Three years ago, I made the following picture of Mister Penis getting lucky in the Castro in San Francisco. This guy was having a foursome on the streets of the biggest concentrated Gay community in the world, with three girls…
This guy had chosen his Halloween costume with care. He has thought about the way he would like to dress up and make a statement. This guy was dressed up as a huge cock!
This might have attracted some other folks in the area he was walking in. What do you expect when you are one large prick, walking in a Gay neighborhood? This is clearly the more Adult Halloween Costume.
Every year, I see the traffic on the blog post where I originally posted this picture go up (nice choose of words in a post containing the word penis and other synonyms several times). Unfortunately the traffic is not very targeted at the content, as it is clear from the referral keywords they were looking for something else.
Do you know what is going on with our climate? Where I live it has been the hottest summer in years. Right now, October 15th, it’s still very warm. In other laces of the world it’s colder than normal. Our climate is changing, we should be aware of the impact we have on the world we are living on.
Today on Blog Action Day, a large number of blogs are writing a piece about Climate Change. All with the objective to make people aware of the changes that are happening in our climate. Read more about Blog Action Day here, and participate by writing a blog post. You still have a couple of hours!
A cease and desist letter I received today made me think about how I would like to be perceived online. Am I writing an interesting blog if I receive a cease and desist letter? That depends, but in this case, it opened up my eyes and made me change the way I want to be perceived online.
Receiving a cease and desist letter
Somewhere in April, I read about a Google employee being sued by a well known affiliate guru in the industry for trademark infringement. The case was later settled, and according to the letter the whole case was based on a misunderstanding in which the defended of the case did not had any responsibility:
Public record information disclosed in the Nebraska litigation established that the reason for the trademarked term found its way into the sponsored link was due to the error of a Google employee other than [name changed to protect the innocent]. This has been publicly confirmed by Google.
The cease and desist letter was speaking of defamatory of the reputation of the lawyer’s client. The title; claiming the client needed a new reputation as his name was being called out in numerous blog posts, was defamatory according to the lawyer.
A mistake was made. In the letter, sent through registered mail, it was written;
A print out of that posting is enclosed
No print out was enclosed. Now I’m not a lawyer, but I’m sure that I could proceed in demanding a print out, as they made a mistake not to enclose a print out.
The lawyer demands that I take down the post which; according to the cease and desist letter. has been so defamatory and libelous. I’ve been thinking about how to handle the case and what my options are. Without asking advise from a lawyer I made my decision.
My response
As I don’t think my title is defamatory and the incomplete letter, missing the print out of the posting, gives me a feeling I’m standing pretty strong in my right to post this, I’ve decided to take down the post. Reason being is simple, I think I have created crap content by writing this post, something I accused the client of this lawyer off.
The client is engaged in selling “make money fast, get rich quick” websites. I hate these sites, and I’ve written numerous times about these. Especially about the ads on Facebook or Google. As the client is not only making money with these websites, but also works for Google, I found it pretty interesting to write about. After all, Google is putting the hammer down on the Google Money Tree. Not that he is exploiting a website that is robbing people from their money, but still.
By writing this crap, I actually created more crap on the Internet. I decided today, that I don’t want to be part of the clutter and creating crap on the Internet. This cease and desist letter has changed the way I might think about writing on this blog. This cease and desist letter has changed my view on possible topic sourcing. I hope this cease and desist letter will make me a better blogger!
I’ve taken the post down and redirected the URL to this page. Not because I think the lawyer has a case against me, but simply because I don’t have the time to get distracted by these nonsense. I have much better things to do, and will not let myself be dragged into a long civil case over something that I could have prevented, even though I’m not that concerned. It’s just not worth the energy and lawyers costs!
What a reputation defenders, just send out a couple of these cease and desist letters, and most of the defamatory and libelous postings will be removed from the first page of Google. Problem in this case is, for every posting that is removed through a cease and desist letter, there are more that will pop-up from page 2 and beyond. I guess the only winner here is the lawyer, who will be sending a lot of these letters to take down postings.
The blogosphere is full with people who write how to become successful in blogging. Some strike it rich, and become professional bloggers, where they give up working for a boss from 9 to 5. Being independent is something a lot of bloggers who just get starting dream off. The simple idea of planning your own time from the luxury of your own home office or in some cases even blogging from the beach is very compelling. Some bloggers make it, for others it’s the dream they keep on chasing.
In my 3 years experience of blogging I’ve seen accidental success posts from myself. With some posts you target success and hope to have written a viral post that will generate a lot of readers and might even get to be a valuable recourse for people and get repeat visitors over time. Other posts are just random notes of something I’ve experienced.
The fact that I’ve had most success with these sometimes random blogposts shows I still have a long way to learn how to write compelling content. Content that makes people want to return to my blog and become a loyal reader, because the fact is that these random success posts all have one thing in common; a high percentage of first time visitors. I doubt that these random posts are converting these first time visitors into loyal readers, let alone subscribers to my RSS feed. These random posts are so random, that nobody who is interested in these particular topics covered in the posts, are even interested in the rest of the content of my blog. Bounce rates of these successful are higher than averages of the rest of the posts, and visitors are gone before I got the chance to convert them to loyalists.
Accidental Blogging Success
I call this accidental blogging success. You have success with some blogposts you had never expected you would drive a lot of traffic to your site with. You stumble on something you can write about, quickly hack a blog post together and press the publish button. After a couple of days, the title starts to appear in your top 10 driving posts, and keeps driving traffic over time. I have a couple of examples on my own sites;
Removing a Trojan Horse
In June 2007 I wrote about my laptop being infected by a Trojan horse due to me clicking on a suspicious link. It took me a good Sunday morning to clean up my laptop. After the laptop was clean from any Trojan or virus, I wrote about how I cleaned up the computer and which tools I used.
After just a couple of months, my post appeared high in the Dutch version of Goolge on the keywords around removing a Trojan horse. From that time on, the post has been bringing in a decent amount of traffic every day. You can even see when there are problems around a new computer virus or Trojan in The Netherlands. When people are searching how to remove a Trojan horse, my traffic goes up.
Chocolate Milk
One day I was eating a pancake together with my old grandmother somewhere in The Netherlands. As I was having a real Dutch Chocolate Milk, the same combination I always had when I was a kid, I snapped a picture of the bottle & glass chocolate milk.
So after a while, I saw all this traffic come to my Dutch blog with some combination keywords. It appeared that the company brought a new product to the market, which was in short supply in the supermarkets. Hot Chocolate Milk through the Senseo machines was the newest hit.
While the fall was kicking in; with bad weather, rain and low temperatures, people were looking for the hot choco pads for in their Senseo machines. With my post ranking high on the keywords, the post still brings in a decent amount of traffic. The traffic follows the seasons, where I see traffic jump up especially when the temperature in The Netherlands goes south.
After this success, I wrote a follow up posts on where the chocolate milk hot pods are for sale. This posts almost brought in the same amount of traffic as the first chocolate milk posts, only is much more seasonal.
Lost the wireless Switch on your laptop?
The only post that could become an accidental success on this blog so far is probably the post where I describe finding the wireless switch on the Dell Latitude E4300. Apparently more people are looking for the wireless switch on the Dell laptops, and this posts has helped a dozen probably frustrated people already.
Casual posts as Biggest Success
So as you can see, your casual posts on your blog can turn out to be your biggest success’. You can’t plan for these success’, these probably fall into your lap. So don’t plan for accidental blogging success, just ride the waves of higher traffic!
I’m interested in any other examples of accidental success.
![Mister Penis getting Lucky thumb[1] Halloween Is Comming](http://www.thenextcorner.com/dennis/WindowsLiveWriter/HalloweenindeCastro_12B41/Mister_Penis_getting_Lucky_thumb[1].jpg "Halloween Is Comming")
One day I was eating a pancake together with my old grandmother somewhere in The Netherlands. As I was having a real Dutch Chocolate Milk, the same combination I always had when I was a kid, I snapped a picture of the bottle & glass chocolate milk. 
The only post that could become an accidental success on this blog so far is probably the post where I describe 
