Google indexes the download page for your hot new “Day Job Killer” ebook and forum users decide to tell their friends all about it?

May be your opinions are different, but $98 for 69 pages makes that 50-some page Rich Jerk ebook a deal for $50 (altough right now they seem to be selling it for $9.)

Time for someone to read about robots.txt!

Web developers seem have mixed results with outsourced knowledge workers. Time and culture differences can make things a little messy.

1. Rather than general outsourcing job sites such as eLance or RentaProgrammer, look at specific online communities. If you are looking for a vbulletin mod, go to vbulletin.org. If you need a programmer for a single job, you might as well find someone who already has expert experience in the area you need work done.

2. Talk directly. E-mail and forum PMs are horrible methods of communicating in a timely fashion. 15 minutes of questions and answers can be stretched out to weeks. AIM, ICQ, MSN, Skype, and the good old telephone are your best friend.

3. If you can pay for a full time programmer, do it — and make sure its through a managed company. Per-job programmers are spending a lot of time and energy on looking for more work. If all that energy is focused on your projects, you’ll be better off.

4. You want a programmer with solid development experience, not someone who has been inserting php scripts into tiny websites for the past 5 years. Development experience means they’ll handle the minor stuff just fine — and excel at the difficult stuff.

5. Don’t cut corners to save a few dollars. If $1000 cheaper means 3 months of delays, its not saving you any money. Add up the delays and you will soon find yourself years behind where you should be.

6. Start simple. The more features you have, the harder its going to be for your programmer to finish the project. The harder it is, the longer it will take. If you are having a web-based tool programmed, have the core features running as soon as possible. Have users test it, then update the specs based on the feedback. The fancy features you believe are a must have right now may be completely unneeded.

7. Treat your programmer like a real person. Just because they may be 5,000 miles away doesn’t mean they don’t have a family or like having fun — just like you.

Its been a busy week. The bad part about that is its Tuesday morning at 3:30 am, so I’m two days in, with another 5 to go. I hope to get a spark of inspiration and pump out a good blog post, but I can’t make any promises.

This blog has been waaay too negative recently, so I have some good news. I am now ranking on the first page of Google for my name. I consider that an accomplishment since I share a name with a former US president.

In terms of business, on of my main areas of focus recently has been management. Managing employees, managing my time, managing my projects. Quadzilla made a post early this year saying be the CEO. I was already on that path, but that pushed me to get the ball rolling immediately.

Two years ago building a website that passively made $30 a day would have been an accomplishment to me. The past 6 months I have been focusing on much bigger projects. If you can create great profitable websites, why do it small scale?

On a completely unrelated note, I came to understand something that once baffled me. An entrepreneur said the best time isn’t watching the money roll in from a successful project — its the nights and days before. Its when you don’t know if you are going to go broke or not.

The beginning of this year has just been insane in terms of profits. A few pretty small projects turned out to work out incredibly well. I’ve come to realise this has nothing at all to do with money. It has everything to do with making things happen. Don’t accept being average, the human race has had a good 6,000 years to do that.

Its about time someone, with some credibility and standing in the domain industry actually pointed out what the hell is going on over at Registerfly.

Since Registerfly really went down the tubes (its been happening all along, but the past 2-3 months its reached critical mass), I was waiting for some domain company, any company at all, to capitalize on the problem. Bob Parsons, the founder/owner of GoDaddy finally has.

Apparently much of Registerfly’s problems are being blamed on shareholder and “key employee” Kevin Medina. A lawsuit posted on Registerflies.com alleges Kevin Medina embezzled money from Registerfly Inc. Apparently Registerfly fired him on the 18th, but he decided to go postal (digitally) and really fuck some stuff up at Registerfly. As far as I can tell, this is a nightmare scenario for an internet company. On the positive side, may be if this guy is an actual crook, he’ll be spending some time in prison.

Then again, what if Kevin is just a scape goat for the rest of Registerflys owners? I have to call into question their credibility as well because the company does not have a good history. For at least the past 12 months Registerfly has had serious customer service problems. If the other owners were merely investing capital, hands off, with little knowledge of the business, then their in-action is explainable.

So what will happen? “In the event Registerfly loses its accreditation, ICANN will work to migrate those customers — who have remained with Registerfly through this disaster — to other registrars.” Still questions remain unanswered, what if you have domain names with privacy protection? Registerfly could easily claim they are the owner. I know my control panel information is completely messed up. Domains that were transferred out weeks ago still show up as registered. Domains renewed until the end of the year show up as expired.

Godaddy.com is offering a transfer special to Registerfly’s victims (hell, the url even has registerfly as the filename!) Not sure exactly how special $6.25 is for Godaddy, but its an offer none the less. One word of warning, Godaddy has been known to suspend domain names for a “ransom” if they recieve certain complaints (namely email.) Considering I run double-optin CAN SPAM compliant newsletters that recieve complaints daily, I’m not to comfortable using them. Otherwise, Godaddy seems to be an ok company, and I’ve had domain names with them for years.

Its going to be a busy, and interesting, week.

Just read this on Slashdot: “ICANN says it will terminate RegisterFly’s accreditation as a domain registrar if the company can’t fix its problems within 15 days”

Question, what happens to the domain name portfolios currently registered with them? I’ve been spending the past 3 months trying to get domains out of Registerfly; the process has also left me seriously questioning the credibility of other registrars too, including eNom.

Update: Registerflies is reporting that Registerfly has been hijacked by a (former?) owner.

So the latest fad in the world of self help is this movie called The Secret and book called The Law of Attraction. A big US talkshow host, Oprah, has jumped on board and the thing has really taken off.

People seem to have one of two reactions to The Secret. Reaction one: “This is BS.” Reaction two: “This just cleared up everything for me, I feel a new beginning in my life.”

I’m watching this on Google Video, and man, what a load of garbage. They keep flashing back and forth between experts.. hm, who is this guy, Dr. Joe Vitale MSC.D… Metaphysician? I know I’ve only been out of college for one year, but what the heck is a metaphysician, or an MSC.D for that matter? This guy has a Doctorate in Metaphysical studies?

If your crackpot alarm hasn’t gone off yet, I have a tin foil hat for you to wear.

“Thank God theres a time delay — that all of your thoughts don’t come true instantly. You’d be in trouble if they did. The time delay serves you, it allows you to reassess, and make a new choice.” Does this even deserve a response?

The movie talks about feeling good and happy thoughts. At the same time, the video infers that by being positive bad things won’t happen to you, bad things like getting a parking ticket, having your bike stolen, or getting a snag on your nylon pantyhose (I hope this is not an issue for any of my male readers.)

The Secret is supposedly made up of 3 steps — “Ask, Believe, Receive.”

Are you F#$@ing kidding me? How about a dose of reality for a change.

If you want something, you, and you alone must work for it. Blood, sweat, and tears. Or for webmasters, bloodshot eyes, an extra 20 pounds, and carpel tunnel. Your mind is step one — and positive feelings have nothing to do with it — its about will. Its nothing but will power and a little bit of chance that gets a marine through Navy Seals BUDS training. Happy supercalifragilisticexpialidocious thoughts aren’t going to help you here anymore than they will help you win the state lottery.

Self help is a cookie-butter business. Its all about making customers feel good. Thus the positive reaction by many of the “un-initiated” to “The Secret.” Pump the audience up first and then sell them. The Secret is nothing more than a carefully crafted execution in marketing.

You want to know what the real secret is? The real secret is hard work. Its hard work that gets you into the position where you can leverage large amounts capital and other human labor to your own profit. Its hard work that keeps a family together and puts children on the right track. Its hard work that landed men on the moon. If you think its anything other than hard work that will get you through life, Joel Comm has an ebook to sell you.

Achievement comes at a price. If you want to float through life, happy thoughts and avoiding the supidest mistakes will probably get you there. Spend your time telling your friends what you are going to do with all that money when you win the lottery. Me, well, I’ll be keeping things interesting.

Another short post — Graywolf has wants to know why his blog has a poorer quality score for his own name than Matt Cutts, Dave Pasternack, Jason Calacanis, and Ted Leonsis. In his own words “So basically what’s happening is because I have a more common name than any of the people above, and there are other more “famous” Michael Gray’s I’m less important, relatively speaking, and forced to pay more for a keyword I that more accurately describes me than one which doesn’t.”

Graywolf isn’t the only one closely watching the Adwords quality score, so are the guys over at pepperjam.

Lets face it, SEO has a growing rival cousin — PPCO. This is hardly new either, do a search for “pay per click optimization” in Google and you should see at least 7 relevant advertisers. The difference is in the past it was all about return-on-investment and bid placement management. Increasingly, quality score optimization is going to take center stage.

The glass isn’t half empty — this is good news for obsessive online promoters and affiliate marketers. The barrier to entry is being raised and the money will soon follow.

After reading Shoemoney’s post about a CPAEmpire Ringtone offer that auto-checks the TOS agreement and auto-submits when the user enters the last digit of their phone number I thought it just couldn’t get any worse. Then I noticed that Dadamobile launched this special offer yesterday — Fart Ringtones.

There was a book that came out last summer titled The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson. I bought the book. I ended up reading a chapter or two and paging through the rest (to be fair, I do this with most books.)

The concept is simple: more niches and more choices for consumers mean more money for big sellers, aka aggregators. One of the given facts goes something like most of Amazon.com’s revenue comes from books that each sell a few copies. The reason it works is because there are so damn many books out there, it adds up to a huge number.

The author has a pretty good blog. He points out the various manifestations of the long tail, one recent post shows a picture of Anheuser-Busch’s line up from 1997 and then another picture from 2007. 1997 has 26 different beverages, 2007 has around 85 (I lost count.) Micro-breweries and alternatives have slowly been drawing away drinkers, they have chosen to compete.

I got to be honest, I’m a little annoyed. Chris plays down the ability of anyone but the big guys to make serious money off the long tail — “eBay, Amazon, iTunes, and Google.” An anecdotal post over at the Valleywag quotes some woman annoyed that Google keeps raising the payout limit right before she is going to get her first check.

The fact is I have been living off of the long tail for the past 2 1/2 years. Hmm, how did I manage that? Recently, I’ve been making quite a bit of money off it.

What Chris seems to completely miss is that automation, globalization, and commoditization (my favorite word) are making it brutally easy to get rich off of the long tail. Yes, aggregation is still important, but even long tail producers can aggregate.

As a publisher there is a straight forward path for you to follow — tons of content. 5 or 10 pages of content just aren’t going to cut it if you want organic traffic. Think about 500 or 1000 pages for starters. If you can’t be bothered to create (or buy) that much content then plan on not making a whole lot of money.

Here are my two rules of the long tail:

1. Saturation. Rather than perfect a single niche, cover all of its holes. There are an unbelievable number of underserved markets out there. Take your business process and replicate it to meet each one. There are many top ranking sites for business industries that have nothing a site in 1999 couldn’t offer.

2. Automation. In order to effectively saturate, you have to automate. The automation may come from cheap human labor, it may come from a computer program. What matters is you are not doing the repetitive and easily-learned stuff.

3. Globalization. The world is your market, or at least a big part of it. Tiny niches die when isolated by geography. Today you have a chance now to reach every potential consumer of that niche. The rapid spread of communication spreads and influences the offline world too — Finnish death metal in Dubai, anyone?

To luddites, isolationists, and religious extremists, this may be a chilling and scary world to live in. Too bad for them, the future will belong to smart entrepreneurs who choose to embrace it.

I thought I was going to have a chance to snatch some prime internet real estate this weekend, but britneyspearsshavedhead.com has already been registered!

Unfortunately so were my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th picks:

britneybald.com
britneyspearsbald.com
britneyspearsbaldhead.com

If you’d like to cash in, the following names were still available at the time of this post:

britneygetsherheadshaved
britneyregretsshavingherhead.com
britneyspearsisbald.com
shavedheadbritney.com
britneyshavesherhead.com

(Think thats scary? Look at the original pic.)