David Leigh

Ed Dale has a new podcast on the Thirty Day Challenge, which as always is worth a listen too. I’m just back from the gym where I was listening to Ed’s dulcet tones

Some good advice as usual - he talks about how increasing your typing speed to improve productivity, and I certainly find that sometimes I can just brain dump a load of stuff while typing at around 300 mph and it is great. The problem for me is getting into the frame of mind for the brain dump though, so although he’s right, that isn’t the whole story.

He also talks about scribd, which I think I’ll avoid talking about from now on as I think I’ve been crossed off Andy Jenkin’s Christmas card list for good, not to mention probably closing for good any opportunity to join Stompernet in the future. C’est la vie.

However, there was mention about Gtrends not working any more. I certainly found it don’t work yesterday, and when I went to Google trends it didn’t seem to work for some terms but worked for others. As of now Gtrends, Gtrends 2.0 and Google trends all seem to be working, so I think that was a false alarm.

The Thirty Day Challenge website is down at the moment, but when it’s working again you can download the podcast here.

Technorati Tags: ed dale, seo, stompernet, internet marketing, thirty day challenge, immediate edge

Although I’ve never been to the System Seminar I have been meaning to for a few years, but feel pretty disinclined these days as it would mean a flight to London and all the security hassle that involves followed by a flight to Chicago and all the security and immigration hassle there too. In short, I just can’t be bothered with the stress.

However, Ken does put out a load of great content prior to the seminar every year in the form of interview podcasts with the faculty and this year is no exception. He’s posted an his first interview with Robert Middleton which you can download from Ken’s blog.

Always great to listen to at the gym.

Technorati Tags: Ken McCarthy, System Seminar, internet marketing

I noticed on another blog a post from Jason Bentley at scribd. To set the record straight he confirmed that the Stompernet video was not the reason for pulling links from scribd, but that an increase in spam in December and over the holiday period had prompted their action.

He also says that responsible marketers will be able to use their service again once they’ve completed some mods to the system.

Another point I’d like to make is that I guess I was the blogger referred to in Andy Jenkins email broadcast on Saturday saying that SMARTS had been pulled. In fact I didn’t point the finger at Stompernet, I suggested it might be related. Perhaps that was lost in my conspiracy theory joke - just shows always use smilies if you don’t mean it.

And just because the was no cause and effect between Stompernet and scribd, I stick by the point I was trying to make; the internet marketing community ought to be more careful about what they publicise, especially in a viral campaign such as this.

The other day I blogged about how Telefonica sucks due to the abuse of their monopoly. I also blogged about Stompernet spoiling the ride for many internet marketers, which Andy Jenkins took exception to, but it has drawn some negative comments in Immediate Edge and at least one internet marketer who is a member of the Stompernet faculty seems to agree in an email pushing the latest Stompernet product.

After my night of insomnia I got up really late yesterday - yes, much later than usual. After a couple of hours with internet access everything suddenly shut off - no phone, no internet.

Telefonica sucks. Worse than Stompernet.

Tuesday night I didn’t sleep well. I’m at home on my own with the cats for company, and so maybe it was them disturbing me - I really can’t remember. Last night I kept being woken by one of the cats, so decided to get up and work for a bit. I went back to bed at 2:45 and slept until another cat decided he didn’t want to sleep.

And now tonight, just when I was dropping off to sleep I was woken up by a beep. Mobile phone? Cordless phone? PDA? Nope, so back to bed. BEEEEP. Drifting off. BEEEEP - every three minutes.

So I tried to identify in which room. It’s loudest in the bedroom but doesn’t sound like it’s in there. Listen to the neighbourr wall - not that either. Try and sleep. BEEEP. Drift off. BEEEEP. And then a cat started.

So it is now 3:50, I haven’t slept properly since Monday and I’m feeling a bit the worse for wear for it. Part of me says get a coffee now…

Earlier today I found that links in my documents published on www.scribd.com no longer worked. That creates a bit of a problem since I’ve been using scribd to test new niches for the last few months. Scribd documents get ranked really fast, so it was great to be able to rank and get orders within a few days.

A week or so ago Stompernet published a video detailing this exact technique. And you know what - suddenly there are thousands more scribd pages appearing. And today this in the scribd FAQ:

“Can I include links in my Scribd documents?

No. Due to abuse from search engine optimizers and internet marketers, we have adopted a no link policy. You may place one link in the website field of your profile page. You may not add HTML links to documents on Scribd.“

Now it could be coincidence, but one possible scenario for this to happen is that the volume of internet marketers introduced to scribd after the Stompernet video brought this to the attention of the scribd admins, in which case Stompernet has spoilt the ride for everyone.

<irony>And if I were looking for conspiracies I might think it was done on purpose so that people could see how good the new Stompernet program is, get people to sign up AND demolish competition at the same time.</irony>

Don’t worry I don’t expect any sympathy, I’ll move on and do something new.

Black 332 Bakelite Telephone

Originally uploaded by Old Telephones

At the end of last year my parents, who live on the Costa Brava, decided to take the plunge and subscribe to ADSL. They’ve been signed up to Direct Telecom for a few years ago, mainly because they have fantastically cheap calls and my sister lives in Australia.

They signed up for ADSL with Direct Dial and received the equipment, and waited the four weeks they were told it would take for Telefonica to connect them. Unfortunately on the final day my parents received a phone call from Direct Telecom telling them that Telefonica couldn’t install ADSL. Anyway, Direct Dial reapplied to Telefonica; another month later the same result. So my parent’s Spanish friend phoned Telefonica to find out what the problem was.

The answer; since my parents don’t use the telephony service from Telefonica, they wouldn’t connect them to ADSL, simple as that, clearly an abuse of Telefonica’s monopoly and illegal under European law. Last year they were fined €150 million - I hope the bastards are fined again.

I got home last night to find the latest Immediate Edge newsletter - or at least half of it - available for download.

Although it’s a bit later than planned this 23 page newsletter has a couple of great strategies for making money online fast. It won’t get you earning big bucks, but never forget that while $10/day doesn’t sound like much it totals $3,650/year - and if you have several of those regularly earning for you the cash quickly mounts up.

One of the strategies is about earning from cost per action (CPA) networks, where you get paid every time someone performs a specific action, usually which is to give their email address. Dan Raine was able to average $34/day from this method with a couple of hours work while testing the strategy - that’s $12,410/year. I know you can’t retire on $12k per year, but once you’re earning that $12k move on to another niche - if you manage one every month for a year you’ll see it quickly adds up with the added benefit that the more you do it the better you’ll get at it.

I’ll be giving this a shot over the next week or so because it does look pretty easy to implement - I’ll let you know how I get on, although obviously I won’t be revealing which niches I’m targeting. One of the Immediate Edge strategies called Maximum Edge is currently bringing in one or two sales every day and so Immediate Edge is now paying for itself several times over.

That just about wraps it up, I can’t wait for the second half of the newsletter!

Click here for more info on Immediate Edge

Technorati Tags: immediate edge, seo, internet marketing

Last year I finally got around to reading some books that I should have read years ago. One of those was Neuromancer by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, and I recently bought the two sequels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

The prose is pretty dense and so they’re not exactly for the fainthearted, but great reads all the same. In many ways it is remarkable how Gibson foretold of a massively internetworked world and it was he who is responsible for the term cyberspace (as well as ‘the matrix’ please note). Although I can’t quite visualise what Gibson’s cyberspace looks like, it doesn’t seem all that distant in some ways from virtual worlds such as Second Life.

One of the aspects that I find interesting is the way in which AIs (artifical intelligences) are born and evolve in cyberspace, appearing as voodoo gods to some, as well as the consciousness of people being captured in in a biochip so that they survive beyond death, questioning the nature of existence.

A couple of things that date the novels somewhat - Neuromancer was written 25 years ago to be fair - is the number of times that faxes are mentioned, the amount of smoking that goes on (although in a post-WW3 scenario perhaps smoking in public has become accepted again), and that nobody seems to use a mobile phone.

Thoroughly recommended, if you haven’t read the trilogy yet go and buy on Amazon now.

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, william gibson, neuromancer

Well, I’m back. And it’s an interesting start to the year.

First I forgot to renew one of my domains. The website isn’t important to me any more as it has had a Google penalty for around 18 months, but almost all my email goes through this domain as I’ve used it since 1999.

First of all I thought that people weren’t back at work yesterday, until I looked at the website. Thinking it was my server, I checked another domain; it was fine. Finally checking the DNS details I found that to all intents and purposes the domain no longer existed.

Re-registering the domain was no problem, and the website was up and running within a couple of hours. But when I found no email this morning I began to worry. After multiple reconfigurations it might be working - it was throwing out a 550 - no relaying error earlier, but I’ve received some spam which at least is a good sign

The second interesting thing is that I’m no longer on Digg. Digg+blog has been a powerful combination in getting articles to rank in minutes, but I admit that I may have overdone it with Digg. They clearly think so as my account is no longer and my IP address seems to be blocked.

I’ve been using Digg regularly since about May for StomperNet SIMPLE; then the 30 Day Challenge; and just recently with Immediate Edge. I’ll take it a bit easier with other similar sites as I’ve been hitting them too, but it will be interesting to see how much my rankings suffer by being bigtime undugg.

Oh, the shame of it - what would Ed Dale say?

Technorati Tags: digg, immediate edge, stompernet simple, 30 day challenge