Some Knowledge

There’s a wonderful new scam on the net.  Companies offer a free sample of a resveratrol supplement.  Buried in the terms and conditions on another page from the order page, there is fine print that states you will be billed every month for shipments of their product.  The price of this stuff is like $90 for 30 tablets, which is ridiculous.  They get your order and then if you happen to read the terms and want to cancel, they tell you you have to wait 24 hours, meanwhile your order ships and they have you on the books for a recurrent charge on your card.

These people are very tricky.  Last year Barbara Walters did an interview with some doctor making claims for this substance.  The sites selling this stuff took her picture and created a phony news site, complete with call letters and a fake testimonial about how all you have to do to get a supply of this stuff is just hook up with three different companies pulling this scam and get free samples.  They totally wrote fake news about how you can get a free years supply just for signing up.  What they don’t tell you is that you are signing up for three recurrent billings of $90.

Why are there so many scammers on the net?  It must be the national sport to try to rip off the elderly or something.  Maybe someday there will be some enforcement on the net to shut down these bastards who pull these scams on unsuspecting people.  In any case, if somebody offers you something for free, don’t believe them.  Free samples are one of the oldest scams in the world.  In this case, there are a lot of places playing this game.  Always read the terms and conditions before you give anyone a credit card number.  Better yet, don’t believe everything you read on the net.

So, you want to become popular.  You want millions of people to buy your products.  You want to get elected president.  All it takes is a little publicity.  Even a total unknown can make it big with the right PR.

How do you get this publicity for yourself?  Well, first you have to arrange to do something that would warrant a news report.  You might come up with a new way to look at global warming.  You might invent a more fuel efficient car.  You might go into business selling time shares.  Some things are more newsworthy than others.  Whatever you do should be something people will enjoy reading about.  Maybe you built a house out of popsickle sticks.  Maybe you cooked up the world’s largest loaf of bread.  Think of something that people would be interested in and do it.

Next, you have to get the word out about your great skill.  You will need to write a press release.  A press release is just a story about this great thing you did.  It tells the news media about why what you do is so worthy of the news.  Once you have your press release, you will need to distribute it to the news media.  Don’t forget about radio and TV.  TV can drive a lot of traffic to your website if you get in the news.  Now, get ready for reporters and film crews to interview you.

All this is a rather strange way to get famous, but it’s how the game is played.  You might want to read some material on this topic.  Check in the business section of any book store and you will find lots of books about PR.  They are right next to the books on salesmanship.  In many ways, the subjects are similar.  You will need to sell yourself to the news media to get the publicity you seek.  Look at anyone who is famous these days.  They will usually have a PR firm promoting the hell out of them.  This is how the fame game works.  You invent the news and the reporters do the work to get the word out to the public.

Of course, you might be poor and have to do everything for yourself.  Few things are as cheap as a free blog to post your thoughts on the web.  If you publish enough information, a few people will find your work.  Make sure your name is highly visible on your blog if you want to become famous.  Now just write a lot of controversial opinions on famous people.  Be sure to use inflamatory language.  Don’t get slanderous or libelous, or you might get sued.  Now, since you write about popular topics and people find your blog through the search engines, you are on your way to becoming famous.  All it takes is a bit of work and some personality, and anyone can become as famous as they want.

In the last two days I’ve thwarted two more attempts to install rogue antivirus softwarez on my computer.  One of these sites was a redirect from the first search result returned from Google on a movie title, and the second one was an Adwords advertisement from somewhere in Checkoslovakia.  The Firefox Noscripts plugin stopped both of these attempts cold.  This saved me a couple hours of scanning and cleaning out all this junk.

I don’t know how Google can get away with selling advertisements to scammers like rogue antivirus operations.  Then again they sell thousands of ads to places about making money online.  The bottom line is you can’t trust anybody on the net not to try and infect your computer with junk.  I’ve got shields for this stuff now, and the extra effort of having to approve media from different sites is not a problem.

I had all kinds of fun yesterday.  I looked up a site on how to make money on Google.  I clicked on the first search result.  It was a trapdoor for a rogue antivirus website.  It shut down my browser, opened up a new browser, and started to scan my computer.  It took two applications of ctrl-alt-del to shut this thing down.  These things are not antivirus programs.  They are criminal scam programs that tell you your computer is infected, then they try to sell you their product.  They download trojans onto your machine.  You can not shut down these malware apps with the close window buttons.

I ran Spybot S & D and found some nasty trojan loader bot.  While I was doing this my antivirus program found another trojan.  I ran a virus scan and found another trojan that was hiding inside a PDF ebook.  After everything was cleaned out I took a break and went to the book store and read books about hacking and computer security.

When I got home I did some web searching on rogue antivirus programs.  I read in a comment on an article on Wired.com that you can prevent these programs from running by using a plugin for Firefox called “noscript”  that is available from Mozilla.org.  I downloaded the plugin and hooked it up.  The downside of this is that I had to approve scripts from the sites I use that run them, like WordPress and my email accounts.  Still, it’s interesting to see how many javascript apps the various sites run.
The plugin blocks some advertisements from displaying on the browser, and I occasionally get a warning from sites that I have to enable java to view the website.

I don’t know why they can’t write a web browser that does not allow a website to take control of your computer.  Sure, you have to allow them to call programs like Adobe or media player to view certain files they might contain, but allowing a website to close your browser and install a trojan and other nastiness designed to extort money from the user is ridiculous.  Hopefully, blocking scripts from random sites will stop some of the nonsense that has been going on caused by these Russian sites that scam money out of people.  I can live with a little inconvenience if it stops an annoying waste of time like clearing up viral infections on my machine.

I seem to find these things at random on various make money websites.  For what it’s worth, here’s a link to this website value calculator.  I ran this blog through the site and got a worth of something like $11,849.  This seems like a lot of money based on just looking for backlinks, but hey, there’s a lot of writing on these pages.

About all this information does for me is to inspire me to post this story about the website.  I don’t know how accurate these estimates of cash value are, but it is something that may be entertaining to anyone who works on a blog or other website.  I’ve been taking some time off of writing here for a while.  I think I should do a little looking around the web and find some more interesting things to write about.  For now, I think this is all I am going to post.  Perhaps I will check back later if I have any more interesting things to say.

Bewildering Stories is a web magazine that has a lot of different strange stories.  Bob Brill from the Ann Arbor Writers Group told me about this site last night at the writers group meeting as a place where I could find some of his stories.  Bob is a good writer, and if you want to read what he has published on this site check out his bio page here.

There are a lot of web zines these days that publish just about any kind of story or work of fiction.  The world is changing, and much of the new literature will be available online as opposed to being printed in ink on dead tree fibers.  There is a lot of good fiction and other writing that can be found on the web, it is only a matter of looking for this material and all the time you will spend enjoying yourself reading.  If you are interested in reading some good stories, check out Bewildering Stories.  It’s free and there is no membership fee for accessing any of the work from any of the issues that have been published on this site.

Here’s something I learned today.  I logged onto my Myspace account.  Within a few minutes I got a message.  The message came attached to a picture of a cute woman.  The text of the message was written by somebody who had a bad command of the English language.  Supposedly, this woman was away at college in Ghana, and her parents died in a plane crash.  Could I please send money for a plane ticket, and this person would come and live with me when she got to America while she looked for a job.

The faulty English was a good clue that this was a scam.  The Myspace profile had a background and a picture and one friend, Tom.  I laughed and then reported this person to the site admins as a scam artist.  So, this afternoon I learned about another way to make money online.  All you need is a picture of a cute girl and a Myspace account, which is free.  Then you troll around for a likely sucker and send your ridiculous pathetic pitch for why you need this person to send you thousands of dollars.  What a brilliant business model.  No money invested and nothing but profit coming out.

There are far more sophisticated scammers out there on the net.  It’s the persons who know how to speak English you really have to look out for.  The first clue that you are being worked for a scam is when the person starts asking you for money.  I have a good defense against that sort of thing these days.  I am poor, and don’t give any money away for any reason but my own.  Still, there are a lot of kind people in the world, and these scam artists prey on this kind of personality.  If you don’t want to be ripped off by some scammer, learn to be greedy and only spend your money on things you want for yourself, or people you care about.

My inbox was flooded this morning with a dozen emails from different marketers.  It’s not really spam, I think, because I signed up for all these mailing lists.  Still, it’s a bit annoying to read through so many sales pitches for information products on how to make money on the Internet.

It’s obvious how to make money on the net.  You sell an ebook or video series on how to make money on the net.  This does not even have to be good information.  In fact, it can just be a small ebook on how to sell information products with a website.  I watched one video from Frank Kern on how one group of people set up a site and made $400,000 in a week.  Wow, very interesting.  And to get the same information all I have to do is give you $2000?  Wow, I see now how to make the real money.  Sell information on how to make money.

What gets me about these various schemes is that they produce absolutely nothing but more websites on how to make money.  A shoe factory makes and sells shoes.  People buy shoes to wear and everyone involved makes some cash.  A publisher makes books that entertain or inform people.  The publisher sells the books to people who are looking to be entertained or informed.  An Internet guru takes a file on how to make money online and sells the file to people looking for information on how to make money online.

So, my email account kept me busy all morning.  I think I wasted two hours looking at all the pointless videos and sales pitches.  If I ever have to, I could probably write my own sales pitch for these kinds of products.  Maybe I should reply to all these hucksters and offer my services as a copywriter.  I could cash in on some of their good fortune at selling information to people on how to make money selling information to people.

I don’t know why I got so many of these sales pitches today.  Maybe the impending market crash has got people scared.  Maybe the email marketers are ramping up their operations to try and get all the cash out of the system before it all goes to hell.  I don’t know.  I think I may end up taking myself off all these pointless lists and go back to just deleting random spam from unknown persons as my email activity.  It’s interesting to see how these people operate on an email list they spend so much effort generating.  If this is how real businesses operate, it’s no wonder the whole economy is going bankrupt.

I had an enjoyable day reading stuff on the net and watching videos. I found a bunch of MLM marketing videos by Katie Freiling that were interesting. I have no intention of investing in any of these marketing businesses. It was just nice to watch somebody so enthusiastic about what she does for money. Besides, Katie’s cute.

It’s a nice day outside and the sun is shining. I read some strange things about WordPress just a while ago. This one site said things like your basic blog will get deleted if you run any advertising or paid posts on it. Then, I went to the terms of service link at WordPress and read through all the terms, which said nothing about advertising, just not using the blog as a link farm for a commercial site. So, I don’t get tons of traffic anyway, and I’m not about to advertise or sell links, even though Google somehow gave this blog page rank 5 for some reason. I don’t much care about making money with this little blog right now. If I wanted to make money on the net I would create a site that posts links to various credit card companies and make money as an affiliate directing people to credit card applications. I hear some of those sites clear $90,000 a month doing that. Besides, a static site like a credit referral site wouldn’t involve tons of typing.

I haven’t done much fishing around for popular topics lately. The other day, my most popular entry was something I wrote off the top of my head about solving physics problems. I hear CERN is having some physics problems these days with a blown transformer and fried wiring. Too bad. I guess they have to wait until Spring to see if they can form tiny black holes that destroy the earth, as if that was even possible.

Well, that’s about all I feel like writing about today. Maybe I will go back to searching for MLM marketing videos on the video hosting services. It’s strange to me how some people can get so excited about selling such useless products or services. If Internet marketing was about setting up factories to build solar cells or windmills or electric cars, I could see the point. As it is now, unless they can ship it in the mail or by truck or just download it directly, it’s probably not being sold much online. Then again, real estate is big business. With all the foreclosures and the depressed market, it would be a good time to stock up on houses and sell them when the market recovers. Then again, we may be in for another dark ages. Why does that make me laugh?

First, you need some kind of product.  This is important.  If you don’t have a product all you have is a pyramid scheme, and that’s illegal.  So, you get a product.  The product should either be something expensive, like a travel club membership, or something that has a recurring charge, like diet food sales.  In general you will want the cheapest kind of product that can be distributed with minimal cost.  Perhaps some kind of ebook would be ideal.

Once you have your product, you will need to decide on a structure.  Most MLMs are based on a simple pyramid structure.  Those who enter early on the top of the pyramid have a lot of people under them.  Those who enter later have fewer people under them.  Perhaps divide the people under a person into several teams.  You should sort out the structure of your MLM before you publicize it.

Now you will have to set up a website.  This is the most cost-effective means of promoting your business.  Write a nice long sales letter and get accounts set up so you can start taking payments from the people who fall for your scheme.  You will want to set up a forum for your employees/customers so they can arrange themselves into teams and exchange information on how to make the most money from your MLM.  This is good for your business, because as the organization running the show you get a good cut out of every sale.

Now, you will want to really get the word out about your offering.  How you do this is for your customers/employees to set up their own websites selling your high profit product.  The more people you have trying to sell your product, the more money you will make selling your product.  Everyone who buys your product becomes a sales person for your product, so potential growth is exponential.  Be sure to capitalize on all the new websites your customers are going to set up by selling them hosting packages at an outrageous rate.

Once you have several hundred people actively promoting your ebook or travel club or diet food on the net, the money will start rolling in.  You will have to keep track of your profits and of your payouts to your MLM customers so be sure to take some of your profits and hire a good accountant.  As long as you pay your taxes and report anyone who makes more than $600 to the IRS you should be OK with the law.  Soon you will have an empire of moneymaking websites pulling in a constant stream of cash for you and your family.