I recently mentioned that bloggers with quality niche blogs shouldn't bother trying to make money through payperpost.com thanks to horrible support and extremely low paying "opportunities" for bloggers.
That prompted this thread on V7n. A few staunch supporters of payperpost came out of the woodwork including DeniseG. Now Denise G is a bit hard to understand seeing as how she's gone from hating on Payperpost to calling PPP critics sheep (who are ba-ba-baing behind John Scott).
Now since I am a PPP critic, I guess that puts me the sheep category. I objected in the comments area and that's when DeniseG called me famous for asking who thinks PPP sucks. Of course she also hallucinates about ageism and sexism (see pages 4 or 5 of the thread I linked to first).
I didn't know that 80% of homebuyers begin their search online, but I know I did. Here's an interesting article about ho real estate people are spending more advertising dollars online. The focus here is on them creating video driven websites to show off properties. It doesn't go in to how they market those web sites...
I've been blogging about real estate (on anoter blog) recently but just so I don't have to make the switch, here's a good real estate article on how most homebuyrs either want to much and have to settle for less or have to spend more than they planned.
I just deleted some spam comments because I want to look my best. That's not easy when you've been posting fairly infrequently as I've been. Why do I need to look my best?
Surprisingly, I found this blog nominated for the 10,000 blog challenge prize. Even more surprisingly, people are voting for me (I voted for myself out of vanity, but that's not surprising). Possibly, there was some misunderstanding about the contest guidelines because I have other blogs more deserving than this one IMO. What I think I'll do is blog about each of the blogs that was nominated with me. I've been busy blogging about directories, but as long as I'm nominated I might as well blog about blogs like the contest suggests.
A number of people on the different webmaster forums out there are complaining that their Yahoo checks are being made out to their usernames rather than their real names, particularly when the business information field is left blank.
The general consensus seems to be that to avoid the problem altogether your best bet is to fill in the business information field with your personal information (assuming you're not a business entity).
Other than that, you can do two things. Send the check back to yahoo and ask for a corrected one. Or most banks will let you deposit a check made out to "gumpersag" or wahtever as long as someone signs it over to you. Just sign your user name and deposit the check. Don't bother trying to cash it.
I'm trying out Yahoo Beta (Yahoo! Publisher Network Beta Program) on www.nfl-giants.com - ads appeared immediately, but not targeted ones. I see one long distance ad, 3 finance ads (mortgages, refinancing, and general loans), and one high speed internet ads.
I'll give it some time to see how things go before drawing any real conclusions. However, I must say that since I registered as a sports site and all content is sports related I expect the ads to get more sports related.
I make and accept numerous payments through PayPal and quite a few web hosts are beginning to accept PayPal. One day all the subscriptions I'm paying were cancelled (not by me). I immediately knew it was a PayPal glitch and I contacted support.
The responses I've been getting (and it takes about 10 days to get a response) are scary. First they wanted me to fill out a fraud claim (since someone else must have entered my account and cancelled my subscriptions) but how can I make a claim? I didn't lose any money. Besides I don't believe anyone else did access my account.
I wrote them back explining that they've not addressed my problem. I just got another response that has nothing to do with me - instructions on how to cancel a subscription. The problem with companies like PayPal and Ebay (with no phone support) is that there's no accountability. I can't call anyone to get answers or explain how incompetent the support staff is. All I can do is continue emailing people who have no idea (or no inclination) to help me or even to address the actual problem.
Now I have to make other arrangements with my web hosts and people I advertise with.
Someone claiming to be Jarrod Hunt from textlinkbrokers.com left a nasty little comment on my online advertising blog:
And this is why you are broke with a blog that has no readers and why we have 40 people working for us and over 4000 active clients, including several Fortune 500 companies and 2 of the top 10 internet retailers.What struck me first is the lack of professionalism displayed by the writer. Am I to believe that the author of this comment does business with fortune 500 companies? The sort of bragging seen here, not to mention the lame insults, remind me more of middle school than a business context.You should spend less time criticizing other people businesses and more time thinking about your own.
And just so your information is correct. We dont charge to monitor your links until after 2 years.
I guess my last responce to you also went unheard as well, since you still think that we only pay $5 per link. We only pay $5 per link for low quality sites like the one you submitted to us.
Get over it dude.
Another thing that struck me is that the author is criticizing my online advertising blog though he himself seems to be a reader. I mean he did leave a comment on my site. Also, the comment about my being broke struck me as odd. I haven't argued about personal wealth since a boy named Alex told me in 4th grade that his family was richer than my family.
The other very interesting thing is the "low quality" remark regarding the site I submitted to textlinkbrokers.com. First it tells me that textlinkbrokers.com is buying links on low quality sites for 5.00 and charging people good money for these low quality links. After all, they do offer 5.00 each for low quality links.
Lastly, I wonder if this Jarrod Hunt actually remembers the emails I sent him regarding sites where I might place text links. At the time I mentioned ESL go and Jtrotta.com, both of which have lots of link popularity and traffic. If a PR 7 with over 1,000 uniques on a bad day is "low quality"...
Needless to say I didn't take them up on their generous offer to pay 5.00 for a permanent link on either of these sites. Nor am I likely to send these highly professional text link brokers who use schoolyard insults any more letters of inquiry...
I was thinking it could never be worth it to pay someone to run or help run my forums. Now I'm thinking it might be very possible because I saw this ad on the V7n forums offering really little money for a lot of work:
* Minimum of 200 post a month (Half of this MUST be new threads)As I attempt to hijack the thread, I asked this question:
* Promote forum in at least 10 other forum/directory a month
* Run contents for members
* Help choose contest winner
* Help with putting contents of site newsletter together
* Provide ideas to stimulate forum growthRemuneration
------------------
* $100 payable by PayPal, MoneyBooker or UK cheque
* Share of advert revenue i.e. can sell two text link or promote your own websites free)
So how much should I offer to someone for moderating my forum? Let's say I demand the first two:* Minimum of 200 post a month (Half of this MUST be new threads)
* Promote forum in at least 10 other forum/directory a monthbut NOT the others:
* Run contents for members
* Help choose contest winner
* Help with putting contents of site newsletter together
* Provide ideas to stimulate forum growthThe newsletter one sounds like a lot of work...
Kate Burns from Google UK has some important information about advertising and branding:
"Some online marketers forget branding's importance as a search engine marketing component. When they regard search advertising as direct-response marketing -- as they often regard all online marketing -- they believe they save money by paying only for conversions. They don't realise how much greater clickthrough and conversion rates would be if their brands were recognised and trusted by that same search audience."One must also consider what happens when an ad is seen on Digital Point's free advertising network where an ad for your site might be displayed on thousands of sites across the web. Awesome for SEO, but good for branding?
Clickz reports a study that found only 9% of fortune 100 companies have effectictively optimized sites. For the study, good SEO included "unique title tags, unique meta descriptions and meta tags, relevant body text, and anchor text containing primary keywords or phrases."
Of course that last one, anchor text, is probably the most important (although links from different IPs may be necessary for full benefits) and Fortune 100 companies could probably buy all the anchor text they need...
Here's a press release about a new product called keyword tumbler. The ideas is to take your keywords and come up with lots of variations you could market:
Most successful online businesses use keyword marketing to drive high-quality targeted traffic to their site via pay-per-click advertising like Google's AdWords program.....If you had to manually create keyword lists using all the variations of your keyword phrases it would take hours, if not days. But with Keyword Tumbler you can create these lists in minutes!
Please check out my new site, buy-links.com in which I try to provide information about online advertising, especially text link advertising. For example, there's an entry about buying text links from irrelevant sites which notes an argument that links from non-related sites don't help link popularity. Now that's probably wrong. I mean there must be a reason why adult and casino sites are always spamming blog comments. But still, there are some good reasons to buy related links.
Threats to Google points out that there are some lawsuits brought against Google because they now accept bids on searches for registered trademarks. This may impact Google's profit as the pay for litigation and could possibly lose revenue.
It may affect advertisers too. If someone searches for your competition, you might want an ad up there to lure the searcher to your business instead. For now Google allows that; Overture doesn't.
http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/ad_network_222.php