Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post calling into question a meeting with Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, as a grand prize for Yahoo Search Marketing’s “Ultimate Connection Contest.”

I just noticed that this post recieved a completely unrelated comment. It would appear to be backlink spam except the poster’s anchor text is “Karin.”

“Ivanka will emcee the Third Annual Inspiration Awards Gala… (date, time place) Each year, Step Up Women’s Network rolls out the red carpet and gathers 400 members, supporters, industry elite, and community…blah blah blah for another paragraph)”

What was the motivation behind this? It certainly isn’t from your typical blackhat SEO cialis debt reducer, nor does it appear to have come from someone who understands internet marketing…

Time to start my own blog PR firm?

Most books I read I do not finish. I finished reading the 4-Hour Workweek - Escape 9-5, Life Anywhere, and Join The New Rich, within 24 hours of buy it (Amazon.com, 5 stars, 111 reviews.) I strongly recommend you read this review if you:

a) You want to increase your productivity and profits.
and/or
b) Your current lifestyle blows.

Timothy had a business throwing off mid six figures but he was overworked. While attempting to sell his company he started outsourcing business processes rather than doing everything himself. Rather than profits dropping they jumped double digits. He took a short vacation to Europe which stretched out over a year.

I took away one big lesson from this book: outsourcing. Almost everyone spends too much time doing things that others can do better and cheaper. Consider this, English speaking MBAs from India can be hired for around $15 an hour. (Check out Brickwork India at b2kcorp.com for starters.) Bad quality? Big US service firms are already arbitraging cheap offshore labor, often charging customers $100,000 for $10,000 of work.

The second lesson is don’t work yourself to death. The old work 40 years and retire attitude is a bad deal. Those of us in our 20s will need 4-5 million dollars to retire comfortably anyways; most of your friends will work until they die. Spend more time with your family today by hiring a virtual personal assistant to take care of other redundancies, like dealing with customer service for 45 minutes (more info here.)

Destroying the four hour workweek slacker stereotype, Timothy points out that people get bored very fast being idle. Instead he suggests spending that “retirement” with intensive learning and physical activities abroad.

Most of the concepts in this book resonated loudly with me. Perhaps thats why I read until the last page. At the same time I am a huge advocate of working hard. I tell anyone flat out that if they want to make it in business they better be ready to bust their assess for years. If you want that 7-figure business there is no shortcut. You still have to travel down the hard path to get there.

This book definately delivers on its promise for a “Four Hour Workweek” but… many readers, if not most, are going to have a hard time with it. Some of Web Publishing Blog’s audience could begin that work week this Monday. Heck, I could. The agressive and adapting entrepreneur audience will completely understand Tim’s attitude. However, most people in the business world will continue to spend their life chasing dangling carrots, with or without this book.

Timothy comes from a direct marketing and internet background. I was suprised to hear references to one of my favorite sites, MarketingExperiments.com, along with my friends from PepperJam listed in the business resources references. There is discussion of both Adwords PPC and SEO in the section about business building. Most of us can skip this, but its just another indicator to me that he really knows what he is talking about.

Should you buy the book? It could fall into the category of “life changer.” I’m filing it under “positive reinforcement” for a path that I have been heading down for the past three years. At the very least, I urge you to check out Tim Ferriss’s blog. It is practically a case study of book promotion and PR for 2007.

A quick summery for those who love Cliff’s Notes. Working less is not sloth. Dirt cheap college-educated labor can operate your business better for you and grow it. We live better strengthening our minds, bodies, while spending time with friends and family — being a life-long workoholic is for suckers.

Remember the controversy a Canadian webmaster caused early last year? I’m not sure if it was the amateur appearance, the $10,000 a day claim, or the non-existance of a massive server infrastructure that created so many skeptics. The reactions were extreme but more than a few smart web developers figured it out.

PlentyofFish’s owner, Markus Frind, dropped me an e-mail yesterday. His free dating site is now ranked as the #5 US dating site by Hitwise. Thats quite an achievement considering 1 and 2 are True and Singlesnet, two sites recieving massive volumes of traffic thanks to huge spending sprees.

This week The Wall Street Journal featured an article on his site. “A few months back, he posted on his blog a picture of a check from Google for nearly $1 million for a two-month period. Google confirmed the check was for real.” (worth noting that was in CAD.) Markus now reports PlentyofFish is bringing in between $5-$10 million per year.

Perhaps some will doubt the new claims. For those with both feet in the online dating industry right now, these numbers might not only be reasonable but sound a little low.

Markus currently blogs “The Paradigm Shift.” If you missed it the first time, there is an interview from last year right here.

Short notice here; got an e-mail about this so I am assuming they still have a few of their remaining 100 spots open. At 11am PST Right Media is hosting a 1 hour Q&A with Tim Ferriss the author of “The 4 Hour Workwork” (his blog is here.) This is part of their newly announced publisher seminar series so I expect to hear a lot about web publishing! You can register for the session at this link.

I spent some time reading Tim’s blog and was very impressed. He certainly knows his stuff and is transparent about it. You can be sure there are more detailed posts are to come.

There has been a pretty good run of daily posts at WebPublishingBlog over the past few weeks.

I have decided to scale down my blog posting a bit. Between my business projects and good weather here it may be best to stick with one or two posts a week for a while.

Additionally I would like to move back toward my original of the blog — gaining contacts. This means higher quality posts that other people link to. As an added bonus this also gains readers. Looking back, my interview with Markus Frind still results in more incoming links and SE traffic than anything else I have written.

Sound good? I hope this blog isn’t the equivilent of bed-time stories to any of my readers!

All of the buzz in forums and blogs this weekend has been about a post on Jensense about Google kicking out PPC arbitragers. (PPC arbitrage is where you buy traffic, send it to a page with PPC ads, and turn a profit because you paid less than the visitors made for you by clicking PPC ads.)

There are a few different takes on this. Both content publishers and affiliate marketers seem pretty happy. Shoemoney thinks Google is just pruning out publishers that have low quality traffic.

Jensense’s original post does specifically state that she has heard from both those doing “Made for AdSense” style of sites or those doing arbitrage.” In other words, this is not just about PPC arbitrage.

There are multiple ways to do PPC arbitrage. One method involves buying traffic from second and third tier PPC networks. The traffic is so bad it usually does not convert for even e-mail address submissions, but suprise, the visitors click PPC ads. I could certainly see how arbitragers buying large volumes of this quality of traffic could be kicked out.

Without making this post obnoxiously long, here are some conclusions which, in my opinion, are likely true:

- Google is using Adword’s buyer’s conversion data to identify poor quality traffic.

- At the end of the quarter, Google is going to make more money off of this, not less.

- Google likes arbitrage, but it wants the profits for itself. There are even reports of Google billing advertisers for keywords they didn’t buy. (Its all good when it converts, but not when you are an affiliate and the keywords break the rules.)

- PPC arbitrage is perhaps the best business model for fast, immediate profits. For investing large amounts of capital and long term profits, its a big house of cards. As the Adwords quality score has proven, Google makes all the rules and Adwords is not an auction bid system.

- Publishers who are running solid content sites and doing PPC arbitrage should keep the businesses seperate. This is one of the reasons I put an end to my PPC arbitrage projects last year.

There is a *must read* interview with Frank Schilling over at SEOBook (If you are wondering why the hell you should care, Frank’s domain portfolio rakes in $20 million a year.) This guy knows domain names and he puts his money where his mouth is. This quote stuck out to me — “if you build the world’s biggest ceiling fan company at fanhub.com and then you want to acquire ceilingfans.com .. it is going to get much more expensive as time goes by. Names like those are going to be worth millions one day, so the time to acquire them is when they seem cheapest and unimportant to you.”

Even if you don’t share the same .com optimism you may want to consider holding on to those names that get type-ins. $4,000 today might be a fraction of what you can get 10 years from now.

Frank is posts a lot on his blog. Here is another good quote from today — “In 5 -10 years the largest commercial registrants (domain-name based media companies) will probably be the retail registrars themselves. Like a casino in charge of the count room, the house always wins.” Why? To grab dropped domain names.

Consider this: Registerfly sucked for years. Their user interface was buggy. Domain names users renewed didn’t review. Their customer service was all but useless in the 12 months proceeding their execution by ICANN. Registerfly was a reseller for eNom. eNom was purchased by Demand Media. One of the domains I lost in the Registerfly mess is currently sitting on a parked PPC page with registrant data resolving to eNom. That was a single domain. Now imagine this on a very large scale.

So what do you need to know? Good domain names will probably be worth more than you think and sometimes it is in your domain registrar’s best interest for you domain renewals to fail.

Have a good weekend.

Here are 5 proven ways people make a lot of money online. All are hard, some have produced fewer millionaires than others. As for me, I like the final entry. Read it. Its why you won’t hear me speaking at any more conferences (in the near future) or writing any books.

1. Monetizing “free” traffic. Simple, build a website, get it indexed in the search engines, monetize it with advertising (PPC, affiliate, display/banner), pocket the profit. This is why search engine optimization is such a big deal.

2. Buying traffic and selling it for more. Harder than #1 because you can lose money. You buy visitors from any source (PPC, display/banner) and send them to a website that will earn more money per unique visitor than you paid per unique visitor.

3. Sell information to other people about how to make money online. Its garbage but this garbage has made a handful of people rich. Most of the money comes from e-mail lists and other affiliates. This is the land of long sales letters, H1 headlines, and clickbank screenshots (showing you that they know what they are doing because they just sold this garbage e-book to 1,000 othe people like you.)

4. Build a money-losing business and flip it to Google, Yahoo, or another big media technology company. This is a step up from 1, 2, and 3. Why? Because it results in very large paydays. With the expection of a select group of domain name owners, its unlikely anyone from 1, 2, or 3 will ever have over $100 million in their bank account.

5. Build a money making business. Pocket the profits and/or sell it. This typically includes selling subscription services, retail, or digital goods. This may well be one of the hardest of all. Because of all of the money flooding the internet there are price discrepencies that make it virtually impossible for a business to turn a profit.

How so? One example is Google giving away services for free. Google Analytics was once a service that cost hundreds of dollars a month. Now its free. Suddenly anyone trying to sell an advanced web site analytics service for thousands of dollars a year is in trouble. The same applies to high volume retail with razor thin margins. In both cases you simply can’t compete on price.

Making money on the internet can be very hard. When you do “crack the code” there is no guarantee that what works today will work tommorow. Markets change. Algorithms change. Buyers dissappear. If you want to become an internet millionaire don’t prepare for a vacation — prepare for survival.

I was shocked to see some of the nastiest young actresses I posted about on WickedFire in March end up on the Maxim Hot 100 list. Beauty is only skin or bone deep, and make up combined with Photoshop does a good job at enforcing that. Unfortunately most of these girls are coked out and pretty damn ugly.

I don’t think I’m going to be alone here wondering how in the hell Lindsay Lohan made #1. Does Maxim Magazine auction off their sexiest women spots?

I just opened this e-mail today from Yahoo called the “Ultimate Connection Contest.” The prize includes $25,000 of Yahoo Search Marketing credits (pretty cool.) Oddly it also includes “An executive meeting with Ivanka Trump.”

For those of you who haven’t seen The Apprentice here in the states, Ivanka Trump is Donald Trump’s daughter. I looked at her bio on wikipedia and I saw nothing about pay per click marketing. I see things about her being a model, making television appearances, being on The Apprentice with her father, and getting a bacheler of science in economics. Perhaps Yahoo should replace her with someone like Jeremy Shoemaker or Aaron Wall? Just a suggestion.

If you are interested in the $25,000, check out this link.