Better still, how can someone be smart enough to work a computer, get on the web, sense there is opportunity to make money, and then do the most idiotic things to sabotage themselves?
I get Google Alerts on all kinds of keywords in my niches. I am the third guy on the web to know when there is something new in my markets. It goes like this:
1. The person puts up the content, 2. Google finds it, and
3. I get an alert.
You can imagine I see a lot of stuff before the rest of the world knows about it. But you might not believe some of the stupid things I see coming online. Rather, stupid things done by incredibly stupid people.
I see people scraping content… still. This is an old practice where you set up a site and simply send a $5 robot script out on the web to scrape up anything in its path and bring it back to a site or blog and regurgitate it as some kind of twisted, nonsense content. Scraping worked for 5 minutes and made like 3 people very wealthy.
The alerts I get are for blogs like bxdftgdh.blogspot.com. (That might actually be a real domain although I just randomly smashed my keyboard with my left hand to come up with it.)
At first I thought “maybe this is a serious black hatter who really knows what they are doing and they’re making a lot of money from this.” Then I check out the site and feel like crying for the depths of stupidity that our species can reach.
It’s very, very sad when you realize that the people doing this kind of stuff are not, in fact, intelligent programming aces gaming the system with exclusive programs they developed with their 150 I.Q.
Rather, these are people who saw something a smart person did and thought they were replicating it by puking stolen, random, nonsense content all over the web (in 2007!). I will see content that is so random, with just my keyword or name shoved inside it. Sometimes it’s just a piece of one of my old posts abruptly cut in half by another piece of content from some real estate site or other completely off-topic.
My friends would say “Blow it off. Don’t worry about this stuff. They are losers.” But then I started to realize they aren’t just losers. They are people with sophisticated computers, the smarts to turn them on, get on the web, and have this land of opportunity before them to make something really powerful that returns real profits and sells real products, and they chose instead to fail.
I mean, these guys work HARD to fail. I’m talking fireworks and ticker tape parade failure. It is harder to fail to make money online than it is to succeed the way these people are doing it!
Here are some tips for those folks who somehow learned to read, but are still dumb enough to do the following…
1. It is no longer necessary to have a domain like this: real-estate-secrets-make-money-at-home.com One could argue that it was never necessary and I wouldn’t put up a fight.
2. If you own a blog on blogger like this aksdkjhtoinj!.blogspot.com you are a bonafide idiot. A savant maybe, since you were able to even figure out how to turn on a computer and get that far, but you’re stupid. Dead in the head. Something the pool boy missed when skimming the gene pool for the crap that floats on the bottom in the Spring.
3. If your domain is decent, you have an actual site on it, you’re in a market where you could actually make money, and you go and f*&k it up by putting scraped content on it and hoping it will just run itself and rake in the dough, you’re certifiably stupid. You haven’t been paying attention. You’re not just stupid. You’re lazy and stupid.
4. When the trail of success is laid out in front of you and all the components you need are in plain site, and you still think you can do it on your own with no help from people who have tons of experience, you’re pretty stupid.
5. Making money online can be accomplished with hundreds of different, legitimate tactics. Consciously choosing one that is not on the huge list of things people can and have done to actually make money is not only stupid, but I’ve drafted a bill for my Congressman to introduce to make it illegal to be so stupid.
6. When you know that all that stands in your way is hard work and doing what the smart people tell you to do - yet you choose something that no sane, reputable expert recommends or endorses because it promises easy money - I’m sorry, but you’re a Grade-A Moron. USDA Certified Beef hanging in a refrigerator truck on a meat hook is smarter than you.
7. You spend thousands of dollars on consulting or coaching to have the road to success paved in gold for you and you don’t apply what you learn nor grasp what you’ve learned even if it was painstakenly laid out in a way a 9 year old could understand. What I can never figure out is how people like this even get thousands of dollars to spend on consulting!
I have no idea why so many weirdos are attracted to, and actually believe there exist, truly easy ways to make money online with a website. There is no easy way if they are not ready to study. It only becomes like shooting fish in a barrel when you’ve learned enough to build the gun, load it, and point it in the right direction.
My advice: Don’t come into a professional arena and take a big dump on it as if it isn’t as specialized, technical, complicated, and important as professions you were born to respect. The people who make money online with great ideas, software, ingenius products, incredible marketing tactics, and eye-catching design are geniuses in their own right.
No one would never train a surgeon by throwing them in the operating room with a scalpel and a book on basic anatomy. Everyone knows this intuitively. Yet the same people who know this come online and act as if online business and marketing is something you’d just need an ebook and hosting to succeed.
I am coming to believe that the disrespect for online business as a group of serious professions is what dooms most people to failure at whatever they try online. To me, some of the things people are doing, like above, is like taking a loaded gun and turning it around to look down the barrel. That’s evolution’s way of weeding out the sick, weak, and dumb. Even on the virtual highway you cannot escape old fashioned biology.
Are you a serious, business-minded, disciplined entrepreneur? Or do you just have an internet connection and wish you had more money?
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Michael Lodispoto 12.02.07 at 6:54 am
So so true! People just aren’t as intelligent as most think, in a great many ways. Before we judge them though maybe we should also look in the mirror and think if perhaps you and I and others reading this aren’t as smart as we think they are.
Here’s a test for you. I did this in one of my offices in New York City. I have one that is dedicated to customer services for companies all over the world, and my people are well paid even for New York City.
I asked each one
1. What is the moon?
2. Does the Earth go around the Moon?
3. The Moon go around the Sun
4. Does the Sun go around the Earth?
5. Does the Sun go Around the Moon?
6. Does The Moon go around the Earth?
Now you and I might think these are common sense as we all look up in the sky and should know what the hell is going on with such important features of our lives and solar systems. But out of 30 employees only 6 knew that the Moon revolves around the Earth. An equal number thought the Sun went around the Earth!
I’m talking college graduates here who supposedly had at least a basic Astronomy course ( or got out of the 3rd grade!)
Try this with people you know - even the intelligent ones and see what I mean.
Now I’m not trying to say all of these people are idiots. My own mother failed this test and thought that the earth went around the moon! How can I call her stupid?
What I am saying is what is common knowledge to you or I even in marketing may not be common knowledge to your wife or employees or other marketers.
One employee looked me in the face and said ‘”What does the moon have to do with this job?”
So Jack, finding people all over the net who fall for these get rich quick schemes is not surprising to me.
I’m sure you have received those letters from someone in Nigeria ( or nowadays South Africa, Brazil and so on) that claim to have some diplomat with 20 million dollars in the bank who will give you a finders fee of a few million if you help them out. This is e-mailed to millions of people a year and is commonly known as the Nigerian scam. Well this idiot was a client of one of my companies, a virtual office company and i saw first hand how stupid people are. I had to shut them down and report them to the FBI as they ripped people off and continue to do so to the tune of millions of dollars a year.
As P.T. Barnum said, there’s a sucker born every minute.
It’s all of the people who want things NOW and don’t understand that you always have to work for success that fall for the BS.
James Schramko 12.03.07 at 3:06 am
Bravo!
Great to read something so true and cutting. It annoys me when my google alerts bring back junk. Does anyone still think this is a long term strategy that will pay for a decent lifestyle?
If you have a look in any popular IM forum the most popular threads relate to short cuts and easy methods….
Makes it easier for us hard working guys!
dave0 12.03.07 at 5:15 am
Nice rant Jack. I enjoyed it and had some good laughs.
As an IM fresher as of start of 07 the first thing that confronted me was the very bad example that even most apparently respected IM gurus were putting out. I thought what chance is there for their minnions to employ even basic standards of biz practice and etiquette.
Much follows from the “experts” imo and unfortunately it is all too easy to get away with murder on the internet and I shouldn’t want the job of being the regulator ! And noone has to be interviewed or provide any kinda cv to join the get rich quick club. Result can be 99% morons with no control or vetting.
Exceptions are very few and far between and proper regulation is an impossible task. There is no answer to the problem. All we can do is to have a good laugh.
Mark McCullagh 12.03.07 at 7:09 pm
Thanks for that Jack.
I’m getting tired of ALL of the unethical marketing online these days. I’ve seen some “advice” on a forum recently on how to scape content from Digg (I think) using the “blog this” tool.
Posters on the forum thought this was a great strategy. What a bunch of morons!
Like you said, there are so many legit ways to make money online, why not use your time accordingly.
Of course, I wonder the same thing about many criminals…..
Fred Black 12.04.07 at 12:32 pm
Jack;
Great post! So, exactly what are you trying to say… you shouldn’t beat around the bush so much, just come on out and say what’s on your mind!!!
Seriously, people have been doing this kind of stupidity since day one. Think of the Wild West when someone would strap on a six shooter and think they could take out an experienced hand like Billy the Kid… rarely work out like they thought it would.
I feel your pain!
Fred Black
Bill Urell 12.04.07 at 12:49 pm
Jack,
I have had Google alerts bring back my own content mish mashed on garbage sites. I don’t know, a scraper and word randomizer. I have also had numerous instances of people using my content without the resource box or even a link. So it goes.
My life has gotten a lot more serene since I found 1 or 2 things that work and stick with it rather than chasing the next new thing.
Bill U
Eran Malloch 12.04.07 at 4:02 pm
Ah Jack jack jack, me boy… (said in the voice of Geoffrey Rush - Capt Barbossa from Pirates of the caribbean)
A good post my friend - and I do agree with you, but there’s one thing I have learned in this life and that is that “common sense aint that common!”
I continue to beat my head against a wall in response to a similar situation in my own life which I am sure we are ALL familiar with… That one of the people we know who forward emails that promise riches from Bill Gates (pick ur fav multi-billionaire business guru) if we will forward their email to everyone we know, and they can track it and will send us $234 each time it gets forwarded…
God save me from the dumb morons of the world who actually believe this rubbish. 20 secs of searching on google would show it up as a scam, but these idiots STILL think its legit because it says its legit (in the email) AND that its been on TV, etc etc etc.
Same for those dumb annoying emails warning you of impending doom from a (fake) virus that’s doing the rounds. I even got one of these once from a guy who SHOULD have known better - the MANAGER of an IT firm!!!!!!!!!!
Anyway, stupidity, gullibility, laziness, greed and so forth know no bounds for some people. I guess u just have to sigh, forgive them for demonstrating their idiocy, and move on, secure in the knowledge that they offer no competition to a genuine hard working person who prefers to THINK!
I do agree with what Michael Lodispoto said - sometimes they are smart folks who just don’t know better.
AND, James Schramko hit the nail on the head. These folks just mean there’s less genuine “competition” for us!
OK, off to work now. Love ur blog Jack - keep writing & I’ll keep reading.
Eran Malloch
Perth, Western Australia
http://EranMalloch.com
Lauren Lee 12.05.07 at 9:57 am
“Scraping worked for 5 minutes and made like 3 people very wealthy.”
So funny! And so true. When I read this I thought, “2004 called. They want their technique back!”
It’s not often I read a blog post and wish I were the one who had written it. Great observations, great writing and great wit.
Lauren
IncrediBILL 12.09.07 at 11:06 am
Nice post but they aren’t as stupid as you think as I’ve been watching and fighting these scumbags for a long time and they wouldn’t do it if they weren’t making any money so I wouldn’t exactly call them stupid.
Blogspot is free and new sites get indexed in just a few hours as I’ve had new blogs show up in 30-120 minutes so it’s a speed ramp onto the Google highway.
The random scrambled text gets long tail hits and the ads on the page are the only thing someone landing on the site see that make any sense so they click on them to exit, which means they make money even if they only get a few clicks before the blog is removed.
Don’t know if you had javascript disabled or not when you looked at these sites, but the new breed of these sites redirect you to a different page where a central ad server shows you the most relevant ads for the query that landed you on the original gibberish page you never see.
So I wouldn’t call them stupid, but I would call them scum-sucking bottom-feeders.
Who I would call stupid, ok GREEDY, are the PPC and affiliate programs that can obviously detect that their ads are running on multiple junk domains using the same AFID yet do nothing to stop it.
These are the people directly responsible for creating the capability for these bottom-feeders to operate and earn money doing what looks stupid to the rest of us.
When you consider that those ’stupid’ scripts crank out thousands of blogs a day with hundreds or thousands of pages per blog and generate a little money per blog and add it all up, it does look like it beats working for a living.
While you and I do it the hard way these parasites profit off our backs and the only way to stop them is to cut them off from scraping your site in the first place.
It can be done, it’s just not easy.
Jack Humphrey 12.09.07 at 1:59 pm
Bill,
I am sticking to my statement. They’re stupid.
I’ll tell you why:
The vast majority of these people are “me-too” people who bought what some SMART black hatter was selling. They in turn try to do as much as a monkey could - pushing buttons and not understanding a thing about what they are doing.
The tiny handful of people who figure these scams out are smart - the the majority of the people who follow them around and think they can replicate results from what the black hatters choose to share with them, are being Grade A dense.
And it’s a lot of work - make no mistake about that. Ask Howie Schwartz why he went white hat (he has shades of gray left in there too). He stated on one of our calls just how much work it is to spam, despite any and all forms of software automation.
What these guys do actually makes posting and ranking look like the easy way to riches. All you have to do is think about writing content that attracts traffic in our scenario.
It might be work, but it’s nothing compared to managing a massive spam network which only a tiny handful of people can do properly and an even smaller number find “fun.”
I have black hat friends. I hear all the chatter that never makes its way to the boards. The spam world is cut throat and competitive, and, done right, way out of the average lazy person’s league.
So if you aren’t incredibly resilient and extremely bright, you don’t have a chance in hell of pushing buttons and making money fall from the web.
Gordon Milton 10.22.08 at 12:37 am
One half of the world is here to worry the other half.
Gordon Miltons last blog post..A Simple Solution To A Massive Problem