www.affiliateconfession.com

Could the world possibly end tomorrow? Well sure it could, I guess it could end any day if you think about it. But what has a few people alarmed at least for tomorrow is that the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, known as the Large Hadron Collider housed at CERN Labs in Geneva Switzerland is coming online Wednesday September 10th.

The Large Hadron Collider is the most expensive single machine ever built by man at a cost of $10 billion and is massive in it’s scale. It consists of 17 miles of underground tunnels and a collection chamber with machined steel plates at either end 30 meters in diameter (3 times higher than the tallest diving platform at the Olympics). The purpose of the collider is to discover fundamental particles, specifically the theorized Higgs boson, that will help scientists take a step closer in their search for The Grand Unified Theory which will basically explain all of physics.

Where the problem comes in, is that the experiments conducted by the collider can produce mini black holes which some scientists predict can end up at the core of the Earth and eventually consume it (yes, the Earth) like you do your grandmother’s special blueberry pancakes. For some ultra-geek reading, check out professor Otto Rossler’s paper on how this may happen (get out your scientific calculators). He has also filed a lawsuit trying to stop the collider from becoming fully operational.

The world probably won’t end tomorrow because the LHC is only being fully powered up and accelerating a beam of particles around the ring without crashing them into an opposing beam which would produce the mini black holes. However, you never know what will happen.

If you don’t know what will happen to you if the world comes to an end, you can check out this site.

Or if you’d like to watch as the world possibly ends tomorrow, CERN is having a webcast of the days events and you can watch the world end live right here. If the world does end, Google’s ad revenue is sure to decrease a bit.

If you’d like to read some geek tech and science news, you can check out the KurzweilAI.net newsletter where I first discovered this story. I hope you enjoyed our field trip away from affiliate marketing today.

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If you don’t get kicked out of some program, banned from a forum, accused of spamming, have a site or two completely removed from Google’s index or lose a significant amount of money (for you) in advertising during your affiliate marketing career, then you aren’t working hard enough. Every one of those things has happened to me, but fortunately I’ve learned enough along the way that any dramatic incidents such as these should be reduced to a minimum from here on out.

With the way things develop and change at an ever increasing rate on the web and the sheer amount of advice (some shady some not so shady) available on affiliate marketing, you are bound to run afoul of someone’s “rules” at some point. There are things that are clearly wrong to do such as hacking someone’s site to steal their traffic stream or paying someone to click on your Adsense ads, and then there are other techniques that are merely loopholes in the system just waiting to be exploited.

For many successful affiliates that’s the game to be played. The more successful you are as an affiliate is probably in correlation with the risks you are willing to take and how far you think outside the box. Let’s face it, if it were all that obvious and we all played by the accepted rules, then we’d all be in the super rich affiliate category or at least on our way there. What can set you apart is looking at “the rules” and seeing an advantage that no one else sees and then exploiting it.

As an example, for all my whining about Facebook Ads, I’ve actually earned almost $200 in the last 2 days by finding a way to target dating offers in a not so obvious way, and if I told you about it, you’d probably go, “Duh, why didn’t I think of that!” However, the high school interns, or whoever it is, running the show in the Facebook Ads department might at some point decide what I’m doing is not acceptable, and that’s the end of my little windfall. Even though no rules have been broken, it’s the end of the party until the next unconventional technique somewhere outside the box is discovered.

Once loopholes such as this are closed they can possibly have a major impact on your business, that is if you don’t adapt well. And that’s the whole point of this post. Yes, at some point during your Internet ventures you will probably face a setback big enough that may make you want to hang it up and do the college and cubicle thing the rest of your life. But if you’ve built a stable and diversified business where your income comes from multiple sources, it will lessen the impact of a setback that either effects you financially or emotionally or both. Read the Affiliate Confession FAQ for various ways on how I’ve diversified my income and you can too.

Developing your ability to think outside the box and recognize and take advantage of opportunity and see between “the rules”, can turn major setbacks into minor inconveniences.

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Some time from minutes to hours after this post goes live, it will rank number one in Google for tuna frappuccino. While some may get excited about that, it means nothing, because the last time I checked, not a single person was searching for one of these tasty delights. And to my knowledge, Starbucks isn’t serving them yet either.

Depending on how much time you as an affiliate may waste trying to get your domain name or some clever phrase you’ve thought of, to get that high ranking in Google, it can either be a minor distraction or a huge mistake. You may be proud of the fact that you own the number one spot in Google for your name or some obscure phrase, but the harsh reality is that you’re the only one searching for that specific term and it is bringing you exactly zero traffic.

You’d think this would be a no brainer, but it isn’t. Someone might go to Google and think that ranking number one for tuna frappuccino out of more than 39,000 results is something special. It isn’t. There aren’t 39,000 results for the phrase “tuna frappuccino”, there are 39,000 results for pages that have the word tuna and the word frappuccino somewhere on that page but there are zero pages that have those two words together, that is until now.

Reading the little results bar at the top right on Google search results pages can be a quite misleading about your keyword competition. Some of this misconception probably comes from ebook pimps promoting their skills by showing those misleading results on those insanely long sales pages. They will tell you, and even show you, how if you buy their ebook you can rank for lots of obscure phrases as well. You then spend the money and start ranking for obscure phrases that bring you zero traffic, and find you still don’t rank for phrases that do bring traffic.

To get accurate competition results on a keyword phrase, you need to be looking for the pages where your phrase is in the exact order of a keyword that is actually worth promoting. To find your true competition, place quotes around the phase and then look at the results. For example, let’s take the phrase make super big money. Wow, there’s over 2 million results for that phrase! No, there are 2 million pages with some combination of those words on them. Some page may be a blog where a guy is happy about his wife making pizza for dinner and writes, “Super, my wife is going to make a big pizza for dinner. I hope I have enough money in my wallet to go to the store and get mushrooms, otherwise I’ll have to use the credit card.” That’s not really about making money.

When you put the phrase “make super big money” in quotes, the results come out a little different. There are only 4 pages with that exact phrase on them (but now probably 5 with this post) and most importantly, no one is searching for that term.

If you’re overly excited one day to find your name or an obscure term on your web site ranks number 1 in Google, head over to either the Free Keyword Suggestion tool at WordTracker or the Free Search Term Suggestion Tool at KeywordDiscovery and see how many people are actually searching for that term as reality sinks in a bit.

Maybe you can head over to Starbucks now and drown your sorrows in a nice tuna frappuccino. Did you want whip cream on that?

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It looks like Google has gone through and started another page rank update and AffiliateConfession.com came out on the good end of things for the second time in as many updates.

My first post for this blog was on November 1, 2007 and by January 2008 I got a PR 1. The next update was sometime in May and Google handed Affiliate Confession a PR of 3. The latest update must have happened on Friday and I’m now at a PR 4.

It seems like Google is being friendly lately to the blog because they have been sending a lot more search traffic to the tune of about 25% of all visitors. That’s up from 17% in June and 11% in April. Hopefully that trend will continue. As much as I rag on Google this sure isn’t something I can complain about.

The best way to get Google to notice your blog and treat it in a friendly way is to get those all important links coming in by writing good content, sponsoring contests, guest posting, publishing articles to article directories, commenting on other blogs that give a link to top commentators and making an attempt to stand out above everyone else (not that I’m there yet, or anywhere near it).

How much does page rank matter though, is the big question. I outrank John Chow in Google PR now. He is a PR 3 and Affiliate Confession is a PR 4, but it’s not such a big deal when JC is making 10 times what I’m making and that’s just from his blog alone. It doesn’t look like Page Rank really carries that much weight any longer.

Anyone else seeing a page rank update in the last few days? 

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I wonder if Google is as green and carbon friendly as they would like you to think. With their latest move in censoring Water4Gas.com and ebooks and web sites promoting any such product that uses water to give your car better gas mileage, they look rather suspect. Believe it or not I received and email the other day from the powers that be at Adwords letting advertisers know that they will no longer be allowed to run these types of ads in their pay per click network.

What’s the reason given for this business hampering move on Google’s part? The email stated they won’t be allowing this kind of advertising because of customer feedback and “business considerations.” What!? Business considerations? Who is Google in bed with on this one? What about the business considerations of the people trying to make a living selling ebooks and information such as this now that they don’t have access to approximately 25% of the world’s online advertising market?

This is exactly why I have a problem, as do thousands of others, with the way Google operates. They have their tentacles into nearly everything that has anything to do with being “on the grid” and they can just arbitrarily decide they don’t like your product and immediately 25% of all online advertising is no longer available to you. And you have absolutely no recourse. I don’t know what percentage of their business an operation like Water4Gas.com gets from Google Adwords, but I assume it’s a lot since they are a product sold through Clickbank. Any way you look at it, Google’s decision will have a devastating impact on this business and others like it.

As with any product, there will be people who think something like this is an outright scam and others that benefit from it. Products like this one are legitimate and after talking with an engineer friend of mine who has actually built some of these systems, he assures me they do work. I can understand where people may have a problem with Water4Gas.com because what you are actually buying is an ebook showing you how to build one of these systems, not any physical parts as the landing page kind of makes it look. You have to get the parts and assemble the kit yourself, but it does work.

Regardless of what you think of water for gas type products, a decision such as this from the mothership Google should trouble the hell out of you. Now that Google is in the affiliate business with their acquisition of DoubleClick, what product, advertising strategy, ad network or affiliate network is next on their hit list?

In 30 seconds anyone can go to ClickBank.com and find several products that are ripoffs, but look them up by searching with their domain name and you will find plenty of ads on Google. Or look up anything related to making money in real estate, mlm’s, online, trading stocks, whatever, you name it and I’ll bet you can find someone running a scam and advertising it via Adwords. We all must have some discernment in the purchases we make. If you don’t know that by now I have some swampland in Florida I’d like to show you. Caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.

Google has way too much power. When are they going to protect us from themselves?

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