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Trackback Submitter: The Dark Site of Blog Comments

After installing DoFollow, the blog started getting hit by a peculiar sort of spam comment.

Akismet had always been catching the porn comments, and those submitters didn’t care whether DoFollow was installed or not. The latest spam comments are from someone using a tool called Trackback Submitter. The comments were obviously auto-generated, and included a programming bug. Here’s the one that keeps showing up:

This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title nline Opportunity. Thanks for informative article

Note the title of the blog is missing the first O. The sales page (link omitted because I don’t endorse this software) for the software claims it’ll help your SEO efforts by providing your choice of anchor text submitted to thousands of targeted blog. Never mind that you’ll be spamming all those blogs with automated comments.

One of the interesting selling points of the product is this:

The only trackback submitter on the Internet which bypasses comments anti-spam plugins used on blogging software. That’s right! It does not matter that your website is not any kind of blog and you do not link to blog where trackback links are submitted, because unique Anti-Spam Killer feature makes your website to look like a standard blog which is linking to victim’s blog. Make other webmaster to worry – “How the hell this trackback got approved by anti-spam plugin, if it is not any kind of blog and even does not link to me!?”.

That’s funny, since the first I saw of these comments was in Akismet’s spam folder. Another selling point was the autogenerated comments that appear natural, when the only one I keep getting in my spam folder is the one I quoted above.

When you run across products like this, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the bloggers you’ll be spamming. They have full control over their blog, and can easily delete comments they consider to be spam. The only thing you accomplish by using a product like this is to alienate thousands of blogs on subjects similar to yours.

Put the time into making productive comments on those blogs and you’ll see much better results than by using a spam engine such as Trackback Submitter.

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Picking a Domain Name for Your Blog

I don’t recommend the use of Blogger.com for blogs you intend use to make money.

The reason is that blogging is more than just writing interesting posts. You’re going to do a lot of work building backlinks to your blog. If you eventually outgrow Blogger.com and want to move to your own domain name, you’ve lost all those backlinks and have to start from scratch.

So if making money is your goal, start with your own domain name. You can get your own domain name with free hosting (see my JustFree.com series on making your own website for free), or you can go with paid hosting (my favorite paid host is Site5, their $5 a month deal gives you enough space and bandwidth to run several websites).

Having your own domain name helps in two ways.

Branding Your Blog

Branding your blog is the process of making its name recognizable, and considered as a resource for your niche. A domain name for branding purposes doesn’t have to have anything to do with the topic of the website. Consider how Amazon.com has become a household name for an online bookstore, or Google.com is synonymous with search engines.

Branding makes it easy for people to tell others about your blog (“Hey, have you heard about FruFru.com?”).

Search Engine Optimization

Search engines, unromantic that they are, consider a website to be relevant to a keyword if the keyword appears in the domain name. The effect is not huge, and can be overcome if your domain name has nothing to do with the topic of your website. But if you’re starting a site from scratch, consider if using your site’s primary keywords in your domain name is a good idea.

For example, if you’re starting a blog about car repairs that can be done at home, you could use FixMyCar.com and get a relevancy boost for people typing in “how do I fix my car”. Yet it’s still a brandable name, if not as obscure as Amazon.com.

Don’t worry too much if you can’t get the exact keyword domain name you want. Like I said, you can overcome the small relevancy hit you’ll get by not having keywords in your domain name. Search engine optimization is mostly about backlinks and anchor text, with domain names playing a smaller part.

For this blog, I wanted a domain name that was brandable and yet would also be meaningful for the topic of making money online. Online Opportunity seemed like a good choice. The .com wasn’t available, and I wasn’t willing to pay a premium for it, so I went with the .org.

If you have a blog already, how did you pick your domain name?

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How to Pick Your Blogging Niche

You think you want to try blogging as a way to make money, but aren’t sure what the first step is? Lucky you found this post!

The absolute first step in starting a blog is to pick your niche. Before keyword research, before getting a domain name, before picking a blogging platform, before anything else, you must decide what it is you’re going to blog about.

Here are some tips to help you pick a niche that will work for you.

The Niche You Know

Topics you know and are passionate about work well. If you can’t get both of those qualities, then pick something you’re passionate about, whether you know anything about it right now or not. You can gain knowledge through learning and research, but it’s hard to gain passion if it doesn’t exist at the start.

Why is passion so important? Simply put, you’re going to be writing about this topic for a long time. A daily posting schedule is great for building readership and keeping your readers interested. But think about what a daily posting schedule means. Seven days a week, you have to come up with content that’s interesting enough to be read. Days when you’re not feeling like writing, days when you’ve had a fight with your spouse, days when you couldn’t sleep, days when you missed the mortgage payment. You still have to write.

If you’re not passionate about your topic, you’ll skip days and lose readers, and eventually stop writing altogether. There’s a reason most blogs don’t get past the six month mark.

Popular Topics

If you have a choice between passions, blog about something popular. You want to make money with your blogging, which means getting as many people to read your blog as possible. A blog about the wear patterns on ant thoraxes might be interesting, but probably won’t get you the volume you need to make serious money.

Don’t be afraid to blog about topics you don’t think are popular, though, if that’s where your passion is. It’s a big world out there, and you never know who else happens to be Googling looking for a blog about ant thoraxes.

Unpopular Topics

If your passion is on a topic that is distinctly unpopular, that’s fine too. Note that I don’t mean unpopular as in nobody else is interested in it, but unpopular in that everyone hates the topic. You can generate a lot of blog traffic by being unpopular. Controversy is an amazing attractor.

Stay Away from Making Money Online

Just because you want to make money online doesn’t mean your blog has to be about making money online. There are plenty of people making respectable incomes blogging about various topics that have nothing to do with making money online. You might want to make money online, but are you passionate about sharing your knowledge on the topic with others?

Think carefully before starting a blog in this niche.

Write Daily Articles

Once you have a topic picked, then it’s time to write some articles about it. Don’t setup a blog, don’t pick a domain name, just write an article a day about the topic for a week. This is your dress rehearsal, to see if you can actually write about the topic and keep your passion for it.

When you make it through the week and still feel like you want to keep writing about the topic, then you’ve found your niche! Now it’s time to pick a domain name, do keyword research, identify categories, pick plugins, etc.

After you setup your blog, you already have those seven articles written. Post them all at once to make your blog seem lived in, and then start writing your daily posts.

So how did you pick your niche?

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Making Money Through Misspellings

How many times have you heard that good grammar and spelling are essential to success online? Well, it’s true, your spelling and grammar should be reasonably good to make money blogging. But you can profit from other people’s bad spelling and grammar.

This idea isn’t new, but it’s worth talking about because it shows creative thinking. Many people put items for sale on Ebay, and before the time of Firefox there were lots of misspelled words in item descriptions. So someone searching for “clock radio” wouldn’t find the item entered under “clck radeo”. Buyers were missing out on products, and sellers were missing out on sales.

So enter some unsung genius who first thought about applying spell checking technology to an Ebay search engine. The basic idea is that you type in a correctly spelled search phrase, and it searches Ebay for misspellings of that phrase. This lets a buyer find those items that nobody might be bidding on because they’re misspelled.

And it makes the owner of the search engine a ton of money through Ebay affiliate commissions.

To see this sort of search engine in action, type a correctly spelled search phrase into this box, click Generate and then click the link that appears:

This is one of those ideas that, when someone first comes up with it, you say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Making money online doesn’t have to be through blogging or straight affiliate sales. You can offer a genuinely useful service that also happens to net you affiliate commissions.

So when you’re thinking about how to make some money online, don’t limit yourself to what’s in the ebooks or blogs. Think outside the box and try to find a need to fill that can be monetized in some way.

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How to Make Your First $30 at Inbox Dollars in Under an Hour

A while back I wrote a post about the various paid to read programs, and someone asked how much you really could make with them. I promised a case study, and that’s in progress, but in the meantime I thought I’d give you a step by step guide to making your first $30 at Inbox Dollars ($30 is the minimum payout level). At the end I’ll share a secret that will let you add another $45.75 to that amount.

For anyone who hasn’t heard of Inbox Dollars, it’s a website that pays you to read emails, take surveys, shop online, play games, and try out various products and services (as you can see from their banner on the left). Many people think it’s some sort of scam, but it’s simple advertising. Companies pay you to try out their products for free, hoping that you’ll like them well enough to keep using them even when you have to pay for them.

Here’s what we’ll cover in our $30 quest:

Step Time Reward
Join Inbox Dollars 5 minutes $5.00
Intro Survey 2 minutes $1.00
Ebay Offer 5 minutes $6.00
Stamps.com 15 minutes $10.00
OboPay 5 minutes $4.00
Direct Scholar 2 minutes $2.00
Survey Panels 15 minutes $3.25

Note that not all of these offers may be available if you don’t live in the United States. If you live elsewhere, let me know which ones are not available to you.

Join Inbox Dollars

If you’re not already a member, you can click the banner above or click here to join. You’ll need to give them an email address. The number of emails you get from Inbox Dollars is low, so it’s safe to give your primary email. If you’re not comfortable doing that, get a free Gmail account and use that. We’ll be getting another Gmail account later, so get two while you’re at it.

You get $5 just for joining.

Intro Survey

When you login for the first time, you’ll be given the chance to take an introductory survey. This survey asks you some basic demographic questions. Complete it to earn another $1, for a total of $6 in your account.

You can take up to one survey a day. The other surveys available all require that you qualify for the survey by answering a pre-survey set of questions. I’ve not had much luck qualifying, but your luck might be different. I’ll assume you’re not doing any daily surveys, so the $1 for each survey won’t be part of the $30.

Ebay Offer

We’ll need a new email address for this one. I suggest going to Gmail.com and getting a free email address. You’ll use this email address for completing all the offers for Inbox Dollars, so if it gets put on a spam list you don’t really care. No real email will be going to it anyway.

Login to Inbox Dollars and click on Cash Offers in the list of links on the left of the page. You’ll probably find the Ebay offer in the Most Popular Offers section at the bottom of the page. If not, look through the pages of offers to find it.

The terms of the offer are that you must register for Ebay as a new user, and make a bid on an item. Since we have a brand new Gmail email account, it doesn’t matter if you’re already an Ebay member. Click on the offer to be taken to Ebay’s signup page (you must click on the offer, if you go directly to Ebay you won’t get credit for signing up).

Signup using the Gmail address you just created (if you created one to use for registering with Inbox Dollars, don’t use that one. Use the second one you should have gotten). After you get the confirmation email, login to Ebay and find an item to bid on. I tend to use the search phrase “coach bags”, because there’s always tons of them. You want to find an item that has several bids on it, and isn’t expiring soon. You can sort the listing by price to find the cheapest items (usually starting at 1 cent).

Go to the cheapest item you can find that has several bids, and make a bid that’s the minimum amount you can bid over the last bid. The chances are very good that someone else’s automatic bidder will outbid you even before the page refreshes. If not, the item’s cheap enough and there’s enough time left on the auction that you’ll be outbid eventually.

After an hour or so, your Inbox Dollars account will be credited with $6, for a total of $12. You may have received an email or two to click on in the meantime. Those will credit your account for a few cents each, but I won’t take those into account as part of the $30.

Stamps.com

In the Cash Offers section, find the Stamps.com offer and click on it. You’ll need to provide credit card information as part of the signup, but as long as you cancel your account before the trial period ends you won’t be charged anything.

Once your Inbox Account is credited for $10.00 for this offer (which will take a few hours), you’ll have a total of $22.00, plus be able to print out $5 worth of postage from the Stamps.com application that you just downloaded. Be sure to print out your $5 worth of postage before canceling your trial account.

All the trial offers at Inbox Dollars will work this way, you’ll provide a credit card and have a certain amount of time to cancel your account without being charged.

OboPay

You’ll find this one in the free offers section. OboPay is a technology for sending money via SMS messages. You’ll need a cell phone, but no credit card. You’ll even get $10 deposited into your OboPay account as a thank you for signing up.

Plus you’ll get $4 in your Inbox Dollars account, bringing your total up to $26.

Direct Scholar

This offer is in the free offers section. Direct Scholar is a site that says it’ll help you find the best degree for you. In reality, it’s a portal that refers to one of several college sites depending on what you’re looking for (collecting a commission for referring you). Fill out the form at Direct Scholar to get more information on a degree.

At some point you’ll switch from being at Direct Scholar to being at a college website. The main clue is that you’re asked to fill out a form that asks you for the same information all over again. Since the offer was to sign up for Direct Scholar, you can close the window at the point when they direct you to a college website.

This one takes several days to credit your account. When it does, you’ll get $2, for a total of $28.

Survey Panels

Go to the Survey Offers section and find the NPD Online Research offer. Click the offer and signup to NPD using the same email you used for the Ebay offer. You’ll have to complete an initial demographic survey, and then you’ll get a link to another survey in your email. Go ahead and complete that survey to get some points to put into a prize drawing. You probably won’t win, but you never know.

When your Inbox Dollars account is credited $1.25 for this, your total will be $29.25. This should happen very quickly, probably before you complete the rest of the offers below.

Also complete the Net Panel offer for $1.50, the Neilson Net Ratings offer for $1.25,, the Lightspeed Research offer for $1, the ACOP Opinion Panel offer for $0.50, and the Opinion Outpost offer for $0.50, for a total of $34.00.

These particular survey offers were picked because they credit your account quickly, and with no trouble. Some of the other survey offers take days to credit your account.

Note in the Net Panel offer, all your really need to do is to go through the initial list of radio buttons, clicking No to every offer. When they get into the list of offers showing pictures, where they say you have to click Yes to one of them, you should be able to close the window and you’ll still get credit from Inbox Dollars. Do not sign up for any of the other survey panels here, since you won’t get paid for doing so.

For the Neilson Net Ratings offer, you do have to download and install their tracking software to get credit. You can always uninstall it later, or leave it running if you don’t mind them knowing what websites you visit.

If you don’t get credit for an offer after a few days, clear your cookies and try signing up again. Either use a different email address, or if you’re using Gmail accounts you can insert periods into your email address without affecting delivery. For example, if my Gmail address were paidtoread@gmail.com, I could use paid.to.read@gmail.com and the email would still get to me. But it’ll seem like a different email to the websites you sign up at.

Ask for a Payout

You’re now at $34.00. Click the Request Payment link on the left side of the Inbox Dollars control center to request your payment. They take $3 out for processing, so you’ll get $31 from them (if you’re upset about getting more than $30, leave out the two 50 cent survey panels). They do have some fine print on their check disbursement…they take a month or two to cut a check, and you have to be an active member by the time they do. This basically means confirming the paid emails they send.

You’ve also completed a number of different sorts of offers at Inbox Dollars and gotten a feel for how they work. There’s a lot more money to be had there, especially in the trial offers. The key point with trial offers is to remember to cancel before they start charging you. To be safe, wait until the last few days of the trial period, but don’t wait too long.

Bonus Secret

You can complete all the same offers at Treasure Trooper to make an extra $23.00, and at Cash Crate to make another $22.75. Both those amounts are over the minimum payout in each program.

The trick is to use a different email address (or use the dots in the address trick with Gmail accounts) to complete the offers at Treasure Trooper, and yet another email address for the offers at Cash Crate. It would also help to clear your web browser’s cookies between completing the Inbox Dollar offers and starting the Treasure Trooper offers, and again before starting the Cash Crate offers.

Note also that not all offers are in common between the three programs, so some of the Inbox Dollars offers won’t be available at Treasure Trooper and Cash Crate.

So in under 3 hours total, you could have $79.75, less processing fees, coming your way. Not too bad! The free trial offers at all three programs can earn you far more money than that, too. Just be sure to cancel them after you’ve been credited, but before they start to charge you.

Update: Fusion Cash is another program that will pay you for the same sorts of offers, so you can add even more to your $79.75.

What do you think? Is this an abuse of the advertisers, or a legitimate way of making money online?

Update: approximately 45 days after requesting payout for the above offers, here’s the check I received in the mail:

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Site Updates

Some major and minor site updates.

Categories

I finally took the plunge and reworked my categories to be more manageable. One goal was to have a smaller category list for the sidebar. Another was to limit posts to being in only one category, for search engine optimization purposes. So I’ll put posts in the most appropriate category.

My apologies to everyone who received new pingbacks from old posts as I edited them to change the post categories.

Related Posts in Feed

I’ve added the add related posts to feed plugin, so that the feed will now have a list of related posts just like the post itself does. This should help feed subscribers who want to see an older article on the same topic, and will give me more backlinks if RSS thieves steal any posts.

Posting Frequency

I asked readers how many posts per day were too much earlier, and what I ended up deciding to do was to have one content post each day. A content post is one that is on topic and useful. This site update is not a content post.

So you’ll see one or two posts a day, with one of the posts being on topic.

That’s about it. Let me know what you think about the final list of categories.

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Entertainment 4 Less Review

Entertainment 4 Less (E4L) is an MLM in the prelaunch phase.

A pretty common tactic in a prelaunch phase is to offer heavily discounted memberships. E4L took this tactic to the extreme, offering free lifetime memberships. The reason an MLM company does this is to build a large base of members. It’d be pretty embarrassing to launch and only have a couple of people buying the product. By having a prelaunch phase and discounting (or giving away) memberships, the company gets a lot of people who are emotionally invested in the company’s success. They’ll stay in and buy when the time comes, because they hope to make money.

The basic product at E4L is discounted media and equipment: DVD movies, video games, home theater equipment, etc. When they launch, that’s the sort of thing you’ll be able to buy. And you’ll earn a commission when your referrals purchase.

E4L uses a 3×7 forced matrix, so you’ll get some spillover from your sponsors. You earn commissions on purchases from anyone under you in that matrix. They also do a 100% matching bonus for your direct referrals. If a direct referral of your earns $100 in a month, you get a bonus of $100 that month.

Like most free membership programs, E4L has an upgrade option (they call it a VIP upgrade). This gives you a discount on MLM leads and customer signups. Customer signups are people who found E4L not through a sponsor link but through the website directly, or through E4L’s own advertising, and are looking to buy products, not make money (I’m not sure how they determine this). These people count as your personally sponsored referrals. The cost is currently $150 for 25.

So, is E4L a legitimate opportunity?

It’s far too early to tell. The idea of a discount media club could take off, or could flop. The main benefit to getting in now is that it’s free, and if you don’t want to do anything more than get spillover from your sponsor you can join and forget about it. If it becomes popular, you might earn something from it.

You can see the web page here. Click on the “Make Money EZ” link across the top for the details, such as they are, of how the commissions work.

What do you think? Is this a legitimate opportunity or a scam waiting to happen?

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Testing Splash Pages to Improve Click Through Rates

I’ve talked recently about the importance of using splash pages on traffic exchanges, and the use of ad trackers to know which links are getting the most clicks. These are two great concepts that work even better together.

The idea is that you should not just limit yourself to a single splash page. If you do, how do you know if it could be improved or not? Instead, create half a dozen variations on your splash page, and put them into a URL rotator. Either use an ad tracker as the link from the splash page to your website, or use a URL rotator/splash page combination that allows you to track click through rates on the splash pages (the TEToolbox is one such combination that will let you track click through rates on splash pages for free).

So when you place ads that should lead to a splash page, you put the URL of your rotator page. Each time someone clicks on the link, they get to a different splash page. Over the course of time, each splash page is shown quite a few times. You can then check on the click through rate of each splash page to determine which ones are doing better at getting people to click on the link.

This works best if you change only small things about each splash page. That way you know which change is causing better click through rates.

I ran across a great example of this the other day while doing research. The specific splash page I encountered was this one. The splash page itself wasn’t very effective. In fact, it was later that night that I finally figured out why the woman pictured was wearing boxing gloves.

But, I noticed that the file name in the URL was splash7.php. So I poked around and took a look at the other splash pages they were testing. Here’s the complete list: splash 1, splash 2, splash 3, splash 4, splash 5, splash 6, splash 7, and splash 8.

You can see between these that they have three main splash page designs they’re testing. Each main design has a couple of variations, with the woman and the boxing gloves having four variations. In a couple, the only change in the splash page is a dark background versus a light background. Yes, that sort of change can have an effect on click through rate.

To get reliable data on which page is more effective, you need to process a lot of hits to each page. The hits have to be from the audience you’re trying to target. Run a thousand hits through each page, and you’ll have some nice data on which variation of the splash page is doing best.

Then rework the splash pages to incorporate the elements that seem to attract the highest click through rates, get rid of the other variations, create some more variations, and test them all again. Over time you should be able to steadily increase the click through rate of your splash pages.

Note that if you start targeting a different audience, you have to start this process all over again. What worked best for one audience may not work at all for another.

Doing this sort of testing gives you a huge advantage over most Internet marketers, who either don’t use a splash page or have just a single one they use.

Have any tips for the rest of us on what’s worked for your splash pages?

Update: Recently, over at Forum Know How, one of the experts has been reviewing member splash pages and giving advice on improving them. If you’re not a member, you can still get in for $10 for the year, and get some free advice on improving the response rate of your splash page.

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Using Ad Trackers to Fine Tune Your Marketing

One of the problems with marketing online, whether you’re promoting affiliate products, your own products, or a website, is knowing which promotional efforts are attracting traffic.

After all, you put a link out onto safe lists, traffic exchanges, PPC ads, forum signatures, basically anywhere you can think of to get exposure. And you start getting traffic. But which of those links is attracting the most traffic? Which promotions should you ditch, and which should you expand?

If you’re running a website and promoting it, you can use various analytics tools to know where your visitors are coming from. But if you’re promoting an affiliate program, you’re probably sending people directly to the merchant site. You don’t have access to the analytics there.

You’ve probably seen services like TinyURL. Services like this are used to transform a long web address into, well, a tiny one. Many people use this for hiding affiliate links, which is a big mistake, since TinyURLdoesn’t track clicks.

An ad tracker is a way of knowing how many people are clicking on which link you’ve placed out into the wild. An ad tracker is similar to services like TinyURL, in that you replace your normal link with a link to the ad tracker site. When people click that link, they’re taken to the site you want them to go to, but the ad tracker site records the click. Later, you can know exactly how many people clicked that particular link.

Using different ad tracker URLs to send people to the same location lets you know which promotional methods are working best. For example, if you use free classifieds for advertising, use a different ad tracker URL in each classified ad you post. That lets you know which ones are most effective at getting people to click. You might also discover that certain ads work best in certain classified sites.

If you already have access to a set of tools such as the Traffic Wave tools, then you have access to ad trackers. If you don’t currently have access to a set of Internet marketing tools, you can get free ad trackers from URLFreeze.com.

You’ll need to signup for free to URLFreeze.com to get ad tracking capabilities. After that, you can add as many URLs as you want, and see how many clicks each has received. An ad tracking URL looks similar to a TinyURL one. For example, this one from URLFreeze.com, http://urlfreeze.com/jshaffstall/L-1c90/ , just takes you to this blog. But I’ll be able to know how many people click on it.

Clicking the above link you can see that URLFreeze.com puts a small bar across the bottom of the screen. That’s the price you pay for getting an ad tracker for free. If you want to remove that bar, you can upgrade to a pro membership for a one-time $27 fee. That’s actually a good value, given that other sites charge monthly fees for ad trackers. But the advertising bar in the free ad trackers is not at all intrusive.

While ad tracker technology is simple, using them requires some planning. The basic idea is to use a different ad tracker URL every time you place a link.

For example, say you promote an affiliate link on your website by writing a couple of articles and placing a banner. Create a separate ad tracker URL for each article and the banner, for a total of three ad trackers. This lets you know which article is doing better at getting people to click the link, and how the banner compares to the articles. If the articles do great, you’ll know to put some effort into writing more of them. If the articles don’t do well, you can save that effort and put it into something else.

The same strategy applies to every link you place throughout the Internet. Use a different ad tracker URL every time you place a link.

While going through the stats for all these ad trackers can be time consuming, the insight you gain into what advertising efforts are getting people to click will be worth it.

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$100 Review Contest Results

With a total of 7 entrants to the review contest, I’m grateful for the participation of each person. I appreciated all the constructive suggestions, and am glad that everyone found the information on the blog useful. If I could afford it, I’d give 7 prizes away!

The prize for the best review was to be $100, or $200 if I ended up winning RandLife’s review contest. I haven’t seen any announcement of a winner over at RandLife, so it looks like the prize is $100.

The reviews were all great, and I had to go back over each one carefully to pick a winner. The choice was not easy. There were elements to each review that were unique and worthy of recognition.

Julia, over at Bundah Work At Home wrote a review in English even though she’s not comfortable with it, and ended up with a great review, plus a suggestion that I put a Technorati button on the blog (which has been added at the bottom of the post pages).

Cman, at Cman’s Money Page caught a cosmetic problem in my blog theme under IE 7, and also wrote a great review. I haven’t tracked down the IE 7 problem yet, but will manage to squash it eventually.

Lori, at B Money Savvy suggests a splash of color added to the blog would help, and goes on with a great review.

Beth, at Confessions of an Online Marketer takes me to task for a laborious about page, but then goes on to say she learned something from my Directory Maximizer review. That’s the sort of comment that keeps me blogging, when I hear that people have gotten value from the posts.

BetShopBoy, at I Thought, Therefore I Blog, writes a great review highlighting my willingness to spend money on behalf of my readers.

Tyson, at Some Make Money, suggests a new logo for the blog, and covers the blog’s presentation, categories, and content. His suggestion about cutting down the number of categories is a good one, and something I have in the works.

Enkay, at Enkay Blog, admits that he wants to win the contest to pay for blog hosting, but also has a great review, linking to specific posts he found useful.

The judging was entirely subjective, based on which review I liked the best. If I do a contest like this again, I’ll put some objective judging criteria in, because I liked all the reviews! Since I had to pick one, I went with Tyson’s review, which stood out just a shade over the rest because of his new logo suggestion.

Congratulations, Tyson! Let me know through email how you’d like your winnings transmitted.

I also wanted to recognize Enkay, who not only was the first to enter the contest with a review, but also used another post in his blog to later promote the contest to give me some more exposure. This despite the fact he was hoping to get some web hosting dollars out of the contest!

I didn’t have an official second place prize, but since this is my blog I guess I can change the rules at the last minute to add a second place prize of $50 toward Enkay’s web hosting fees for the next year, for effort above and beyond his best interests. Anyone reading this who wants to contribute to the cause should go to Enkay Blog and buy him a cup of coffee.

Let me know through email how you’d like the second place prize sent, Enkay.

Thanks again to all the contestants!