- The Old Curator
- Posts
- Destroyed by hackers a lesson in what not to do.
Destroyed by hackers a lesson in what not to do.
Back in 2003 I was living and working in Shanghai and on a flight back from Hong Kong, following a conference I bought a small book called…
Back in 2003 I was living and working in Shanghai and on a flight back from Hong Kong, following a conference I bought a small book called “How to make money online”
Basically, the book advised one to build small websites related to groups of keywords.I started doing it made $50 a month, eventually then up to $300 and then realised this is a numbers game.
I came home bought some software called traffic equaliser which auto-built websites, and eventually, I was earning $1000 a day in 2004. Very few others were doing this online.
In January 2005, I got up one morning, and we made $5 out of a whole network of 2000 domains and 93 million webpages had been hacked by an Islamic group based in Bremerhaven, Germany who replace every page with an Islamic flag and militant chanting.
We tried for six months to recover domains, and then realised that once domains are de indexed in Google Yahoo and MSN, irrespective of what they say, They are never reindexed and ranked resulting in organic search traffic ceasing.
I ended up having to return to my normal job of working at sea. I did that for 10 years. One thing early learned back in 2004 that appears not to have changed there is a lot of people online claiming to be an expert on how to make money of selling it, I refer to it as Gurudoo in fact, I once had a domain of that name which has long gone.
One of these so-called gurus is actually a senior British politician called Grant Shapps, who at the time was operating as Michael Green, claiming to be an Internet expert selling courses online for $299.
Another issue was: Many people said you really need to build a mailing list, but the sites were not specific and were very generic a list did start building, but what exactly do you send to a generic list. Writing content is very time-consuming, and I didn’t have a skill set.
Roll forward to 2023, several things happen which has caused me to reevaluate the whole situation and the viability of this type of enterprise.
One of them is everybody’s panicking about AI. My logic is AI is something we should learn to use quickly and figure out how it may be used to provide value online.
The current reality appears to be that people are simply running out of time, probably because they spend so much time wandering around the Internet, and they’re not focused.
There appears to be a need for a form of filtering of information, and perhaps a requirement for suggestions.
How to achieve this is something I am exploring furiously, utilising free and low-cost tools.
An example
Technologies changed so much. It’s 9 o’clock in the morning here in UK, it’s bitterly cold I’m out walking my Jack Russell along the beach, my iPhone with an app called Drafts. For example, I’m recording this. When I get home I’ll tidy it up grammar check it, and I’ve posted on my blog and using free to send it to Substack, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Consistency seems to be the issue. It’s not difficult with AI to generate a readable email article every day and then see where it leads, so that’s currently what’s happening.