Archive for the ‘General’ Category

1. start yet another ‘how to make money on the  Internet’ blog – the Internet needs more of these about as much as the world needs another real estate agent.

2. get upset when people like me write about you. Your website is in the public domain. If you spout bullsiht or are trying to scam people it will get noticed.

3. go around telling people that Twitter is the future of the Internet. It’s not – and you clearly are not smart enough to  understand the agendas of the Social Networking sites!

4. start talking about the big names like Daren Rowse and John Chow in your blogs like they are personal friends – you are fooling nobody – you are nobody.

5. pretend to be an expert when in reality you are nothing but a newbie selling Clickbank crap or spurious ‘training’ on things you don’t understand yourself – do you really think anyone believes the fake earnings reports and pictures of you in front of someone else’s Ferrari…?

We have a very successful specialist forum, and I’m now in the process (or should I say have pretty much finished) setting up a new one devoted entirely to blogs – the blog forum. And now, I’m looking for bloggers who might be interested in helping with contributing, promoting and moderating the new forum.

Being a founder member of the forum will present plenty of opportunity to promote yourself, your blog and your credibility as the forum grows.

I could easily do this myself – but thought it would be much more entertaining to do it with some like minded souls…

Interested? Send me and email and tell me a little about yourself (in return I’ll send you a bit of background on myself) and we’ll take it from there…

I promised some positive post – so here’s one…

Every now and then you stumble across a great site – today’s was Kiva. A site distributing micro-finance to small business around the world, mostly the third world.

If you don’t know what micro-finance is – put very simply, it’s a small loan – usually from a number of investors to small business owners. Its a way to help people grow a sustainable business in a developing economy. And get most of your money back into the bargain…

You can loan as little as $25 and make a real and lasting difference to someone who needs your help! Go on – you have nothing to lose!

Visit the Kiva website and see how easy it is.

I’ve always loved the phrase… (View the definition and history on Wikipedia)

And, this led to me calling my first company Scorched Earth, hence of course the domain name. I stopped using the business name many years back but have never let go of the domains for largely sentimental reasons. It’s been sat doing nothing for along time – until now. And who know maybe back with a vengeance…

It seemed to fit with my general thinking for this site – my intended irreverence- so have been brought back to life…

Yes - it does look a bit like me...

You know – up to now I don’t know. But to give  anyone reading this some background – as I’ve said elsewhere I am a web designer. I’m also a web designer that believes in practising what I preach, so my wife and I also run an ever expanding portfolio of  sites and blogs which make revenue mostly through paid for advertising and Google adsense. As well as blogs under our own names. We’re big fish in a little pond if you like.

So why this blog? I got a bit pissed lately after a former ‘friend’ picked our brains and then headed off to imitate our work – and in one particularly galling instance approaching a client, try to sell to them – whilst also duplicating content from one of our sites. He now has three blogs – in one of which he portrays himself as an Internet/blogging guru – quite absurd given that he started last Xmas and is doing the usual ‘I want to be a professional blogger’ thing of copying the ’10 ways to blog’ post and the like, rewording it and claiming to be authoritative… Also claiming that this blog actually is now his main living – do the sums – it must be bullshit – or at best a gross exageration of the truth.

Okay, so I couldn’t give a damn about him personally – but I do care about his site and sites like it that…

1. Tell lies, most people who make these claims are probably only making a few bucks on the side – if that
2. Decieve, where these people try and sell you stuff of little value, like stupid reports on how to get rich overnight
3. Infest the Internet, I can’t stand just how many of these ‘get rich bloggin’ blogs there are with all the same crap on them
4. Create spam, and never let go of any email address they acquire
5. Scam unwitting newbies into parting with cash for ridiculous schemes anyone with a bit of Internet savvy know won’t work

Getting the picture of where I stand?

I also don’t like stupid personal blogs – but do get highly amused by just how bad some are…

I have no idea where this site is going at the moment – I guess I’m going to let it establish it’s own direction – but so far the plan is to throw in some irreverent blog reviews of terrible blogs,  give a few hints and tips on things that I KNOW works – and take a few guesses at others, perhaps the odd personal take on life and maybe expose the odd scam.

I’ll also be riddling the site with affiliate links – to things I like – and things – I don’t. And, I’m very interested to see if people do sometimes click through and buy the scams and trash I write about….. This blog, is a bit of an experiment – and will take shape, and find its’s own direction over time….

I am a web designer and have been messing around on the net long before the days of the web – my first modem was 2,400 baud. So I guess that qualifies me to have some opinion on the way things have developed over the years. I don’t purport to be a ‘guru’ on the Internet and cyber-culture (actually it’s just a bulsiht phase used by the ‘Internet marketers’ – the type that used to plague the paper classified sections prior to the digital age…), though I would guess I´m way closer to that title – which I hate – than most of the readers of this site. Disagree? I don’t care… Read the rest of this entry »