Demagoguery For Dummies: How To Convince People You’re A Saint,Despite Explosive Evidence To The Contrary
How can a demagogue who boasts of kidnapping and killing and whose woeful misjudgment has reined down death and destruction on his own country be hailed as a saint? Is this demagoguery for dummies or what? How can the Lebanese people, proud descendants of the Phoenicians – first to trade widely on the Mediterranean and resourceful developers of our Arabic numerals – be completely duped by this inept practitioner of argumentum ad populum. The hobgoblin has hijacked their government, shouldered aside their army, and subjected them to their most deadly and destructive disaster in recent times. And yet his picture and his praise seem to be everywhere, except, of course, on the Israeli side, where is he is considered the equivalent of Osama Bin Laden and a lawful candidate for sudden admission to death's door. And, even in the wreck his judgment hath wrought, he now has the temerity to cast himself as a savior who will rebuild Lebanon and gets off to a dramatic start by having his terrorist org pass out 12,000 smackers in, ironically enough, US dollars, to families whose homes have been destroyed. Meanwhile, just to keep the devastation in the active hopper, his outfit insists, in defiance of the UN cease fire, to disarm, saying that, at least for now, it’s “not an option.” Thankfully, Nasrallah faces a challenge to his credibility that isn’t going to disappear. Now that his displaced advocates are making their ways home to the death and destruction that they recently knew as their families and homes, they are faced with inescapable proof that he may be just the opposite of the saint they adore. Grudgingly, they may finally see that he may more correctly be seen as the opposite of a saint. Certainly, he can mollify them in their loss, as the Roman emperors once passed out bread to the starving masses. But even he cannot bring back the dead, and the many lost loved ones are bound to rankle in the bereaved families. Can his demagoguery, dumb in its choices and flagrant in its guises, possibly continue to dupe the people whose lives he has so grievously and irredeemably devastated? It is his war on the truth and their peace with it to call him to its court and its justice. Ours is but to observe if the people of that unnecessarily wounded nation can set aside their misguiding passions and turn out to be just too darn smart for the deadly dummy.
Google Adsense - Responsible For The Decline Of Web Publishing Standards?
Where would we be without Google?
Well I can tell you one thing for sure, without Google's Adsense advertising program, we'd be exposed to a whole lot less substandard publishing on the web.
It seems every man and his dog has fallen for the "earn $5,000 a month for doing nothing" rubbish that any number of dodgy SEO practitioners and website content creators are sprouting.
The truth of the matter is that to make any money out of Google's Adsense, a couple of pretty basic rules apply:
1) You need good content. There's little point whacking up any old copy that just happens to be SEO'd up to the eyeballs with high paying keywords if it doesn't make sense. People are spending far too much time optimizing their copy to get high paying adsense ads on their pages, and forgetting about actually offering something to their readers. Your readers won't come back if you provide them with no reason to.
2) You need traffic to make money from Adsense. Lots of it. With average payouts somewhere between $0.10 and $0.50 for ad clicks. You need a lot of clicks to make it worthwhile. Consider this - the accepted click through rate for Adsense ads is somewhere around 1%, that's right - anyone who tells you that they're getting 10% is either lying to you because they're trying to sell you something, or employing dubious tactices that will probably get them banned from the Adsense program soon. With a click through rate of 1%, and, lets say, a payout of $0.25 per click, how many page views do you need to make $100 a month (the minimum monthly earnings before Google will send you an Adsense cheque)? Well - you're going to need 400 ad clicks ($0.25 x 400 = $100), to get those 400 ad clicks at 1% click through rate, you're going to need 40,000 page views.
3) You need buckets of original content. Taking the above example, of requiring 40,000 page views, and supposing that you have worked your ass of to produce 100 pages of quality, focussed, keyword rich content, you're still going to need each of those lovingly hand crafted pages to be viewed 400 times each month to reach your goal. That's a lot of back-links and word of mouth you're going to need!
4) You need to update your content regularly. Search Engines will drop you like a stone if you don't update you site regularly. The professionals in the field are using automated means to update their sites at least daily to provide fresh content to the monsters which are the search engines. Find yourself off the front couple of pages in the search engines, and you might as well close your Adsense account - Google won't be sending you any money anytime soon.
5) Don't kid yourself that you can compete on high paying keywords. "But I've heard that there are keywords paying $25 per click" I hear you say. "So if I get the 400 clicks in the above example on my site about Mesothelioma, I'll make $5,000!" Yeah - good luck with that! Have a look at the first page in Google for the search term Mesothelioma, it's full of sites by people who know a whole lot more about search engine optimization that you or I.
6) Don't think that people are making a living from a single site. The people who are making a living from Google Adsense are doing it by using a network of sites. They have at least a dozen sites, all on different servers, with different IP's, with different domain names, using a careful and studied linking strategy to share traffic and page-rank among their various sites. Anybody making a living with Adsense is achieving over 2,000,000 page views a month. that's a lot of pages of good content. Just think - 12 sites, each updated with fresh content daily, is 360 new articles a month - at an average of 30 minutes each = six hours a day writing (let alone site maintenance etc.) It's sounding more and more like a full time job, without the security.
So, as you can see, making a living with Google's Adsense program is not quite as easy as some would have you believe. If you are after a way to make some pocket money on a site you already have, which has good content, then go for it, but if you think you're going to make a living, think again!
