About a week ago, I was approving a new publisher to 1upAds.com when I noticed that his submitted website domains were very suspicious. He had entered half a dozen domains that looked like the following:

xn—k2j02n2alsdkf0d.com, xn—a0j0n323kflkjd.com, xn—pqopwpqgjbk2jblka.com, etc.

My initial thought was that these sites were garbage – very low quality sites that were most likely receiving untargeted traffic through some cheap source such as PPV traffic. I was concerned about the traffic quality that would stem from these sites, and thought there was a good chance that this particular publisher would send in fraudulent traffic.

However, the domains were so strange-looking that I thought something must be up… that they must serve some useful purpose (because who would register such throw-away domains?), and so I did a bit of research.

Many of you may already know what these domains are, and perhaps this is fairly common knowledge these days, but I sure didn’t recognize what these domains were at the time, and so that means that some of you probably don’t either. So here’s an introduction to IDN and Punycode.

IDN (IDNA)

IDN, or IDNA as it is often referred to, is an abbreviation for Internationalized Domain Name.

There are plenty of articles and explanations as to what an IDN is, but basically it is a domain name that contains a character (or characters) outside of the standard ASCII set that is approved for “standard” domains (a-z, 0-9, and a dash).

They are used in countries whose language(s) contain non-Latin scripts and diacritics (ex. é) such as Arabic, Hebrew, Korea, etc.

IKEA was apparently quick to get on the IDN bandwagon and offer IDN domains to their customers from around the world.

Here is what their IDN domains look like in the following languages:

• Arabic – ايكيا.com
• Chinese – 宜家.com
• Japanese – イケア.com
• Greek – Ελλάδα

  Assuming your browser supports these special UNICODE characters (which it should, unless it’s severely out of date), you should see the example IDN domains above.

Punycode

Punycode is a type of encoding (RFC 3492) that was created exclusively to convert IDN domains to standard domain ASCII characters (a-z, 0-9, and a dash).

This encoding was created so that multilingual IDN domains could be standardized into the WHOIS registry, used properly as network host names, and used in other situations where non-ASCII characters wouldn’t function properly.

In short, Punycode is an encoded version of an IDN domain.

The Punycode version of the IKEA IDN domains mentioned earlier are as follows:

• Arabic – ايكيا.com – xn--mgba7f1ab.com
• Chinese – 宜家.com – xn--obt4b.com
• Japanese – イケア.com – xn--cckd3b.com
• Greek – Ελλάδα.com – xn--hxakic4aa.com

Note: Punycode domains won’t work in older browsers.

Converted IDN domains will always begin with the xn— prefix.

When you visit an IDN domain with non-Latin characters, your browser will convert it to Punycode automatically.

There are many Punycode converters out there, such as this one.

And Now You Know!

Again, you may have already known about Punycode, but I sure hadn’t. But now that I do, the next time I see a publisher with submitted website domains looking like:

 xn—k2j02n2alsdkf0d.com, xn—a0j0n323kflkjd.com, xn—pqopwpqgjbk2jblka.com, etc.

I will know what’s going on

I occasionally receive e-mails from readers of my blog (or those who may have read about me in an interview or article somewhere) telling me that they want more independence and would love to quit their job and work for themselves online for a living.

Some would like to strike it big, making a lot of money online, while others would simply be happy to make enough to pay the bills but still be able to work from the comfort of their own home like I do.

Unfortunately, I believe that a lot of people are misinformed as to just how easy it is to make a living online. Sure, the online entrepreneur life can be easy, but it doesn’t mean that it didn’t take a lot of hard work, skill, and a little bit of luck to get there.

In this post, I would like to reply to all of those e-mails I get from people asking me if they should quit their job and/or how they can do this for a living.

1. Don’t Quit Your Day Job

First, don’t quit your day job to try to switch careers with making money online. Even if you had a $50,000 cushion, I still wouldn’t recommend it.

The only time you should feel safe to quit your day job is when you’re consistently making money online. It doesn’t matter if you suddenly started making $5,000 a month for the past 2 months online, if before that you were making only $50. Things happen a lot quicker online, and your newfound $5K a month could disappear in a few month’s time, leaving you both broke and without a job.

Once you start making enough online on a regular basis to cover all of your living costs and then some (for savings, recreation, emergency, etc.), then you should feel safe to leave your job. By a regular basis, I would recommend at least 6-months, but preferably a year.

Now, I know that a lot of people will disagree with me on this, and yes, working a full-time job leaves very little time to be able to work on your online projects, but especially in today’s economy, where landing a decent job is such a battle, it’s really too risky to quit your job with the hopes of trying to learn the ropes of the online business world.

But keeping your job has more perks to just being a safety net… which brings me to my next point:

2. Don’t Be Afraid to Invest!

If you have a job, you have a massive advantage over the 15-year-old whiz kid nerd who is busy learning PHP and MySQL to try to be the next Zuckerberg.

Sure, he has time on his side – which is nothing to sneeze at, but you have capital.

Take some of that hard-earned cash from your day job and invest it into your online business. Sure, you might lose it, but you will gain valuable experience and be able to leap-frog past others who are trying to do things the slow and hard way.

For example: let’s say you had an idea for a website where people could list the ingredients they have in their fridge, and the website would spit out recipes that contained only those ingredients – a perfect site for poor college students.

The slow route would also be the cheap route: you could learn PHP, Photoshop, XHTML, and even host your site on a free hosting site without your own domain. It’d be free and would cost you nothing except a crapload of time… which is the most precious resource.

Or, you could invest a couple weeks worth of wages from your day job and outsource your idea to a developer and have them do all the work for you. This route might take a month, whereas the slow/cheap route might take 2-3 months.

The point is, you can totally kickstart your way into the online world by investing some of what you make from your day job, online.

One of the best ways may be to simply purchase an existing site on Flippa. Most of the hard work is already done for you then, and you can save a lot of time trying to built a site up from scratch.

You could even work for a year or two at your day job and save $50,000, to then invest it online by purchasing a website that’s making $3,000 a month.

Besides, if you quit your job and have little-to-no experience with making money online, it’s likely going to take a hell of a lot longer than 1 year to learn the skills to build something that you can live off of.

3. It’s Not Really as Easy as You Think

As I said in my intro, a lot of people think that making money online for a living is a dream job, as if you just sit back and hold down F5 all day, watching your 5 digits turn into 6.

While that can –and does- happen sometimes, the truth is that it takes a lot of work, knowledge, and experience to be able to make money consistently online.

It’s so easy for people to become confused, because people – myself included – will often brag about how awesome it is to do this for a living, and how you can work only a couple hours a week if you wanted and still be able to handle things just fine.

But this is usually the case AFTER all the groundwork was done. AFTER all the sleepless nights of server difficulties, programming woes, and no-traffic syndrome torment your mind for weeks on end.

Unless you have a lot of experience as a programmer, designer, or server administrator, you may be surprised at just how much knowledge is really needed to do this for a living, that most people in this industry take for granted.

Offline, people will often ask me what I do for a living, and when I tell them, they tell me how they’d love to do that as well. Often, they even ask me how they can get started.

When I start telling them, I start to realize just how unlikely it is that they could ever do so, unless they really worked hard and were very serious about it, because they’ll start asking me the most basic questions… such as “Wait a second, what’s a domain?” or “What is a PayPal?”.

There really is a lot of technical knowledge that you need to know in this business. Even buying an established website that is 100% complete actually takes a fair bit of technical knowledge, as you’ll likely have no idea how to transfer the domain and website to your registrar and web server properly unless the seller or your web host (or somebody else) does it for you.

And the technical side of the industry is only one set of skills that is required (or highly recommended; you can always hire people to help you with that). Marketing, design, creativity, etc. are just a few more examples of skillsets that are usually needed in this industry.

Making money online can be very “easy” once you build up to a certain point, but getting up there is most certainly not easy.

Don’t Let That Scare You

Don’t get me wrong – I love working for myself by making money online at home, and know that is true for every single other person I know who is doing so as well. It is insanely rewarding (both moneywise and timewise) and offers a mostly stress-free life, at least compared to a regular 9-5 job.

Once you start doing this for a living, you’ll never be able to work for somebody else again… it’ll seem so foreign and obscene to you. And if you think you have the drive to succeed in this business, then I’d encourage you to jump in as soon as possible.

But please do not think that this is an easy gig or simply a job that you can just choose to jump into. It takes a lot of work, drive, and skill, and thinking that you can just somehow quit your job as a mail carrier when you “know how to use Word and send e-mail with attachments” and somehow start making enough online to support yourself with in a couple months is just insulting to those of us who do do this for a living.

This post is starting to get fairly lengthy, so I think I’m going to abruptly end it here. I’m not sure if what I wrote above is written in a lucid manner, as I’m writing in a very tired state, and am not going to bother to proofread my post as I usually do.

I apologize if it sounds like a rant and/or not helpful. And remember, this post is targeted mostly to those who are not making any money online and likely have never even developed a website before and suddenly want to be able to do this for a living.

A few months ago I published a post titled My 2008 Personal Income Tax Results, and in it I mentioned how I was going to set payroll up with my corporation to pay my personal self in the future, to make processing and managing income tax easier.

Originally, I was going to process the payroll all by myself, do all the calculations and paperwork, and remit the income taxes to the CRA (Canadian Revenue Agency) every paycheck.

I was very stressed about having to set it up and how much time it would take to process manually every 2 weeks, so I posed the following question to my readers: “Does anyone have any experience setting up a payroll through a corporation with the Canadian Revenue Agency?”.

Fortunately, a number of people responded with helpful comments. In particular, I’d like to thank Paul Piotrowski, Martin, and Brian for really pushing me to use a 3rd party payroll management service.

In Canada at least, there are basically two sources for outsourcing your payroll management needs: Ceridian and ADP. Both are absolutely massive companies and have favourable reputations behind them, but I ended up going with Ceridian (the company Paul recommended to me) because it’s Canada’s largest payroll management company and is also tied in a partnership with TD Canada Trust, which is where my corporate bank account resides.

Getting set up with Ceridian wasn’t too difficult. After speaking with a representative over the phone who answered all my questions politely, I was sent a bunch of forms via PDF which I signed, scanned, and e-mailed back.

I also had to provide important information such as documentation and proof of my company’s incorporation, a signed statement from my bank, etc. It did take a little while getting everything in order, but Ceridian employees are very tech-savvy and respond to your e-mails pretty fast so I believe my setting up process was actually finished by the next day.

The next step was to get acquainted with the Powerpay system – Ceridian’s online payroll control panel where I can manage every aspect of payroll. It came with a 100+ page PDF instruction manual which I quickly read a couple times, but for the most part it is fairly self-explanatory.

I spoke to another representative who walked me through how to submit my first payroll, and it’s really just a few steps.

Here is a screenshot of one of the screens within the Powerpay system:

Basically, I just have to log in once a month and submit my payroll. This only takes a minute, and can actually be automated if you want the same amount each month. I chose to do it by hand so I can become familiar with how it works.

I should mention that the Powerpay system is only one method of managing your payroll. You can also do it over the phone, for example.

I have my payroll set up to run once a month, and it takes the amount from my corporate bank account on the 28th and, since I set up direct deposit with my personal bank account, deposits there on the 1st. These dates may change slightly depending on whether or not they fall on a weekend or holiday.

I currently have my payroll set up to pay me $4,500 each pay period (once a month). This is the gross amount before taxes. I only need to pay myself enough to live on – the rest will stay in the corporation to take advantage of the lower tax bracket.

In Canada, in addition to the basic income tax, we also have to pay into the CPP – Canadian Pension Plan. This is forced and mandatory. The sad part is, my generation will most likely never see a dime of the CPP… our government pension plan is is not much better shape than America’s.

To make matters worse, since I am both the employer and employee, I have to pay the CPP twice! CPP is nearly 5%, so that’s 10% from the gross amount that is going down the drain.

Below is a screenshot of my first payroll summary:

As you can see, of my initial $4,500 payment, $799.91 goes as general income tax, $208.31 goes to the employee CPP, and another $208.31 goes to the employer CPP. That works out to $1,216.53 that is immediately taken off and sent to the government.

What’s left is $3,491.78.

My first payroll was sent out without any problems and withdrawn as scheduled from my corporate bank account on the 28th, as seen in the screenshot below:

The reason why it shows a debit of $5,156.18 instead of $4,500 is because there were some initial set-up fees with Ceridian. For those wondering, the actual service cost to use Ceridian is only around $25 a month once you’re set up. The set-up fee will vary as well, but I paid around $600 since I opted for a paperless feature.

On the 1st of the following month, I checked my personal bank account to see that my very first payroll payment was deposited flawlessly with the correct amount of $3,491.78.

Awesome. What I really like is that I’m free to move around money as I want. For example, if I wanted an ‘advance’ of $30,000 to buy a new car, I could process that immediately. I’m not limited to being locked into a fixed $4,500 per month.

I’m very happy I went with a 3rd party payroll management company such as Ceridian instead of doing it by myself. I have no doubt that the decision saved me countless hours of accounting work each month, and all for only around $25 a month.

So, if you’re looking to set up payroll for your company, definitely outsource it. It’s really easy once you’re set up.

I was doing a bit of quick surfing early this morning when I happened across a very interesting ad on CNN.com

Now, we’re all familiar with Apple’s TV ads that mock the boring, broken down, and pathetic PC, and I’ve seen the same video ads on various sites sites before. But what I saw on CNN was a lot more sophisticated.

These types of video ads may have very likely been out for quite some time now, but it’s the first time I’ve personally seen one.

The ad consists of two different ad sections on the site both loading in sync and communicating to each other. The “Mac” is shown at the top ad, and the “PC” on the right side, and they continue to talk to each other in another example of a successful and funny Apple ad.

In case CNN.com is geotargeting the ad, only running it at certain times of day, or just isn’t running the ad anymore, here’s a quick screencast I made of it:

Taking a quick look at the HTML, it appears that the top 966×110 embedded flash ad is indeed separate from the right side 336×600 flash ad.

While the technological significance of this is nothing new, it’s nice to see more sophisticated advertising on the web. Hollywood’s marketing companies have been taking advantage of the creative aspects of the Internet for some time now with interesting rich-media/flash ads that would be designed around the particular movie being advertised.

While these ads can be annoying at times, they typically honour the [close] link and/or only display once every 24 hours with the use of a cookie. The Apple ad on CNN above, while playing the video portion automatically, has the audio off by default for those who may be viewing the site at work.

I don’t know – I just saw the ad and really enjoyed it. I love it when, as a consumer, my intelligence is respected or I’m simply confronted with more creative forms of advertising.

11 days ago I made a quick post on my blog titled Limited-Time Free WordZe Subscriptions, in which users had 6-days to sign up to obtain a free month’s subscription of WordZe.

Well, that offer is now over (you snooze, you lose!), but I’m writing this post to show you just how profitable WordZe really is.

The Limited-Time Free WordZe Subscriptions post probably took me around 45-minutes to write, yet it brought in nearly $100.

What’s important to note is that while most of those were sales, at least some of them will renew their subscription, meaning that some of those conversions are actually recurring passive income that I’ll get as long at the customer subscribes to WordZe. If they decide to stop for a while and then use WordZe again in a few months, I’ll still get paid.

Also, since WordZe will be increasing their price from $35 to $45 a month soon, that means that I’ll be getting an extra $3.00 per month, per subscriber, at $13.50.

Now, $100 is obviously nothing extraordinary, but remember as well that this was the result of ONE POST… a post that took me less than an hour to write.. probably between 30-45 minutes. And also remember that these are my customers for life – I’m guaranteed a 30% cut of their subscription fee forever.

I haven’t even been promoting WordZe that much. I’ve made a total of 3 posts, and nothing else. I don’t have their banners or links up anywhere on my blog, and am not promoting them on any of my other sites. And even with only 3 posts on WordZe, I’ve already made close to $300 in commissions, and made them $1,000 in sales.

$1,000 in sales from 3 posts ain’t to bad if you ask me. If you have a great quality product or service that you think would interest my readers, then you might want to consider purchasing a paid plug or paid review. If those 3 posts I made for WordZe were all paid for, it would have only cost WordZe $330 at my current reviewing rate. $330 to make $952.95 in sales isn’t too bad if you ask me

If you decide to sign up to WordZe as an affiliate, please use my referral URL

Sign up now before the price hike!

This isn’t really supposed to be spread, but I have insider knowledge that WordZe will be removing their 20% discount for recurring subscriptions very soon – it could be any time now – effectively increasing their price from $35 to $45. However, if you purchase a recurring subscription now at their current price of $35, you will lock in that price, meaning that even when WordZe does increase their price to $45, you will still only have to pay $35.

So even though you missed out on your chance to use WordZe for 1-month, don’t make the same mistake twice by missing out on signing up to WordZe at 20% cheaper. I’m predicting that the new price will take effect within two weeks.

What is WordZe?

Haven’t heard of WordZe? WordZe is a very powerful keyword research tool which is used primarily to improve PPC campaigns on PPC-services such as Google AdWords. It’s also very useful to research keyword trends and to discover profitable niches which haven’t been saturated yet.

I first came across WordZe when I wrote a review of them last summer. I’d strongly recommend reading the review as it is very detailed and gives a good summary of it’s various features (Note: For some reason, some of the review’s content is somehow missing due to an unknown technical glitch, but it’s still a decent read). I was very impressed with their site, and would consider it a must-have for any affiliate marketer, AdSense arbitrager, or anyone who uses PPC advertising.  

Referral Program

I love WordZe is because of their very lucrative referral program which pays out 30% commission on any trial or monthly subscriptions for the lifetime of the referred customer.

In addition, it also has a 2nd-tier which pays out 5%. This means that you can refer other publishers to their affiliate program as well, and earn 5% off of all of their referrals as well.

For example, if you signed up 14 publishers to their affiliate program and each of those  publishers signed up around 10 publishers on a recurring subscription, you would receive $245 in passive income each month.

I’m kicking myself now because I never used my 2nd-tier referral URL in all my past posts about WordZe. If I had, I might very well have been making $250+ a month from them by now.

I have an extremely high conversion rate with WordZe since they offer a great service and product, and so it is very easy to sign people up as a result.

I’d strongly recommend their referral program. If you sign up for it, please do so through my referral link so that we can both make money

I don’t often like to reveal my sources for who I use for design work and programming as it has more downsides than upsides:

• It drives up the cost from simple supply and demand
• It creates more business to the company meaning longer waiting times
• It provides my competition with valuable information to help their own sites

This is why I usually keep my sources a secret and charge a price to reveal who I use. So today is your lucky day since I’ll be revealing one of my most prized contacts: BannersMall.com.

They only charge $25-$35 per banner, depending on the size, and have a turnaround time of around 3 days. They can do all of the most common banner sizes, and even do custom banner sizes. They even do Peel Away ads for only $75!

Even though BannersMall is run mainly by two people (four in total), they’ve already done work for over 4,000 clients, having created over 30,000 banners. Some of their clients include HostGator, E-lance, 1&1 Hosting, and the American Red Cross. In fact, looking through their portfolio, it almost seems as though they’ve created half of the banners that you see online – seriously.

But don’t take my word for it – look through their 129 jam-packed pages of their portfolio for yourself to see the quality of their work.

BannersMall offers additional services at affordable prices; you can put a 24-hour rush service on your order, which is great to have when you have a campaign you want to launch right away, or purchase the source PSD’s for only $5 per banner.

That’s all I’m going to say about BannersMall because that’s all I need to say. I’m a past client of BannersMall, and they didn’t pay me to write this, nor am I receiving any affiliate revenue from writing this post [Note: As of January 21st, 2008 I added affiliate URLs]. But if you do decide to go with them for your banner creation needs, please drop my name so that they know I’m sending them some business It’s the least you could do for learning of such a great resource from me

I’ve used BannersMall in the past (for my MMAForums.net banners), and since I’m going to start marketing and advertising my blog soon, I naturally ordered their largest package of 10-banners. They even threw one extra one in for free. What do you think?:

(The banners below are both 728×90 leaderboards, but due to width constraints on my design, I’ve had to display them with a 620 width which distorts them. Click on them to see them as their actual size):

Feel free to add one of them to your blog and link back to me!

I know that the majority of you out there do not do this "web thing" for a living (although that’s the goal). And I know that most of you either work a regular job or go to school, or even do both.  As such, I can only imagine that when you are able to find those 2-3 hours each day (probably late at night, I’d imagine) to work on your sites, you cherish the time that you are able to spend on them.

If you fall into this scenario, it is crucial that you work as efficiently as possible in order to take advantage of the short amount of time you are able to work on your sites so that one day you can quit your job and do this for a living (isn’t that the goal here?).

I am going to focus this article on working efficiently by minimizing distractions only, and will save other aspects such as automation and record-keeping for some possible future posts.

Enough distractions, let’s get started!

1. Isolate yourself

I know that some people can do homework while watching TV, or read a book while on the subway, but I can’t. I need absolute concentration with zero distractions.

Even if you are one of those people above who are not easily distracted, I still think this tip is beneficial.

If you work in an environment where there are other people, such as if your office or desk is in the family living room, unless you live alone you are going to be distracted and disrupted throughout your work sessions, even if you don’t readily realize it.

I’m not even talking about things such as your kids running around the house yelling, but just the small things which can add up.

For example, you could be in the middle of a great writing storm on a blog post, writing fast and smooth, when your wife calls out from the kitchen asking (telling) you to take out the trash. Oh, sure, you don’t plan to do this now since you’re working, but even responding and saying that you’ll do it later, you’ve already had your concentration broken and it may take 5-minutes to get back into that intense writing mood again.

This may sound overboard, but these little things add up. When you work around other people you’re simply going to get interrupted and distracted.

Preferably, if you can, make one of the rooms in your house into an office for yourself. Or if your house isn’t big enough for that, tell everyone that you’re working now and don’t want to be distracted. It’s not much too ask since you’re only going to be working for 1-3 hours.

You may be surprised just how much more you can get done when you’re not being interrupted by people around you.

2. Close Instant Messengers and E-mail Notifications!

Turn off all your IM’s including MSN, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger! And don’t forget to turn off any e-mail notification programs such as GMail’s Notifier tool.

This is most likely the single-biggest leech that is usurping your time. Unless you’re 40+, I’m sure that every single one of your is guilty for talking on instant messengers when you are supposed to be working.

The funny thing is, I’m sure that all of you know that you waste a lot of time talking when you should be working, but shrug it off anyway.

It is amazing just how much time is wasted by having these programs open when you should be working. Going on away or busy mode isn’t enough; some of your buddies will still message you anyway – you know I speak the truth. And then there are added distractions such as when your buddies log on or off.

E-mail notification programs are just as bad, because if you’re like me, when you receive a notification of a new e-mail you instantly stop what you’re doing to go and read it.

I must admit that I currently have my programs open and running as I work right now, but sometimes I have to because I have side work stuff going on in addition to writing this post. For example, I’m waiting for somebody on AIM to tell me when he’s finished something that I need to handle right now.

But that doesn’t excuse me for having GMail Notifier and MSN Messenger running. The bad thing about MSN Messenger is that it’s both an IM and E-mail notification tool.

When I do my work sessions with all these programs closed, I can focus much better and can get work done that requires my full attention. For example, I always close down these programs whenever I’m writing a paid review on my blog or a review for PublisherSpot.

Try working with these programs off – you might be surprised just how much work you get done.

3. Turn Off your Phone and TV

Hopefully you don’t have a TV in your office – if you do, you should remove it as your office should be used solely for work (or gaming *smile*). If you work from a desk in a room such as your living room that has a TV, then be sure to turn it off.

Even if you think you’re not going to watch it and have it on some channel that you’d never watch such as say the Women’s Network, there will be times when you turn your head and sneak some peaks at it. There are certain words and sounds that will inevitably catch your attention. BREAST. What? Exactly. That just proved my point. You could be working, then somehow be alerted to the word "breast", because a woman on the The Women’s Network just announced that it was "Breast Cancer Week", but as a guy, you only heard the word "Breast".

Okay, that was a bit of a comical example, but it still illustrates my point. There will be times when words and sounds will simply grab your attention and you waste 15-seconds here, 15-seconds there, and again, this adds up to wasting your time.

And turning off your phone or leaving it in a different room on vibrate is pretty obvious, but how many of you actually do this? Apart from simply not being distracted with phone calls from your friends, wife, or girlfriend, you may receive text messages or even e-mails.

I actually have my Blackberry Pearl right in front of me, and every few minutes I see the red light flick on it, alerting me to a new e-mail. I then go and delete the e-mail. This occurs once every few minutes (God, I get a lot of e-mail) and each time I waste 5-6 seconds deleting them.

So I need to listen to my own advice and start leaving my phone in a different room. I don’t answer calls, though. It’s not like I can’t phone them back afterwards. I consider myself at work, and as such, my boss (me) won’t let me take phone calls

4. Be Comfortable

While at first it may not seem that being comfortable has any relevance to minimizing distractions, it in fact actually does.

I currently have a half-empty (half-full?) mug of coffee in front of me to help keep me alert and awake. By drinking coffee, not only am I keeping myself relaxed and comfortable with a beverage, but I’m providing my body with caffeine to help keep focused on my work.

I also have Winamp running with an online radio station. Shoutcast.com has a great selection of free radio stations, many with no advertisements. This means that I can listen to music non-stop with no interruption and no ads. The music helps me stay focused by relaxing me. I’ve actually noticed that changing the different genres of music by listening to different radio stations actually really helps. For example, I’ll listen to a top-100 pop station for a couple months, a Beatles station for another 2-months, etc. I’ve listened to everything from Reggae to Bach for long periods of times to keep my brain interested.

I’m sitting in a leather message chair. Again, being comfortable helps. If I was sitting in a rigid chair, I may keep fidgeting around, taking rests to rub my back or reposition myself into a more comfortable position.

Being comfortable and content while working pays off!

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Throughout the past several months I’ve noticed that I would receive numerous pingbacks from other blogs that were simply ripping off my content and using it as their own.

This is done automatically, no doubt, although I think that some actual human had to have originally added my site into their script that rips content.

Two of the worst culprits are (God, forgive me for giving them traffic) RookieMillionaire.com and ArmchairEntrepreneur.com which seem to each rip about one post per week. Here are some examples of ripped content from my blog: RookieMillionaire [1, 2] ArmchairEntrepreneur [1, 2] Voixx-Facts [1].

But it’s not just my blog, other sites such as PublisherSpot.com are being ripped from too (example).

At least I can see some satisfaction from some of these sites being shut down such as this one where somebody like me probably complained to their host.

These are just a few examples, but there are probably hundreds of such sites stealing and ripping my content. These examples are also only posting about a paragraph of text, but some of them post the entire posts.

And while they do link back to my full post, you can’t simply expect to repost my content, even if it’s partial, on a site whored with ads and then just link back to my site and think that makes it okay.

Normally I wouldn’t care about such worthless sites, but I’ve been noticing them grow lately with the amount of pingbacks on my posts. I’m worried that search engines such as Google might penalize me since my content may appear to be duplicated content since it is on so many other sites. Is Google smart enough to know which is the real, true content?

I also don’t appreciate the pingbacks in my comments from these sites… that is the salt in the wound. I wonder if there is a way for me to block out certain sites from displaying pingbacks on my blog… perhaps I just add the URL to my list of blocked commenters the same way I do with people? Another solution would be to disable pingbacks entirely, although I do like to have legitimate ones…

Or perhaps I am looking at this the wrong way, and should actually be grateful that these sites are linking back to me as it grows the number of sites linking back to my site. But I just can’t stop thinking about how that very fact may actually hinder me in regards to SEO rather than benefit me..

What are your thoughts?

peephole