How to Deal with Internet Asshats

Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one. – Callahan, The Dead Pool

When we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical. – Unknown

As a person who has been playing around on the internet for awhile now, I can safely say that it is a pretty hostile place. There is a thing called “Keyboard Courage” that emboldens people to say things to others online that they would never say in person.

Personally, I think it’s because the person never has to suffer the consequences of their words. Although there are stories of people who have hunted down internet antagonizers in a quest to do them bodily harm, the vast majority of people who act like asshats never have to come face to face with the person they are talking shit to or about.

If you are the person who is being insulted, ridiculed, yelled at, or generally subjected to some of the nastiness found online, it can be very upsetting. I think this is partly because we expect people to behave in a civilized manner online and we are shocked when confronted with the reality that the internet is nothing more than a zoo populated by hairless monkeys hunched over their keyboards slinging digital poo at each other. I certainly was surprised the first time an internet asshat slung a virtual turd in my face.

Google’s Farmer Update Kicked My Site Off the Search Engine

When it comes to internet marketing, I’m pretty well versed in the different tactics you can use to increase website visibility and generate traffic. Several years ago, in fact, I had a website where I wrote about internet marketing, web design, and article writing. Even though this is an erotic fiction story site, you can find many of these articles in my archives from when I moved them from the original sites.

Anyway, everyone is up in arms about the Google Farmer update which was supposed to address the problem of spammy content and content farms. I didn’t think anything of it because all of the content on my blog is original even if it is a few years old. But if Google’s update managed to deindex popular sites like the Cult of Mac, then I should not have been surprised to find that this blog no longer ranks for my name Daria Black.

Finding Adult Hosting for Your Spicy Content

I was going through my archives and found an old article I wrote about free blog hosting vs. self hosted blogs. This got me thinking about the various struggles I have had over the years finding a good company to host the websites I created. The problem I’ve run into is the fact that I write erotic fiction stories and thus needed adult hosting.

I would say the majority of web hosting companies online do not allow adult content on their web servers. Adult websites with porn images and xxx videos generate a lot of traffic which consumes tons of space. A high traffic porn site can make all other sites on the server slow to load or even cause the server itself to crash. No hosting company wants to deal with that so they make sex content providers find adult web site hosting.

Make Billions Selling Advertising

Quite the sensationalist title, huh? But it got your attention didn’t it? Well that’s what the internet advertising model is all about. It is the process of getting the attention of web surfers and inducing them to make a purchase or, at the very least, visit another website.

Making money using the advertising model is easier now than it has ever been before. In the past, the platforms available to those wishing to make money using the advertising model were severely limited to those who had the technical know how, connections and, yes, money in which to pursue the business. The internet, however, has blown away all the barriers to entry and a budding entrepreneur can start making money online in a matter of days.

To be successful with this model, there are a few things you need to consider:

How to Maximize Your Donations

I’m not sure that the donation model can be considered a business model. After all, you are counting on being able to convince people to give you money in exchange for the warm fuzzy feeling of helping you and not a product or service. Some people, as in the case of Karyn Boznak and Jason Kottke, were very successful with it but the majority of others languish in obscurity.

The trick to maximizing your donations lies in communicating the value of helping you. People have to find your “cause” worthy enough to go through the trouble of completing a Paypal transaction. For example, I am more likely to give money to someone who needs it to feed their family over someone who needs it to pay server costs. The former prods my sympathy for my fellow human being while the latter seems to me more of a business expense that should have been accounted for.

Whatever the cause you are championing, below are a few tips to help increase the likelihood of your web visitor clicking on the donation button.