Posted on April 26th, 2008 in General
Last week Geoff at Cant Get Rich asked Nickycakes to do a phone interview for the first in his series of weekly podcasts. After some technical difficulties, it finally got recorded, and today he posted it. The interview with the Cakes is about 20 minutes long and there are some pretty funny parts. Topics discussed range everywhere from facebook ppc to what john chow ate for dinner last night.
There’s another interview on the podcast from some boring moron from dubai who does some crappy article writing service, so that may be worth skipping (or listening to for a good laugh).
Anyway, check it out: Cant Get Rich Podcast - Episode 1
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on April 22nd, 2008 in General
Nickycakes gets asked this question quite often. “What is a Reformed Blackhat?” Most people assume that it has something to do with spam or making cloaked pages to fool the search engines. Wrong, WRONG. First, take a look at what “blackhat” really means.
For years, the terms “Black Hat” and “White Hat” have been used to describe hackers, people who break into computer systems, etc. A Black Hat hacker is someone who breaks into systems with malicious intent. Personal gain, causing a general ruckus, or making a name for themselves are a few of the motivating factors. White Hat hackers, on the other hand, is someone who breaks into systems to help. These people are generally the ones who notify the vendors of problems in their systems, help write patches, etc.
Anyway, along came SEO. Like hacking, there were 2 sides of the SEO coin. There were webmasters who got their search engine rankings naturally by writing “good content” or developing relationships with other webmasters for backlinks, etc. Then there were people on the cutting edge who came up with creative ways to rank higher in search engines with less work. Sometimes these practices are thought of as “spammy” but generally none are illegal unless computer systems are being broken into, or can-spam laws are being violated.
So the terms “White Hat SEO” and “Black Hat SEO” were born. Neither have much real meaning, but both are thrown around quite liberally. It’s kind of silly, really. The self proclaimed “White Hat SEO” will try to build inbound links to his website by manually visiting related blogs and making comments on them with his website’s url in the comment. Someone more clever than him will write a program to automatically post comments on all related blogs with the push of one button, and the “White Hat” screams “BLACKHAT!”.
That’s really what Blackhat SEO boils down to. It’s just a term thrown around a lot by idiots who are continually 1-up’d by people more clever than they are. It’s pretty much meaningless.
Ok so that’s the end of that tangent. What does Nickycakes mean by “Reformed Blackhat?” Well, many years ago the Cakes could have been labeled as the type of blackhat first mentioned in this post. Since then many things have changed and now he’s devoting that energy to something more productive: making money on teh intraweb. Hence Reformed Blackhat.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on April 21st, 2008 in General
So as was posted yesterday, the winner on Friday night was too close to call, but the results are in! At 7:28 PM, Amin Taheri was sittin on $1002.50 while the 2nd place guy, Matt Marcin was at $983.65. Really close! The amazing part was, Matt started his campaign less than 24 hours earlier and came from behind to almost win the whole thing.
Geoff PM’d Nickycakes when Matt signed up to say that Matt was claiming to be able to win it even though the leader was already at around $750 in commissions. The Cakes was a little skeptical, but the guy almost pulled it off.
So, of course Amin will have his XBox 360 sent out to him as soon as he sends Nickycakes his address. The dude lives in England so it’ll prolly take a week to arrive or whatever.
But, because the race was so close, and because Matt put in such a dramatic effort to win at the end, Advaliant felt like it was only fair to put up the cash for a 2nd Xbox 360 and send it to him. They’re keepin it real as usual.
Overall the contest was awesome. The turnout was great, and there were probably about 100 participants total. A few guys sent messages to Nickycakes saying that even though they didn’t win, they were glad they had tried because they were able to get good profitable campaigns going. One dude (who ended up being 3rd place) was actually running his first affiliate campaign ever, is in high school, and is making close to $200 a day profit. If Cakes was making $200 a day on the intraweb in HS, he’d be rollin up to prom in the stretch escalade with spinners.
Anyway, thanks for playing everyone, and enjoy working with one of Nickycakes’ favorite networks. And thanks again to Advaliant for fronting the 2nd xbox for the #2 guy!
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on April 19th, 2008 in General
Nickycakes is currently on vacation in Maryland and hasn’t been able to post anything about the contest. Apparently there were 2 people that hit the $1000 mark around the same time for the Xbox contest, so Cakes is still waiting for the people at Advaliant to confirm who won. There will be prizes for both of the guys, however. They will probably have an answer on Monday.
One of the guys actually came from behind in 24 hours and hit $1k which was fun to watch.
Anyway, more to come when Nicky gets back home!
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on March 26th, 2008 in General
Ok, a couple weeks ago, Nickycakes signed up and started using Twitter. He was hesitant at first due to a few factors.
- Turnoff #1: shoemoney posted about it, which generally means it’s a crap service he’s been paid to promote
- Turnoff #2: nobody can really explain what twitter does, they just say to try it…no thanks
- Turnoff #3: it’s got a bunch of stupid web 2.0 graphics, which Nickycakes hates. it’s got a bunch of bubbly clouds and screams “IM AN IPOD LOVING D-BAG”.
- Turnoff #4: it’s called TWITTER…seriously…twitter….sounds like some 13 year old girl dress up myspace game. imagine the ridicule of using this service and then recommending it to family/friends.
So after much harassment to join by people, nickycakes signed up. He’s not too sure why people have trouble describing exactly what this service does. Here’s exactly what it is:
It’s facebook’s status updates.
There ya go. They took facebooks status updates and made a whole website and api around it. You post a short blurb about what you’re doing at the moment, and everyone who you’re friends with sees it on their feed. They added a few small things like the ability to reply to people or send private messages, which can be forwarded to your cellphone or google chat, but that’s the basics.
But for a completely ripped off idea, it is pretty addictive. There’s a firefox addon for it, which shows you popups in the lower right when new items show up on the feed, thunderbird style. It’s super easy to use it from your cell if you’re bored on the subway or whatever. ANDDDDD it’s syndicated on indexed blogs which lets you get a few backlinks for whatever links you’re posting.
And thank goodness, you can change the background of the page for your account so you dont have to look at those retarded clouds, otherwise the Cakes would have been out like a trout, for real.
So if you’re already signed up, or want to, go sign up and follow Nickycakes to see when he’s hittin up the gym or avoiding cooking for his girlfriend. You never know when he’ll be dropping that tip on how to make billions of dollars a minute online with no work!!111~
Published by nickycakes //
