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

I’ll never understand why these stupid Syndik8 forum kids think they’re mastermind internet marketing wizards because they can do something so stupid as referrer spamming but apparently the little acne ridden troglodytes think they are God’s gift to making money online.

A thread was posted at DigitalPoint a few days ago that brought up an issue of some 60 year old retired troll Syndik8 ringleader who calls himself “Bompa” (possible real name David Benware) who was harvesting DigitalPoint member’s domain names and using some kiddie script to dump 500+ lines in their server logfiles as shown below :

66.225.211.249 - - [20/Jul/2008:05:39:59 -0400] “HEAD / HTTP/1.1″ 200 - “http://blackhatbootcamp.com” “MORE TRAFFIC! - MORE MONEY! - LEARN HOW!”

Even though this “black hat” SEO expert presented himself on the DP thread, admitted he was guilty as charged and attempted to apologize, he clearly stated he wasn’t stopping :

It will only be available to members of the Boot Camp. Membership is limited to only 25 at this time. Plus, not all members use all of the tools. (I know this from the other tools that I code and release to my members: KommentKing, ExtremeSearchBot, BlogCreator, etc.)

Needless to say, he was banned from DP for his actions and most likely he will be banned from his webhosting company or beter yet, his domain name might be banned because he is obviously using phony registration data :

Registration Service Provided By: NameCheap.com Contact: support@NameCheap.com Visit: http://www.namecheap.com/ Domain name: blackhatbootcamp.com Administrative Contact: na David Benware (bompa2000@yahoo.com) +1.5082222 Fax: +1.5555555555 37 Crestwood Drive Northborough, MA 01532 US Name Servers: NS1.HOSTMONSTER.COM NS2.HOSTMONSTER.COM Creation date: 15 Sep 2007 01:49:33 Expiration date: 15 Sep 2008 01:49:33

Oh well, he only only has a few months left on his domain registration. Any bets as to whether this domain gets renewed ?? Hopfully Brian Krassenstein of TalkGold forums doesn’t read this post because next thing you know we’ll be seeing referrer spam promoting Talkgold or TeamEarners.

         

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In reaction to the recent events surrounding the heavy handed move by the Associated Press to impose guidelines (and ridiculous fees) on the exerpted copy in the blogosphere, a new website billing itself as the Unassociated Press is urging bloggers to create a multipartisan buzz and let AP hear all political bloggers loud and clear. All of this is in reaction to the Associated Press issued DMCA takedowns last week to Drudge Retort bloggers for excerpting short snippets of its articles.

This scenario reminds me of the 1976 Sidney Lumet directed film Network, where the main character Howard Beale (portrayed by Peter Finch) aka the “mad prophet of the air-waves” gives a raving revelation about how the media has turned the news into entertainment for their own profit (shhh, don’t tell CNN or MSNBC). The most memorable (and often quoted) part of the film occurs when an obviously enraged Beale launches into one of the most memorable film speeches of our time…

‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:

For those of you who’ve never seen the film “Network”, here’s a clip from YouTube but be warned, although this movie was made over 30 years ago, it just might startle you how relevant the concepts are to our current existence…

If you’re a blogger and have somehow missed the news regarding the AP’s strongarm tactics which rival the RIAA’s nastiness in terms of censoring the internet to maintain their own bottom line, the New York Times carried a story The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs on June 16th which briefly highlighted the AP’s stance on this strange, new initiative of theirs.

The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright. Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words. On Friday, The A.P. issued a statement defending its action, saying it was going to challenge blog postings containing excerpts of A.P. articles “when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste.” An A.P. spokesman declined Friday to further explain the association’s position.

Of course, this ignorant action by the AP has set off fireworks across the blogosphere with bloggers such as Daily Kos openly defying the AP’s announcement of a new fee schedule called the Excerpt for Web Use Policy that bloggers have to pay to cite text from AP articles. The fees are as follows:

• 5-25 words = $12.50
• 26-50 words = $17.50
• 51-100 words = $25.00
• 101-250 words = $50.00
• 251 words and up = $100.00

If you’re scratching your head and still don’t believe all of this nonsense. Maybe it’s some sort of sick, twisted, latent April Fool’s day prank, have a look at the Associated Press Content Services webpage where these morons actually expect bloggers to fill out a form with a cut and paste of the text fragment you want to excerpt along with the url where you will be publishing the exerpt on.

Have these dinosaurs at the AP even realized that the majority of bloggers are using software to publish their articles and that the url of their story is not fully formed until the moment after the blogger presses the “publish” button ? How on earth would a blogger be able to submit their url they intend to use an excerpt on before they’ve published their story?

Not to mention, what is an AP writer who borrows content from a blog for use in an AP syndicated article supposed to do about compensating the blogger who initially broke the story? It’s a well known fact that, more often that not these days, bloggers (and YouTube users) are breaking news BEFORE the AP writers can prostitute it to their streetcorner pimps known as newspapers. How many times have we seen a story pop up on Digg or Reddit only to see it coming across CNN or MSNBC’s air-waves hours (or days in the case of print media) after it was already “old news” on the internet.

Is the Associated Press jealous that they have been made obsolete by the social phenomenon known as blogging?

         

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Publishers and affiliates worldwide who were less than enthusiastic about eBay’s decision to take their affiliate program “in-house” as opposed to operating it through Commission Junction have now been expressing distress about EPN’s shoddy tracking and reporting. Many publishers have been reporting a significant decrease in earnings since the switch from CJ to EPN and there have even been reports of EPN expiring affiliates for the quality of the traffic they are driving to eBay’s auctions. The EPN discussion boards have been flooded with disgruntled affiliates threatening Class action lawsuits and EPN stealing traffic from affiliates and in true eBay fashion, none of their moderators or representatives have responded to these discussions.

Yesterday, eBay sent out an email to all affiliates that I found in rather poor taste addressing network quality issues…

Thanks for signing up to the eBay Partner Network - we really appreciate your continuing support. Over the last few weeks, many of you have been asking questions about our policies regarding use of paid search campaigns and ad networks. We thought it would be helpful to provide some clarifications. This is important, because any affiliate that violates the eBay Partner Network Code of Conduct, Network Agreement, Program Terms or Privacy Statement runs the risk of being expired from the eBay Partner Network and/or having their pending commissions reversed. Paid Search What is Paid Search? * Direct Paid Search is where an affiliate buys keywords on a search engine and directly links the traffic to eBay from the search engine’s sponsored listings. * Indirect Paid Search is where an affiliate purchases keywords, but directs traffic to a non-eBay domain landing page that contains links to eBay. What is prohibited? * Direct Paid Search on the Tier 1 search engines of Google, Yahoo and MSN, and any of their content networks, in the US, UK, Australia and Canada programs. * Bidding on keyword eBay or any derivation of eBay on any search engine and directly or indirectly linking to eBay. * Utilizing automatic redirects to eBay from an Indirect Paid Search landing page with the intention of masking the true direct nature of the advertisement. * Please note the above list is not intended to be comprehensive. Please make sure that you are familiar with all of the eBay Partner Network terms and conditions. Ad Networks We understand that some affiliates purchase inventory in other ad networks to promote eBay. The eBay Partner Network does not explicitly prohibit the use ad networks; however each affiliate is responsible for the quality of all of the activity on their account. If you use any ad networks, we advise using great caution and that you thoroughly understand their product offering, because you are accountable any policy violations caused by activity within the ad networks you use. Violations we have seen in the past are mostly related to Section A of the eBay Partner Network Code of Conduct which states that the delivery of cookies or any sort of tracking tags not initiated by the affirmative action of an end user is strictly prohibited. Here at the eBay Partner Network, we consider maintaining a high quality network as a critical component of our job. It helps us ensure our valued affiliates get full credit for the activity they drive and helps us provide them with competitive payout terms. We’d like to thank the vast majority of our affiliates who are doing their part in maintaining the quality of their traffic as well. Regards, The eBay Partner Network Team

While I wanted to give EPN the benefit of the doubt and tried to not to be negative regarding the fact that eBay is possibly one of the most disgraceful companies regarding support, service and honesty (besides Google) and is generally not to be trusted, I kept quiet and wached as the scenario began to unfold. While everybody else was switching their CJ/eBay links to the new EPN links, I resisted and left the majority of my existing CJ links intact, only choosing to use the EPN links on new sites and pages. Now we have PepperJam Network announcing their partnership with the eBay affiliate program which makes even less sense than eBay pulling their program from CJ. Most of my readers know I am 100% supportive of PepperJam and have been a staunch supporter of the CJ/eBay affiliate program however I think eBay and EPN should spend more time concentrating on getting their end of the deal operational before they start slagging affiliates over quality. Especially when they are not exhibithing quality themselves.

It seems to be a slap in the face to us publishers and affiliates that EPN is trying to shift blame for their lackluster performance onto us. You would think a publicly traded company such as eBay who has already been the subject of unfavorable press such as this BusinessWeek article “Auctions on eBay: A Dying Breed” would realize that offending power affiliates with idiotic emails such as the one above can spell disaster to their shareholders.

EPN needs to step up to the plate and take accountability for their own actions rather than make asses of themselves with updates such as the one they issued yesterday.

Tags: eBay, EPN, Commission Junction, PepperJam, affiliate

         

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