Warning: This is a very long post. If you’re reading this from a smartphone you may want to wait until you get home.

In this post I will explain in detail how I gained over 10,000 real Twitter followers in a short amount of time and reveal how you can do it too.

I was a latecomer to Twitter, but eventually decided to sign up. However, I never really used it. And apart from running a couple of Twitter contests and adding a Twitter counter and link on the right-side of my blog, I didn’t really try to increase my followership.

But once I started using the Twitter app on my Blackberry, that all changed. I started to really enjoy Twitter and use it frequently. As I started to Tweet more often, I realized that my number of followers was fairly low and not seeing much growth at around 1,000, and so I decided to try to dramatically increase it.

I currently (as of writing this post) have 10,383 Twitter followers – all real people, most with many followers themselves, yet am only following 10 people myself.

No Follow-for-Follow

There are many services and tools (both paid and free) that will allow you to increase your number of Twitter followers by agreeing to follow others in return. While this would probably help gain my number of followers fairly easily and quickly, I don’t like it for several reasons:

1. In doing follow-for-follow, most services and tools require that you give up your password. I don’t like the thought of that at all.

2. While it’s actually fairly common to see a high follow-to-follower ratio on Twitter, even with some celebrities, it also dilutes a lot of the value of your followers as they’re just blind sheep who are only following you so that you follow them in return.

3. I hate the fact that you are always "in debt"; you are stuck following all of those people, because chances are if you unfollow them that they will unfollow you back.

4. Which leads me to my next point. I am sure that in the future, as more ad networks which allow you to sell your Tweets pop up, they will eventually factor in a follow-to-follower ratio metric. When this happens, my account will look golden.

5. I am currently following only 10 people yet have over 10,000 followers. I think this makes my account stand out more. It also doesn’t hurt to increase the follower conversion rate, as it may appear that account must be good to follow if 10,000 others are following me and I’m not following them back.

What Didn’t Work

I first tried a couple services in which you purchased packages that would gain you Twitter followers over a fairly quick period of time – typically 2-7 days.

There are many services that offer this, and even more that will offer them if you allow follow-for-follow.

At first glance, the results looked awesome to me. I gained around 2,000 followers within a few days and grew from 1,000 to 3,000 followers. But then upon closer inspection, I realized that the average follower only had around 3-4 followers themselves, 8-9 tweets, and were following around 50 people. They also all had similar usernames… as if automatically generated using common first and last names with a couple of random letters appended to them.

Upon further investigation, it was confirmed that these were bots/fake accounts that were sent to me. To make matters worse, a few weeks later I was seeing massive unfollows of around 150-500 about once a week or so, to where I ended up where I started at with around 1,000 followers.

Having the followers unfollow was bad enough, but I don’t want fake followers… that makes them 90% useless (having a high metric in anything is still always beneficial, which is why I didn’t say 100% useless). So, this didn’t work.

I then considered using TwitterCounter’s Featured User service, which at first glance looked fairly promising. What enticed me was that you’d get high quality followers and definitely not bots.

But their prices are just insane. They state on their site:

"When you’re a featured member you get approximately 1 Twitter follower on every 100 views."

Yet they charge $285 for 50,000 views, resulting in an expected estimate of 500 new followers.

That’s $0.57 per follower which is really expensive!

That number increases with the more volume you purchase… for example 100,000 views (1,000 followers) is $545 or $0.54 per follower, but that’s still insanely expensive.

And so, TwitterCounter’s service was out of the picture.

What DID Work

Enter Twiends.

Twiends is a free service that allows Twitter users to list themselves in which is essentially a giant Twitter directory.

And giant it is. It is in the top 3,000 on Alexa and boasts over a million members.

You sign-up, choose 5 categories that best represent your Twitter account, and are given 25 free "seeds" for signing up.

A seed is essentially a credit, and is used as a type of currency on the site. You set a seed-rate on how much you are willing to "pay" for people to follow you. In contrast, you can also gain seeds by following others.

There are fraud checks in place to help prevent cheaters from mass following in order to gain credits and then mass unfollowing, although at the same time you can’t expect a 100% retention rate because people will naturally unfollow you anyway, especially if your Twitter updates really suck . On average, you can expect a long-term retention rate of about 50%, but this will really vary depending on your settings and how you tweet (if you just spam your Twitter account with ads, the unfollow rate will obviously be higher).

Great Value in Purchasing Seeds

While you could certainly sit in front of your computer all day and manually follow others in order to gain seeds, that would be an incredible waste of your time, not to mention that it would defeat the point of the "No Follow-for-Follow" mentality that I mentioned earlier.

The secret to Twiends is to purchase seeds or packages.

For example, as I write this, here is how many seeds I currently have in my account:

Do you know how long that would have taken to amass if I had tried to gain those manually? It’d basically be impossible.

Twiends allows users to purchase seeds through three different methods: subscription-based, predefined seed packages, and one-day featured slots:

As you can see, the bigger the package, the cheaper the seed price, so it’s cheaper to buy in bulk.

If you’re interested in trying Twiends out, I highly recommend starting with the One Day Featured package at $79. You should receive approximately 3,000 followers within 48 hours. That works out to around two-and-a-half pennies per follower!

With the One Day Featured slot, you are shown on the right side of the main directory pages in a Featured Users section. Twiends pays others 7 seeds to follow you even though you don’t actually use any seeds of your own. This is why this is such a great package to buy, as you get 24-hours as a Featured User.

It is most beneficial to new users to the site as it means that nobody has followed you yet. As a result, the slot starts to lose its effectiveness with each implementation, so you wouldn’t see another 3,000 followers if you purchased it immediately the following day, for example.

It’s a good slot to get once in a while, but not all the time.

Also, keep in mind that while you should receive a crapload of new followers in the first 1-2 days of purchasing a Featured User slot, that you will inevitably see a bit of a decrease during the next 3-4 days. This is normal and will only last a few days (if you have a seed balance) as it’s only normal for some out of those 2,000-3,000 new followers to unfollow you. You will keep the vast majority of the followers that you gained.

If you’re happy with the results of the One Day Featured slot, then I’d recommend grabbing the 20,000 + Featured package at $300. It’s $50 more than the 20,000 package but you get 1 free day as a featured user which is worth $80, so it’s a better value.

Or, you could purchase the 50,000 package which has a really low per-seed rate at only $0.012, plus 2 days of being a Featured User.

I personally have only ordered the large packages and not the subscriptions myself, although I’m sure the subscriptions are just as fine.

Please note that the 50,000 package will not be available to you until you become a VIP member, which basically means that you’ll need to make a different transaction first.

There are even larger packages available with greater discounts, but for most of you the 50K is plenty large enough.

Prices may Rise…

I noticed the other day that the cost for the Featured User rose from $59 to $79 as demand for it increased.

As more and more people start to realize the power of Twiends, the rates will likely increase as well, so grab your seeds at these low costs while you can!

I know, I know, it sounds all very pitchy, but don’t say I didn’t warn you . I’m probably going to grab the 100K package next for this very reason.

Maximize your Retention Rate!

I’m going to share a massive and very important tip with you.

When I first started using Twiends, I was very disappointed with their service because I was getting an incredibly high unfollow rate due to cheaters trying to game the system by following and then unfollowing users.

I managed to dramatically reduce my unfollow rate and increase my retention rate to around 50% by making the following changes to my account.

*** I highly recommend *** that you make these adjustments to your Twiends account before purchasing any credits!

Once logged into Twiends, go to Settings located at the top right, then click on the "Modify Options" link (it’s located right after the text "2 seeds offered to some people, with follow back turned off").

Then change your settings to match mine as in the screenshot below:

By default, these are set to the very highest which is why the unfollow rate can be so high.

If you want to have an even better retention rate you can adjust these as desired, but keep in mind that you will gain new followers at a much slower rate.

You can freely increase the "Offer 2 seeds when someone follows you" rate to whatever you wish – as this shouldn’t affect your retention rate. It will simply drain your seed balance much faster, but will gain you new followers dramatically faster as well.

I personally offer 2 seeds because it’s the best value, and I’m happy with my new follower rate.

Proof Twiends Works

Here are some screenshots, courtesy of TwitterCounter (which I highly recommend using if you start using Twiends), which show the effectiveness of Twiends:

First, here are the results from the past 30 days. As you can see, gradual, steady growth:

And here are the results over the past 3 months. Take a guess when I used a "Featured User" slot:

And here are the results from the past 6 months:

I’m not the only one benefiting from Twiends though. I privately told John Chow and Zac Johnson about it as well and they both signed up and purchased the packages as I recommend to them (starting with a Featured User slot and then a 50K package).

Take a guess when John started his Featured user spot

And when do you think Zac started his Featured User slot? I’m almost regretting telling Zac about Twiends though, as he’s on pace to pass my number of followers now!

John, Zac, and I are all very happy with the results we’ve seen with Twiends.

As you can tell, I highly recommend Twiends, and plan on doing a follow-up post once I hit the 20,000 follower mark.

Follow me on Twitter

If you haven’t already, be sure to follow me on Twitter 

A few posts ago, I posted how a broken hard drive had crippled me due to not having a very recent back-up.

I did have a back-up, but it was 3 months old. I used to make back-ups once a month, but as my websites grew in size and my personal files grew as well, it quickly became quite a chore to back up my computer.

In this post, I will first share how I used to back up my data, and then show my new backing up procedure.

Before I begin, I wanted to address a couple of suggestions that were made in my earlier post.

Using an Online Back-Up Service

First, a couple commenters suggested that I use online back-up services. I did consider doing this, but have a couple of issues with it. The main issue is that the government here recently started to cap Internet use, and made it mandatory for all ISP’s to limit online bandwidth.

With my current plan, I am allotted 125 GB of bandwidth a month. While I don’t get anywhere near that most months, I have started to creep towards it. If you look at August and September in the graph below, you can see that it’s not unrealistic for me to get near that cap:

While I believe there is one upgrade of a plan I can do to get more bandwidth, it isn’t all that much more, and the fact is that my bandwidth will only increase overtime anyway.

Now, I don’t know how much bandwidth an online back-up service would take, and it might be a lot less than I think if they offer incremental data packet changes, but that leads me to my second point:

Part of my back-up routine is to download back-ups of all my websites across all my servers. Since this accounts for 4 GB and take a long time to download, there is no way I can do this everyday, which kind of makes the online back-up thing a bit pointless.

I do love the idea of having an off-site back-up, in the case of a fire, for example, but right now I don’t think an online back-up solution really works for me.

Using RAID or 24/7 Instant Back-Up Solution

The other suggestion was that I use a software such as Memeo Instant Back-Up to automatically make back-up’s to an external hard drive. Another option would be to have a RAID set-up, so that all my data is instantly mirrored across 2 or 3 hard drives.

If I had a RAID set-up in place when my hard drive broke, I could have been back up and running right away, as if nothing had happened.

However, RAID doesn’t solve everything. A fire or theft would leave me without all of my data, and what if I wanted to grab a file that I deleted months ago? Since RAID is essentially a mirror of my hard drive, that wouldn’t help.

I did try Memeo Instant Back-Up, actually, as it came installed on an external HD I bought. However, I found it to be EXTREMELY slow. I understand that the first time you run it that it’s supposed to be slow, but the ETA of running the initial back-up procedure was something like 6 weeks! Even if it’s a lot faster after that, there’s no way I’m waiting 6 weeks before making a back-up.

And I don’t appear to be the only person who finds it slow. Google returns a lot of complaints about its slowness, such as this one, which has 43 comments from others reiterating the same problem.

My Old Back-Up Set-Up

Okay, I warn you: this is pretty old-school.

What I used to do, up to a couple weeks ago, was simply make back-up’s onto DVD. Actually, DVD’s were only in the past year or two. Before that, it was actually to CD’s!

Here’s the general procedure of what I used to do:

1. Download back-ups of all my websites, which accounts for dozens of websites spread across several different servers. This alone takes around 3 hours generally. The good news is that the back-up’s are all prepared automatically, so they are always waiting for me to simply FTP in and download.

2. Then, in order to protect my sensitive data from possible theft, I would password-protect all of my data the only way I knew how (which is a little bit embarrassing), which was to zip it all up into one RAR and then password-protect it that way. With 30GB of data to RAR into one file, this generally takes another 2-3 hours.

3. I would then burn this password-protected RAR file to DVD. I started by using CD’s, but then my files quickly grew in size so I had to start using multiple CD’s. I then switched to DVD’s, but then quickly had to start using multiple DVD’s… and so I had to split the RAR file into separate archive files in order to fit them properly onto the multiple discs.

Lastly, after double-checking that everything was backed up fine (could be accessed again), I would write down on a sheet of paper when I last backed up.

I’m sure you can see why it was a chore for me to back-up, and it only grew worse every time I did it as I would always have more data to store.

The neat thing is that I’ve been doing this for a decade, so I actually have back-up CD’s dating back from around 2002. It’s really neat going back and looking at some of the older back-up’s once in a while, as I found incredibly old websites I used to own as well as old photos, etc. It’s a real time capsule

My New Back-Up Set-Up

Once I started splitting my password-protected RAR into multiple files, I knew that I needed a better back-up solution. Not even Blu-Ray or 16GB USB flash drives would last me long, considering that I have 30 GB minimum that needs to be backed up these days.

So, I went and purchased a 1TB external hard drive for $130 or so, which has USB3.0 compatibility (although my computer currently doesn’t have a USB3.0 connection, but the USB2.0 speeds aren’t bad).

While I could simply drag-and-drop all my files to the external HD, there still remains the issue of encryption protection. Sure, I could continue to RAR all my files into 1 password-protected file, but that always felt wrong to me, and does take a long time to do.

Fortunately, I found an absolute AWESOME software program that is completely free and open-source. It’s called TrueCrypt and here’s a brief description from its website:

TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted volume (data storage device). On-the-fly encryption means that data is automatically encrypted right before it is saved and decrypted right after it is loaded, without any user intervention. No data stored on an encrypted volume can be read (decrypted) without using the correct password/keyfile(s) or correct encryption keys. Entire file system is encrypted (e.g., file names, folder names, contents of every file, free space, meta data, etc). 

It has hordes of features, is incredibly strong and versatile, and works on any OS. It’s so strong that the FBI couldn’t even decrypt a TrueCrypt volume despite trying for an entire year.

I highly recommend TrueCrypt for password-protecting or encrypting anything.

So what I did was set TrueCrypt up on my 1TB external/portable HD so that the entire HD is encrypted, yet data can be accessed and transferred on-the-fly as if it wasn’t encrypted.

I can therefore simple drag-and-drop all my files from my PC to my portable HD, unmount it, disconnect it, and I’m done. No need for stupid RARing, and no need for burning DVD’s.

It also means that when I want to access a particular file, that I can do so much quicker.

And with 1TB of data, I can still make archives of each back-up period, simply by putting every new back-up into a different folder, named by date. Since each back-up is roughly 30GB, I could have approximately 30 retention periods of data.

However, I may instead just buy a new portable HD each time… they’re getting bigger and cheaper all the time, and it wouldn’t hurt to have another off-site back-up. That’s one thing I did like about DVD’s and CD’s… I have some of them in different locations, just in case there IS ever a fire or theft of both my computer and my back-ups.

So, here is my new back-up procedure:

1. Download back-ups of all my websites, which accounts for dozens of websites spread across several different servers. This alone takes around 3 hours generally. The good news is that the back-up’s are all prepared automatically, so they are always waiting for me to simply FTP in and download. (No change)

2. I simply plug my portable HD into my computer, mount it with TrueCrypt, and then drag-and-drop the back-up files over. I then un-mount it, unplug it, and store it away.

3. After a quick double-check that everything was backed up and encrypted fine, I then write down on a sheet of paper when I last backed up.

That’s it! It’s sure a HELL of a lot easier to do now – and with TrueCrypt, I feel that my back-up is far more secure than it used to be.

I can now back-up more frequently since it is is a lot less painful, which is the whole point.

I realize that there are many ways to back-up your data (as mentioned in the beginning of this post), but this method works best for me at this point. I may look into online back-up’s in the future, but I’m content with my current (new) set-up at the moment.

On a side note, I am missing out on the practicality of having a complete image or ghost of my machine. Unfortunately, the Windows Vista Home Premium edition doesn’t come with the Complete PC Backup feature, but I believe all versions of Windows 7 does. I’m probably going to buy a new computer in a year, at which point I’ll have Windows 7 and will then also back-up images of my computer onto my portable HD so that if something catastrophic happens again, I can literally be back up and running within hours.

6 weeks ago, on September 21st, 2011, I was only around 13 hours away from completing my epic weight loss challenge. It was already a very stressful day as I still had a couple pounds to lose, but it was about to become far more stressful.

I had woken up early that morning and went on my computer to start an early work session. Things were going fine for about an hour, and I was just in the middle of unzipping a bunch of banner creatives for a new PPC marketing campaign I was setting up, when my computer slowed down to a crawl and then just became unresponsive.

I rebooted, a bit annoyed as I had a lot of windows and projects open at the time, but quickly felt an uneasiness settle in my stomach as my computer didn’t load Windows. I rebooted a dozen times, with each subsequent reboot only making things worse, to where the computer would only POST but go no further.

With no Windows DVD (pre-install) or ghost image to work with, I Googled my city for computer repair services. Fortunately, I found a guy who only charged $60 no matter what the problem is, and he said I could come and drop my computer off at 9:30AM, which is what I did.

It turns out that his home business was only a few blocks from me – one of the houses that I regularly walked by on my daily walks for my weight loss challenge.

He said he’d take a look and would give me a call within a few hours.

And so I went home, very stressed out and worried, and also very weak and hungry due to hardly eating or drinking anything the past 48 hours due to the weight loss challenge deadline which was at 10PM that same day.

To make a long story short, the tech called me back and told me that my HD was completely wiped out. It was making these crazy scratching noises and the data on it was all gone. He said he had experience in recovering lost data on failed hard drives, and had these special software tools for it (which he ran all day and night on his powerful computer), but was unfortunately still unable to recover my data.

This was my greatest fear… obviously I could care less about having to replace a hard drive, or even an entire computer. It’s the data I wanted… and the data was gone.

But… you have backups, don’t you?

Now, obviously I’m not so stupid as to not have any backups of my data. Anyone who has anything of importance on their computer would be crazy not to.

The problem is, my back-up routine was to make back-ups about every 2 months on average.

It started out being once a month, but then the amount of data I had to download from my 3 servers started getting larger and larger, and the data on my HD was quite a lot and took a long time to RAR for encryption and space issues.

And so, the backing up process would take a good 7-8 hours, which would make it such an inconvenience.

To make matters worse, I was just about to make a new back-up when my HD crashed! I hadn’t made one in a while, and needed to transfer my data to my laptop anyway, as I was going on a trip in a week.

So, the HD failure happened at the worst possible time basically. My last back-up available was from June 24th, 2011 – 3 months of lost data!

At least you had a relatively recent backup…

Sure, I had everything from June 24th, 2011, but all the work I did in the past 3 months on my computer was gone. I cannot tell you how stressful this was.

Here is a partial sample of the more important data I lost forever due to the HD crash:

*** = Lost forever | *** = 3 Months of data lost

• All accounting Excel files ***
• The brand new source video openers for my blog videos, which took me 3 days to make ***
• Numerous photos and videos (all uploaded, but videos are at mercy of YouTube) ***
• Important gathered data such as for TubeToolbox and Rank Tracker *** / ***
• All website file changes – not all of which can simply be re-downloaded ***
• A long, detailed list of work for my programmers that needed to be done on 1upAds ***
• My ‘blog’ file, which was a very long list of blog post ideas queued up ***
• My ‘sites’ file, which was a very long list of site-specific work that needed to be done ***
• Hundreds of ad creative, including PSDs and custom-made ads, for my PPC ad campaigns ***
• Custom Photoshop actions ***

As you can see, I lost a lot of important stuff.

And don’t forget, too, that I had a brand new OS put on my computer by the tech, and so I had to spend hours customizing things the way I like it (I’m a bit of a Windows power user… like things simplified and in a certain way). Not to mention, all of the little 3rd-party tools and programs I had to reinstall and set up, such as ZScreen, Ultramon, Auto Hotkey, WinRar, SmartFTP, Windows Live Writer, and a good dozen other programs.

Don’t just back up – back up frequently!

So, while I was saved from an even worse scenario in which I had no back up’s at all, the fact that I hadn’t backed up in 3 months certainly had its impact on me.

Even backing up every 2 months is not frequent enough. After all, that’s 2 months of data gone… 2 months of work down the drain. That’s a lot of wasted time.

Learn from my mistake – back your computer up more frequently. Having a RAID set-up would have probably saved me in my situation (the tech said that even a RAID set-up can suffer catastrophic failures), but it wouldn’t protect in the case of a fire or theft, which is why I like to have an external solution.

When you make a back-up, try to to remember that this is your last date of recovery; that all the data since that time may possibly get lost forever. This may help push you into making more regular back-ups.

In my next blog post, I will share in detail how I used to back up before my HD was wiped, to how I back up now, which is far faster, cleaner, and more up-to-date.

It is currently 11:40 P.M. as I’m writing this. By this time tomorrow, I should arrive in Orlando, Florida.

I have to “get up” in 5 hours to catch the 2-hour ferry to the mainland, then take a 45-min taxi ride to the airport. The flight from the Vancouver International Airport connects in Salt Lake City, Utah to finish the journey to Orlando.

The problem is, I haven’t started packing yet, and on top of that I still have to set up the brand new laptop I just purchased and get it set up with all my software as well as transfer my files from my PC to it.

So basically, I won’t be sleeping tonight… which sucks, considering I’ve been up since 6:30 A.M. (after sleeping for only 4 hours).

Anyhow, I’m hoping I get everything set up, ready, and packed in time.

So what will I be doing in Orlando? Well seeing as it’s Orlando, Disney World and Universal Studios are definitely on the itinerary, but there is also some business involved. More on that later.

As you should know by now, I am a complete fanboy when it comes to HostGator and cannot recommend them highly enough.

I switched to them back in September of 2009 and have only had outstanding experiences with them to date.

So, I was delightfully surprised (although at the same time, not-so surprised) when I discovered in their newsletter that was sent out yesterday, that HostGator has increased the amount of bandwidth on all of their dedicated servers to 10TB. That’s 10,000 GB!

Depending on which dedicated server you had before, you were given between 1.5TB to 2.5TB, so this increase is really a MASSIVE improvement! Existing HostGator users don’t have to do anything to upgrade, and it doesn’t cost any extra. New users will get this by default.

Bandwidth Overages are Hella Expensive

I run a lot of websites, which in turn generate a fair bit of bandwidth. Bandwidth is one of those vital things that you need to have enough of, as overages are extremely expensive – even at my beloved HostGator – and you never know when you’ll need that safety net.

For example, many years ago, my movie site leaked behind-the-scene production stills from the then upcoming Star Wars: Episode 3 film. It quickly got viral around the web, being linked from websites such as Movies.com and Yahoo.com. I wasn’t using HostGator way back then, and so all the newfound, expected traffic took down my server as well as leaving me with one hefty bill.

You never know when you might get on the first page of Digg or your site gets mentioned on TechCrunch – can your server handle all that traffic?

A couple of months ago I actually inquired to HostGator about increasing my allotted bandwidth on my dedicated server there.

They responded by telling me that it cost $0.30 per GB of bandwidth (prepaid). That’s $300 per TB of extra bandwidth! Ouch!

And their overage charges are $0.50 per GB. So, imagine that you launch a new website that goes viral really quick and in a few days you discover that you are 3,000 GB over your bandwidth limit – this would equate to a bill of $1,500.

Don’t blame HostGator for this, either. This is standard for hosting companies… in fact, many charge closer to $1.00 per GB overage.

Switch to the Best Web Hosting Company Now

I’m not afraid to promote HostGator so fiercely, because I’ve been nothing but impressed by them, and know that you’ll love them.

Don’t worry about all the complex mess and hassle of having to switch servers – HostGator will migrate your entire setup (websites, e-mails, etc.) free of charge.

Please keep in mind that the 10TB of bandwidth increase only applies to their dedicated servers (although their smaller servers are actually marked with “unlimited bandwidth”). However, they start at only $175/month so they’re really affordable.

If you’ve been contemplating about upgrading to a dedicated server, there’s no time better than now to do so.

ikoni

And now for something completely different…

Back in 2009 I added a couple of poll-specific posts to my blog for you guys to fill out. Each poll on the 2nd poll post received an average of around 170 results, which is actually a lot when you consider that they’re from a pretty targeted group .

As I mentioned in my original posts, polls are a fantastic way to gain a quick summary of what your visitors want in the form of numerical data.

In addition, while polling visitors can help me personally make decisions and find out information, when visitors can see what the current vote results are, I think they also in turn provide interesting content to the reader.

Therefore, here are 10 new poll questions for you guys. They vary in topic and theme, but in general are focused on making money online. Some of them are also not useful to me in the form of data, but are simply there to satisfy my curiosity.

Once you vote on each poll question, you can see the current results as well – you don’t have to wait for me to post the results

Also, a note to anyone reading this via e-mail or RSS reader: You’ll need to actually visit this post in your browser to fill out and see the poll questions.

A couple of days ago, the online poker websites PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, and AbsolutePoker.com, which are the 3 behemoths of the online poker world by far, were seized by the United States Department of Justice and FBI.

The founders of the sites, 11 of them in total, were indicted for several counts of bank fraud and money laundering. This is HUGE news. The prosecutors are seeking at least $3 billion in penalties. This is like Bernie Madoff, only these sites – allegedly – didn’t screw investors, but rather the government and their competitors.

To show just how serious this is, click on any one of the following 3 links: PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, and AbsolutePoker.com. I’ll wait.

If you did, then you’ll have seen the image below:

Can you imagine if these accusations were false (which, by the way, I doubt is to be the case. It’s the government after all, not a competitor with a lawsuit)? In addition to losing millions per day from having their sites shut down, think of all the PR damage already caused.

In addition, and perhaps more importantly, everybody’s account on these sites (at least in the US) is frozen. They cannot cash out their funds! Who knows how long these trials could take and what could happen afterwards. Some people may not be able to withdraw for a year or more, or maybe even never? Is that possible?

While the average real-money player probably only has around $200-300 in their account, you’d be surprised how many people have $10,000+, and there are certainly some who have millions in their account. But it’s all frozen now. Ouch.

However, the websites’ language/country specific websites appear to be functioning as normal (Ex. http://www.pokerstars.fr).

Here are some more details from CNN Money:

The sweeping 52-page indictment alleges that the companies, based offshore, used "fraudulent methods" to get around U.S. anti-gambling laws "and to receive billions of dollars from U.S. residents who gambled through the Poker Companies."

The authorities also issued restraining orders against more than 75 bank accounts, and seized five Internet domain names used by the companies to host their illegal poker games.

The companies allegedly arranged for the money from U.S. gamblers to be disguised as payments to hundreds of non-existent online merchants for the purchase of items such as jewelry and golf balls, according to the indictment.

The defendants include Isai Scheinberg and Paul Tate of Poker Stars; Raymond Bitar and Nelson Burtnick of Full Tilt Poker; and Scott Tom and Brent Beckley of Absolute Poker.

"As charged, these defendants concocted an elaborate criminal fraud scheme, alternately tricking some U.S. banks and effectively bribing others to assure the continued flow of billions in illegal gambling profits," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

Prosecutors also filed civil charges against the poker companies and several individual "payment processors," seeking at least $3 billion in penalties.

Prosecutors also alleged that John Campos, a part owner of SunFirst Bank in Utah, agreed to process Internet gambling transactions in exchange for a $10 million investment in his bank by one of the other defendants.

Prosecutors said they are working with Interpol and foreign agencies to secure the arrest of the remaining defendants, who are not presently in the United States.

Did I Dodge a Bullet?

It was only 6 weeks ago when I sold my poker site, this this fiasco happened. Did I dodge a bullet?

Also, about a week ago, I decided to check all my poker affiliate accounts one by one to see if I had any money there, and was pleasantly surprised to find a couple thousand in my UltimateBet (same company owns AbsolutePoker, one of the companies listed in the indictment) affiliate account that I didn’t know about. I withdrew it that same day.

Did I dodge 2 bullets?

Well, maybe… maybe not.

First, regarding the withdrawal: in this case I think I did because even though I’m Canadian, UltimateBet’s site is down, plain and simple, and I don’t believe they have country/language specific ones like PokerStars does, so my funds would have been locked in there for who knows how long.

Regarding the selling of PokerForums – it’s too early too tell. On one hand, this is very bad for the poker world. It scares a LOT of would-be depositors away, all your recurring income from revenue share referrals is locked up, and fear always means less advertisers.

On the other hand, this could be a good thing as well. You see, part of the problem is that EVERY online poker player already has accounts at PokerStars, FullTiltPoker, and UltimateBet. This makes referring new players to them very difficult because they have all been used up.

Since they cannot play there anymore, for the time being at least, it means that you can use this opportunity to refer them to a new poker room, meaning a new $150-$300 CPA for you or revshare for life. Then again, this whole fiasco could annoy and/or scare a lot of poker players away.

So really, in my opinion, it’s too early to tell if I dodged a bullet by selling my site when I did.

What do you think about all this? People can be so greedy it’s sick. These guys were already billionaires, but it was never enough for them. They wanted more. Come on guys… 2 billion is not much different than 10 billion. It’s hard to spend that much if you wanted to.

Over the past couple of years, it seems that webinars have become more popular in the make money online blogging scene. A webinar, for those of you who don’t know, is basically a live screencast, often involving more than one person.

I’ll be in my first webinar tomorrow with John Chow, Zac Johnson, and Matt Mickiewicz (the co-founder of Flippa, Sitepoint, 99 Designs and Learnable). Not a bad group of guys to make my webinar debut with!

The webinar’s focus will be on buying and selling sites with Flippa. Between Zac and I, we’ve personally dealt far into the 6-figure dollar range just from website and domain transactions, and we’ve both been using Flippa (formerly Sitepoint Marketplace) for many years, so we should be able to share a lot of useful content.

The webinar is limited to the first 1,000 people who sign up, so be sure to secure your spot now, as chances are it will be filled. There are only a few hundred spots left, and once this post is published and John does another post, the 1,000 limit will likely be reached.

In the webinar, Zac and I will be doing individual presentations, and then all 4 of us will be answering any questions you guys have. You can ask us questions in 3 ways: by phoning in, by online microphone, or by chat. Here’s your chance to ask any of us your questions related to buying and selling sites and domains online!

• Title: How To Buy And Sell Sites On Flippa
• Date: Thursday, April 14, 2011
• Time: 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM EDT
• RSVP: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/149586550

This webinar has absolutely no sales pitch whatsoever, and is completely free.

In addition, Matt has graciously agreed to give $20 in Flippa credits to the first 100 attendees at the webinar. This credit is good for new and current Flippa users!

I’ve had a real nasty sore throat this past week and sound like crap, but I’m hoping I recover enough over the next day-and-a-half to where I’m at least not clearing my throat of phlegm every 5 seconds

Anyhow, I hope you make it – it’ll be fun!