Anyway, Yahoo Mail seemed like the best place to start as I resisted the urge to do anything meaningful. I opened up the Inbox and started clicking the little boxes to delete all the crap that I allow to collect for various stupid reasons. Offers for this or that. Newsletters for forgotten interests. Affiliate managers begging me to get to work and promote their crap. Jokes that have been passed around since ‘99. Etc.

Of course there were the requisite Internet Marketing offers for getting rich. Or successful. Or something. I noticed another ebook/course/membership or whatever it is they are pimping on how to plan, build and promote websites. And I considered this offer as I have others many times before it. I have bought maybe 10 or so ebooks that detail the authors plan to create online properties that will make you successful in Internet Marketing. I have read maybe 10 others that came as bonuses from this membership or that program I purchased. And none have really helped.

I thought about this ebook phenomenon. How there is so much hope each time we purchase one. You buy it and it doesn’t inspire you to do anything with it. Or you try the method and it doesn’t seem to work for you. You become more and more jaded each ebook you buy. You become embarrassed to admit that you bought just one more in the hopes that it would spark something in you. They are like crack. The salesletter makes you think that maybe this is the one. After about 10 or so you are simply done and feel like you have learned your lesson. Not how to be successful but simply that it’s far better to buy the dinner the salesletter said you could give up for the price of the ebook.

It’s the Yin and Yang of getting rich on the Internet. There are a lot of crappy ebooks floating out there. There are a ton of folks looking for a solution that just doesn’t exist. There are a lot good ideas yet plenty of lazy people.

It makes you feel bad to read an ebook and not make money the way it was represented. Maybe in a way you feel like a failure. People don’t talk about it. You hardly ever hear people admit they spent $47 on some technique and it went tits up on them. They just file the ebook away and write shitty blogs about how ebooks are ripoffs.

But who is the real failure? If a writer cannot reach the reader then they have failed. Of all the ebooks that have been written about building planning, building and promoting websites, why are people still struggling with the concept? Writers argue that readers are lazy and that they want to be spoonfed. So if you truly want to help people wouldn’t it be incumbent on you, the writer, to motivate these people, outside of the damn salesletter!?

There is a really great ebook that has yet to be written. One that doesn’t regurgitate 98% of what we’ve all known since 2005. One that actually disperses the remaining 2% that matters. One that motivates. One that teaches. One that feeds you every mouthful.

We will no doubt search for that ebook and feel like shit for doing so. Ebooks will come and go. Most we will simply let float on by. But there will always be that one that makes us think that this time will be different. It won’t be but we still hope.

I haven’t bought an ebook in over a year I don’t think. Probably longer. Those days are past. I make some money each month and it’s good enough (ADD continues to rule and things are scattered.) But every once in a while I hesitate before clicking the checkbox to delete an email wondering if that could be the one. Too cynical to think otherwise I click delete.

Bing. Still use it. Still love it. And apparently I’m not the only one. I’ve been hearing people promote it, word of mouth style, on TV. And now I am concerned a bit. I make money with Google. Will there ever be a point when Bing affects my Adsense earnings? Seems crazy right now. But stranger things have happened. People get tired of shit. They love things shiny and new. People know me as the “computer guy” around the ‘hood. I’ve got people tooling up asking if I’ve been to a site called Bing. Really? I look in my stats on some of my sites and I’m starting to pick up more and more Bing referrals. Maybe for advertising Adsense will become even more important (for Google) as people use other methods for search yet still click those shitty little ads.

And that’s another thing. I’ve still been using Twitter as a means to search too. I’ve mentioned that before but you can find out all kinds of up to the second information. Google? The hell is Google?

Some of you remember a guy named Griz. I think he’s gone feral. Haven’t heard from him in ages. He talked a while back about using Today.com as a place for links and to collect a few dollars. I signed up and started working a crappy little blog. It’s not much but I’m making about $1.50 a day there now. I send traffic from 4 Wordpress.com blogs, one Blogspot.com blog, one free hosted blog elsewhere, one self hosted blog and 5 Hubpages to my blog at Today.com. I update all the blogs about once a week, which basically involves adding a photo and a snarky comment. And the Hubpages actually make a few pennies every once in a while too. All but the Hubpages have a PR better than 2. Makes them useful for getting other sites indexed and popular.

I know some of you may scoff at $40 a month. I cashed 9 checks yesterday from various online affiliate programs. 8 were less than $60. It all adds up. Sure I’d love to make $700 a day in Adsense but that is just not happening. So I collect the scraps and piece them all together. My PayPal account is like a dividend program. A few times a week I’ll get a deposit here and a deposit there. Some for $20. Some for $300. It all adds up. Google is my biggest contributor but the scraps fill in the gaps nicely.

Blogprofitz has been a pleasant surprise. If you don’t have time to DIY with StoreStacker or need to offload some of the CPU cycles from your hosted account, then BP is a good solution. I haven’t yet made a million dollars pimping eBay and Amazon stuff but I have built a few huge sites and they are getting indexed. Every single post. BP is very easy to use. Good for those needing to add content to your site. RSS feeds, articles and products. Your blog comes alive.

I’ve been trying to get motivated to build a Hubpage a day. Many of you know about Court’s 100 hub challenge. He seems very successful with it. I’m not that successful. I get few Adsense clicks no matter how diligent I am with keyword research. But the thing is I am going to continue to work this. Why? Because I am sick of webhosts. I would love to have hundreds of Hubpages and/or Squidoo lenses that were bringing in $5K+ a month. Pipe dream? Waste of time? Maybe. But you have to try to succeed. Failure is just part of the deal.

Speaking of Court, I am still a member of the The Keyword Academy. The main reason is that they added 30 blogs that you can use to write something and splash your link on. It has actually made a difference to a couple of my sites. They require you write at least 125 words and only use one link back to your site. Knowing their prowess at SEO I can tell you at some point those links are going to be very powerful. 125 words. Surely you can cobble together 125 words in a coherent fashion 30 times in a rapid manner.

I think perhaps I am the only one I know that does not either have a smartphone or want one. I don’t get the allure. The last thing I want to do is talk on the phone. I have a cellphone that I bought for $15 on eBay that costs me $10 a month to make a call on. My daughter on the other hand is spoiled and has a smartphone that she can do texting unlimited and surf the Internet. She can listen to music and watch videos and play games on the thing. Whoopee. I don’t want to text people. I’d rather call. I’ve already said I don’t like to talk on the phone so there you go. Surfing the Internet on a 3-5 inch screen is retarded. I’d sooner buy a netbook and tote it around with me in the event I needed Internet access. Hell it’s cheaper. Why would I want to play a game on a little device? I have an XBOX at home that is fantastic. You can watch movies and TV shows on the thing? Wow! If I have to watch TV why would I want to hunch over a tiny little device to do it? Plus most of that shit you watch and play on the devices you have to purchase from an app store. More money flushed IMO. It has a camera? So what. I have a Canon that is smaller than the iPhone that is 10 megapixels and can do all sorts of different photos. Not to mention a dSLR. It has video? I use a Flip. Easy to use and offload video. I use it at my daughter’s softball games. But the phone combines it all. Yea and each feature is mediocre compared to a stand alone unit. I’m sure it’s cool and fun and you get used to the convenience factor. I simply do not want to be tethered all day long. Rim, Apple, Nokia, ATT and Verizon are sucking the life (and money) out of people.

I rode the Cherohala Challenge this past Saturday. It was a nice accomplishment. Long story short, it was hot, windy, I stupidly got dehydrated, my legs cramped badly the last 40 miles and was lucky to finish. We climbed the Dragon and we ascended the Cherohala Skyway. It was brutal. Next up: 6 Gap in the Georgia mountains in September. Can’t figure out how to make a trip to Texas to ride Hotter n Hell in August work out this year unfortunately.

Thanks for reading.

enact an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates.

Amazon then scolds the affiliate for not taking action to contact the their representatives to put a stop to this crap:

The unfortunate consequences of this legislation on North Carolina residents like you were explained in detail to key senators and representatives in Raleigh, including the leadership of the Senate, House, and both chambers’ finance committees. Other states, including Maryland, Minnesota, and Tennessee, considered nearly identical schemes, but rejected these proposals largely because of the adverse impact on their states’ residents.

TN did the right thing. I contacted my rep and let her have an earful that these types of tax schemes would hurt the state more than help. I would lose quite a lot of revenue if I wasn’t able to participate in affiliate marketing. I don’t make a lot from Amazon but if Amazon is pulling out so could others. They could either stop the tax scheme and benefit from me spending the money or we could both lose. More states than not have come to the conclusion that it was bad business if all these companies stop allowing their affiliates to participate in their program. The states either get a little bit or they get nothing. The government in N.C. must simply be stupid.

On the positive side states like N.C. just eliminated a bunch of competition for the benefit of me and my state of TN.

Here’s the thing: If you don’t start paying attention to the politics that is swirling around you, particularly given that many states are on the verge of bankruptcy, you are going to lose. Politicians listen if they are contacted. They crave re-election over anything. I don’t know if anyone raised the issue in N.C. but those affiliates should be protesting in the streets if they care enough.

Here is the link to the blog that posted this with tips for what you can do in the comments.

For an Internet marketer it might be best to start thinking how this is going to affect you. Yea Google is the top dog and will remain that way for some time. But what if people start using Bing and they stay? Maybe Bing eats into Google’s market share by a few percentage points. This year it might be a few points. Next year a couple of more. Maybe Windows 7 is for real too and they implement Bing is that for search. Maybe Bing is used on Xbox in some manner. Who knows? Will people be more inclined to advertise on Bing? Will your Adsense revenue start taking a hit over the next year or two? Might be good to think how a viable Google search alternative could affect your online money making gig.

Google feels so…2007. It feels old and tired. Bing makes me happy. Searching at Google is boring. I took a screen print of an open search in Bing and will explain why I think it’s cool.

Anyway you slice it, Bing has pizzaz. Instead of a boring homepage for geeks and techies like Google has provided for ten years, with Bing you get a cool little photograph. It’s a nice change from the Google boredom.

How is the search experience? Fine, thank you. For all of us trying to find relevant keywords, or ideas, for our websites, check out the goodness Bing provides. Beneath your search term you get a list of keywords that pertain to your search. Google does this too so it’s not a huge win for Bing. But check out the related searches to the side. Google doesn’t provide that. This is helpful for those of us looking for ideas.

Speaking of search results. Google takes up more space with ads than Bing. It’s actually very cluttered if you compare it to Bing. These two following screen shots are taken from my laptop. Top to bottom of a search result. Notice the difference. With Bing, in the open window I can actually view 3, almost 4 results without having to scroll down. In Google, one barely fits on the screen before I’m mousing around. Interesting no?

Obviously the problem is the extra results for shopping. Maybe that is more helpful than not for people. And obviously the Google toolbar is a hindrance for results too. Google in their zeal to become everything for everyone has simply cluttered a typical search in my opinion. It just looks ugly compared to to Bing.

Okay let’s continue with the search results. To the right of each is a little slider bar looking thing. If you mouse over it a popup window appears giving you a preview of what that page is about. Pretty nifty. But dig what that means for your business. If you are writing crap for your website and just assuming that people are going to visit and click out via Adsense, I think this is another nail in that coffin. You are going to have to write shit that people will actually find useful or they ain’t going to bother visiting. They will just keep previewing until something works for them.

Below is a favorite feature of mine. The image viewer. It works really well. You can set up the listings in whatever manner you want as seen in the little icons. You mouse over the image and it pops up as seen below. If you click the picture then it takes you to another Bing page that shows the web site that it came from.

I like that it so elegantly displays the website the photo came from in another frame. It looks so much better than Google’s. Again the functionality is not that different but style is everything these days. Bing blows Google away. And frankly the functionality and results are comparable.

So there you have it. Bing is king. For IM purposes I like how it gives up ideas. BTW, check out the more tab and click over to xRank. It will give you further ideas of stuff that is hot for the day. The photo thing is cool because if you use photos in your sites/blogs then it will entice people to visit. I get tons of people visiting my sites through the photos I have posted. I think this will add to that. I’ve also noticed that I am getting more traffic each day on some of my Wordpress blogs and the Today.com blog from Bing searches. Mostly from folks finding a photo and visiting.

I should have put this in an ebook and sold it for $97, $47, $27, $17 dollars.

Thought I would bring this, make your own product or service and sell it deal, to your attention. But with my own cynical twist. See I find it mostly is a sham. Of sorts. You know how guys sell their shit and you wonder if they actually make money from the technique or do they simply make money from the sales? Well interestingly this one guy that is surprisingly transparent indicates how lucrative it is to get people believing in your crap.

I follow the stock market a great deal. I’ve been investing/trading since college to make extra money. I find it far more interesting to find the right stock and make $100 in a half hour than spend 4 hours building a bullshit website for Adsense. Conversely you never really lose money with a website, only time. Obviously if you trade bad you can lose money. Anyway, there is a website that I follow via Twitter and Stocktwits from a guy named Timothy Sykes. He’s apparently a self proclaimed big stick that has made some cash shorting penny stocks. He seems successful and is happy to let you know about it. Tons of people follow the guy and apparently pay huge dollars to learn his techniques. And that is the point of this post. He makes far more selling his shit than actually playing the stock game. Props that he is so transparent about it. He’s not an affiliate marketer trying to sell to other affiliate marketers so he’s a little different.

He bragged this weekend how he generated $150,000 this month. Pretty impressive no? I thought, damn he is a trading savant. Until you look at the numbers:

Bragging aside, how did I just DOUBLE my blog’s monthly earnings from the $80,000 range to $153,450 in May 2009?

Here’s the breakdown:

May 2009: $153,450
$29,968 TIMalerts
$85,514 Instructional DVDs
$25,725 Advertising & Affiliates
$980 An American Hedge Fund
$11,263 Trading Profits

TIMalerts is a trading service. The rest is self-explanatory. $11,263 in trading profits? Really? Now given that he is a big stick I would have thought he’d deliver more than that. I mean, you’d be hard pressed to quit your full-time job after paying short term taxes on that.

$85,514 selling DVDs. Holy shiot. Monthly residuals of $30K. Holy shiot. This guy is a freakin Internet marketing genius. Check out his site. He knows how to sell himself.

Look, without getting into it, the last couple of months haven’t exactly been hard to make money in the market. The game has been rigged by the amount of money being pumped into the system. You simply can’t fight the Fed…or the Treasury. I’m just having a hard time getting impressed with how much he made trading versus how much he sold. Though he did make profits so I guess I’m being an asshole.

My point is that he makes the big money on servicing his products. A small percentage of his profits is actually him doing what he sells to the wannabes. We see this all over affiliate marketing. I always question these guberus about how they make their money. Do you make money actually doing what you are selling or are you simply making money on the product?

I would love to know what the Internet marketing guberus actually make with Adsense and affiliate sales versus product sales and memberships. Bet it looks a lot worse than Sykes. I have no idea why he feels the need to splash the data up on his website. Guess he wanted to brag about the money. That’s cool, but it really helps amplify a point I’ve been trying to make on this blog for a couple of years now. The money is in the product. Not the technique.

Let me be clear: I have no problem that people make the big money doing this. It’s fine. It’s cool. I just don’t find affiliate marketers very credible when they talk about how much money they make and how great their product is, etc. It makes me wonder if they make the money with the technique/product or selling the shit to the sheeple. Sykes helps make my point.

What you do is set up an existing or new blog site within the Blogprofitz dashboard. The only thing you have to do is host and configure a Wordpress blog. You set up the blog name and user name and password. You have to set up a wad of categories for all your products, videos, feeds and articles to get posted to. You go into the dashboard and set up the various affiliate programs that you want to pimp. So if you have IDs for Crapbank, CJ, Overstock, eBay and Amazon you’d simply add them in to your dashboard.

Then you set up a rule to use. If you were going for Amazon junk you’d go through the menu to set up what products to pull. Then you’d tell it what blog and category to post to. You could set up a rule to post Crapbank garbage in one category and Ebay trash in another category. Or dump it all into one category.

You can still post your own articles as normal, or post articles from their content database of over something like 14K articles. I hear the quality is suspect. Rewrite them if you choose to. You can drop videos and RSS feeds by setting up a rule for those as well. Your site can get quite large.

Unlike StoreStacker, Blogprofitz handles the posting so you don’t have to muck about with a cron job. Apparently their system kicks off every hour. In the BP settings you’ll indicate if you want postings every however many days. I’m going to see how every day works out with Ebay and Amazon.

Kick back and think of the potential. If done right this can be a money making monster that you have very little to do with. And talk about long tail keywords. Did someone say duplicate content? Nah, I don’t think so. The individual product blog post might be duplicated but the main blog page has many potential variables. They provide a plugin that only posts snippets of the posting on the front page. You simply provide the “read me” variable to link to the full blog post.

I’m giving it a whirl. A trial pack of three. I should have bought when it was cheap so now I get to pay $19 a month. Yep it’s a monthly fee. But damn, surely I can make $20 a month on one blog, much less 3.

Interesting though, I just went to one of my blogs and hit the “previous posts” link at the bottom. It listed the previous posts I did but the product posts that were posted remained at the top of the blog…as they should.

So dig it. This is how I am using the product. Tell me I can’t build a friggin monster site with little to no effort. So I added one of my blogs to the system this afternoon. I had something like 20 posts already added to the blog. Pretty boring with crappy Adsense that didn’t do much. Now I’m posting Amazon and eBay products to the blog. All the while I’m adding quality articles via Article Marketing Automation when something relevant comes through that system. I don’t have to write articles for the blog because someone from AMA or the BP content club will do that for me. I don’t have to worry about the monetization as I set that up and it is pulling from ebay, Amazon, CJ, Crapbank, Overstock, PayDotCom and Affiliate Bot. I can add relevant RSS feeds and videos easily. And after 20 minutes (or less, depending if the WP blog is already set up) I have a relevant and thick affiliate site that I don’t have to do much more than get links for if I choose. Because there is a good chance that when Bing and Google start indexing all those posts I am going to start bringing a whole lot of traffic in via very long tail keywords.

And by the way, if you use PLRPro’s PGB and are rocking the Wordpress option things could get even more interesting. You’ll post up 40 articles for your blog, add it to BlogProfitz and start pulling products. Yea, I think I’ve developed a new love for blogs. This is smokin’. Tell me how I’m wrong. Collect your thoughts and I’ll wait for you in the comments.

After a couple of years of making a half-ass effort I am about done trying to sell affiliate products via Blogger. If targeted correctly I can get some Ebay clicks from a franken site or two. But for my time and effort I will be banging out even more Blogger blogs for the express purpose of boring some visitor enough to get them to click away via Adsense. I’m done wasting blog space on some banner ad when clearly the masses prefer to explore a pretty blue text link. I place far more pennies in the bank via Adsense than trying to sell someone’s gizmo, at least on Blogger. Diversification might be great. Continued failure is not. Let’s roll more pennies.

Are the guberus losing their mojo? Seems as if there are no new ideas. Just fresh tosses of the same keyword gathering, article writing, link building, SEO salad. Every once in a while a product gets shoved down the pipe that might help with an activity you are churning through (BMD or BCD anyone?), but mostly what’s old is new again or what’s new is old again, depending on how you view it though your looking glass.

Are you having fun yet? I like that I can build a site, let it lay there and potentially make money months later. Keyword research, article creation, building sites and collecting backlinks sucks large. So what does a bloke do? Laziness is my calling. So is making money. I have demonstrated that they can co-exist. Overcome the laziness at the onset, build a stupid site and watch it collect pennies months down the road without anymore intervention. But to answer my own question: No, I’m not having fun. I think building niche site after niche site, and all it entails, is utter madness.

You know how some people say invest your profits back into your business? I don’t (yet) subscribe to that. I figure if I can’t build a few sites a week, and at the end of the year have 50 or so of those averaging a couple of bucks a day then I shouldn’t bother with the grind. Why would I pay someone to build something that I have no idea will or will not return that investment? I have numerous 15-20 page sites that have been left in the stagnate pool of SEO slime that makes $2-3, sometimes more, each day. So I take all my profits and put some aside for trips to Disneyworld with my family or snowboarding in the Rockies and the rest goes into my retirement accounts. I don’t stimulate Internet marketing any more than I have to.

On an average day I do nothing in Internet marketing. And am happy about it.

I would rather trade stocks than build sites and promote them via Adwords. It’s roughly the same risk in my mind. And trading stocks is far more enjoyable.

What is the point of do-follow and no-follow? Just another example of Google enabling the game if you ask me.

Have I mentioned how much I like Bing? At the risk of shitting in my own plate, I really hope Bing kicks the crap out of Google.

I soon became a shill for Nichebot. A happening little keyword resource if there ever was one. Google Keyword Cruncher really digs into the Google Keyword tool to find all sorts of keywords. And it doesn’t cost that much of your credits. I take those keyword phrases and splash them into Keyword Analysis X and find out if I can compete for that phrase.

Keyword analysis is a grind (but not as much as getting backlinks). There are a lot of tools out there to help you figure out which keyword to target. The most obvious, and the one I use, via Nichebot, is Google. But just because you find a keyword people are searching for does not mean you can compete for it without a ton of backlinks. Nichebot, and now Traffic Travis are the tools I use to quickly determine if I can compete for the keyword. Firefox has an add-on that you can use, but I find it a drag. I’m sick of getting backlinks so finding keywords that I can compete with is the only way I can justify spending time doing this shit.

Anyway a new version of Traffic Travis Professional has come out. I just updated to 3.1. But you don’t need to pay for Traffic Travis. It’s free. The pro version gives you the opportunity to save reports and make larger keyword lists among a few other things. But the free version is perfectly fine. Especially if you want the SEO Analysis feature. It gives you sweet information on the keyword phrase you are targeting like Page Rank, backlinks, H1 tag information, among other things.

The reason I bring this up because for those that are a member of Court’s Keyword Crash Course then you know what a pain, I believe, his method of keyword phrase competition analysis is. Nichebot and/or Traffic Travis makes this grind much more palatable.

Traffic Travis free versus the professional version. I realize the question might come up. Dunno what to tell you. I got the Pro version through PLRPro for nada. I don’t see why you would buy the Pro version without checking out the free version. If you like it, go to the comparison page and see what you might be missing. Take it (the pro version) for a free test drive. I don’t know anyone that is more fair in Internet Marketing than Mark Ling. If you don’t like it, don’t extend the 7-day trial.

Is this a magic keyword, SEO tool? Nope. I just bring it up because the tool keeps getting more and more useful and for a free tool it is crazy not to give it a spin. If nothing else I am really enjoying the SEO Analysis tool. I’m getting some good competition info from it for keywords I want to target.