Controlling the flood of spam using catchall

Posted by stuart as email, spam

I get a shitload of spam. We all do. I don’t even get up when I hear Austin Powers telling me “You’ve got mail baby, yeah!”. I would estimate that over 90% of all email I receive is spam.

I like signing up for stuff online. I figure giving my email address up is a small price to pay for a lot of the free goodies online.

To try to keep a handle on the spam, and a good way of working out who is selling your email address, and who isn’t, I use individual email addresses for each thing I sign up for online. By using a catch-all email address, I get all my mail forwarded to my ISP’s email account (I figure they’re probably better at keeping their mail server running than I am).

All email sent to (anything)@mydomainname.com gets sent to my ISP’s mail account.

For example, if I was signing up to mt own newsletter (if I had one), I’d use the address “pimpmypagerank@mydomainname.com”.

Then, every now and again, if I think the level of spam I’m getting increases, I sit down and start looking at the “to” addresses in the spam, and have fun working out who’s selling my details.

I know, I need to get out more.

Fun with TLA’s Link Worth Calculator.

Posted by stuart as make money online

I was mucking about with Text Link Ads Link Worth Calculator today, and discovered something interesting.

It would appear that the code-monkeys over at TLA have a sense of humour.

Text Link Ads Link Worth Calculator calculates the supposed value of a text link on a given website. Simply type in the URL, and a couple of other variables, and it uses PR, Alexa rank and whatever other factors they’ve come up with to determine the value of a link.

Where it gets fun is when you type in the URL’s of some of the “biggie” websites. A good place to get a list of sites to try is Alexa’s top 500 list.

Here are a few of the responses:

Microsoft.com - More than you can afford
Google.com - Fuh-get about it!
Yahoo.com - Haha, Very Funny
qq.com - Priceless!
live.com - We Can’t Print That Many Zeros
Blogger.com - More Than You Can Afford

Then try text-link-ads.com, and you get:

And last but not least - Try msn.com, and you get this:

Gold!

Competitions to promote your blog

Posted by stuart as online marketing, make money online, adwords, blog, adsense

I see Darren has just tied up the running of a “group writing project“, titled “If I had to start my blog again” where he has asked readers to write in their blog what they would do differently if they were starting their blog again from scratch.

Darren seems to be a top bloke, and the motivations for this project are obviously quite altruistic (You get a link from Darrens blog at ProBlogger - worth its weight in gold!), it’s actually a very clever marketing ploy for his blog. Whilst not all the participating bloggers have linked back to ProBlogger, most of them seem to. Let’s say three quarters of them linked back to him, that’s sixty backlinks, and it hasn’t cost him a cent!

Jeremy at Shoemoney’s actually taken a slightly different tack with his competition, he’s asked people to nominate the most helpful blog, and is actually offering prizes, not for the people nominating, but for the owners of the most helpful blogs. I’m not sure how this actually benefits Shoemoney, other than the buzz he’ll get for giving away some pretty good prizes. ($US1,150 in prizes all up!). The only criticism I would have here is that someone like Darren at Problogger or one of the other  “big guys” who are already making decent money from their online efforts will probably walk away with most of the cash.

All in all I think that these are both excellent ways for these guys to promote their blogs. Although they’ve taken different routes, they’re headed in the same direction - create the buzz, get the backlinks, increase the traffic, make the moolah!

This has got me thinking about a way to do something similar. Although I couldn’t get away with doing something like Darren, as I don’t have the readership he does, offering some prizes is something that I would certainly think about. I wonder which would be more beneficial in the long term - $100 spent on an AdWords campaign, or $100 given away as a prize for the person who makes the most interesting post in their blog about what they would do with the money.

What’s in it for me?

Posted by stuart as online marketing, make money online, copy writing, blog, adsense

Darren has an excellent post on his blog at the moment about the fact that blog readers are selfish.

He makes an excellent point with the following sentence:

“One of the best ways to do this is to work hard and nailing down the key benefit of reading your blog into a single sentence or phrase so that you can incorporate it into your page title and header - you might even like to reinforce this with a picture or some other visual element (like a logo) that communicates simply and clearly what the blog is about.”

(Cue thinking music)

Whilst (I think) Darren is talking about reinforcing the benefits of reading your blog to the reader, this is an excellent idea for keeping yourself focussed on the main aim of your blog.

This makes for some interesting navel gazing. Rather than thinking about how our blogs benefit us, I think we need to focus on how they benefit our readers. For example, rather than saying “I’m going to make a blog about electronic gadgets, in the hope of picking up some traffic and generating AdSense clicks or affiliate sales”, we probably need to be saying “What can I offer readers that they won’t get from anywhere else, which will keep them coming back, which (hopefully) will generate ad clicks and sales?”

I would think that the key here is the “What can I offer” part. The blogger / reader relationship seems to be a give and take one: the blogger gives the reader good content, and the reader takes it or choofs off to somewhere else where he/she can get it.
I guess you could almost take the quote from Darren and extrapolate it out to the creation of a mission statement. For example, for this blog, up till now, it might have been:

“A place for me to vent my spleen, take the piss out of people who I think are doing the wrong thing online, and discuss my online money-making adventures”

What does this give the reader? Nothing! It’s all about me. Notice all the bold bits - There’s not much here to pull a reader in and hep them feel a part of my blog, is there?

Maybe something like this would be better:

“To create an environment where my readers can discuss issues relating to online money making, interesting developments in the online world, and look at what I and others could do better. To ask for the advice of my readers, and make them feel like a valued member of my community”

I think I’ll print this out and stick it above my monitor!

Footnote: Thanks to Jeff for his kind words - I’m not going anywhere, just slowing down a bit and re-focusing

Writing for fun versus writing for profit

Posted by stuart as online marketing, pagerank, make money online, adwords, google adsense, blog, adsense

I’ve been giving a fair bit of thought to my motivations for my online adventures recently. I’ve been trying to work out exactly where I’m hoping that they will take me, and what I hope to acheive.

We all dream of being the next Joel Comm, Shoemoney, or Darren Rowse from ProBlogger, but is this realistic?

I love to write, it’s kind of an escape from the drudgery of day to day life with my health problems. Any money I make is really a bonus. I’ve spent the last couple of months setting up “mini-sites” to see if I can make a few extra bucks, registering domains, link building, writing content etc. But is it really worth it if the majority of it is a chore?

The writing part of it is what really floats my boat. I don’t enjoy link building, I find submitting sites to directories a chore, and SEO is a real pain in the ass.

So I think I’ve come to a bit of a decision. I love writing in this blog. It makes me absolutely no money, but it’s about a subject I enjoy. I like looking at what other people are doing online, I like following other peoples online adventures. So I will continue to write here.

I also have another blog over at the Renal Unit. It’s about kidney disease, dialysis, and transplantation. I enjoy writing about that too. (It’s something I know a bit about, and something that (hopefully) I can make a bit of a difference to peoples lives with)

All the other sites I made were a grab for cash. They’re about subjects I’m not really interested in, therefore struggle to consistently create useful content for.
I’ll keep an eye on these other sites, and maybe I’ll have a change of heart at some stage in the future. But I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, there’s no magic keyword density, traffic building secret, or undiscovered niche which will make me rich.

Good luck to the rest of you in your online adventures, and I look forward to keeping tabs on how you’re going…

Stu