First and foremost, I know I havent posted. Hell, i’ve lost 100 readers on my rss feed. I’ve been really busy. Most of my time has been focusing on two projects, one is an educational social networking site, and the other is an insurance claims systems. My soon-to-be brother in law is into health insurance and is wanting to start an freelance hdhp-only insurance company? I’ve been talking with him about doing some of that as well. So, yeah, not PPC, not arbi, just coding and design work…

I am at a loss for what to tell you about, but I wanted to share some tools I use on a regular basis that a lot of people probably don’t use. My friend, the bofester, shared some of these with me over the last few weeks and I am using them extensively and finding great results from them.

The most important site I have used in 2008 is Assembla. Assembla essentially allows you to setup a project, check out code, and track bugs within one instance. Now, I know a lot of you coders out there have messed with subversion - this place hosts svn repositories for free. Its a nice site. It also has some nice features to find freelance workers…

Have you heard of Rescue Time? It gives you the ability to track your time and what apps you are using the most. It allows you to categorize things as ‘work-related’ or ‘goofing off’ so you can see, from a percentage standpoint, how productive you are. I have used this tool for about two and a half weeks and I am being more productive. I started off around 35% productive, but I have been pushing myself into the 60% range. This tool might be responsible for me making a lot more cash!

A few quick things you might or might-not have heard of that I want to share. Check out Can’t Get Rich podcasts. Geoff has put together some decent interviews, well, for people that are into our industry. Both Nickycakes and Uberaffiliate have done interviews — riveting! haha.

Btw, I have an xbox 360 now (another reason you’ve not heard from me) … if you wanna play, comment your gamertag so I can add your sorry ass. PS: I suck at most games.

The zip file is corrupt. Yes, you got nothing more than a death cab for cutie mp3 + random ascii from me on April 1st. I didn’t feel comfortable faking my own death, so it was the only plausible thing I could think of. Are you pissed off? Please say no. I thought it was cute to waste several hundred gigs of bandwidth by offering a 16mb useless file for download. I mean, come on, you cant trust anything on the Internet on April 1st! To those of you who were frustrated and pissed away hours trying to open it… uh, you need to re-focus your energy’s on your campaigns and system building and less time on reading blogs! hah.

That being said, I am going to commit myself to daily postings on this site. I wasn’t lying about the projects i’ve been working on — they are consuming large amounts of time, so I’ve not been really able to post much, but I’d like to offer my services to you guys. My boy nickycakes has been filling your browser with great tips over the last few days, so we will say he’s just been taking up my slack, ok?

I’ve got a hankering for a good blog post with a tip that really has helped me out over the last few months, and its a bit deviant, so maybe I’ll share that soon! If someone wants to do a guest post, might be a great way to get your blog some exposure as I have a pretty captive audience. Hit me up - you know the email… deStone(my name)sucks@gmail.com.

It’s been nearly three weeks since I posted. I’ve had a lot of people wondering whats been going on. Well, a few things…

I’ve been working on two *top secret* products with a few of my buddies, so honestly, i’ve not been adding a lot of new campaigns, updating blogs, or gaming any systems lately. When you _dont_ want to be a “shoemoney” type blogger, its hard to write powerful, compelling code exploits every day. That and I received a pretty disturbing threat from a few members of the industry over some of the code they thought I would release. Those in the know, like being in the know, and they dont want you in the know.

Well, I’m not going to give away anyones show — but after looking at some sites, there is a bunch of software that is becoming available similar to one of my major tools, so guess what — I’m going to drop a ‘minimalized’ version of it for you guys to download and play with!

BUT — lets get some things straight. In order to download this, your going to have to sign up on my mailing list and join my RSS feed, add me as your friend on twitter (http://www.twitter.com/deStone), and digg / sphinn this post! Its a deal / no deal situation, really, I will pull the download if I dont get diggs and sphinns. I am posting on this blog for some industry cred for petes sake! If only a few wickedfire ppl read my site, pfft, nothing has been accomplished.

Sign up for the mailing list here:

You’ll get a welcome message. Guess what, that welcome message has the password to the zip file, use the fourth full word on the email as the password. Its that simple.

This tool will should give you the ability to rapidly build and manage 1,000s of campaigns with most major ad providers. OBVIOUSLY I’m not giving you my entire system. I’m not stupid. Please look at the code and build as you wish…

• Step 1: Mailing List Sign up? Check.
• Step 2: Follow deStone on twitter? Check.
• Step 3: Digg this article here.
• Step 4: Download
• Step 5: ????
• Step 6: Profit!

Download Now ( ~ 16 Mb)

<3 Guys!

PS: I’m obviously not going to be responsible for any software issues you have with this … I mean, its just a zip file, but don’t start running this without looking at some code and making sure you don’t blow up your computer. I get a little nervous about releasing code like this…

I just finished watching the UK vs. Georgia game on Yahoo sportscast. I am so mad right now, if I had a CRT monitor, my fist would be through it. Why? At the end of the game, kentucky used a well structured play in hopes of forcing a foul. In my opinion, I witnessed the most perfect execution of that play ever. The georgia player was tricked into bulldozing over a kentucky player near the sideline. No foul was called. Kentucky ended up losing.

I learned a real valuable lesson that I think completely applies to our business. RULES were created to have order — but most of the time, chaos prevails and rules are worthless. There was no way the official would call that foul, though it should have happened. Google should ban every ’sketchy site’ it finds, parasite hostings _shouldnt_ work. Guess what, it does. You have to make a choice, do you take the moral high ground or exploit a system and its rules.

I, personally, have found success by putting the ‘rules’ aside.

Georgia, and the asshat SEC officials, win.

Almost daily I have people complaining about how they can’t seem to make more than a buck or two a day online. These are good, hard working people, almost all of them are really intellegent. Why can a guy like me make money, but they cant?

• Time Commitment
• Lack of Focus
• Lack of Skillset
• Lack of Connections
• No Killer Instinct

Time Commitment

Some of you jokers waste a lot of time. I am challenging you this - if you are new to this game, set aside 6 hours a night to it. Wow, deStone, thats a lot of time for a guy like me. No crap. I did it. I worked an 8am to 6:30pm job every day. I’d come home, log into irc, open up my eclipse dev setup, and start. A lot of times I would work until 3am, go to bed, and start again at 8am. Yeah, it sucks, but if your going to learn and be successful, you got to put in your time. Unfortunately, not all of us got to learn about Affiliate Marketing while we were in high school or college.

Lack of Focus

Go buy an nice, expensive moleskinne notepad from Borders. Write down all of your goals for the night in it — everything you need to get done. Use a new page every day, carry over the stuff you didnt finish to the next day. Jot ideas down in it. This book is your new lifeblood.

Find good mood music, and start lighting up your projects - be it creating a mass amount of PPC campaigns, facebook ads, or building a cloaking system for your super-duper-blackhat control center. Journal everything.

Quit wasting time in irc pestering people! I see so many people just sitting there on irc, waiting for someone to drop this super idea that is going to turn them into a millionaire. Guess what, the only way to strike it rich is to do it first and keep quiet about it!

Lack of Skillset

I’m putting this on the list just because I think a lot of people think they are too good to code their own stuff. I’ve met them, they continue to tell me on email “deStone, I’ll just outsource it”. Yeah, ok, whatever, Why are these jokers emailing me asking for tips if they are so sharp and have enough cash to outsource everything. Don’t get me wrong, outsourcing has its place, but a fundamental understanding of how to code and create systems is going to make you a winner in this business.

Lack of Connections

The ultimate fear, I remember it — talking to my first affiliate manager. Guess what guys, very few of those affiliate managers have a clue on how to drive traffic, build websites, or scale systems. All they do is interface offers to people. If your a newbie, guess what, your getting an affiliate manager that probably knows less about the business then you do! But guess what, those people hold the keys to success. Dont be scared to call them, dont freak out when they call you wanting to join their programs. Having a ton of affiliate programs, and good people to work with — that’s key!

• Neverblue Ads
• Copeac
• RocketProfit
• CPAEmpire
• PepperJam Networks
• Ads4Dough
• Advaliant
• Hydra Networks

Another important way to get connections — irc! Don’t be a douchebag - join our channels, idle, jump in every once and a while and share something but DO NOT COME IN ACTING LIKE YOU’RE GOD and start demanding people tell you how to do stuff.

No Killer Instinct

I’ve had terrible headaches for nearly 4 months now, daily. I have an amazing girlfriend that wants to spend more time with me. Trust me, I have 1000x more reasons to not be working on projects then you do. Hell, I didn’t feel like writing this blog post. But guess what, I have a killer instinct. I MUST SUCCEED. I will not let myself fail. And that drives me insane. It pushes me to staying focused. It forces me to meet new people and network. That instinct made me become a php ninja and css junkie last year. I can not fail. I will not allow it. Do you have that? If not, your not going to make big bucks in this business. I know a lot of people that have that kind of drive and desire — to be the best, and those people arent going to let ANY of you out-do them, especially if you’re lazy.

In conclusion

I know this post wasn’t technical at all - I just feel like every once and a while, a person needs to hear something like this to encourage them to keep building systems, keep starting new streams, and to continue to strive to be their best. Hell, I feel energized right now while I’m reviewing this — lets get to work, mates!

I’m writing this because I am pissed, like, violently upset. I’ve had hundreds of people messenging me stuff like this:
"deStone, help, my clicks went from $0.10 to $8.00 overnight. What can I do? Why did this happen?"

Well, I’ll lay it out for you, the reason you got slapped is because you’re lazy! LAZY! All you want to do is “get rich quick” and you think that there is some magical formula that will never change. Google has built their Adwords platform around having companies create landing pages that sell products. We are kind of like middle men to that process, as most of the time, we don’t own the product nor are we the company.

So Google wants to make us pay more, cause they want legit stuff - not third-party affiliate marketers that are just looking to get rich quick. What do they do? They change the rules to make it harder for us when they see a pattern forming. Guess what, you whinners, 90% of the people that are complaining were direct linkers to affiliate offers. Google doesnt want Neverblue Ads or Copeac to make money, THEY want to make money. Obviously Google cant get rid of us - their stock would fail epically — like barman’s attempt to hook up with this hot girl. So it has to be a slow and progressive change. This is one way they weed out the morons trying to make a quick buck.

That being said, we now have to accept the rules have changed and we have to work harder to get cheap clicks. Guess what, I’ve been doing that for a long time, my strategy has only slightly changed with this update. You, if you are seeing high dollar clicks, must now change or be removed from the SEM gene pool. Here is what I would do if I were you. Careful, you might actually learn something in the following steps.

• A) Quit reading seo moz and all the misinformation posted on their site about how to fix the QS Slap. Google doesn’t give a shit how fast the page loads - this information is retarded. 90% of those people are just wanting you to subscribe to their rss feed so they feel important.
• b) Go do a search on google for a competitive term.
• C) click an ad that is ranking well, and you feel would not be there unless they got the click for a real price, versus the inflated QS price.
• D) Very important — VIEW SOURCE THE EFFING PAGE and see what they are doing to get a high quality score. Then apply it to your designs if applicable. Rinse and repeat these steps until you have a system that gets you $0.05 clicks again.
• E) *BONUS* Don’t ask me what i’m doing, because i’m going to make fun of you for expecting me to give away a million dollar strategy to some dumbass (I don’t know) on the Internet for free. Live, Learn, and Utilize.

I’m thanking God this happened. I can now buy some competitive terms for a lot less mula then before because there is less competition.

ps: I <3 you, barman.

I have two four requirements to use this code.

• so if your reading this, and you haven’t signed up on the mailing list - do so, now.
• Go to another super affiliates site and ask them where their code samples are and link back to me in the comment section.
• Join us on #deStonesucks on irc. — see details here.
• Add the RSS to your reader.

Mailing list signup

You’re going to need a few things for this to work. One of them is magpie, then you will need a dictionary file as well (right click, save as). For those truly lazy, here is a complete download of this entire tutorial.

Step 1:

Create a directory called backlinker on your server. Dump the contents of dictionary.txt, the magpie install, and backlinker.php into it.

Step 2:

Modify the code so that $promoteurl is your website you are wanting to blast out. $throttle is just seconds between hits on del.icio.us.

Step 3:

Run the backlinker from the Command Line. If you have other dictionary files, you can use them instead of ‘dictionary’ (must be a .txt file)

php backlinker.php dictionary

Step 4:

Watch as the hits start rolling in from referrer logs. Modifications I have on my personal version - I store each url in a database so I can re - hit it later, I have proxy support built in, and I am using the multi-curl class our buddy win– created. If I gave you that, I wouldnt be helping you, now would I? Questions? Join the irc channel and discuss.

Backlinker.php - View Source

<?php
// set timeout to 0 so it doesnt time out.
set_time_limit(0);
$promoteurl = "http://www.somewebsite.com/subdir/";
$throttle = 10;
require_once('rss_fetch.inc');
// open up our dictionary.txt file, dump it to memory for use
$myFile = $argv[1] . ".txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'r');
$theData = fread($fh, filesize($myFile));
fclose($fh);
unset($fh);
echo("\n\n deStone's del.icio.us backlinker \n***************************************\n");
echo("Promoting: " . $promoteurl . "\n");
echo("*** LOADING " . $argv[1] . ".txt\n");
// get an array of each keyword from the dictionary file.
$taggroup = explode("\n", $theData);
unset($myFile);
unset($theData);
foreach ($taggroup as $tag)
{
$tag = trim($tag);
$url = "http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/" . $tag . "/";
$rss = fetch_rss($url);
//throttle for del.icio.us
sleep($throttle);
foreach($rss->items as $item => $x)
{
$url = $x["link"];
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $promoteurl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0');
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close ($ch);
echo("Hit " . $url . "\n");
unset($result);
unset($ch);
unset($tag);
}
}
?>

Just wanted to share a few things with you guys real quick. First off, the fastest way to introduce a lot of people and get some synergy created is to create an irc channel. Some of you guys have never used IRC before, and that’s fine, but its a great way to network. Here are the quick steps:

Windows:

• Download mIRC
• Install mIRC
• Join a freenode server/server irc.freenode.net
• Join #deStonesucks /join #deStonesucks

Mac guys:
I’m clueless, whats a good irc client? Comment away.

Linux:
Google Irssi or xchat - depending on if you want a GUI interface or not.

Once you’ve joined, here are some rules. Don’t be a dick. I mean that in the most nice way possible. I already had some guy get pissed.

[20:13] <johnwinner> are you doing arbitrage to aff stuff or pure click arbitrage?
[20:13] <johnwinner> or are you just a noob in need of attention?
[20:13] <johnwinner>
[20:20] <destone> noob in need of attenion.
[20:20] <johnwinner> i knew you were to say that
[20:20] <johnwinner> ok
[20:21] <johnwinner> good luck with whatever you want to do
[20:21] * JohnWinner has left #destonesucks
[20:21] <destone> i wanted to punch that guy
[20:27] <thebarman> what was his problem?
[20:27] <thebarman> jealous of your success?
[20:28] <thebarman> you should have been a really serious asshole
[20:28] <thebarman> "i don't got time to talk to broke people like you"

I don’t have to validate myself to you. I’m not asking anything from you, you obviously want to be successful. You wouldn’t be reading my blog if you didn’t.

I added a waiting list for information … I know a lot of you guys wanted to be first to know when I push out stuff, so you can subscribe here.

btw - #cakes, #bluehatseo, #wickedfire are good channels as well.

Wow, guys, great.  I had about 250 emails over the weekend wanting more information about some of the things I’ve been building.  Probably 10 of those were bad ones - basically get-rich-quick morons asking for screenshots of checks for legitmacy before they would even open their ears to my preaching.  I’m not going to be doing that.  What if my systems all fail tommorrow?  Are you going to abandon me?

I know one thing for sure - I am a permanent fixture in this industry.  We build systems and procedures to survive cycles, right?   Exactly.

I’m going to try and personally contact each of you over the next two nights.  If you could, lets continue to expose others to the light.  I would like to have a lot more people with varied talents helping in our discussions.  Do you know someone that is an expert in SQL?  What about other coding languages besides php?  Let’s turn them on to the idea - share the rss feed with them or get them to email me.  My number one skill is being able to communicate to others, be it affiliate managers or other marketing professionals - You need to master that to become successful in this industry (yeah, sorry, I know you want to just email people all day …)

Hopefully that clears up all the confusion as to why I have not replied to the emails thus far.   Oh yeah, What kind of format would you guys like this in?  Do you think we should start a forum, chatroom, newsletters, daily email, etc?  It needs to be dynamic - we are creating a community.  Would love your thoughts…  d( ** spam_makes_ppl_money ** )eStonesucks@gmail.com.  Holla.

Boys and Girls,

I come to you a humble man. A man that has finally found his path in life. As some of you may know, I recently put in my two weeks notice. It wasn’t a bad gig ya know, but I was getting tired of feeling like I was wasting my time and abilities on some slacker job that a 40k php developer could do. It wasn’t fair for them, and it wasn’t fair for me.

In less than three months, I have been fortunate enough to jump from making roughly $5 to $10 a day in adsense to nearly $30,000 + a day in PPC arbitrage. I’ve kept it quiet for a long time mainly because I wanted everyone to respect me and not treat me like the other ’super affiliates’ that are running around slapping their jaws, acting like they invented the internet.

I don’t review websites, I don’t put on funny looking t-shirts every friday, and I don’t lie to absolute beginners. All I do is code, build systems, and scale madly. I’m not here to jerk chains, all I want to do is help a few people quickly change their lives around.

I was in debt almost $70,000 dollars when I first started these side projects. I had a boat I loved, I had a cute girlfriend who needed a ring, and two car payments that made rent look cheap. My ignorance got me into that position and now that I am debt free, I will never live through that hell again.

I want to help a few find their way and earn this kind of money. I don’t want to brag or post checks. I don’t really think you care what I wear, but if its kewl looking I might show it off… That’s not my purpose on this blog.

If you are up for the challenge and you want to learn some legit systems (whitehat, greyhat, bluehat, blackhat, or redhat) — shoot me an email at deStonesucks(spam_stops_here)@gmail.com.

Later peeps.