Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

It only seems like yesterday that I was writing about Click Fraud and how the new breed of CPC advertising networks were going to need to up their game when it comes to preventing it. It’s one of Google’s biggest issues with Adsense and if they can’t eliminate it completely then who can? I wasn’t surprised to see then that John Chow’s TTZ Media affiliate network is already starting to experience some problems.

“One of the things that came up as we started accepting more affiliates who are not friends with John Chow was this : CLICK FRAUD.
So many affiliates are starting to take advantage of it, logging more clicks than they should, that are not deserved.”

Apparently thousands of clicks have already been removed from the system due to some simple IP checks. From my own experience this is not good enough, for example I can think of at least 2 employers I know where more than 9,000 employees share a single external IP address. Even several hundred clicks from that same IP over the space of a month or 2 may not be fraud, it can easily happen once those spammy work e-mails start getting circulated about a page that perhaps has TTZ ads on it. Not only that but large scale fraudsters will of course be cloning and hijacking thousands of IP’s which simple database queries are not going to easily detect. There is nothing easy about stopping click fraud (Just ask Google) but in order to make life fair for both the advertiser and the publishers you’ve got to invest in it, as far as TTZ Media are concerned it looks like they are prepared to put that investment in and it will be interesting to see how they get on.

Just to make things clear I would never recommend anybody try and con an advertising network. It is this sort of thing that will eventually see the end of CPC advertising that so many of us rely on for large parts of our income. Think about it, when the advertisers don’t see a good enough ROI then they either lower prices or pull the plug. Making money online takes work and time, click fraud is for fools.

Surprises don’t get much better than unexpected money turning up in your bank account and thanks to Commission Junction I had a little bit of that action this week! The last time I spoke about Commission Junction was because I’d had a bit of a falling out with them over an advertiser. To cut a long story short I was invited on board an advertisers program (by the advertiser) made a load of sales for them only to be booting off because of the content of my website. It was crazy for a few days, as far as I was concerned my earnings were being forfeited and Commission Junction could go and take a running jump! That’s how it was left, or so I thought…

Turns out that the evidence I supplied was enough for Commission Junction to not withhold my earnings and to honour the sales I’d made. I haven’t checked to see if the advertiser in question still uses them but either way it was nice of them to stand up for the little guy here. This week they paid me, as it’s bonus money I wasn’t expecting I’ll probably by investing it in some form of making money online scheme, or maybe it’s time I dabbled again with Adwords.

Whilst I was away from Commission Junction I’ve been experimenting a bit with another affiliate network, NeverBlueAds. It’s still early days but even at this early stage I’d say that NeverBlueAds has the potential to be the most profitable affiliate network I’ve used to date. I’ll report back in a month or so when I know better but if you’re looking for some high quality prducts to promote for a great percentage you could do worse.

Pay-Per-Click in whatever guise you take it has to be the easiest way of making money online. For most people it may not be the best way of making lots of money but when it comes to giving you a morale boost there is no easier way of earning a few dollars. It’s no surprise then that as Google sloooowly leans more towards an action based model for Adsense there is no shortage of new PPC brokers trying to get you to show ads for them. I only hope they’re properly prepared.

Back in the day when hosting and bandwidth cost several hundred dollars a month I was out there giving software away for free. At 4 meg a download my costs were pretty high, that is why I turned to advertising. I tried several CPA schemes that although well targeted they didn’t convert well at all. Banner advertising just didn’t seem to work on my website. It was then that I found a company also offering PPC ads so installed them. In the first month I made a couple of pound, nothing like enough to cover my costs. In order to try and get more clicks I decided to embed some simple ads into the software I was giving away, it did work a little bit but click through rates will still way below 0.05%! That’s when I hit on the idea of instead of just showing the ad link, why not open it for them? (I’ve got to point out that the company in question had nothing in their TOS about software clicks) So that’s what I did and was it an eye opener! In the first week of putting the new ad enabled software out my account was showing a balance of more than £2000, what’s more because of the randomness of the adverts being shown and the random factor of whether to open them or not and the fact that only 1 add would be shown per user per 2 weeks everything looked normal in the stats. This carried on for several more weeks until I was due to get paid, I bottled it. You see I’d only planned to cover hosting, not turn a profit so when I saw the figures involved I closed my account without payment. I put my hands up, stopped that version of the software in it’s tracks and told the advertising company that all my “clicks” should be refunded to the advertisers. What happened next surprised me, they admitted that they had no idea that many of my clicks were not valid, not only that but they invited me back to create a new account and use it properly. I declined because by then I’d discovered Adsense and was earning very good totally legitimate money with them.

So the question is fair game or fraud? Google have made a huge investment in removing click fraud from Adsense, with all these new PPC providers popping up I only hope that they are putting the investment in to run a fair network for their advertisers and publishers alike. If not then it’s going to be here today and gone tomorrow which nobody wants to see.

Are there any ethics when it comes to making money online? It’s a question I sometimes have to ask myself, normally when I’ve just thought of something that will make a lot of money, isn’t illegal but just doesn’t “seem right”.

A very good example of this was something that happened today. I’m a member of a fairly hard to get into affiliate scheme for one of the UK‘s biggest brand retailers on the internet. The way it works is the usual planting a cookie for a set amount of time and you get a percentage of whatever the person buys, nothing very exciting there, just normal affiliate stuff. What I’ve been noticing though is that people tend to click on the special offer banners I use, not buy that “special” product but then just by the law of averages go back and buy something from that online shop several weeks later. It’s a big, popular online store and lots of people use them. Of course by using those banners the actual number of referrals I have is quite low and so are my earnings.

I was thinking what would happen if I changed the rules of the game. For example say I have a page that gets hit 1,000 times a day by people searching for “boob tubes”. Now what if right near the very top of that page I including a link in the body with the text “the best boob tubes I’ve ever found”, using my affiliate link. Of course anybody clicking that link is taken to the website that has nothing to do with boob tubes but by that point my cookie is in place. No real harm done to the visitor right? Probably just a duff link or something? Instead of 5 referrals a day we’re now more likely looking at several hundred. Over the next month they shop, I earn money. In theory it’s a great idea, it’s just a shame that it just doesn’t feel “right”.

I suppose in a situation where you’re desperate (or evil as some people call themselves) then this would become acceptable, maybe? For me, at the moment I just can’t bring myself to do it.

I’m faced with a bit of a dilemma this morning. Commission Junction have contacted me regarding the rather short “shove it up your ass” e-mail which I sent after they threatened to close my account. Well I say contacted, it’s far more of a sorry we didn’t mean it and we really do value our publishers because that’s where we make all our money sorry sorry sorry type of e-mail. They also explained that they were only acting on the instructions of the advertiser had no idea about the relationship between the advertiser and me and that they’d be more than happy to leave my account (and commission) exactly where it was.

The problem I have is do I back track? Do I say all is well with the world and just carry on as if nothing has happened or do I close the account? My heart says close it, my head says keep it, if only for the e-bay affiliation?

It would also help if I had a way of contacting them, the e-mail was sent from a no-reply address that bounces and none of their messages show in my CJ inbox. I have a feeling that apathy could be the winner here.

My previous experiences with Commission Junction have not been that great, there was that one time when they closed my account without telling me but left their advertisers adverts running. That was a bit annoying, it also earned them there first strike from me. They don’t really appear to do anything for affiliates, it’s all about the advertisers for them, 1 look at the rubbish percentages will show you that.

In the last 24 hours they’ve managed to hit strikes 2 and 3 and I’ve now asked for my account to be closed. The main problem here is that I’ve been stitched up like a kipper, one of their advertisers has taken me for a ride and Commission Junction are more than happy to go along with it.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by a company to promote an event. They’d found one of my sites, loved the look of it and we’re really keen for me to sign up with their affiliate program (through CJ) and get earning. It was a personal e-mail from one of their marketing representatives, I know this because I replied and we had a very nice exchange of ideas going forward. So I used my existing CJ account to sign up, was approved after several days (during which they reviewed my website again) and then set about integrating their creative’s into my content. The site in question isn’t really a money maker but more of a hobby, I’m not overly bothered about the money from it so the very low commission percentage was not a problem. After a couple of days I checked my stats and low and behold the program was doing great, a 15% conversion rate for them, just under $500 in sales and I’d earned a little bit as well.

Jump forward to last night. I get an e-mail from the advertiser stating that due to my website containing illegal content they were pulling the plug. Maybe just a coincidence but I was only 1 or 2 sales below getting a better percentage for the rest of the month. As for the illegal content, that’s utter crap. I’ve always been very careful with all my websites and I’m certainly not interested in getting into legal battles over the sake of a hobby website. A t the first sign of a cease and desist order I’d alter whatever it was they were complaining about. To date nothing like that has ever happened. Besides the website contains nothing but text content and links, if I remove that text then the website doesn’t rank and they don’t sell. It has been a great way for them to make some very quick sales earn a wedge and then not have to pay any commission, great. That’s strike 2 for Commission Junction for allowing any old company to sell stuff through them.

Then I got another e-mail this morning this time from Commission Junction themselves. As I expected all commission is to be forfeited. Not only that but I have somehow violated their TOS and have 5 days to respond. Maybe I upset their nan or something? Strike 3. I am also a Commission Junction customer, without me and other affiliates hosting ads for their advertisers they don’t have a business. Completely ignoring the fact that their is nothing illegal about the content of my website there is also the small matter that the company in question bloody contacted me personally AFTER reviewing my website. They then accepted my application (that they had asked me to make) after reviewing my website again. After I’d earnt just enough money for them they then decided my website was not suitable and I got shafted. I gave Commission Junction a response in less than 5 days, shut my account now and void any banners that are showing, I don’t want to be earning their advertisers another penny.

I know it’s slightly of subject but this is what really worries me about Google’s edging towards CPA. It is just switching the potential fraud from publishers to advertisers, and when you’re dealing with a big advertiser as an individual you’re screwed from the start.

By the way I’m now on the lookout for a good CPA affiliate network, what’s your favourite?

Everybody has seen an advert like this one (OK, maybe not quite as good as that one) where people will offer to submit your website to 1000, 10000, 100000 “Search Friendly” directories for a stupidly small fee. Has anybody ever actually bothered to review these services though? Well luckily for everybody I’ve used quite a few of these directory submission services and here’s the truth.

What Is Search Friendly

In directory terms I think them mean that

1. The page has page rank
2. The page does not have an excessive amount of outbound links (30 seems to be nice)
3. The links are not disguised or no followed

What they don’t tell you however is that simply by creating a directory of non original link only content AND by offering a paid submission option (which almost all do) they are anything but search friendly.

But Do They Work

I would look at work as 3 things, some direct referral traffic, an increase in general search ranking performance, a positive effect on page rank. If you don’t see any or all of them then I’d say that this linking strategy is not working.

I can only go from my own personal experience, but in the 3 years I’ve been using various link services (ranging from manual submissions in Thailand to automatic large scale directory submission) I can honestly say that I’ve never once experienced any of the above factors. No direct referral traffic, no increase in search performance and no effect on page rank. Over that time I have clients who didn’t know any better spend hundreds of dollars (without consulting me first I must add) on these services which no positive effects, I’ve spent my own money to try and kick-start new websites and again no effect. For me and my clients it’s been like throwing money down the drain. There are several directories out there (the ODP, Yahoo directory) that are well known to have a positive effect on your website, there are a few more that do appear to be useful in terms of referral traffic but in general I wouldn’t waste my money on these services.

Prove Me Wrong

If you run one of these services and want to prove me wrong, then please be my guest. At present this blog gets around 60 unique visitors a day, has no page rank (although a 3-4 is predicted) and does very little in the natural search results. If you think your service can boost these stats then drop me an e-mail to close dot cowley at gmail dot com

You perform your magic on this site and if it works I’ll happily write a lovely review about your service and it’s positive effects. Not only that but I’ll recommend you to several existing and all future clients. If you can prove that you’ve got a directory submission service than can be of benefit then you’ll do very well out of this deal. My arms are crossed and I’m waiting here for somebody to prove me wrong.