In February I wrote a post about how for many people (who actually care about the quality of their work), low self esteem is one of the largest competitors to getting a fair market rate for the work they do. And low self-esteem can happen to anyone at any level of business:

What should have been asked, but wasn’t, is this: A-Rod, putting aside the Y&S line — since you weren’t that young, and you certainly aren’t that stupid — where does your low self-esteem fit into this equation?

Because that — low self-esteem — serves as the pure truth when explaining why a guy who already was by far the best shortstop in the game, if not the best overall player, would decide that steroids are the way to go. Low self-esteem is what makes a player of A-Rod’s abilities turn to Scott Boras, an agent who eliminates all other factors — comfort level, compatibility, organizational professionalism — and makes the number of zeroes at the end of your contract the only thing that matters when counseling his clients.

Self Doubt is a Strong Self Protective Strategy

The rub of it is that self-confidence is often counter-intuitive. Real experts are often self skeptical, challenging their own experiences & assumptions.

Approval is not the goal of investing. In fact, approval is often counter-productive because it sedates the brain and makes it less receptive to new facts or a re-examination of conclusions formed earlier. Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns. - Warren Buffett [PDF]

Public Relations Hacks

Whereas the fake experts just sell junk:

Baker, author of the new book "Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy," comments: "If someone works for a trade association, they're there to push the industry line. Talk to someone with another perspective."

And they often do so EVEN WHEN they know they are wrong:

Q: Were you wrong to be so bullish?
A: I worked for an association promoting housing, and it was my job to represent their interests. If you look at my actual forecasts, the numbers were right inline with most forecasts. The difference was that I put a positive spin on it It was easy to do during boom times, harder when times weren’t good. I never thought the whole national real estate market would burst.

Do You Trust Sales Copy?

The lies baked into sales copy and public relations make sales harder than it needs to be because they teach consumers to be distrusting, and what marketers are selling is hope. Some people can sell get rich programs and pyramid schemes with a smile on their face, whereas others under-sell their own potential due to modesty and uncertainty.

The truth rarely ends up in marketing copy, so we discount much of what we read, assuming some of it to be false or over-stated. A person that is mostly driven by being an expert will likely have sales copy that sounds wishy-washy, especially when compared against a person who does nothing but write sales copy (or spin public relations) for a living.

Businesses have to hold contests to pry testimonials out of consumers, because without them all we have is sales copy, and people generally don't share specific numbers unless they are paid to (in one way or another).

Marketers Sell Hope

It is not that marketing is evil, but that consumers are gullible. The market for something to believe in is infinite, but we want to get behind a person with confidence so we are certain they are right. That is why there are so many hyped up launches with big guarantees and little substance behind the products...they work because we are suckers that want to pay for certainty, even if that certainty is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

Excessive Self Confidence Crushes Longterm Returns

Ironically, the more confident a person is, the more likely they are to be ignorant:

“There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear he might be one of them. Dr. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

“On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dr. Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.”

As Jill Whalen recently wrote in this great article, the answer to many SEO questions is "it depends." Which is why it is important for SEOs to keep launching new websites and have multiple data points to compare their experiences against. It helps keep us honest and uncertain and learning.

But the less confident you sound, the more sales you lose if/when you sell how to information.

Brian Clark Rocks

I generally have been better at giving people other copy tips than I have been at writing our own copy. A sales letter is rarely a good spot to be self-depreciating or hold back, but for me it seems a self-aggrandizing feat unless it is broken down into chunks, patterned after another starting point, and/or done with the help of a master copywriter. This is proven by how Brian Clark killed it when he helped us out in the past, and proven once again with the great work of our current conversion boosting partners.

Interactive Sales Copy Writing

When you run a community website your sales copy selects who joins the community. Push conversion too hard and you get a community that looks nothing like the great community we have been lucky enough to build.

We have been working again on making our sales copy sharper and more confident with more concrete stuff in it...and the sales increased much more than I would have expected because I mistakenly assume people are far more rational than they are and know me way better than they do. That is not to say we try to state anything false to make a sale, but we have the input from people who are confident and sales/conversion oriented...they come up with ideas and we implement the best bits that really fit what we feel fits our brand.

Learning From My Mistakes

In years past I believed that you could do everything yourself, but this is probably one of my biggest flaws from a business perspective. One has to recognize their own limitations (or be held back by them for a lifetime). In some cases it is best if the person providing the service lets someone else help write the sales copy...works for me! :)

Originally when we published this we were going to make it subscriber only content, but the change is so important that I thought we should share some of it with the entire SEO industry. This post starts off with a brief history of recent algorithm updates, and shows the enormous weight Google is placing on branded search results.

The Google Florida Update

I got started in the search field in 2003, and one of the things that helped get my name on the map was when I wrote about the November 14th Google Florida update in a cheeky article titled Google Sells Christmas [1]. To this day many are not certain exactly what Google changed back then, but the algorithm update seemed to hit a lot of low level SEO techniques. Many pages that exhibited the following characteristics simply disappeared from the search results

• repetitive inbound anchor text with little diversity
• heavy repetition of the keyword phrase in the page title and on the page
• words is a phrase exhibiting close proximity with few occurrences of the keywords spread apart
• a lack of related/supporting vocabulary in the page copy

The Google Florida update was the first update that made SEO complicated enough to where most people could not figure out how to do it. Before that update all you needed to do was buy and/or trade links with your target keyword in the link anchor text, and after enough repetition you stood a good chance of ranking.

Google Austin, Other Filters/Penalties/Updates/etc.

In the years since Google has worked on creating other filters and penalties. At one point they tried to stop artificial anchor text manipulation so much that they accidentally filtered out some brands for their official names [2].

The algorithms have got so complex on some fronts that Google engineers do not even know about some of the filters/penalties/bugs (the difference between the 3 labels often being an issue of semantics). In December 2007, a lot of pages that ranked #1 suddenly ended up ranking no better than position #6 [3] for their core target keyword (and many related keywords). When questioned about this, Matt Cutts denied the problem until after he said they had already fixed it. [4]

When Barry asked me about "position 6" in late December, I said that I didn't know of anything that would cause that. But about a week or so after that, my attention was brought to something that could exhibit that behavior. We're in the process of changing the behavior; I think the change is live at some datacenters already and will be live at most data centers in the next few weeks.

Recent Structural Changes to the Search Results

Google helped change the structure of the web in January 2005 when they proposed a link rel=nofollow tag [5]. Originally it was said to stop blog spam, but by September of the same year, Matt Cutts changed his tune to where you were considered a spammer if you were buying links without using rel=nofollow on them. Matt Cutts documented some of his repeated warnings on the Google Webmaster Central blog. [6]

A bunch of allegedly "social" websites have adopted the use of the nofollow tag, [7] turning their users into digital share-croppers [8] and eroding the link value [9] that came as a part of being a well known publisher who created link-worthy content.

In May of 2007 Google rolled out Universal search [10], which mixes in select content from vertical search databases directly into the organic search results. This promoted

• Google News
• Youtube videos (and other video content)
• Google Product Search
• Google Maps/Local
• select other Google verticals, like Google Books

These 3 moves (rel=nofollow, social media, and universal search), coupled with over 10,000 remote quality raters [11], has made it much harder to manipulate the search results quickly and cheaply unless you have a legitimate well trusted site that many people vouch for. (And it does not hurt to have spent a couple hours reading their 2003, 2005, and 2007 remote quality guidelines that were leaked into the SEO industry. [12]

Tracking Users Limits Need for "Random" Walk

The PageRank model is an algorithm built on a random walk of links on the web graph. But if you have enough usage data, you may not need to base your view of the web on that perspective since you can use actual surfing data to help influence the search results. Microsoft has done research on this concept, under the name of BrowseRank. [13] In Internet Explorer 8 usage data is sent to Microsoft by default.

Google's Chrome browser phones home [14] and Google also has the ability to track people (and how they interact with content) through Google Accounts, Google Analytics, Google AdSense, DoubleClick, Google AdWords, Google Reader, iGoogle, Feedburner, and Youtube.

Yesterday we launched a well received linkbait, and the same day our rankings for our most valuable keywords were lifted in both Live and Google, part of that may have been the new links, but I would be willing to bet some of it was caused from 10,000's of users finding their way to our site.

Google's Eric Schmidt Offers Great SEO Advice

If you ask Matt Cutts what big SEO changes are coming up he will tell you "make great content" and so on...never wanting to reveal the weaknesses of their search algorithms. Eric Schmidt, on the other hand, is frequently talking to media and investors with intent of pushing Google's agendas and all the exciting stuff that is coming out. In the last 6 months Mr. Schmidt has made a couple quotes that smart SEOs should incorporate into their optimization strategies - one on brands [15], and another on word relationships [16].

Here is Mr. Schmidt's take on brands from last October

The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

"Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."

"Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he said. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component."

And here is his take on word relationships from the most recent earnings call

“Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that are going to roll out in the next little while.”

The January 18th Google Update Was Bigger Than Florida, but Few People Noticed it

Tools like RankPulse [17] allow you to track the day to day Google ranking changes for many keywords.

4 airlines recently began ranking for "airline tickets"

At least 90% of the first page of search results for auto insurance is owned by large national brands.

3 boot brands / manufacturers rose from nowhere to ranking at the top of the search results.

3 of the most well recognized diet programs began ranking for diets.

4 multi-billion dollar health insurance providers just began ranking, with Aetna bouncing between positions #1 and 2.

3 of the largest online education providers began ranking for online degree.

5 watch brands jumped onto the first page of search results for watches. To be honest I have never heard of Nixon Now.

The above images are just some examples. Radioshack.com recently started ranking for electronics and Hallmark.com just recently started ranking for gifts. The illustrations do not list all brands that are ranking, but brands that just started ranking. Add in other brands that were already ranking, and in some cases brands have 80% or 90% of the first page search results for some of the most valuable keywords. There are thousands of other such examples across all industries if you take the time to do the research, but the trend is clear - Google is promoting brands for big money core category keywords.

Want to read the rest of our analysis? If you are a subscriber you can access it here.

I have been a big promoter of the SEM Rush service because I think it rocks. As an extension of that, I partnered with with SEM Rush to license their data and offer the organic search piece of their service as a free bonus to our SEO training & community members.

If you are a paying subscriber you may want to check out our new competitive research tool.

Site Specific Competitive Intelligence

You can use it to find the most valuable or highest traffic rankings for competing sites

Page Specific Competitive Intelligence

You can use it to find the most valuable or highest traffic rankings for a specific page

Similar Keyword Audience

You can use it to find sites that have a large overlap in search rankings / audience

Easily Export Data

The columns are sortable and it is easily to export 1,000 listings in a couple of seconds.

Advanced Uses

On the competitive research tool page I list 10 high powered ways to use this tool. I would share them publicly, but if you only find one of those tips applicable to your site & situation you should still be able to make far more than $300 from it - making the cost of the subscription free.

Try it Now

If you are a subscriber try it now. If you are not a paying subscriber you may want to join. We keep trying our best to add new content and goodies each month :)

If only Google would sit still for one moment!

The job of the SEO would be so much easier :)

As we all know, the last thing Google wants to do is make life easy for SEOs, so we'll just have to live with the constant change. One of the biggest changes SEOs have had to adapt to in recent times has been algorithm shifts that reward big players.

For example, Google results heavily feature YouTube (owned by Google, of course) and Wikipedia pages in against almost every search we make.

Let's look at some of the advantages of big business, and ways the small guy can counter them.

Advantages Of The Big Players

Unlike the small business, large businesses have access to significant amounts of capital. They can use this capital, indirectly, to buy position.

They can run large ongoing media campaigns that ensure visitors, links and attention, and all the resulting ranking advantages that provides. Big business can cross promote their properties, which makes it easier to launch new sites. They can buy out competitors (Google - YouTube) and trounce the competition, even though they enter late. They have many employees they can throw at problems, and waves of lawyers to throw problems at others.

What does the little guy have?

An internet connection.

Google Has Devalued Easy Tricks

The low hanging fruit is gone.

Google will always be a moving target. As the structure of the web changes, Google changes with it.

In the last few years, Google have devalued on page factors, they've made link building a lot more difficult, and the playing field is far from level. When the big guys get caught out using aggressive SEO, they're often given a free pass back into the index, because to not have them showing would devalue Google. The little guy is likely to be excluded for some time.

What Can The Little Guy Do?

The big companies have one major problem.

They're big.

Because they are big, they can often only operate in tried and tested ways. For example, there's a Telecoms company that have just wasted tens of millions of dollars on a website that most bedroom SEOs could have beaten in their sleep. The site has recently been shut down.

The site was uneconomic because the only way this big Telecoms company knew how to operate was by using the biggest and "best" suppliers. So that meant hiring in consultants from the big consultancy firms. That meant employing large vendors to do their programming. It meant above-the-line advertising at prime time, and saturation advertising across newspapers and radio. It meant hiring teams of people and organizing them in the tried and tested organization structure.

Because that's how they've always released products and services.

Also consider that a lot of Web 2.0 operations, lauded in the media for the past few years as "the bright young things to watch", are now crashing to earth as their big-money funding dries up. Turns out that was the only thing keeping them going. Meanwhile, a lot of SEO-aware webmasters are enjoying a growing income because they're always had the revenue equation right.

In both cases, the access to big capital was a disadvantage. It meant these companies didn't need to be smart.

So what, specifically, can the smart, little, SEO-aware guy do?

Big Bets?

You can take big bets.

The big guys tend to be conservative, but we don't need to be. We can have a crazy idea one morning, and make it a reality by that afternoon. We can ask ourselves "Is this idea crazy enough!".

The big company finds it very hard to do that.

Big company people often fret about their jobs and reputation, they have to convince a lot of stakeholders, and there's always someone waiting to stab them in the back.

So they play it safe.

Read why Seth thinks "safe" is bad idea.

Small Niche

The big company might not be able to make money out a small niche.

In the Telecoms company example I used above, their bloated structure and operating methodology drove costs way above the potential return. However, a smaller company with lower overheads could have made a success of it.

There are thousands and thousands of small niches the big companies can never compete in.

But you can.

Personal Trust Networks

Big companies have problems personalizing their services and relationships.

The web is about to change again. And when the web changes Google changes, too. The big change is a social one.

Twitter, social media, bookmarking sites are all about "the personal". They're hard for a big company to centrally control. That suits the small guy.

Look to build up a high degree of trust with small, tightly linked networks of people. Use a blog to keep in contact. Not just any old blog - really work it. Make it unique and own your ideas. Have an opinion and shout it loud.

Try to talk to those one hundred people in your little niche who make a difference. Talk to those 100 people who think the same way you do. If they know you and trust you, they'll do a lot of your marketing for you. There remains no more effective marketing than word of mouth.

Ask your friends to help out. Cross promote their stuff. Go into joint ventures. Really work the personal, trusted relationship side, because that's the way the web is going. Trust is being decentralized.

This is one area in which the big guys are going to have a lot of problems competing.

Friendgine - Friend Search Engine

Aaron has a great idea called "Friendgine".

Set up your own, personal Google or Yahoo search engine that includes the sites of all your friends and personal network colleagues. If you ever need to link to an external article, search your friendgine first, and link to your friends if they have relevant content.

This is a subtle way to keep in contact. They'll also likely reciprocate the favor. By creating these mini trust webs you'll make it difficult for other people who haven't established such relationships, to follow. You'll have your own nepotistic closed circle :)

If you want to see a presentation on this topic, check out Aaron's Beating The Big Guy

This is going to be a bit of a personal post...if that weirds you out, then please skip it. :) It explains how my lack of self-confidence developed, and how I slowly developed confidence over the years - and used it to build a thriving online business.

A Lack of Confidence Limits Success

One of the biggest things that separates really successful people from people who are only moderately successful or just getting by is self esteem. I have always been a bit cynical in my perspective, and have been consumed with self doubt since sometime grade school. It turns out this is quite common, though few people admit it publicly.

Establishing Seeds of Doubt

One of my weird attributes is that at times it seems I have a photographic memory, but I was on the border of being legally blind - without knowing it. Whenever I would get an eye exam I would fail them in school, and then when it came time to go to an eye doctor somehow I would squint or cheat or something (to this day I am not sure how I passed them). Perhaps it was because I didn't want to be flawed or different. About half way through high school I got glasses and it made a world of difference to improving my confidence. But it only went from super low to low. ;)

My older brothers were a bit of troublemakers and picked on me a bit, which was not so good...though my sister was very caring and nurturing toward me. 2 weeks after high school I joined the Navy. The current military is not the military my grandpa served. They generally only teach you what you did that was wrong, and structure and orders did not get along well with me. So after about 6 years of that I started playing on the web, and within the first year was doing well enough to quit my job. But a lot of my flaws and self destructive behaviors did not disappear right away...many lingered for years.

Limited Perspective

I did decent off the start, but earned somewhere in the 2% to 3% of my potential. A lot of the 97% of potential revenue was missed simply because I did things to keep busy and did not act as a business person - going to SEO conferences but not really selling anything, spending thousand of hours on forums, and offering a better customer service to $79 ebook buyers than most SEO companies offer when they are getting thousands per month from their clients.

A Challenge

When I started making enough money to get by I was happy with that. When you go from making nothing to doing pretty well (even only relatively) it can feel a bit weird. What helped me decide to earn more was when Traffic Power sent a bogus lawsuit my way, costing about $40,000 in legal fees from a lawyer that told me that the $5,000 retainer was more than enough to cover the case. At that point I decided it made sense to build up a bit of a war chest in case anyone tried to screw me over again with some bogus crap like that.

Ignorance vs Scholarship

Some people are academics. Some people have street knowledge. A rare breed of person has both, while still finding enough time to do self promotion to make it all worthwhile.

The people who know the least often scream the loudest, and I have always worked hard to try to balance learning vs selling...making sure to keep myself way over on the learning end of the spectrum. The problem with that type of strategy is that unless you sell aggressively and/or apply that knowledge to the right verticals, you are simply killing your profit potential as opportunities around you disappear.

Super Salesman

I recently heard an audio interview of a multi-millionaire info-marketer who stated that he started online marketing via bulk email spam, but did not make any money doing it. His first real moneymaker was selling an information product on how to make easy money online. Think about that...here is a guy who had no success, straight out teaching others on how they can easily gain success. Sorta feels like fraud, and yet the guy can say it with a straight face and confidence. It takes a lot of self-confidence to be able to do that.

Please Recycle!

Another internet marketing company that has sold 10s of millions of dollars of internet marketing products bought my ebook and said they loved it passing it around the office. They asked beginner level SEO questions, and less than a month later they were selling an SEO info-product. Years later one of their senior members joined our training program because he was struggling to rank websites and said that he was blown away at the ideas I came up with.

Another top selling SEO course actually lifted lines from my ebook to put in their product. I am not sure if they intentionally did it, but when they asked to get an up to date copy of my ebook for the second launch of their product I was pretty certain that it wasn't an accident.

Everyone is Broken

I also get to talk to some internet marketers off the record, and some of them have revealed things like that they were about to go bankrupt, and that they created a project out of thin air because they had to in order to prevent their business from going under. Seeing that others are just as flawed behind the curtain makes it easier to be comfortable with ones own flaws.

Asking for Reciprocity

Another info-marketer in the golf space bought my ebook and then tried to use that as a free ticket for about 10 hours of consulting. I answered a number of his questions, with the end answer being "your site(s) are nothing more than cheesy spammy looking salesletters that offer the web no value whatsoever until after people give you money." Eventually I asked him if he valued his own time at $8 an hour, because I could use some help with my swing. About 2 years later my wife read a book about info-marketing millionaires, and saw this guy profiled in the book. Offer discount pricing and people will not respect you or listen to you. They will waste your time though.

Change Takes Time

Even AFTER I ranked well in the search results with many sites, spoke at dozens of SEO conferences, and was recruited by a Microsoft headhunter to head their SEO team, I still was lacking in confidence. Part of why I stuck with the ebook model so long was just general self doubt. It was working well enough, and in spite of selling $1 million worth of the ebook, helping to make many multi-millionaires (as per customer feedback), and ranking for many high value keywords, I still wondered if I knew enough to be a teacher.

There is Always an Excuse

My general lack of respect for authority made the idea of being perceived as an authority confusing. And seeing how marketing is sometimes used in exploitative manners made it hard for me to push too hard on that front. And I didn't even like subscription based business models because of how shady pharma corporations hook customers on drugs that solve symptoms rather than problems.

Markets Drive Value Toward Price

If you do not value yourself properly then the market will work to help discount the value of your time. And, considering that we are all going to die someday, it is quite self-defeating to put arbitrary limits on your potential. Yet we all do it in some ways virtually every day.

Your Are Your #1 Competitor

The whole point of this winding post is that until I gained enough self confidence there were always excuses to say "this is good enough" and/or "I can't do that." Online you have lots of competition. And any bias self-imposed limit that clouds your judgement lowers your perceived value and your ability to create profit. Your biggest competitor is yourself.

"Free" Help

Until I met my wife I was so longing for connection that I actually used to respond to emails like this one

"plz sir i am starting a new blog can you tell me that how i have to start its search engine optimization .
The details are not required but just the steps you follow while doing your work .
Please sir i am a boy of 18 years old help me i want money very urgently .
sir u know that now there is a hard competition in world of seo so anybody recieving this male please forward to Mr. Aaron for GOD sake Please .

Thanking you .
who is reading please forward thi message to Mr Aaron Wall"

There are billions of people in the world, but billions of them are unwilling to put the effort in needed to become successful.

After about 5 years of answering those types of emails, I learned the hard way that if people do not pay for help they intrinsically value your time and advice at $0 (or really close to it). Help the wrong people who are unwilling to do work and you not only waste your own time, but you get their internal frustrations cast on to you...further lowering your sense of self value. I can really see the difference in quality between free and paid when I venture off our forums to check out some of the "free" ones...a lot of misinformation to be had!

Sage Advice on Resonance

I really wish I would have listened better to one of my mentors when in 2005 he said:

I think the best brands, the best sites have a large portion of their founders personality in them. Never be afraid to be yourself, after all there are 1/2 billion people on the www, not all of them have to agree with you. Concentrate on the ones that share your views, concentrate on making their experience the very best it can be, the rest forget them.

Or to put it another way, the best sites say - this is what we do, this is how we do it, if you don't like it go somewhere else.

What helped me gain adequate self-confidence?

• My wife meeting me and falling in love with me. She thinks far more of me than I do!
• My wife pushing me to charge more and do better (at first this created stress because I took it as me not being good enough...but she was right all along. To this day she still has way more self confidence than I do and I am so lucky to have her in my life.)
• Working with some of my mentors. I was stoked when we hired Peter to help work on the blog here because he was one of the 3 people I tried to pattern my initial online strategy after (Seth Godin and a friend from the UK nicknamed NFFC being the other 2).
• Working with my partner the caveman to optimize some of the largest and most complex websites of companies worth 10s of billions of dollars...and getting repeat business from those clients (even though they have internal seo teams).
• Using the power of SEO & marketing to promote good stuff - like PBS :)
• Watching Thom Yorke's struggle with success in Meeting People is Easy.
• Some of our other projects working well and generating more revenue than this site does.
• Seeing about a half-dozen people or companies that know less about SEO the I do re-wrap my ebook in another format and sell it for anywhere from 5 to 100 times the price.
• Working with Conversion Rate Experts to improve the conversion rates of this site and seeing a great lift.
• A better and deeper connection with our customers afforded by the membership site business model where you get to see people learn in real time and see the excitement of their progress when top rankings roll in.

Still Have Some Bumps & Bruises

If you don't fail then you never tried to do anything great.

I still fall short on many goals. Today was the 1 year anniversary of the change in our business model, and I wanted to have made 10,000 forum posts in the first year, but I only made 9,928 so far...falling 72 short. I still spend too much time sitting at the computer and do not exercise or read books as much as I should. I still am a bit overweight, but I will start working on that soon...and in spite of that, I have way more self-confidence than I did a couple years ago when I was able to run a sub 6 minute mile.

Given the complete fraud that is our corrupt taxation policy and fascist banking system (everyone should be in debt forever except for the bankers who destroy trillions in wealth and loot the treasury) I have a renewed sense of cynicism, but at least I am not lacking in self-confidence! :)