A discussion of earning with the Best Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers and Affiliate Marketers.

A few months ago, the web information company Alexa redesigned their website and since then I’ve been noticing these incredibly distasteful advertisements pitching weight loss products, wrinkle removers and suspicious get rich quick schemes. While these type of advertisments are nothing new on the internet, what stood out to me was each advertisement appears to be placed by a person who is located in the same city as myself. I captured a few screenshots seen below…

When you click on any of the ads, you’re taken to different blogs that appear to be authored by a real person who resides in your home town. Some of the blogs in question are:

mywrinklesarecured.com
dianeswrinklecure.com
daily-job-news.com
rachelrayblogs.com

If you look up any of these blogs in Google, there are numerous bloggers warning that these flogs (as Jay Weintraub calls them)are blatant scams by scum of the earth affiliate marketers (Lincoln Adams’s affectionate term for the unethical blackhat set).

There have already been a few ongoing discussions about the legality of affiliate marketers using IP2Location or hostip.info databases to translate a visitor’s IP into a physical location to make it look as if the flog is authored by someone local. Some say it’s just a blackhat trick while others such as myself realize this type dishonest endorsement from non-existent consumers is in direct violation of the FTC’s “Truth in Advertising” laws designed to protect consumers from fraud.

If you have a look at the FTC Guide Concerning Use of Testimonials in Advertising, it clearly states :

§255.2 Consumer endorsements. (b) Advertisements presenting endorsements by what are represented, directly or by implication, to be “actual consumers” should utilize actual consumers, in both the audio and video or clearly and conspicuously disclose that the persons in such advertisements are not actual consumers of the advertised product.

So I have to ask myself if anybody at Alexa has ever heard of the FTC? Maybe they think it’s not their problem because the actual ads are being served through Pulse360.com which makes the following claims :

Whether you are interested in creating a campaign for ContextTarget, LocalTarget, BehaviorTarget - or any combination of the three - it all starts here. The sign-up process is simple, and before you know it your Pulse 360 campaign will be up and running. The company started as the new business name for the content-targeted sponsored links business, previously part of Kanoodle, which has been around since 1999. Pulse 360 is now a unit of Seevast, an operating company created by industry-recognized professionals to provide innovative Web-based marketing services.

OK, so Pulse360.com has a technology called “LocalTarget” that evidently thumbs it’s nose at FTC guidelines by using IP translation and phony testimonials to dupe consumers into believing they are being marketed to by somebody local. It’s also strange that the whois record for Pulse360.com clearly designates Kanoodle.com, Inc. as the owner and both sites are even on the same IP address.

What do you think? Should marketers be allowed to use these deceptive practices to dupe consumers?

         

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Past and present Google Adwords customers - check your email! You should be receiving an email notice regarding settlement of the Adwords class action lawsuit for $20 Million. If you were an Adwords customer between January 1, 2002 to February 28, 2009 and your account was charged more than your daily budget you may be eligible for piece of class action.

If you are not a Reseller, you are a member of the Class if: you reside in the United States, have paid Google for advertising pursuant to Google’s AdWords program and either (a) became an AdWords advertiser between June 1, 2005 and February 28, 2009, inclusive, and were charged more than your per day Daily Budget on any day during that time period; or (b) paused your AdWords advertising campaign on any day during the period from January 1, 2002 to February 28, 2009, inclusive, and during the same billing period when your AdWords advertising campaign was paused, were charged more than the product of your per day Daily Budget times the number of days that your AdWords advertising campaign was not paused during that billing period.

The settlement was for $20 million to be distributed between class members who meet the criteria for disbursement.

Pursuant to the settlement described herein, $20,000,000, in a combination of cash and AdWords Credits, have been created for the benefit of the Class. These funds have been placed in an interest-bearing escrow account. A Class member’s distribution from the net Settlement Fund will be determined by a Plan of Allocation to be approved by the Court. An explanation of how each Class member’s distribution will be calculated for purposes of the settlement is set forth in the proposed Plan of Allocation which is summarized in Part VI of this Notice below.

Google has denied any wrongdoing in the case.

Google, while continuing to deny all allegations of wrongdoing or liability, desired to settle and terminate all existing or potential claims against it without in any way acknowledging fault or liability.

The lion’s share is going to the lawyers but there will probably be a lot of other people who get a piece…

Representative Plaintiffs’ Counsel for the Class intend to apply for: attorneys’ fees of not more than $5,000,000, plus a proportionate share of the interest earned on the Settlement Proceeds, for reimbursement of expenses incurred in connection with the prosecution and settlement of this litigation, not to exceed $250,000; and for an incentive compensation award to the two Representative Plaintiffs, not to exceed $20,000 each.

You can get more information about this class action lawsuit at :
http://www.adwordscustomersettlement.com/

So what do you think? Are any of you reading this going to get a big windfall from this class action? Affiliate marketers are bread and butter for Adwords so there would have to be quite a few affiliate marketers in line for their settlement.

         

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In the past I’ve blogged about Using Chitika Premium and Adsense to Create Multiple Revenue Streams and how effective it is to use Google Adsense as the alternate to Chitika Premium. For anyone else who has been exercising this strategy, there’s still no issues with combining the two on a page, it’s just once again - Google in all their inimitable wisdom - has decided to make changes to the way Adsense units are served, once again causing webmasters unnecessary work. Here’s the update from Chitika in case you haven’t seen it…

We are sending you this email because it looks like you are using AdSense as an alternate ad in at least one of your Chitika ads. Because of a change that Google made to how AdSense is served, you will need to make a quick change to your alternate ad setup to ensure that it will display correctly. HERE IS WHAT YOU NEED TO DO TO MAKE SURE YOUR ADSENSE ALTERNATE AD SERVES CORRECTLY: 1. Open the .HTML file that contains your AdSense code with Notepad or any other text editor. 2. Place <html><head></head><body> before your AdSense code and </body></html> after the code - for example: <html><head></head><body> <!–ADSENSE CODE GOES HERE –> </body></html> This will ensure that your AdSense alternate URL will display properly. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us directly, leave a comment on our blog post about this, or post in our forums. Best Regards, The Chitika Team

If you’re still holding out on mixing Adsense with Chitika and you’re watching your Adsense eCPM go down faster than the Titanic, click the Chitika banner below and read the article I linked to at the beginning of this post and try a benchmark test for yourself.

         

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It’s been a while since I was last inked but last week I was hanging out with my friend “Machine Gun” Kelly in Daytona Beach doing some video of him tattooing some other friends and the tattoo bug bit me. I was looking through the mountains of flash art he has and I was going to get a pair or cards, some dice and a lucky shamrock on my shoulder but we found this tiny frog flash art that Kel enlarged and modified to come up with the calf piece seen below…

When it’s complete it will be all the way down to my ankle with some koi fish swimming under the lillypad in Kanagawa style oriental water with ornamental bamboo in the background.

If anybody reading this is in the Central Florida area and you’re looking for a phenomenal tattoo that is a world class piece of artwork, use the contact form on this blog to contact me and I’ll see what I can setup.

If you’re an affiliate who reads this blog and you have a tattoo you’d like to show off, you should check out my fledgling tattoo forum and build a few backlinks while talking about getting inked.

         

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