One of the most common methods for making money online is in making and selling websites. Setting up a customized WordPress or static site is easy to do and costs almost nothing and selling it on after a few weeks of work is an excellent way to make some residual cash. However, there is an equally easy method which takes exactly the same amount of time and effort to complete but is VASTLY more profitable. This article is a length look at a simple business model you can adopt immediately and start making three times as much income from making websites as everyone else does.

The basic overview and idea is to create a niche website with some content, build some incoming links and traffic flow just as you would with any regular site, then get in touch with and pitch to businesses offering different plans which they can rent and then use the influence and benefits of your site to help grow their existing business.

Let’s take Massage as an example niche. First we spend a few weeks or a few months building a nice Massage site with WordPress or XSitePro or perhaps just HTML and PHP, however you create websites already, this method will slot in. Typically I will build a WordPress site, because it’s what I’m good at. So I install WordPress and style it with a nice Massage image header and add some colours that fit into this category. I’ll install all my standard plugins which help SEO, communication, link building and more. I’ll install a wordpress forum and create several massage related topics in there. All these steps take me a total of around 30 minutes to an hour.

I then find some common Massage questions people are asking in massage forums and on massage sites. I’ll use these questions to write 40 or 50 articles which people are genuinely interested in in this area and are searching for the answers to. Once I have close to 50 articles I use WordPress’ built in future-scheduling feature to make it post one article every week, thus giving me a years worth of articles being posted to my site on autopilot. I can hire someone to write me 50 articles for around $200, depending on how important the quality is. If I’m short on cash I’ll write them myself in 3 or 4 days and gain the benefit of ensured high quality.

While my first few articles are publishing I’ll spend the first couple of weeks building incoming links for free from directories, forum signatures, commenting, article submission and Social Bookmarking. This takes a bit of time and effort but gets the site on the radar and usually to pagerank 3 for free. Next I’ll spend a few hundred dollars for some advanced SEO, buying links, a Yahoo! directory listing, some press releases and more.

In most circumstances I’ll spend a month and around $400 on the site and I’ll end up with a good massage site with pagerank 4 and a few hundred visitors per day. This is a pretty common strategy and at this stage most people would sell the site for shy of a thousand dollars and repeat the process. So next is the twist that earns me at least three times as much as everyone else.

I rent the site out. I spend a good chunk of my time getting in touch with massage businesses from around the world. These can be local massage parlors, a masseuse house in Germany, a site online that sells massage oils, or just about any business that is related to my niche. I tell them that I have an excellent and well positioned (in terms of SEO) website that revolves around their business and would be excellent at generating them leads, traffic or an advertising platform. Like most cold calling, I’ll get a response from around 10-20% of the people I contact and I’ll have to work pretty hard before someone will rent from me. But once they do I’m generating $50-$250 per month for virtually no extra work. If I can put together a PDF file as a report which details my growth details (in terms of traffic and SEO over the past month or two) and show examples of how I can use my site to generate them more business, they’ll be interested and buy in.

A good way to market this is offer different packages. Package A. at $50 per month offers them their own company logo or banner and a method for collecting customer details (a registration system you can export and give them contact details & leads), Package B. is $100 per month and offers them the same with their company colours styling your site and various links pointing to their existing site. Package C. is $200 and allows them to edit the content of your site, put up their own info and company details, write up articles, etc.

One of the beauties of this model is that once you have the basics down pat and know what you’re doing you can duplicate it with a new niche within a few weeks and start making cash within a month. If one of your contacts decides they no longer want to rent your service (though typically once they start seeing the benefits this doesn’t happen) you can contact someone else and bump up your prices as your sites rankings and traffic increase.

Another very cool benefit is that while you’re setting up your site or while you’re transferring to a new client you can sell affiliate products, paste in your AdSense code or sell advertising space for some extra pocket change. If you run out of clients or get fed up with it, you can still earn cash.

Yet another awesome incentive for adopting this business model is that if at any time you need an extra cash boost you can sell a few of your sites. Since your sites will be earning you cash each month over a period of time they’ll grow as you add to them and build more incoming links. After a year you could have a majorly profitable website on your hands and since you have a huge list of business contacts in your niche you will have no shortage of businesses wanting to buy your website. Depending on how well you do you can easily earn $5,000 or more from selling a reasonably sized website.

The numerous side benefits and possibilities from this business model are truly staggering and at no stage will you be short of new ideas. Since you have the ability to kick your clients each month and offer it to new businesses for increasingly larger monthly sums you’ll soon have a very low maintenance, very high income, always growing business model with huge room for experimentation so you’ll never get bored.

Backwards messages, known as Backmasking, in songs have been around since the Beatles (Tomorrow Never Knows is the first known song to contain a backwards message) and were at times surrounded by incredible media and public hysteria. In early 1982, the Praise the Lord Network’s Paul Crouch hosted a show William Yarroll, who argued that rock stars were cooperating with the Church of Satan to place hidden subliminal messages on records. Also in 1982, fundamentalist Christian pastor Gary Greenwald held public lectures on dangers of backmasking, along with at least one mass record-smashing. During the same year, thirty North Carolina teenagers, led by their pastor, claimed that singers had been possessed by Satan, who used their voices to create backward messages, and held a record-burning at their church.

Electric Light Orchestra singer and songwriter Jeff Lynne responded to allegations by calling this accusation (and the related charge of being “devil-worshippers”) “skcollob”.

Serial killer Richard Ramirez, on trial in 1988, stated that AC/DC’s music, and specifically the song “Night Prowler” on Highway to Hell, inspired him to commit murder. Reverse speech advocate David John Oates claimed that Highway to Hell, on the same album, contains backmasked messages including “I’m the law”, “my name is Lucifer”, and “she belongs in hell”. AC/DC’s Angus Young responded that “you didn’t need to play [the album] backwards, because we never hid [the messages]. We’d call an album Highway To Hell, there it was right in front of them.”

While the majority of famous backmasks have been imagined (a phenomena caused by the human brains need to explain everything, similar to how ink blot pictures work), there are several which have been acknowledged and confirmed by the artists who created them. Here are 20 of such backmasked messages.

Evil Eye by Ash
Message: “She’s giving me the evil eye, suck Satan’s c*ck.”

Said at the beginning of the song. Lead singer Tim Wheeler remarked that “Yeah, we did hide a secret message in ‘Evil Eye’, but it’s not that bad…”

Detour Through your Mind by The B-52’s
Message: “I buried my parakeet in the backyard. Oh no, you’re playing the record backwards. Watch out, you might ruin your needle.”

Rain by The Beatles
Message: “…the sun shines. Raaain. When the rain comes, they run and hide their heads”

Lennon stated that, while under the influence of marijuana, he accidentally played the tapes for “Rain” in reverse, and enjoyed the sound. The following day he shared the results with the other Beatles, and the effect was used first in the guitar solo for “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and later in the coda of “Rain”. Note that the last line is the reversed first verse of the song.

Lift Your Head Up High (and blow your brains out) by The Bloodhound Gang
Message: “Devil child will wake up and eat Chef Boyardee Beefaroni”

Said in a deep, odd-sounding voice. Preceded by “I hope you take this the wrong way / And misinterpret what I say / Rewind and let me reverse it / Backwards like Judas Priest first did”

Hate Yer State byChoking Victim
Message: “You think you’re alive motherf*cker? You’re just the walking f*cking dead, you’re a f*cking sheep, stepping on my back to stay alive. West coast, East coast, you’re all just a bunch of f*cking fools, you and the rest of this greedy f*cking world. Kill yourself! So remember, stay in school, say no to drugs, oh yeah! Hail Satan! Good night boys and girls, pleasant dreams.”

Reversal of undecipherable gibberish at beginning of song.

Rocket by Def Leppard
Message: “We are fighting with the gods of war”

A preview of another song, “Gods of War”, on the album Hysteria.

Fire On High by Electric Light Orchestra
Message: “The music is reversible, but time… (violin note) is not. Turn back! Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!”

Electric Light Orchestra were taken to court over an alleged backmasking message on their 1974 album Eldorado. This was during the time when media hysteria surrounded backmasking and many bands were taken to court, often for nonsensicle reasons. In response Electric Light Orchestra included 2 backmasked messages in their next album Face The Music, the more coherent of which is above.

Hot Poop by Frank Zappa
Message: “Better look around before you say you don’t care. Shut your f[censored]ing mouth about the length of my hair. How would you survive, If you were alive, Shitty little person?”

This profanity-laced verse, originally from the song “Mother People”, was censored by Verve Records, so Zappa edited the verse out, reversed it, and inserted it elsewhere in the album as “Hot Poop”.

Michael by Franz Ferdinand
Message: “She’s worried about you, call your mother.”

Right before the second verse. A reference to bassist Bob Hardy’s homesickness during the recording of the album. The band “wanted to do the exact opposite [of Satanic backmasking], put the most positive thing we could think of as a backwards message.”

Echo Side by Insane Clown Posse
Message: “Fuck the Devil! Fuck that shit! We believe in life legit. If you diggin’ what we say, why you throw your soul away?”

Everybody Rise by Insane Clown Posse
Message: “Yeah, if you flip this message cuz you think there’s some secret message, there ain’t shit!”
Reversal of gibberish at the end of the track. Said by Violent J.

Boys in Black by L7
Message: “All beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. Two all beef patties.”

The formula for a Big Mac.

Nightmare/The Dreamtime by Motorhead
Message: “Now tell me, about your miserable little lives. I do not subscribe to your superstitious, narrow minded flights[incoherent] of paranoia. I and people like me, will always prevail! You will never stifle our free speech in any country in the world, ‘coz we will fight forever[incoherent].” “In a single stroke, you poor, stupid, running dogs. Why is it…”

Throughout various sections of the song. Reputedly a message to the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). The PMRC claimed that popular music, and especially rock and heavy metal music, was partially responsible for the contemporary increase in rape, teenage pregnancy, and teen suicide. The PMRC also advocated against supposed subliminal backmasking in records, and accused bands including Led Zeppelin, Rush, Pink Floyd and Queen of backmasking to promote Satanism and drug use.

Bloodbath In Paradise by Ozzy Osbourne
Message: “Your mother sells whelks in Hull”

A parody of the most famous line from The Exorcist, in which the possessed child screams “Your mother sucks c*cks in hell.”

Empty Spaces by Pink Floyd
Message: “Dear Punter. Congratulations. You’ve just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the funny farm, Chalfont.” (voice in background) “Roger! Carolyne is on the phone!”

Coup d’Etat by Plasmatics
Message: “The brainwashed do not know they are being brainwashed”

After the Song “The Damned” (at the end of the album).

Perfect Sense by Roger Waters
Message: “Julia, however, in the light and visions of the issues of Stanley, we changed our mind. We have decided to include a backward message. Stanley, for you, and for all the other book partners.”

Waters deliberately recorded a backward message critical of film director Stanley Kubrick, who had refused to let Waters sample breathing sounds from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

665 by Soundgarden
Message: “Hail Santa. Santa, I love you baby. My Christmas king. Santa, you’re my king. I love you, Santa baby. Got what I need.”

Throughout the song. Obviously parodies the claimed Satanic messages.

Which Describes How You’re Feeling (Demo ) – They Might Be Giants
Message: “They Might Be Giants wanted to include a verse about the suffering people of the world, but we couldn’t figure out where to put it into this song.”

Towards Destiny by Tiger Army
Message: “Tiger Army Never Die, Tiger Army Never Die, Tiger Army Never Die. As the last tiger dies, the Ghost Tigers rise. Heed the call of the werecat Transylvania. We fight on the side of fate. Toward destiny, we ascend to it forever. Hail Satan.”

After the first verse, at around 0:36. Never Die was a song on the band’s first LP, and “Tiger Army Never Die” has since become the band’s motto. The title of Tiger Army’s third release, III: Ghost Tigers Rise was taken from this message as well.

Other instances of backmasking

In the computer game Doom II, a garbled message played at the start of Map 30, spoken by the “Icon of Sin”, can be played backwards to hear “To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero.” Romero was a programmer for the game; he put the backwards message (with distortions) in to get back at the artists who put the image of his head on the final level.

Blizzard Entertainment has released two games with known hidden audio messages. In Diablo, the message “Eat your vegetables and brush after every meal” is heard as the player enters the 16th level. In Warcraft III, clicking on the Demon Hunter hero a number of times produces the backwards message “I love green trees”, which sounds (forwards) like “siege niege avalya.”

In once scene of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, Beavis and Butt-Head hallucinate, and voices are heard in the background. The voices are the two characters speaking phrases such as “Everybody go to college, study hard, study hard.”

The Red Dwarf episode “Backwards” includes various backwards messages, including “Oi! Hey! Oi, you robbing bastards, that’s our tandem!” and “I’m addressing the one prat in the country who’s bothered to get hold of this recording, turn it round, and actually work out the rubbish that I’m saying. What a poor, sad life he’s got!” The episode revolves around a return to an Earth where time is running backwards, so most of the dialogue in the show is backward. Most of the backward messages in this episode agree with the subtitled captions explaining them, with a few exceptions.

At one point of the Spongebob Squarepants episode “Opposite Day”, Spongebob and Patrick were talking backwards. When played normally it is gibberish but when it is played in reverse it has a hidden message. The conversation played normally:

Spongebob: Kcirtap yeh.
Patrick: Pu evig I.
Spongebob: Edis etisoppo eht ot teg ot.

The conversation played in reverse:

Spongebob: To get to the opposite side.
Patrick: I give up.
Spongebob: Hey Patrick.

5. Mortal Kombat

The one that started it all. While it may seem pixelated and dated now, it was undoubtedly the most violent video game of its time. Spawning a huge fanbase, a movie, and a plethora of sequels, most of us have probably played Mortal Kombat in at least one form of another.

Who can forget pulling in a victim with Scorpions snapping beak; “Get over here!” while following it up with a gruesome uppercut. The game used real life actors and mapped their faces onto sprites, creating a pretty strange yet realistic effect which made it all the more awesome when Sub Zero ripped someones head off, leaving their spine dangling below. Fatality!

Originally released in 1997, this is an oldie but goldie. It’s still a thoroughly enjoyable game and was a breakthrough in its time with video scenes from inside the car and real world physics.
Think Mad Max on steroids and you’ll start to get a feel for Carmageddon which is set in a post apocalyptic world where the car rules. The idea is to race against a handful of other modified death cars through various levels, including deserts, industrial areas and populated cities, all to the tune of Fear Factories Demanufacture album (hell yes!). However, if you don’t feel like racing you can hunt down and destroy your enemies one by one until you’re the only survivor. Amongst all this, not only can you run over pedestrians, but you’re actively encouraged to do so, gaining extra time and credits for combo bonuses and “artist impressions” (which you get by utterly mangling bodies).

Carmageddon caused media scandal when it first launched and in most countries a “safe” version was released with zombies, robots or aliens instead of people. In some countries the game was banned completely. None of this stops it from being an absolute classic and the first go-anywhere 3D driving game which spawned 2 successful sequels.

3. Thrill Kill

Originally called S & M for Slaughter and Mutilation, Thrill Kill for PlayStation was never released, it was axed 2 weeks before it was due to go out. EA said that they didn’t want to “publish such a senselessly violent game” and stated it was so offensive that they wouldn’t sell the game to another publisher either. Fortunately for us former employees of EA released it onto the internet which are still available. The pirated version was the one and only reason I bought a PlayStation.

Incredibly simple, Thrill Kill consisted of only a single room where up to 4 opponents fight to the death. The usual life bar is replaced with a kill meter, which grows as you do more damage to your opponent, eventually you’re able to activate Thrill Kills which were always awesomely brutal, sometimes sexual, moves like dismemberment, mutilation, cattle prods down the throat or crushing skulls with stilts. Oh yes. One of Cleetus’ lethal finishing moves was to tear the head off his opponent and drink the blood that leaked out of his victim’s severed neck.The story goes that the 8 characters all led devious lives and died in various ways, have gone to hell. A modern day hell which reflects todays real life. Marukka, the God of Secrets has pitted them against each other, promising to give rebirth to the one survivor. Each character is battling for self-preservation and the hope to be born again.

Cleetus is a redneck cannibal. The only victim that he didn’t eat escaped minus a leg, which Cleetus carries around for good luck (and occasionally uses as a weapon).

Dr. Faustus, a master surgeon, died from an infection after installing his stainless steel jaws, made from a bear trap.

Oddball was a top FBI agent who hunted down serial killers. He began to admire them and slowly slipped into insanity. Oddball is extremely intelligent, cunning, and without remorse. Pity, sympathy, and compassion have no meaning to him. Although his arms are bound in his cozy little straight jacket, he has learned to adapt, as any good predator should.

2. Postal 2

One feature in Postal 2 is the ability to pick up cats as an inventory item. When used, the player shoves the barrel of the currently equipped firearm into the cat’s anus, as a ’silencer’. Every time a shot is fired, the cat meows in apparent agony, and the gunshot is muffled. After several shots the cat will be killed and will fly from the end of the weapon.

Any game where you can use a cat as a silencer has to be worth a mention. Highly violent, both Postal and Postal 2 met with much protest from various activist groups. However, the Running With Scissors software company who created the series responded by saying that the amount of violence in the game is entirely dependent upon the player. In fact, it’s actually possible (though very difficult) to complete the entire game without harming anyone.

The game is split from Monday to Friday and the tasks are simple things on a to-do list like ‘Cash Paycheck’, ‘Confess sins’, ‘Get milk’, etc. To accomplish these seemingly simple tasks, the player can chose to be peaceful or utterly, all out violent with unique gameplay changes for each choice.Some violent features include the ability to decapitate people with shovels, and then kick their heads around or play fetch with a dog, cops who beat innocent NPCs to death with batons, even if the NPC surrenders and begs for mercy and setting fire to people with gasoline, matches, napalm and moltov cocktails.Not content with just being violent, Postal 2 is also pretty disgusting. You have the ability to urinate on people, causing them to vomit in disgust. You can also urinate on food items which are then eaten and regurgitated by cops. Using an Antrhax-filled cow’s head as a weapon causes victims to vomit blood. Oh and you can also stun gun people til they cower in fear and urinate themselves..Featuring ATF, SWAT, the National Guard, psycho butchers, religious cults, the Taliban and Gary Coleman, Postal 2 has earned itself a violent and revolting reputation and is illegal in at least 3 countries.

1. Manhunt

Quite possibly the most violent game in the list, Manhunt revolves around James Earl Cash who has been sentenced to death by lethal injection. His injection is replaced with a sedative and Cash is abducted by a wealthy Hollywood director. The director has a thing for Snuff flicks and sets up Cash as his latest star, butchering local gangs on film in the most violent and horrific ways possible.

The director communicates with Cash via an earpiece and security cameras record his murders. For extra points the player must carry out more gruesome kills. These range from suffocation by plastic bag, decapitation, jamming a crowbar in the enemys skull, etc.

Manhunt was banned outright in several countries when it was launched and later in the UK the game was linked to an actual murder case of a 14 year old, Stefan Pakeerah by a 17 year old, Warren Leblanc. Stefans mother claimed that Leblanc had been obsessed with Manhunt after he pleaded guilty in court and as such most vendors in the UK removed Manhunt from their stocks. This led to a significant increased demand from other retailers and internet auction sites. Police denied any link, but it still strikes a chilling cord. Especially when you consider that Leblanc murdered his friend by stabbing him with a claw hammer, identical to an execution shown in Manhunt.

Invision and WordPress

Invision has decreased in popularity in recent years, but is still one of the big contendors. Meshing it with WordPress is pretty simple and the best option I could find was InvisionBridge Wordpress-IPB Bridge (http://forums.invisionize.com/lofiversion/index.php/t125596.html) which combines the login system for each and also offers some extra options in the paid version (which is $30), including posting topics and comments on WP as threads and replies in IPB and vice versa, avatars and PM integration and a few others.

Integrate SMF and WordPress

SMF is fast growing in popularity and is a personal favorite of mine. It’s fast, reliable and does everything that phpBB does but better. It also lends itself to other software very well and so hooking it up with WordPress is a sinch.

All you need to do is download the WordPress SMF Bridge plugin (available from http://www.earthorbit.com/opensource). It installs like any other plugin and means that when users sign into your forums they’ll also sign into WordPress and vice versa. You can also set it to post treads on SMF as topics on WordPress, display your SMF stats and a few other things.

Alternatively you can try the original upon which the above version was based at http://www.dmry.net/wordpress-smf-bridge-plugin-10/

Integrate vBulletin and WordPress

vBulletin is one of the more professional forum software packages and while phpBB is usually seen on sites which get 5 visitors per day, 4 of which are the web-masters friends and family, vBulletin is seen more on serious sites where SEO and design matter.

Since vBulletin costs money to buy and use, it has an excellent team behind it and support and great functionality. To bridge vBulletin with WordPress is an extremely simple process and can be done by downloading this vBulletin plugin (Complete Wordpress/Vbulletin Bridge – Share Users And Postings – http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=134521) and following the instructions.

Integrate WordPress with phpBB

phpBB is the big daddy, the long standing heavyweight of the forum packages. This is mainly due to the fact that it was the first major open source forum solution and was free from the get go. phpBB has more plugins, mods and extensions than just about any other piece of software, and so integrating it with WordPress is again, pretty straight forward.

The best options I could find are WP-PHPBB Wordpress plugin (http://www.avalon5.com/wordpress/themes-plugins/wp-phpbb-wordpress-plugin/) which installs just like any other WordPress plugin and works well. The only requirement is that your WordPress and phpBB installations are using the same database, though if you’re handly with PHP you could probably get around this.

Alternatively there’s the more up to date WP-United (http://www.wp-united.com) which has a bigger ranger of options and attributes including login integration, giving blogs to your forum members, easy setup, theme integration and more. For all the forums, this is the best package I’ve seen out there and both the forum system and plugin are absolutely free.

While some of these options may take a little playing around with before they’re functional, most work out of the box. One problem though is that when you update WordPress to a new version, you may be left with forums that don’t work or don’t integrate. If this is a problem for you I recommend checking out The Top 4 WordPress Forums Plugins

What’s the biggest living thing on Earth? Some might say the Elephant, though the Giraffe is taller. Others will contest that it’s the Blue Whale. The smarter of you, with a smug, content look on your faces, might even suggest that the biggest living thing on Earth is, of course, the Great Barrier Reef. Well you’re all wrong! The term “biggest living thing” is a bit ambiguous since you can measure by tallest, heaviest, longest or by taking up the most area. None-the-less I think I’ve narrowed down the top 7 contenders. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest living things on Earth, which are utterly monstrous by comparison.

1. African Elephant

Record: Heaviest living land animal.
10.6 metres (35 ft) and 12 tonnes.

The African Bush Elephant (Loxodonta africana), of the order Proboscidea, is the largest living land animal. At birth it is common for an elephant calf to weigh 100 kg (225 pounds). The largest elephant ever recorded was a male, shot in Angola in 1974. He weighed 12,272 kg or 13.5 tons (27,000 lb), with an overall length (trunk to tail) of 10.6 m (35 ft) and a shoulder height of 4.2 m (13.7 ft).

2. The Blue Whale

Record: Heaviest living animal.
33 metres (110 ft) and 181 tonnes.

The Blue Whale is currently the largest living animal by length and weight. It has been recorded to be as long as 33 metres (110 ft) and weigh as much as 181 tonnes. Hunting has made the Blue Whale almost extinct and in 2002 there were estimated to be between 5,000 and 12,000 left.

3. Amphicoelias

Record: Tallest, Longest and Heaviest animal to have lived.
40-60 metres (131-196 ft) and 122 tonnes.

Amphicoelias was a herbivorous dinosaur which is thought to have grown up to 40-60 metres (131-196 ft) in length, and weigh up to 122 tonnes. As such it would have been both longer and heavier than the blue whale as well as being the biggest dinosaur to have lived. Controversy surrounds this creature however, since only one fossil was ever found, and it was lost shortly after its discovery in the 1870’s. The field notes and drawings still exist. Other large dinosaurs include the estimated 45m long Seismosaurus, the 44m long Bruhathkayosaurus and the incredibly tall 18m high Sauroposeidon who would’ve easily been able to poke its head into the 4th or 5th story window of a building.

4. Bootlace worm

Record: Longest living animal.
55 metres (180 ft).

The bootlace worm currently holds the record as the longest living animal and is found along the coasts of Britain. A specimen washed ashore in the aftermath of a severe storm near St Andrews, Scotland in 1864, and had a length of more than 55 metres (180 ft).

5. Great Barrier Reef

Record: Largest superorganism (an organism made up of micro-organisms).
Covers 2,600 km.

The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is the world’s largest coral reef system, composed of roughly 3,000 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for 2,600 kilometres (1,616 mi) over an area of approximately 344,400 square kilometres (132,974 sq mi). The CRC Reef Research Centre estimates the age of the present, living reef structure at 6,000 to 8,000 years old. The reefs cannot be considered a living organism, since it is built by billions of tiny organisms known as coral polyps.

6. Armillaria ostoyae

Record: Largest living thing by area.
Covers 8.9 sq. km.

Armillaria ostoyae is a fungus commonly known as a Honey mushroom, and sometimes called Shoestring Rot. It attacks trees and is able to travel great distances under the bark or between trees in the form of black “shoestrings”.

One specimen, discovered in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon, U.S. was found to be the largest fungal colony in the world, spanning 8.9 km² (2200 acres) of area. This organism is estimated to be 2400 years old.

While an accurate estimate has not been made, the total mass of the colony may be as much as 605 tons. If this colony is considered a single organism, then it is the largest known organism in the world by area.

7. Pando, The Aspen Colony

Record: Heaviest & Oldest living organism.
Covers 4.3 sq km and weighs approx 6,000 tonnes.

The Aspen is a part of the willow family and may not seem very impressive at only 15-25 metres tall, but when you consider that all species of Aspens grow in large colonies derived from a single seedling they start to get a whole lot more interesting. They spread by means of root suckers and new stems (the Aspen itself) grows around 40 metres from the first, or parent tree. This enables the Aspen colony to survive forest fires, since the root system is buried underground below the heat source.

While each tree lives around 40 to 150 years above ground, the root system of the colony sends up new stems as older ones die out, as such the Aspen colony is extremely long lived, often thousands of years. One colony in Utah, nicknamed Pando the Trembling Giant, is claimed to be 80,000 years old. This amazing fact makes it the oldest known living organism.

Pando was discovered in 1992 and is estimated to be 6,000 tonnes which would also make it the heaviest known living organism. Pando encompasses 43 hectares (that’s 107 acres or 430,000 square metres) and has roughly 47,000 stems. Pando is latin for “I spread”.

What is CPALead and How Does It Work?

A month or so ago I wrote a WordPress plugin for CPALead.com^aff which is a third party system that allows you to put pages of your website behind a survey which your readers must complete to reach the page, in return for which you gain a small commission.

However, I realized that I hadn’t given CPALead its due and figured I’d take this opportunity to give it a more analysis and provide some tips and tricks on getting the most out of it.

CPALead has two main methods for generating income. First up is what they call the Active Survey Display which simply displays a list of all the surveys available in their system. This isn’t very popular, and since there is no incentive for your readers to complete a survey unless you create one by other means, this tool is hardly used at all.

The next method is the Premium Content Tool. This is what sets CPALead apart from other third party CPA networks. It allows you to put a simple piece of javascript on any page of your website which then hides that page behind a survey. If your reader is interested or has reason enough to complete the survey, you earn cash.

A third and slightly less fundamental method for generating income is CPALeads referral program which works like other affiliate systems in that you gain a commission of 5% of the income generated by people you refer to CPALead. Since this is less than most referral systems and drastically less than the 50+% you can expect from ClickBank products, it isn’t really worth spending much time on, but can always net you a few dollars extra.

What are Some Best Practices for CPALead

I’m often asked how people make so much money with CPALead when others make only a few dollars per day and it has to be said that there is a huge gap in the earnings of people who use CPALead. Some people will earn a dollar per week while others will net a thousand or more per day. The difference truly is in the method of marketing.

While the amount of traffic sent to your CPALead page is up to you and you alone, the commission can be affected slightly and the conversion rate will be totally different depending on the action you take. Here are some top tips n tricks to get the most out of CPALead:

1. Use A Splash Page
One of the biggest reasons that people don’t complete surveys is that they don’t understand that doing so will give them access to valuable content. For example, people may link to your CPALead page with something like “Click here for free videos of the new South Park” but when the visitor arrives they’re presented with a survey splash screen. 9 times out of 10 they wont even bother to read the text and you lose a potential commission. This may also happen when users are directed to your page via search engines.

To solve this and greatly increase your conversion rate, add a splash page. On this page put a simple description of the content offered. If you’re offering a video, take a screenshot of it and show this. Next, make sure you detail the steps that your readers must take before getting access to the content. Be meticulous about this, detailing exactly what the user must do and giving as much information as you can.

Finally, add a link to the content page. It is best to add this link after the description so that your readers are more likely to read it before continuing through.

2. Understand That CPALead is a Niche Tool
Many of the complaints I hear about CPALead are from people who are using it on blogs, dating sites or other sites that just wont work with this system. Your readers must have a reason to complete the surveys and so unless you have content people are after you’re not going to make any cash. If you use it on a blog or article website you’re mostly just going to piss people off.

Some good websites to use CPALead with are:

• MMORPG and browser games where you can offer extra points or bonuses for completing a survey a day.
• Social networking sites or even forums where you can offer membership.
• Download sites offering eBooks, images or other files.
• By far the most profitable sites are video sites. Offering all the episodes of a TV show, for example, then hiding each one behind a gateway is a great way of doing well.

3. Pay for Traffic

Another mistake that people make is not using PPC campaigns to vastly increase the amount that can be made from CPALead. Since the main factor that determines how much you earn is traffic, it stands to reason that more traffic will equal more profit, right? And the single fastest way of generating large amounts of traffic is via PPC.

AdWords is the most popular of these, but instead I recommend Yahoo! Publisher Network or Microsoft Ad Center (the Yahoo! and Live.com versions of AdSense) because they usually offer equal amounts of traffic for less. So long as you pay less for traffic than you earn back then you will make profit.

Your profit from CPALead can be represented with a simple formula:

Profit = Traffic * Coversion Rate/100 * Commission

So, for example, if your site merits 100 visits per day, your conversion is typically 50% and your CPALead Commission is (and it pretty much always is) 50c, then your CPALead income formula would be 100 * .5% * $0.50 = $25.

So if you’re in doubt or have never used PPC before, work out the above figures using free traffic then find out how much 1,000 hits will cost you via PPC. If the amount of profit you make from 1,000 hits is more than the cost of that traffic, buy. If not, find a cheaper keyword and create content to offer in that niche.

4. Pay for Content

Paying for traffic is probably the biggest and most important step in earning from CPALead, but paying for content can also bump up your profits and lower the time you spend putting things together. The web is awash with sales pages for products which people genuinely want but don’t want to shell out $47 for. If all they had to do was fill out a survey, the chances are they would, right? So why not pay someone $100 to write a couple of eBooks on a popular topic? While they’re doing that put together a splash page and a website to hold everything together. Once you have the eBooks, throw them up and start buying traffic. Viola! So long as your traffic costs less than you earn you should quickly make back your costs.

All considered this may sometimes take less than a week. If you use PLR material you can do it in a day.

5. US Traffic Is Best

CPALead hooks up with companies offering surveys from all over the world but the vast majority are from the US, UK and Canada. Since some surveys are only available to certain countries (most companies only want the information of people in their own country) often times you’re wasting your traffic unless it’s from USA, UK and Canada. If you use the tip above and pay for PPC traffic, this is easy done. AdWords, as well as most other PPC systems, offer an option to only pay for traffic from certain countries or geographic locations. Use it and cut out the wasted traffic.

While CPALead isn’t going to become universal like AdSense and you wont hear much about it, for those who use it correctly it produces vast amounts of easy income. I’ve seen people make several thousand dollars profit per day simply from a couple of eBooks and a lot of PPC traffic. Try it out now^aff and see for yourself.

Recently, since the popularity of this site has increased reasonably well, I’ve been exploring new methods for generating cash from SeanBluestone.com. One of the methods I am experimenting with is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is one of the main ways to make income online and is extremely popular because, like AdSense, it’s extremely simple. In contrast to AdSense however, it pays out big. While a click on a valuable AdSense ad from your site will typically net up to a few dollars, an affiliate sale will typically net you $20 to $30 but can easily net a few hundred dollars and with a bit of work even a few thousand. From a single sale.

One key technique used with affiliate marketing is to write reviews for the product you are marketing with your affiliate link in the text. This is a good approach because the sorts of people who read your review are people who are already interested in buying the product. If, for example, I wrote an article entitled ‘Toyota Widget x300 Reviewed’ then you can bet that the vast majority of the organic (search engine) traffic that comes to that page will be people who are interested in buying a Toyota x300 model Widget. Sometimes all it takes is hearing a good review and they’ll commit to buy. Since there’s a handy link to the sales page on your blog they’ll click through and viola, you make an easy commission.

The problem with this is an ethical one. Since you are interested in seeing a sale being made, you are likely biased towards writing in favor of the product, even if it sucks. This is a horribly common place problem which means that the extreme majority of product reviews on the internet are biased.

So you should just disregard any review with an affiliate link in it, right? Well unfortunately it’s not that simple. The best reviews are always from those who have used the product for their own needs and sometimes affiliate marketers of the product are the only people in this category. There are also cases where affiliate links are masked and so a reader doesn’t know they’re giving a commission to the affiliate marketer and hence don’t know whether the review is potentially worthless. And then there are paid reviews.

Paid reviews are reviews, usually blog entries, that are written by the blogger for a commission which don’t contain an affiliate link and sometimes go to great lengths to appear as though they are unbiased and genuine product reviews, even when the webmaster may never have used the product in his or her life. Companies like these because they know that many people don’t trust or don’t use affiliate links any more and if an article is seen on a prominent website which raves and glorifies their product, that’s likely to end in more sales for them.

DooYoo.co.uk is a great example of a site offering paid reviews. They pay anyone and everyone 50p (around 75c) for each review and an additional 1.5p or 2.2c each time another dooyoo member reads your review. The minimum cash payout is £50. Alternatively you can receive Amazon.com vouchers or make a charitable donation.
Being honest however, 50p per review is less than other paid review sites can offer. The difference with dooyoo however is that it’s easy to sign up and get going with. They also have an active moderator base and if your reviews are good you will be noticed and receive bonuses.

Ciao.co.uk^aff is very similar to DooYoo whereby they offer small amounts of cash for member reviews. The amount you earn depends upon how other people in the community rate your review.

Epinions.com is a vastly popular product review site which pays members for their reviews. The unique thing about Epinions is that they’ve worked hard to make sure even negative reviews generate income and use a Yahoo! Answers style community trust model to make sure honest reviewers do well. Unfortunately they use an ambiguous pagerank style formula for working out which reviews generate the most sales for associated companies and as such the only way to work out how much reviews are worth is to sign up and try it out, which I haven’t done and as such can’t comment on.

PayPerPost.com^aff is another paid review site which maintains a relationship with thousands of companies and has a marketplace where these companies offer, what it calls Opportunities, to review Product X from Company Y in return for cash. PayPerPost.com boasts a huge inventory of companies and products and reviews can net upwards of $1,000.

Most physical products like clothes, toys and games don’t suffer from these bias review problems because they can be seen and handled and more and more people will check out YouTube to see the product in action before they buy it.

So how can you determine whether a review is legitimate or not? Here are a few key pointers. Does the review contain an affiliate link? If so then the review may not be legitimate and may be fabricated to encourage sales. Is the review exclusively positive? In most cases a good writer will include some of the negative things about a product in a review as well as the positive whereas a paid review will usually contain insignificant or trivial negative aspects or will be exclusively positive. Are there outrageous claims that don’t have proof or evidence to support them? A scenario which I see all the time is where a product is advertised and the sales page boasts titles and claims like ‘How I make $10,000 per week from this simple method!’ with a plethora of PayPal screenshots which when investigated usually turn out to be copied from the hundreds of other sites sporting the same images. A very good rule of thumb to remember is that if a product sounds too good to be true, it almost always is. If you aren’t put off by claims like this then at least do some research before investing your cash. If the site has forums, ask the members questions. If the site has testimonials, check up on the customers and if possible email them for a response. If the site has none of these or no method for getting in touch with people who have actually used the product then simply don’t buy.

While affiliate links don’t affect the price you pay or your service, and so wont be an issue for the majority of people, it’s important to get reviews and insight into a product before buying. This is especially true for electronic products like eBooks, SEO services and the likes, since the only evidence that many of these products works are customers who have already used them. Internet marketing is rife with biased reviews or worse reviews that are entirely fabricated and so when buying a product or service you should always be sure that the claims on the sales page can be backed up with hard evidence.

The WordPress PHPList Dual Registration Plugin puts a small checkbox on your WordPress registration page allowing new users to subscribe to your chosen newsletter from PHPList.

Recently I set up and launched a newsletter system on SeanBluestone.com using PHPList. Since I already have a number of people signing up for this site every day I wanted to add a checkbox to my WordPress registration page to allow them to simultaneously sign up for my newsletter.

You can download WordPress PHPList Dual Registration here. You can also check it out a demo of it in action on my registration page.

This is great because it’s optional, while checked at first, and if it turns out they don’t enjoy the newsletters they can unsubscribe at any time. I adapted this script from Jesse Heaps PHPList Comment Subscriber plugin which does the same thing with comments and may be useful to you.