How To Become A Spammer Regardless Of People Following You On Twitter
skorks.com
skorks.com
Few days back there was someone here who told us that he was getting as much as 1 thousand dollars EVERYDAY by developing many small apps for the iPhone and selling those. This is opposite of putting all your time on a single iPhone app and betting on it.
The original article was really helpful for me. I disagree with those that are getting a different message from it.
I believe that was Max (the original article author). Was it not?
I don't get this common reaction to the post? What's wrong with providing something for a dollar, if it's worth a dollar?
What's necessarily unprofessional about providing something worth a dollar?
What is it about online entities that make it necessary for them to be somehow more "worthy" than most peoples' daily slog in a cubicle or behind a register? Yes, the internet makes it more possible to make "worthy" entities, but why must they be worthy?
Just because some people associate their better instincts and identity with the internet doesn't mean that everyone should do the same. Otherwise we'd all be driving Priuses.
I make money with iphone + developer tools + web tool + code repackaging. I can follow the $1 principle using those and it works.
Of course, I started with $1 goal, but they are all making far more than that.
SEO stuff is just too competitive, I am not smart enough to go battle against people with years of experience. My next moves are going to be facebook, smaller social network apps. Then I'll face video and add-on tools for iphone.
Assuming niche sites is about SEO is thinking small. I specifically mentioned examples and said to build software around it, not to go make a landing page style stuff.
The journey towards 400 projects will give you the insight you need to make a lot of money. It's the journey that makes the difference, not the goal.
Your owl idea and my owl idea are quite different, Max. If you notice people criticizing your owl idea, they keep coming back to the fact that your idea exploits content already created by someone else and served by YouTube, and that the act of putting it on an owl video minisite monetized by AdSense does not create value.
In comparison, I paid to have my owl bingo cards created, I am unambiguously the moral owner of the content (both because I paid for it and because I made the software that made it possible), my cards enrich the Internet because they fill the "owls of Asia bingo"-shaped hole in the life of some actual user somewhere, the cards accurately demonstrate the operation of a software product which is actively supported, maintained, etc.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215
(what is it about birds and AdSense?)
The context was about how difficult or easy it was to make $1 a day, and my samples there were made to demonstrate the required amount of work involved in making $1 a day.
I don't do such things (I tried with the ninja video site, did not work out). I'm pointing out that it can be done that way.
Using this approach you can reflect on all the different little projects you worked on and then pick out different ones where getting the $1/day was easier than for others.
The idea and reality some people can be rich without developing something of value (as defined in the blog post) is offensive on a very primal level to most people. It just doesn't seem right and fair to most folks.
Right now he's generating buzz around his personal brand so that when he does have something he really wants to shout about he'll have people ready to listen.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this approach as such - but keeping it in mind does temper my expectations when I read one of his articles. It's less "I wonder if I'll learn anything new/interesting" than "I wonder how he's going to draw a reaction with this"
In the past I announced stuff and it died in the grave of silence - this time I want to make sure that I can get the word out.
Sure, I could do all that without actually saying that I am doing this, but I want people to opt-in, pay attention even though they know what I am doing, and not because I am pretending to be a sage business man just to later spam them. I'm clear and upfront about it - I'll give you good information on the few things I know, in return when I announce my project, go try it out, be a beta tester or something.
My current small projects are just stepping stones, and this is the path I have chosen to break into the big time. I tried it the other way - building soemthing and then announcing it - didn't work. Now I'm trying it by first building an audience, and then releasing software.
If there are people willing to create $1 "crappy" products, and people that want to buy them, I think this pretty good.
His argument was that regardless of how much fun it is or how easy it is to do, it is crap, and filling the world with crap is bad from a basic moral standpoint.
Your idea also creates a virtual barrier for people who want to create new stuff -- who cares if the version 1.0 is bad?
Or how about preventing the Madoff scandal? The market isn't perfect, and simply "creating a good one" does not guarantee the market will embrace it. Markets work when consumers have (and want) the necessary information to make a good choice. Information overload makes this difficult to acquire.
Let's look at in an example in your world: I want to buy a digital camera. There are many, so I'd like to know which one to pick. I go online to read reviews. Unfortunately, in this world, every single review is a paid review (because why not get something for it), or is a review that is essentially paid, because they get a cut from your purchase price. How am I supposed to make an intelligent choice?
That example isn't far from reality, by the way. Especially in the "Make money online" industry. Try finding a legitimate review of any of those programs. Every review is overly positive to try and sell you on it so they get paid. Even if you search for "So and so product scam" you'll find an article that is titled "Is so and so product a scam? Find out here", and then they immediately answer, "No. Buy it with my link!"
Note: I realize that "applying your moral standards to others" gets us people hating gays, etc. But the alternative of not applying your moral judgment to anyone but yourself is also ridiculous. That would mean you can't call out lying politicians, greedy corporations, "scamville," or anything else that most people don't support.
Why not, if you don't approve of it? Societal pressure is the best way to keep people from doing stuff that is lawful but (subjectively) distasteful.
There's nothing wrong with pressuring people to follow your morals. In fact, it's my moral obligation to do so.
Also, I don't think it makes sense to distinguish between the business world and the real (?) world. They're the same world, and the same morals apply in both.
The debate is where you draw the line to define something as spam, and it also depends on your definition of spam. I mean, you can twist Google's business model and say it's scraping other people's content and plastering ads all over its pages. That sounds horribly close to a definition of spam and yet people love the search results from Google.
For the same reason, all the content this guy is ranting against is not spam either. I'm free to ignore all those eHow pages (actually some of them are not that bad) and referral sites and quirky apps that people write.
It only turns into spam when so much dark SEO has been applied to it that it turns up in search-engine results for which it should have been irrelevant.
If you only have one horse in the race, if it dies you're toast, so having 10's or even 100's of little sites is good business in the sense that it will never die overnight.
Let me give you some examples of sites I built in that vein, now both defunct because the $1 / day target was not even in sight.
I built a platform that allows you to sell stuff online, and because I figured the good advertising and affiliate money is in financial products I focused on houses and cars.
The two sites were close enough that they could share a single database, free to use for the user and attracted a small group of users from various countries.
But that's where I missed the boat, this sort of thing doesn't work on an international basis, you have to tailor it to each and every market specifically. So what started out as a vision of low maintenance useful sites with solid income slowly morphed in to high maintenance sites with low income. In other words failures.
Spam didn't enter in to it, and if the concept would have been successful I can see a lot of ways in which to create further 'clones'.
Then there was Max' example of the site with the owls. There is quite a bit wrong with that whole view, for one it doesn't really add value, after all, if you go to youtube and type in 'owls' you get the exact same list. Only with a couple of twists, for one that list is up to date, no broken links. Whereas any 'collection' of youtube video links that you maintain will have to be checked periodically for broken links (this can be automated though).
Finding a successful 'template' that you can clone is an essential component to the scaling of many businesses, each of the clones can then be targeted at verticals, just like what I tried to do with the cars & houses, you could do with owls and penguins.
But the line for me gets drawn at having nothing but links to other peoples content, aggregation with razor thin added value is too cheap and spammy to me, I'd like projects to have a bit more meat. But that also means that you'll be investing more time and that may eventually not be worth it, especially not if a project fails.
There's something to be learned from Max' treatise, I agree with the initial impression that it advocates spammy thin sites, but if you look at that as a way of testing the waters to see what has 'legs' then it may not be all that bad.
And I'm really curious about how his experiment with the site he's going to be building will pan out.
Your investors don't care how you make money, so long as it doesn't impede the making of future money.
First, your relative success today doesn't mean that you will be more successful or successful at all today. This is similar to the fallacies of greedy algorithms in computer science, if you're familiar with them. Secondly, utilitarianism will not give you happiness, which is pretty much the most important thing in life, more important than financial success.
Posterous has a terrible conversion rate.