Here are some of my points which I wrote from a new user’s point of view:

1) Mac has nice design

The design of mac is really great. That’s why it’s a pleasure to work on Mac. It’s a pleasure to carry mac, it’s a pleasure to just take it out of your bag and put to charge. And finally it’s a pleasure to type on mac. I wanted to buy a typewriter and I will buy it some day. But among different types of keyboard I prefer mac. The external and internal design of macintosh computers (cause it’s not only related to my particular macbook but to other products as well) give their users esthetic positive feelings. That’s not only my point but many other people told me such impression.

2) Mac makes you feel superior

Many people use mac and that’s not a luxury thing. But for some people it remains a luxury. Many other laptop models can satisfy users’ needs no worse than macs. But still some people prefer mac due to its status. The whole mac hysteria gives Mac computers superior position comparing to others. Very often this feeling passes into computer owners. Of course it depends from surroundings. If you are among IT people your Mac means nothing, moreover some can even joke at you cause you bought such overpriced thing. But in other groups of people your Mac can make you feel superior both in your imagination and in theirs.

Actually that’s all. I have nothing to add. If I would need to talk about Mac’s disadvantages that would be much longer post. But that’s another story.

In my SEO job I like to speak with people from different countries with the help of google translator. I know that it’s almost impossible to avoid mistakes by translating big sentences this way. But I think somehow it helps me to learn new words. This post was inspired by reading the book about Global Search Engine Marketing. I have plans to do global SEO and online marketing. Not for the reasons to enlarge the number of clients and profits (in this case it would be better to focus on English language clients and projects) but because I like new things and new knowledge. In SEO which is sometimes quite boring such thing as international localization can bring both new language skills and entertainment.

Languages which I learn (or had idea to learn) include: German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin (yes, the “dead language”), Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Norwegian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Belorussian, Italian, Romanian, Serbian, Hindu and Chinese.

1) If you lack self-esteem you can change “s” to “c”. So only 1 letter will make you not SEO, but CEO.

2) If you are obsessed by idea that site positions were affected by google panda, just search “panda” in images and you will understand that such a lovely creature can’t harm you.

3) If you are afraid you can be fired – don’t worry, there are plenty of seo vacancies all over the world.

4) If you are from India and your seo sucks, try to do all your best anyway: you may be updated to the higher caste in the next life.

5) If it is hard to understand others (i.e. for the reason their language sucks) try to imagine that you are drunk and you will understand better.

6) If you bought some seo software and the quality is bad, don’t be sad, it was probably made in China.

7) If people don’t understand what do you do, just say you work for Google and they will think you are cool. (And it won’t be a lie cause you make your small contribution to Google)

If you lost a lot of money in casino, don’t be sad – these costs can return to you. (Casinos spend a lot of money for seo)

9) If you are hungry but don’t have food at the moment, RSS can feed you.

10) If you are listening to someone and he or she speaks some nonsense, don’t worry this is just a spinned content.

11) If someone is shouting at you, point a finger at him(her) and say: I delete you from friends, block and report as a spam!

And sometimes these new to seo people want to discuss and defend the position which they’ve heard from a friend or read at some web-site. The same comes with the consultation, it can be even more exhausting for you. For me it’s not a problem to end the conversation at once with those about whom I don’t care. But what if a friend asks you? What do you do? Do you start explaining or do you suggest you can do seo for his / her web-site? Or may be you suggest some seo company? That what I want to ask you, my friends bloggers and seo specialists. If you provide seo consulting – would you charge you friend?

Or may be you had situations when you SEO job spoiled your friendship? Either results or expectations failed. For example I had a situation when several years ago I was a head of seo department in one company and I employed my friend. He was and he is good seo specialist, but he drank a lot and missed many days work. Due to the lack of his responsibility I lost some credibility in the eyes of my boss. I was angry at my friend but it was hard for me to fire him and I did not do it. Well, occasionally I speak with him now, but I don’t expect any good results from him.

I remember one situation when I just started to work in seo, I had to refuse some proposals of friends to promote their sites. It was not about money, I was not sure I’m good enough.

And what stories do you have regarding seo and your friends. About seo and it’s impact on friendship. I hope to encourage discussion and/or your posts in similar thematics.

 But why not to use my real name? It seems for me when I bought domain flodner.com and later created some social medias related to this name I did not think I would need to have strong name-brand for myself. If I would create my web-site now may be I would use my real name.

One more reason is that I am a writer. I’m not among mainstream and popular writers now, but I think I would like to be. I have some works published under my real name and I don’t want to mix my real name with seo, online marketing and guest blogging writings.

 In addition, I think Flodner is quite good pseudonym, it originated suddenly and I don’t remember when exactly. I won’t tell what it means, I’ll only tell that there is a secret involved.

 I think that’s all for this post. And I hope it was interested for people with whom I work online together, correspond and communicate.

1. Blog is a small investment.

The domain name (which costs about $10 a year) and web-hosting is probably the smallest investment you can make in the internet. The bigger investment as it seems to me is your time, which you spend on creation, management and update of your blog. But without such investment you won’t be considered serious by many other people. If 10 years ago it was cool to have own web-site, not it’s strange not to have one. I mean it’s strange for those people who spend a lot of time online. It’s better to stay away from free domains like blogspot and wordpress. I think it can only hurt your reputation, unless your content is really amazing. Free blogs are either for newbies or for spammers. And even if you are newbie, I suppose you don’t want to remain in this status forever.

2. You will better understand blog owners

Sometimes it can be irritative not to receive responses for you guest blogging requests. But try to imagine that you receive hundreds e-mails a week which you need not only to read and reply, but to post the content from letters, or at least review them. That’s a cruel example but I hope you got the point. Some new guest blogging specialists think that blog owners have no other things to do except managing their blog, so they expect blog owners to post their new post as soon as possible. It’s very useful to have own blog (or several blogs) – cause then you will better understand blog owners. Very soon you will achieve the necessary experience in managing and configuring your blog. This may give you some helpful tips how to better format and design your future guest posts. Moreover after keeping own blog you will understand better the psychology of bloggers.

3. It can be your visit card

You can make the visit card from your blog. For example you can keep there your examples of guest blogging posts, your CV and all necessary contacts. Then your blog can become additional method of receiving clients. Moreover you blog can be your name brand which will help you to maintain good relationships with other bloggers.

4. It can be profitable

There are probably thousands of people or even more who dream to live from blogging and do nothing. Of course (especially in the beginning) your blog won’t substitute your daily job. But it can bring additional income. Most of bloggers know how to monetize their blogs. Your revenues will increase as long as your blog traffic and blog rank increases.

I think these 4 reasons will suffice to persuade guest blogging specialists without blogs to start blogging on their own.

Addiction as a notion can be positive or negative. Most wide-known negative addictions include drug-addiction, alcohol-addiction, etc. Positive addiction can be for example some goal-oriented work, or total dedication of artists in times of the creation of their masterpieces. Even love is considered by many people as addiction.

Computer addiction, internet addiction, social network addiction are often discussed. For sure it is not proved if these addictions are positive or negative. I think it depends. The people you admire (you – I mean average internet users) were addicted – Steve Jobs, Mark Zukerberg, Google workers – all they were successful not despite their addiction but the help of it. In contrast to many other people who spend days and nights online, chatting about some shit or watching entertainment shows or spending bucks for downloading porno. In their case their addiction is if not a disease – bad habit.

Last time I spend a lot of time in guest blogging. Actually, that is my favorite seo job and it goes far beyond seo. Not only the process of writing article takes a lot of time, but the process of managing. It’s very easy to find blogs. Everyone can do it, just by typing query into google or some other search engine. It’s also not so hard to find good-quality blogs cause usually they are at the top of results. The most important part is managing your content and your connections by written correspondence and some other means.

Definitely guest blogging is a trend now. I don’t know how long will it last, but now for me it seems to be the most interesting link-building technique in web 2.0. Something really radical must be born to sweep out this trend. I’ve got more and more requests both to publish my guest posts and to publish posts on my sites. I even think that I need to increase the number of my sites and allow guest posts there. But guest posting takes so much time that sometimes I can’t do other things I planned to do online. It’s definitely an addiction, one more proof is that sometimes I check my e-mail which I use for guest posting more frequently than my personal mail!

But assuming all I wrote about addictions above I consider guest blogging a positive addiction. I know there are people who are also addicted (at least to some extent) to guest blogging. And I think we need to unite, may be in society of Anonymous Guest-Bloggers (like anonymous alcoholics), if MyBlogGuest would not exist – I think I would focus on creation of this community.  But now I don’t see the reason for doing it, I have enough contacts with bloggers from all around the world. We’ll see if other bloggers will recognize their addiction and then may be we’ll try to find some treatment. Not to quit guest blogging, but on the contrast – to force our addictiveness work for us and make us happy and successful.

Why do people use Adsense?

1) This program is owned by Google.  People think that such famous company won’t cheat them. Moreover many people like to have the feeling of attachment to something great. And Google is great and cool in people’s minds.

2) Even for the web-newbies it is very easy to paste adsense code to their sites.

3) Adsense is paying per clicks. When someone visits adsense statistics he or she may have the impression that they already started to earn money even if they had just several cliks.

All these reasons are understandable. When I started to use Google Adsense in 2007 I was also expecting to make a lot of money in short terms. I know that long time before some people made simple sites called MFA (Made for Adsense) which received targeted quality traffic from search engines and with right adsense placement they achieved good results. Of course their accounts were banned later and now all good web specialists agree that adsense sucks as monetization methods. It’s better to pay attention to other programs.

Why adsense really sucks

1. You can be banned with no reason

In the beginning of this year after my adsense earning reached the level of 75 Euro (for dollars this amount is $100) I was banned from adsense and there is no way I can access even the stats of my account. I did not expect such fraud from Google but it happened. For my appeal they replied with standard message.

Hello,

 Thank you for your appeal. We appreciate the additional information you’ve
 provided, as well as your continued interest in the AdSense program.
 However, after thoroughly re-reviewing your account data and taking your
 feedback into consideration, our specialists have confirmed that we’re
 unable to reinstate your AdSense account.

 As a reminder, if you have any questions or concerns about your account,
 the actions we’ve taken, or invalid activity in general, you can find more
 information by visiting

I googled these words and found many other posts about adsense ban. As I mentioned I signed to adsense in 2007 and that should be my first check. So I earned 76 Euro in 5 years (!!) and I did not receive even this payment. Do you think I made “invalid activity” or clicked the ads myself? In this case do you think my earning would be so low? 15 Euro a year or 1.25 Euro a month. That’s not even the package of cigarettes!

You may think I have personal reasons for writing this post. In some way it is so, cause I don’t want my web friends and new web-masters to repeat my mistakes. Before I was banned I could not imagine that google can be so shit in one of its products.

2. There is no support

The standard message reply which I posted above was the only reply I got. I got no more replies and the situation is the same with other people who were banned. Moreover their FAQ page has only several general questions. So that means they don’t care. Probably because still there are many people using adsense.

3. You need to have really great traffic to earn something

If your site is new or if you have 100-1000 visitors a day you won’t earn much. May be $1-10 dollars a month. And in case you have big traffic – many direct advertizes will contact you by themselves. And they will offer much more money for the advertisement.

4. If you don’t receive elite traffic – you get minimum

If you are not from US or Western Europe- forget about big earnings. For US, UK, some other rich European countries (like Germany, France), may be also Australia and New Zealand traffic price per click is relatively good. It could be $1 or even more depending from keyword. That means that if your sites get small portion of such traffic – you will receive $0.01 – $0.05 for clicks.

5. Big delay in payment

When your earnings reach minimum $100 (or analogy in other currency) you have to wait 1 month or more till the check will be sent to you. Then it takes time for the check to arrive. Then it takes time for you to go to a bank. Then it takes about 1-2 month to receive money from that check (I was told so in bank)

6. Many banks don’t accept Google Adsense checks

Moreover they don’t even know about such checks. And checks is the only possible choice of payments for adsense. In contrast a lot of other advertising programs offer wide variety of payments and sometimes you can withdraw your earnings in 1 second.

7. Waste of time

Adsense setup and different placement optimization advices really waste your time. I regret that I wasted so much time in placing adsense, then removing, then placing again. I also spent a lot of time in my statistics panel to see which adsense channel, which click and when brought some earnings. That in some way I’m even happy I was banned so I won’t waste my time for adsense now.

8. Adsense is for beggars

I think that probably adsense is the most popular begging advertising. The “revenues” are so small so that is really the minimum you can get. I have analogy that it is like a begging. Someone clicks and you get a penny. And later you boss can take all the amount from you.

That’s all for now. I wish everyone to focus on really valuable things. Goodbye Adsense. Fuck you Google.

But I used to buy cards for present, of course only if they were beautiful. Recently I discovered that Silicon Beach Training started a SEO Top Trumps competition and  decided to participate. I wrote in my post that this card idea is excellent and it inspired me for many other ideas of souvenirs and products which may be produced. I mean related to seo, social media and online marketing products. But after I tried to preview my post – it vanished! It was probably due to the end of my login session. So I won’t repeat my post, actually I was angry, but then I thought may it was a mystical sign to keep my idea for myself. So I won’t repeat the idea I came with, I will try to realize it in the next months. The only thing I will say is that is was about seo chess game ))  And the fact I wrote this post will enforce me to remember this idea!

Firstly I thought to write critical post about Jon. Well, may be it’s because of impression I got after watching his latest webinar. I got no new information from it and the mood of that discussion was quite promotional. After telling some basic things which he already told before (i.e. in this short video on his site’s home page) and after mentioning some success-stories, Jon told that he is going to become a mentor for  everyone who is interested. The course will involved videos, webinars, and some personal work. The price is only six $99 payments so that would be only $594 in 6 month. The amount of people whom he can assist as a mentor is only 100. So multiply 594*100 and you get $59,400. Almost $60, oooo – pretty awesome – isn’t it? Especially if there is not so much work involved. And I’m also critical about different money-pulling programs would it be cash catchers or google snipers or guest bloggers.

Secondly, why I was quite critical is that for me such course won’t provide any value. I think it’s better to learn on practice and all the necessary tips are available online in free access. Moreover I know people who are more experienced and knowledgeable in this are. These are all those whom Jon mentioned in his webinar and many others. Actually I consider Ann Smarty the best specialist in guest blogging. A lot of authors wrote fantastic and helpful guest posts, but she went further and became creator of best guest blogging community – My Blog Guest. Following Jon’s idea that it’s necessary to know important people in blogging. I completely agree! And MyBlogGuets community allows even for the newbies to find friends and blog to accept their posts! And it’s better to spend $20 to become PRO member there than to apply for any of online courses available. With PRO membership you can use article gallery and with it – it would be even easier to promote your web-site with guest blogging.

Going back to the title of this post. After some critical words about Jon and his proposition I would like to add good ones. Those who never heard about Jon – it’s better to read his article on problogger. The most fantastic thing is that despite his disease, Jon became successful. Firstly I thought that may be it would be bad to write any critics toward him, but I don’t want to treat him like a charity case (he mentioned that he doesn’t like people to treat him like this). That’s why I decided to critic his pretty awesome services from a point of advanced guest blogger. But we all have something new to learn. From Jon you can learn the power of character and the power of concentration and dedication oneself to guest blogging. So I won’t say Jon Morrow is a bad mentor, he is pretty awesome mentor, even great mentor for newbies. But not for me.

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