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Ja Kel Daily Dot Com Review

This is my day for reviews, apparently.

When I first went to Ja Kel Daily Dot Com, I had such a sense of deja vu that I had to check the Firefox address bar to make sure I wasn’t actually at John Chow Dot Com. The WordPress theme used is the same, the layout is the same, right down to a picture of a car in the main banner.

Now, I just wrote a post talking about learning from the people who are making money online, featuring John Chow. Jason Neuman, the editor of Ja Kel Daily Dot Com apparently felt the same and decided to create a John Chow Dot Com clone. Since Jason hopes to make money from his blog, I suppose cloning John Chow’s site does give him an edge. Jason has even cloned John’s review scheme to improve his search engine rankings for the keyword “make money”. He might have wanted to pick a less competitive keyword…even John Chow isn’t on the first page of Google results for that one.

A blog should really be judged by its content, though. Of the posts showing on the home page when I visited, 4 were paid reviews, 3 were rehashed topics from other blogs, 1 was the post about his review scheme, and 2 were original content.

One of the original posts was about Squidoo, and the other was about an article submission service. The Squidoo post was pretty much just an overview with his referral link. No problems with that, but it would have been nice to see some concrete tips for newcomers to Squidoo. The article submission service was a new one to me, and I enjoyed reading about it. I’ll be interested to see what sorts of results Jason gets with it, since article submission can be a powerful tool for getting backlinks.

So, what can we learn from Ja Kel Daily Dot Com about making money online? One is that it isn’t necessary to have much original content to blog each day, if you’re willing to reuse ideas from other blogs. The other is that using John Chow’s scheme of offering backlinks in exchange for reviews is a great way to build traffic. According to Jason, in the comments of the linked post, he had 0 subscribed readers before he started using the review for backlink scheme, and now has hundreds.

While I probably won’t subscribe to Ja Kel Daily Dot Com, I do have to admire Jason for putting together a package that makes him money online. It’s hard to argue with success.

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SELaplana Review

SELaplana is a blog by Sustines E. Laplana. The blog covers a wide variety of topics, including ones designed to help you learn to make money online. Sustines was the first person to use my new contact form (only minutes after I activated it!) and requested I review his site as part of his Join Review Me Challenge and Win promotion.

Sustines has picked an interesting way of branding himself. He calls himself the Dumb Blogger, and one claim to fame is being #1 in Google for the keyword “dumb blogger”. In fact, the top 5 results are either to SELaplana or about SELaplana. Unfortunately, “dumb blogger” doesn’t even register as having search volume, which generally means there’s less than 1 search a month.

The blog itself is an interesting mix of posts. Technology, making money, religion, there’s a little bit of everything. A truly impressive amount of content, spread over nearly 60 categories. As I was scanning the category list, there were the usual suspects, but also ones like “surgery”, and “God”. For a niche blog about making money online, there are quite a few off-topic posts.

According to Sustines, the blog gets about one thousand visitors every day. As he notes in that post, though, most of the keywords being used in search engines related to those off-topic posts, not to making money online. In my opinion, Sustines is sitting on a gold mine of information about what people are searching for online. While SELaplana doesn’t interest those visitors, he could create another niche blog or two that would.

And that brings up an excellent lesson about targeted traffic. Traffic alone doesn’t make you money, targeted traffic does. Keyword research is a critical component of writing a blog, and no blogger should write a post without having determined which keywords will bring in the right sort of traffic.

There are a few things that caught my eye that looked unprofessional that Sustines might want to fix. The first was that while he’s using the Top Commentators plugin, he doesn’t have it set to ignore his own comments (so the first entry in the top commentators list is himself). Another is that the Google ads in the right hand sidebar don’t blend well, having a white background while the sidebar itself has a gray background.

The sheer number of links in the sidebar is a bit overwhelming. The last 30 posts are shown in the sidebar, along with a list of projects, the most popular posts, the MyBlogLog widget that shows pictures of recent visitors, and a few links to anime guides.

I’d like the blog more if it were more focused on the primary topic, making money online, and didn’t have quite so much visual clutter.

With one thousand visitors a day, though, Sustines is sitting on a traffic stream that he should be able to make money from, if he can come up with a blog targeting what those visitors want.

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John Chow Results

Some of you may be wondering what actual results come out of doing a review of JohnChow.com and getting a link from his blog. My post about what John’s done right that beginning bloggers can learn from qualified as a review, and a link to Online Opportunity from his blog was posted Friday night.

During the day Saturday, JohnChow.com sent 27 visitors my way (edit: another 16 Sunday). Several of them left comments, not only on my John Chow post, but on other posts (thanks to everyone who commented, I appreciate you taking the time to look over the blog). A couple suggested I review their blogs in exchange for backlinks (which I will do over the next week).

So, all told the amount of traffic generated isn’t staggering. But at least in the case of Online Opportunity, it’s targeted traffic since a large number of the readers at JohnChow.com are interested in making money online. So I probably got a couple more regular readers out of the deal.

Another benefit is to my page rank. I won’t know how much of a benefit this is until the next page rank update. But as I’ve said before, page rank is a minor factor for traffic generation (it’s highly relevant if you want to sell links or do paid reviews).

The biggest benefit, from my point of view, is the increase in relevancy a link from JohnChow.com gives to Online Opportunity. The post that links to the review sites is rich with the keyword “Make Money Online”. A link from that sort of page increases my relevancy for that search term. I asked John to use the anchor text “Online Opportunity” for the link, which increases my relevancy for that search term, too.

Since I’m currently jockeying for top position in Google for the keyword “Online Opportunity”, the relevancy boost is helpful. I’m not even in the running for “make money online”, but the relevancy boost there is nice, too. To keep boosting my relevancy for “make money online”, I’ll likely steal John’s idea of providing a backlink for reviews, like many other sites have done. That’s a strategy for the long-term, but John’s shown it works.

So the John Chow effect wasn’t quite as great as I’d hoped, but I expect it to pay off in future search engine traffic.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by from JohnChow.com. Stop by again!

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RandLife Review

I referred to Randall Cornett’s blog, RandLife, in my post, How to Make Money Blogging: What Would John Chow Do?. Well, Randall has entered the ranks of bloggers who run contests to gain reviews of his site with his Here’s your chance at winning a easy $100.

Since I write a blog about making money online, I could hardly pass up an opportunity to make an easy $100. Competition is fierce, though, with the likes of Jane May involved.

On with the review! RandLife is a blog about many topics, including affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, blogging techniques, and, in his own words, “my ever so boring ramblings”.

One of the things I really like about RandLife is that it’s a blog that includes topics about making money blogging, and Randall is actually making money blogging. That’s a significant accomplishment, and testifies to Randall’s perseverance. He says he made $55.78 in May by putting Google’s Adsense ads on his blog.

Now, before you start to say something about that not being much money, let’s put it into perspective. Randall has put a very discrete ad block on the top of his home page only. The ads don’t show on individual posts. This is classy, and very respectful of his readers. Nevertheless, this means that people following links directly to posts won’t see ads.

The sort of ads that show on RandLife are typically those about making money online. Let’s say Randall gets $1 per click on those ads (I don’t know exactly how much he gets, and he can’t tell us, but keywords about making money online are typically expensive). A 3% clickthrough rate on ads is average, which means that only 3% of the people who see an ad click on it.

Let me get my high school algebra text book out…that’s 55 people clicking on ads in May, I make that at a little over 1800 visitors. Some of those may be repeats, but that’s still a good amount of traffic coming through the blog. Don’t let the relative scarcity of comments fool you, RandLife has readers.

While some of the posts on RandLife are derivative, you can’t really fault Randall for that. The culture of blogging means that some topics are duplicated throughout the blogosphere. The recent acquisition of Feedburner is a great example of this. By the time I’d seen it appear for the fourth time in my RSS reader, I’d begun to tire of it.

Some of his other posts, though, are just plain interesting. His recent post about the Website Grader is an example. I’d never heard of this tool before, but it’s useful for anyone running a website. Randall gives value to his readers with lots of blogging tips.

If it sounds like I’m a fan, I am. While I cover far more than how to make money blogging at Online Opportunity, I think that’s the way that is most accessible to just about everyone. And I admire anyone who sticks with it long enough to build an audience, and who provides interesting original content.

Good job, Randall!

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Get Paid To Click Ads

I promised some safer opportunities than what I talked about in my MLM case study, and here’s one: get paid to click ads.

Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar a year investment by companies that are desperate to get you to look at what they have to offer.  Some of those companies are taking the paid to click route, where you get paid a modest fee, usually one or two cents, for looking at their advertisement. 

Their reasoning goes, if enough people look at the advertisement, someone is bound to be interested and buy.  This is hugely untargeted traffic, from an advertiser’s point of view, and I’d think it isn’t the best use of their advertising dollars.  But we can take advantage of their desire for live eyes to view their ads.

Here’s a selection of programs that all pay you to either view or click on ads.  I’m not trying to be comprehensive here, just provide an overview of what’s available.

AGLOCO

AGLOCO is a paid to surf company.  You run a small program called a viewbar on your computer, and while you surf the web targeted advertisements are displayed in the viewbar.  You get paid a portion of what the advertisers pay for displaying the ad.

If you also them purchase something through viewbar, say a book from Amazon.com, you’ll earn a part of the commission on that purchase.

Note that AGLOCO is still in the pre-launch phase as the viewbar development finishes.  Signing up now will ensure you get the viewbar when it’s ready.

The real earning power with AGLOCO comes from referring other people to the program, since that means there’s a larger pool of users to attract higher paying advertisers.

ClixSense

ClixSense is a program that pays you to click on ads and view an advertiser’s web page for about 30 seconds.  While there’s no requirement you actually look at the page (you can open it and then work in another window while waiting for your account to be credited), the assumption is that you’ll see the page even if just for a few seconds when it first comes up.

The vast majority of the clicks are worth one or two cents.  By paying a $10 annual fee, you’ll get access to higher paying clicks. 

One tip when creating your profile in ClixSense.  Check every box when they ask for your areas of interest.  They’ll use those to determine which ads to show you.  Since our focus isn’t on finding products, but on getting paid to click ads, having as many ads available as possible is the idea.

ClixSense also has a referral program, where you earn 10% of whatever your referrals earn.

Inbox Dollars

Inbox Dollars is primarily a paid survey site.  They do send emails that they pay you to read, which consists of clicking a link in the email to view an advertiser’s page.  But the primary purpose of the emails is to get you back to their site where they’ll remind you to take a survey. 

Pay per email read is generally about 5 cents.  They control how often they send emails, so you cannot work harder to read more emails. 

Surveys typically pay $1, and there are also various free offers that pay up to $2, and free trials that pay up to $15. 

Inbox Dollars has a referral program, too, paying you $5 for each person you refer.  They also have a signup bonus, where you get $5 just for signing up.

Earnings Potential

So how much can you earn with these free programs?

Well, AGLOCO earnings are unknown, since the viewbar isn’t available yet.  Let’s focus on ClixSense and Inbox Dollars.

Assume an average pay per click on ClixSense of 1 cent.  You can get higher priced clicks, but not often enough to affect the average if you’re going for high volume.  Assume a minute viewing each ad page.  You only need 30 seconds, but if you’re switching windows to do something else you probably won’t check back in 30 seconds every time. 

If you have a couple of hours free each evening, with weekends off, that’s about 40 hours a month, for about $24 per month.  Nothing to write home about, but if you’re on the computer anyway you might as well get the money for it. 

Inbox Dollars earnings for paid emails will be about 5 cents a day, for a total of $1.50 each month.  The real earnings with Inbox Dollars comes from paid surveys and trial offers. 

Let’s say you take their daily survey for $1 every weekday, and complete one trial offer a week for $10.  That brings you up to $61.50 each month. 

So your total earnings between the two programs would be $85.50 each month for a couple of hours investment each weekday. 

Many beginning bloggers don’t get up to this level of earnings.  But with blogging you get far more leverage for higher earnings, if your blog becomes popular. 

Use a New Email Address

When you sign up for these programs, do not use your regular email address.  You won’t get a huge amount of email, but it’s best to isolate your personal email from this sort of traffic, just in case your email gets onto a spam list of some sort. 

You can get a free email address with plenty of space at Gmail.com.

Conclusions

You can get paid to click ads, but the amount of money you make from any one click is small.  So, as the saying goes, you have to make up for it in volume.  Join as many programs as possible, and click as many of their ads as you can in a day. 

You’ll make far more money creating a popular blog or website, but getting paid to click ads requires far less creative energy, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t think they have anything interesting to say (I disagree, but that’s the subject of another post).

Regular readers will remember my Marketing Pond review.  Marketing Pond consolidates quite a few paid to click opportunities, including those mentioned above, under one banner, making it easy to join them all and to take advantage of the various programs’ referral bonuses.

Have any experiences with paid to click programs?  Leave a comment and let us know!

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MLM Home Based Business : A Case Study

You may be asking yourself, “Why is Jay looking at an MLM opportunity when John Chow makes over $10K a month blogging?”

There are a lot of people out there attracted to multi-level marketing. The idea of leveraging the earning potential of those you recruit is a powerful attraction. These people are often those who can least afford to lose money online…they may be working at jobs they hate, and have little energy left to devote to an online business. Yet the idea of making $1 or so filling out surveys online doesn’t appeal to them.

If you’re one of these people, I want you to stop, and wait. True to the mission of this blog, I’m going to pay the money and take the risk, and let you see whether you really can succeed at an MLM opportunity with only part-time effort. This will take some time, because I want to make sure that I allow enough time to make a fair evaluation.

So today I’ll review the program I’ve chosen, and let you know how I’m going to proceed. Then in a few weeks, I’ll be back with the results. If you want to view the ongoing details, you can go to Apsense.com and join my NPN group.

The MLM opportunity I’ve chosen is called The New Plan Network (NPN).

The best sort of MLM opportunity is one where members do not pay just to support those above them. That’s why I like Agloco, since members don’t pay anything at all. NPN does require a monthly payment, but provides some Internet marketing services in return. The services provided are:

  1. Autoresponders: setup a series of email letters to be sent to prospects over a period of time.
  2. Generic opportunity capture pages that feed into your autoresponder
  3. The NPN Messenger: an instant messenger sort of application specific to your upline and downline at NPN.
  4. Ad Trackers: see which of your online marketing efforts are getting the most traffic.
  5. URL Rotator: display one of several possible web pages when going to a rotator address.
  6. A Clickbank front end: a store of Clickbank products you can direct people to, with your Clickbank id associated with all the products.
  7. Banner Rotator: every member can provide three banner advertisements that are then displayed on the NPN web pages.
  8. Multi-Downline Builder: you can provide details of up to five other MLM programs you support, and anyone you recruit into NPN will see the links to those programs.
  9. NPN Toolbar: a toolbar with quick links to NPN news and the members area of the site.
  10. Leads: you can purchase the contact information for people who have indicated an interest in online opportunities

Now, none of this alone is remarkable, and many are available for free. But packaged together, you could justify $10 a month for the services.

Their primary selling point is that they use a 5×5 forced matrix for people you refer to the program. This means that if you refer Jim and Sally, Jim will be under you and Sally will be under Jim. This supposedly keeps Jim interested in the program, since he got a referral unexpectedly.

Earnings are a modest $0.50 per member in your downline. With a 5×5 matrix, you can have up to 3,905 people in your downline, for a total of $1,952.50 per month. You also are paid $5 per month for each person you personally referred. To further complicate things, if you or your personal referrals have recruited at least 1 new paid member in the month, you will also earn a bonus equal to what your personal referrals earn that month.

All this makes it a bit tough to estimate a possible income. Theoretically, if we don’t manage to recruit anyone at all, but our sponsor does, we’ll still end up with people underneath of us and earning money.

Seems like a great deal, right?

That’s part of the goal of this case study, to see how it works out in practice. I’ll be marketing NPN the way a typical beginning online marketer would do so, using methods that are quick and easy, sometimes trading money for effort. This includes:

  1. Using NPN’s own lead packages ($30 per month)
  2. Posting in appropriate forums
  3. Sending emails to safelists
  4. Some bulk pop under traffic

We’ll see in a few weeks how effective these methods are. Again, to keep closer track of the results, see my NPN group on Apsense.com.

While we’re waiting to see how this goes, I’ll review a couple of far safer opportunities. See you tomorrow!

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How To Make Money Blogging: What Would John Chow Do?

In any field, if you want to be good at something you look to those who are and see what they’re doing right. If there’s something that John Chow does well, it’s make money online using his blog.

I’d really love to look at what John does to monetize his blog. But that’d be a bit like telling you how Bill Gates gets business loans. A beginning blogger simply can’t use the same techniques and expect success.

So I want to go back in time and see how John started. How did JohnChow.com start off? Using the magic of the Wayback Machine, we can take a look through the mists of time and see the site as it stood on December 4th, 2000.

You’re probably thinking, “my blog’s much cooler than that!” Keep in mind that the Wayback Machine doesn’t always do a good job of capturing themes in a site, so I’m not sure if the site looked that bad. But you’re probably right that your blog looks much better.

The site doesn’t change much until late 2005, when it has become an actual blog. One of the things that strikes me right off is that the mix of posts is about the same as now. Some personal posts, some online marketing, and some technology related posts. John writes about the things that interest him, and that interest comes through the blog.

According to John himself, he didn’t monetize the site for nine months, so from December 2005 until about September 2006 the blog was run without any advertisements. This allowed John to build a loyal readership.

Too many bloggers who start out wanting to make money with their blog create a blog with no content in it and put in the maximum number of Adsense blocks possible. But it’s the reader of a blog who click on the links, and many people are turned off by advertisements on a new blog.

Do you have to wait nine months? Not necessarily. Randall Cornett waited three months, and showed over $50 in advertising income for the month. Not quite up to John Chow’s approximately $350 in his first month, but it’s a good sign you don’t have to wait quite as long to monetize your blog.

The key would be whether you have readers who are participating in your blog. Do they leave comments? Do they seem to care about what you’re posting? If so, you could probably get away with placing some discreet ads on your blog.

Keep in mind that less is often more, though. Jane May reported an increase in Adsense income from removing ad blocks from one of her blogs. The key is that you don’t want to annoy your readers…they’re the ones who make you money.

So what John Chow did right is to start a blog on topics he was passionate about, and build a loyal readership. At the point when he started monetizing the blog, he was popular enough for it to not affect his readership.

What else has he done right?

John offered links from his page to people who review his site. By linking to other sites, John shares a bit of his PR with them…in essence, hanging around with the popular kid makes you a bit more popular, too. Of course, this resulted in more traffic to JohnChow.com which meant more readers.

Many bloggers are obsessive about page rank (PR). Now, realistically, PR isn’t that important for traffic. Traffic comes from your search engine rankings and from links to your site. PR is a result of good links to your site, but improving your blog’s relevancy to search terms will do more than raising your PR to get you sustainable traffic. But PR is a metric, and people love to maximize metrics. John capitalized on this love of PR to get links to his blog.

Let me repeat from above, it’s your readers who make you money. Growing your readership is the most important part about making money blogging.

Take a look back at the chart of John’s earnings since he started monetizing his blog, and you’ll see the dollar amounts increase month after month. This no doubt reflects an increasing readership.

So if we ask, “What would John Chow do?”, the answer seems to be to write about what interests you and build a loyal readership before even considering monetizing a blog.

Have you had different experiences with ads on blogs? Leave a comment and let us know!

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Safelist Advertising

I’d heard the term “safelist” used in conjunction with email advertisements, and finally had time to hunt up a couple of safelist sites to see what it was all about.

A safelist is basically where you send email out to a list of people. But unlike typical lists of email addresses you might buy, where the email has been harvested from web pages and newsgroups, and the people probably don’t want to receive your email, a safelist is an opt-in list. This means that every member of the list has agreed to receive emails from the list.

So it’s safe to email to the list, and won’t be considered spamming.

As part of my research, I ran across people saying that safelists don’t work. Never one to take someone else’s word for anything, I joined up with Herculist to see how it all worked. I created a new gmail address to put onto the list, since I expected I’d be receiving a lot of emails (I was right).

And then I sent out an ad myself.

Over the next day or so, I received dozens of ads to my Herculist specific email address. The first few I read, then I got into the habit of simply deleting them as they came in. And when I received no hits on my ad, I realized that everyone else was doing the same. There was simply no motivation for me to pay any attention to the ads.

I began to see why people say safelist advertising doesn’t work.

Over at Apsense.com, someone referred me to GotSafeList.com, and seemed to be genuinely enthusiastic about it. So I went to check it out, and signed up for their free level of service. Again I created a new gmail address for the safelist. Upon confirming both my safelist email and my main contact email, I was given 5,000 credits for signing up. A credit is basically an email sent to a single person.

So I could send an email to 5,000 people on the list (there were just over 5,000 on the list). There was also something called a hotlink site I could setup. Meanwhile, the ads started arriving in my inbox.

Again, I read the first couple. At the bottom of each there was a link to earn credits from having read the email. So I clicked on the link, figuring that earning credits was a good thing. The website specified by the person who sent the ad (their hotlink site) was shown in my web browser and I had to leave it there for 10 seconds to get the credits. So I looked at the site. At the end of 10 seconds I closed the browser, having earned a few credits.

The next ad earned me cash when I clicked the link ($0.0001). Turns out that GotSafeList can give you credits or cash when you click on the link, more or less randomly. The cash won’t make you rich, but if you accumulate enough of it you can turn it in for extra features at GotSafeList.

I began to see why the person who referred me was so enthusiastic about GotSafeList. Unlike the other safelist site I’d tried, here members had an incentive to click through to your site, and to look at it for at least 10 seconds. And it was kind of fun to wait and see if I’d get credits or cash (once I got banner credits…I’m not sure what they’re used for, but I’ll have to find out).

It’s too early for me to know if GotSafeList is more effective than other safelists, but I at least feel like my ad and website is going to be seen, and that’s far better than having the ad deleted with a dozen others.

I’d love to hear your experiences with safelists!

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Apsense.com Review

Apsense.com is a social networking site for people looking to do business online. This includes network marketers, or just people looking to promote an online store.

The purpose of the site is not to market your opportunity to the other members, although it’s inevitable that some members will spam others with hyped up opportunities. The real purpose of the site is to build a network of contacts that can support you in your own efforts.

Let’s say that you are having trouble keeping up with sending emails out to a list of subscribers. You go to Apsense.com and ask for help. People who’ve been there before make suggestions (perhaps setting up an autoresponder so you can write ten emails when you have the time, and have them sent on a regular schedule). Or maybe you’re having trouble getting people to your web site, so you go and ask for advice from people who’ve been through the process.

Building a network of contacts for support is essential to any business success, including making money online. Apsense.com is one way of doing this.

The site functions a bit like MyBlogLog. You can create groups (like MyBlogLog’s communities) that others can join, and each group has a discussion board. You can ask other group members for help, and the group can take on collaborative projects if they want. Apsense.com also offers free advertisements that display on their site, so if you have a service that might help others succeed online you can get exposure for it without spamming the groups. The advertising is credit based, and I think you earn credits by participating in the site.

So far, the site’s community seems very helpful and friendly. There are some of them that just spam the groups with their own opportunities, but most seem to want to network and help in the way the site intends.

As a bonus, to try and build the community during the pre-launch phase, Apsense.com is giving away a year’s VIP membership to the first 2,500 (now 5,000) members. I’m not sure how far along they are in giving these away, but I signed up earlier today and was able to upgrade. The upgrade link says it’ll cost money, but if you click it and there are still free upgrades left you will not have to enter any payment information. I haven’t figured out yet what the VIP membership gives you over the free membership, but it’s worth upgrading if you’re one of the first to get there.

So, all told this seems like one of the better social networking sites for online businesses. I’d tried AdlandPro without too much success (the ratio of spam to advice was quite high).

If you’d like to try Apsense.com, click here to join. Don’t forget to join the Online Opportunity group there and say Hi!

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Marketing Pond Review

I ran across Marketing Pond just the other day, and it’s an interesting enough concept to deserve an in-depth review.

The website makes the following claims:

  • An autopilot income: this is something most every opportunity claims, so no surprise there.
  • Free advertising
  • Free website
  • Free opportunity
  • Free ebooks

The website mentions a downline, so right away we know we’re dealing with some sort of network marketing. My basic rule with network marketing is that in order to be a reasonable opportunity, the people you recruit cannot be paying your income. Otherwise it breaks down eventually.

Since Marketing Pond advertised itself as free, I signed up to get a closer look at what they offer.

The website itself isn’t extremely clear on this. When you sign up, you get to a page listing 27 different programs (11 free advertising programs, and 16 money making opportunities). Each program has a spot where you can put your affiliate id for that program, and a link to where you can signup for the program.

After puzzling through the rest of the website, it turns out that Marketing Pond is what I’ll call an “opportunity aggregator”, but the rest of the world calls a “downline builder”. All of the programs listed provide some benefit for referring new members to the service. Promoting more than a few of these programs individually would be a pain, and dilute your efforts.

What Marketing Pond does is provide a central place for signups for these programs. You promote Marketing Pond, and anyone who signs up under your referral will then sign up under each of the 27 programs under your referal for those programs, automatically (Marketing Pond automatically puts your affiliate id in the right spot for each program).

When I realized what Marketing Pond was doing, I was a bit amazed that I hadn’t thought of it myself. As a programmer, I could create a website like Marketing Pond with no trouble. And it makes a lot of sense to promote a single website rather than try to promote dozens. I’d never thought of it, but someone did.

The hardest part about getting started with Marketing Pond is signing up for all the programs. If you’re already a member of a program, you just put in your affiliate id. There’s no requirement that you sign up through Marketing Pond. You should sign up for any you aren’t already a member of through Marketing Pond, though, to give your sponsor proper credit and make sure you get credit from your referrals.

It took me a few hours to sign up for all the programs. Some are more involved than others, and all had confirmation emails and an opt-in process.

I want to give a brief overview of each of the programs involved. I’ll post more detailed reviews of the interesting ones later. The programs fall into two general categories: opportunities and advertising.

The opportunities are where you make money, and the advertising programs all provide a boost to your marketing efforts as you get more and more people signed up under you at Marketing Pond.

Opportunities at Marketing Pond

  • Agloco: Get paid to surf the web. I’ve written about this before.
  • Inbox Dollars: Get paid to read email and take surveys. You get $5 for just signing up.
  • Take the Internet Back: Get paid to look at advertisements. You get $10 for just signing up.
  • Slash My Search: Get paid to make web searches, or for referring others to make web searches.
  • Treasure Trooper: Get paid to participate in free trial offers. Make a portion of what your referrals make.
  • Cash Crate: Get paid to complete surveys and join websites. Make a portion of what your referrals make.
  • Clicks Matrix: Primarily a traffic exchange, but you can also get paid to view websites
  • Donkey Mails: Get paid to read emails and view advertisements.
  • No Minimum: Get paid to read emails and view advertisements.
  • MyLot: Like MySpace, but you’re paid to participate.
  • Clix Sense: Get paid to view advertisements, plus earn a portion of what your referrals earn.
  • AdBux: Get paid to view advertisements, plus earn a portion of what your referrals earn.
  • LinksGrand: Get paid to view advertisments, plus earn a portion of what your referrals earn.
  • Word Linx: Get paid to view advertisements, plus earn a portion of what your referrals earn.
  • Hits4Pay: Get paid to view advertisements.
  • Deals N Cash: Get paid to view advertisements, plus $5 for signing up. Make a portion of what your referrals earn.

Now, clearly you’re not going to be active in all of these. Inbox Dollars and Take the Internet Back are easy enough, since they send you emails and pay you to read them (generally about $0.05 per email). One or two of the others may strike your fancy, but you won’t participate in them all. Go ahead and sign up for each through Marketing Pond, though, to take advantage of the referral bonuses.

Advertising Programs at Marketing Pond

  • Traffic Digger: Typical viral advertising, the more people you refer, the more times your ad is shown.
  • Ad Grid Network: This one is an ad exchange. You show their ad block on a website, and your ad gets shown on other people’s websites. You can see an example of the ad block on my personal blog.
  • Page Swirl: They provide ad rotating on a page swirl page. If you upgrade to paid options, they’ll use various traffic exchanges to advertise your page swirl page.
  • Traffic Swarm: You get credits by viewing other people’s pages, that are then used to show your page. The best option is to include Traffic Swarm links on your website. That way your links show up on other people’s website, rather than just being seen by other Traffic Swarm users. Here’s an example of Traffic Swarm links (these opportunities are not being recommended, this is just an example of using Traffic Swarm):
  • Traffic Roundup: Another one where you earn credits by viewing other people’s sites that are then used to show your site.
  • Free Viral: In this one, when you go to the Free Viral page, you see 7 advertisements. To sign up, you must click on each advertisement to get a code. After you signup, your ad is put into the list (through the above link, my ad is in the #1 spot), and as people sign up under you it gets pushed down the list. Eventually it can be seen by thousands of people as they signup.
  • Link Referral: Another view a site to get credits deal, but they also include the option to review a site for more credits. A reviewer is going to pay more attention to the site, so is a better prospect.
  • Link Scout: By promoting your Link Scout page, you get your ad viewed. You can also earn credits by viewing other ads.
  • Traffic Wave Profits: Another advertising aggregator that has one or two programs in common with Marketing Pond, but also has a paid program or two.
  • Big Daddy Pays: A search engine that lets you place ads by bidding on keywords. Everyone who joins gets one top spot on any available keyword for free. Your ads cost credits, which you earn by viewing other ads or by reading email announcements from Big Daddy Pays.
  • Hits2U: Your ads are displayed on the Hit2U page. This also seems to be a feeder for GDI (Global Domains International), which is a company that sells .ws domains and hosts them for $10 a month. They pay you to refer new people to them.

One of the key points in most traffic exchanges is that you only have a few seconds to interest someone who is really only interested in getting credits for their own website. So your page has to catch their attention quickly.

The advertising programs can be used to advertise any opportunity, not just Marketing Pond, so it would be useful to join just for those if you already have an opportunity you’re promoting.

Conclusions

While the number of programs in Marketing Pond can be overwhelming, it’s quite a clever concept. You promote one website rather than 27, and automatically get referrals for the 27 programs.

That said, you probably won’t be able to keep up with all the traffic exchanges. Most give you some free credits to get started, though, which you can use to advertise Marketing Pond itself.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this with Free Viral, though, since the only people who see your ad are the ones you’re referring (e.g. the people already signed up with Marketing Pond). Instead, pick another opportunity to advertise with Free Viral, something you think Marketing Pond users would appreciate (e.g. something free).

With the signup bonuses and a few paid emails, I made about $22 the first day. That isn’t sustainable, since the signup bonuses accounted for $20 of that. But that was just from reading emails and taking a couple of surveys.

Will I keep up with taking surveys and reading free emails? Not to that level, since the amount of time needed is large enough I can’t justify it. Someone who needed the money more than I do might have a different perspective.

The concept of the opportunity aggregator or downline builder is an interesting one. Marketing Pond is themed around traffic exchanges and easy ways to get a little bit of money online. I could see the idea being used for other sorts of network marketing opportunities, too. As a free service, Marketing Pond beats page rotators hands down.

Let me know what you think!