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National Novel Writing Month begins Nov 1, 2011 and runs for 30 Days. The goal is to write a 50K novel. What a great way to brush up on your writing skills.

Unless you’re happy building landing pages with poorly spun content or trying to generate high bounce rate traffic from organic search, creating high quality content is probably the most essential skill for any type of marketing.

Quality content keeps your website visitors engaged, keeps them on your pages for longer and leads to a higher conversion rates. These are all good things. On the other hand, poorly spun content is the fastest way to trigger the “back button” reflex in most web surfers. Not such a good thing.

So how does one learn to write killer content that keeps readers engaged?

The answer is simple - Practice, practice and more practice.

If you’re looking brush up on your writing skills and have some fun while doing it, you might be interested in National Novel Writing Month which begins November 1st and runs until the end of the month.

The goal is to write one 50,000 word novel from scratch in a month’s time. That’s a little over 1,600 words per day and accomplishing this is no easy task. Out of 200,000 entrants in 2010, only 30,000 actually crossed the 50K finish line. One of last year’s 50K finishers was none other than Matt Cutts of Google search quality and webspam fame.

There aren’t many rules for the event. To be an official NaNoWriMo winner, you must…

• Write a 50,000-word (or longer!) novel, between November 1 and November 30.
• Start from scratch. None of your own previously written prose can be included in your NaNoWriMo draft (though outlines, character sketches, and research are all fine, as are citations from other people’s works).
• Write a novel. We define a novel as a lengthy work of fiction. If you consider the book you’re writing a novel, we consider it a novel too!
• Be the sole author of your novel. Apart from those citations mentioned two bullet-points up.
• Write more than one word repeated 50,000 times.
• Upload your novel for word-count validation to our site between November 25 and November 30.

Who knows? You just might become the next Stephen King or David Ogilvy.

Here’s the link again in case you missed it above : National Novel Writing Month

Call it an inconvenience, call it search confusion or call it just plain ridiculous but without formal announcement, Google has removed the + sign operator from advanced search.

The + sign operator has been a staple of search engine logic long before Google began their monopolization of internet search. It doesn’t even take a power user to modify searches with the + plus sign as I taught my grandmother how to modify searches with the + plus sign over a decade ago. She taught it to her friends at the senior center. Whatever shall they do?

Here’s an example of the latest Google logic sure to bewilder grey haired grannies worldwide :

The point is, however insignificant it may seem to Google engineers, people DO NOT appreciate these type of seemingly minor changes that make you rethink how to do something you’ve been doing for years, if not decades.

No doubt, this change has direct correlation to Google’s social network Google+ although the exact reasoning is not clear. More than likely it has something to do with searches for data on Google+ and the asinine use of the + plus sign in the naming of an internet entity.

As a programmer myself, when I first saw the name “Google+”, I thought it was quite strange that a company hatched from the interwebs, would know that the + plus sign is not allowed as part of domain names and is only used in urls to replace a white space.

Bad Google.

On the bright side, Google hasn’t removed the - minus sign search operator which excludes keywords from queries, at least not yet.

Don Lapre made a career out of pitching Get Rich Quick schemes on television and the internet but in the end, it was the pitch did him in.

On October 2, 2011, multi-level marketing and infomercial pitchman Don Lapre was found dead in a jail cell in Arizona. Although he was only 47 years old, he had been a force in television infomercial marketing for over two decades.

Many of us who remember a world without Facebook and cellphones will remember Don Lapre from his late night television infomercials where he pitched get rich quick schemes. One of his most famous schemes involved placing classified ads in newspapers around the country and watching the money flow in.

I remember a friend paying several hundred bucks for Lapre’s “Money Making Secrets” system and dreaming what to do with all the cash he was going to make. The system came with a manual on how to write effective ads and a phone book sized directory of all the newspapers in the US. The only thing it didn’t come with was a product to sell.

You see, Don Lapre was selling the model he used to market the product he was selling.

All in all, most of Lapre’s ideas were pretty sound if applied correctly but his promotional tactics were sketchy, which is what led to his arrest. Lapre was indicted by a federal grand jury in Phoenix, Arizona in 2011, on accusations of running a nationwide scheme to sell worthless Internet businesses. Federal prosecutors accused Lapre of bilking more than 220,000 victims out of nearly $52 million. He was charged with 41 counts of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, promotional money laundering, and transactional money laundering.

His downfall? Making false claims about the effectiveness of “The Greatest Vitamin in the World”. He didn’t even make landing pages with fake testimonials from Kim Kardshian, spam Facebook or any of the other shady techniques self-proclaimed “super affiliates” have bragged about.

Sure Don Lapre made a lot of money and was living large but he ended up cutting his own throat with a razor blade in a jail cell at 47 years old. Not exactly a happy ending.

So next time you’re thinking that consumers are for fleecing and they will buy anything if you bend the truth a little, think again. All it takes is a few consumers to file complaints with the FDA or FTC and you might find yourself on the losing side of a federal indictment.