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Libertarian Party Executive Director Shane Cory sent out his latest email update to the subscriber list today, summarizing some of the party’s accomplishments during 2007, informing us of the current status on ballot access issues, and making another pitch for some much-needed donations. If you happen to be a current LP member or are simply tired of the “business as usual” politics of the other parties, please consider voting with some of your dollars and making a donation. As I have discovered in my 13 years as a member, running an effective political party is a very difficult task, especially in a country such as the United States. Significant amounts of money and advertising are required just to be taken seriously, although once the momentum gets going and a certain critical mass is reached, our job should become somewhat easier due to free publicity from the major media outlets.

In the text of this update, I have reconstructed the active links from the email, including the one for an encouraging article from the Washington Times:
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Sporting four instances of “lol” and five smiley faces, the latest update from Owl Post admin Michele Ballard was sent out today, informing us that she has processed all outstanding advertising redemptions and is beginning to catch up in the payout department. She has also promised to update the finance page, which according to my account page was last updated on June 15.
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I have some good news for those of you who are wondering about whether or not it is worth it to upgrade at Clixsense.

Approximately one week ago, after being a free member for a several months, I finally took the plunge and upgraded here by using some of the PayPal money that I had received from Quick Rewards. The process itself went very smoothly; I was instantly credited with the upgrade after the payment was sent through PayPal from the site. The first thing that I noticed after I returned to the main Clixsense menu and clicked on the “Get Paid to Browse Ads” option was that I now had 511 new ads waiting for me (yes, over five hundred), several of which were worth more than the usual one cent. This was certainly a pleasant surprise considering the fact that I never had more than around 20 ads to click on at any one time as a free member, even if I waited several days between logins.
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One form of spam that has been on the rise over the past two weeks is stock spam, which is most commonly used to promote a type of scam known as stock pumping. This is a technique in which spammers attempt to manipulate the price of a company’s stock, usually in the upward direction, in order to make a quick profit. The most common tactic used to accomplish this is known as the “pump-and-dump” scheme. With this method, a spammer chooses a stock that is relatively unknown, has a low price per share, and has low trading volume. Most such stocks are traditionally called “penny stocks” because they usually trade for less than one dollar per share and are listed only on the over-the-counter bulletin board (OTCBB) or Pink Sheets exchanges. With this type of stock, the spammer can usually raise the share price relatively easily by disseminating lots of positive (and sometimes fraudulent) information about the chosen company and lure naive investors into quickly buying shares, thus temporarily driving up the price. The spammer, having bought fairly large blocks of shares in advance, then quickly sells the stock by “dumping” it back onto the market before most investors realize that the information being disseminated is exaggerated or inaccurate.

Another tactic that is sometimes used by stock spammers is called the “short and distort” method. This is essentially the reverse of the more popular pump-and-dump; instead of hyping up a stock, negative information is sent out in an attempt to drive the share price downward. Rather than buying shares, the spammer short sells them- that is, the shares are borrowed from a broker and immediately sold for whatever they are worth at the current price. In a short sale transaction such as this, the investor hopes that the stock price declines because if it does, the shares can be bought back at a lower price than what they were originally sold for, leaving the difference as profit. However, there is also significant risk involved in this proposition because if the price of the stock actually goes up, the investor can lose money when the shares are eventually bought back in order to settle the short position. For this reason, plus the fact that the possibility of short selling is usually not offered for penny stocks, the short and distort method is not as popular with veteran spammers. However, it is sometimes still used by unscrupulous investors who have inside knowledge of the companies involved and want to manipulate the markets for quick profits.

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An e-commerce site called LPStuff.com that has offered Libertarian Party products and campaign supplies since February 2006 is now expanding its selection to include some back to school themed items such as bags, backpacks, and stationery. The site is gradually accumulating a good collection of T-shirts, bumper stickers, campaign literature, and other items that are useful for promoting the Libertarian Party and increasing public awareness of our existence. The email update from earlier today details the latest sales promotion:
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As I was going through some of my old office supplies to clear out space and remove unnecessary items, I noticed a dust-covered recipe sitting on top of an old stapler that I had not used in several years. The recipe was a small cutout from the back of a bag of King Arthur whole wheat flour from about three years ago. After remembering that I really liked this recipe, I figured that I might as well share it with you here.

I have made the brownies several times according to this formula and noted that it is an excellent alternative to the typical prepackaged brownie mixes found on the store shelves. The main advantage to using this method is that you can control the amount of chocolate and sugar that goes into the final mix in order to suit your individual taste. Since I tend to like dark chocolate more than the sweeter, creamier varieties, I usually increase the amount of cocoa slightly while decreasing the amount of sugar. You can also substitute a small amount of brewed coffee for the vanilla extract, which adds an interesting twist of flavor.
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Two days ago, while reading through some of the recent posts on the StartXchange blog, I discovered a new program called Advertising KnowHow. It’s owned by Robert Puddy, one of the fairly big names in the Internet marketing world and is somewhat difficult to categorize because it combines several different kinds of marketing methods under the same site. Probably the best way to characterize this is as a kind of all-in-one marketing platform. It includes a manual traffic exchange component, but is also a list builder, article submitter, downline builder, and affiliate program.

The traffic exchange part works a little differently from most other exchanges that I have seen. It has a 10 second timer and keeps track of your credits and page views like one would normally expect, but in order to click to the next site there is a little “floating surfbar” that slides onto the screen as soon as the timer runs out. It is approximately the same size as a standard banner and slides in from any side of the screen much like a glide-in or fly-in hover ad. The “click here” button is located on this floating banner, randomly mixed in with three “not here” buttons as a kind of anti-cheat feature. An interesting little perk to this exchange is that it is possible to pick up random referrals even as a free member if you surf at least 50 pages per day for five or more of the past seven days. An email that I received from them earlier today helps explain this:
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In the latest update from Take the Internet Back, the owners are now offering members five points for providing them with a link back to their site. In my case, this really wasn’t necessary because I am linking to them already. However, since they are hoping to increase their search engine rankings with some added backlinks, it seems to make sense from a marketing standpoint. They are also explaining their position on revamping bidhire.com, citing the fact that purely member-driven promotion was not giving them enough juice to get the site into the wider markets. They are hoping to speed up the process a bit so that they can gain a competitive advantage and maximize long term returns. As usual, the actual text of the update is posted below the fold:
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While not everyone knows about SEO or even what it is, there are many useful tools available that SEO professionals and webmasters use that also have significant benefits for casual searchers who may want to expand their knowledge and access more detailed information about their favorite topics. In this article, I will give a brief description and provide links to some of the tools that I commonly use as a webmaster for both optimization and general information purposes.

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Last week in my end of July news sweep, I mentioned that I had received an invitation from Invoke for another interactive online survey. Earlier this evening I managed to successfully access and complete the session, and should be receiving my $20 honorarium within a few weeks. This is what the original invitation email looked like:
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Last week we received what is probably our tastiest product sample so far. This one was a frozen pizza that arrived in a styrofoam container with some dry ice on the bottom. The box that contained the pizza itself was one of those black and white “Brand X” kind of boxes that did not reveal the brand of the product but did list the ingredients and nutritional information. Along with the product, we received our survey instructions, which revealed that the testing was being conducted by a company called MRSI, or Marketing Research Services Incorporated:
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The CorpusTrader.com classified ad site that I mentioned earlier has sent out an email update announcing some improvements to the way advertisements will be handled on the site. The main benefit is that it will now be easier to keep our ads online continuously without having to worry about them getting deleted or having to go through the hassle of typing in our ad text more than once. There are also plans in the works to improve the Google Maps feature for garage sales and real estate sales. Here is the actual text of the update:
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When optimizing a website for the search engines, one of the first things that you need to do is figure out which keyword phrases you want to target for high rankings. Many site owners seem to know immediately what keywords they want to use, but it is still a good idea to step back and put a few moments of thought into it before committing yourself to any major expenses of time or money.

There are three areas to look at when choosing your favorite keywords:

• Relevance - Are your proposed keyword phrases actually relevant to your site and its content, or are you just trying to rank for them because they “sound cool”?
• Search Volume - How often are people actually searching for these keywords? If the traffic volume on a keyword is pitifully small, it’s probably not worth trying to get a high ranking for it.
• Competition - How competitive is the field or niche you are trying to target? If there is too much competition, particularly from strong authority sites, you could wind up stressing yourself out by attempting to reach a goal that simply isn’t feasible for you.

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The market research company MySurvey has sent out their latest edition of Opinion Digest, which I received in the mail earlier today. Among the contents of this monthly newsletter were the results of a recent survey titled “What Can’t You Live Without”.

According to the survey, 51 percent of Americans now consider a home computer a necessity rather than a luxury, and the list of what items people consider necessary is growing. Some of the items have been around for quite some time, but are now deemed necessities by much larger segments of the population. In 1996 only 32 percent of American adults considered a microwave oven a necessity, but by 2006 this figure had increased to 68 percent. Here are some of the other findings:
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The new game that Share Ad Space mentioned in an update earlier this week has now been officially announced and implemented. Earlier tonight, I logged into my SAS account to check it out; so far, it seems to be working as promised. Although I did not play far enough into the game to advance in level, I played several short rounds and managed to achieve a favorable ratio of advertising credits gained vs. pages surfed (it was around 1.5:1 or so in my favor when I logged out).

One thing that helps is to write down the number of credits revealed under each box as you click them so that you can remember which boxes have the correct numbers under them when you need to make a match. This saves time in clicking boxes that you have already uncovered and will give you a better chance of having a favorable surf ratio overall. Here is the full update that explains the rules of the game in detail:
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