This story we’ll be mentioning here is something that we people at Dumb Little Blogger personally experienced, due to which many of us couldn’t sleep for over two days.

If you’ve been visiting this blog for quite sometime I’m sure you’d know about the various eBay ventures we’ve been a part off, me and my partner are always looking for new opportunities and almost every month we do earn a few quick bucks via eBay, but sometimes our greed for money is just too much for our senses.

Just a few weeks ago I saw a thread in Digital Point Forum (You can see it here) in which a person was recruiting eBay sellers to sell his products, it seemed like a good deal, I contacted him asking for more information on this, and he was planning to sell the Cannon Eos, which is a $3000 camera and offered me $500 per sale, when I went to eBay to research that, I was really surprised to see such high demand for this product, I could have made as much as $4000 in a month buy listing just this one product.

I did get doubtful about this in the beginning, but then he asked us to use his PayPal account for the transaction, so even if he does try to scam us, the refund’s would go through his Paypal, so I guess that was good enough for us.

After listing, we started getting responses immediately and within 24 hours their was a sale, and me and my partner almost jumped through the roof, like he had instructed us we had the payment go through his Paypal account and he asked us to keep a 2 day dispatch time, so we were eagerly waiting for our commission and tracking ID, we would have stood waiting for him for almost a week, but we were shown ‘The Ugly Truth’ in just two days.

The guy had no products, he just used other people’s eBay accounts to sell a product, and to our surprise he had another thread in the same forum (Check it out) looking for Paypal account holders, the payment goes to that particular Paypal account, during the two day dispatch time he has the money transferred using Paypal express transfer to an anonymous bank account in Cyprus and very soon he is out of the scene.

It was then, the Paypal account holder and our eBay account that had the problem, we were quite safe as we used a VCC to verify our eBay account, but the poor Paypal account holder had his account limited, so far nothing has happened, but the $3,000 will be taken out of his own account now.

We just thought that we were one of the only idiots to be a part of this, but it turns out, he has listed 100s of products and used 10 to 20 Paypal accounts and had many anonymous bank accounts which were untraceable, you can check out the two threads we’ve mentioned above, many sellers and Paypal account holders have been a part of this.

We were just lucky enough to escape unharmed, but our eBay has been limited now, but I’m just glad it all ended with just that, within a month’s time he has listed many products including the Apple iPhone and the iPad, everything that would sell quickly and sell for a big amount, and if not million he has made close to it, many other’s listed 5 to 6 of his products at once, and we are unable to describe the torture they are going through at the moment.

Many of you can see how easy it is to pull something like this, its not only a problem to buyer’s, but even sellers and Paypal account holders, and after some research its hard to believe that if I wanted to pull off something like this, all I need is $200 and I can easily get more than one Cyprus based bank account with it, the money is not that easily traceable at the moment as it would have changed multiple anonymous banks  by now.

Do leave your valuable feedbacks below and we’d love to interact and discuss the subject with you people, do connect with us on Twitter and subscribe to our blog for constant updates.

The internet is surely on of the greatest inventions of mankind, it has brought in various revolutions and changes in man’s life in just 4 to 5 decades of its inception, as mentioned earlier, this beautiful innovation too results in the end of a cycle to begin a new better one, but thanks to the internet, markets and businesses today have become extremely volatile. There was a time when businesses launched one single product and existed for years selling the same with nothing new, but today firms have to bring in constant changes to their product mix in order to survive.

Below is a list of a few businesses which have existed for quite some time and have had thriving profits so far, but may not exist by the end of this decade, many of them have already shown signs of uncertainty, even they may not completely disappear, they’re sure to reduce to a significant level for sure.

1) Newspapers And Magazines -The very first mode of mass communication, the newspaper, may meet its end this decade, many newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have already shown signs of going out of business due to falling subscribers. Both of them have become victims of their own innovation, that is putting up news on their websites for free, why would anyone buy a newspaper or a magazine when it is completely available online for free, which is also a lot more convenient than the traditional newspapers.

Things have gotten too much out of hand now, most newspapers really need an online base in order to survive, and due to that their subscription based revenue will constantly fall, Wall Street Journal has efficiently monetized itself by charging its online users, but thats a different case as WSJ has very unique content, which NYT and others fail to provide. News organizations will survive, but the newspaper has a product won’t exist for long, most publications have to find an alternative to monetize their content, traditional CPM based advertising on their websites isn’t going to get them anywhere.

So far the transition had been very little year or year as most people were used to the newspaper format and a website didn’t seem very comfortable in the first outlook, but things are changing soon, this happening way faster even in many developing countries such as India.

2) Offline Bill Payment Services – Many of you from the US and UK may not have seen small shops being set up for the sake paying bills, but here in India that’s a thriving business, the population is so much here that most people have to line up for hours just to pay a small electricity bill, so in the late 90′s and the early 2000′s  people started setting up shops that helped people pay their bills, all they charged was a small commission, but such businesses turned into billion dollar publicly traded companies over the years.

Now due to high internet penetration very few people require such services, many firms that provide this have already reduced prices to cope with the falling demand, but it won’t work for long.

This is a major problem as many of these firms have 1000′s of share holders and they provide their services with the help of affiliates and franchise owners who will be affected, so this can disrupt the lives of millions of people, but this will surely make the consumer’s lives a lot better, without something like this it would have been real hard for Indian citizens to cope with the rising population.

3) Storage Devices – Now I bet most of you have a series of storage devices for music and other types of files, and one of the most judged features of phones and other consumer electronics is its memory space, but thanks to cloud computing they are soon loosing their importance. Why would you need an external hard disk or a pen drive when everything that’s your’s is available everywhere in the cloud???

Cell phones, MP3 players and tablets will exist, but their disk space will lose value, but firms such as Transcend which manufacture storage devices are headed for a dead end. They may not realize that now, but halfway through this decade most of you will realize what I meant.

DVDs and CDs have are already on a downward drive, and very soon it’ll be the same for most storage devices, but yes firms that manufacture enterprise servers will stay in business due to continuous rise in web hosting requirements. This change will surely cause a revolution in the consumer electronics market and firms have to adapt to them in order to stay in business.

4) Retailers (Hardware And Consumer Electronics) – The internet has made a deep impact on retail, especially on electronics and hardware, the main problem here is that its hard to find everything you want in one place, and this is one hindrance that has been solved by e-commerce, the cost of products sold online are quite cheaper compared to offline retailers, moreover the overheads of online retailers are quite low as they don’t have to maintain an existing stock.

A buyer may not be able to touch and feel each and every product, but he surely gets the consumer’s view on it, their is a vast variety, so the choices of a consumer are really ten times more, and another new development is the option to pay in installments which is being offered by many new e-commerce sites, so now I don’t really see a reason to walk into a BestBuy store again.

Many retailers now have already started selling online, but the issue here is employment, thousands of stores will have to shut down due to which millions of retail workers lose their job’s.

5) Retailers (Movies, Music And Video Games) - The decline of electronics and hardware stores is yet to start now, but movie, music and video games has already started, in India itself you can see many retailers shutting doors, and this all due to the recent surge of online retailers here, these stuff are very convenient to buy online as you can digitally download it or have it couriered it to your house itself and it costs less than what it would if you had buy from a brick and mortar store.

Most people prefer music and games digitally downloaded, the same applies for movies, but for this atleast some people would like a physical disk delivered as most people don’t like watching movies on their computers.

This is an industry which is going to free fall in the next 3 years, and unlike many others on this list, they may not even exist by the end of this decade, here again retailers can make it big on the net, but its the loss of jobs and employment that we must be worried.

6) Libraries And Book Stores – These do come up in the above category as they do are victims of digitalization, I have mixed feeling about them, I think physical books will stay for more than a decade, but book stores and libraries will be extinct way sooner than you think, even though most books still aren’t available in the digital format, their physical versions are available for purchase online, so that surely eliminates the need for a book store, and ebooks eliminate the need for a library.

A man cannot keep buying all the books he wants to read, which is why their is a library, but now at the cost of a book’s rental we can buy it and keep it with us forever as an ebook, so basically I don’t see a purpose for a library either.

The biggest problem I face when I go into a library or a book store is that I rarely find the book that I want, because you can’t expect to keep stock of millions of books, but an online retailer does not have to, he just has to list them and when their is a sale, all he has to do is order it from his supplier, so you can expect almost every published book under the sun to be in their.

7) Independent Real Estate Agents – As population in world started to increase, the demand for land started to increase, but the supply of land is always fixed, so it started to carry a price tag on it which fluctuated according to demand and supply, and in the Twentieth Century investment on land for commercial and residential purposes started to increase manifold, so their began a new profession which required no capital investment and all it required was efficient connections, using which many individuals made millions.

They say that real estate was a last hope for a person who has failed in life, as almost anyone can make a quick buck with it, but now that too seems quite difficult after many real estate websites started to spring up all of a sudden which offered everything a real estate professional would, could be accessed from anywhere, and most of them just charged a one time fee and customers didn’t have to pay huge commissions.

This new development was a huge threat to agents all over the world, but they did learn to adapt, these sites required agents to get more listings, and real estate professionals got a wider media to showcase their deals now, so at the moment its a win – win solution, but their is slow transition taking place at the moment, today when somebody wants to buy, rent or sell a property they have their first look online, so the traditional agent is completely absent.

8 ) Printing and Publishing – The world is going to get free of paper real soon, kids who take birth after 2020 may not learn how to write with their hands, and hopefully all of the written content will be available in a digital format, so their is no real purpose of printers, printing houses and publishing firms, so companies which make these technologies (Eg – Hewlett Packard) and those which provide such services are in great danger.

The paper industry in India has already started to decline, and this trend is seen in many other countries as well, but according to me this is a very good trend, manufacture of paper takes up a lot of energy and gives out heavy fumes, and if the prices of paper fall, then it could be the perfect alternative for plastic.

This is a sort of change I’m extremely happy about, people blame scientific innovations for destroying the environment, but I suppose its the same scientific innovations that can bring about a cleaner world.

 9) Book Publisher’s And Distributors – If your a writer and have ever published a book I’m sure you’ll know that being accepted by a big publisher such as Penguin or Bloomsbury meant Millions in royalties, and its likely to stay so for the next few years, but off lately it has been self published authors who are making it to the best seller’s list, most new publisher’s prefer publishing on their own as big publisher’s take as much as 6 to 7 months just to contact the author back.

Due to various services such as Lulu and Smashword, self publishing on the internet has turned out to be a piece of cake, anyone can publish anything, and within a few days they’ll have thousands of readers.

Traditional publisher’s need to change their policies fast as most author’s today prefer getting self published, the main reason why many still go to the traditional ones is because they have connections with stores and libraries, and as we’ve already mentioned they too are gonna go out of business real soon, so their is no real use of their services anymore.

 On To Our Readers

This is all we’ve got at the moment, but the truth is that something like this can never be predicted, many changes will surely occur during this decade, but I’m pretty sure at least few of the sectors will go out of business this decade. Such changes can cause problems and uncertainties, but its always better to welcome them.

Do let me know about what you think about this in the comments below, be free to tell us about more businesses that might go out of business due to this.

Just a few weeks ago when my exams finally completed I had the time which I required to run and grow this blog, and at that time my blog had lost all its traffic, all my hard work was ruined, this was all because of lack of search traffic, and it was then that I started promoting my blog extensively on search engines and within just a few weeks I’ve gained quite some good results.

I’ve devised an SEO strategy which I follow everyday for my site and certain things I do after publishing a new blog post, you might require certain tools to implement these, although many of them are available cracked. This does not involve my on – site optimization as thats something is extremely simple due to the availability of automated plugin’s.

Keyword Research

One of the most important elements in SEO is keyword research, as the net is increasingly getting more and more saturated the importance of keyword research is increasing, and I bet most of you know its importance, but its rare to find a practical guide on keyword research anywhere in the web, thats actually because this is something that differs from website to website and niche to niche.

Keyword research can be mastered only with experience and not with just knowledge, but here we have managed to give some guidelines to make it easier. First of all you’ll require a tool like Market Samurai, which is pretty expensive, but you can use some free alternatives to that.

When you get an idea to write a new post you first want to know how many people are actually interested in reading it, which is where a keyword research tool comes in, then you’ll also need to know more about the competition, for example, if I own a blog related to ‘Dog Training’ and I am targeting the keyword ‘Dog Training’ I’ll see the monthly search volume and even the competition.

If the monthly search volumes are good I would immediately start aiming at it, but then I’ll also have to look at the competition, if the competition is too high I would never be able to get to the front page, if its medium then I might have a chance, so I analyze my competitors, that is find out who they are and where they get their links from, which is quite easy in Market Samurai, but I’ve put up an image below seeing which you can do without it. This is basically analyzing the number of anchor text backlink’s these sites get and their sources and you can assume that you’ll rank higher than them if you can get higher quantities of better backlinks than them.

This strategy almost always works, if it does not bring you to the top it can atleast get you noticed, but if the competition is too high, its best to use an alternative keyword and promote that, for example, you can try a longtail keyword ‘How To Train A Dog’ which would usually have a lesser competition, the Google Keyword Tool itself suggests these keywords, so you can just pick one among them.

After coming up with the keywords, its time to target them with your content itself, make sure you have the keywords in your title, post and in the tags, so that once we start bringing backlinks and get your site indexed Google will know where to put you up.

Getting Indexed

After publishing your post its time to get indexed, which is actually quite simple, most people just submit a sitemap to Google and expect their new posts to get noticed automatically, but I’m talking about letting Google know about it with a bang.

Right after I publish my post I send over huge quantities of backlinks to my website instantly, by huge I mean 90,000 to 100,000 backlink’s, this way I don’t just let Google know about my article, I get it indexed in the keyword of my choice and also rank higher than usual, but how is it that I can get so many backlink’s at such small time??

Most of you have seen Whois sites and those sites which claim to measure your website’s worth, these sites are constantly updated which is why they are constant grounds for Google bots to find new content, and getting backlink’s from these sites is extremely easy, your site would have already been indexed by many such sites, but there are many smaller ones which you would not have been able to tap. These sites have a URL in which you can place your URL and by just visiting it you would have recommended the indexation of your site, but manually doing this for 1000s of URLs is just a waste of time, which is why I use a special addon in Scrapebox.

Scrapebox has an addon, Rapid Indexer which does the job for us, you’ll have to load the list of such sites yourself, put up your site URLs and just ping and within a few minutes you’ll have 1000s of links. Now many of you might ask, wouldn’t Google ban us immediately if we get such high volumes of backlinks in such a short period of time??? Well if that was the case then I could have easily utilized this on all of my competitors and get my site to the top right? So no such thing could happen.

Deep Linking

This is just extending the previous job a bit further, many of you might have thought that I use this method only for my homepage, but I generate such high volumes of backlink’s to almost every new post I make, this is something that is called deep linking.

This way I can ensure immediate search traffic to almost all my posts within just a few days after I publish them, so now this is not just a method of getting indexed, but instead I could rank #1 for my keyword using this method. This is an highly extensive version of backlinking and the results can be too good to be true, but this is where I recommend some caution.

As soon as my post gets indexed, it might be in the first 5 pages of its focus keyword, but after I perform this deep linking it initially disappears and after a few days comes up on the top depending on the competition.

Blog Comments

Today the easiest possible way of getting backlink’s is through blog commenting, and thanks to various tools such as Scrapebox we can gain 1000s of backlinks within minutes without any manual effort. Such commenting is surely a burden on the internet as it results in heavy spamming, but none of these comments even get noticed by common internet surfers, they are just recognized by Google bots and thats what matters to us.

The first step here is to get a software such as Scrapebox, which also has many alternatives of its own, after getting such a tool its time to find a list of dofollow auto approve blogs, these are those blogs which have no spam protection and auto approve all comments, which is surely very advantageous, you can either buy these lists or create your own using tools such as Scrapebox.

After making a post and having it indexed, I start up a Scrapebox campaign and run a quick campaign of about 10,000 verified backlink’s, I do 10,000 as many of them have a lot of outbound links and are of low PR, if you can spend time harvesting good links then you can do a lot lesser, but I just prefer doing this. It must be noted that in the name field I add my anchor text which will use the link I’ve put up, this is because I don’t spin my name or URL, if you like you can place HTML links within comment box, but that might result in heavy failures.

This is again very safe, I have exploited this method to its highest extent and have gained a lot of search traffic using this method, another trick here is to use trackback’s, these days blog comments undergo heavy approval, but getting trackback’s is very easy, you just set up scrapebox to ping a trackback on those links and those blogs will give you a trackback with no link heading from your side, this has got much higher success rate.

Indexed Article Backlink’s

Article directories today are almost on the verge of death, but still article backlink’s are worth a goldmine, as Google always trusts in content backlinks a lot more than those in blog comments or elsewhere.

I basically concentrate on distributing good quality articles to blogs and directories which allow a link within the post body, for this I use various private blog networks which are a bit expensive, but surely worth every penny. It’s recommended that you buy a service such as Linkvana, Unique Article Wizard or Article Drip Feed, they have a list of webmasters and blog’s under them looking for content and you can easily get a well spun article into 300 to 400 websites instantly.

These services themselves have all the resources to help you get the links indexed, but other than those I run a small indexer campaign which I’d mentioned above for each of these links to get them indexed as soon as possible.

All I do is write two 150 word articles, have them spun a few number of times, put up my anchor text links and send them over the directories, this can be a bit time consuming, but its way better than writing guest posts for the sake of traffic and SEO results.

Forum Profile Backlink’s

After getting some article backlink’s and having them indexed your post should start getting some good traffic from search engines, but our promotion does not end here, their is one last step to pass on more link juice. I bet most of you have heard of forum profile backlink’s, its as powerful as blog comments, but stands second when it comes to ease of use as here you’ll have to sign up.

Again here you have plenty of tools to automate the process, I’d recommend the best tool that is Xrumer, but I’m pretty sure that most of you will not be able to afford that, so you can opt for a VPS service, where you’ll be paying a small monthly amount for the product.

After getting your product, start up a campaign, use your target anchor text keywords and use all the links you’ve generated through article backlink’s, you’ll require 10s of thousands of backlink’s and very soon these articles will start rising high for the keyword and so will your own post which will indirectly get all of the link juice.

On To Our Readers

It’s been quite some time since we last published a post, I hope you liked this one, if so please do share it with your friends, do subscribe to our newsletter and also do follow me on Twitter to keep getting updates on the latest happenings in this blog.

Unlike others I have never concentrated on search traffic and now it stands in the 9th position, though I think that nothing can be as targeted and profitable as organic search traffic, my blog has moved and grown a lot faster with social media.

When I got started Stumble Upon was already pretty saturated and their was hell lot of competition, so a single submission would not get more than 8 to 9 hits or more than 3 likes which I’m sure would be from my blog itself, but since then I have made a lot of changes to my promotional plan which turned it all around for me.

Factors for StumbleUpon traffic

StumbleUpon’s algorithm is still not very clear, but due to a few experiments and experiences of mine and a few friends of mine I’ve put up a list of factors which you’ll need to consider to get StumbleUpon traffic, some of it is something all of you already know and we’ll be discussing about how to get them as well in this post.

No. of users who thumbed up is the basic ratings used by the StumbleUpon algorithm and its a means used by users to promote an article they like, at one point of time this was the most important factor and you could have done well with only a couple of likes, but this has been changed and the importance for likes has been reduced.

No. of users in your network as the value of your likes reduced, Stumbleupon started giving importance to your network that is the number of followers you have, the main principle behind this is that more the followers, the better you are, I asked all my friends to follow me on StumbleUpon and I successfully built a strong network.

No. of profile views is again something which proves influence and quality, but I seriously don’t believe in this as you can get a hell lot of views even if your profile is brand new, but most internet marketers believe this as a priority.

No. of reviews on profile and submission which is extremely important as one review can be equal to 25 likes, but reviews are tough to get. Reviews of you again is to improve your stumbleupon quality and you can take all of your articles viral if you get 10 reviews on you.

I’ve often seen one review make a submission go extremely viral, so I often ask my social media network to review my submission.

Type of users who like, review or submit your articles matters very much, reviews, followers and network is something one can use to determine ones authority on StumbleUpon, so I often ask a few influential friends of mine to submit my posts and I promote the posts which indirectly gains them exposure.

Build a strong social media network

Many of you would already know about the methods I use to promote my blog, I have huge social media mutual swapping network on Gtalk and we all send each other links to get votes and many times I get more than 120 to 150 votes on each social network.

This has worked out to be a fantastic way to build traffic and many of these guys generate tens of thousands of visitors each day to their sites using these methods.

As I’ve mentioned above StumbleUpon requires a hell lot of ‘likes’ and reviews in order to trigger a chain and that would seem very much impossible without such a network, I know many of you would consider it spamming, but their is seriously no way other than that.

Build an authoritative account

I used to always bring in 50 to 60 likes on each submission of mine, but sadly they never gave me more than 300 to 400 views which itself is less, this was because StumbleUpon underwent a change of algorithm and now more importance is given to the submitters authority and the voter’s authority rather than an assigned value to all votes and reviews.

After you’ve built your network on Gtalk you can easily ask other users to follow you, review you and review your submissions which could result in an authoritative account. Sometimes you can go extremely viral just after you make your submission even if you don’t get likes from anyone else.

Bring in ‘Likes’ and ‘Reviews’

After you build your network your surely going to have tons of requests for votes, so after making every new submission go out there on Gtalk vote on theirs and ask for likes and reviews on yours, before doing this I hope you’ve built an influential profile as that adds to the effect.

Many of these guys on your network will have good profiles themselves so you’ll surely trigger a strong chain which would undoubtedly bring in 1000s of visitors immediately and will continue for a few weeks.

This again brings in hell lot of exposure to your profile so each time you pull off a successful campaign your StumbleUpon presence keeps getting better and better. Right now I get a hell lot of traffic from it, but sadly I’m not able to post consistently which makes it non-consistent.

Instead of sending swappers to your StumbleUpon page directly for reviews I’d advice you to send them to a twitter page or to your post page where they can use your widget or goto stumbleupon from and like it, I recommend this way because direct traffic has lesser value or maybe the moderators may feel suspicious which may restrict your popularity.

Get on-site exposure

As I’ve mentioned above, the best exposure you could get is through your blog and StumbleUpon naturally adds more value to likes and reviews which come from your blog.

This can either happen organically if you can succeed in creating a strong community or you can send your swappers onto to your article page and make them like your article as thats better, but its time consuming and many of them may disagree and ask for direct links.

Its also recommended that you put up stumble follow buttons on your site and try to get as many followers as possible from it as most people who come from your site will remain loyal and may share similar interests.

Leverage and capture leads

StumbleUpon may give out hot numbers in your analytics view, but if you go a bit deeper you’ll notice a huge bounce rate, so the idea here is to make sure your site loads fast enough to make sure the user doesn’t click on the stumble button again.

You can cover up your blog with subscribe buttons and also fill it up with StumbleUpon badges, I recommend you to use the WP Greet Box which I think is really useful in capturing leads.

No matter how much traffic you get their are great chances that you turn 1% of them into subscribers and 3% into followers on StumbleUpon. That is why I mentioned that your presence gets better each and every time you go viral.

On to our readers

I’m sure many of you would feel that our methods above are spammy, well yes they are and I hope you get used to it as their are no ways out. StumbleUpon which is one of the best sources of traffic always keeps tweaking its algorithm usually to provide the best content for its readers, so quiet often we need to keep evolving.

Surely we’ll keep posting more on this topic so to keep up with such posts do follow us on Twitter and also subscribe to our blog’s feed and if you have any doubts, suggestions or queries please comment below or you can also connect with me personally.

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Whenever I hear about a successful internet firm being taken over by a larger firm, I kind of feel sad for the founders, though most founder’s would be happy about the huge profits they’ve made, I’m sure many of them will feel the pain of loosing control of the company they built with sweat, blood and hard work, and I’ve seen many such entrepreneurs who repent years later for giving up their first business.

The main reason for this is that good ideas come only once, and great ideas come only to 1 in a million, and those of them who give up such great ideas for short term benefits will surely repent later on, I bet atleast some of you have heard about Roy Raymond, the then infamous founder of Victoria’s Secret, if you haven’t heard of him then don’t be surprised as nobody does. This guy got this great idea which was worth billions of dollars, but he decided to sell it for just $4 million. He repented doing so as just a few years later Victoria’s Secret was earning over $300 million a year, and Raymond lost two of his other startup’s and finally ended up bankrupt jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Now lets get back on topic, just a week ago their was huge buzz all over the internet about TechCrunch founder announcing his resignation on the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt, and as expected it was the clash of interests between his editorial values and ethics and that of Aol, and so far TechCrunch has never hesitated in criticizing Aol or its management for any reason, but now I suppose that the Aol management has had enough and Michael being a regular employee at the moment, couldn’t help but quit.

Yesterday, after almost a week the former TechCrunch editor made a small and simple comeback, with a blog named Uncruched, at the moment the blog has just one post titled ‘Here I Am’ but with no text, but even after that it’s received 100s of comments. What he plans to do with this is not quite clear, but seeing the name and style it seems like a direct attack on Aol and even on TechCrunch.

There were certain reasons why Michael Arrington was an important asset even after buying TechCrunch, and this was because in the past six years Michael Arrington has successfully uncovered various secrets of the silicon valley, and TechCrunch’s revenue sources are not really what they seem, TechCrunch earns a lot more by endorsing other firms and internet services than normal advertising, and many of these are against the ethics of blogging and journalism. Now that he is successfully out of TechCrunch, there is no one to keep an eye on what he does and where he does it, so his new blog, Uncrunched may turn out to be the next Wikileaks for the silicon valley.

Whatever I mentioned above might not be true, but at the moment Aol would surely feel insecure as Michael still has a very loyal support from colleagues and former employees. I’m watching Aol and Yahoo quite closely these days

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If you’ve ever visited my Twitter account before you’ll see a decent following of 2000, all of whom I know and with whom I constant engage, but as Twitter kept growing over the years it seemed like a puny number, especially if your a social media optimizer and whenever I approach a potential client they often expect a decent following to prove my expertise in the field. These two methods I’ll be showcasing below are pretty old and I’m sure all of you already know about it, but I’m changing a few methods within them adn adding a few more tricks.

All of these are basically inexpensive, but it all depends on how you want to do it, if your planning to do this manually, which is not recommended your sure to save a lot of money and see a rise in your following for free, but at the same time you’ll be spending hours of precious time on this, so it’s recommended that you buy bots and Twitter automation software’s such as TweetAttacks and TweetAdder.

Social Media Swapping (Retweets)

I bet I’ve mentioned this term 100s of times on this blog itself, if you’ve not heard about it, don’t worry because I myself coined this term. This basically means the exchange of social media votes on various social media platforms for increasing traffic and authority, in simpler terms I ask you to retweet my tweet and then retweet yours in return, which is sure to yield huge results if done massively. Over the years I’ve successfully built a huge swapping network on Gtalk which is currently big enough to get to the front page of Digg within minutes of submission.

Now in the past few weeks I used this network to the fullest extent and started aiming and working for 200 to 300 retweet’s, all of which contained 3 to 4 hashtag’s making it even more targeted, now using this method, my Twitter username would pop up with my Tweet for high volume keywords on Twitter 200 to 300 times a day, so surely I got a awful lot of targeted followers every time I did so, and this came with 1000s of visitors and pageview’s almost instantly.

This method does take a lot of time, I took almost a year to build mine, but I’m sure many of you can do it within 3 or 4 months if you can concentrate on this for a few hours everyday. Firstly I’d recommend you to start swapping with your friends on Facebook and Gtalk, which is why I recommend you to connect with as many internet marketers and bloggers as possible, no matter how small your initial network is, it is sure to grow as many of your friends would like to exchange their contacts for your’s and many of them also recommend their friend’s to ping you for votes, so once the initial network is set up most of the other work is done by itself.

If you have a good enough network, start promoting your Tweets, Diggs etc, via exchanging votes from them and I’m sure you’ll see a steady rise in Twitter followers from day one.

Mass Follow Technique (Finding the proper bait)

I believe all of you are familiar with the Twitter mass follow technique, which by far is the most popular black hat Twitter method to increase followers, but over the last 3 years Twitter has made multiple changes to it’s algorithm which makes it extremely difficult to mass follow users manually with an intention to increase followers, which is why tools such as TweetAttacks and TweetAdder mint so much money.

I recently bought TweetAttack’s and so far its working like a charm, each day I follow up to 1000 people and gain 250 to 300 follow backs, and what makes these tools different from manual following is that they have a clear understanding of the Twitter API and try to manipulate it and make our tasks seem highly legit, and today there are hundreds of such software’s and services out their many of which are even free, but what most people don’t realize about Twitter marketing is that it does not depend on the software you use nor the client you manage your account from, it depends on your timing, planning and selecting skills.

No matter how good TweetAttacks was I still had to decide whom to follow on my own, and for the first few weeks I had a very little follow back, but soon it reached to over 50% which is what it is today.

I succeeded in doing this because I made a list of those Twitter users who themselves increased their following through mass following method, and you can easily identify them by seeing the ratio between the number of people they follow and the amount fo followers they have.

It took me almost three weeks of search to find the best and now I have a list that could last me for at least 2 months and can surely bring in over 10,000 followers.

To start off with this method, the first thing you must do is to buy a software such as TweetAttacks or TweetAdder, both are expensive, but they are really important for internet marketers, after that try playing around and learn as much as possible about using these tools, then you can start off with your hunt for baits on Twitter and if you are looking for the signs which I’ve mentioned above I’m sure you’ll find many such users. The best way to search is to use search terms such as #Twitterfollow, #Massfollow etc.

On to our readers

It’s been more than a month since I stopped blogging on this blog, although I cannot promise to get back, I can surely promise all of you that I won’t let this blog to die, soon I have various plans after which I might bring in many more things within this blog, but at the moment you cannot expect more than one post per week.

Do let us know about your questions and suggestions in the comments section below and also do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter to stay updated.

If you’ve been reading my posts in the past I’m sure you realize how much I hate firms which raise millions from investors while being wholly dependent on some other firm, in the past I’ve criticized a few narrow niche firms including some Iphone and Ipad developers who have had millions bet on them, as often I feel that these developers are liable to the terms and conditions of Apple and will always have to keep a honored relationship with them in order to survive, thus creating a total loss of freedom.

Today Zynga and it’s various products maybe highly popular, but the company itself has agreed that substantially all its revenue and all it’s players come from Facebook, and to be clear with that they are just like any other Facebook App Developer and have no legal partnership with the company, so in case if there has been a strain in Zynga’s relationship with Facebook they may be removed from the social network overnight.

To add to this another issue questioning investors is what’s the main source of revenue for Zynga?? The answer is the sale of virtual goods, which is surely a great source of income, but not efficient or reliable as just a small portion of their massive user base actively buys them, and I believe almost all of those users are from Facebook. Zynga surely has got a hell lot of options in order to effectively monetize themselves, but it seems they prefer running their firm like entrepreneurs on the 90s. Zynga currently has got a market valuation of $970 million and after this $1 billion IPO there valuation is sure to touch somewhere between $15 to $20 billion (including secondary exchange), but the hard truth here is that the company earned a income of just $11.5 million during the first quarter of 2011, making it highly overvalued.

IPO ‘Hysteria’

So far there have been 64 IPOs this year in the United States itself, due to favorable market conditions almost all of them have been a success, so I figure even Zynga is bound to do well during the issue. This year has witnesses the highest rise in internet IPOs since the year 2000 which was followed by the deadly dot – com bubble.

Zynga being the most popular and most successful of the lot is surely bound to issue upwards of a billion dollars, and if it does so it would be the largest IPO for an internet company since Google in 2004.

I myself use Teamviewer with my partner in order to collaborate our resources and for various other activities, but Teamviewer as popular as it is, has a few issues which causes computer’s to get stuck and many times people lose connection from their partners which can create serious issues, to deal with all that I stumbled upon Techinline.

Unlike Teamviewer, Techinline is a web based controller which I think would surely make it more stable, efficient and faster and in the past few weeks while I’ve been using it, I don’t think there were any sort of issues or errors with it. Techinline basically uses SSL to transmit proprietary remote desktop protocol as in HTTP, an SSL certificate is created for each remote desktop and is used for cryptographically secure communications between the remote desktop and the accessing computer.

In order for one to connect with a remote PC he or she must have a 6 digit code, which is just like how Teamviewer works, other than this Techinline also provides chat, file transfer and many more. It has been criticized for being a total copy of Teamviewer, but I completely disagree with it asTechinline goes up for a simpler and faster approach and being completely web based makes it a wholly different system altogether.

Where Does It Come From?

The company is yet very small, but seems to be doing really well when it comes to business, it was started by a group of IT veterans in 2006 and this seems to be their first masterpiece, and I’m sure we’ll see and hear a lot from them over the next couple of years.

Due to competitive challenges the company has evolved rapidly in the remote access products niche and has got various big time customers including Dell, Intel and Microsoft.

Cost And Pricing

Good products such as these always come with a price tag, but in this case I believe the pricing has been very reasonable, Techinline provides two pricing systems, one allows you to pay as you go and the other is subscription based, you can decide which system suits you the best according to your needs. The monthly subscription starts from $30 per month and allows unlimited sessions and pay-as-you-go starts from $20 for 5 sessions.

Maybe Teamviewer stood at an advantage here, as it’s completely open source, but for professional purposes and remote software support that require immense speed and accuracy, nothing can beat the expertise of Techinline.

Try it out

You can decide more on this topic by trying it out for free for 15 days, and I’m sure you’ll realize the worth of this software later on, I do agree that most of you here may not be able to afford it, but whenever your deciding to grow your business and its communication, I seriously urge you to have this in mind.

This is a sponsored post, in order to get your product or service reviewed please visit this page!

Well I’m pretty much sure very few of you have an account in AOL, and that few includes even me, and of course that wasn’t one of the best decisions I made, but at that time I was pretty young to be called net savvy and in the year 2006 AOL made its presence in India with a bang with all sorts of promotional programs, advertisements and marketing stunts all of which came for a heavy price, at first it was a success, but that didn’t stand for long.

Three to four months down the line, many of AOLs Indian subscribers started to move towards Gmail and Yahoo which provided a faster and much better user experience, although I wasn’t one of the them I knew the mistake I had made, as it was during those years that my presence on the internet began to grow and my AOL id was my identity and it was then that I figured out that AOL does not allow mail forwarding, so even though I could have dealt with it, I guessed it was too much of work and decided to go with it.

Later on, it turns out that AOL India had lost almost all its traffic and was burning cash at a huge rate in the fall of 2009 and that was the first time AOL sent chills down my spine, and today they are at there worst possible state.

Huge decline in traffic

For a company like AOL the traffic their sites receive is the blood of the company, and because they failed to keep up with other competitors they noticed consistent decline in traffic over the years and that was sure to lead towards lower ad rates as 80% of AOL’s revenues were generated from advertising sales, so within a few months AOL took a direct hit on its bottom line and soon enough the entire company faced internal conflicts resulting in Layoffs and cutbacks which often make things worse for a media and internet firm.

So during this time the site’s traffic kept falling with the company’s share price and profits and the management team tried all its might to improve their hoaxed businesses and when it didn’t work they decided to sell many of their toxic and unprofitable assets in order to raise funds and increase profits.

But this again was a short term relief as this disintegration of its online assets resulted in a much faster fall in traffic, this was because most of its sites such as Bebo, ICQ and MapQuest were inter-dependent on each other and on the AOL main site as much as it was dependent on them, so basically there was a steep decline in traffic after the various sales during 2009 and 2010.

Separation from Time Warner

In 2009 AOL Time Warner had lost a lot of its wealth and it saw plenty of investor agitation and by the end of that year they were forced to separate the firms which brought down the $226 billion company to a valuation of just $20 Billion.

This can be considered a good sign in one way as now the executives of AOL had much more freedom to take decisions, and of the factors of AOL’s downfall is said to be slower management and decisions. After the disintegration AOL formed a new business plan and basically started concentrating on an entirely new vision, though there hasn’t been much results so far I surely do think it could regain its old status.

Takeovers and change in business model

In the past one year AOL has made numerous acquisitions which would sum up to over $700 million, and all of this investments were made on a similar niche which gives us a brief idea about AOL’s new business model. They bought TechCrunch and The Huffington Post both of which produce aggregate amounts of content and now they plan to distribute this content across their network sites, well this is just a part of it and the actual plan is pretty complicated.

One benefit of this as we can already see is that these particular sites are niche sites and as usual sites like these tend to have a high advertising rate, which has helped AOL revive its broken advertising wing and improve its network.

The idea seems pretty clear, they raised over $1.1 billion selling various assets and now they are using the same to acquire new age internet businesses which are sure to help in building AOLs brand identity. But I see this going in a way through which the main AOL site could be turned into a mere content delivery network.

Operations in India

AOL’s operations in India were started in 2006 and I’ve already mentioned briefly about the initial success and the factors which contributed to the later failures, but there are also a few issues with India itself.

Firstly AOL was late to enter the Indian market as by 2006, groups such as Google and Yahoo were well established, so the only way AOL could quickly market itself was through expensive advertising which did work, but their degraded user experience spoiled it all. Even though AOL India never made a profit, they still had over 1000 employees which consisted of engineers and developers who provided services to its other projects.

One of the key reasons why AOL India remained unprofitable was due to the high bandwidth costs which prevail in India, the high costs don’t matter much on the consumers side as India already has a huge number of internet users, but the issue is with the bandwidth costs which AOL incurs. Big internet firms with self hosting have to get a leased lines of their own for faster services and that does not come cheap in India, which was one of the main reasons why internet startup’s here have slow growth.

But now they have even decided to cut down on their development team and within a month a team of over 1500 employees was reduced to just 100 and it’s said that the Indian team will focus on building AOL’s mobile applications.

Shutting down of AOL India

In 2011, just one month before writing this post, I had a shock of a lifetime when I realized that I could no longer access the AOL India site, after a few hours of searching I figured that AOL mail does work if accessed directly and I quickly changed all my important account IDs from AOL to Gmail and saved all my important mails in a folder outside AOL.

After two days they started redirecting aol.in users to coolage.aol.in which is a social network for college students, but still I couldn’t find a single piece of information on this anywhere. It took TechCrunch and other tech sites more than 2 weeks to realize this problem and that’s when all of them came out with a post, this also shows the lack of popularity which AOL suffers in India.

Many rumors started filling up the net, one such rumor was that AOL was coming up with a redesign, but its clear that its not true as they wouldn’t risk weeks of traffic for a redesign, but I do think that this was just a way to save on bandwidth costs which they have and they also seem to be promoting their CoolAge service, which I’m sure won’t stand a chance.

Bugs and technical issues

Though the main AOL India page was brought down, people still had access to their mails and fearing the worst I had stopped using AOL completely and was visiting it once in a week, but recently something much worse happened which got me extremely angry.

While I shifted all of my important mails I didn’t care much about deleting my contacts, as little did I know that bots could easily takeover AOL. Just a week ago many of my friends started complaining that they had received a mail from me with nothing but a link which they claim was infected, after logging in I noticed that all the contacts on my list had received the same mail and this was the worst issue I had faced with AOL, and after a bit of search I figured that all AOL India users faced this.

I figure that the shutting down of their main site provided bots with easy access as many of the security procedures too were down with it and that may have caused this issue, after this AOL was not accessible for almost 6 hours which I think was used to combat this bot, and this surely removes AOL from my list of trusted companies.

On to our readers

Right now they are surely in a bad state, but so far they have worked out well in order to regain their status, and I am pretty sure they will spring back up if they follow this path.

If you’ve faced any such issues with AOL please do let us know and do subscribe to our feed and follow us on Twitter.