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To Be King Of My Own Domain
9/22/2007 1:17:36 PM
After I have created my fortune online, I think I will start my own country in which to enjoy it. Like the Republic of Molossia (photo of Molossia's president at right).
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!
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Steal This Article?
9/22/2007 11:01:53 AM
What do Denny Waldarmo, Sarah Sandori, H.Tim Sevets and Jer Bosky have in common?
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.
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More on BlogRush
9/21/2007 11:35:17 PM
Couple of posts ago I talked about BlogRush (or is that Blog Rush, two words?). It's a new program to help you generate lots of traffic to your blog.
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.
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Best Free Writer's Tool of All …
9/21/2007 6:47:19 PM
… at least that's my opinion — and I'm sticking to it! I'm talking about a nifty little word processor called RoughDraft.
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.
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Coolest New No-Cost Way to Pump Up Your Blog Traffic
9/20/2007 10:48:42 PM
If you're using the Blogging to the Bank method of making money online (or any other income generating program based on blogging), there is one thing you absolutely need for success–traffic.
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:
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