Or, I just might move back to my native homeland, the Dominion of British West Florida.

Want inspiration for starting your own micronation? How about a travel guide to these highly personal kingdoms, duchies, principalities and (would-be) breakaway republics?

Lonely Planet has a whole book about them!

Share This

Answer: They are all clients of mine, and they are all being robbed.

Those four individuals are part of a writers consortium that I helped form.  They write articles that are posted to article directories, most notably ezineArticles. Per ezineArticles’s terms, they receive no direct compensation for their writing, and other people are free to use their articles on their own web sites or ezines.

In return, Denny, Sarah, Tim and Jer (and the 65,000 other expert authors at ezineArticles) get to include an author’s information section—commonly called a “bio box”—with every article they post. Anyone who uses one of their articles is required by ezineArticles’s rules to retain that bio box.

The presence of the bio box is the main reason that most people sweat away at the keyboard cranking out articles for ezineArticles and similar directories. The bio box typically contains links back to the author’s home page or other web site with which the author is involved. If the author is selling a product or service from that web page, the bio box can generate valuable traffic—and, ultimately, income.

This, by the way, is at the heart of the so-called “Bum Marketing Method” popularized by Travis Sago. It also forms a part of the arsenal of traffic-generating techniques advocated by many of today’s make-money-online gurus, including Rob Benwell of Blogging To The Bank fame.

The other day I Googled one of my most prolific author’s names—Sarah Sandori—and was gratified to see that her articles had been picked up and used on thousands of web sites. But when I started checking some of the sites that had re-published her articles, roughly half of them had left off the bio box. So except perhaps for a minor boost in name recognition, all of those “bio box-less” impressions were doing Sarah (and our consortium) absolutely no good.

Worse, a small number of the web sites that used our authors’ articles went further than simply leaving off the bio box. They put other people’s names to the articles, or linked from within the articles to their own product marketing pages.

None of this is the fault of ezineArticles, whose terms of usage clearly state that you can’t republish articles from their site unless you include the authors’ bio boxes. I need to go back and re-read their terms; possibly they even threaten legal action against violators. In any case, ezineArticles asks its authors to contact any web site violating the terms and demand that the rules be respected (by adding the bio box, for example), or that the incorrectly posted article be removed.

The problem is that violations now number in the thousands, and that’s just for one author’s content. If this is happening for all 65,000 of ezineArticles’s contributors, then it has grown out of hand.

A large proportion of the scofflaw sites that I found appear to be “scraped”—that is, sites generated by automated scripts that go out on the web, grab content from here, there and everywhere, and churn out junk pages by the tens of thousands. It’s like a crime wave that has gone beyond the ability of anyone to effectively police.

Now, even given the existence of so many robot-created web sites, the fact of course remains that there is a human being behind every one of them. Domain registration information, including contact info, is public record, although there are ways to hide the identities of the real people who are involved. I’ll certainly be contacting as many of the scofflaws as I can, though how many will either correct their sites to conform to the rules of this game—or else remove them completely—remains to be seen.

How do other writers, or their agents, handle this? Do others agree that this is a growing problem? Can the article directory sites do anything beyond what they are already doing to enforce their terms of usage?

Let’s discuss.

P.S: I hereby give permission for anyone who wishes to republish this article, provided that a link back to this site’s main page (Banking On The Blog) or to this specific post is included.

Share This

This commenter offers food for thought about how you can screw up with Blog Rush–and by implication, what you should do to make sure you gain the most traffic juice from B.R.

In related news, in a few days BlogRush will begin offering its widget in an array of colors, so you can choose the look that goes best with your blog’s theme.

Share This

I talked earlier about Yeah Write, which I love, but personally YW suits me more as a note taker/storer application. For sheer ease of opening up a screen and writing, I give the nod to RoughDraft.

RoughDraft was created by a writer in England named Richard Salsbury. I’m not sure what happened to him, as the last updates to his web site are from 2005. If you need an easy-to-use word processor designed by a creative writer for other writers, then you should get over to that web site right now while it’s still there.

RoughDraft is a freeware word processor that runs on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP. Although suitable for general use, it was specifically designed for creative writing: novels, short stories, articles, plays and screenplays.

“It’s designed to be as practical as possible, offering all the features you need, but without being complicated or awkward to use.,” Salsbury informs.

Among RoughDraft’s special writer’s features are modes to automate formatting plays and screenplays, instant backup of all open files, and automatic creation of cover pages for manuscript submissions with word and page counts.

RoughDraft. I love it! Thanks, Richard, wherever you are.

Share This

There’s a clever new system out that there that can generate a serious amount of blog traffic for you. It’s called BlogRush.

BlogRush works like this: You add a small chunk of code to your blog template (the sidebar is a good place for this). That code the generates a graphic, visible to your visitors, that contains headline links to other blogs.

The links in your BlogRush graphic generate traffic from your blog to those other blogs. But in return, a link to your blog will appear on some of those other blogs, offering the chance that their visitors will click through to you.

Every time someone views one of your blog pages, you will earn a credit. For every credit you earn, a link to your blog will appear on someone else’s blog.

There’s more to it than this, but it’s almost as simple as I’ve outlined it here. You can learn all about it, sign up and put the code in your blog in just 10 or 15 minutes. Cost? Entirely free.

Oh, BlogRush also has a referral system. Every time someone views your blog and signs up for the BlogRush program, you get additional credits whenever their blog is viewed. You also earn credits for people who join BlogRush from viewing their site … etc., etc. — down through ten levels.

Really, folks, if you’re looking for free traffic to your blog without paying a cent, this is the proverbial no-brainer.

Here’s the link to learn more and to join. And here’s what the BlogRush widget looks like:

Share This

Babies. Flowers. Couples kissing. Cruise ships. A half-eaten hamburger. Soccer players. Rock bands. A cat in a goldfish bowl. A cathedral. Vacation pictures–lots of vacation pictures. More kissing couples. Anime art. A gravestone. Someone blowing out birthday candles. A perfume bottle. A tree. Another tree. Buddies with arms around one another walking through some European plaza. Parrots, houses, train stations, oceans. I even saw a screen shot of a foreign currency trading chart flash by.

Watch it.

Share This

Today I’m pleased to recommend a little program called Yeah Write (in fact, I’m drafting this post in Yeah Write before pasting it into the blog).

Yeah Write, besides having a clever name, is designed to take up little room, to be quick-opening, and otherwise to kick away all barriers to free and easy, anytime-the-mood-strikes writing. And there’s a free version.

The program uses a file-cabinet metaphor for organizing your documents. You can create more than one “drawer,” but you don’t really need to. Just open the default drawer, pick the most suitable format from the available tabs, and start writing.

Available formats (or templates), by the way, include “Diary,” “General,” “Journal,” “Letters” (personal or business), “Memos” and “Notes.” The program automatically opens to “General,” which I find to be sufficient for almost any kind of writing I want to do. (There’s also a tab labeled “YW Info,” which contains information on available updates and a user’s manual.)

Yeah Write has some basic formatting and editing options, such as the ability to boldface and italicize, to create bullets, and to do a find-and-replace. There’s a built-in spell checker, too, plus a few other nice controls.

But again, the main point of Yeah Write is writing. Just get in and hit the ground typing — don’t even worry about saving, because the program will do that for you automatically.

You can download Yeah Write from the Web site www.yeahwrite.com.

You can use the free version of Yeah Write as long as you like. At installation, you can choose to try out the full version for 15 days; at the end of the 15 days, if you don’t purchase the full version, the extra tabs and features will become non-functional. You can then choose to hide those features from view if you want; in any case, all the features of the basic, free version will continue to work for you.

For myself, I chose from the start to view only the free-version features. Less confusion that way.

The paid version of Yeah Write is just $29. For that you get additional features such as outlining capability, and some additional tabs representing additional document formats: address book, e-mail, fax, envelopes, phones messages, text, to do, and another business letter template.

Share This

Heres’ a nifty free tool you can use to see your site as a search engine spider sees it: Pingoat’s spidering simulator (scroll down to below the goat’s-head logo to find it).

Just type in a keyword that you want people to use to find your blog and the Pingoat’s spider will quickly highlight everywhere that it is encountered. Gives you a visual sense of your keyword’s density across your site.

Share This

This is a widely discussed phenomenon generally known as paid blogging or pay-per-post blogging. The usual model is that you agree to write about a company or its products in your blog, and receive compensation for doing so.

Some bloggers consider this to be on the shady side, but I think it’s fine if:

1. The blogger feels free to give his or her honest opinion, even a negative one (some companies understand that even less-than-great publicity is still publicity),
2. It is made clear to the blog’s reader that a particular post is a compensated one, and
3. Compensated posts make up only a small percentage of the total posts on a blog.

Several companies have arisen to match advertisers with bloggers willing to post for pay. PayPerPost is one of the larger and better known of these.

If you have a blog, you can sign up with PayPerPost to be available for paid blogging assignments. It’s free to register with them.

They do have some requirements, though. One of the main ones is that your blog must be at least 90 days old. That means that this blog you’re reading now would not yet qualify.

Individual advertisers may have additional requirements. Often these will relate to the blog’s topic (they might not pay you to post about their new mp3 player on a blog devoted to pet birds, for example). They might also want to be assured that your blog has sufficient traffic to justify paying you to post about them.

If this interests you please be sure to check out the PayPerPost site for more info and maybe you’ll soon be blogging for pay. Again, sign-up is totally free.

Share This

For the past couple of years, I’ve been developing my own forex trading system that seems to be working pretty well as a get-rich-slowly alternative to the usual frenzied ups-and-downs associated with this market.

To briefly describe it, it’s a form of day trading in which I make many tiny (almost microscopic) trades, closing them out only when they hit certain profit targets.

As for losses, I just let them run. Most forex traders would consider this madness and would say there’s no way such a strategy could lead to anything but doom.

Using this system, I am almost always carrying a significant unrealized loss. But so far, this is outweighed by my realized profit. More importantly (to me) my overall account balance continues to grow at a rate of 1 to 3 percent a week.

This crazy little experiment of mine in currency trading is admittedly still tentative. At this point, though, I am fairly confident that if I continue to plug away at it, I will reach a point where I can consistently and safely take a couple of thousand dollars a week from my forex account without lowering the equity in it. That would be enough to live on if I so chose.

According to my calculations, I could let the equity build longer before I started tapping it, and be able to regularly extract $5,000 or $10,000 a week.

Math is a wonderful thing, of course. As someone said about one financial guru’s wildly overstated investment returns, by his calculations the guy would own all the money in the world within 10 years–something that manifestly did not occur, as the guru went down in in the flames of bankruptcies and lawsuits.

So, I won’t start counting unhatched chickens just yet. Still, the method of spot currency trading that I’ve developed seems likely to continue working to the good.

I’ll explain my system in detail in future posts. Call it the Quazboo Forex System. (”Quazboo” doesn’t mean anything; it’s just a word that didn’t exist until now, based on a quick Googling.)

Share This