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The past few days I’ve been experimenting with google trends.

Google trends are hot topics of the moment. I wrote one tiny post using the keyword phrase Hurricane Gustav track, and have gotten about 500 hits in two days.

Not too shabby, I can always use more traffic, and I have impression based advertisers who pay me for each view of my website, which is nice.

I was quite amazed at this technique myself, as I never expected it to be this valuable.

The more amazing thing is the fact that I was also able to round up about 35 new subscribers overnight. I didn’t think the traffic would be that sticky but apparently I’ve got myself some new readers.

I’m definitely going to be using google trends more and more to bring in more quality traffic, and keep you posted on the outcome.

One note- Hurricane gustav is still bringing in a lot of traffic, my advice would be to write a blog post about Hurricane Gustav track, and see how much traffic you get from it.

On a side note -I do feel bad for those in the path of Hurricane Gustav, and making money off a hurricane isn’t that great, but they’re used to hurricanes and if I went through something like Hurricane Katrina, there’s no way I’d move back to the gulf coast region. My thoughts and prayers are definitely with the people down there.

Lets hope Hurricane Gustav proves to be a let down as far as hurricanes go..
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Barack, John and Gustav
How you can capitalize on google trends…
hurricane gustav track, get the latest updates on hurricane gustav

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Google Trends update:
Yesterday I mentioned delving into google trends as a way to bring new traffic.

Yesterday I wrote a post about Mackenzie Phillips, Del  Martin Dieing, and Hurricane Gustav track. Each of these topics were at that point in the top 5 google trends.

I know I planned to write 25 posts on google trends topics, however I had some errands to run offline and was unable to get back on - don’t worry I’ll be doing a lot more of these.

I found out that it’s a very wise thing to do, in fact I’m thinking about instituting a trendy wednesday. Every wednesday I’ll focus my efforts on google trends topics.

The results have been astounding - I got 131 hits to one blog post on hurricane gustav. All these hits were either from google search or google blog search, which definitely proves that the point is valid, perhaps if I’d worked on a longer post with more mentions of hurricane gustav I would’ve ranked even higher.

At any case this does prove something pretty remarkable, and that I’m going to be delving a lot deeper into, over the coming weeks.

Stay tuned for further updates on google trends.
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Google Checkout Trends Knows Your Shopping Habits
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Using Google Trends To Determine ‘Community Standards’ Of Obscenity

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Read Write Web posted a article detailing three futuristic search engines, and I discovered SearchMe.com and thought it was a pretty interesting find. I even made a video on the features and uses of Searchme.com Check it out below. What are your opinions?

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3 Unique Search Engines of the Future
Time and Patience are Keys to Good Search Engine Optimization

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Google has too much power online, they can make and break anyone that they choose.

If you write a bad article about them, or sell links, or do this or that, they can remove your site from search, not that I get much traffic from search, thankfully I’m a social marketer more than an seo marketer, and most of my traffic comes from pinging identi.ca, twitter, friendfeed, and facebook.

Apparently if somebody clicks a bunch on adsense ads on your website, you WILL get banned from adsense, does this seem fair? I didn’t do a thing, one person ruined me from collecting my adsense revenue. After a year I was at $90 and then in one day got $7 worth in ad clicks. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if someone who works for google made all the clicks so they wouldn’t have to pay me.

I even told google about the suspicious activity, before I was banned. Does this seem right? Sure, I could go register a new adsense account in my wife’s name, but what would stop them from banning her account when we reach $90 again?

Which is why I’m launching a new facebook group: Google Haters. This is a group of people who basically hate google, perhaps a union of bloggers standing up for our own rights. According to google the internet is a tyrrany and google rules, but I believe we can fight back.

Have you been banned from adsense, adwords, or search rankings? Drop your comments or join the Google Haters group on facebook. We’ll have adsense click-off weekends, and do our best to wreak havoc on the internet king. I’m totally peeved at this and I believe in fighting back when I’ve received an injustice. If you’ve been hurt by google in anyway this will be a great way to fight back.

Join the facebook group now!

Of course you can call me mad, or an idiot, or over-reacting, but just wait - anyone can be hit by google, I always did my best to follow all the rules, I never broke any rules, and I still got banned. It can happen to anyone, I highly recommend just quitting google and trying another ad network.

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I’m just going to make this quick - Chris Brogan reported(When Google Owns You) that google had shut down the who account of a Nick Saber, just an average guy, for no apparent reason. Here’s what Chris posted:
Nick Saber isn’t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:
Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]
That’s it.

Nick sent a message or three to Google for support. He got back this:
Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our
investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at
this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very
seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information
about this account.
And that’s it.
That’s just an excerpt. The question posted was are we giving google too much power by relying in the arm of google too much? Does google control our lives? What would happen tomorrow if you couldn’t login to Gmail, or similar?

These are all troubling issues, remember once upon a time when Google’s slogan was ‘Do no Evil?’ What the hell ever happened to that? It’s been a scenario in the bible, and philosophical circles for ages: With power and / or money comes corruption (not always but quite often…).

It seems Google has free reign to run unchecked and do just about whatever they want to.

WHY I’M PISSED: Today I found out that my adsense account had been shut down. Apparently someone thought it would be funny to click on a bunch of my links, and raise my daily revenue. Do they get punished? Nope, just me. I’m sure I’m not the only person having issues like this…

I was about to cash out my adsense for the very first time too.. I had like $90 before the 97 fraudulent clicks… Yes, I did submit an appeal, but from the way google seems to be acting lately, I doubt I’ll even get a response. Nick eventually did get his account back, you can read about the reply he got from google here.

On another note, apparently google can make their own rules when it comes to ads served on google UK. They apparently are serving a large interactive ad in their sponsored section see the pic below.

I found this via Google Blogoscoped. Google’s stance has always been that google won’t use any ads that adwords users can’t access in their user panel. Apparently Google’s new stance is “go F*** yourself, we can do whatever we want <hwa hwa hwa>…” Blogoscoped also pointed out that this isn’t the first time they’ve proved themselves wrong. You can view the search your self: Secured Loans.

In closing, I’d like to say that I’m moving to another email provider, and closing down ALL my google accounts once and for all.  Shutting down my adsense account was uncalled for, especially since I went to their help forum to report the suspicious activity 3 days before it was shut down. Perhaps people should be notified and given a chance to rebuttal. Perhaps googlers should be innocent until proven guilty…eh?

What’s your take? Google Evil or Nay? Would you join a Boycott if there were one?

Here are some related posts:

Guy gets locked out of all Google apps
Google Can & Will Shut Off Your Account Without Warning
The Downside of Relying on Google for Everything [Google]
When Google Owns You

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TabmixPlus and Firefox 3.01
I don’t know about you, but my favorite firefox plugin for the ages has been TabMixPlus. Recently(past 24 hours) firefox released a new update, and upon loading it said that the TabmixPlus addon will no longer work with Firefox 3.01.

I quickly went to google to find me a solution. I found the solution over at the plugin’s forum, however I thought I’d repost it here to make it easy for you to fix it.

There’s actually two ways you can fix it. First off you can just install my updated program - if you trust me, I’m in no way affiliated with the plug-in makers, and I make absolutely no claims here, but it worked for me, or you can follow my steps to modify the plugin yourself.

To download my updated version click here.

And here are the steps for doing it yourself. Please note you will need winrar to perform this upgrade.

Download the original plugin - save it to your desktop.
Right Click on the file. Choose open with if available, or just ‘open’, and open it with WinRar.
Drag the ‘install.rdf’ to the desktop, right click on it, and choose open with notepad, textpad, or any text editor that you prefer.
Next you’re going to want to find the line that says: em:maxVersion=”3.0″
Change the 3.0 to a higher number, 4.0 will work until firefox 4.0 comes out, or you could just change it to 3.01 if you prefer.

Save the ‘install.rdf’ file. Drag it back into the winrar window overwriting the existing file.
Close the winrar window. Drag the xpi file into the firefox window, install it and enjoy!

Please leave a comment if this helped, if it didn’t help - also let me know and I will try to find another fix for ya.

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As many might be aware this blog was recently relaunched in March 2008, after about 8 months of silence.

Originally, I lost the blog posts that I’d had, and it appears google is still punishing me because they can’t find the links to those posts anymore. Using a bit of ingenuity(aka the waybackmachine at archive.org) I’ve found the old posts and have been adding them, post dating them of course for the original date they were posted.

Next I’m adding 301 redirects via htaccess to make sure that everything is pointing to the right spot.

Hopefully this is enough to get google to give me some PR love. At least Alexa still like’s me!

If you notice old blog posts going to your feeds you can ignore them or re-read them if you want to. Just don’t judge me on them as I think my blogging style has improved greatly since those early nights in 2007, when I started out blogging about the Law of Attraction.

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TNX - pronounced ‘thanx’, as in sms texting language is an up and coming Text-Link Exchange marketplace.

The premise behind TNX is that by increasing the amount of ‘quality’ links coming into your website, you will also increase your search engine rankings, and thus get more traffic.

It’s a good practice when using services like these not to disclose the fact that you are using them as google frowns at the practice. As a rebellious blogger though and not a fan of being told what I can / can’t do - I recommend giving them a try - both as a monetary source as well as a source for more traffic.

One thing I like is that they have a market where you can buy / sell / trade TNX points - you could also give them away in contests and what not. It’s like a liquid commodity, and personally I like them a lot better than Text-Link-Ads.

They do offer full-control over what kind of links are placed on your site, as well as what kind of sites your links show up on.

If you’re looking for an affordable method of ranking higher in google and a new way to make some money online go ahead and give TNX links a try - and when you’re done swing on over and let me know how well they’re working for you - I would also like some tips to share here on how to use them more effectively if you have any - feel free to leave a comment.

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Apparently the four biggest internet companies are at it again, everyone would love to be google, of course google would love to acquire everyone else.

Microsoft wants yahoo to be their love child, but Yahoo is like, I dunno Aol is kinda cute, and I might be crushin’ on google too.. I think we could make cute babies.

Here’s a short overview from Mashable:
Here’s a very short recap of the internet love rectangle story so far. Microsoft bids for Yahoo; Yahoo wants more money; Google doesn’t want the deal to happen; Microsoft reiterates their bid; Yahoo still wants more money; Yahoo considers closing an advertising deal with Google; AOL and Yahoo consider merging.
While the community at large is thinking what does Yahoo see in Aol, and for that matter why does Microsoft want Yahoo? It’s all one big convoluted love triangle.

The winner though in this menage tois, in my opinion is probably Google, they’re not in “love” with anyone, and stand less likely a chance of getting their heart broken.

The problem one blogger noted was that everyone wants to be google, but they are trying to do it using big business practices, when Google is google, because they are different, they do things differently and that’s how they came to be where they are. Until the old business mindset is lifted, none of the other internet giants will be able to rise to the level of Google. Plain and Simple.

Read more here:

Yahoo and Aol might Combine
The Big Four Fight: Everyone Else Wins
Can Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Aol, and Newscorp sit down, and  just Divvy up the internet already?

 

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Fool or Be Fooled!
Yesterday was probably the biggest April Fool’s day Prank day I’ve ever seen. If you’re trying to make money online, then you probably had your own April Fool’s day prank - if not then you missed out on a great Opportunity. Some blogs have even launched or come out of obscurity due to a prank.

To follow success, you need to follow those who are successful, and Darren Rowse who says he’s not a fan of April Fool’s day - said he just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. He calls it ‘Opportunity Cost’, which is the cost of passing up an opportunity.

April Fool’s day in my opinion is a fun day, to build traffic and linkbait. But it does get old, remember April Fool’s starts a day early in Australia - which is why I launched my pranks a day early, to get the most value..

Here’s a recap on my pranks - one of which nobody caught..hehe..

Free Hardware Downloads! Get your Macbook Air today!
Shoemoney Arrested for Riding-A-Bike While Drunk!
Problogger Darren Rowse - Is Filing for Bankruptcy! What are we to do?
Google buys Microsoft for $1 Trillion Dollars. Bill Gates Craps Pants!

 

And now for the one that nobody called me on:

Wow, Twitter + Digg = 1755 New Subscribers over the Weekend!

The truth is I only have about 90 subscribers, which is still good for 2 weeks!

The one that got the most talked about, surprisingly was the one about Problogger, apparently he’s more popular than Google buying Microsoft. (By most talked about I’m going by # of comments received)

Everyone who is anyone yesterday was pulling off some kind of prank.  There were many great pranks - the best though, would have to be my wife’s.

We’ve been trying to have a baby for 2 years now, and haven’t been that successful, in fact that’s one of the main motivations for me - to become successful so that we can do some of the more expensive infertility treatments out there. She is on medicine for PCOS, a female disorder, that when she goes off the medicine she needs to take a Pregnancy test (she takes it for 10 days per month.)

So this morning I walk in the bathroom, and see a test and it’s positive. I was like what the ____?! She’s like oh..yeah I’m pregnant, and I’m like really? She’s like - No.. Gottya!.. I must say it was definitely a good one, she had me for a minute..lol.

Around the blogosphere there were tons of april fool’s day jokes.

 

Google had a great day of jokes:

Google’s Scratch and Sniff E-Books
Google talk, in order to reduce chat-based CO2 emissions, is going to be cutting back on useless characters. EG: “As far as I’m Concerned” becomes “AFAIC”.
Then there’s Google & Virgin Mobile’s plan to colonize mars called project ‘Virgle’. Read the official blog post, or watch the youtube video.
There was also talk of OpenGoogle, which apparently lets you create a seach engine of your own, that has a custom ranking algorithm, and a personalized interface. You can choose from 100 different ranking criterion, including: Page’s self importance, # of original ideas, IQ of Author / Webmaster, Number of links from Wikipedia, this was originally posted by ionut here, apparently Google’s system also gave Ionut an IQ of 125, of which he says they’re 50 off. He wouldn’t state, in which direction they’re off though.. So could be 75 or 175 - my bet is 75. 
Also on google docs if you clicked on the New tab, it gave you the option of creating a ‘New Airplane’, which would then create a document with a paper-plane layout design.
Gmail, utilizing a new eflux-capacitor technology, can now send emails to the future and the past. Their new initiative is called: “Custom Time”
According to Seach Engine Land, Microsoft - Google’s biggest competitor is going to pay people $1,000,000/year NOT to use Google. If this is the case - count me in! LOL.
Google Calendar has a new “Wake-up kit”, includes bucket of water mechanism. It uses progressively more aggressive approaches to waking a person up, starting with an SMS message, ending with a bucket of water in the face.
Virtual Tourism Blog found that Google Street View censors it’s Competitors like Yahoo.
Google’s myspace clone - Orkut, turned into ‘Yogurt’.
Google added ‘I’m feeling Lucky’ feature to google Calendar, so you can add a random event, for instance ‘Date with Anna Kournikova’, (or George Bush, Lois Griffin, etc…)
The google sight-seeing blog reports new viewing options in google earth and google maps - xray and thermal energy. Now you can see inside buildings!
Google also launched “Adsense for conversations”.
The french Abondance Blog announced that Google is the new sponsor of the Paris Saint Germain football club, they backed it up with photo evidence, as well.
ReadWriteWeb reported on Google’s new ‘Dream Ads’.
Google’s Matt Cutt’s apparently skipped April Fool’s this year, and instead got a Firefox tattoo(Suspicious?)
Also on google earth, it was reported that if you zoom out far enough, you can view all the continents as one, as it might have looked a million years ago.
The sun discovered an UFO on Google Earth.

Some other notable Pranks:

Youtube rickrolled everyone big-time, and so did JohnChow. This apparently pissed off a lot of his subscribers / patrons. Chris Jacobson from Money Making Scoop states that he lost some work he was working on because of the javascript popups. John Chow even reported a lot of comments to the effect of people un-subscribing, because of the RickRoll.
Daniel at Daily Blog Tips, announced they were acquired for $168,000 - that was NOT true, he also announced on Daily Writing tips, that English was becoming the official language of the Internet.
Problogger Darren Rowse’s launch of “Pay Per Tweet” was obviously a gimmick - admittedly I fell for it, and sent an email to the email address he had for it.
You can also check out Tech Crunch’s lawsuit for $25 Million against Facebook.
Then there’s John Chow Cola - the Official Soda of Bloggers everywhere.
WinningTheWeb added a hummer h3 to their huge contest.
Garry Conn got banned from Adsense and lost like $13,000. I knew this was a prank because he didn’t seem as upset as he should’ve been.
Bloggingfingers, obviously copying my prank, hehe.. Broke into the 23k subscribers realm.
Digg to buy Microsoft as shares fall..
Darn Good Reviews announced soap made from frogs that washes away fat.
Chris Pirillo apparently got in fight with wife and quit job.
Shoemoney wrote a good post on how to make $100000 in an hour.
Discounted Airfare - if you’re willing to stand.
Tech2 spoke of India banning foreign Social Networks.
Mahalo’s interview with Steve Jobs.
New Music Mask, turns your face into a musical Instrument.
TimeTraVLr Builds your website yesterday, using Web3.0 Technology and 50% more Ajax!
Thinkgeek is selling a Betamax to HD-DVD convertor.
IRS considers giving bloggers  tax exempt status.
Njection is offering real-time tracking of police officers, and tells you what crime they’re responding to.
E-harmony founder finds true love…At Match.com!
Ades’ Blog is going RSS - ONLY!
Joel Comm finds way to totally get rid of Spam.
Trust Banners - Enforces Guaranteed Brand Loyalty.
Thinkgeek also has a new USB Pregnancy Test.
You can also check out Gearlog’s Poop-brown Ipod, in support of those with Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
You can also read about Apple’s launch of I-phone Enterprise Infrastructure Server (IpEnIS for short).
Also Nintendo WII launches a new virtual peeing game called the super PII PII Brothers. I can see lawsuits saying the game is sexist, after-all males would seem to have an advantage…

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