Dave and Jay - Crazy Web Entrepreneurs

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably know that Jay and I run a small, fairly successful classified site network in Oakville, Mississauga and Burlington. We’ve been running them for years now, and in fact they were the first sites that Jay and I developed together.

For a long time, we’ve been trying to get the script re-built from the ground up - and now finally after several false starts, we’ve managed to get it complete… almost. We’re in the final testing stages before going live. Part of the reason it took so long to develop is we were trying to get it done for fairly cheaply, and it was difficult to find a reliable programmer who could work within our budget. We actually started the project with several coders who eventually petered out on us, but fortunately they hadn’t been given a deposit and we weren’t out any money when they left us.

We finally found someone to do the script several months ago, and he has just about completed it. It’s really come together quite nicely, and I think our users will be very impressed. Not only does the site incorporate some neat AJAX functionality, but we’ve added features that will make both administrative tasks easier, and improve user experience.

Users can now register (optional), and if they do, they are able to see when their ad is approved and can delete it when they are no longer interested. Also, paying advertisers are now able to place automatically-posting text ads that will be posted once a week. We’ve also revamped the design to give the sites a fresh new look.

The real changes come into play on the admin side. Not only have we added several structural changes to increase the number of indexed pages Google has on us, but we’ve added a banner management tool (previously, adding banners had to be done manually, and it was time consuming).

Running classified ad sites for a few years has given us a unique perspective on the kind of repetitive problems that you run into over and over. The major headache is people posting ads that require a paid subscription… previously, we’d have to manually email them and tell them they must buy advertising to advertise their business. To solve this problem, we’ve added a 3 step system: once we flag a message business, the script will check an advertiser list, and if the post is not on that list, then it checks if the user has any warnings already. Finally, it springs into action. On a first warning, the user is sent a nice message explaining how our site works in terms of advertising. The second warning is a sterner message that informs the user that another infraction will result in a ban, and finally the third warning adds the poster onto the ban list and they are no longer allowed to post ads.

Jay and I are both really pleased with how this script has turned out, and we may even decide to package it as an electronic product and use it as a new product we can sell for money. I’ve always wanted to have a library of high quality scripts to sell from a website.

Good Profits.

I have to say, Dave’s take on Google’s recent actions was quite interesting…

The only thing I can really say about it this is: what about it really surprises anyone? Name one country or big corporation who hasn’t gotten a taste of real power and not changed because of it.

That being said, I’m not totally convinced that everyone has their facts straight. Given the way search engines operate, it is entirely possible that this “attack” is really just Google’s way of heavily de-emphasizing blogs and links from blogs.

A little over a year ago, blogs were considered the defacto SEO tool for both blog and ping style indexing tactics and link building - but now that blogs are so mainstream, perhaps Google simply decided a change was needed, and in this case the change was noticed by an extremely vocal segment of the online population… bloggers.

Another theory would be that services like Payperpost are essentially a variant of link brokers, so if Google is specifically targeting people earning money through this sort of monetization, is it really evil or just an extension of cracking down on link sellers?

Regardless of who is right or wrong, in the long term I do believe Google is positioning itself to be our online “police” - but the fact of the matter is, we all want them to do it. Their attempts to filter the information may suck for those of us who depend on their traffic, but for the common person who is just looking for information, all this effort is perfectly justified. Now if we start seeing people having trouble because they use YPN instead of Adsense, then we’ll know they’ve gone too far - but until then, I think we can cut them some slack.

The other day, I mentioned a problem I’ve had with Adsense Deluxe on The Ancient Standard, and upgrading seems to have lessened the problem, as I’ve seen less of a descrepancy yesterday and today. However, I’m still seeing more clicks reported in my stats than in Google Adsense, so I’m not quite ready to accept there is a problem with the stats quite yet.

My next plan of action is to switch to a completely different Adsense plugin. I’m going to try Shylock Adsense; one thing I really like about this plugin is that it allows you to schedule Adsense to show up later, after the fact. So, I can set it so that no Adsense is displayed in a post until it’s more than 7 days old or something.

This will allow me to keep the homepage Adsense free, without having to remember to go in later and add Adsense to each post.  I’m hoping that removing all Adsense from the homepage will help increase the conversion of new visitors to regular readers.

So, my quest to solve the mystery of the missing Adsense clicks continues, I will keep you posted!

Good Profits.

It looks like Google is all but declaring open war on the Blogosphere, attacking alternative sources of monetization that don’t line up with their idea of how the Internet landscape should run. The latest victim is paid postings. PPP CEO Ted Murphy has announced that the big G has started reducing the PR of blogs in their network to 0 from whatever they had previously. Penalties against other review post services can’t be far behind.

Google has been warning about the coming storm for a long time, but they are playing a dangerous game. Policing the Internet is an extremely ambitious and possibly impossible undertaking, but they seem determined to do their best to enforce their view of how website monetization should work on everyone.

The problem I see Google encountering in the long run is that ultimately the Internet is based on good content, not Google. John Chow’s blog is a prime example of this, he had been penalized heavily by Google long before the PR reductions hit, but people had interest in what he had to say and the Google slap he got didn’t hurt him at all. In fact, I bet it even increased his readership, because everyone was talking about it and building awareness of him. John believes Google is irrelevant, and one Blogger doesn’t really change anything despite how big they are, but if more and more people adopt that philosophy, Google may run into a problem.

I understand Google has a really delicate balance to maintain when looking out for the well-being of their advertisers, but more and more they are setting themselves up as the totalitarian dictatorship over the rebelling webmasters… and if history has taught us one thing, it’s that no empire lasts forever.

Good Profits.

I have to confess, as much as I tried, I just couldn’t force myself to watch the entirety of episode 12…

It’s not because I was bored, at least not in the same sense as Dave was “bored”… Some part of me found it quite interesting, however what turned me off was that a show in this genre picked such absolute horrible competitors.

The “IM” world is full of people of varying success, but there are a lot of people out there who try really hard and are successful, but just haven’t taken their business to the next level of actually being a “millionaire”.

So to me, seeing the finalists having so little credibility and having to create their own product seemed entirely superficial, showcasing exactly what is wrong with the industry as a whole!

/rant off

That being said, this article is supposed to be about who I think will win, not why I’m annoyed at the show. :)

My personal vote is for Charles Trippy - while I’m not going to buy his product, I do think it’s rather intriguing and I think it would appeal to a lot of people, even those who aren’t in the IM industry.

Normally, in competitions like this, I assume that when a male is going up against even a semi-attractive female… I know that sounds incredibly sexist, but that’s human nature - and consider that this is Internet Marketing… and on a geeky reality TV show, the demographic is surely mostly male.

However, in this case I think Charles will take the win because he has an interesting product (if I was 8 years younger and more socially adept I would buy it), whereas Jaime is presenting a product that really makes no sense - before the show, she had a government job and then she quit the job to come on the show. Now she’s qualified to teach people how to become successful in 12 weeks!!! WOW.

The sad thing is, Dave is probably right, and people will look at the bonuses and hit the buy button… *shakes his head in frustration*

Ah well, the world is rarely fair…

Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing a strange thing with the statistics reporting over at the Ancient Standard… the stats have been reporting more adsense clicks than my Google account was, and I’ve been noticing a lot of visits from blank pages of spam domains. I’ll have to admit, I’m a bit slow on the uptake, so it took me a while to surmise that something wasn’t quite right.

Last night I did a little searching and I found this page… I wasn’t able to find any other information about this exploit, but the words…

“This vulnerability reminds me of the the old Hacker movies, where a worm is released that steals random pennies from unsuspecting victims. This vulnerability is the closest I have seen to this scenario.”

…sounded way too much like what was happening with my stats / Adsense account discrepancy. So I’ve updated the script with the fix they posted, and I’m going to keep a close eye on things over the next few days and see if the discrepancy I was noticing on a daily basis is corrected now.

I hadn’t really heard anything about this vulnerability online or in the blogosphere, but I know Adsense Deluxe is used fairly widely, so this is something that could be potentially affecting many people. I also found no mention of this on the official Adsense Deluxe homepage, and the current version available for download seemed to be the exploitable version.

I’m lucky, the stats program I use just happens to track outgoing clicks as well as incoming referrers, something a lot of stats programs don’t do. If I hadn’t been tracking outgoing clicks, I would have had no idea anything was wrong!

If you’re using Adsense Deluxe, you really need to make sure you’re not suffering from this exploit!

Good Profits!

With all the “make money online” courses flying around out there, it’s a miracle that we’re not all super rich yet… or is it?

Well, a few months back, I stumbled upon a website where people share and jointly purchase all these high priced “guru” training programs. Now you’d think, “surely people who can access even the top $1000+ programs would be able to make some money online using this knowledge”, but after lurking about the IRC channel this site sponsored, I quickly discovered that almost no one was making any money at all.

At this point I got discouraged with the site and started trying to figure out how this could happen. After downloading every course I could get my hands on, I quickly found out something rather shocking: most programs were simply rehashing the same content or ideas, and then packaging them as something new or presenting it in audio format.

Some gurus are more blatant about it than others, but once you can read everyone’s content, it begins to become painfully obvious how repetitive it becomes - although this really shouldn’t be surprising. After all, there are only so many ways to fry an egg or build a website.

Since then it occurred to me: these so-called gurus are really no different than an “old boys” club. You have the powerful list owners at the top who make most of their money promoting the “next big thing”, and for the most part they get rich by doing each other favors - like “you promote my product and Ill promote yours” sort of exchanges.

At the end of the day, we’re left with gurus who really don’t sell anything besides “how to make money” courses. They’re not out there in the trenches selling e-books or creating websites like they tell us to in their programs.

I don’t know about you guys (and girls), but when I watch an episode of ‘The Next Internet Millionaire’, I come away feeling like I’ve just witnessed something criminal, like sitting in on a meeting at some sort of call center talking about how to fleece senior citizens out of their savings.

It’s sad, scary and pathetic all at the same time! For instance, in the last episode, we see Joel of Adsense Secrets fame coaching one of the final contestants on how to create a product on making money with viral videos, and at one point he asks the contestant “do you have any proof of making money doing this?” and the contestant responds “no, but I can show people how to do it.”

That being said, there are a few gurus who come dangerously close to breaking this mold. Ryan Deiss, for example, is probably the only “guru” who has kept my respect despite this revelation, but that’s another post for another day…

/rant off

Jay and I haven’t been following NIM, but we did watch the last episode that covered the two JV’s that the two finalists are putting together with Joel and his Team, and we thought it’d be fun to make some predictions.

Honestly, I’m not sure if it’s because I’m getting a bit too old or something, but I watched three or four of Charles Trippy’s videos and I felt like I was being lobotomized. I can’t believe people watch that stuff… that being said, his stuff IS popular (just look at his YouTube channel), and I’m all about giving credit where credit is due, even if I don’t understand or agree with the methods. There’s not too much to say about Jamie, as from what I understand, the show was her first foray into making money online, so her product will have to be judged solely on its own merits.

I think both the ideas are solid, and the fact that Joel decided to offer them both a JV opportunity shows what a savvy business man he actually is. However, there is going to be one winner and one loser, and it will be interesting to see the final results.

Charles is promoting a product he’s come up with called Viral Video Fever, which will basically be a video tutorial series that shows people how to create videos that have the same success as he has had… whereas Jamie is going to be selling a book that is a sort of memoir of her experience on the show combined with “how to quit your day job” information.

It would be really nice if they posted detailed metrics of the sales period, though I don’t think they will… I’d love to see how Trippy’s non-standard, but nicer sales letter page fares in terms of percentage conversions, but my personal prediction is that Jamie will end up winning NIM.

Why? When it comes down to it, I don’t think either product has a leg up on the other, but what Jamie has done with her site is packed literally tons (I stopped counting at 50 and there were a good chunk more) of bonuses into her offer, whereas Charles only has three. I am banking on the fact that the sheer number of Jamie’s bonuses will cement the irresistible offer for the traffic her site gets. Time will tell if I’m right, we’ll see!

Good Profits.

I have been plagued by similar distraction problems in the past like the ones Jay just mentioned, and I still have trouble with it from time to time… but I’ve found a system that I find helps me get what I need to do done. It does take a bit of self-discipline, but I’ve found that setting up a task list and a reward system helps me stay on track.

How it basically works is: you set up a task list of everything you need to do in a day. If you have one large or several large tasks, split them up to make the amount more manageable. Then as you complete items off the list, reward yourself. In Jay’s example, a reward would be playing Assassin’s Creed for 20 or 30 minutes before going back to work.

I’ve found this system extremely effective for getting everything that needs to be done in a day complete. Not only is it satisfying to cross off a task from your list, but you get a temporary distraction.

I don’t know what to call the problem that Jay and I, as well as so many other online entrepreneurs, have - other than a lack of dedication. More than anything, I think that is the difference between people like us who just ‘do okay’ online and the people who make profits that are in the top echelons of the online earners.

Yay… only a few more days ’til this amazing game is released and my productivity drops to zero for a few weeks!!

While I may be excited about its release, it also shows a rather big weakness in my… “work ethic”. I believe this “weakness” is one many online business owners, especially the younger ones, share.

What this highlights for me is the need to push ahead and put together a “work only” zone: ideally, this would include a computer set up in the basement with no games, no TV, and possibly even no internet access.

When you’re doing projects where time doesn’t matter, stay upstairs with all its distractions, but if you need to type something up or read an ebook, then go downstairs.

For example: I recently spent 1.5 months rewriting content for a new ebook, and I spent maybe 4 evenings a week and most mornings working on this thing. Yet at the end of the day, it was only 61 pages long - and since it was all rewritten, it really should have taken me maybe 1-2 weeks.

How did that happen? Well between watching TV shows, chatting on MSN and finally Halo 3, I was pretty lucky to do 1 hour of work out of every 4 that I sat in front of the computer.

Distractions suck!