, who can’t stop hitting reload, pegging the Angel Fire box in hopes that someone will come on and tell them the secret to IM success.

I know Thor has posted a response on my blog, defending his show.  I really feel bad for the gurus and the sponsors. I think John Chow and Shoemoney are okay guys, but this show is just smearing their face in the mud.  The sponsors like Pecker Jam, Tool Bag and Ken’s Jewelry certainly aren’t getting their moneys worth. 

My plan was to follow the show and critique what was offered up to the public, maybe expand on concepts that were brushed over.  I give up on that plan as I see that this show is pathetic, amateurish, and painful to watch. I think I can learn more about making money from Mathew Lesko…

By the way… who decided John Chow was the “black hat of black hats?”. Was he awarded this title for hacking the poor password schema of the TAC blog?

update: I was able to make it through the entire first episode of the Top Affiliate Challenge.  For those of you that weren’t as fortunate I will go ahead and share the affiliate tips that were covered in this show. 

1.  
2.  
3.  

If I missed any, PLEASE fill me in. Thanks.

Top Affiliate Challenge is Bottom Feeding

Saturday, June 28, 2008

The ”Top Affiliate Challenge” is just 3 days away from airing it’s first episode and the controversy is already starting to brew. I figured this would be an appropriate time to look at efforts of Thor Schrock’s ”Top Affiliate Challange” to see just what is driving it.

The big picture… Why would the show’s two biggest gurus Jeremy Schoemaker and John Chow choose to participate in a low budget internet reality show? What do they have to gain? Perhaps the better question to ask is; how much more could they afford to lose? It is common knowledge in the Online Marketing world that Shoemoney and John Chow have raked in a significant chunk of cash over the years from their blog. What isn’t discussed (for obvious reasons) is that they have been on a steady dip for quite some time now and they are quickly losing traffic and reach. Lets take a look at the charts…

First up, take a look at the dwindling reach of John Chow and Shoemoney over the past 8 months. “Reach” shows us how many internet viewers out of a million, come across your website. Thor’s blog does little more than serve as a baseline. To give credit where credit is due, Thor has only been blogging since his appearance on Joel Comm’s “Next Intnernet Millionaire” so he hasn’t had the time that Chow and Shoemoney have to build traction.

I know that “reach” doesn’t hold the same weight as overall rank, so I’ve saved the best for last.  This is where you see the sharpest drop in the success of Shoemoney and John Chow’s blog. “Rank” is your sites overall rank of all indexed sites in Alexa’s database. Alexa is the authority on internet traffic statistics and they have well over 20 million sites indexed.  In the hay day of John Chow’s and Shoemoney’s success, their blog was ranked in the top 5,000 of all internet sites. Anything in the top 25,000 is well respected and a lucrative candidate for monetization. 

Ouch!  Looks like our heros were taking quite the hit.  As I pointed out in the images, once the “Top Affiliate Challenge” was announced, all three sites saw a slight bump in traffic. Once it goes on air will see them recover? I guess that is something that only time will tell.

In the mean time the shows gurus and producer are attempting to drum up controversy and draw attention to their dark horse. A week ago Shoemoney aired Ty Hurd’s dirty laundry and subsequently threw him under the bus at the advice of his “legal council”.  Today John Chow announced on his blog that Shoemoney has already given up. Ahhh the drama.  Come Monday we will get our first glimpse at what happens when 12 contestants picked to live and work together at the Hampton Inn New Victorian Suites for a week, choose to have their lives taped, and start being real. Or something to that effect.

Fuck “the dream” of Being a Millionaire

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The word “millionaire” has become trite. It’s a goal that just doesn’t have the ring to it that it once did.  1 in 100 people in the US are millionaires. I certainly know 100 people that I’m smarter than, so that can’t be the secret.  I also know 100 people that lack the ambition that I have.  So to that can’t be whats required either.  So what does it take to be a millionaire? I don’t care. Who wants to be a millionaire? 99 out of 100 people, the other one already is.

According to Google 908,000 web sites contain the phrase “I’m rich” while 1,300,000 contain the terms “I’m broke”. Hmm this doesn’t correlate. It appears that way more people are willing to boast that they are rich than admit to the world that they are broke. Plus, there are a lot of us in the middle. They call this segment “the middle class”. Which brings another search to mind “middle class” turns up 23,900,000 results. WHOA! That is where we all must be!

I could show you where the rich congregate in disproportional numbers. The online news and publications that the affluent read, what they buy, where they invest, where they spend their time, what they enjoy doing. Outcome can be qualified and quantified based on consumption. Eat a lot get fat. Eat something poisonous and the autopsy will reveal what it was that caused your condition. 

Positive thinking will not make you rich. The secret is not in your mental state, it’s in the facts and figures that worked for those before you, those around you and those who will come after you. You have to research, monitor and emulate.  You have to know what it takes to become rich in order to be rich.  “Millionaire” is not a magic word, it’s not a fantasy, it’s a status that 1 in 100 Americans have already obtained.

12,500,000 sites will tell you how to “make money online”, 24,500,000 can help you “lose weight”. How much money are you making visiting links? How many calories does it burn to click your mouse. Market Basket data and data mining made Google the monster that it is today. Use it to your advantage, the answer is in the numbers. Separate the real from the fake and act. Filter… and stay tuned.

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