This is an unfortunate situation. Whether he is guilty or not is irrelevant….I want to know how they caught that guy. It had to have taken 30+ cops, a net, and barrels of commercial-grade glue. I saw him play one time in Denver against the Broncos and he outran the horse carrying the flag on the field between quarters. That happened to be the same game that he threw a 50 yard pass to himself when the refs temporarily allowed the Broncos to field 16 players on defense and handcuffed all eligible receivers. They had to make it fair somehow….

I subscribe to Business 2.0 magazine and I usually receive the magazine about a week later than it hits newsstands. Sometimes I just can’t wait and go to the website early to see what they’re all about that month. This was the case again this month as I ran into the cover story online about Kevin Ham.

Kevin has found a way to exploit newbie internet users by using their typos and domain guesses to make truckloads of money. The article talks about if this is ethical and how many enemies he has collected over the years. I think the guy has a great idea and deserves every penny he gets for the practice. There should be (and probably is) a whole market for monetizing early internet users and their navigational mistakes. Kevin makes his money from Google/Yahoo whenever a link is clicked on a landing page that someone accidentally lands on by directly typing in their search or domain name into the address bar. The ads on his landing pages are relevant to the domain name or typo and we have all probably landed on one of his (or someone like him) pages.

Once you land on page, you have an option to leave in many different ways:

• re-type the domain name in the address bar
• hit the back button
• go to a search engine

or actually click a link and follow the advertisement. Doesn’t sound evil to me. You still get a choice and you aren’t tricked into doing something you didn’t want to do in the first place. Two things stuck out as me as I read the article, unrelated to Kevin Ham, was how Microsoft’s newest browser version IE7 will correct typos or sometimes send you to their own landing page. This is kind of like Microsoft gaming its own ad platform. Again though, I have no problem with it because you never have to click a link you don’t want to. The other thing that struck me would be how Google should give this guy a medal because landing on those pages enough as a new user would make anyone learn how to use a search engine.

More power Kevin.

I have been writing recently about Content Management Systems and have finally chosen one. I am going to post much more about it later but the main reason I needed a CMS was landing pages. These are pages on a websites that are directed towards very targeted groups of your customers. For instance, it would be You Design It having a single page with a lot of information on it for Softball Teams or another page for Christian Groups or another for Houston Screenprinting, etc.

These landing pages are great for directing those specific groups to the exact information/products/designs they are looking for. I think they have a lot of use and are definitely handy when you have a lot of content on your website. However, there are some web companies who are abusing those pages to get higher in the search engines. These companies have caused a group to form named “No More Landing Pages” that is against targeted landing pages altogether. Kind of silly and a bit extreme if you ask me. I just hope they cool their jets and don’t get the ear of Google. I don’t want to be punished for hard/smart work.