Seriously! Not kidding i did!

and for those of you who have a hard time digesting this, then here’s the screen shot of my AdSense account, that’s 97k in just 1 month – I am now officially the king of AdSense !

Now that i have your attention, want to know my secret?

Unlike all other gurus i am not going to make a ebook about this and sell, instead of doing that i am going to share those secrets which made me solid $97k within a month, so hang on with me till the end – believe me you don’t want to miss this!

Did you Got Ripped off ?? Ad Sense treasure? Make money with AdSense?

Well i did got ripped off many times with AdSense product and ebooks, i never made a single BUCK until i discovered this extremely ‘Top Secret’ which all AdSense gurus DON’T want YOU to know about! But i am going to expose the ‘top secret’ of all those ‘AdSense gurus’ today so you can too be a AdSense Guru.

But Wait till you find out how these so-called gurus rip you off without you suspecting a single thing. Before that let me tell you something about one so called program called Adsense Treasure [LINK REMOVED]

A guy named Abid says he made $40k dollars with AdSense using his super AdSense site, now to come to think of it – when someone boasts so much about their products then of course people want proof to believe it and this guy shows you PROOF as well,[screen shots of his AdSense account - which looks very real - almost like mine!]

Take a look at some interesting facts of what most AdSense gurus will sell, tell and earn!

1. The main Adsense treasure site is actually not the one which i showed you here, but this guy made it viral by introducing a affiliate program so indirectly he is making 100 other people to use his product and scam other innocent people, the picture you see on that site are not even real,if you were smart and Google those pictures on Google images for ‘AdSense treasure’ you will find them hosted over 100 sites and the exact same copies of these ‘AdSense treasure sites’ are everywhere on the net take a look at this one here. Does that ring a bell?

2. Most AdSense Gurus will sell you ‘articles’ or ‘article sites’ with a promise of get-set-forget but the hard truth is these articles they provide you are being used by 100+ other sites on the net, so if you even trusted this you will end up having duplicate content on your site which means you won’t make anything via AdSense as Google is going to penalize you!

3. Almost All AdSense gurus will sell you junk that is a ‘rewritten’ version of some old product which you never knew!

4. AdSense Gurus never show you a ‘live’ working site of their own using which they earn so much as they promise you!

5. AdSense Gurus earn more money selling their ‘AdSense products’ and via affiliate programs then they earn with that AdSense Program!

6. No AdSense guru will actually provide you with a valid ‘thank you’ letter from Google, but the truth is any AdSense or ad word member who performs excellently well is being thanked by Google or they have appreciation letter right form Google!

7. AdSense won’t make you money without a website or via ‘revenue sharing’ unless you work extremely hard!

8. Most Gurus will ask you to advertise via AdWords and then monetize your ‘advertised’ page via AdSense to make money, now that is Dumb! but people fell for it too

9. 80% of AdSense products are useless and the only way you earn money via it is through click bank!

10. AdSense is Google property, if you think you can trick and make money with AdSense like the gurus tell you to then you scammed a Internet Giant! Get used to it their are no shortcuts to making money with AdSense or tricks to earn overnight – the only fact is these are methods the gurus use to promote their products.

How they hypnotize you into buying and make you believe their products?

Its basically because the sales letters of such sites are too good to be true, just a few months back their was a site that promised you ‘free Google AdWords ads’ and everyone fell for it, without doing any research or being a well informed buyer – people JUST buy them!

And the biggest reason for that is the proofs they provide, those screen shots which are definitely not photoshop are too hard to part with, but now comes the interesting part you all been waiting for!

True AdSense money makers are those who are good in analytic and SEO along with lots of traffic. But wait their is still 1 way to make $97k+ with AdSense and that’s my way!

My secret to $97k+ a month!

remember the screen shot i showed you above?  No its not photoshop its real!

But the truth is i never earned $97k+ this month, i wish i did tho lol,bottom line that screen shot is fake!I had you believing me for a second dint i?

Here is the secret i promised – I used a ‘AdSense screen shot Generator’ to generate this image, its as easy as 1, 2, 3! and now imagine all those people who fell  for these scams and worse of all all those affiliates who promote these scams!

You want to know about the generator also? go here its one of those fake generators [please don't use it to scam others]

well i don’t know your intentions but my intention for that screen shot was to inform you about how easy it is for anyone to ‘label’ themselves are ‘AdSense gurus’ and rip you off, just like this guy abid and many others are doing online, i learned the lesson the hard way but i don’t want the same to happen to you guys! So watch out for these pesky AdSense gurus!

If you think you got scammed just like i did then give this article a digg or tweet and help spread the word!

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

Anything that is stolen and re-used without the permission of the original author/creator is plagiarism, you know when you use to steal information from Wikipedia for your school projects? or stealing your competitors content for your own clients? this is the first hand example of plagiarism, the Internet has made the entire world a very small village, and communication is so fast that it is possible for someone stealing your content within the next 10 minutes of it being published.

But the plagiarism that i am talking about here is about the the content[mostly articles, scripts,software,images] that you create and which get stolen. Plagiarism surely is very hot topic on the Internet world and their is no doubt 80% of what you see and what you get online from ‘any’ website or ‘any’ guru is actually a ‘remake’ of someone Else’s work, this is how it goes, you get a idea you sell it, the other uses that idea and adds some of his own to it and then sells its again its a whole new idea! But when it comes to articles and web content, specially for bloggers, then you don’t want thieves stealing your work!

Why? because plagiarism hits any webmaster very hard, although their might not be any advantage to the thief, but their surely are disadvantages for you! That is why your content must stay protected, because you have worked hard for it and if someone else is profiting on your hard work then that is simply unacceptable and not fair!

But the question arises, How can you detect, protect and punish plagiarism??

There are many smart webmasters and equally smart thieves, so it all depends on your knowledge on how you deal with it, because some times you might not even know that your content is being stolen and used elsewhere!

How to Detect plagiarism?

Many people don’t know that they are victims of plagiarism and as a webmaster its YOUR responsibility to keep checking on the Internet and find thieves so that you can defend your works. Their are many plagiarism detection tools, that can detect and inform you about stolen and dupe content. Below are the top 5 tools that i would recommend anyone to use.

1. Copyscape : Copyscape is the most widely used tool to detect plagiarism and dupe content, but its not free for life and after certain inquires you will have to pay for it or wait a month, but so far its the best one out their!

2. Doc Cop : Doc Cop is another free tool, but you need registration before using it, its performance is very similar to that of copyscape and would recommend it as an alternative

3. PlagiarismDetect : Yet another awesome site with more functionality but it requires registration too and the free version is limited.

4. RePrintWriters : This service checks your entire article to find and detect possible copies, excellent tool for article and content plagiarism detection

5. CopyRightSpot : More similar to copyscape and does not require registration

How to protect yourself from plagiarism?

Like they say ‘prevention is better then cure’ its better you protect your content from getting stolen then rather finding thieves. But how can you protect them? Their are many ways to protect yourself from plagiarism.

1. Most content thieves are those who are new to ‘blogging’ or newbies looking for articles to post on directories, squidoo, hubpages, paid to write etc, these people have absolutely no knowledge of what they are doing, but they like spamming, the most easiest way to keep such people away is by showing ‘Page protected by xxx’ signs, most of them won’t mind stealing.

2. The ‘not so newbs’ may not be scared easily by logos or signs you put on your pages[which looks very ugly for a website or blog, trust me] for such users the best option for you is by disabling the ‘right click’ feature, i know that you want to know how to disable that, but it will take lots of time if i explained that here, so i would suggest googling it, for wordpress their are plugins which do that automatically for you.

3. Avoid using your self-written content on ‘other peoples’ sites, what this means is avoid hosting your content on sites like ‘paid to write’ example associated content, etc. Unless you know what your doing, you should always know that once you submit to those sites, your content is no longer yours. Its fine if your selling those articles but if you don’t want others to use them then avoid this.

4. Avoid using free sources, like ‘free blogs from wordpress.com or blogger, because their is no guarantee that the content is yours and anyone could easily steal those, other then that don’t use ‘tweaked content’ on your site as well, tweaked content are ‘remakes’ of someone Else’s articles, which can be easily done with soft wares, so if your doing this and if those articles are stolen then you are in no way going to be the original author of those articles!

Don’t use your articles multiple times, on multiple sites [same articles] and DON’T submit the articles you use on your site into ‘article directories’ for link building, because not only will you get rejected, but if you do get accepted you will lose your main sites page rank and Search engine rankings for ‘dupe content’ so avoid that. I rather write new articles exclusively for article directories.

5. Make your articles your domain/website related, make them so hardcore to edit that the editor will waste lots of time doing that or best of all, include links into your articles to your other articles or sources from your website. This way when they copy your content without editing then you get free ping backs and track backs this will not only inform you that someone stole your article, but it will tell Google that the article is yours and Google will credit you and ‘ban’ the other website for dupe content. [This has worked for me so far]

How to punish the thieves?

Even after all you do their are chances your content might get stolen, mostly by those ‘auto blogs’ that just hack into your RSS feeds and take everything away. So how can you punish thieves that had stolen your content?

1. Start nice and good, send the webmaster a nice email and ask him nicely to remove your content and explain him why its not good for him for keeping your content[don't threat] and what could happen to his search engine rankings and page rank. [THIS idea has worked for me 99% of the time]

2. Send a email to the ‘web hosting company’ of that website, you can find this information easily by checking the websites ‘whois’. Tell the web host your problem and show them information and everything they need to know, this would get the webmaster hosting account ‘banned’ for breaking copyright laws and plagiarism

3. Use services and forums of reputed companies, social groups and anti plagiarism services, complain or report the webmaster and i am sure you will get lots of help from their, i personally did the same a few times and found lots of help. If the website which had stolen your content is selling some products or services then you can write reviews about them and what they did to your content, even tho this sounds good but it will take time and i personally don’t think link building for some thieves is a good thing:)

4. Threats : They always work, in fact threatening to sue someone for stealing your information always works because the thief knows they stolen and directing them to few documents on the anti-plagiarism sites will show the thieves that they are punishable by law, one single sentence about ‘suing you for copyrights infringement’ is enough for them to remove your works. Their are some experts that even threat about harming the thief and actually that always works, they harm the thief’s website reputation and income, some of these involve banning the thief’s web accounts on this hosting or worse his AdSense account by click frauds![i don't recommend this]

5. If nothing works and if your so desperate, then you can actually sue them, this is costly but if you got the amounts and if you sue someone then you might actually make back the money if you win, best of all it will make other thieves aware of your seriousness. In fact one guy made his ‘content thief’ rank no 1 on Google for words such as ‘biggest content thief’ you can try that too, but its up to you to handle it, i rather use method 1,2,3 and maybe 4 and just make the world aware of the thief.

Like always when their are closed doors their are always other open doors or maybe windows too lol, so discover more and play safe, keep your content yours only – simply because you had worked for it!

Has it happened to you?

yes in fact it did, 4 of my articles where stolen by normal websites and bloggers and around 8 of them were ‘tweaked’ and used by auto-blog sites, i did what i told here in this article and i had 90% of them removed.I try keep my site user friendly so i don’t block right clicks or put 100 different logos, but if their is someone threatening my credibility i will fight back!

So what, their is nothing bad in copy pasting! really?

To all those who actually want to steal content or think their is nothing that is bad about it you must know that, Google will penalize your website, remove them from search engines, ban your web accounts like AdSense and drop your page rank to 0! ALL THAT for plagiarism, just 1 article and your doomed! so why risk it? their is no money making in stealing content and selling/using or doing whatever you want with it, because at current Internet age, users are becoming very web savvy, same goes for the Internet webmasters and buyers – so your not fooling anyone!

Anyways i think this is enough to get you hooked with your content and make you realize its value, if you want to know anything drop me a email or feel free to contact me.

Once again STOP PLAGIARISM!

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

For me twitter is very time consuming and after twitter made few updates a while ago, we are no longer able to see the ‘mutual’ or those people who we follow that do not follow us back and worse of all you can no longer remove them directly via twitter in bulk.

This made it very hectic for me recently and i slowly started losing followers, because people tend to take advantage of this and remove the people they follow because they know we might not be able to find out about that for a while.

And to make it worse, its impossible to manage multiple accounts and to analyze my twitter status, trend and followers.

Out of all these painful issues the most annoying one is the amount of spam direct messages that i receive from twitter followers and friends, most are automated, but imagine getting 500+ DM every day because that’s the amount i get and then deleting them all one by one takes a lot of time.

Due to all these problems i started searching for solutions and since twitter is exploding and their a app or script for almost anything in twitter, just like their are for facebook and iphone, twitter apps are amazing and can enhance your usage of twitter. I found few of them and used them for a while, and out of those all, i found 5 of them most useful.These apps,bots,scripts and services helped me save tonnes of my time on twitter. And i felt like sharing those for all of you guys who have similar problems.

1. Huitter (no longer works)

Huitter.com provides some very good twitter apps and scripts, one of those called ‘Mutuality’ is my favorite

Using Mutuality you can automatically ‘unfollow’ all the people who you follow and who are not following you back, their is also an ‘exclude list’ where you can add people who are important to you and you don’t want to unfollow them.

All this within a click of a button so you don’t want to miss this.

2. Friend or Follow

Friend or follow is a quick service which shows you how many of your friends are not following you back and how many of your followers your not following, its a good tool to find out the mutuality when you need it. An excellent tool for those who have lots of followers and friends.

3. Splitweet

Splitweet is a amazing tool for those who have multiple accounts on twitter. Its the ultimate solution to managing multiple accounts with ease, its also good tool to monitor your brand.

You can use it to tweet on multiple accounts at the same time and follow the tweets of your friends from all your accounts at the same time, all at one place! Check them out.

4. Useqwitter

Twitter always send you a message to your inbox whenever someone starts following you or sends you a direct Message, but does it send you a email when someone stops following you?

Useqwitter is one such service, it will send you email updates when someone stops following you, its a good tool to monitor your twitter account, but if you lose lots of people daily then you will gets lots of messages in your inbox!

5. DM doctor

For those of you who get tonnes of Direct messages and waste lots of time trying to delete them and empty your inbox, this is the solution for you!

The DM Deleter is a script, you need to bookmark the script and go on your inbox and then select your options and click! And your messages will be deleted automatically. You can read more about it here.I deleted 1843 messages with it today, and it took me few minutes to do that and i wasted 30minutes + yesterday to delete around 200 messages manually :S wish i knew about it sooner.

Anyways hope these tools are useful and enhance your twitter experience, their are many more tools out their for twitter and i will be making a list of all of them very soon.

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

First let me introduce you to the concept of landing page, it can mean differently for different people.

For affiliates a landing page is the first visible page to the traffic that they send by promoting that particular product, for affiliates landing pages can be the deciding factor for sale or no sale. It is also the squeeze page from where you effectively build your list.

For Website owners, a landing page merely means the first page or the index page [also known as the home page] of their entire site, this is the page that gives the site its identity and provides visitors with an overview of what is inside the site, just like a index page does on books or the introduction in movies.

For Product owners, the landing page is where their affiliates send the traffic to, this is the most important page of any website because it is that page which will provide the user the information about the product and everything regarding it, its also that page which has to be good enough for the visitor that it converts him into a paying customer. But lets keep that aside for now.

The above mentioned are examples of how one can describe a landing page, but am not going to go deep into those topics, i will make detailed post about them later. But the Landing page which am going to talk about now is the one for a ‘list-builder’, this list builder can be anyone, a website owner, a affiliate, a product owner or simply a company doing research. Also known as a squeeze page. See my previous article for more information on list building.

Like i said, for a list-builder the ‘landing page’ means everything, because the ultimate goal of a list – builder is to convert the visitors to his site into subscribers to his list! And all list-builders depends on the landing page to do its magic.

Landing page is also known as squeeze pages or lead capture pages so don’t get confused when you hear those terms as they all mean the same.

First things first – The tools:

Before you start building the perfect landing or squeeze page make sure you have the right tools, because sometimes having the right tools reduces your work, saves a lot of time and money along with giving you great results. Here are the top tools i recommend.

1. WebHosting: HostGator (for hosting your pages – use code ‘SJRECOMMENDS’ for discounts)
2. Domain Names: Namecheap, Godaddy
3. WordPress Based Themes: Elegant Themes (for bloggers)
4. Products to promote or sell: Click Bank (once you build a list, click bank is basic you can find many other programs out there)
5. Get an Autoresponder : Aweber (the back bone of your email marketing campaign or alternatively you can use getresponse)
6. Exit pops & pop ups: Pop Up Domination (for bloggers – or else use an exit pop, search online you can find one for free)
7. Link Cloaking: PrettyLinkPro (wordpress plugin, use free version or get the pro with added features – useful if you have internal links or in your mailings or ebooks, etc very helpful since they are easy to edit anytime without changing the link and redirect it anywhere you wish)
8. Automatic Squeeze pages: Profits theme (for wordpress, build a squeeze or sales page with click of a button)
9. Outsourcing: Fiverr (for traffic, videos, voice overs, content, ebooks, anything you can think of!)
   

The landing page magic:

Ready to build a list yet? So how can we create that magic to get excellent conversion rates? follow these points to create the magic for your landing page.

• Stick to the topic: Your landing page should be product specific, niche targeted and to the point
• Give something free: Landing pages are more effective when your offering something for free
• Use my writing techniques from here to optimize your landing page
• background of your landing page should be white or the same color as that of your website,according to my research white backgrounds get most ‘time’ a visitor spends on the page
• Their should be images for any product that your giving away or offering trials for, these images should be placed in the left hand side for optimum results
• Use buttons to highlight important points, red buttons works the best – bullet points are the key here.
  
• Use ‘highlighting’ to mark important features of the offer, such as ‘free’, ‘limited’, etc.
  
• Remember that your building a list, not a membership site, so don’t force your visitors to fill invaluable forms or provide lots of details, most list subscription forms requires email and first name, stick to that because i have found that the more the information you ask for the lesser are your conversion rates.
• Stick to the title, if your offering free goodies or report, or a trial to your brand new product then stick to that don’t deviate from topic and start talking about things that are not needed, this is not a product page – your not necessarily selling something so there is no need to have a ‘story’.
  
• Keep your landing page as short as possible! Most affiliates and product owners tend to make their landing pages[which are also their sales letters] into incredible 10000 + words articles. Study shows that average visitors to your website are more likely to convert if you give them information about what they can expect in brief and since your landing page is meant to convert traffic to subscribers their is no point in writing a article about it, because no one will bother reading it.
• Promote your landing pages effectively, you may not promote your site at all, but you must promote your landing page because you need traffic to convert them into subscribers so promote them in all possible ways you can.
• Use points instead of paragraphs, because short points are much better to read then entire paragraphs with so many words
• Show the visitors the aim of your offer, don’t hide things, be open – or in other words, provide users the trust that your not going to spam their emails or sell them to others.
• Avoid lots of internal links to external sites on the landing page, links in landing page is like a leak in a pot, your valuable traffic may just run away from your page which is what you don’t want! So keep links limited unless important ones.
• Brand your page, don’t let it look dull and unimportant, give the professional look
• Do SEO even on the landing pages. yes some people argue about this but this is actually very helpful, because you get organic traffic to those pages and that traffic is very laser targeted and converts at very high rates!
• Be clear and write with the flow, don’t use hard words, make sure the reader understands what your trying to convey
• Provide your subscription forms more then 1 time! This is important and so is the location of the forms, your goal is to make sure at least one form is visible to the visitor at all time, so when he scrolls down to read till the end their should be 1 form visible to him at all times!
• Use google analytics and the tools provided by your email marketing solution, track your traffic and conversion rates and find out where you lack and where to improve.
• User drop down menu buttons instead of radio buttons, because the shorter a form looks the easier it is for visitors to fill it and the higher you convert
• Cause urgency, tell the visitor that the page will vanish after certain time or the offer won’t last long so that they take action the very moment they read it
• Talk to the user, about the user and for the user, no one actually cares about what you the list builder gets from it, everyone cares for themselves so instead of using words such as ‘we’ user words such as ‘you’
• Most visitors are likely to read the starting few lines and the last few lines, and the same goes for the paragraphs, make optimum use of it then they might read the middle portion, so you know the major ‘hot spots’ where a visitor gives most of his or her attention
• Don’t use too much flash work or pop ups, those things are irritating even for you, so the visitors to your site are also humans, avoid torcher!
• Test before trying and compare before starting, make sure your better then your competition or any other list builder, also visit their landing pages to find out how they are doing and take out the best portions of their tricks and apply to yours
• Make sure your page is fast loading, the slower it loads the lower it converts because no one is going to wait 2 mins for a page to load!
• Don’t use clip art or artworks[unless your promoting or offering art related items], instead provide images
• Location of the page, make it discoverable don’t hide it, in fact study shows landing pages with their own domain names convert a lot better then the ones hosted on sub-domains, but it all depends on what type of offer your giving to your visitors.
• Use a good simple design, but make sure the design is not too good also. Keep the major elements of your page visible while keeping the prospect into the ‘flow’ of your page, they should not feel or tempt to close the page, be creative!
• check your conversion rates, think of how much you convert and track the major sources of traffic that convert effectively.
• use exit pop ups, when a visitor is about to exit your page give pop ups with a even better offer to catch their attention again!

Updated June 2011:

Here are a few more pointers that i have learned since posting this:

• Use Videos: Videos are the new trend and video landing pages tend to convert much better.
• Show your self : either show your picture or record a video with your own voice, don’t be afraid or nervous. These are the ‘trust’ factor and would definitely get you more conversions.
• Use captions for images: If you use images then put captions underneath them, these little captions are very powerful and according to Ryan, people look at title, sub headings, images, captions and post script. So these must be the converting factors!
• One field tactic if your desperate: If your page doesn’t convert, simple remove the ‘name’ field and just ask for their email, that’s it! This one field tactic will take away the ‘personalization’ value form your list but will increase conversions.
• Offer a double bait: If you don’t get good conversions then here is another tactic, offer your ‘freebie’ that you are giving away or part of it to your visitors without them having to opt in, you can use this with exit pops and convert exit traffic efficiently. Simply put a link back to your opt in page inside the freebie or better split the freebie in 2 parts, give one for free and ask them to opt in for the 2nd.

I think this much information is enough for you to create the landing page magic, if you need any help feel free to ask me. I would also like to know the methods and tricks that you use to convert effectively so don’t hesitate to tell!

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad and like my fan page on facebook, till then have a great day,

SJ

I am sure you must have heard pretty much from every single guru, affiliate and successful online entrepreneur that the money is in the list, but what exactly is a list? How can you build one too? How can you convert huge traffic into your opt in subscribers and then later convert those subscribers into your paying customers?

These are the things to remember when building a list, but more importantly building a profitable list so you can really supercharge your ‘make money online‘ dreams:

What you will need in order to start building a list:

1. An Auto Responder: Building a list requires a few tools in order to get started. The first and the most important one is an auto responder. Auto responders are were you will store your list, build campaigns & send messages to your list. Auto responders are the backbone of your list building efforts & it’s important to get a auto responder that has good delivery rates, lots of features, good support and of course is within your budget. The industry leaders currently are Aweber & GetResponse, which are the most preferred auto responders used by internet marketers. However Aweber & GetResponse can be costly if you are just starting out with an average of $200 for 500 subscribers annually. For starters i would recommend Mail Chimp, another good auto responder but most importantly a great tool for building a list without a budget. Mail Chimp has a free for life plan where you can store up to 2000 subscribers & send up to 12,000 emails per month. That is good enough for now, so register at MailChimp if you are starting out or consider Aweber and GetResponse if you want more options.

2. A Landing Page or Blog: Now that you got a auto responder ready & fired up its time to start getting those subscribers. But of course where will you send your traffic? You will obviously need a site/blog or else a squeeze page (also known as landing page) to send your traffic to where your optin lead capture forms are (alongside your offers). If you don’t have one already then you will need a web host (i recommend Hostgator – use coupon code ‘SJRECOMMENDS’ to get 25% off) along with a domain (get them at Goddady or Namecheap). Once you got everything set up, all you need to do is set up your squeeze pages & plugin your opt-in forms.

3. Traffic: Its all about traffic when it comes to building a list. Once everything is set up you will need to start driving quality & targeted traffic to it. Start getting the word out, promote your page via social media, bookmarking, etc. Once you start building traffic then read my post on how to retain traffic to your site.

List Building Ethics:

Now that everything is set up its time to convert the traffic to subscribers & then the subscribers to paying customers.

1. Know what a mailing list is: A list is basically the collection of all the people [their emails and other optional information] who have opted to receive messages from you, always remember that manually entering a huge list of emails into your auto responder is not actually a list and their is definitely no money in that too, because what you will be doing that way is spamming those emails which could be very bad later on. So never spam your list or create a list without the permission of those people who are added into your list, make sure your list is 100% opt-in. On a site note it will be hard to find a good auto responder that will just simply allow you to add a list and send them mails. Another thing to take care of is that importing a large list can cost you a lot & migrating from one auto responder to another can result in loss of your subscribers.

2. Bribe your visitors: When it comes to building a list, most successful internet marketers actually ‘bribe’ their traffic into submission, they do this by giving attractive free offers which results in the traffic and the people to sign up for the list, those offers must be highly niche related, free and very tempting. If you obey this single rule you will convert more then 90% of your traffic if its highly targeted, so obey this golden rule, bribe them.

3. Write a good landing page copy: The landing page is the most important aspect of a list, its the page where the traffic comes to, this page should be able to convert that traffic into opt-in subscribers. So making your landing page as informative, short, tempting and attractive , the more will be the conversions. Read my post on how to make good landing pages for more help.

4. Don’t be a dictator, Respect Freedom: Give your list members the ability to unsubscribe, make sure they are able to contact you, so maintain a separate email for that activity. Give them valuable information but not all at once, keep them waiting so that they don’t run away, spoon feed them step by step, don’t be Hasty and don’t talk always about a product, i.e don’t always do promotions with your list, send emails that are worth reading and related to your niche, involve them in your work. Don’t annoy them by sending messages every single hour or day for that matter, maintain a gap and monitor your lists.

5. Engage & build a community: Once you have a list which is growing continuously, there are a few things to remember, now that the traffic to your landing page are your subscribers, its time to treat them as ‘humans’ and not ‘bots’ anymore, this is the most important step where everyone else fails. If you read point no.2 i told you to bribe them, but its actually that they are forced to join and after they get what your giving free, they are more likely to unsubscribe to maintain low spam in their in-boxes. This step is very important because once someone joins your list, your ultimate goal is to NOT let them unsubscribe, once you follow this the money will flow automatically, because you must win the trust of your subscribers and not make them feel as yet another group of email list which you keep spamming and try selling your products too.

Bonus Tip for bloggers: If you find some of your list members being inactive then consider deleting them from the list to free up space for other subscribers, this can help you save a lot of money. If you are building a list via your blog or website rather then a squeeze page then consider getting pop up domination, it is a very powerful tool that can help you get up to 300% conversion rates.

This should be enough for now for list building basics. Keep building that list, next time i would get more deep into the topic. Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

Traffic is the most precious asset of any website, blog or online business, and almost all new start ups fail in protecting traffic loss, which results in their business being paralyzed before they could even start to the fullest potential.

But the most important thing is, that those who fail in this are mostly the ones that do not realize the difference between ‘real people’ and the term ‘traffic’, but i can’t blame them, because the so called gurus teach them about traffic as if it is some bots which will pump us money like a ATM, but on the other hand those who learn about the value of traffic and understands the needs and requirements of those people who visit their sites and then use the learned information to optimize their service are the ones that will really make money online.

So keeping that in mind, i did my research and found lots of interesting things and facts that will make traffic coming to your site vanish. So this is how you can ‘not’ lose traffic from your sites, do and don’t of blogging. Remember making money blogging isn’t rocket science, all you need to do is learn by trial & errors.

1. Less advertising: Don’t Offer any advertising on your website or blog if its less then 30 days old.

2. Stick with your niche: Make sure your website carters to the needs of the subject on which its built upon, i.e stick with your niche don’t wander off.

3. Don’t fake comments: Do not do fake comments on your posts or add fake subscribers to your feed burner.

4. Engage: Participate actively in communication by replying to comments on your posts.

5. Be Original: Make sure your content is original, fake content of any sort, even PLR and MRR articles are useless and it could hurt your search engine rankings as well.

6. Don’t annoy: Never Do pop-up or pop-under advertisements, its a very well known fact that visitors hate the pop ups and are tend to run away from a site that spams the visitor with tonnes of pop ups.

7. Respect the Big G: Obey the rules of service providers, advertisers and other programs that you are affiliated with, for example AdSense, do not offer them or ask your users to click those ads or use words such as ‘pick a link’ etc, such terms can get you banned not just from the program but from the search engines as well. Use words such as ‘sponsor ads’ instead. Getting banned form search engines means NO traffic.

8. Build links & community: Make sure you submit your site to all top search engines, directories, etc. Write ezine articles for article directories and get back-links to your site, maintain a must follow blogs list and use them to build more back-links. Check out making money by writing to find more useful article sites that you can also use to build a community & make money at the same time.

9. Don’t spam or scam: Do not spam on social media sites or any site for that matter, set your goal every month or week and do not deviate from those, never try to scam or make money illegally, such things might be bountiful for some time but in the long run your in loss. Read how to detect online scams to find out more about what you shouldn’t do in order to be scam & spam safe.

10. Get a new theme: Make sure your website design and layout is user friendly, do not use too many dark or eye irritating colors, get better themes. Attractive themes means more loyal visitors, take a look at these amazing themes.

11. Cloak your links: Cloak your links, do not start using affiliate banners in your advertising space. Get the pretty link wordpress plugin if you have a wordpress blog to automatically cloak all outbound links, just like i do on my blog.

12. Don’t do flash: Don’t use flash banners and too much flash work, search engines don’t detect flash as good as they do words, even if you get your flash content indexed in search engines you will have a hard time ranking them.

13. Build a List: Make sure you offer your visitors RSS feeds and subscriptions, its always advisable to start building a mailing list since the start, you can also create a custom landing page and use list building techniques to build a huge list of opt in subscribers. Offer Free reports, ebooks or products to attract more subscribers. Take a look at my article on how to build a list. Get a auto responder which are the most important list building tools, the top 2 in the industry are aweber & getresponse.

14. Don’t buy traffic: Do NOT waste real money doing blog promotions, blogs with content are not worth promoting with real money on services such as the ‘get paid to’ or ‘opt in lists’ or even the custom ‘traffic’ packages from sites, such traffic is pointless because for a blog the most important traffic is the readers and those who are interested in the niche you are working in, Google AdWords and other advertising networks should be used to promote affiliate products instead.

15. Keep your blog alive: Remove the first default post on the blog, the blog-roll and make sure you adjust your plugins and widgets, this is the step where most ‘new comers’ fail in blogging. Read my post on the must have plugins for wordpress bloggers.

16. Customize your site: Customize your Error pages to give it more professional look, add a custom favicon and custom blog logos to fit your overall blog design. If you don’t know how to add a favicon to your site then read about it on my post.

17. Let them search: Offer search in your site and make sure its visible by the visitor, this helps the reader find what he is looking for.

18. Be Social: Offering links to your other accounts including social networks and twitter is always advisable, this helps build a relation with the visitor and could actually gain you loyal readers.

19. Use a traffic retainer: When users exit from your site,its up to you, if you would like to include a ‘exit pop up’ that could ask your visitors to check out another offer, etc. But this is not advisable for normal content sites and blogs, as it would not work and is most effective on landing pages. Check out this amazing pop up plugin for wordpress blogs if you are interested.

20. Use google Analytic: always analyze your traffic on a daily bases, note down the visitor trends and the change, keep yourself updated to your traffic sources, top landing pages and use this information to optimize your service.

21. Write for people not for bots: Remember what i said about the term ‘traffic’ and the ‘actual traffic’ ? always keep in mind that people visiting your site are real and not bots, so give them real things and make your posts look real, as if your giving a speech or talking to someone on email, the more personal and targeted you get the more the reader will read further. Read how to seo for beginners to learn more about mixing SEO with real content.

22. Be simple: Don’t get too professional, their are many people on the Internet and depending on your niche, specially on a ‘make money online‘ niche, 80% of the visitors to your site might be new comers and they will have a hard time understand your hard use of terms and concepts, so break down your content and information to make sure everyone can understand

23. Give credits: Most traffic is attracted to ‘sources’, which means nothing else but a list of ‘top’ services or ‘top tools’ etc, such source posts are always indexed quickly on search engines and study shows that users spend more time on ‘source’ posts then on other average posts.

24. Check your work: Make sure your posts are spelling free, the font and color of your font are readable, divide your content in paragraphs and/or point-wise this would give a more organized look and feel, which will guarantee a longer stay.

25. Make a point: Highlight and bolder the area or words that are of importance, the semi title and the title, use more eye catching terms for your title of the post. Post title should ALWAYS be search engine keyword related, for example someone looking for ‘twitter tools’ are likely to search with keywords such as ‘twitter tools’ ‘top twitter tools’ etc, so make your posts with similar titles, don’t use titles that are very long, for more information check out my previous posts on how to write great articles and content and how to make money writing.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

This is my personal review of Hunch.com, a recommendation engine that helps you make good & informed decisions – SJ

Can’t decide where you should go for summer holidays?

Or what jobs to apply for? Which new car would you buy? Where to invest that money you have been saving for awhile? What gift to buy for your relations? So many questions but hard to decide, right?

There are times when you are unable to decide what to do and those times are really stressful. Many people have a hard time making the right choices, some go for what they want to do while others chose to follow advices, but nonetheless when it comes to decision making we really wish that life could have been just a straight road but unfortunately its not, it has many turns, twists and surprises and ultimately we have to come to a decision. I consider making informed decisions as part of personal development.

Most of us are likely to follow advices or do the same as others around us do, but have you ever wondered if that’s the best suited choice for you? Need guidance?

Well look no further, introducing Hunch.

What president should i vote for?

Hunch is a very smart platform which helps you make the right choices regarding anything and everything, once you find your issue using the huge database, the hunch bot will start asking you questions related to your problem, these questions will have different answers attached to it and each answer has a different follow up question attached, so in a series of steps after you completed the questionnaires the hunch bot will search and match your results with the solutions database and it will give you the best options you should go for, in case you don’t like those it will always provide you with alternatives.

Based on your activities, the more you use hunch the better the hunch bot will get to know you and the better it will respond to your decision making. When you first visit the site, hunch will ask you few questions and those answers will be saved to your browser, the next time you visit hunch it will automatically detect you and it will get as close results as possible for you based on your location, personality, hobbies and more.

So if their is something you can’t decide about, make sure you check hunch.com their smart robot will definitely help you in your needs and best part about it is you don’t even have to sign up or create any accounts to use hunch system, even tho if you do create your account then hunch bot will perform a lot more better!

Go ahead and give it a try, Ask Hunch, enjoy your results and good luck decision making.

Update 2011: Hunch has grown incredibly and has helped thousands of people so far. They also have a goodies section & a very large community. You will now need to register at hunch for more.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

Google has always been a source of income both directly & indirectly for many internet marketers. Making money online with AdSense being at the top of that list. Google AdSense is the second hand of the Google advertising network and the twin of Google AdWords, which means AdSense and AdWords works hand in hand for Google.

When advertisers invest their money using AdWords, the publishers makes their money by displaying those AdWords ads using AdSense, so basically AdSense is huge and the possibly to earn money with AdSense is huge as well, but that also means that you are going to be competing with thousands of other publisher for the ad share.

In this post in my AdSense on-the-go-guide, am going to explain step by step process of starting your AdSense journey by registering a account that is guaranteed to be activated within 24 hrs. The post will basically show you how to get an Google AdSense account easily.

Step 1: Register for a blogger account

You must be wondering why am asking you to register for blogger instead of AdSense,well their is no catch its very simple trick and i will tell you why in a while.

But first go to blogger.com or blogspot.com (both are the same) and register for a free blog. This is done because blogger is a Google service and we are going to use this newly created blog of Google to get a fast AdSense account since Google is becoming very strict with admission to publishers in AdSense.

Don’t worry you don’t have to use blogger blog service its completely up to you on where you use your AdSense account, but Google will check your account details once you register and it will inspect your site which you register with, so if you use a blogger blog while registering it just makes it easy for Google to accept you faster then other sites since its their own blogging service, your account will not get rejected this way. You can also make money blogging on blogger if you cannot afford hosting.

Step 2: Register for a AdSense account

Here we go, before you can actually start earning money with AdSense you will need a AdSense account, AdSense is free for all as long as you accept the terms and conditions of Google and its advertising programs. To register for your AdSense account click here.

Now see the following screen shots on what to do once your there. Click image to Enlarge.

Adsense setup

Step 3: What information to fill

Remember to fill in all the details correctly because your dealing with Google here, don’t think you can fool them because your only fooling yourself. If your not 18 yet i recommend registering a account with someone else’s name, like your dad or mom or elder brother, but make sure you enter their details as required, because google don’t use paypal they send checks so the information should be very correct and make sure they have a bank account.

then see the second screen shot, Click image to enlarge.

Adsense setup

Read google policies and all the terms and conditions before signing up, don’t blame google later if you face issues.

NOTE: Never try to use multiple account with AdSense, if your already a AdWord advertiser or have a adsense account previously registered then you won’t need a new account you can use those settings for AdSense as well,  if google catches you with breaking rules or multi accounting then it may result in your accounts being suspended and all earnings whatever you have earned so far will be credited back to the advertisers or to Google. So if your registering with a account with your dads name, make sure he does not already have one, because not only you will get your account suspended you will do the same on his other account as well.

Once you are done with all of these steps, google will send a mail to your registered email id or google account id, if you registered as shown then your account should be activated within 24 hours.

That is all about getting started with adsense and registering a account without problems, in the next post i will show you how to manage and set up your ad units and more.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

Twitter is exploding and their is absolutely no reason why we all should not take
advantage of this great social media. – SJ

Twitter is not like most of the social media sites, in fact twitter is a platform for micro blogging and millions of people are using twitter for various purposes with celebrities, bloggers & Internet marketers leading in the race of the twitter domination game. Their is no doubt in twitters power and what it could do to your business but twitter also has its limitations, most people do silly mistakes and could possibly lose a vital opportunity of using twitter. If you are micro blogging using twitter then you need to read them carefully.

Here are the 15 MUST AVOID twitter mistakes that could damage your business or reputation.

1. Using Mass mailing and Direct messaging bots

How is it a mistake?

Most of us tend to think that others will feel much better if we send them direct messages, this is true if you do it manually but not so if you use a bot, because a bot will send message to your twitter followers instantly after they start following you and your followers can easily identify that you are using bot, most of them un-follow and some of them might even report you for spam!

Update: Where did the direct messages go in the new twitter? Twitter has taken care of this problem but now you can use mentions, like @sameerjoad to catch my attention, works similar to direct messaging other then the fact that its open tweeting.

2. Following to your limit

How is it a mistake?

When most of us start on with twitter for the first time we are very eager to grow our followers, in fact some of them try to do that within few days, which is not only impossible to achieve but is very foolish on your part.

Twitter has a max follow limit, you can’t follow after your first 2000 followings unless their are 1850 people following you! If you keep following and hit your limit you will stay their for days and find yourself losing more of your followers as most of them think you are just adding lots of followers in a hope to get them to follow you back and grow your followers in return, but this tactic wont work if you try to do it overnight, specially if you show the follow limit of 2000 for months till you get your own 1850 followers.

Other then just losing your own followers you could also lose your account as twitter hates spammers and can flag you if you follow so many people during any 24hrs period, they will add you to your ‘suspicion list’. The best way to avoid this is to follow only the people you wish to follow for tweets & unfollow those who don’t follow you back.

3. Not unfollowing the non-mutual’s

How is this a mistake?

Non-mutual are basically the people you follow who do not follow you back, if you don’t remove these non-mutual’s from your follow list then your follow list will hit the limit and take your precious space!

Let me put it this way, you have 1000 followers and you follow 2000 yourself, out of these 2000, 1000 of them are non-mutual’s and they do not follow you back, now excluding  the people you love to follow like some celebrity or news tweets etc [who usually don't follow back] there will still be a large number of non-mutual’s, if you don’t remove them, then your followers will grow very slow or might no grow at all! If you removed 600 of them then you could follow 600 others and possibly convert 300 of those 600 into your own followers thus growing your own follower base!

4.Not Following Back

How is this a mistake?

This is a huge mistake on your part, mostly because of 2 reasons

a. you might lose your followers since you are not mutual and occupy their space and they expect you to follow back

b. you could be losing huge information or valuable tweets from those potential followers

their is a exception if your some top celebrity or well know person, but you still miss a lot on  reason ‘b’.

Update 2011: I recommend to NOT follow everyone who follows you, specially the fake twitters (dating profiles, etc), the inactive ones, the overactive ones (who tweet more then 25 times a day), the spammers (who only tweet with links), the self promoters or weblogs (Internet marketers promoting their make money online offers or spamming you with links), the wannabes (fans of celebrities), etc. Why is that? Because you will have hundreds if not thousands of tweets on your home page & it really gets annoying when things start cluttering up.

5. Not Optimizing twitter

How is this a mistake?

Not optimizing twitter means that your just using the basic twitter layout both on your twitter homepage and on your personal sites.

This mistake won’t affect you a lot, but changing the background, writing a short bio, linking to your website and good logos can really boost your rate of followers and popularity among fellow tweeples!

You might have noticed that even i myself did not do a lot of optimization mostly because i am lazy and too busy but their is no excuse when it comes to making money out of twitter. (i have added it this to my to do list, so i expect my twitter profile to change soon).

Also if you just use a link on your own site or blog to your twitter account then your less likely to get noticed then using images, icons, plugin’s or awesome widgets!

Using a ‘tweet this post’ widget can really bring you a lot of viral traffic and indulging yourself in other twitter related site like twittercounter.com or tweetmeme.com can really be a boost, but always be careful if that site is legit.

Update 2011: You can use ‘addtoany’ or other social promotion tools to take advantage of all the different social media platforms & not just twitter!

6. Re-Tweeting Multiple people at same time

How is this a mistake?

Re-Tweeting or RT for short means you tweet someone else’s tweet and giving proper credit to the original twitter.

RTing can be fun, exciting and very useful because not only you share someone else’s message to your follower and gain their respect but at the same time let your followers get variety other then your usual tweets with new content, it can be viral also.

Now you must be wondering what is wrong with RTing? Well the mistake is in the method you do it!

Mostly the correct way to do it is like this

RT @Sameerjoad – Hey check out this new video at youtube.com

but most people wants to RT multiple tweets at the same time and they do it like this

RT@Sameerjoad , RT@mr.x, RT@mr.y……..etc

such users tend to think that all of their followers will actually click each of those users to check their tweets from your single tweet, this would never work!

in fact some people find it very annoying and can actually start blocking you or un-follow you or even report you!

So avoid multi RTing in same tweet, if your very lazy then just don’t RT it at all!

Update 2011: Twitter has taken care of this & now there is a automatic retweet function, using @ tags now serves as mentioning, yet again mentioning to many people at the same time can be a bad thing.

7. Self Promotion and limitations

How is this a mistake?

limiting your twitter usage to only promoting your products and services can be very bad for you, you know you are self promoting if your doing one of the below, so stop these activities if you wish to build a community & good following.

a. Calling yourself a ‘social media expert’ or ‘guru’ in your twitter bio or telling others that they can ‘make money online‘ or ‘increase their twitter followers’ in your ‘bio’ shows your sole purpose on twitter is self promotion and making money, this should be avoided as you will find yourself losing lots of followers. Twitter is a social media site and you should use it like one, be original and let your bio space limited to your bio only.

b. tweeting only about your site, products or links will result in followers running away from you as your giving them only business talks and links and the only people who will be following you are those who are doing the same as you are doing, thus resulting in loss of potential customers.

c. tweeting the same message more then once - some people or all of us know that even if you have 10000 followers the chance of your tweet being read by all of them is close to zero, because they will be following so many people and have many tweets following around or simply because they are not around at the time you tweet. Because of this some people tweet same message over and over and over and some do that more then 100 times in a week. This is considered spamming.

your followers will find it annoying and will go away.

Update 2011: According to recent study, the exposure to your tweets depend on the amount of followers you have, their level of activity, the number of followers they have & the message of your tweet. A tweeter account with 10k followers will see an exposure of 100 – 500 eyeballs on average, with a CTR of 0.7 – 10% depending on the tweet itself.

8. Using Twitter as social network

How is this a mistake?

Many people argue about this, but the sooner you realize the better it will be, twitter is not a social networking site, it is a social media platform. Its NOT like facebook, myspace or other top social networks, you can’t have the same level of privacy, features or usage as that of a social network.

Why am i telling you this? because twitter is a micro-blogging platform, it does not have all the features as that of a normal social network site, you won’t find your friends enjoying twitter the way they do in facebook and you should get used to it also, twitter has its own advantages.

What am trying to say is that on normal social networking sites, all you basically do is add friends, do some wall posting, upload pictures and most of us check our facebook or myspace few times a week or daily, but twitter is not the same and you will defiantly need more effort to get noticed, so use twitter for what its meant to be used for, what are you doing? but of course not limited to that only, in other words don’t try force your friends or net workers to join twitter if they are your friends on facebook, some of them might not find it useful while others might.

Update 2011: Twitter is starting to bring in more social networking features & with so many twitter based services such as twitpic, etc you can do quite the same. But yet again twitter is not a social network but a social media platform, that does not mean that you cannot network with people on twitter, commonly known as tweeples.

9. Tweeting in different languages

How is this a mistake?

Although its good to have people from all around the world using twitter and having them as your followers, but everyone knows that basic language of twitter is English.

I don’t know about the legal issues you might have to face if you send a tweet in a different languages since i never did that myself, but tweeting in another language could also kill your followers as not all might be from your same place, or knowing that particular language, not all might be having that language pack installed in their browsers so your just loosing more followers if you did that.

And since English is know to all of twitter users [if they didn't know it they won't be their!] its much advisable to tweet in English unless you promote a specific thing in a specific region or have read and understood twitters terms and conditions.

Twitter has a set of their own languages so if your language is not included i recommend you not tweet in that and contact twitter staff for more questions.

Update 2011: You can tweet in different languages, but be careful if your followers are English speakers. Tweeting in your local language if allowed by twitter can actually be an advantage in getting local followers & more exposure via twitter search.

10. Trusting anything and everything

How is this a mistake?

With the rise in twitter’s success there has been a steady increase  in the number of scam sites as well.

Twitter unlike other social media sites grants access to other ‘applications’ to access your twitter account from their sites, other social sites allows the applications to link to them first and then provides users with a database of applications to choose and use.

This feature of twitter is very unsafe, since their are tonnes of website who could tell you that they are a twitter application and promote something like ‘get 10000 visitors in 1 week’ and to sign up they ask you to enter your account information usually your twitter account information, some of these sites are legal and not doing anything suspicious but not all are like that. That’s why you should be careful specially from sites that may look just like twitter [such links might be promoted to you by others or even in DM from your twitter account and thus catching your attention unnoticed]

Twitter.com scam sites

Update 2011: In just 2 short years twitter has done lots of changes, recent changes in twitters developer & API access services now make it impossible for scam sites to operate, twitter also monitors all twitter based sites using their network & API. So i guess this problem has been solved. However there are still sites floating around that asks you to ‘Enter your login details’ in order to use the service they offer, NEVER do this as twitter has made it clear that all twitter based services should use the twitter developer app API.

11. Using multiple accounts on twitter

How is this a mistake?

Its not hidden that many people actually have multiple twitter accounts, they might be using one for business another for personal purpose and some even have 10 accounts dedicated to their 10 different sites or services, this not only requires them to manage and tweet on 10 accounts but they actually try and get the same number of followers on each one, it becomes very annoying for your followers and very hard for you to actually manage multiple accounts!

That’s why its always advisable to use 1 single twitter account even if you promote multiple services because not only this gains you large number of followers but customers or users of 1 site knows your other services and sites form your tweets thus helping increase traffic.

Update 2011: It is legal to use multiple accounts on twitter, however if found spamming even on one account you risk all your accounts connected to that IP. Please remember that multiple accounts are hard to maintain & can be a daunting task, so think before you proceed.

12. Faking to be someone else

How is this a mistake?

Twitter lets you create a user account and almost all great and well known companies have their twitter accounts!

But some smart people in order to gain popularity and followers they try to fake themselves to be someone else, their have been recent cases of a top celebrity or well known names/personalities using twitter, but later those twitter users were confirmed to be fakes and they had to face several punishments for celebrity impostor!

in fact twitter recently launched a celebrity impostor act to protect the identities of those celebrities, so if your found doing so not only will you lose your twitter accounts, face legal actions but you might even end up facing online harassment’s from those millions of fans, don’t play someone be yourself!

Update 2011: You can get banned for faking to be someone if reported by the original person. Twitter has a verified account system for real celebrities, unless you don’t have that verified badge you risk account banning even if you are the real celebrity.

13. Not Protecting and claiming your id or brand

How is this a mistake?

Just as faking to be someone is a mistake, not protecting your brand id and your public profile is a mistake on your part also.

Specially for people who have multiple products, services and websites, these brand owners find themselves in hardship as sometimes the smart twitterholics will register accounts with your brand name, and cause you loss of traffic and income, in fact they can damage your identity and drive your customers away by posting unwanted or painful content about you or your service.

Lets say for example you have a site called ‘make money with me’ and you have another site called ‘learn to blog with me’, now you go on twitter and register yourself a account which might be just your normal name like ‘sameerjoad’ even though you might use the same account for all your sites, someone out there might register a twitter account that goes with your site names, and he could be making money from your products, service and sites. (affiliate marketers do that, shocking but true!)

This is why you must protect your brand id, even if you don’t use those so many accounts you can create them as a safe keep for the sake of protecting your ID and you can divert all traffic or followers of those accounts to your original account.

14. Selling/buying twitter accounts

How is this a mistake?

Twitter does NOT allow you to sell your twitter accounts and it is against their policy if you do so, but still their are people with the same ideology that ‘rules are meant to be broken’ and they do break them, if you think you can make a account with 1000 followers and then later sell it to someone then you better be careful as twitter is watching you.

Selling accounts on twitter has grown recently with the growth of twitter, this has been mostly related with people who do identity faking and then later sell those accounts to the original owners to make some quick cash, but doing this can get your accounts[all of them] banned and your twitter days are over.

Also if found doing so by your followers[which is obvious since the tweets will change] they will start unfollowing you as well, so even buying twitter accounts with 10000 followers is useless and illegal, so watch where you put your money it might just get wasted.

Stay safe don’t try illegal tricks to make a quick buck, its my job to warn you the rest is up to you.

15. Using bots/hacks and scripts on twitter.

How is this a mistake?

It is very well known that no one can use twitter to its maximum potential without using other applications, their are tonnes of twitter applications, bots, scripts and hacks, almost all are legal but not 100% of all.

In fact scripts like ‘tweet this post’ or RT or auto add etc are not bad at all, they make your twitter experience very quick, smooth and gives you the ability to utilize twitter to its full potential. But hacks and scripts that are made by 3rd parties or anyone with a scripting knowledge can be very risky, in fact using hacks and bots like direct mailing are very annoying and will affect you indirectly.

Twitter scripts like auto tweets, which keeps posting a pre-written message after intervals of time is very annoying and risky, because twitter is a platform for you to express yourself, not a place where you keep tweeting auto spam messages all day around.

There are many ‘do it yourself’ guides on the Internet where some self proclaimed gurus teach you how to create your own twitter plugins, ads, hacks, scripts and bots and most of them ask you to insert codes pre-written by them in your site files, like the theme file or plugin directory of wordpress, such things can mess up your blog or site if you don’t have any knowledge and can even infect your servers, this has happened before and the infections could lead to you having issues with your hosting company. (Similar tricks are used for facebook, using javascripts!)

And last but not the least using scripts,bots and hacks takes the fun away from the real twitter experience which is tweeting on your own and not making tweets that contains lots of links or a one that goes of every single minute, this could effect your followers interest in your service.

That’s all for 15 must avoid twitter mistakes, took me around 2 days researching and writing on it but always ready to help.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

When i talk about scams, i don’t mean a literal scam which of course are also present, but i am talking about services, products, things that you pay for which are over-hyped, bs, crap, full of promises, free money, pyramid schemes, MLM, fast action scams, etc etc.

There are tonnes of schemes, offers, services, ideas and products these days, and none of those can guarantee you success that’s the first thing you should know!

But it comes to the same question every time, how do you know something your visiting is a scam ?

I am going to show you how to detect scams and how to avoid them, mostly i learned all of these because i have been a victim to almost all of them, so i will be showing you my methods along in detecting online scams, make money online scam, get rich quick scam, investment scams, phishing scams and almost all types. This is a comprehensive & updated list of various online scams going around on the internet up until 2011.

You know something is a scam when,

1. The Too good to be true scams!

If its too good to be true, lots of promises and if the site basically takes you to a fantasy world after reading it, more like a pyramid scheme.

2. The Credit card scams!

Sites that asks you to pay via a cc in a unsecured area, on the secure sites their is ‘https’ instead of ‘http’, they have certificates and their is a ‘lock’ icon on top of your browser bar where you enter the site address, sites that don’t have this means they are unprotected or not encrypted, i.e they don’t use an SSL encryption [which means the information you type will be visible to the owner as it is and is not encrypted]

3. The Safety illusion scam

Sites that shows you icons and logos of various organizations like e trust, geotrust etc, which are not verifiable upon clicking [i.e they are just image]- most of them show you a ‘paypal verified’ but its only a image and theirs no proof if its not click-able.

Avoid such sites which try to impress you with .jpg images as they are truly scammers!

4. The pay now and call later scam!

These sites are usually not scams, mostly shows that the owner is not professional and don’t maintain a automated system, but sometimes they can just scam you.

They ask you to pay upfront and then later contact them via email to receive your product or login IDs.

5. The boasting scams!

There are images of cars and houses saying “i bought this new House or car 2 days ago” [seriously who in the right sense will believe that?] i can put up white house and say i bought it a week ago using my program.

6. The fake trust scams!

There are lots of testimonials of other users, usually with not click-able links, or images of people who you can google up using google image, even a 10 year old kid can put up someone else’s photos and write something as if it was a real customer. Update: Due to a recent act by the US Government, all testimonials should be verifiable upon request or the site showing them can face legal actions. So know your rights, if a site is showing lots of testimonials then you can ask them to verify them!

7. The strings scam!

Some sites offers you something for free, then on next page asks you for a fee or donation and finally you end up signing up for a spam mailing list, they always have a string attached to each offer which directs you to other offers.

There are also some sites that offer you something for free, and on the next page tells you that its only free if you ‘buy’ some other products or if you provide your credit card information!

8. Phishing and privacy scams!

The site asks you to download and install various files or software that have the names of popular media, like suppose there is a site saying “amazing get rich in 1 month formula FREE! – WATCH VIDEO NOW!” and when you click on the video to play it they actually ask you to download and install a file which appears to be named something like ‘real player v11′ or ‘divx player v9′ etc etc, these sites are pure scams! DON’T EVER DOWNLOAD OR INSTALL ANYTHING that sounds fishy! they will hack into your computer using those programs [which cannot be deleted] and steal your private information, cookies, saved passwords and user ids. Be very careful and consider downloading those files from their original publishers like adobe or real, then go back to the site & verify. If it still asks you to download then take action & report the site to anywhere you can.

9. False Apps scams!

A site that proclaims itself to be a application to some top social media or social network site, their might be a site that says it can get you 1000 twitter users within next 24 hrs and asks you to use their twitter application, which usually requires you to enter your user id and passwords, thus hacking into your accounts without you even knowing.

10. Spam land & Social Media Spam Scams!

These are scamming methods of a online marketer to get your information and later resell them to others, this may be legal but very annoying on your part.

One another popular way of spamming that is going around on social media sites like facebook. These spams usually involve when a site promises you something special, a loophole or something really exciting or unknown, for example how to see your friends facebook messages, or see who is talking about you on chat, etc. Then the site asks you to copy paste a code on your browser in order to see this. But in reality, this will never work! The code is a script that is designed to instruct facebook to send messages, links or post on your friends walls with a message, etc. This would make your friends want to use the site too, but in reality everyone gets spammed in the process. The most recent such hoax was the osama bin ladens death. Which created a internet spam on ‘watch osama operation video’, or ‘leaked osama video by US’, of course everyone wants to see that video, but if it was never released then it never exists! All you will do is spam everyone on facebook & might get your account hacked in the process as well. Keep away from trying to exploit facebook, youtube, or major sites. Don’t click any such links & if your friend seems to be posting such things inform them about it & ask them to remove those links.

A site that is being promoted by top online marketers which usually involves or requires you to sign up for their mailing lists in promise of something better and in return you end up in spam land!

11. Coupon codes scams!

Sites that gives you coupon codes saying free access, this might sound good if you like that service and might even be a good thing, but in reality the online marketer is scamming you by saying that it will give you free access to those services using those coupons which they provide, later you will realize that the free offer was only limited for the first few month after sign up etc and you just created a yearly subscription – you got scammed!

12. ‘Get Paid to’ Scams!

All ‘GET PAID TO’ networks are scams! their are some which are true to their words, but all get paid to [click, read mails, write, surf,do offers,etc] are pure scams, they are waste of time and only have one goal – to take your money[or to make you do something to earn them money] and your private information [like those survey sites], they might be run by top marketing giants to some 10 year old kid, and they have no guarantee when they will vanish off from the Internet.

13. Information whois scams!

A site that hides its ‘whois’, in case you don’t know, smart people do a ‘whois’ of a site to find out more about the site owner or the domain owner and information such as where the guy is located or what company hosts that domain, if a site is trying to hide such information from you [as some hosts provide private who-is services] then i would recommend you to be very careful of those sites. They might not necessarily be scam, but if a site is selling something or asking for information & its whois is hidden then you might need to be careful. Not all sites need to show the whois, in fact some major corporations hide their whois for privacy & copyright reasons.

In case your wondering how to find someones whois information, check it here.

14. Investment Scams!

All ‘HYIP’ are SCAMS! Yes it may sound funny but their are thousands of people who lose money in HYIP programs, in case your wondering what it is, HYIP stands for ‘High Yield Investment Programs’, these sites usually ask you to invest say $50 in promise you 200% return within 1 month, i.e $100 in end of the month, and when that time comes they offer you a option to reinvest the same money again to double it, in the end they tempt you to make your friends, family etc everyone join in that scam and finally after few months they will be gone, along with your money. If your interested in HYIP don’t do them online or else do your research & trust only those sites that have been around for decades.

15. MLM scams!

Nearly all ‘MLM’ or related schemes are scams, MLM stands for multi level marketing, i should not be calling it a scam, but MLM is a flop idea that don’t work anymore simply because it requires lots of hard work, no guarantee, cold calling, leads making, etc while their are many smarter ways to earn then MLM.

16. Matrix and cyclers scams!

All ‘matrix’ systems or cyclers are scams. I am not saying they might not be real, but most of them end up scamming you, matrix system is almost similar to HYIP and MLM but with some twists, and it usually involves you to recruit others via your affiliate id and those recruits would have to invest real money, so in this case your not only getting yourself scammed but others as well, so don’t promote or use matrix’s or cyclers unless your sure that those systems are legit and proven!

17. ‘Pay it forward’ or Chain Mail Scams!

The ‘pay it forward’ scam, no i am not talking about the sites that use the pay it forward system[even tho they might be scamming you as well] this pay it forward system is very weird and usually involves physical methods, like someone will ask you to ‘send mails by post’ containing 5 dollars or more to specified location and mention your name as well, then those people who receives it will do the same to others and keep spreading the words, while you might be going around the post office waiting for mails, this might work but try it at your own risk as you cannot trust the person to actually pay it forward.

There is a similar trends online that involve spreading chain mails or posts, avoid these as well. Nothing that involves spreading the word will actually do you any good & you will end up being a spammer. The smart thing is that the person who started these chain mails or emails is actually profiting from your efforts. Yes thats how smart Internet Marketers are!

18. Duplicate content Scams!

Sites that offer free products or bonuses [usually the same bunch of things which almost 99% of the Internet marketers will offer] on purchase of their products, now this might sound tempting [because all the Internet marketers make sure their sales letters are tempting] but the fact is that they are just trying to sell you  a product which they even dint create! yes you heard it right, i have tonnes of zillions of PLR, MRR products which i could sell as if my own products, with the sole purpose of making money, nothing in it for you, so avoid such sites. This is also a good way to avoid information overload. You can’t make money online by reading ebooks but only by taking actions!

19. Misleading Advertisement Scams!

“Congratulations you won 1234$ click here to claim them now!” or “you are the 999,999 the visitor, claim your prize here”.

Yes you guessed it right, basically these types of advertisements are from the lotto or pooling sites, where you play and try your luck, its not a scam but a legit thing on their part, however their are TONNES of lookalike sites just like the top sites[free-lotto for example] and those sites can steal your private information or even scam you.

20. Casino scams!

Online casino, well not all are scams, but recently i discovered a software that allows me to instantly create ‘my own casino site’ and boy was i shocked when i found that it gives me exactly the same output as a top casino site has, and the best part is all the money which a player deposits goes direct to my paypal, so be careful as some casinos might just scam the shit out of you! Anyways gambling will rape you up like always, so even if you play at online casinos do it at your own risks, and think about your family before trying it [as sometimes they are so addicting you might end up throwing in all your savings into gambling.]

21. Reputation scams!

Sites with bad reviews – perhaps you don’t value your money, perhaps you do? but if you do, then like all other smart buyers you will do your research on the site or product before buying, type the site name and add ‘review’ to it on google, like ‘click-bank review’, then the mighty google will show you what others are talking about it and you might just save yourself from getting scammed. Most of the time the reviews you read could also be fabricated. So only trust reviews from reputable sources such as amazon, yahoo answers, etc. [the reviews posted by the site itself are of no value & internet marketers would do anything to fabricate information if they want to make a sale]

22. Warez scams!

Warez sites! you might wonder why am adding warez sites to list of scams, well mostly because they might end up hacking your paypal or other private information [including your email] – how?

well everyone wants free stuff, and mostly people do searches like ‘free instant site creator’ and you will only find warez sites that will offer exactly what you want, and some of those software might not be what you want, but spy ware and ad ware that will just destroy your computer! [also torrents are NOT exactly warez, they are different then warez, torrents are p2p media sharing, but people associate illegal torrents, i.e warez to all other torrents, and sometimes torrents can also be used to do the same]. Be careful of what you download & always scan them before running.

23. Script scams!

Sites that offer free scripts or nulled scripts, how cool it will be if i actually had my own facebook site? or youtube? amazing ha? well not so when you find the scripts, of course you can always get a coder to do it for you, but be careful of those ready-made scripts that are promoted all around the Internet, specially the nulled version of a script using which hackers can break into your site, your pc and other important areas where you don’t want them!

24. The T&C scams!

Here is a rule of thumb, Read before you click the ‘I Agree’.

yes you heard it right! always read a companies Terms AND Conditions before you actually sign up for them, because even unknowingly you might be getting scammed legally. Prevention is better then cure, ha?

their are many online companies, some with good reputation some with bad, but all have their T&C along with disclaimer, some of them try to trick people and they do it legally because you don’t read the T&C.

25. Work at home scams!

Sites that offer you work at home can actually be scamming you, these usually involves envelope stuffing, craft working, chain letters,surveys etc where they don’t only charge you but at the same time help them scam your friends and other contacts, be careful they promise you to make money and they charge you for a list of ‘free sites’ that you can find yourself if you did a bit of googling! so be very careful of these scams! Specially the sites that offer you surveys and free offers and charge you as well. If you want to work at home, then do so by freelancing, etc. Also remember, never pay in order to get paid, never pay to get a JOB!

So good luck in your journey in this dangerous world, stay safe and bookmark this page. Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ