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Blogger Jailed, Desperately Seeks Bail

Okay, so I haven’t really been jailed.

I’ve been asked to participate in a local jail-and-bail type of event to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association. I go and sit in a jail cell for an hour, and hopefully they let me out afterward. That might have something to do with how much money is raised in my name, although surely feeding me three meals a day while they wait for the money to come in is going to cost more than just letting me go.

They’ve got a nice website for directing potential donors to, so in the event that any random strangers stopping by the blog want to help me raise bail, you can go to my page on their website.

They’ve set my bail at $3,600. I have a feeling I may be in the cell for a bit more than an hour.

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Using RSS Thieves for Backlinks

A few days ago I got a trackback from a site that had copied Tyson’s review of Online Opportunity without providing proper attribution. I’d suggested to Tyson that he use a signature plugin to include a link back to his blog in his RSS feed.

I belatedly realized it’d be a good idea for me to do the same, so downloaded DD Sig. You can see the signature this adds on the single post pages:

If you found this post interesting or helpful, consider subscribing to our RSS feed. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you!

Unfortunately, I discovered that DD Sig doesn’t add a signature to the RSS feed. But I liked automating the call to subscribe, so I left it active. I then located RSS Signature, which does add a signature to the RSS feed (and nowhere else).

So now the RSS feed has this at the bottom of every post:

© Online Opportunity – This post was written for Online Opportunity, a blog about how to make money online. If you found it interesting or helpful, consider subscribing to our RSS feed. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you!

You’ll notice that I don’t use a simple link back to Online Opportunity, but rather use a keyword link I’d like to rank higher for in search engines. I figure that if my posts are going to be stolen and used somewhere else, I might as well get a backlink with my choice of anchor text out of the deal.

The main benefit, though, is that anyone who sees this post on another blog will know it didn’t originate there, and be able to click through to come here to see more posts like it. And even if they don’t realize the post was stolen, they may still subscribe to my feed and start picking up the posts from the original source.

As a funny note, a couple of days after my John Chow post resulted in a backlink from JohnChow.com, I got a trackback from a blog that regularly stole John Chow’s posts, including the review posts. So for the one John Chow post I ended up with two backlinks.

The moral is that if you’re writing a blog, and doing the right thing for your readers by providing a full feed, your content will get stolen someday. Being a bit proactive can turn the event into a benefit to your blog.

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$100 Review Contest Entrant #2

The second entrant into the $100 Review Online Opportunity Contest is Tyson, who writes Some Make Money.

While Tyson doesn’t actually make fun of my logo, he offers a fun alternative to my more traditional logo. Some Make Money covers a variety of topics, including blogging tips, web tools, and what Tyson calls “observations”. Observations seems to be a grab bag of miscellaneous topics, so be sure to take a look to see what’s there. Anyone starting up a blog should pay close attention to his most recent post about how his review of Online Opportunity was plagiarized by a spam blog. It can happen to anyone, and probably will.

While Some Make Money is a new blog with relatively few posts, it looks like it’ll continue to be interesting. I’ve subscribed to catch all the future posts as they come.

If you’re interested in entering the $100 Review Online Opportunity contest, see the original post for the rules.

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Google Cash Detective Launch Review

Note that this is not a review of Google Cash Detective, but a review of the launch.

Along with a lot of other people, I’d bought Google Cash years ago, only to find that the Adwords market had changed. The low hanging fruit was gone, and you had to go for the low-traffic long tail keyword to get anywhere. Since they were low traffic, you had to make up for it in volume, and I didn’t have the patience for it.

And for years, the Google Cash mailing list was quiet, with only the occasional announcement about a new version available. Then, on May 17th, I get an email about an automated version of Google Cash that would be available soon. What had been a dead mailing list suddenly has daily traffic with announcements about the new product, that, according to Chris Carpenter, was so good it would revolutionize the PPC industry.

Chris wrote an ebook about the product, created demo videos showing it in action, and even offered everyone $0.50 per person they referred to the free ebook.

Finally, June 4th came and Google Cash Detective was put up for sale. The website had some technical glitches, but eventually you could get through to purchase. But he was only selling 500 copies, until he saw how this revolutionary tool affected the PPC market (for the cynics among you, 500 copies earned Chris about $200,000 before expenses).

This is a great example of how to create a buzz in a dead mailing list, and in the PPC community. From a marketing perspective, there are many things Chris did exactly right:

Premarketed Via The Ebook

The ebook told enough of the story to get those people interested who were like me, and had bought Google Cash but had trouble making it work. A totally automated system for finding out what was working for other people.

The referral bonus for the ebook was a nice touch, and a good investment.

Demo Videos

Actually showing the product in action was a great move. A properly run demo can make a product seem much better than it really is, as I should know from working as a computer programmer for 15 years. You can target the big ticket features and gloss over the parts that need work.

Marketing Via The Google Cash List

The Google Cash list represented Chris’ best prospects. They’d already bought Google Cash, and if they weren’t successful with it he had the perfect product to offer. This is a great example of the benefit of maintaining a mailing list and keeping at least minimal traffic on it over time.

The tone of the emails was also great for building anticipation. Phrases like “…receive numerous emails begging me not to release this software” helped to validate the value of the product in his readers’ minds.

Delaying The Launch

By delaying the launch, Chris allowed the anticipation to build for those who were interested in the product. By announcing in advance that he would only sell 500 copies of the software, he built in a sense of scarcity. I have no doubt that many of the website glitches were due to his server getting hit hard at noon on June 4th (the time when you could first buy Google Cash Detective).

The Fine Print

While Chris made a considerable amount of money on the initial launch of the software, there are two ways that he continues to profit on it.

One is that while you can get data on the number of clicks a keyword has gotten through Google Cash Detective, you have to pay a bit extra for it. While the amount per keyword is small, if you’re running numerous campaigns it can add up.

Second, there are two aspects of building a PPC campaign. One is finding the niche, which is what Google Cash Detective helps you to do. The second is actually creating and running the campaign, and adjusting it as needed as conditions change. That’s done by another product, the Google Cash Automator, which is available for a monthly fee.

Conclusions

If you have a mailing list you haven’t been getting much out of, you can learn a lot from the launch of the Google Cash Detective about how to revitalize the list by offering them a new product that addresses common shortcomings in the existing product.

And no, I wasn’t one of the ones who bought Google Cash Detective, since I don’t have any interest in doing PPC campaigns right now. If anyone did get it, let us know what you think of it.

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How Many Posts Per Day Is Too Many?

Look for advice for beginning bloggers on the Internet, and you’ll find lots. Some of it will be about posting regularly, preferrably daily. But if you can’t make daily, pick a frequency and stick with it.

I find myself having trouble limiting myself to daily posting. In fact, I’m usually not successful, having a couple of posts each day, sometimes more. I have so many ideas for post topics that it’s tough to not simply write them all and post them. I could use WordPress’ timestamp feature to write them all and post them daily over the next month, but I enjoy writing something each day. A month without doing so might get me out of the habit.

I’d like to get some feedback from the readers. Is it distracting to have multiple posts in a day? Has the number of posts been too much, or just right?

If you’re reading this through a feed, I’d appreciate it if you’d take the time to come to the website and leave a comment. I try to ensure that the feed contains no more than two posts a day. Does that work for you or would you rather just have a single post each day?

Thanks for your feedback!

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John Chow Back at #1

It’s sad, but it appears as if Google has not changed its algorithm to discount John Chow’s review scheme.

It’s too bad. I rather liked the idea of Google taking some sort of action, based on their distaste of paid and solicited links. It would have kept things interesting, and forced bloggers to be more creative in their reciprocal linking. A sign of continued evolution, if you will.

A few days after dropping out of the #1 slot for “make money online” in Google, John’s blog is back in #1. Despite promising to share how he did it, John cops out and simply hints that Google’s webmaster tools are your friend. Note that I’m deliberately not linking to his post, since he provides no useful information beyond that hint.

Over at the SEO Refugee, amid a rant about self-proclaimed SEO experts, is some information on a possible cause of JohnChow.com’s drop from the #1 spot. Apparently John recently heavily modified his robots.txt file.

For those of you new to running websites, the robots.txt file contains hints to search engines. You can ask Google, for example, to not look at certain pages on your website. John had a post recently detailing robots.txt changes needed to prevent Google from seeing too much duplicate content on your WordPress blog. Shortly after that post, he dropped out of the #1 spot for “make money online”.

The hint John dropped makes sense if you assume that a change to his robots.txt caused Google to stop seeing many of his pages. Google’s webmaster tools have a robots.txt analysis tool that allows you to evaluate potential changes in your robots.txt file and see what effect it would have on Google’s ability to see your web pages.

Seems like the kind of thing he should have done before making sweeping changes.

So John screwed up his ratings in Google by changing his robots.txt file, and fixed it by removing those changes and allowing Google to everything, duplicate content and all. Since his site is no doubt crawled daily by Google, it would not have taken much time for this change to push him back into the #1 position for “make money online”.

What do you think? Is this the final answer, or is there something else involved? We might as well speculate, it’s unlikely John will share the info.

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Site Updates

A few more site updates to note.

DoFollow plugin installed

I’ve now installed the DoFollow plugin, so commenter’s links will be followed by search engines. I’ve updated the comments guidelines to reflect the fact that using blatant keywords in your name is not allowed. Appropriate options for the name are either your name or your blog’s name. Also, comments that add nothing to the discussion won’t be approved (e.g. “Interesting”, or “Great post”).

I’ve set DoFollow on a 2-day delay, so the comments become follow comments after 2 days. That gives me time to delete any comments that do get through that are abusing the system. My goal here is to reward commenters who contribute.

Site Unavailable Plugin Installed

I’ve also installed the Site Unavailable plugin. When activated this plugin provides a simple “This site is down for routine maintenance” message to any one except admins. This solves a frequent problem I’ve had, where I want to update some aspect of the site that requires multiple steps, and until all the steps are finished the site may be broken. Users will now not see the site in the unfinished state, but get the site unavailable message instead.

So if you see that message, it just means I’m tinkering with the site. Check back later in the day to see what’s changed.

Signature Plugin Added

I’m now using a signature plugin and the RSS Signature plugin. I added these after Tyson’s post at Some Make Money was duplicated without proper attribution. This way, every post will have a link back here and a link to the blog’s RSS feed. If someone copies the post from the RSS, those links go along with it.

Categories

I’ve been trying to clean up the categories a bit. I didn’t have a clear idea of what categories I wanted when I started the blog, and want to cut down the number of categories a bit while keeping everything organized. So if you see a category that’s missing, that’s why.

This is a work in progress, so if you have suggestions on what categories I should get rid of, or which ones I need to add, let me know.

More Spam!

The blog has apparently become popular enough to attract spammers. So far Akismet is doing a wonderful job of blocking spam comments, and has only blocked one real comment.

Hope you’re enjoying the blog!

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$100 Review Contest Entrant #1

The first entrant into the $100 Review Online Opportunity Contest is from Enkay Blog.

Enkay Blog is an interesting mix of posts on technology, finance, and current events. The most recent post caught my eye immediately, about twins being born from different mothers. No, it isn’t something from the National Enquirer, but a legitimate piece of news.

There’s always something interesting at Enkay Blog. Be sure to go over and take a look!

If you’re interested in entering the $100 Review Online Opportunity contest, see the original post for the rules.

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Daily Pay Guarantee Reviewed

When I first ran across the Daily Pay Guarantee website, my first thought was that it was a typical landing page full of hype and an opportunity to bypass.

They claim that you can “make up to $1,000 a day with no sponsoring, guaranteed”. They convey the essence of wealth with a picture of a Mercedes Benz, and say you’ll “get paid within the next 24 hours guaranteed”. This sounds great! Clicking the button to find out more takes you to a signup page. There’s also a FAQ link across the top.

The FAQ has the details of what’s going on. Basically, you pay an initial registration fee of either $250 or $100, and then pay $5 a day thereafter. If you pay the $250 registration fee, they put people under you automatically. If you pay the $100 registration fee, you have to recruit your own downline. The FAQ doesn’t say what percentage you get from your downline.

The FAQ is quick to reassure you that this is not a pyramid scheme. Daily Pay Guarantee also brings in money through a search engine, traffic exchange, and safe list (which you are agreeing to be on by joining). No mention of how much of that money goes to members.

At this point, Daily Pay Guarantee has raised all my red flags for an MLM opportunity:

  1. Unrealistic promises of success with no work put into it
  2. Members pay into the system to support those above them
  3. No actual product or service that members are getting for their daily fee
  4. No details of how downline commissions work
  5. The website contradicts itself in places and is unprofessional

My normal reaction would have been to close the browser window and forget about Daily Pay Guarantee. It’s almost certainly a recipe for losing money. But it’s also the sort of thing that would appeal to someone new to making money online who is desperate to escape from a day job. That’s just the sort of person I started this blog to help.

So against my better judgment I paid the $250 registration fee and signed up. I picked the $250 amount because if I was going to review the opportunity, I’d review the option that would most appeal to newcomers to MLM and Internet marketing.

Things went downhill from there. According to emails I received, I should have two people assigned to my downline within hours. Instead, it took about a week and a half just for them to recognize that I’d upgraded from a free member to a “bronze” member. It took another day or two to get my first person assigned under me. I did no promotion of Daily Pay Guarantee (after all, I paid for them to do the work).

For a while they had a list of free and paid members on their website. By communicating with the person I had signed up under, I worked out their algorithm for assigning downlines, and knew exactly when my two people should have been assigned. When that point had passed, I started bugging them. I never actually did get an email answers, but eventually I got the one person put under me. That was a few days ago, and there’s no sign of a second. But as a result of my bugging them, they did take down the pages that showed the free and paid members, so other people wouldn’t be able to know when they’d screwed up.

I’m currently breaking even on the $5 a day. I’m not sure how that works, since I only have one person under me who is also paying $5 a day. But then they never really did say how the commissions work, so it’s hard to know if that’s right or not.

So, after giving Daily Pay Guarantee a try, my first impressions are confirmed. This is not a professionally run organization. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s just a couple of guys who know PHP coding.

Give this one a pass, along with any other MLM opportunity you find that has the same qualities. The only way you’ll make any money in this sort of program is to get in very early and get very lucky.

On the other hand, if you have $250 you can afford to spend in order to try and make money online, go over to Site 5 web hosting and give them $120 of it for two years’ web hosting under their $5 a month plan. That gets you 110 GB of storage, 5 TB bandwidth, and the ability to host 110 domains (this blog is hosted at Site 5).

Spend the other $120 on a nice logo or WordPress theme, and start blogging. After two years of blogging, you’ll probably be making more money through advertisements on your blog than you would be if you’d put the $250 into Daily Pay Guarantee.

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Agloco Viewbar to be Released

I don’t normally jump on popular news and write posts about it, but since this is directly related to previous posts I’ve done, I wanted to mention it.

Agloco has announced that the viewbar will be released Monday, June 4th.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with Agloco, the viewbar is a piece of software that sits on your computer, just above your Windows task bar. The viewbar displays advertisements, allows you to perform Internet searches, and will have some hooks to let you buy products from Amazon.com and other companies.

All of this makes Agloco money, as advertisers pay them to get access to their guaranteed audience. Agloco then shares that ad revenue with their members.

Two things factor into how much of the ad revenue you get. One is the amount of time you spend online with the viewbar active. You can get credit for up to 5 hours a month. The other is the number of referrals you have brought into Agloco. The reasoning being that a larger pool of members means they can charge advertisers more, and so there’s more money to share with members.

You’re basically getting paid for surfing the web, which is something you do anyway (or you wouldn’t be reading this).

If you haven’t already signed up with Agloco, you should do so relatively soon so that you’re ready when the viewbar is released. At this point nobody is sure exactly how much money is involved (except we know John Chow is going to get most of it). But since it’s free money, it’s worth doing.

Some people have asked me, “If I’m only getting credit for 5 hours a month, should I close the viewbar down after 5 hours?” My take on this is that the longer everyone has their viewbars up, the larger the pool of advertising money to be shared. So even though you only get credit for 5 hours in terms of your percentage of the pot, leaving the viewbar up increases the size of the pot.

What do you think? Is signing up for Agloco the thing to do, or is it all a big scam of some sort?