He's baaaaaaack

Yeah, I know. It's been years. But guess what? Real jobs suck. Somewhat to my shock, I'm still getting checks every now and again from this stuff. It's been almost 3 years. That's insane. So you know what? I think it's time to start putting some spare time back into this. There's clearly money to be made.

I think I'm going to be a tad more aggressive in my goals this time around. I want a $100 day in the next month or so. I think I've got enough free time to manage it. Wish me luck.

Whew...

Well, school is underway, I'm settled in and things are crazy.

I thought I'd have more time for this stuff, but one class in particular is taking up a lot of time. To go off on a little bit of a tangent/rant it's a programming class and he uses an email grader to check your output. He tells you what the name of the input and output files are (so you can grab the data to manipulate), but you never get to see it. He gives you a sample input file so you know kinda what it looks like, but that tends to be a simple case. His input files (used with the email grader, that you can't see) tend to be more "worst case" type input files (IE, there's extra spaces that you have to deal with). When you email the grader all you get back as a response is A)"Your program didn't compile", B)"Your output was wrong" or C)"Your output was correct." You can't see the input file, nor can you see what your output was. So even very simple problems are almost impossible to debug, because you essentially have to do it blind. The email grader is 100% literal, so even if you have one extra space somewhere it's wrong. Fun.

Anywoot, hopefully things will slow down a bit and I can get back to business. For now, I'm trying to keep things short and simple, so I might focus on article writing or perhaps dip into social network marketing. Things I can do without having to keep a close eye on them, because I'm a bit too busy right now. I was pretty happy to find that I've made about 100 bucks a week the last few weeks, and I really haven't done anything. Bonus money :P

Also, I'm pretty excited about my senior project. I got it approved before the start of the semester. It's going to be an indexing/rank tool. Essentially, I plan to make it do some social bookmark submitting, trackback discovery/submission, and auto find high page rank places to make comments. The trackback part is a bit spammy I suppose...but the comment part won't be automated, it'll just find them for you, so you can read through it and make a real comment. The social bookmarking part I hope to be somewhat like Bookmarking Demon. Depending on how quickly things come together it will have more or less features, but those are my basic goals. Should be pretty neat.

So far it can login to a couple of social bookmarking sites. I figure that once I start to get a better handle on using C# (which I'm new to), things should come together a little quicker. The social bookmarking part will probably be the bulk of the work, so I'm hoping to get that mostly done within the next couple of months. I already have it setup to make new threads for each site, so it seems to be running pretty quick. Once it gets up and running a bit more, should be a handy tool for indexing articles, lenses, whatever.

Not Dead

Yeah, I bet you thought I was dead...or at least that I gave up. Actually, neither is true.

This stuff has gone on the back burner a bit, as I'm getting ready for my return to college. I've been spending time with friends and family. Also, I got a proposal for my senior project completed and accepted. I've started research and work on that.

I apologize for the complete lack of updates. I originally made the blog for myself, just to keep track of what I was up to, I never really expected anybody to read it, lol.

With school starting up, I might actually be making more updates and working harder than before. I know that seems strange, but being home and around family all day (only 2 days am I home alone for any stretch of time) in a small house, it's hard to stay focused. I have my own apartment now up at school, so I'll be able to get some time to really focus in.

Bum Marketing Adventure

I gave up counting days, lol.

I'm in a bit of a rut right now. I'm having trouble making things work. I've hit a lot of setbacks. Things just aren't working well.

I'm making things easier on myself. I've been getting frustrated, so I decided to just let that go. I would spend all day working on this, yet really get nothing done. I'm changing this. I have a very simple goal for each day. Make one good site. That's it. If I feel like more, I can. If not, I can forget about IM for the whole day. It seems to take 2-5 hours to do, depending on how quickly I get a good idea. This goal guarantees that I get something worthwhile done everyday, without wearing me out. I've stuck to it for a week now.

I'm also not worrying about money right now. The fact is, as slow as it's been lately, I'm still way ahead of where I thought I would be. So I'm just going to go about this slow and steady.

My biggest problem now is, with Squidoo not quite as good as it once was, rankings are harder to come by.

Days...a lot... - Bum Marketing Adventure

I realize my posts have grown rather infrequent and for that I apologize.

Things have gone downhill lately. I won't really get into it, but I've been having a hard time making things work. I'm not giving up but I'm a little exhausted and frustrated.

The couple ideas I had seem so powerful, I just can't quite crack the code to it. I KNOW there is huge gains to be made, I just need to come up with a really good plan to exploit it. I'm so frustrated because I know I'm right there, I can feel it...I just can't quite get over the hump. Hopefully I can figure this thing out before I go crazy.

This month has been by far my worst. I plan to make next month my best.

Days 67-72 Bum Marketing Adventure

Wow, long time no update.

Well, I'm still unsure on Squidoo. Some of them are still doing ok, others aren't. From what I heard, the reason many sites dropped (or get deindexed) was because a spammer got a hold of Squidoo and made something like 70,000 lenses in just a few days. I'd imagine it was someone using a scrapper (script to steal content from other sites to make you a bunch of automated sites. Individually not very effective, but 10,000 plus can add up. And it's completely automated.)

This, of course, made Google frown on Squidoo. Squidoo contacted Google to try and rectify the situation. While it seems somewhat fixed, this is bad news for us Squidoo users. First of all, it brings Google's eye on Squidoo. So, if they weren't before, they're now well aware of IMers on Squidoo. Secondly, Squidoo may have to drop the hammer a bit on spam lenses. While most of us should be ok with that, it may cause some problems. I'd expect to see some captcha on there as well. They do have some when you make a lens, but apparently that's not enough.

That said, to call it dead would be stupid. It's still pretty powerful and its future remains to be seen. If you can get your lenses some links, it's still very powerful. And even if you can't, it still works ok.

I, as usual, continue my poor attention span ways and waste time doing a million things. Oh well, at least I enjoy doing that. Although I have stumbled upon a new idea. If I can get creative enough, it could be huge. We'll see.

Day 64, 65, 66 - Bum Marketing Adventure

Well, it appears the Squidoo drop wasn't just my imagination. A couple of you have noticed it as have a lot of people at the Warrior Forum. While I wouldn't call it completely dead, it does hurt the viability of marketing that way. I knew it was only a matter of time before this happened. Squidoo has almost NO real information on it, just IMers trying to make money. Squidoo even advertises itself as a "get high ranks in google easily" tool. Those two pretty much spelled its eventual doom.

I've been trying to find ways to replace Squidoo. I might have a couple ideas. For now I guess I just target less competitive keywords, as they still rank ok. This is a bit of a downer...ok a huge downer. I guess that's the life of the starting out IMer. Big highs and big lows.