In a world of complex websites like aggregators that aggregate existing aggregators, it’s extremely beneficial to reduce great ideas down to simple formulas. I do this all the time, but here are a couple of my favorites:

1) Million Dollar Homepage + Publicity = Cool, Innovative Idea

2) Million Dollar “X” + Lack of Originality + No Effort = Lame Knockoff

I’m not smart enough to add any variables or derivatives into these equations (probably because I dropped out of high school to pursue a Web 2.0 million dollar social network,) but they are still useful for general applications.

For example, take the website you want to analyze and plug it in to the second equation. I’ll pick an example out of the blue, oh, let’s see… how about AdSpheres.com.

And I’m in luck! www.adspheres.com is supposedly a “totally unique” new way to advertise, but when plugged into my equations, the scientific method yields the same result: “Lame Knockoff”

The formula could be wrong, though, as it’s only 99.9% accurate. (And we know all know that 99.9% usually means 55%, at least in terms of web hosting uptime.) So you have to validate the answer.

Now, to validate your findings, you have to check over the website and consider your gut feeling…

Well, um… in this case, I guess I’m totally wrong. My formula would lead me to believe this is a pixel advertising knockoff, but it is actually the most innovative website I’ve ever seen. It’s obviously different and innovative because they use spheres instead of pixels. Wow!

Just plain genius!

For just $1 you get a tiny ad on a site that no one will see unless they themselves are gullible enough to get roped into the whole “sphere buying” scheme. If they’re that gullible, you could easily convince them to buy just about any worthless $47 ebook!

Now I’m off to buy spheres that say “Did You Just Waste $1 On A Lame Ad? Then CLICK HERE to discover how to gain massive traffic to your website overnight, with no work required!”

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Want to get tons of quality visitors from Yahoo Answers without spending a dime? If so, you’ve come to the right place.

Last month I mentioned the $97 Answer Sniper software, along with why I’m not buying it. (Be sure to read that post and the comments, some idiot stopped by and left like 5 dumb, yet amusing, comments.)

Anyway, since people are totally missing the point I was trying to make, I’m writing another post specifically about how you can market on Yahoo Answers legitimately and easily, without spending a dime. (BTW, the whole point is that you don’t need to buy $97 software to do this.)

(Step 0 - register for a free Yahoo Answers account and/or link your Yahoo email address to a Y! Answers account.)

There you have it, a simple guide to getting free traffic from Yahoo Answers. And you didn’t have to spend a dime.

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Another rant for you…

WidgetBucks launched in the fall of 2007 and it looked pretty sweet; I’ll admit to checking it out and liking the widgets. It got some praise, some hate, and a lot of people who kept asking “did you get paid yet?” after the ads had been running about three days…

Despite all the ensuing hatred, I tried it out in a limited run on some gadget sites and the payouts were pretty good. Then, once people reported they had been paid, I ramped it up and was certainly pleased - roughly 40-60 cents per click! (Compared to 10-20 cents per click with Adsense.)

Even when they switched to super-low CPM rates for international publishers, I was happy with my RPC payouts.

But then one tragic day my RPC dropped to like four cents per click!

Yes, one of my gadget sites was showing those cheesy smiley face ads instead of the widgets! And this was a USA traffic site!

I switched to better networks like Chitika and Adsense and even ShoppingAds, all of which worked better than the WidgetBucks CPM ads.

I was going to let this slide by, until I got a recent email from WidgetBucks with this statement:

CPC rates have have dropped significantly since this past weekend (March 29-30). We are working through those issues with partners right now and anticipate these rates will rise again within the next seven days. Incidentally, this drop we are seeing is not unique to the WidgetBucks network when it comes to shopping CPC rates right now; nonetheless, we’re working to get those CPC rates back to their week-ago levels.

See, my problems began long before March 29th. I was already getting just a few cents per click… If my payouts had dropped any lower, I would have owed WidgetBucks money!

[Stay tuned for more rants…]

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The latest news from Google Adsense is that you should NOT be aggressively blending your ads.

They give you a couple examples, and it goes without saying that some Adsense placements I’ve shown you before fall under these restrictions!

But as long as you aren’t using these tactics, you should be fine.

[Via WhyDoWork]

P.S. Make sure your Privacy Policy is updated, too.

I totally forgot to mention this crap that if you run Adsense, you have to add a long Privacy Policy to your site or else you’ll be breaking Google’s TOS. Instead of complying with these new terms, I decided to remove Adsense from quite a few of my sites…

But if you want to keep Adsense and be in compliance, here are a few good links:

www.jensense.com/2008/02/26/tracked…adsense/

www.jensense.com/2008/03/05/adsense…use/

http://techtites.com/2008/03/08/privacy-policy/

http://www.techspikes.com/privacy-policy/

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Well, if you’re a blogger, there’s no way you missed April Fools Day this year. Just about every blog had some sort of trick!

However, it’s about quality, not quantity, so here are my thoughts:

My most anticipated prank was from Shoemoney, and his Make $1000 An Hour video turned out to be pretty cool. It was pretty obvious, but still funny… and the joke kept going through the comments, so it was a good time. (Some people were fooled though!)

John Chow partnered with Coca-Cola, which was OK. The Photoshopping was great, but it was a little too obvious to fool anyone.

And the Rick Rolling stuff was pretty boring. The one from Cow was plain obnoxious.

Zac Johnson started his own blog affiliate program, which wasn’t the funniest out there, but it was believable. 75 cents per click would have been a nice payout

Darren Rowse launched PayPerTweet, which was quite amusing, although I’m willing to bet that there is already a lot of “pay per tweeting” going on. Funny and believable, it was a good one.

It must have worked, too, because it seems more and more bloggers are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. A coincidence, or are they looking to cash in?

You could even sue Facebook. Granted there are lots of lawsuit jokes, but that post on TechCrunch was so funny anyway!

Jim Kukral was in there too. His joke was the post “Stop Asking Me to Digg Sh*t”… since that was posted on April 1st, it’s obvious that he actually wants you to send him tons of emails every day asking him to Digg your stuff.

My personal favorite prank was from Tim Ferriss, a master of outsourcing, who revealed that he even outsourced his personal blog! I was torn between “wow, he is a freakin genius, I want to do that, too” to “man, this would be a crazy good April Fools joke!”

Turns out it was a prank, and it was extremely fun and realistic. Kudos to him!

The big letdowns were people that pretended to sell their blog, which is way too common, and it’s been done so much before. There are so many things you could do, why bother with lame, old jokes like that?

It would be much better to joke about SEO firms or make tons of cash. (My jokes were obviously the best of the bunch, but they didn’t get much coverage because I don’t have thousands of noobs lurking around here looking for generic advice…)

Another great one was in the form of Blog Commentator. I was in on the joke, but apparently very few people were.

You know how I love spoofs, right? Well Blog Commentator was a spoof on all the “buy blog comments” style of comment spamming services. It even had contextual analysis technology like Google Adsense so it could analyze the blog post and leave a thoughtful comment that would in no way be recognized as spam!

Please take a look, it must have taken tons of work to do the full sales letter, ordering process, and wait list! I thought it was hilarious, but no one else joined in. I can only think of three reasons for that: 1) People are too dumb to appreciate a good April Fool’s Joke, 2) People are too lazy to look at it, or 3) Blog comment spamming is so common that bloggers are no longer passionate about it.

I didn’t mean to rant so long, but a lot of top bloggers give out press coverage to real comment spammers, but they ignore a great spoof about it? WTF?

Anyway, Happy April Fool’s Day!

Did I miss any good ones?

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As usual, I like to be totally open and honest on this blog, and once again I’ll be revealing my infamous “blog income report” for the previous month. This one covers the dates of March 1-31, 2008.

In case you have forgotten, these blog income reports began as a case study in December of 2005 to see if I could make money in the “internet marketing” niche by placing affiliate links and then telling people NOT to buy products. Reverse psychology, if you will.

The first month was pretty pathetic, as I made a total of 10 cents. I think the problem was that I was running Adsense ads alongside my affiliate links, and Adsense totally cannibalized my sales. Had I gone without Adsense, I could have made upwards of $10,000 at least. I mean, I was averaging almost three visitors per day, with only two of them being family members that took pity on me!

Anyway, those days are long gone. Last month (February 08) was a record-setting month despite it only having 29 days! This blog generated a total of $39,281.19, which averages out to $1354.52 per day. Pretty sweet if you ask me.

But not as sweet as March! The record-setting streak continued and brought in…

Total Blog Income for March 2008: $41,648.03

That’s what I’m talking about! Here is the breakdown:

• Paid-to-surf sites: $19,418.22
• Paid reviews that aren’t marked as such: $11,125.00
• Pharmaceutical offers: $5,104.31
• Trendy 125×125 sponsors ads: $3,829.36
• Subvert and Profit: $2,119.50
• Adsense Arbitrage: $51.64

The blog traffic for March wasn’t bad, either. I managed 357,186 page views from 215,921 visitors, according to my trusty Google Analytics stats. Calculate the site wide eCPM and it comes out to $more than you made!

The icing on the cake is that this is pure profit. Other than the time it takes me to write these posts, I don’t pay for anything. That’s a very important detail right there, so let me explain…

First, hosting. Normally, with the bandwidth I use, you’d be paying close to $2000 each month for the servers (one to run Apache, one to run SQL, and a load balancer.) But my day job has me in control of the IT department at the NYC branch of a fairly large conglomerate… Yep, you get the idea. Compared to the business they do, my blog’s bandwidth is barely noticeable… so it runs on top-notch equipment and no one in the office notices

(It’s not really stealing, I mean, just watch Office Space and you’ll see how it works.)

Second, advertising expenses. Some people spend $30k per month to bring in $40k, but they’re doing it all wrong. See, my content is so amazing that not only do people link to me, they go out of their way and actually purchase advertising and direct the traffic to my blog. It’s really sweet!

Those people are probably thinking about the principle of reciprocity, and think that I’ll do something in return for their kind gestures. Well, they can keep thinking that all day long… but they’ll be losing a lot of money and I’ll be raking it in. I’m saving for a Bugatti Veyron, so I need every penny I get.

How To Be a Six Figure Blogger

I’ve already given you some tips on how to cut costs, but I’m so generous, I want to give you some more advice.

Making money on the internet, whether you’re blogging or twitting or spamming Myspace, consists of two things: driving lots of traffic to your site and then having sales copy so good that not a single person leaves without first buying something. Both parts are equally hard, although the second part can be improved easily by filling your site with lies.

It doesn’t matter how many people read your site if you’re not trying to sell to them the entire time. You gotta start with a pic of a sports car and mansion to show how rich you are (even if you swiped the pics from Google Images,) and then promise that if people give the money to you, that they’ll end up super rich like you are.

(This practice isn’t unethical, either, as long as you have a very tiny disclaimer hidden on your site that says it’s unlikely that the customer will make any money.)

So hopefully you learned something in there. Follow that formula and good things will happen!

(Probably not to you, but surely to someone out there that isn’t stealing bandwidth and deceiving customers!)

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“What SEO firm would you recommend?”

Man, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that, I might be able to afford some paid links. It’s just so hard to find a good SEO firm that you can trust.

First of all, there are a lot of SEO firms and individuals that have no clue what they’re doing. Second, some might know to build links, but the way they go about it is just pathetic. Third, you’re not going to find good testimonials for a good firm, because they have to keep their client list private.

So you need to get personal recommendations from friends and colleagues, and then filter out the testimonials that are based on nothing more than referral commissions. In my case, my list of worthwhile SEO firms was whittled down to just two incredible firms: Ranked Hard and Black Magic SEO.

But considering that both are great firms, we have to investigate some more. The first thing is that the Black Magic SEO site (linked above) does a great job at keeping their client list private. They are so secretive, you can’t even see their website at all!

Since I have connections, I scored a phone call with Lucy (or was it Lucifer?) from Black Magic SEO, and she assured me that they know their stuff, but their services are a little out of my price range.

So next in line, Ranked Hard. I spoke with Bradley, who seemed like a nice guy, and very intelligent. Despite their very simple formula for SEO (somehow they do it without the cauldrons,) he gave me some examples of how it worked and even a few “tricks of the trade.” And you know what, I believed him.

So, for anyone that needs a legitimate SEO firm, take a look at Ranked Hard, a true SEO firm!

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