“Oh darling, I’m glad you could stop by to see little old me!”

“Shut it granny. Start knitting!”

If that’s how your last conversation with your grandma went, you might just be the next dot com mogul. But if not, there’s still time to exploit her in order to support your crack addiction.

I got the idea from the “Socks with a Story” story over at Springwise (an entrepreneurial ideas blog.) Once I saw it, I knew it would be perfect for the conniving internet marketing crowd!

In Switzerland, there is a company called NetGranny that is a collective of 15 grannies who knit socks “on demand” when someone orders online. Customers get that warm fuzzy feeling from knowing that the socks were made just for them by someone they saw online. And they certainly pay a premium for it - $38/pair at today’s exchange rates!

(Considering the terrible German to English translation on their site, I doubt many Americans are ordering from them. That leaves the market wide open!)

If a few grannies can get together and make money selling socks online, surely an internet marketing guru can put together a similar website with even better marketing materials to make it more convincing. It doesn’t matter if the socks are knitted by your grandma, yourself, a group of metrosexuals, or even if they come from your local thrift store. It only matters where the customer thinks they are coming from!

Follow this step-by-step tutorial and you’ll be raking in the dough in no time:

1. Find a source of knit products, whether they are socks, mittens, caps, whatever.

The point here is to find something that you can get your hands on.

2. Craft a story about where they come from.

It could be “a 100 year old grandma that immigrated from Norway in 1910 that had to knit socks to survive the cold” or “a group of grannies passing the time at Rose Shadow Nursing Home, knitting for the children they wish they had.” Just so it inspires feelings.

3. Make a website that tells the story but also uses slick sales techniques to convince visitors to shell out $50 per item.

(Big red font and fake testimonials will be great, but unfortunately there’s no need for a 3D ebook cover.)

4. Send some press releases and run some ads.

Now you need to exploit potential buyers, convincing them to buy your product. A TV infomercial would be good, because you could use that to show a happy family enjoying their knit socks.

5. Profit.

If you did steps 1-4, this should take care of itself.

6. Call a lawyer when you get exposed as a fraud.

Hire a good lawyer and they’ll keep you out of trouble. It worked for OJ Simpson.

7. Leave the country and live off the money you made and deposited in an off-shore bank account.

Just 7 steps gets you from a nobody to a millionaire with their own island. Who says internet marketing sucks?

[This post is being entered into the Tutorials writing project at DailyBlogTips.com]

Photo credit: caswell_tom (who does not exploit his grandma!)

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It’s times like these when internet marketing sucks so bad that it’s not even funny. I mean, it was pretty bad when David Airey got a big Google penalty earlier this year, but guess what happened now… someone hacked his Gmail account and stole his domain!

Talk about getting screwed over by Google!

There’s no reason for me to explain this further, other than saying that everyone needs to read the story:

http://www.davidairey.co.uk/google-gmail-security-hijack/

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You know how clicks on Google’s own search pages are more expensive than ones through the Adsense publisher network? I think Google claims that people using search engines are in the buying mood, whereas people browsing websites might randomly click an ad. (And this is commonly accepted, as advertisers pay more for clicks coming straight from Google.)

Did you ever think that Google was just greedy? Perhaps they display high-paying ads on their search pages (where they keep all the revenue) while displaying the cheap ads on Adsense publisher pages (where they have to split the revenue.)

There was an interesting discussion at the Warrior forum last month that revealed an Adsense exploit that allows publishers to take advantage of this. A member found that if you remove your publisher ID from the Adsense code for a couple days, Google will start to display some very high-paying ads (compared to what they were displaying.)

Then you can put your pub ID back in and reap the rewards for a few days, until Google replaces the ads with more low-paying ones. It’s a shady tactic and could get you banned, but the results were interesting.

So in situations where Google is not splitting revenue with anyone, they display the highest-paying ads. Switching your pub ID to someone else’s will not do this, so that’s further proof that the big G is keeping it all to themselves!

Warning: Removing the pub-ID alters the Adsense code, and could very well get you banned. Try this at your own risk.

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