If you are not some sort of Internet moron who somehow has stumbled on my unambiguous website and completely missed the legend that is Paul the psychic Octopus well I have some good news for you. Paul has made further predictions (not on the result of football matches) but the future direction of the Internet and those who dwell upon on it. I will get back to this, but first I want to examine the theories of how this superior being came to existence:

1. Pure Coincidence – I thought in the effort of balance I would examine this obviously untrue and patently false accusation that it is mere coincidence that Paul the Psychic Octopus has correctly predicted the outcome of all the matches at the world cup. I suppose it is pure coincidence that 9/11 happened when that date represented by the font windangs is a plane and two towers as well.

2. Supreme Being – Perhaps Paul is not merely a conveyor of future predictions, but some sort of aquatic demigod who has come to earth to eat mussels, entertain visitors, predict football matches, and start a series of events that will ultimately result in the demise of the human race and the planet on which we reside. OK maybe not entertaining visitors but consider what if he isn’t predicting the matches so much as he is imposing his will upon the destiny of the earth?

3. Back to the future – The most likely of the theories that surround Paul, is that he is of this world, but merely a passenger back through the passages of time. After intensive investigation is has been extrapolated based on Paul’s testimonies, that he is actually from the year 2080 and is 75 years old. Paul has been quoted stating “swim, swim, bubble, eat, ink, ink, swim” which roughly translates to “I used to swim in a private aquarium for my master, however some time in 2080 I was fed some out of date mussels and fell terribly ill. In a desperate attempt to make me better, my master underwent some experimental treatments, involving tin foil, a microwave, testicles from an ox, a copy of twilight, a unicorns horn and a modest American. OK I made the last bit up about the modest American, but some sort of accident occurred during the procedure causing a wormhole through time, in which I tragically fell into. I arrived in a German aquarium and was luckily placed in a position where I can tell my story because the aquarium people thought it was a clever idea to get football predictions from an octopus.”

So knowing that Paul is from the future I decided to ask for some insights in the future of the Internet particularly relating to webmasters. Unfortunately I was not able to secure the services of the octopus whisperer (who translated the above piece) so I was forced to merely place in glass boxes filled with mussels into his tank with two possible answers to the questions I pose to Paul. It is important to realise that I asked Paul to choose the closest correct answer so the answers are limited to how well I predict future trends. So here is the full transcript of the interview:

Adam: Hi Paul, its a pleasure to meet you, how are you?

• Option A: Fine
• Option B: I am a god-damn octopus what do you care?

Paul: Option A, Ink, Ink, Swim

Adam: I have been told by a reliable source that you are not in fact psychic, but have travelled back in time and was hoping to ask you some questions about the future. Let me ask you whether or not you know about me in the future and how well scribblescratch has done.

• Option A: You have become supreme overload of the earth, on the back of huge financial wealth and popularity gained through the growth of your website scribblescratch.
• Option B: You have become the supreme overload of the earth, on the back of huge financial wealth and popularity gained through the growth of your website scribblescratch.

Paul: Swim, chew, Option B

Adam: That very interesting although a fairly predictable outcome there. It has been recently predicted the generation x/y/z lacks the social co-ordination to become successful in the business world because of an over-dependence on technology and socializing via the new mediums. How exactly does Generation X/Y/Z stack up?

• Option A: Compared to the baby boomers? Ha its no contest, they are the most destructive, self-indulgent in history and are looked down upon as such.
• Option B: After Skynet was launched there really is no need to succeed in the business world.

Paul: Option A, death stare, bubble

Adam: It seems Apple, Microsoft and Google are the 3 big players in the various markets today. Will they still be around in 70 years? And if so are they still as dominant?

• Option A: They are much the same as today, diversifying with new technologies, they have many more competitors but are still looked at as being the most powerful player in their respective industries.
• Option B: Are you referring to the great three world republics of Googlonia, The democratic Peoples republic of Microsoft and the United States of Apple?

Paul: Option A, ink, swim

Adam: Is Steve Jobs still referred to as enlightened entrepreneur?

• Option A: No, he is still considered a tool
• Option B: Definitely a tool

Paul: Takes the mussel out of both boxes at the same time. Then inks.

Adam: What has been the most exciting advancement for the Internet in your life-time?

• Option A: Virtual Reality is the norm where you can experience almost anything imaginable.
• Option B: Spammers have been outlawed world-wide with a minimum penalty of death and enforced vigorously.

Paul: Option A

Adam: This interview and article is obviously becoming a farce with no real point, so for my last question whats the best condiment with calamari?

• Option A: Soy Sauce
• Option B: Tartare Sauce

(Paul smashes his glass aquarium and goes on a rampage killing 15 aquarium workers. He is shot by an off duty police officer, and we all enjoy a nice deep fried lunch with tartare sauce).

You can view the auction on Flippa here.

So if you are looking for a PR5 blog, with:

• 4000+ visitors/mth
• $200/mth revenue
• 28 unique wordpress themes
• 16 custom logos

Please place a bid on the site or at least let others know about the auction.

This tip applies to those of us operating a website in any given niche – mailing list bounces. I recently sent out an email to members of one of my sites. This resulted in about 200 bounces. I was able to mine the bounces for a couple of domains that were no longer being used but had yet to expire. I already knew these domains were within my niche so I scooped them up for the price of a registration renewal.

Again this is only really applicable if you maintain some kind of a membership list and you are interested in domains within that niche. You can always offer people who have mailing list something for them to send you a list of expired domains. And you have to do some work to maximize the return. But at these prices how much work is that likely to be?

“Twitter is just for twats”

Seriously what purpose is there to update everyone about the finer details of your life every 5 minutes with 140 characters. Journalist Bruce Sterling summed it up perfectly when he was quoted saying “Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite ‘The Iliad.’” My fiancee recently had a free twitter account added to her mobile and spent last night telling me pointless pieces of information that famous people had been tweeting. The Honourable prime minister of Australia found time in his busy schedule to let his twitter followers know the following:

KevinRuddPM: A stunning building in the heart of the city bringing the researchers from 3 unis together for the first time. Good stuff. KRudd

KevinRuddPM: Today a $200m investment in a new SA Health & Medical Research Institute for researchers on cancer & other big diseases. KRudd

KevinRuddPM: Great to be back in Adelaide. Partnership with @PremierMikeRann on record investments in road, rail, schools, health and water. KRudd

KevinRuddPM: Amazing facility and great ethos of education excellence for Aboriginal kids. Helps turn closing the gap into a reality. KRudd

Fascinating stuff. Perhaps a link to further information on his tweet may of made this information somewhat beneficial and I guess this blame sits squarely on the prime ministers shoulders, more-so than twitter itself. But still he is not unique with these types of tweets and this absolute dribble has close to 2 million followers!

But alas, the techno-savvy crowd keep plugging it and its been suggested by many bloggers far more qualified than me that it is extremely beneficial for their sites. So I thought I would take a look at what the gurus are posting. You see my major qualm with twitter is that, I have set up a twitter account and now have no idea what to tweet about that my (future) followers would find useful.

So first stop is at problogger.net’s author Darren Rowse twitter account. As a leader an expert in the blogging industry surely he must know what to blog about and to his credit his tweets have some merit (for him mostly). He tweets his new post, post that are worth reading and tweets to get further participation from his readers. There are also a few personal tweets thrown in there for good measure as well. As a blogger twitters use becomes becomes clearer for me in engaging and maintaining your readers, but as a follower I still don’t see why I would want these updates particularly on my phone. At best I guess it can act like an rss feed, but perhaps I simply just don’t get it.

So I decided to dig deeper and try and find some achievements by this simple 140 character social service. And to my surprise there have been some major ones. From wikipedia we get “During the 2008 Mumbai attacks eyewitnesses sent an estimated 80 tweets every 5 seconds. Twitter users on the ground helped compile a list of the dead and injured. In addition, users sent out vital information such as emergency phone numbers and the location of hospitals needing blood donations. CNN called this “the day that social media appeared to come of age” since many different groups made significant use of Twitter to gather news and coordinate responses.”

Also “in June 2009, following allegations of fraud in the Iranian presidential election, protesters used Twitter as a rallying tool and as a method of communication with the outside world after the government blocked several other modes of communication.On June 15 Twitter rescheduled a planned 90-minute maintenance outage after a number of Twitter users and the US State Department asked Twitter executives to delay the shutdown because of concerns about the service’s role as a primary communication medium by the protesters in Iran”.

Major achievements in disaster relief and democracy can not be unnoticed. And these phenomenon have continued with more recent examples of disaster relief in Haiti and Chile and further democratic pushes within heavily moderated China. The power of this social media in the previous examples sure make my attacks seem hollow and ill-informed but I am sticking to my guns here.

You see, these examples are few and largely in the minority. I still don’t care what Paris Hilton had on her toast or what Ashton Kutcher is doing tonight and to think of people checking these tweets to find out this sort of mundane, inane information quite frankly makes me a little sick. Taking away the few legitimate twitterers why on earth would anyone care what Joe Black is doing in his daily life. Twitter receives a staggering estimated 55 million visits a month but that does not make the social media service into something greater than the electronic updates of triviality and pointlessness that tweets so often are. I think the popularity of Twitter reflects society more than the social media itself, and societies concerns of being left behind. Hell that was the reason I signed up in the first place. Only 40% of twitters users are retained which I think emphasises my point.

I am going to finish this post with a quote from the co-founder and CEO of twitter Evan Williams, which pretty much sums up perfectly:

“Whoever said that things have to be useful?”

Let me know what you think about twitter in the comments below.

1. New articles with only half the content look unfinished and unprofessional
2. By the time I have concluded an experiment no one is viewing the article because it is already buried in the archives
3. I assumed I would get some suggestions about an experiment at the beginning which would ultimately lead me to tweak the experiment but this was never the case
4. Some experiments may break down or need to be changed as new evidence becomes available

So what all this means is that experiments will only be posted when I have completed them and can post the results. The point of telling you all this is to let you know that there are experiments under way even if they are not being posted. Without further ado I would like to let you know about the following experiments underway or under consideration.

Experiments you should already know about

• Guest Posting Experiment: I want to find out how easy it is to get your post published on popular sites and the effects this will have on traffic and readers.
• Bookmarking Demon: I personally think that Bookmarking Demon is one of the best pieces of software to assist webmasters. It doesn’t try to do the job of a webmaster, merely assist in automating a time-consuming, but ultimately rewarding task; Social Bookmarking. But first I would like to put it to the test.

New Experiments you don’t know about

• Social Bookmarking: This site gets good traffic from search engines, referring sites, direct traffic but sees almost no traffic from the social bookmarking sites. Can I improve this situation?
• Paid Traffic: Do those paid traffic services you read about actually send you traffic you can monetize? Redirected URL’s and the like seem to make their claim at least plausible but I prefer to put it to the test.
• Paid Diggs: Can an article hit the front page of Digg by paying for Diggs? Its a bit black-hat but the rewards could be great.
• Clickbank Product/Service: My biggest project this year. I have an idea for a piece of software that will make webmasters lives much easier. Can I create, market and then profit from this massive undertaking?
• Web Directory: I always had the idea that you could buy a free web directory and convert it to a paid directory rather easily. Will this money making idea work or will it go onto my list of web failures?
• Building A List: Everywhere you talk to professional bloggers the biggest mistake/regret they almost unanimously say, is they wished they started building a list earlier. Well I think its time I dived in and put this to the test. Can a list really be that beneficial?
• SEO Company: I have finally decided to hire an Australian SEO company to optimize one omy sites. I have always thought it would be extremely profitable if you could outsource your SEO work and get some quality rankings in the search engines. Its a 12 month contract so the results will be interesting.

Reflecting on this list and publishing it, is highly embarrassing now that I view them from a different understanding. Logic should have been enough for me to avoid most of these mistakes, but being inexperienced, and impatient is a handicap that can be difficult to overcome. So without further ado here is the mistakes that have shaped my past and led me to where I am now online.

Surveys (do I even need to elaborate?)

The first money making venture most people will come across online is paid surveys. It all seems straight forward, big companies looking for market research paying regular people (like you and me) for their information. Unfortunately in my experience the whole industry is saturated with hyperbole. Yes, you can make money but the surveys a few and far between, they take a lot of time to fill out and the compensation is less than desirable. If indeed you think you have found some surveys that pay a decent amount, it usually involves you paying money for a guide, links or participation in those surveys. Nothing screams scam more than being asked to pay something upfront so that you can than earn money. Needless to say after several weeks, countless hours and almost zero income I gave up the surveys.

Logic dictates: Companies would not want anonymous, impersonal easy to scam surveys for their market research. They would be better placed to put their money into face to face surveys and reputable research companies instead of the anonymous world of internet users.

Ebooks

Whilst ebooks are starting to find a niche these days within the premium content they contain, in 2004, they were pretty much repackaged articles and of the low quality kind. There was really no value to them. However I could buy resale rights to ebook packages and then sell them individually. With no stock to manage and no additional cost it is easy to see how a naive entrepreneur was quickly sucked in. I bought a couple of the ebook packages and tried to sell them in forums, on ebay and through my own ebook website. I made probably enough sales to cover my cost and a little bit of profit, but when you factor in the time spent making those sales, it was another spectacular failure.

Logic Dictates: People will only buy something of value to them. If you can not fill a need or a want with a product that meets the individuals standards you will not be able to make a sale, and in the rare cases you do make a sale, there is less chance of making a repeat sale, which is significant if looking to make long term profits. Also when selling a product or service in an over-saturated market it is critical to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Ebay

OK my Ebay mistakes are due more to my incompetence then the auction giant itself, but I bet I’m not the only one who has made these mistakes. It usually always starts when experimenting with Ebay by selling the excess junk you have around the house. In my case it was old mobile phones and video games. Making a few hundred dollars out of junk you would otherwise throw out is a good feeling, so you continue to sell whatever you can find. Eventually however, you run out of your household junk and need to find more stuff to sell.

After running out of household items I began my search for more goods to sell and eventually I found out about dropshippers, companies who stock, package and post the goods for you so you can focus solely on the sales. Seemed like a perfect solution, but unfortunately it had more holes than the Green Bay Packers defense. Firstly dropshippers seem almost impossible to find. The only dropshippers with any credibility I could find charged prices which were comparable to the prices on ebay anyway. Anytime I found a reputable looking dropshipper with competitive prices I was required to pay for the privilege to sell their stock or worse for a list of contacts for dropshippers. Again this sounded like a scam and so I was left without any products to sell.

So with the dropshipper idea worse than Paris Hilton’s singing career, I tried buying in bulk and selling the products individually. I think I bought a bulk lot of DVD’s and was able to sell most of them. Unfortunately after accounting for ebay fees, the profit margins were small and I still had some leftover stock which I could not sell, so overall it was a fairly unsuccessful endeavour.

I had one more idea and it involved hitting up garage sales around the area every weekend and buying bargains which I could resell. This was actually fairly successful with most garage sales selling items way below their actual worth and for a couple of months I was making some nice profits. However getting up early every weekend was not my idea of being a web entrepreneur and keeping an eye on market values of products on ebay was becoming rather time consuming. Also I began playing sports on the weekend again and as such had to abandon this idea.

Logic Dictates: You need a reliable supplier (or supply) of a popular product, which you can get under market value. It would probably be best not to buy in bulk stock unless you have a plan to get rid of excess stock somehow. Ebay is very similar to a brick and mortar business and requires a lot of time, dedication and luck. The most important aspect is finding reliable suppliers which is something I definitely never achieved.

Pyramid type schemes

I should have been able to easily see through a pyramid scheme I know. But in effect it did actually sell a product and was more of an affiliate pyramid scheme. Essentially the scheme involved a 5 tier affiliate program where you sell .ws domain names. I probably could of been more successful if I had a website (and a list) at the time to help me sell the program, but alas I didn’t and so I tried to sell through ebay and ebooks. A few wasted weeks later I realised I would not see any success from this program and as such I cancelled it.

Logic Dictates: that pyramid schemes must have a large number of losers to have any big winners. The question to ask yourself is: are you at the pinnacle of the pyramid making all the money or are you at the base of the pyramid funding the people at the top?

Holiday Website

This project is still alive and may yet become a success but at this stage I think we can still call it a mistake. The idea was to sell advertising space on a holiday site specific to a destination, in this case Ulladulla (my home town). You can view the site here to see the idea. Traffic was good, rankings were good but unfortunately I needed to be more proactive in generating sales. I made a few sales on the site, but I think the potential was far greater than that. Most holiday websites these days are national generic ones where you search for individual locations and I think there is definitely a market for niche sites like mine.

Logic Dictates: That small businesses (particularly in small country towns) are less inclined to use online advertising models. They are even less inclined to seek out advertising opportunities and as an advertiser I should of been far more proactive (I might still).

Pagerank Domains (Selling Llinks)

After becoming more competent is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) I became aware of the value of relevant links on high pagerank (PR) sites. I thought if I had a number of high PR sites selling 10 links each at monthly rates I could make a living off of the links alone. Buying an established site was too expensive and creating more would take far too long, however I found out that you could buy high PR domains at a decent price. I was also somewhat aware of the risk of buying domains based on PR alone. However having no patience, I jumped straight in, buying up to 10 domains with PR, setting up simple blogs and trying to sell links.

Half the sites lost there PR within a couple of months, 3 lost PR and 2 remained constant. Of the 5 remaining PR websites, 3 became niche blogs related to their domain and the other 2 became bidding directories. One of the niche sites did quite well in the search engines and I sold it for $400 with some adsense revenue as well as selling some yearly links. Selling monthly links proved far more difficult than I had envisaged and so I began tying to recuperate funds by selling yearly links. The other two niche sites made a minimal profit as well after selling them. The two bidding directories were actually quite successful. I sold quite a few links and used this revenue proof to sell the sites at a very tidy profit.

Overall though, I would estimate that I broke even with my PR domain endeavours. That being said I was in the red for a long time while I added value to the sites so that I could sell them. Selling links on the sites was far more difficult than I estimated and far less lucrative. I would probably not recommend ever buying a domain name (as opposed to registering one) as search engines and visitors really do not pay much attention to the domain.

Logic Dictates: People don’t sell something that could easily make them more money. Any domain without content (website) is going to be punished by Google as it offers nothing to its visitors. There is merely a delay between the infringement and the punishment.

Website Marketplace

Without doubt my most disappointing mistake as well as my most costly. I tried to make a quality marketplace to buy and sell websites because I felt there was a gap in the niche with no easy search options for listed websites as well as no escrow payment options. I spent $5,000 and a better part of a year getting the site developed by foreign freelancers as well as creating a strong website flipping blog and getting first page rankings for buy website and sell website.

However the site had a few bugs in it and the quality of the scripting was generally very poor. In addition Sitepoint began rolling out changes eventually leading up to Flippa (which I think was somewhat a response to my marketplace) and I had run out of funds to properly launch the website. Despite the site being of high quality and countless hours of work involved I made a few key errors that caused its eventual demise. I later found a strong adaptable auction script for $500 which could of easily been customised to suit my needs and it would of save me $4000 as well as being more secure and taking far less time to develop. An extra $4000 to promote the site may of been the difference between success and failure. Another mistake was not being more knowledgeable about my subject matter. I had bought a couple of sites before I began the project but by no means was I an expert in the field and as the project evolved with my knowledge on the subject, my cost and time similarly were affected.

Logic Dictates: Most sites can be made from available scripts that can be customised to your needs. Usually it is far cheaper and far quicker than developing a script from scratch. Also when creating a marketplace you need to be able to quickly establish yourself amongst your competition with a number of both buyers and sellers to create activity within your site, so you will need a budget that can help you achieve this result.

Currently

I could almost make my entire living off of the internet. In fact I think if I chose that path and dedicated more time to my online activities that I would be able to live comfortably (not rich) from my internet businesses. However I think I will keep my day job if only for the social interaction I enjoy which is definitely one of the worse attributes faced by many a web entrepreneur.

Future

My next goal (amongst many) is to develop, promote and sell my own product aimed at webmasters. I have seen the amount of success many have made by selling their products through places such as clickbank and I have a few ideas of products that will fill certain needs many webmasters face.

Summary

I hope you have had a good laugh at my expense and also learnt a few things. I think I will write up a partner post in the near future something along the lines of “what I have learnt from my mistakes”, but for now all I want you to take a way from this article is that a god dose of logic and cynicism when making decisions online will often be enough for you to avoid making these types of mistakes.

Also I am looking forward to hearing some of the mistakes you guys have made. Get it off your chest, you will learn something, make others smile and feel better as a result. So if you have made a mistake (everyone) post a comment below.

META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”

The result of this new code was that google (and other search engines) stopped crawling my site and all external links form my site carried no SEO value. Obviously this was detrimental to the site and I needed to fix the issue immediately.

What I Did

So instead of dissecting the source of this new code I just jumped on in and tried to remove it. Here is a step by step guide of what I did wrong

1. Viewed the header file to remove the code. Could not find the code.
2. Added my own robots meta tag with index, follow. Needless to say that did not work.
3. Noticed a php wp_head in the header code. Tried to edit the file to no avail. (On a side note it took me a while to find the code, wp_head can be found at wp-includes > general-template.php > line 1132)
4. Luckily stumbled upon the solution in a forum

What Needed To Be Done

If I thought about this logically it would of only taken 2 minutes to fix. I should have asked why did the code suddenly appear? I recently reinstalled the newest version of wordpress. And what happens when you do that? It resets to its default settings. And what default setting affects search engine robots? The privacy settings.

So to solve this issue is an incredible simple fix. Go to Admin area > Settings > Privacy > select “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” > save. Problem solved.

I wrote this article to teach you two things. One was to show you how to remove this tag, META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” from your wordpress header. The other is a lesson in logical problem solvng. If I had taken a few minutes to consider the issue (particularly what could have caused it to begin with) logic would have led me the solution much faster and saved me a lot of time.