www.affiliateconfession.com

Have you ever wanted to stick it to Google and be in charge of your own advertising? How would you like to get 100% of the profits you earn in selling advertising on your blog? You could create your own advertising page and individually track, schedule, manage, collect payments from advertisers and more or you could get OIOPublisher and have all that done automatically. And now you can do it for 50% off.

You’ve probably seen the little 125 x 125 ads on many blogs and over to the right in my sidebar and may have wondered how all that works, what makes them rotate so you never see them in the same position and I’m sure there are a few more questions. Well, OIOPublisher does a great job of all of that and to introduce their latest updated version, they’re offering a 50% off coupon. The regular price of IOIPublisher is $37, but if you use the code QWERTY-17 when you order you can get $17 off that price. Yea, I know it’s exactly 46% off, not 50%, but it’s close enough for the title.

OIO already has a ton of features, but version 1.60 adds some significant upgrades such as:

An addition of an ad queue
You can now use html with the ad system
You can now use use OIO with non-WordPress sites (very cool)
OIO will now be integration with an upcoming ad network (ViralBlogAds.com) (so you can sell unused adspace on the network)

OIOPublisher must still be hosted on a WordPress blog, but with the upgrade, through java script you can now place ads on any website and then sell ads through your own system or through ViralBlogAds.

I love OIOPublisher and use it to manage my advertising here at Affiliate Confession and if you want to start selling ads on your blog or just need a better way to manage them you should definitely take advantage of this discount. Don’t forget to use the coupon code QWERTY-17 for your $17 discount.

Today’s thought is another that was found in Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4 Hour Work Week, but originates from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have troubles.”

This can be related a lot to the get rich quick mentality that is so prevalent on the net today. You especially see it in the multitude of ebooks for sale promising everything from blogging riches, to Adsense riches, to a quick buck in real estate, to numerous other methods of creating money.

Methods may create some quick cash, but principles are timeless and create true wealth. Are you thinking about how you can cash in on the net with the latest technique for manipulating Google or are you thinking about how you can help other people get what they want or need from life?

Sometimes it can be a struggle between these two competing drives for the Internet businessperson and I am as guilty as the rest.

Your thoughts?

I don’t usually divulge some of the more gray hat techniques I use to get traffic and build links, but I messed up this one and through trial and error it seems to be perfected, so I thought I’d share it. It is based on Collin Lahay’s Link Building With Flickr technique and this one takes the process just on step further getting you links on pages with a PR of 3, 4 and even a few with a PR of 5. Flickr has recently implemented the dreaded “no-follow” tag, but I am still getting links in Google using this technique as show below for one of my blogs:

If you don’t have a Flickr account it’s easy to sign up for one at Flickr.com. You will actually need a Yahoo account (the same as a Yahoo email address) first and then you sign into Flickr and create your account in about 10 seconds.

The nice thing about Flickr is that it lets you leave comments on other people’s photos and what you may not know, is that you can put some basic html in your comments. That basic html allows you to even place an anchor text link. See how this is getting better?

Now, Collin’s technique in a great one because he shows you how to find Flickr pages that will potentially have hundreds or maybe even thousands of links coming in to them. These links will be from people who found the photo through Digg because it reached the front page and had maybe ten of thousands of visitors, consequently people will link to that photo. Eventually these Flickr pages will rank high and get some good PR because of all the links coming in. You can learn how to find those photos by reading more on Collin’s link build technique.  

But what if you want to find pages at Flickr that have high PR already? After using Collin’s technique I started thinking about that and it hit me like a ton of bricks how simple it would be to do. And it gets even better because these pages may give you a relevancy benefit in the search engines as well. (I don’t know this for sure, it’s just an educated guess) Even if you don’t get a relevancy benefit, at least your comments will be relevant to the picture with what I’m going to show you.

How do you find hi PR photo pages on Flickr? It’s simple, you just use the site: command the www.flickr.com url and a keyword. For example, if you had a site about cats and wanted to find high PR photo pages in Flickr about cats, you just plug this into Google: site:www.flickr.com cat . It’s that easy. Then what you want to look for is a search result that says, “on Flickr - Photo Sharing!” at the end of the title. These are the only results that are individual photos rather than groups of photos, a photographer’s page, discussion groups, etc. You may have to click over to a few of these kind of results before you find one with PR. you do all this while you are logged into your Flickr account and there will be a box at the bottom of all the comments for you to leave yours.

A Word Of Warning

As I said at the beginning, I messed this one up, and yes I did it good. I’ve had 2 Flickr accounts banned because I got a little overzealous and posted a few too many links. I always leave comments relevant to the photo I’ve located, but leaving too many seems to be grounds for banning. No big deal, just go get yourself a new Yahoo ID and a new Flickr account and you are good to go. I now make sure I create a Yahoo ID strictly for a Flickr account and do not use the Yahoo ID for any important email because if it gets banned, Yahoo takes away your ID as well. I also limit my comments to 6 or 7 a day and open a new account after leaving around 40 to 50 comments

I don’t know how much longer this will work, but it still seems to be working even after the “nofollow” tag implementation. I just put up 3 or 4 links today and I’ll report back in a couple of weeks to see if I get a backlink in Google.

I guess being an affiliate marketer and not making the bulk of my income from my blog has its advantages. The main advantage is that I don’t have to try and please Google with Affiliate Confession. Now, in my affiliate ventures I do try to follow the webmaster rules as best I understand them coming from the Mother Ship. But on this blog I have a luxury and I’m going to enjoy it.

One thing the luxury of not having to please Google, because I must make money from this blog, has taught me or rather shown me, is that I’m tiring of having to think about everything I do as if the goons at Google were looking over my shoulder. That’s just wrong. When did Google decide they’re the only game in town and you must abide by their rules of netiquette. Let’s call it what it is, Google is running a dictatorship and if you want to play in their game you must abide by what the dictator says or you get executed.

However, Google isn’t the only game in town. Over the last month Affiliate Confession has received more than 7,000 visits and more than 12,000 page views, but just 8.5% of that traffic has come from Google. The bulk of that traffic or 19.5% has come from direct visitors, people who come directly to Affiliate Confession without being filtered through a search engine, another blog, Entrecard or some other source. At times I have even received huge boosts in traffic from social media type sites such as StumbleUpon and Digg.

Google has positioned themselves as though the masses, and webmasters more specifically, are beholden to the playground of the Internet they have created for us. When the decision makers at Google issued the bizarre decree that webmasters were henceforth going to be punished for selling text links on their sites, that just made my blood boil, but I have yet to speak up about it. I don’t sell and have never sold links on any site I’ve run in the 4 years I’ve been making money online and it still made me furious. Then just yesterday, John from JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes left a comment where he stated in part:

I worry about google penalties every day, and they are penalizing whole sites for doing paid reviews. Anyone who even mentions Pay Per Post gets penalized now. I had a BizRate widget on one of my sites with all nofollow links and I got a 1 year penalty to PR0 and supplemental index in google. Once I removed that widget when my contract with Bizrate was up - within 3 days I was Pagerank 4 and back in the index.

That comment just got me thinking how dependent we’ve become on one entity in this whole Internet game. And yes, many of us are dependent on Google for much of our livelyhood whether it be through Adsense or them sending lots of traffic our way. If it weren’t for Google in many aspects, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do and have the benefit of working at home.

But back to the text link debate, I think the whole issue stems from the fact that Google doesn’t want webmasters to sell links because that’s their business with Adwords. Let’s face it, Google makes boatloads of cash from lots of people losing money on Adwords and if Google penalizes high traffic sites that sell text links, more people will have to continue to get traffic via Adwords, even if they lose money in the process. You may think that’s a dumb theory, but it is a known fact that people lose thousand of dollars just trying to figure out how to use Adwords and then they need to find a niche to be profitable in.

What has made this blog relatively easy to write has been the fact that I think of writing as more of a conversation than trying to find a keyword, and get it in the title, and make sure it’s in the first paragraph and make sure I don’t link out to something bad, and make sure I kiss up to Google every way I can so they might bless me with some traffic. Okay, I do that with most of my affiliate sites because want that traffic, but even then you never know what’s going to happen. For example, one of my vacation blogs was getting about 80 people a day from Google and hadn’t been updated since mid November, so I posted an entry thinking I would get even more traffic. Unfortunately that was a bad decision. For the last week I’ve received about 8 to 10 people a day from Google to that site. So much for trying to please them, I did nothing but update my blog and lost 90% of my traffic.

What it all boils down to is that I’m just not going to play the game with Google on this blog because I don’t have to. I enjoy writing and explaining what I do on the net to earn money and if Google would like people to know about that, they can send me some and if not, I’ll just rely on my readers and social marketing to get the word out.

Oh, by the way, my Featured Sites links are do follow.

I’ve seen the “dot com” domain name question many times, but it’s still one that confuses people and I finally came to a black and white decision on exactly what kind of domain names to buy, and what to stay away from, a couple of years ago. Terri from By America For America again posted this great question a few days ago and it always begs for an explanation.

My rule for domain names is pretty simple, unless you have an organization, never, ever buy anything other than a .com name and unless your company name has a dash in it, never, ever buy a domain name with a dash in it. Of course you might want a .mobi name for your mobile phone web site or a country suffix if it is required.

Dot com names have been the most popular domains on the internet since day one. It’s what we all matured on the net with and when you know the name of a company, but don’t know their url, the first thing you’re going to search on is some form of their company name followed by a, you guessed it, dot com. Unless you are trying to be real cute with your domain and come up with something very brandable or memorable like WhatDoYouThinkOf.us, there isn’t any reason for a business to buy anything other than a .com name.

Why no dashes? I learned this the hard way when I bought www.i-work-at-home-based-business-opportunity.com. Stupid, just plain stupid. I was a noobie affiliate marketer and though I would be smart in trying to stuff as many keywords into my domain name as possible and make it easy to read. There are all those keywords, work at home, home base business, business opportunity. What was I thinking? It’s six dashes too many.

That domain has never done well except at the very beginning when I was getting around 200 people a day. After about six months Google and MSN deindexed it and even though I’ve tweaked that monster for 3 or so years and it is now indexed by Big G, I only get about 60 visitors a day (MSN still won’t index a single page of that site). I have read that having too many dashes in your domain devalues it in the eyes of the search engines. But the truth is, no one really knows.

However, there is a much better reason not to put dashes in your domain name. Let’s take a look at a situation where I’m trying to tell someone that long domain name over the phone:

Client - What’s your url?
Me - It’s uh, double-u, double-u, double-u dot i dash work dash at dash home dash based dash business dash opportunity dot com.
Client - What, could you repeat that a little slower?
Me - double-u, double-u, double-u dot… i… dash… work… dash… at… dash… home… dash… based… dash… business… dash… opportunity… dot com.
Client - You work at where?

Get the picture?

You don’t want to get yourself into a situation where you have to spend more than 5 seconds telling someone your domain name. Unless you find a name that is very catchy and brandable I try to find a keyword that fits well with my concept for the site and make the name as short as possible. If you have to explain your domain name to someone, it loses it’s appeal and it more than likely won’t be remembered. Quick at easy is the rule.

Alan