Christian Little

I didn’t realize until yesterday how long I have actually been a member of the DigitalPoint community. I’m not sure if I should be proud to admit that I’ve been there for two years, or if I should be ashamed at the hundreds of hours I’ve spent posting in stupid threads there.

So to mark my second anniversary there, I decided to clear out all the threads that I had subscribed to over the years…about 800 of them! For those of you that don’t know, every thread that you reply to or create becomes a subscription in your account, so if you click on “User CP”, then “List Subscriptions”, you’ll get a huge list of every thread you’ve subscribed to. You can also manually subscribe to a thread in the “Thread Tools” menu for any thread, even if you don’t post there.

I must admit that I’m amazing at how many useless threads I’ve been in such as You Know You’re a Webmaster If…, and Who Are You When You’re Drunk?.

But with all silliness, there does come several good parts about being in this awesome community, and so I’m going to share several notable threads that I have seen over the years…

First I’ll start off with the standard questions that most people ask, such as do affiliate programs really make you rich, do you declare your business expenses (you’re an idiot if you don’t), and CSS and SEO – does it help? When I first started sorted through my subscription list, I found dozens of standard newbie questions that arise, but those three are some of the more popular ones (aside from the obvious “how can I make money online”, “how do I promote my website” generic ones that appear hundreds of times per day).

It wasn’t too long after I joined DP that a new buzzword started circulating called “bum marketing”. It was mostly hype from a new ebook that had appeared, which made insane promises of generating thousands of visits to your website with very little work (don’t you just love how ebooks and other stupid marketing schemes love to dangle a carrot on a stick in front of you?). The bum marketing method was just a nickname for article marketing, which had been common place for years. Basically you take an article, submit it to hundreds of directories, and then spin it to create a whole new article from the same content and repeat the process. The idea was that with 10 articles you could spin out 100 articles and distribute them through various article networks. Did it work? No, it didn’t deliver the thousands of visitors it promised, but it was (and still is) a great way of getting backlinks to your website so a lot of people still use it today as part of their SEO efforts. Today hundreds of threads popup on DP asking if it works or not (I bet the owner of that site made a killing, a lot of people gave in and bought the book), but back in the day only a few threads existed such as does bum marketing work, and has anybody had success with bum marketing?

Over the years, blogging has become one of the mainstream ways of building a site and updating it. You can get some really amazing free wordpress themes that look more like professional websites rather than just a blog (i.e. the theme I currently use is called Mimbo, and it’s a magazine-style design rather than a standard blog design). A really fun even happened to financial bloggers at the start of this year – Forbes.com was starting to syndicate content from investment blogs and people were getting invites to join…unfortunately Forbes would only allow you to join if you agreed to use their own advertising network exclusively on your blog – but it brought in a lot of attention – it was forbes.com afterall and they were giving you massive link juice for it.

There were a lot of other major blogging trends that happened (I have about 40 threads bookmarked), but I can only put so much stuff into a single posting here so maybe one day I’ll discuss other cool ones that happened. But one thing that has remained consistent is people constantly debating whether commenting on other blogs works or not (such as here, and here), but there has also been some amazing contributions to this, such as a list of 1200+ do-follow blogs that appeared not too long ago.

I’ve also witnesses a lot of really bizarre things happening, and after reviewing the threads I have bookmarked I think that Google’s gravestone search is probably one of the more creepier ones…but I must admit I’m very curious as to how it will work. Their satellite technology isn’t advanced enough to use OCR on tombstones, and I really doubt the government has a reliable database of this information anywhere, so it’s going to be interesting to see how this new project by Google turns out.

And of course, there are all the scammers on DP…I must admit I’m fascinated by how various schemes work and so I like to read them and figure them out. A few of the more notable ones include a guy asking for $7 million and promises a return of hundreds of millions, various scams that promise to fund your startup in exchange for a $10,000 up-front fee (such as here, and here), and hundreds of threads of people complaining about how they go ripped off (see here, here, and here for examples). I could write a book on DP scams by now from how much crap that has appeared, but for the time being I’m content to sit and laugh. Afterall, it’s easy to fall victim to scams when you get things like this where even I got scammed (meh, it happens, thankfully it was because one of my clients asked me to set it up for them, now they listen way more to me about stuff like this, so I guess it did have some positive effect).

What I’ve posted above is just a dab of what has happened over the years. There’s been hundreds of schemes, scams, contests, promotions, buzz words, ebooks, stupid poeple, and many other interesting events – but I simply can’t get into all of them.

Happy Labor Day everybody!

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