About email spamming

December 3rd, 2009

This subject comes back recurrently to our team, either directly triggered by client’s requests, or indirectly, thru our need to explore new ways of communicating with the wide public.

We receive more and more email spam everyday, as sure you do and everyone else does.

Even does who compete with us doing SEO in order to take advantage of organic positioning in Google or Yahoo, and those who run Adwords campaigns for clients, known as Search Engine Marketers, do also mail spam.

The legal aspects remain to be blurred, at least here in Argentina. No law forbids spamming, and judges would have difficulty understanding the issue and establishing who and how are getting damaged by this (obnoxious) practice. Well, as everything else, it depends on which side of the street you are. A busy spam reader will complain about his lost resources, but a successful marketer will be happy with the fast and cheap results.

Where shall the law be applied? In the sender’s side or in the recipient side? Some action that is legal here might not be affected by the law at the recipient side.

There is also the geographical distribution of resources, like servers for email relaying and hosting the target site (if there is one). Some servers could be located in countries where the laws against spam do not apply.

At this point we are contacting several providers that perform email spam on the client’s interest. They know all the tricks that allow decent effectiveness and very low exposure.

The first results, in a next posting.

What does Demi Moore butt have that my ebook does not?

August 13th, 2009

Recently Demi’s husband took a shot of her behind, while bending over in panties. He later posted the photo in Twitter and challenged the CNN news chain to reach 1,000,000 Twitter followers before him.

Of course she still is very attractive at 46, but the picture is not enough for normal viewers to permanently subscribe to Ashton Kutcher’s pointless ramblings in Twitter.

Demi Moore photographed by her husband

However, more than a million non-normal viewers subscribed to his Twitt and he won the challenge.

This is exactly what drives me to the issue of how difficult it is for a non-celebrity to spread ideas �no matter how good� across the Web.

Publishing an idea by itself is usually pointless. Most news publishing sites receive 100 postings per minute, and the good ones are quickly covered by the immense amount of bad ones. I only obtained a limited success by resorting to very specialized and expensive techniques, like SEO or gray hat Google ranking methods.

Websites, ideas, photos, articles, press releases and ebooks share similar difficulties for getting known and reaching their intended audience. We website promoters use different techniques, some routine and some creative to get the message across.

Being creative is very important. We’ve always heard that if a dog bites a person it is no big news. But if a person bites a dog, it is. In other words, improbable facts are more newsworthy than regular ones.

Back to Demiďż˝s back, it is improbable for a loving husband to take advantage of his wife celebrity status to show her intimate parts to the world. And Demi is not only cute but gentle, because she took it lightly. If I dared to show my skinny wife’s parts to the world I would sleep in the doghouse for a month. Or worse.

I cannot stop thinking about why this particular picture became so widely famous among men everywhere. What would have happened if the sneaky Ashton would have pictured another part of Demi�s anatomy? This is an important philosophical issue for me. A view of her groin would have been too daring and easily attributed to anyone else. Her boobs are not so distinctive after surgery. I vote for the butt, the ultimate male intrusion.

Demi breasts

What if Demi were posing for the photo? It would not have been the same. She posed for a million photos so far, some available on the web if you search for an image under �Demi Moore (before breast implants)�.

Following this line of thinking I appointed a model to pose naked as illustrations for my ebook on Naked Business Proposals, and it was not enough to bring the huge amount of audience I expected. Of course this made me extremely angry. Why is it that the ignorant, superficial, celebrity suckers, lusty guys of this world would rather watch Demi’s butt than read the insightful book (my opinion) that took me such pains to write?

Maybe Ashton succeeded because he did not need to. He probably will never have to work again in his life, even if he divorces Demi and hires very bad lawyers.

Maybe the photo got famous because it was pointless, while most of my marketing actions try to sell something, and the readers immediately sense it and turn away.

Maybe the idea of a competition between a pointless photo and the CNN giant motivated the public to support David against Goliath.

Maybe stupid things are more prone to become news than smart ones.

Maybe her butt is just too good.

More Demi Moore

SEO Audit: what to check and how

August 4th, 2009

We have a SEO Audit service, and we are always in the look for new issues to detect. So far we have about 50, and most webmasters should be aware of those. On average, a website incurs in 30-35 faults that negatively influence its rankings.

The issues are divided into insite and offsite. The insite are the easiest to fix, and the offsite factors, mostly link related, are to be addressed with method and patience.

We are offering an installment plan, that also offers a monthly update on the standing issues. The idea is that sites are to be permanently monitored for negative ranking factors.

We collected a number of software resources to make checking faster. Some are links, some are software packages, some are scripts that run in our pages. This arsenal allows us to run deep analysis in a day or two. This is not intended to discourage imitators: most tools are publicly known. But of course it requires a lot of time of dedicated programmers, which we offer to our clients.

Check the above cited page and if you are really interested, ask for a sample of our work, or for the complete model report that we send to our clients.

Our interest is mainly to earn money providing service, but also to correlate the SEO Audit issues with ranking: as a result, we improve our knowledge of what is important for ranking.

How easy is to email spam: Interview to a Spam Teacher

June 22nd, 2009

I found an ad in a spammer’s website offering Mail Spam services, software and databases for sale, and he also taught how to use them, here in Buenos Aires…I could not help myself and decided to take a 60 minutes’ class, for 15 dollars.
I was received by a man who I thought was the father or grandfather of the teaching hacker, but he wasn’t. I am the old one in this business – I thought – but let’s give him a chance to show what he knows. I bombarded him with questions and he answered most of them.

- Is legal what you are doing? (I know it is not)
- Yes, of course. I mean, I don’t do it, I manage it. My client is the one doing it…
- Some Disclaimers state that one-time-spam including the opportunity to get deleted from the list, is not illegal. Is this true?
- I don’t know, and I don’t care.
- What if someone suits you?
- They do not know who I am.
- How do you acquire SMTP Mail Servers?
- I don’t know, I bought a list once and it works.
- Do you sell it?
- Sure, for other 15 dollars, you get 20 servers
- Do you research into new spamming methods?
- No, what for? The ones I’ve got work.
- Do you exclude from the lists those who request it?
- Yes
- Did you ever have any problems with this activity?
- Not so far, after several years.
- Not even with your internet provider?
- No. I’m spamming right now. (he is…)
- What spamming speed do you achieve?
- 40,000 emails per hour.
- Do you offer your spamming services through spam?
- No.
- Why not?
- Because my clients get to my through my website.
- Was your website optimized by a SEO?
- No, it works well like this. I made it myself (I can tell…)
- Is this what you do for a living?
- No, this is my hobby
- What software do you use to track clicks? to block the IP? And to send emails?
- These, see? I Google them, download them, then search for its crack on Astalavista, and that’s it!
- And how do you protect from viruses?
- Any standard antivirus… (this guy is really bold and naive, but lucky)
- If spamming is so easy, why isn’t there any more spam in the world?
- Who knows… (I did not really expect an answer)

What caught my attention was that with a low technological knowledge level, this gentleman spams and sells the spam service without trouble and without any conscience objection. And as this wasn’t enough, he then offers to teach the secrets for a few dollars.
I left thinking that if he does it…

Domain Development Plans

June 22nd, 2009

After 8+ years developing tools for content generation like GatewayGenerator and Synonymizer, we arrived to the conclusion that most clients are not willing to buy and learn new complex tools, but they would be willing to purchase of services instead. This is the age of Instant Delivery, after all.
For this reason we are puting together a series of plans that convert empty domains into Google-ranked, money-making, marketable sites.
Creating quality content is possible, but requires a real writer. They charge about 15 cents per word, with standard quality. With our products, we can charge less than 8 cents per word.
A valuable resource for websites is a script that provides interactive features: a blog, a forum, a news aggregator, a classified ad system or others. We can install any of those for a minimum value.
The whole thing can be hosted and surveyed to avoid spam attacks in one of our servers, all with different IPs to avoid being marked as web spammers. We also monitor the web rankings and traffic, to ensure the search engines are not excluding the client’s site.

Plan 1 – Small Site

Setup

Host the site in a Linux Server with 10 mb of space and 100 mb of monthly transfer
Define Keywords (in collaboration with client) – Create a logo – Create 1000 keyword phrases to use along the site – Create 100 content pages with original text – Install a script for content management – Create a sitemap and a Google Webmaster account to manage it – Submit to 50 directories

Maintenance
Hosting – Monitor legitimacy of traffic and Google ranking – Write 300 words per month

Cost: U$D 300 and U$D 30 per month


See our Domain Development Plans for more details and options.

Technology Transfer by means of SEO, Web 2.0 and conventional web tools

June 21st, 2009

The author is completing a methodology to be sold to Universities as part of a Technology Transfer Program.

There will be a Consulting Marketplace, with all possible categories to help classify the offers and demands, and to allow efficient matching of problem posers and problem solvers. Both companies looking for solutions and individuals offering services can find each other and become partners.
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My very naked special way to promote my ideas

June 20th, 2009

I just released my ebook “Naked Business Proposals”.  A freeware version can be downloaded at my site, www.business-ideas.com.ar/ebook. A paid version can be obtained paying $39 at the same address.


The  book has 40 business ideas that I created and intend to take to the market. Most of them are Web projects, each one based on a different subject or business model. 5 or 6 are health related, and the rest cover most fields. I have the concept and the technical elements to carry them out, but not the financing.

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Our automated site creation software for Google ranking

December 5th, 2008

We are improving our page-generation software, obtaining every time better sites and always good positioning results.

We recently made a project for our Spanish SEO site, www.yo1ro.com and got excellent results for most of the keywords. It is very interesting to analyze the results of the near 80 pages made, and which ones obtained good results. All pages have one of 5 templates, depending on their role in the site network: sitemap, 1st level keyword, 2nd level keyword, index to secondary domain pages, randomly combined keywords.

Since we can change the structure of the templates, getting different keyword densities and element (image, metatag, heading, tag) combination, there are many experiments to be made. Those experiments let us know which factors are important (positive or negative) for results.

If you understand some Spanish, ask us for the  detailed results of this experiment. Ohterwise, wait a couple of weeks for the next English experiment resutls.

Investing in Domains: revenue thru Adsense – How much and when

November 10th, 2008

Investing in Domains in these days more profitable than putting the money in bonds, stocks or any other financial instruments. Of couse, this is November 2008 and the markets are quite upset. My view is that they will come back to almost normal in a month or two. In the mean time, Domain Development is a very good alternative.

Since I started DomainGrower.com I am trying to predict how a domain will perform, depending on its name, the intended market, and the investment the owner is ready to do. Every domainer wants to make sure the investment will be highly profitable, and they ask about Google Ranking, Traffic, Adsense revenue, maintenance cost, increased domain-site value and finally, profit.

I am not able at this point to provide exact projections or a formula. However, I have now a pretty good idea of how the domain can grow and how much will return.

Very good domains convert visits into sales at 1% or more. This is quite unusual, but sometimes we see it. When your domain does not sell any particular item, just adsense clicks, the conversion rate can be 0.5% and be very good. It is also important to assess the quality and quantity of the traffic. If your visitors are real estate investors ready to buy expensive property, the clicks will be very valuable. Maybe U$D 40 or 50.

On the other hand, if they are poor Hispanic teenagers looking for free music or porn, their clicks will be much less valuable, maybe $ 0.03.

My advice would be to focus on a niche audience, providing some free service that could mean value for them. Adsense revenues will help pay the bills.

After that, you can start thinking into selling some valuable items. As your audience grows you can find new demanded fields where you can offer quality contents. At that point, maybe 6 months after start, you will jump from red to black numbers. In a year, the increased value of your site will be also reflected in the domain name value.

Ask us about the value of your existing domain or developed site, and listen to our domain growing suggestions.

What a web promoter learns from a Trojan site infection

August 27th, 2008

I noted yesterday that the visits to a website of mine had multiplied 5 fold in a day. After feeling some satisfaction on the success of my promotion efforts, I noticed something unusual: the requested subjects had nothing to do with my main theme, but with foods and drinks. And when you visited one of those pages, you were redirected to a malware site.

I entered my sites by FTP and I found many offending pages that some bot had placed there. And when I say many, I mean about 5000 files in dozens of directories in several sites accross 3 servers… Many hours were needed to clean up.

Of course I had to clean my PC from malware, apparently coming from a mailing software that I had downloaded 2 weeks ago.

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