It’s only been a few posts since I posted that I was starting a new job with a startup company. Well, already I have been given the boot. First let me explain.

Under the National Party (NZ’s right wing party, probably in line with USA Democrats however, and then Labor is even further left), NZ was introduced to the 90 day law. What the 90 day law basically is, is to allow any business to fire a worker (With no recourse) within the first 90 days of their employment. What it was supposed to do was give employers confidence that if they hired a smooth talker that couldn’t actually do the work, they had a way to get rid of him. In a way, that is how it is working. But there is also another side to the story, in that anyone, for any reason, can be fired within 90 days. In the initial write up of the law, you didn’t even need a reason to fire them, you could just say “Sorry it isn’t working out, cya”.

Before the 90 day rule, there was alot of rules about how you could fire someone. You needed to give them warnings, and give them a chance to buck up their ideas. There was also redundancy which came with a bunch of extra rules about re-advertising the position. Redundancy was usually very favorable to the employee since it was not their fault the position was no longer required.

Now in my hiring with this startup company, they had the 90 day rule in there (Which is their right). However it stated that at any point in the first 90 days, they could fire me on the spot, with 1 days notice. Also in the contract was a stipulation about being made redundant, which gave me 30 days notice, and a few other benefits. I managed to work my way in the contract, and force them to raise the 90 day firing from 1 days notice to 7. Not much, but it is better than 1.

Yesterday (Monday in NZ), I had to stay home with my girlfriend as she was very sick. While holding her hair back out of the vomit, I received a email from my boss saying that financially it wasn’t working out and I was being fired under the 90 day clause. So I had 7 days left of work, and then I am a goner and into the unemployment queue.

Just like that. I was now unemployed. I had no warning, I had never attended any meetings about performance, or about how the company was doing financially. And not only that, but I had essentially been made redundant. The company just did not have enough work for an extra developer. But instead of being made redundant, I am “fired”. Swish.

It kind of bugs me because I more than paid my way with my work. They say that an employers wage should be 1/3 of what he brings to the company. 1/3 to the employee, 1/3 to the employer, and 1/3 to the business itself. I more than did that. I won’t say what my salary was, but “we” were hired out at $120 an hour + tax. And ofcourse had over hanging on quotes etc.

So where to from here? I am really not sure. People I know always say I am crazy for not just staying in Affiliate Marketing. I have more than enough SEO knowledge up top to make bank. But it doesn’t fulfill me. I am almost a pin up poster boy for the moderate democrats/labor party. Once I have enough money to live and enjoy myself, I don’t need more. I don’t thrive knowing that my bank balance is filling up. If someone said I could get paid 100k a year for sifting sand, and then go on a 1 month vacation to the bahamas, I wouldn’t take it. I want to live everyday and enjoy it, not spend 11 months out of the year hating my job, doing the same thing day in day out, and then have a bit of money to finally enjoy myself.

I thrive on having the knowledge, and teaching it, but not as much using it. You may know how to reach the top of Google is to build 100 PR4+ backlinks manually, but that doesn’t mean you want to be doing that all day.

So with that all said and done. Back into the Software Development recruitment process

Patience.

That’s all it takes to succeed.

Let me explain a bit further….

Not that long ago. I was looking for new ways to advertise Wachahost.com. We went the usual avenues, Adwords, Mediabuys on related sites, and eventually I cam across BuySellAds.com (BSA). I had been semi involved with using BuySellAds not that long ago for another one of my products, but I had palmed off all the grunt work to my partner in the business. So in a sense, I was a complete newb to the system.If you are too, then basically BuySellAds.com is a website marketplace where you can purchase a banner ad on any of the publishers websites. You pay for a month upfront for displaying your banner, and whatever amount of clicks you get from it are dependent on the quality of the ad, the ad position, and the site impressions overall.

The thing about BSA that many beginners fall into, is that they want to buy ads right now, when they are in the mood for work. That doesn’t work. Trust me. The amount of money I have thrown at absolute crap sites that supposedly get thousands of impressions, and yet get 3 clicks in a month on my banner is unreal. Learn from my mistakes.

For the most part, you have to understand that there is literally thousands of advertisers on BuySellAds.com. If the site has no existing advertisers on it, 99% of the time it is because the site has a terrible Click-Through-Rate. I don’t want to say it is 100% of the time, because maybe the site is new and you could be finding a gem. But I can honestly say out of the many many ads I have brought through the service, if there has been more than 1 open spot on a single ad space (Or site in general really), it has been money down the drain.

So how can you get around this? BSA has implemented a “Waiting List” system. Whereby you can subscribe to be in the queue for an ad spot should it become available. Be aware that all ad spots on BSA are subscription based, that is that unless you manually discontinue the ad, it will automatically renew (onto your CC). However there are times when maybe an advertising budget runs out, a CPA offer runs dry etc that the advertiser may have to pull his adblock. Here is where the waiting list becomes invaluable. Do note that there is no “placings” on the waiting list. Everyone is lumped together and when the spot becomes available, everyone on the waiting list gets an email at the same time. Then it is a race to who can get through the checkout fast enough.Sometimes I have read the email 30 minutes after I received it and the spot had been eaten up.

Now I will admit, trying to get an ad on a website that has high demand for the placings is still not a bulletproof plan. You could be just one of the many sheep following the crowd trying to advertise on it and you are all following each other into the pit of no return. But the odds are much much better than trying to blow money on low demand sites.

In my last post I said that I had started a new job in a small startup company. I got hired as a Software Developer doing various web and desktop projects. But one of the cool things about this particular job, is that they are really open to any ideas. Heck, I explained to them building backlinks via WordPress Comment Spam and they were all ears. Something I have really disliked in the past, is people who know nothing about a topic, still discrediting what I say. Previously I have told people that you could rank with nothing but Forum Profile links. And they have said “Nah that ain’t right, it’s all about the g00glez brah”. It’s like they don’t know themselves, but still want to form an opinion on it.

So upon starting my new role, I sort of threw out the idea of SEO on our own company site. They were spending a little bit of money on PPC but most of the work/sales came from word of mouth clients. I explained to them that if they invested even half of what it takes to be in position 1 in Adwords for the entire day 24/7 into SEO, they would achieve similar results. Surprisingly (Atleast to myself), they listened and took onboard all my onsite SEO suggestions, and even gave me free rein to do what I wanted in regards to offsite backlinking. I even joked that I should get double my salary if I get them in the top 3, and without even batting an eye lash they agreed.

The challenge begun.

I decided that I would try various things out all in order, just going 1 at a time to see which one gave us a bit of a bump. It probably isn’t the most ideal way of doing things as things can take days, weeks or even months for your work to be shown in the big G. But it gives me a clear path of what we are doing, and allows me to explain to my superiors one step at a time what we are doing. So first off was Web 2.0 property building. This is using Squidoo, Hubpages, Tumblr and the like to flesh out content pages that then link back to your site.I have written about Linkwheels in the past (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), that don’t really work nowadays, but give you a general idea of what I am going for.

Straight away I looked for an automated solution. There was always SENuke, but it is such a slug nowadays. So instead, I decided to have a go at using SerpAssist. I had read alot about SerpAssist before but never really gave it the attention it deserved. At first I thought it was simply a diagram tool, but it actually does build backlinks for you aswell.

Let me give you a rough idea of the order on SerpAssist.

First you write up a couple of articles and put them into {|Spintax}. I usually use SpinnerChief for this, but others have used TBS before and got OK results. Heck some people just spin the article all automatically and never bother fixing up all the grammar mistakes. Each to their own.

Next you use the diagram tool to draw out how everything will link together. The cool thing is that it isn’t just drawing a nice bubbl diagram. It is actually choosing which properties will be linking to what, via what links and using what articles. It really is cool to put together a master plan before getting started. Another cool thing is that you can make the diagram as big as you want, I know people that have 500 node diagrams in this thing. Also another great thing is that any email accounts that need to be created on the way are done by the system also.

Once your diagram is all done, it is time to submit. Now, here is where SerpAssist really amazed me. I was expecting my computer to be locked up (Similar to SENuke) waiting for it to do all the submissions. What a suprise it was when I found out all the content actually gets submitted to SerpAssist’s main server, and then they process it from there (automatically) for you. They actually have all the bots/scripts running on their own servers doing everything for you.

1. This is genius.
2. It means every little site change can be handled by them instead of having to update the program every day.
3. It means I can create 500 node diagrams, submit them, and then go to sleep without my computer being on all day.

Bloody A! How cool is that. However, it does come with a downside. If alot of people are using the program, your jobs can sometimes take a while to finish. They guarantee that any job will complete in 48 hours, but generally the max it has taken is 12 hours. For most people this isn’t a problem. In my situation it was great, In the morning I drew a quick diagram, submitted it, then went on my normal days work without worrying about it. However when I was messing around with the program at home, It was annoying to be waiting so long for jobs to finish.

Once the jobs are completed, the properties are pinged and you are left with a nice backlink diagram.

A couple more things to add.

The “real world” properties, and by that I mean ones like tumblr, ezinearticles.com etc are a very small list. You can check out all supported sites here. SerpAssist provides their own article directories that you can also add into the diagram. However I’m not sure how these will pan out as it must be pretty obvious to Google to just ignore these sites.

Each month they provide you with 200 free captcha solves.

The cost is $7 for the 7 day trial, and then $97 per month after.

Ok,with all that fluff out of the way. What about the results?

I absolutely N.O.W.H.E.R.E. I got moved up zilch places.I used the application on several personal sites, aswell as my workplaces website and it honestly didn’t do anything. On all sites I used various linking techniques, Link Pyramids, Link Wheels, Gay Wheels, Shit I did them all.

Before I bash the application, let me say a couple of things first. I think the limited subset of sites that you can submit to REALLY hurts the power of this tool. When you think about the properties you would like to place, you think of Squidoo, you think of Hubpages, maybe Webs.com or Weebly. You don’t think of some minor article directory out of nowhere. Out of the ones they support, I would only ever use Quizilla, and LiveJournal (And POSSIBLY Tumblr although they ban incredibly fast) outside of this application. Zimbio (And I think Wikispaces aswell) have all outbound links set to nofollow aswell.

But one thing you have to remember, If I did all this manually, would I have gotten different results? Nope. It is not the applications fault that it didn’t work for me, maybe I did something wrong, maybe Google just doesn’t care for “article marketing” anymore. The application itself is sound and works very well, but the ranking outcomes do not.

Lack of posts again.. Arrggghhh.. I hate it just as much as everyone else. But sometimes real life takes over.

So where am I at? Well new job. Yes again! Unfortunately my last job didn’t quite work out as planned. It was a blast though and I had great fun working on the project, but unfortunately it came time to move on. The decision wasn’t an easy one, but sometimes you just end up working in a company that doesn’t have the working ideas as you. I was used to being in an environment where everyone knew web programming and there was no explanation needed, and I moved into a role where I was the sole/lead developer trying to explain the ideas all the way back up to the top.

I’m also the type of guy that starts work at 9, doesn’t stop till 5, and then switches off. It clashes with alot of ideals that Internet Marketers have that they can work when they want, and put in long hours when required, and other times lax out.I have nothing against that ideal, I don’t think it is lazy at all. But I prefer to just do the work BEFORE it is actually required. Thus you don’t end up having endless nights at the end of the month.

I also got a good job offer locally for a small startup web development company. So it is back to the old 9 – 5 *gasp*. So far it has been great! The size of the company (tiny) has really allowed me to get my ideas across, and they have even be happy to hear my ideas on SEO/BH Advertising which is pretty much unheard of in the development world. Usually you are hired as a developer and have to stick at that.

Anyway, hopefully I can get more blog posts done. I have been working on flipping a bunch of sites that I have going, but they are stuck right at the top of the 2nd page. Once I finish working on them and list them (probably on flippa.com), then a blog post will be forthcoming.

Over the course of my Software Development life, I have had the opportunity to both build my own products and sell them as a sole trader, and work with companies to launch their own products. For every product, it was not how it was coded or the information provided that guaranteed sales, it was how we wrapped it. Yesterday while lazying about watching NZ vs Pakistan in Test Cricket (5 day game so very very slow game, faster than NFL though ), thinking about this really brought back a really weird example of this.

Years ago the Affiliate Marketing world was really in a buzz. There were no Content Lockers at that time, and not the expansive lists of CPA networks you have now to get into. It was sort of a “fad” at the time and everyone wanted to get a piece of it. One thing that became super popular at the time was DominateIM. DominateIM was this coaching service that supposedly taught you how to make money online. There was some really big names behind it and I know alot of people that jumped onboard. Personally, I bought one month and never renewed. For me it was like a “best of” of threads on various forums already. There was nothing new, there was no 1 to 1 coaching or anything like that. It was simply a list of methods, and a forum where you could discuss them.  However, if you did follow through with what they gave you, you could make money there was no doubt about that, but to me I personally thought I had all the knowledge they were handing out already.

Hold on… Sorry. Mid post here I have actually gone to check if the domain is still active : http://dominateim.com/

So I guess you can still buy in (Or however they are running it nowadays). For the context of this post, I am writing of only how it was 2 years ago or so. I don’t know how it is now.

Anyway, As I said. I was a member for 1 month and never re-subbed. Interestingly enough I had several friends that bought into the whole hype and joined. Infact it was one of those friends that encouraged me to join (And I think even paid for half of the membership for me he was so keen).

Now here is an interesting little thing. One of the very first methods on DominateIM involved posting ads to craigslist with job offers and then you send them through a work from home CPA offer or what have you. Pretty standard stuff nowadays but back then craigslist was almost untouched by the masses. I thought I remembered the method from a looonngg time ago so I got to searching around. Sure enough, I found a pretty similar thread on DigitalPoint that was posted months before DominateIM even came onto the scene. The DigitalPoint post had 2 posts and both were negative posts about spamming, and then the thread had died. Now what makes this intriguing, is that I had showed this thread to the same friend who was so keen for me to join DominateIM all those months ago, and he had sort of poo poo’d the idea. He thought it wouldn’t work. But here he is, buying coaching, for someone to tell him the exact same method that was posted on the forum.

I even asked him about it. Pointing out that the two methods were the same so why is he only now going to go through with it. He didn’t really have an answer but it was easy to see. The post on DigitalPoint had been written in a wall of text, it was from a relatively new member, and it’s only two replies were negative posts. The DominateIM salesthread on various forums had people gushing praise over them, and inside the coaching portion, people were bragging all over about how money they had made. Not to mention people have this mentality that when you pay for something, it must be of higher value than something that is free.

Even so. It is still such a weird moment in time thinking back on it how two identical methods can have two radically different outcomes for people.