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I just read this article by Darren Rowes, and that made me think of how big a similitude there is between the following 3 characters:

Yeah, right: Darren Rowse, Steve Pavlina and… Dr. Phil. There is, of course, something to admit: the three of them have big success in their fields of interest. Darren is a great blogger and a guide to bloggers. He writes very well and gets to the point; furthermore, he generates income, so, in the end, he’s a winner. Steve professes personal development and defines him self as follows:

a blue-eyed, colorblind, left-handed, well educated, vegan, lucid dreaming, purpose driven, happily jobless, reality manipulating, meditation practicing, Reiki healing, risk taking, goal seeking, problem solving, early rising, passive income generating, highly motivated, energetic, disciplined, persistent, optimistic, fearless, and proactive… writer, speaker, blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, game designer, entrepreneur, husband, father, and archetypal Aries.

Here’s a comparison of Darren’s and Steve’s web traffic.

I’ll assume everybody knows Dr. Phil. Now, what the hell is the big deal with them? They’re indeed charismatic people that have something to say, and do it well, but after reading they’re blogs (and watching Dr Phil’s show) pretty extensively, I came to the conclusion that they just keep repeating the same thing over and over again.

Let’s talk about Darren and Steve. Let’s me honest and face it: they found their niche into a very well paying one: they talk about making money. Who wants to make money? Basically almost everyone. Repeating more or less the same things day in and day out, they ensure themselves a good Google rank, they keep the RSS subscribers and fanboys happy, and, above all, they increase the material in their websites. What does that mean? Passive income, as they call it (of course not so passive, since they do a pretty much huge job). More material, more frequent material, equals better Google ranking, which equals more people ending up to their websites looking for how to make money. Of course, then, most of their ads will be related to making money (thanks to Adsense), and their user will be particularly up to click those ads. It’s a very important key: high “click through rate”. Obviously these guys are smart, and do the right thing in trying to take advantage from the situation, but, unfortunately, it turns out that most their stuff is no news.

Most of Steve’s posts involve motivation and success. Same old information, just shaped each time in a slightly different form. And we all know that what really matters, in those case, are not the regular visitors (which will eventually get the ads-blindness syndrome), but the fresh new ones, especially since it seems that their stories make it to Digg quite often.

So, what is this post about? I would like to tell a couple of things to as much readers as possible.

1. Your way to success is YOUR way to success. If you really really mean to get reach, you’re not going to make it by listening to them. They’re not you, they don’t know you, and their advice is really not worth much, even though they often have good things to say. I tell you what, you will have to find your way through your life, and do with it what you really like, and not what somebody else thinks is the easiest way to success.
2. When you read their posts, remember that they were written for the primary purpose of increasing their revenue. At some point, Darren says that he’s written 20000 posts in 4 years, which is 13 posts a day. And he says he has slowed down lately. Writing a good story, and with some valuable content, which I assume to be a bit more than a few lines of text, will probably take from 20 to 40 minutes, just to take an optimistic expectation. Of course I don’t want to dig into Darren’s personal business, but that seems to me like a full time occupation. Ergo, Darren might’ve had his own good stack of money on which to live, before getting blog revenue.
3. If you are a slow starter in the mornings, you’re not going to become an early riser just because Steve tells you to bring in the autopilot. It might work for a while, and you might mistake this for a hate-post, but the truth is that you are what you are, and you will have your own, very personal, way to become an early riser, if any.

Again, I don’t want this post to be mistaken as an hate mail, that’s way I sad the positive things I think about Darren and Steve first. In their own niche, they’re like Dr. Phil. Charismatic characters, no doubt, but, in the very end, say nothing but things we all know. I don’t know about you guys, but I use to think with my own brain, and usually I know what to do and how to do it. And advice is not meant to be given by total strangers.

So, back to the point, there is a lot of fuss about passive income and personal development. I think that this fuss, although I just contributed to it, shouldn’t have any reason to exist. Before leaving you, I would like to invite you to check the home page for the ads selling campaign which will also be used to fund and help cancer research.

Thank you.

As a Linux person, I couldn’t help but smiling about this strip. Enjoy it!

Brought to you by  http://xkcd.com/

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SEO is a really hot topic. Whether you have a blog which earns money through Google Adword, or you run a business on your website, you will soon realize that most of your relevant needs to come from search engines. Let’s examine both cases in order.

Ads driven blog

I’m sure you have read blog optimization techniques basically everywhere on the Internet, so I’m not going to bore you by repeating things that everyone says. I’ll just mention the most important things, and show the way they have affected me. Many people have already proven that the traffic that you’re going to get by making the front page of popular social bookmarks websites such as Digg, Reddit, or Del.icio.us, won’t really affect your traffic that much in the long run. Of course you might gain a few extra RSS subscribed, and even gain Google rank because of the links you might get, but, honestly, it all comes up to one important thing: your content. I’m going to show, with a concrete example, how, in the end, the better traffic you can count on is the one that comes from search engines, and, primary, Google.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the official blog of the i-am-there initiative. I thought I would open up this space so that it would be a good way to explain the motivation behind all this, share with you some ideas and thoughts, and give all this a more human form.

Another million dollar page, uh? Well, technically: yes. And indeed I was inspired by the original idea of the Million Dollar Homepage. On the other end, though, there are differences. Remember to read the quickstart and the faqs to find out more. Furthermore, the ads page will be in continuous evolution and update. This could be a disadvantage, because once you’ve paid you want to be there forever, or an advantage: there’s no such thing as a “sold out”. There are alway ads for they who want some. And Google will like the update frequency. After some SEO studies, I’ve been able to assume that ads in these page will definitely see traffic driven to their pages.

Other advantages? On other pixel sites, you usually pay 1$ or 2$ dollars per pixel, with a minimum share of 10×10 pixels, i.e. 100$ or 200$. Here, with even just 1€, you can get a minimum of 2025 pixels (81×25), which is fair enough for a small banner.

Let’s not forget that 50% of all income will go to cancer research, an issue very important to me. Nowadays the patents system, and the big lobbies have such control that this is actually an obstacle to research, slowing it down, and risking to potentially break new important discoveries that could save lives. I invite you to try this with the smallest amount you feel to invest in it. It’s worth it.

Thank you for stepping by, and I hope you’ll keep coming.