A Very Rich Jerk
I want money. And you do, too.
Now here’s an interesting guy, the
who ‘fesses up about his own money-lust and gives you a few
useful tips about how to get lusty yourself.
First-rate stuff.
His take is simple. A lot of money changes hands over the
internet. Most of it involves middlemen, and much of the rest of
involves the sale of simple information. He shows you how to get
a piece of both.
His style is a little snarky, but the information is good. It
devolves into four broad categories:
* how to create web sites that offer standard pitches for
informational products
*how to create web sites that rely on Google’s AdSense and other
pey-per-click services to earn commissions
*how to engage in wholesaling on eBay
*how to indulge in a few other potentially lucrative online
ventures, one or two of which border on the highly speculative
The marketing section condenses most conventional copy-writing
wisdom into a few paragraphs, and does it pretty well: steep
your copy with hope, urgency, authority, neutrality, fear,
and–evidently his particular forte–quirkiness. Offer expires
at midnight! Don’t be scammed! I’ve tried them all!
But the real value of his approach is the fusion of this basic
copy writing with the technological juggernaut of the
pay-per-click engines. Using various combinations of basic copy
writing and “search engine optimization,” he explains in great
detail how to move your own stuff, or to broker someone else’s
stuff and get a slice of the deal.
If you’ve ever used Google, you already know all about the
pay-per-click business: it’s the set of targeted ads on the
right side of the page. Companies pay a lot of money to have
their products placed in that space.
It’s natural, then, that an entire industry should have grown
up around it to help smaller merchants to use the service, too:
it’s big, big money: Google closed at $303 today (October 20th),
very close to its all-time high, and its 3rd quarter revenue was
seven times higher than last year’s 3rd quarter revenue.
They paid out over $500 million in the 3rd quarter to
advertisers using their advertising products.
Again: $500 million in one quarter. That’s $2 billion a year.
There’s plenty to go around. The
offers a bunch of useful techniques to help us smaller fry
manipulate Google’s system (and Yahoo’s system, and a few others
besides) to get yourself some.
For its specificty and its applicability, the intel here is more
than worth the price. Be prepared to read it a few times, and
then be prepared to do some legwork: he may be a lazy jerk, but
the rest of us need to expend at least a little energy to make a
go of it.
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