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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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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It seems like that for an eternity Feedburner stat counters have adorned blogs far and wide. Many bloggers have blogged about their Feedburner RSS Reader stats, increasing their RSS Reader stats and the value of Feedburner stats. A common philisophy evolved that the higher the number of RSS readers a blog has, the more worthy it is of advertising dollars. I believe this philosophy is archaic and any advertiser who is seeking an indicator of a blog’s strength for advertising purposes should never equate Feedburner RSS reader stats, which are easily gamed, with true “eyes on” traffic. Here’s why I believe this…

Holding Contests to Inflate Feedburner RSS Reader Stats

Countless bloggers have used contests to inflate their RSS reader stats. In the end they are only getting “ghost readers”, not real readers. Maybe you or I would never do it but wherever there is a contest on the internet that requires somebody to do something, there are cheaters trying to manipulate the system. For example : SockPuppet Blog is holding a contest. They are giving a Flip Mino to one lucky winner. All you have to do is subscribe to SockPuppet RSS feed by email. Great… So 15yo Wing Chen, who thinks he’s a genius hacker, uses 100 @mailinator.com disposable email addresses to subscribe to SockPuppet’s feed 100 times. Of course SockPuppet sees Wing Chen is cheating and disqualifies him from the contest but SockPuppet still has 100 new RSS feed readers. Rinse and repeat the contest ad nauseum to end up with thousands of “ghost readers”.

Using Bloglines to Inflate Feedburner RSS Reader Stats

Nothing can inflate Feedburner RSS reader stats faster and wider than being listed in “most popular subscriptions according to Bloglines members” (ask Michael Arrington). Of course, the most popular subscriptions never changes because 9 out of 10 new Bloglines users will choose to auto-subscribe to those featured blogs. Oops, I forgot to mention that Feedburner pulls subscriber count data from Bloglines on a daily basis… As with many online services, Bloglines probably has 10% active users at best, the rest are abandoned accounts or ghost accounts created by people who sign up hundreds of Bloglines accounts so they can sell “100 RSS Subscriber” packs on black hat webmaster forums. An industrious gamer could feasably create 20-30 Bloglines accounts every day using a different proxy and add desired feeds.

Using Feedblitz to Blitzkrieg Feedburner RSS Reader Stats

Feedblitz is a third party service used by Feedburner to agregate RSS reader data. Feedblitz allows readers to subscribe to an RSS feed via email. It’s a very popular service, especially with people who long ago learned to game this system simply by using a “catch all” email address on a domain they own to subscribe hundreds, if not thousands of times with email addresses @ their domain. As soon the subscribers are activated, use a qmail filter to pipe all the Feedblitz emails into /dev/null to make it look like the emails are being read and not bounced. And you were wondering how some of those awful blogs have 600+ RSS subscribers while you only have 16 ?

Should I Game my Feedburner RSS Reader Stats?

No offense to Feedburner, Feedblitz and Bloglines. They are all great services that I use daily and highly recommend to every blogger. They have to leave their systems relatively open for sincere users and the tactics used by people trying to game the system are not harmful to the rest of the users, so it’s a non-issue. At best, gaming Feedburner RSS Reader Stats is a personal, ethical issue that one must deal with for oneself. Which is why I believe that using the number of RSS readers a blog has to gauge it’s effectiveness from an advertising standpoint is ludicrous.

The funniest attempts to game Feedburner stats I’ve ever seen involve bloggers who either replace their Feedburner image with somebody elses or create a fake image that show off their desired count. One blogger even got called out for faking his feedburner image which was quite embarassing and led to the eventual demise of his “super affiliate” blog.

My opinion on gaming stats is “why bother” because in the advertising business, long term relationships are far more important than suckering people into believing you’re something that you’re not. I would rather have happy long term advertisers than an advertiser who feels cheated after the first contract expires and never advertises again.

         

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The competition to build a better search engine is as old as the internet itself but the one thing about search that hasn’t changed is that search is almost always text based. For example, when we search on Google, we’re given a set of text based results with some links to click but we can’t see what’s on the page ahead of us in a visual sense.

Every now and then something comes along that redefines how we think about the way we do things. Something as simple, yet fundamental as search. SearchMe is a new search engine that shows you results as an image gallery of the results you can flip through and filter by topic. It’s like flipping through pages of a magazine looking for an article you want to read.

Here’s a screenshot…

I’ve been using SearchMe for a few days now to test it’s features and the relevancy of search. Let’s face it - If a search engine looks pretty but the search isn’t relevant, what good is it? Compared to other searches I’ve tested such as Cuil and Scour, SearchMe is by far the best search overall in terms of relevancy.

SearchMe was voted one of the 50 Best Websites 2008 by Time Magazine. It has developed a loyal following everywhere except at TechCrunch

         

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