Manifesting itself as a new old problem? That is what a startup company needs to address. The old problems that are being shoved aside because they are not fun, but still keep coming back as a new old problem. What do I mean?

Image by brizzle born and bred via Flickr

Spam – While we all hate it, you find very few companies heading into battle against it. There are a few, but what investor is really going to put money into a company that is dedicated into fighting it? I see blog posts about people getting sick of spam, such as twitter user spam or fake accounts as noted in that recent blog post by @RizzoTees.

While it’s not the same as the spam websites out there that constantly barrage the inbox with the spam email, it’s all the same, very few companies want to fight it head on. While there are companies like the recent LaterSpam.org which is quite encouraging, one company is not going to be the answer to helping to curb this old issue.

Old issues taking on a life of being a new issue. Sometimes you can be the victim of clicking a bad short url, and even t.co isn’t perfect since it’s a wrapper, not an url shortener service. So you have to be guarded at best to stop this from happening. You should check into these urls to make sure what you are clicking is legit. While that will only help to prevent the issue from occurring, there are many other old becoming new issues that should be addressed.

While spam is probably the #1 issue that has never been resolved completely, there are others. They may be addressed in another post, but this one seems to be done for now.

Related articles

• LaterSpam.org wants to help us get rid of Twitter spam, together (thenextweb.com)
• Marking Spam For Fun (notes.torrez.org)
• Later, Spam! Twitter add-on keeps track of how many spammers’ accounts you’ve had deactivated (boingboing.net)
• Why Spam Commenters Are Better At Marketing Than You (hubspot.com)
• Too Many Spam from IMO (morningtology.wordpress.com)
• Someone is sending spam from my email: what do I do? (onsoftware.en.softonic.com)

With regards to that time of the year called award season, in the past month or so, I have had about ~10 Bit.ly URLs that seem to have reached a level of interest.

Image via CrunchBase

#10 – Cottonmouth Ghandi – Vance Savage – Pete’s Dog

- Vance Savage is a very talented musician and music teacher who I met via Craigslist when I was looking for someone to teach my older son how to play drums. I happened to have found him, and luckily we have forged a pretty decent friendship over the past few years. These are some different bands and projects he has out there where you can listen.

#9 – Power Ballad City

- If you are in the mood for a decent Power Ballad, you should check out this bit.ly bundle for it. Clone it!

#8 – Church Tongue – The Gutter – Solo Trashy

- This is a friend of mine that lives up in Chicago. I played bass in his band for a bit, The Gutter, and he did this techno solo Church Tongue project, and I also engineered (re-engineered) the Casket track. I’d love to work (intern even!) in a recording studio.

#7 – 3 Gifts That will Surprise And Delight (ME) on Christmas

- Yes, I would love to find these under the “tree” this year.

#6 – Top Ten Holiday Gifts You May Want to Re-Think Giving

- It’s that time of year, and if you want to get me something, try the #9 link above.

#5 – Crowdsourcing abortion is probably a bad idea

- This one still floors me that someone would try to crowd source an abortion. Not a good idea, and kind of weird and illegal in some places.

#4 – 5 reasons people switch from iPhone (iOS) to Android

- These are my own personal observations written down as a blog post, and surprised it was read by many and linked by a few power twitter users.

#3 – Major Reasons Why Mainstream Businesses Are Leaving Twitter

- A different perspective of the Twitter Kool-aid that everyone subscribes too. Well read post that was written by Scot Duke.

#2 – Beatles on iTunes

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

- This bundle I made to help people understand bundles on Bit.ly. It seemed to work as it was also featured on @bitlybundles

#1 – Wade Phillips Fired – Jason Garrett in as Dallas Cowboys Head Coach

Image via Wikipedia

- Crazy that made it as the #1 item for my Bit.ly URLs, but timing is everything I guess. I’m not even a Cowboys fan!

Technically Speaking, what are your top Bit.ly URLs?

Related articles

• Tab Bundles for Chrome – Bit.ly link bundles made easy! (downloadsquad.switched.com)
• Bit.ly Bundles – Share Multiple Videos With One Shortened URL (reelseo.com)
• Bit.ly Bundles: multiple links, one short URL (geek.com)
• Bundles of Links from Bit.ly (blogher.com)
• 5 Unique Uses for Bit.ly Bundles (makeuseof.com)

That spammers target for your e-mail!

Most of the readers of this blog are well versed in the world of internet marketing. I figured that since the weekend is again upon us, I should share what I have seen as the top business e-mails you should be wary of when you log back in on Monday (or Sunday evening).

While these are quite obvious, and most are caught by spam filters, some may skirt by. A good rule of thumb to follow is when you are checking your inbox from the weekend or holiday, it’s probably a good idea to be extra vigilant on some of the top 5 innovative business targets of spammers.

1. Pharmaceutical or Drug Mail

Viagra is probably the number one mass marketed item out there. If not specifically Viagra, some type of male enhancement drug is pushed into your inbox. Some make it to your inbox, while most perish in the spam box you have set up. Lately male enhancement isn’t the only drug of choice that is pushed into your inbox. Cheap pain killers are another top choice to be pushed.

We have seen an uptick in other drugs that are not widely available without a prescription. That is the root cause of why this is a popular business to be in. Sites are turnkey to set up. Domains are cheaply bought and disposed of. Obtaining legal prescriptions means you have to have insurance to go to a real doctor.

In one of my spam warning posts, I outlined how the industry was now using the .ru or Russian domains. Plenty of those are available since most of the .com, .net, and .org top level domains probably have been taken. or already used and disposed of.

2. Diet or Weight Loss

While the diet and weight loss industry could be looped in with the pharma mass marketing business, it’s still it’s own profitable niche. With television shows like The Biggest Loser pushing weight loss and healthy living, it’s no surprise that this innovative business has taken off like gang busters.

Haven’t seen a lot of this yet, but with the gaming industry getting in on the act such as the exercise games you can find with the Nintendo systems of games like the DS and Wii, this innovative market will only continue to grow. My expert forecast is that while the pharma industry remains strong, the diet and weight loss industry will only continue to expand and grow once the marketers see that pharma isn’t the big pay day like it use to be.

3. Swiss Watch and Rolex Clones

The watch industry is quite the unknown commodity. Most people that I know fore-go wearing a watch these days. Maybe in the circles of the rich and famous, people still wear watches. Maybe if you are attending one of those high priced muckity muck functions, you wear a watch. It’s pretty safe to say that since most people carry a cell phone, most use it for their timepiece.

Why you would even consider buying a fake or knock off item to wear to an event where wearing a watch is the standard is beyond me. If you are going to wear a Rolex, you should probably buy it from a reputable jeweler. I mean would you go to an event and show off your fake Rolex to people?

Nevertheless, this has become quite the popular piece of marketing e-mail that you might see make it through your spam filters to your inbox. It’s not like watches raise a great deal of flags out there, but it should. I seriously doubt that many jewelers market in such a fashion such as mass marketed e-mails, but they might.

4. Insurance

This one can be quite dangerous. Maybe it should have topped the list at #1, but being that drug and pharma spam is the most common type of marketing you will see, I’m hoping you are still reading. These last two innovative businesses that are marketed fall more into the phishing and virus type of marketing. Quite dangerous and something you should really be careful of before mindlessly clicking that link.

Why is the insurance type of scam one of the two most dangerous?

Just this past week, I saw and let readers of this blog know, a phishing scam that involved USAA Insurance company. While insurance may not be where you keep your money, I’m sure you have possibly paid via credit card or check and used the online services that we all enjoy.

5. Banking and Brazil

While many of you probably are reading from the United States of America, there are other countries out there. One of them that has a big internet population and consequently feel they should be considered a major player online is the country of Brazil. With that of course comes all the entrepreneurs from that country that want to mass market and make their millions.

Why did I lump the two together? Because there has been a surge of fake bank phishing scams that originate from the country of Brazil. Most of them are easily identifiable as they have the .br domain tacked on at the end such as wellsfargo.com.br – so pay attention before haphazardly clicking that Wells Fargo link. Make sure it is what it appears to be.

Technically Speaking, most of the mass marketed spam and phishing can be avoided through a little education on the topic as well as knowledge on what might be just another piece of junk mail marketed to you only because they are a top 5 innovative business. Hopefully this post has provided a bit of background and insight on this thriving industry.

Related articles

• What caused sudden drop in spam traffic? ” IT Business Blogs Canada (blogs.itbusiness.ca)
• Spam traffic shrinks 20% as Russian spammer goes on the run (rt.com)
• US No.1 and India No. 2 in Relaying Spam as one in five spam … (indiaprline.com)
• USAA Phish: Avalanche uses many “redirectors” (garwarner.blogspot.com)
• Spam And Spyware | Affiliate, Business & Marketing Guide (farhaoui.com)

While the last spam watch talked about the Russian Viagra connection that is starting to run wild, now the Russians are coming up with an insurance scam.

I should say they have come up with an insurance scam. This one involves USAA Insurance company. Feel free to click that last link, that is the real USAA Insurance link located at https://www.usaa.com/.

The scam url looks pretty legit except for the fact if people would read the url – it’s not. When would USAA Insurance decide to really be part of the .ru domain?

Real USAA Login URL: https://www.usaa.com/inet/ent_logon/Logon

Russian Scam USAA URL: http://session1007435139.usaa.com.vsdfile.ru/inet/ent_chform/

Notice how they try to use URL blindness and have the same format as USAA’s site in the long part of the URL? /inet/ent_logon and /inet/ent_chform are very close to being the same string. If you poke around on the USAA site, I’m sure you will find a /inet/ent_chform.

Technically Speaking, read some of the links shared below by Zemanta on this phishing issue.

Related articles

• USAA Phish: Avalanche uses many “redirectors” (garwarner.blogspot.com)
• USAA offers Aggie credit card (mysanantonio.com)
• Health reform’s side effect: Scams (money.cnn.com)
• Safety Tips to Avoid Insurance Scams (onlineinsurancequotes.org)
• Harmon Leon: For the Love of Viagra Spam and the 419 Email Scam (huffingtonpost.com)
• Girl’s sexy Facebook video is disguise for survey scam (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)

Just thought I’d share a few spam thoughts with you. I tweeted them earlier today, but you may have not seen them.

• Seeing more LinkedIn related spam. Just think before you click that invite from “Monique Howard” or “John Lasister” – if you don’t know them personally or via a friend, don’t click it!
• Seeing more angelfire.com spam. This must be the new banging playground for spammers.
• Still seeing blogspot.com spam. This is starting to die down a bit, but now instead of the usual garbage dot blogspot – there are actual long names being created like MoniqueHoward1970.blogspot.com – so be careful!
• Shipping company spam. Weird that people would click on a shipping company url, but they seem to work.

Lastly, a few ways to report bit.ly spam are below. Created some basic Google Doc forms that can be used in lieu of the standard route with a bit.ly account. If you follow my @RexDixon twitter account, you have seen these promoted lately.

bit.ly or j.mp Spam Reporting Options:

• No Bit.ly Username (bit.ly or j.mp url): http://bit.ly/SpamReporting
• Long URL (no bit.ly or j.mp url): http://bit.ly/MSVLongURL
• With Bit.ly Username: http://bit.ly/ZeroSpam
• E-mail: abuse@bit.ly

Keep in mind on the http://bit.ly/MSVLongURL link, that the long url can only be listed in the bit.ly spam database so that people can’t create a bit.ly or j.mp url of it – ie: doesn’t get reported outside of that system.

Technically Speaking, if you enjoyed reading this, let me know via the comments!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Blogspot Employs Auto Spam Filtering (it-sideways.com)
• Warning: Fake LinkedIn Spam Can Steal Your Bank Passwords (pcworld.com)
• LinkedIn users targeted for spam attacks (zdnet.com)
• Twitter Alert: Don’t click on Link saying WTF Might Spam with i love a*al s*x with goats (shoutmeloud.com)
• URL Shorteners and security (how to preview a bit.ly link) (simple-security.blogspot.com)

A really good post about making your landing page graphically dynamic, read some now….

In this post, you will learn:

• Basic php keyword insertion
• Method #1 – Dynamic image insertion using a static image library
• Method #2 – Dynamic image insertion using Yahoo Images

The Basics: Standard keyword insertion

Alright, I’m sure you’re familiar with dynamic keyword insertion on landing pages. Essentially, you can pass along a variable to your PHP landing page, and have that variable inserted anywhere (visible or non-visible) on your page.

This serves two purposes:
1) To get better Quality Score due to increased keyword relevancy
2) To increase visitor interest and conversions

To do this, just insert the following string anywhere in your landing page code where you would like the keyword to appear:

<?php echo ucwords(str_replace("-"," ",$_GET["keyword"])); ?>

So let’s say you have a landing page called lander.php. You would then call the landing page like this:

http://www.example.com/lander.php?keyword=fleshlight-video-tutorial

Now the keyword “Fleshlight Video Tutorial” would show up wherever you wanted it to on the page. Remember, the php string could be placed anywhere in the code. I usually try to include it in a combination of the following:

Meta tags (description, keywords)
Title
Headline
Image alt tags

Href title tags
Within the landing page copy
As a link anchor tag to another internal site page

Use your imagination! And actually – that is what brings me to the core part of this post…

Method #1 – Dynamc image insertion based on a static image library
Now, onto the fun part… Because we can also use the passed variable as part of filenames in the landing page code. On a regular page, you would normally show static images with the HTML img tag like this:
<img src="images/dog.jpg”>

It would result in a page like this:

…and that image would be the same for every visitor, no matter what dog breed or keyword they had searched for.

But instead of that, we wanna spice it up a little and present our visitors with a picture of his/her dog breed. Think that will bring up your conversions and ROI? You bet!

We can then have custom destination URLs from our ads pointing to:
http://www.example.com/kennel.php?keyword=cocker-spaniel
http://www.example.com/kennel.php?keyword=golden-retriever
http://www.example.com/kennel.php?keyword=german-shepherd
(Of course, the ads themselves should also have the keyword in them)

And we can have all kinds of variations of the same landing page:

We accomplish this by simply replacing the static image filename with the keyword string from the URL, like this:
<img src="images/<?php echo $_GET["keyword"]; ?>.jpg">

This obviously also requires you to actually have image files with these names stored in your /images folder. These aren’t hard to come by though. For a small project requiring a dozen or so images, you can get them yourself from Google images (always make sure not to violate copyrights). If you need more – let’s say for a list of 100 dog breeds, you can outsource the image retrieval to someone from eLance, Odesk, or even the Sell&Buy section at Wickedfire.com.

Technically Speaking, and I know you will want to read the complete article now….

And even more Google Goodness on AdSense:

Google’s AdSense Program has been an excellent source for many to earn money online. AdSense for search may not be new to you, and if you are using it, you should know that you can also improve your earnings by providing users with a customized search box which allows you to filter results for specific domains only.

As an example, if a user searches for the term SEO when using my customized search function, it will only show relevant results on selected domains that I have specified. Apart from the results, ads will also be displayed and as a result can increase my AdSense conversions. See below:

So What’s New With AdSense for Search?

AdSense For Search Ads

Prior to this new release, the only way you could show AdSense for search ads was to use Google’s script. If you had your own non-Google customized search box, your search results will not show any ads. Now, all you need to do is to add a few lines of JavaScript to your pages, and start monetizing your search results too. You can choose the size, shape and location of each ad block, and you can even adjust the style of the ads to better fit the look and feel of your site. Here is a screenshot of a website that uses the new AdSense for search ads:

As with everything Google, this new monetization method is not readily available to everyone and you will need to “convince” Goolgle’s team that you qualify. If you are interested, you can give it a shot by filling in the form provided solely for this purpose. You will be asked to provide your name, email, Pub Id (for existing AdSense users), URL where you pretend to use it, number of pageviews and finally the “killer” question, how do you want to use this product on your website. If your answer is right, then you might be lucky and get approved. Be patient though as according to Google the volume of request for this product is extremely high at this moment.

AdSense For Ajax

Technically Speaking, you should always read more …

This was part 9 in this great series:

Missed a part of this series?
Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About SEO
Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags

Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags
Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes
Part 5: Everything You Need To Know About Domain Names
Part 6: Everything You Need To Know About Search Engine Friendly URLs & Broken Links
Part 7: Everything You Need To Know About Site Architecture and Internal Linking
Part 8: Everything You Need To Know About Keywords

Part 9: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Core Terms
Part 10: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Qualifiers
Part 11: Everything You Need To Know About SEO Copywriting
Part 12: Everything You Need To Know About Page Content
Part 13: Everything You Need To Know About Links
Part 14: Everything You Need To Know About Link Anatomy

Part 15: Everything You Need To Know About Linking

Technically Speaking, you don’t need to start on part 9, but it’s a good read.

Found this one about social landing pages and social e-mails:

Do you want your landing pages and emails to be shared in social media, but don’t know how to encourage your readers to do so? It is not as hard as you might think.

A simple way to make your landing pages social media friendly is to use a plug-in like ShareThis or AddThis. These sites add a small bar to a blog post or web page that allows content to be distributed to hundreds of sites.

The problem with this is you may want to customize the message that is going to be shared. This means sharing more than a URL by adding the content title or promotion into the message as well. Fortunately, custom links that share your content in social media are easy, too. This can be done in emails or landing pages for lots of sites including Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, and more.

Simply replace (xURLx) with the actual URL and (xTitlex) with the actual title for these popular sites.

Technically Speaking, and personally speaking, I still believe that the plugin is the best route to go, but this is good information!

MyContextualAds has an easy way for you to add a few bucks to your paypal account with their “Twist & Tweet” contest. You just have to tweet like I did here and here.

To participate in this contest, all you need to do is include the #mycontextualads tag in any tweet on Twitter. You can be creative with your tweet or re-tweet our message, it’s entirely upto you!
Don’t forget to follow @mycontextualads to find out if you’ve won!

You can tweet #mycontextualads as often as you like. Each of these tweets will be eligible and the winners chosen will be the top four highest tweeters! It’s as simple as that!

But please, no bots or automated scripts please! This is purely meant for fun and lets keep it that way!

Rules:
1. This competition is offered by Zytes Technologies Inc. (“Zytes”) and is open to anyone with a Twitter account who is at least 16 years of age. Employees and agents of Zytes and/or its affiliated companies and family members of such employees are not eligible to enter.
2. The competition starts on Dec 22nd 2009 and will continue till February 14th 2010
3. To enter the competition you must send out a tweet from your own Twitter account and include “#mycontextualads” in your message. The rest of the message is up to you, and you are welcome to retweet our competition tweet URL. Or just say whatever you feel like. And you don’t have to be a user of MyContextualAds to enter, so no purchase is required.
4. You can tweet as many times as you like (though entries using automated tweets will be disqualified).
5. Winners will be chosen at the end of the contest. Winners will be announced after the close of the contest from the MyContextualAds Twitter account and official blog.
6. 4 grand prizes will be available, one each for US $25
7. The prize money would be sent to the winner’s PayPal account – no other payment mechanisms would be entertained
8. Entrants’ personal details will be used by Zytes strictly in accordance with Zytes’s privacy policy.
9. Neither Zytes nor its affiliated companies shall have any liability for (i) any technical failures of any kind, including but not limited to malfunctions, interruptions or disconnections in phone lines or network hardware or software; (ii) technical or human error which may occur in the administration of the competition; (iii) any malfunction of or damage to the prizes; or (iv) any restrictions or delays imposed by any customs authorities or any import or other taxes of any kind imposed by any taxation authority in respect of the prizes.

Technically Speaking, it’s Friday, why not?