Leaving The Day Job

Spamming is like robbing a bank

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The trouble with most get rich quick schemes is either that they don’t work or that they do work but are illegal. The fastest way to get a lot of money is to rob a bank. It’s also a good way to get yourself shot.

Here in our world of affiliate marketing the quickest way to get rich is to force your affiliate cookie on all and sundry and the fastest way to do that is to spam as many people as possible. Spam is everywhere. It must work, people must get rich doing it otherwise it would have stopped by now. It’s also illegal in most parts of the world. So why doesn’t anyone ever get hauled in front of a judge for it?

Over this weekend I’ve happened upon several spammed product feeds in Google’s product search (formerly known as Froogle). They’re just product feeds from major merchants (John Lewis for example) with the product URLs cloaked by bouncing through a redirect on a server in China. This is spamming pure and simple. It adds nothing to the product search, adds no value for the merchant yet makes a tidy profit for the spammer. It’s against Google’s terms and conditions and it’s against the affiliate networks terms and conditions. Yet people still do it. And why? Because it’s an easy way to get rich quick and no one is going to shoot you for it.

What penalties are likely to be imposed on these spammers that they can’t soon find a way around? Google can delete their product feed, ban their IP, block their email address from signing up again but any of these things can be easily defeated by the spammers. The affiliate networks can cancel their accounts but the spammers can sign up again with different details. What’s to stop the spammers? And equally why should legitimate affiliates be prevented from using such tactics if they think they can get away with it too?

As far as Google goes I would have thought they were perfectly capable of detecting these shady redirects in their product search. After all, they seem to have managed to clamp down on such practices in their standard web search. But what can merchants and affiliate networks do about it? I’m sure they have their methods for detecting spammers but my question is whether the window of opportunity is wide enough to make it worth the risk for the spammers. Can the affiliate networks catch the spammers before they can pocket their commission? If not, it’s a lucrative earner with no real work and no real risk.

Of course, wherever there’s an opportunity to make money there’s an opportunity for corruption. Wherever there is communication there is spam. But it’s incredibly frustrating to see other people getting away with it when you yourself are trying to play by the rules. On a related note, I’ve just done a Google search for “free bets” and there are Adwords ads showing up despite the fact that Google don’t allow gambling ads. Surely a company worth over $160b which is famous for it’s algorithms can find a way automatically to enforce their own rules on their own products…

I need a car on my blog

Why do so many of the “make money online” blogs have a flash car on the top their pages? You know 99% of them are faking it. Maybe John Chow’s got a real fancy motor, maybe Keiron has too but most of these folks are just making a couple of quid off Adsense a month. Maybe a bus pass doesn’t look so hot on your Wordpress header.

But I like to be part of the crowd so here you go, the Montymobile in all its glory:

Would you like some blogroll?

I’ve noticed that my blogroll over there on the right hand side is a bit on the small side. I’ve also noticed that I don’t have many incoming links to this blog. So I’ve stumbled upon a genius scheme which I’m going to call “reciprocal link building”. If you’ve got an affiliate or make money online type blog and you add a link to my site I’ll “reciprocate” by adding a link back to you. I know! It’s genius isn’t it? I can’t believe no one has thought of it before.

So if you meet the simple criteria below and have a link to this site from your blog please contact me through the link above or the comments form below and I’ll add a link back to you in my blogroll.

The criteria are simply to weed out spammers, if your blog doesn’t meet the criteria but is still decent drop me a line anyway.

• Blog must be affiliate or make money online based with mostly on topic posts
• Must be an established, active blog eg not just two posts both written six months ago
• Not be just a veiled attempt to sell something

Internet on the move - not as good as it seems

I’m writing this sitting in the arts centre bar of my local university. I’m here to meet a friend but, being the geek that I am, I thought I’d get here a bit early and use the spare time to do some research online and a bit of content updating. I’ve got a fancy Macbook laptop and a fancy N95 mobile so it seemed like an easy enough thing to do. Instead, it turns out to be a right royal pain.

For starters, although I’m in great big wireless hotspot I’m unable to use the facilities because I’m not a student. Without the requisite username and password I can’t log on. My BT Openzone subscription which normally lets me roam on pretty much any hotspot service is useless here. With the uni blanketed with free wifi for the students and staff there’s no commercial incentive for any other operator to set up a service. Evidentally, it’s not worth the uni’s time to join the likes of The Cloud to allow us working folk to take advantage of the facility our taxes pay for either.

But never mind, I have a second option. Passing my local 3 store the other day I noticed that they have wireless broadband for £10 a month, available on a pay as you go, no contract basis - you just pay for the usb modem gadget. It looked good so I went in to investigate. Whilst in there I had a flash of inspiration remembering that my N95 could be used as a usb 3G modem. So I forked out all of £1.99 for a pay as you go SIM instead. Another £20 to Vodafone saw my N95 unlocked for use on other networks and I was off. Or I would have been if I could figure out how to top up the 3 account. I tried to use a cash machine to do it and discovered I could top up any mobile except 3. I tried to do it through the phone’s browser but was told I’d have to register my credit card 7 days before I wanted to use it. And then I discovered I didn’t have a signal on 3 anyway. So much for that plan.

I resorted to using my Vodafone sim card in the N95. I plugged the phone into my laptop’s usb port and tried to connect. My Mac informed me that my phone didn’t exist. No amount of shouting “It does exist, I can see it right here connected to you!” was going to make any difference.

Option 4: bluetooth connection, via Vodafone N95 to internet. Woo! I’m online! I’m restricted to the speed of a bluetooth connection, I’ve got to keep a close eye on my bandwidth usage and technically I’m breaching Vodafone’s T&Cs by using a computer on a service intended just for mobile browsers but at least I’m online.

Some how this isn’t the kind of ubiquitous wireless broadband that it always seems in the adverts. The ads show a guy with a laptop happily surfing the net wherever he pleases. In reality it seems I need a laptop, hotspot subscription, a couple of sim cards and mobile accounts in order to find at least one that provides 3G, a usb cable and one or more mobile phones. One day we’ll have something which “just works” until then I think I’m going to start carrying a good paperback around with me too - at least I know that will work anywhere and keep me entertained when waiting around for people.

Motivational Thunking

My affiliate activities have been having a big sleep in a cave with a hibernating bear since some time in mid-December. I’ve found it nigh on impossible to get myself motivated again. My motivation has been at a low and my self-doubts have been on a high. With that in mind I’ve been finding some blog postings that relight my fire and thought I’d share them here for the benefit of anyone else hitting the winter slump.

Some Day Never Comes - John Chow. John tackles the topic of deadlines. If you don’t set deadlines on your projects they just drift and you never get round to turning them into realities.

Do You Think Like A Winner - Alan Johnson. Guest posting on John’s blog, Alan tells us how winners differ from losers and how to make your blog or website stand out from all the other also-rans.

Want to succeed? Get off your ass and work - Shoemoney. A guest post at Shoemoney.com tells it like it is - and like us procrastinators hate to hear because we know it’s right

You Will Not Make Money Online - 45n5.com. In this videoblog Mark tells us in his usual fast-talking, straight-to-the-point style why we’re all going to fail at this internet money making lark. 99% of people who try are going to fail, you need to really work hard to be in the other 1% and if you’re not prepared to put that work in you’re going to stay with the 99s.

Those certainly worked for me as I’ve started work on my first new website of the year. It’s very nearly February and 2008 has finally got started!

Affmeter Free No More

Affmeter is an essential part of any affiliate’s setup so I was rather saddened to learn that it is no longer going to be available for free.

I discovered Affmeter shortly after becoming an affiliate last year. It’s a really handy bit of software that logs in to all the affiliate networks you are signed up with and amalgamates all your earnings into one report. Every half hour it pops up a message on the screen telling you how well (or in my case usually, how poorly) your earnings are progressing. Best of all it’s been available for free.

So it was somewhat disappointing to be greeted with a message today informing me that the free version is being discontinued. It looks like the announcement was made last week but the news has only just caught up with me. It’s a shame but I quite understand their reasons. I’d often wondered how much money they made off their Pro version when the free version did 99% of what most affiliates want. Obviously not enough to keep the wolves from the door.

As someone who develops software for a living, I know how much time and effort it takes to produce a quality product like Affmeter. There’s nothing similar on the market that I’m aware of and the people behind it are very responsive to affiliates’ needs. It’s a well-respected product but you can only get so far on the respect and good wishes of your users. Bills need paying. Stomachs need filling.

So it’s a shame that a good thing has come to an end but I’ll be paying the very reasonable upgrade fee (less than £20 at current exchange rates). Affmeter Free is dead, long live Affmeter Pro.

Get your site removed from Google - quick!

Most of the time we’re struggling to get our sites INTO Google but sometimes you need to get them OUT of Google quickly. It’s easily done but a fiddle to find.

In my case, I wanted to get my old Blogspot version of Leaving The Day Job removed from Google. I’d moved the blog a few months back but there’s no way of doing a 301 redirect from Blogspot and Google was still listing my old posts at an address which just 404ed. I also suspect that this is keeping down the PageRank for this new site as Google will see it as duplicate content.

If you have your site set up and authenticated within Google’s Webmaster Tools you can simply remove URLs using the Tools/ Remove URLs option. Otherwise you need to use their Webpage Removal Request Tool. In my case I simply wanted to remove an out of date link but there are also various options for requesting removal of a third party’s web page including obscene material, lists of credit card numbers etc.

I simply input the link, gave it a couple of days and hey presto Google’s out of date links to my old blog were gone. Of course, outdated or non-existent pages will eventually disappear from the results anyway as Google gradually recrawls the web but this is a quick and easy way to give the big G a nudge.

Can Yahoo, OpenID build your community site?

Yahoo today announced that they will be supporting the OpenID authentication protocol. This could be really big news to anyone trying to build a community based site such as a forum as users can jump straight in and get involved much more easily.

I’ll explain that logic in a minute but first : what the heck is OpenID anyway? OpenID is a open, decentralised authentication system. What that means is that you get a username and password from one website and you can use it to log in to any other website which supports OpenID. Think of it as being like Microsoft Passport was supposed to be a few years back only open, free and adopted by many more websites.

Users can choose which ID provider they want to use. When they want to log in to an OpenID-supporting website they simple provide their username (which often looks like a web addresss eg fred.myopenid.com) and the website redirects them to their ID provider to log in. The ID provider then passes back a message to the website telling them whether or not the log in was successful.

OpenID has been around for a while and it’s not really taken off outside the geek community because it’s all been a bit complicated for the average user. Why create yet another login for something you don’t really understand anyway?

What Yahoo have announced is that they will become an OpenID provider meaning that users will be able to log in to an OpenID-supporting website using their Yahoo user name and password. This more than trebles the number of OpenID accounts to about 370 million.

So back to my original point: how this can help your community website. People are swamped by user names and passwords. Getting them to create a login for your site to add to the hundreds they already have is a barrier to them using your site. Instead they’ll see a button labelled ‘Sign in with your Yahoo! ID’ and be taken straight to a familiar Yahoo login page before being bounced back to your site.

By allowing them to use their existing Yahoo credentials on your site you’re making it easier and quicker for them join your forums, comment on your blog or upload their user-generated content to your site. No form filling, no validating their email address and no illegible captchas to decipher. They’ll have a smoother path into your site and as a consequence be more likely to contribute.

There are more details at the OpenID website

Entrecard - Fashionably late to the party

Entrecard has made quite a splash on US-based affiliate and money making blogs but doesn’t seem to have gained much traction amongst UK bloggers. I’ve decided to give it a try.

Entrecard is yet another social networking/blog advertising widget to put in your sidebar. The twist in this case is the fact that it’s tied in to free 125×125 button advertising.

The way it works is this: you create an Entrecard in the form of a 125×125 image and place the Entrecard widget on your site. Other bloggers come along and click on your Entrecard to “drop” theirs. This is the social networking aspect of it, when you log back into Entrecard you can see all the cards that have been dropped on your site. So far, so bog standard.

The fun bit is that you gain a credit every time you go and click on someone else’s Entrecard. You can then exchange these credit for adverts on other sites within the network. Likewise people can exchange their credits for advertising on your site, in which case their 125×125 Entrecard occupies the widget space on your blog for a day.

I’ve tried a few widgets on my site along these lines before but I’m still looking for the one that brings in good traffic and preferably doesn’t slow my site’s load time down to the point that you think you’re back on dial up. The main incentive to try Entrecard is that it’s being used by some of the biggest bloggers on the planet. For example, saving up enough credits can score you a day’s advertising on the mighty John Chow’s blog.

Entrecard is free to join, free to use and easy to install on your site (just one line of Javascript cut-and-pasted). You can try it out and gauge the response yourself in no time at all.

If you decide to join up, or if you already have, drop your Entrecard in my sidebar and I’ll come visit your blog.

Friday Night Emails : An Affiliate Account Manager responds

I made a bit of a stroppy post the other evening about the sudden influx of emails I received from affiliate managers right after 5pm on a Friday. Julia Stent from Affiliate Window was kind enough to respond to my post and also give me permission to quote her response here. So here’s the relevant part of her email:

“Just wanted to send you a quick message about your post regarding Dixons emails on Friday night. First off - sorry about that, that was our team here!

“I thought it might be relevant to explain something to do with our email system (and I suspect other networks too). Sending out emails to the potentially thousands of affiliates joined to a programme puts a big load on our email server. If this is done during office hours, it can slow down our receiving external emails from affiliates. This means we have to delay sending out some programme notifications until after peak times.

“I realise this isn’t ideal, and believe me we are working on it! Already at the end of last year we added a whole batch of new servers but these were prioritised to tracking and reporting. I’m not an IT wizard but I suspect there’s a delay at our email supplier’s end as well.”

As a day-jobbing IT manager I can quite understand why Affiliate Window would want to send their bulk emails at a quieter time of day. I know one particular employee at my day job who seems to delight in jamming up our internet connection for an hour or so by sending large PDF files to 500 external contacts at the same time.

Equally, you’re never going to please all the people all the time. For every Monty who objects to Friday evening emails there’ll be A N Other Affiliate who prefers it that way.

So apologies to any affiliate managers who were offended by my first post. Obviously you have your reasons. It’s just that this particular Friday evening was a perfect storm of things annoying me and getting those emails was one of them.

What does anyone else think?