Blogging For Money

I have been poking around Aaron Wall’s SEO Book after subscribing to its membership and I’ve certainly discovered some important things which cuts through the hype about it. The fee is $300 a month, which is definitely way overpriced after I’ve checked out the material available. Fortunately, I didn’t have to pay for the full amount and the subscription will be cancelled at the end of this month, so….

I personally feel that unless you are a total newbie or just beginning to start into search engine optimization (SEO) and want to expand your knowledge of the industry, SEO Book is not for you. Its not to say that SEO Book is totally worthless….I am still printing out tons of material from their “Training” programme which are relevant to my current SEO and SEM needs. Their community forum also has some interesting case studies and SEO-related articles that I am printing out for future reference (and simply because I can). However, let’s just say that after being in the industry for 2 years or so, there’s really nothing major in the content that I don’t know already. After all, experience is certainly the best teacher of all, not a closed “elite” community which charges a ludicrously high fee per month for membership.

Since the forum is pretty much completed now, I think the story can now be told. I have started a new webmasters forum at VCTech Network, my company website. My original intention was for it to serve as a support forum and discussion for our online products and services, i.e. our blog aggregator service, URL shortener and PageRank checker, among other things. But since its pretty much close to what webmasters would want to use for their sites anyway, I thought why not expand on it? I’ve always wanted to run my own webmasters forum. Considering the recent spate of incidents involved in me getting banned from webmaster forums, I think that the timing could not be better.

I hereby take the opportunity to cordially invite you to the VCTech Network Forums.

This is certainly a real blast from the past. Taken at Zoo Negara somewhere in the early 1980s, I presume. No idea how old back then. In this era, computers were just invented and the World Wide Web had not existed yet.

On Thursday, I attended the Google Analytics Master Class (GAMC) at Hilton Hotel which was held for the first time in Kuala Lumpur. According to the organisers, it was previously held in Singapore in 2009 and when they saw that many Malaysians flew in to Singapore to attend the seminar, they thought that it would be a good idea to have the GAMC in both Kuala Lumpur and Singapore this year. Apparently they didn’t expect the seminar to have such a huge turnout. I, too, along with my friend Malcolm had to wait in a very long queue to enter the hall.

Took a photo of myself, since I was bored waiting for the event to start.

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In this video, Matt Cutts answers a question from a viewer regarding techniques on building backlinks to your site. It is important to note that having original content in your site seems to be a major factor in link-building.

If you have been following my other blog, you would know that I recently bought a new, black and shiny scanner (a Canon model) two days ago from Challenger Malaysia store at the Mines Shopping Centre.. I had to get one as the old one (Plustek) which I was using for some 8+ years broke down on me. After having some trouble with it (turns out that the first time around, it was a faulty model), I went back to the store and got it exchanged. Now it is working like a charm.

As you can see, the scanner complements my desktop setup perfectly. Here was its first test image scan and here is its first successful OCR scan.

Incoming search terms:

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Lately, I have been getting these weird SEO spammers asking me to contact them if I wish to increase traffic to my site(s). These e-mails sure look fishy, here is one of them that I received today.

Felicia Sams wrote:
We are interested to increase traffic to your website, please get back to us in
order to discuss the possibility in further detail.

Website:
IP: 122.163.119.126

The e-mail came from seo.sales.traffic@gmail.com. Certainly does not seem to come from a reputable SEO company. So I did a search for this Gmail address and I found out that the problem was not new.

According to the site that I visited, several indicators that this e-mail is spam are:

• The communication will normally come completely unsolicted via email or your website form
• The sender usually uses free non-professional email address (e.g. @gmail.com)
• They do not have their own website
• No telephone number (or not a UK number)
• No company name

I did one step further and made an IP lookup trace for the IP I got from that e-mail. Here was the result:

So do not reply to these types of e-mails. They want you to reply, because then they will add your e-mail to their harvest list and later spam you will all sorts of offers.