Phone calls during dinner. Deadbeat salesmen. Stuff you don’t want or need. Telemarketers…

A staple in the offline business world, telemarketers are almost like spammers. Depending on when they call, they can be just as annoying.

Unfortunately, you can’t escape them, even in online business. They’ll pull your number from public Whois info, or just buy a list from some less-than-stellar online agency that scraped all the Whois data. (Or if you are a legitimate marketer, they picked the phone number right off your Contact Us page.)

Luckily there are a few things we can do to hinder these telemarketers. (The DO NOT CALL list is for personal/home phone numbers and they find lots of ways around this, especially if you operate a website.)

The first thing you could do is use a Private Registration on your domain name. That would probably deter most telemarketers, although it’s still possible for them to get your number.

Next, especially if you skip the private registration, get a PrivatePhone number. It gives you a nice phone number with voicemail, free of charge! It’s great for adding to your Whois details.

Finally, strike back at the telemarketers! Go to Who Called Us and check out the reports of annoyances from telemarketers. If you get a call, report it on that site. It’s simple - just enter the number, time of call, and some details.

Thanks to WhoCalledUs, we can block those numbers from getting to us or just not answer if the number looks suspicious.

Maybe some Web 2.0 company will come out with a service that tracks all the numbers from WhoCalledUs and setup an alert system that flashes “SLEAZY TELEMARKETER - DO NOT ANSWER” whenever they call you!

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Here’s what you’ve been waiting for - an example of Adsense ads that are totally blended into a website’s design!

Did I do it? Nope. I was just kidding about getting banned from Adsense. I’d prefer to keep my account.

All I did was find someone that was breaking Google Adsense TOS.

Here’s the screenshot:

(Clicking the picture brings up a larger version.)

Do you see the ads? No, not the squares in the middle. I’m talking about the ad links in the left navigation menu. You wouldn’t notice the ads at all if it weren’t for the “Ads by Google” hiding in the corner.

I blurred out the logo to protect the innocent, but I hesitate to say innocent - this site is owned by one of the popular internet “gurus.” Even better, this guy is an Adsense guru.

Is he behind the times? Does he have a special relationship with Google? Is he hoping he doesn’t get caught? Is this placement alright if it’s an ad link unit?

Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure this technique will cause visitors to click the ads thinking they are navigation links. And Google doesn’t like that.

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I got an email this morning from John Reese titled “The Next Google Adsense.” I figured it was some new ad service from Google, like their radio ads, that would allow you to earn money that Google could keep for themselves after banning your account.

But it turns out, the email had nothing to do with Google. It was about eBay.

It didn’t take long for me, or anyone else that is a Digitalpoint forum member, to realize this breakthrough new service was none other than AuctionAds.

AuctionAds has been around for a while now, so I’m not sure why we’re just now getting this email… oh wait, yes I am! It’s because John interviewed Shoemoney for a radio show posted on his blog, and this was the best way to get people to visit it and listen in!

But alas, this blog post is probably pretty good, so check it out if you’re interested in a new way to make money.

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Life’s a journey, not a destination. You only live once. Just do it.

Hearing all those nice sayings makes we want to live life to the fullest. And one thing I haven’t done yet is get banned from Adsense. Have you? If not, let’s get moving!

There are plenty of ways to do it. A popular one would be to put images beside our ads. Or place our ads on proxified pages of a proxy site. Hell, we could just click our own ads all day.

But I’d rather push one of the grayer areas (and ride the wave into the black.)

This gray area is blending your ads into your website. There are plenty of legitimate ways to do this, which is why it puzzles me right now, but I know some ways are darker than others.

But before we start blending, we have to figure out how to match the ads to our website. The catch is… we can’t manipulate the ads. So we must manipulate our websites around the ads!

John Chow posted about blending Adsense ads last year, so read his post to get up to speed.

Basically we are going to view the CSS for the ads (using Firefox) and then match our website colors and fonts to those same styles. It’s a great technique and it’s allowed by Adsense, you just can’t blend the ads into the rest of your content. If you did, the user wouldn’t know what was an ad and what was a navigation link!

Wait! Does that mean that we’ll get lots of extra ad clicks and make more money because of this? I bet it does!

Now I know what to do this weekend! [insert evil laugh here]

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It’s been a while since the whole HD DVD key disaster, but this was the first I saw a nice blog post about it at Digerati.

If you missed out, someone got the decryption key for HD DVDs, put it online, and that article made it onto Digg’s front page. Once that happened, Digg got a call ordering them to take it down… and they did. But it was too late. Everyone had the key and kept digging stories that had the key until Digg shut down their submit page!

The funny part is what stories were making it onto the front page. One was “Can You Find the Hidden Message in This Optical Illusion?” with the hidden message being the HD-DVD key!

Some people were quite creative, and at least a couple were captured in the screenshot at the Digerati post.

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If you just launched your spiffy new blog with 25 posts but aren’t getting the traffic you want, I know what the problem is - it’s that you’re an idiot and no one wants to read what you have to say.

Harsh, but true. Unless, of course, someone besides your mom has told you how great your blog is. Then you probably do have a good blog, with good posts. But that’s not enough these days.

People expect you to keep updating the blog. Frequently. Like once a day, as a bare minimum. If you miss a day, people will quit coming back.

Whether you already have 1 post or 100, they want new material every day. And if you want traffic, you have to give in to their demands.

So go read John Chow’s advice (which is right on target) if you want to get traffic. But if you want to get rich quick without working, then I’ll point you towards some gurus selling ebooks.

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Today I browsed through a bunch of keyword tools I had bookmarked and never looked at thoroughly. Eventually I got to PopularSearches.com.

This one combines Overture search numbers with graphs from Google Trends and displays them beside each other. And that’s about it. It’s not a bad site, but it didn’t make me want to go back there for my keyword research. It just wasn’t compelling enough.

On top of that, the “About” page says it’s free for a limited time. There are plenty of free keyword research tools out there that blow this thing away, so if they start charging, I will laugh!

Take a look at it and see if I’m missing something. If you see something really cool about it, please leave a comment and let me know.

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