www.affiliateconfession.com

I find it interesting that there are people on the net who literally scrape out a living day to day. I guess that’s what you’d say about those individuals who seem to think the only way to earn money on the web is to copy other people’s content. I just can’t get my mind around that kind of thinking, at least not in today’s era of more algorithmically (yes, that is a real word) advanced search engines.

I was alerted by a commentator yesterday about my post on the Moped niche where a scraper site ranked at the number one spot for a couple of search terms I suggested people look at. However, as I checked this morning, they are no where to be found. The weird thing about this particular scraper site in question is that it isn’t monetized in any way. No Google ads, banners, affiliate links or anything are on this site, yet it consistently outranks me for several of my keywords for a short time and then it’s off into obscurity again. Most splogs like this are monetized in some way, this one is the exception to the rule.

I also see big name bloggers getting scraped on a much more frequent basis. I’ve written a few guest posts for John Chow and won a couple of contests on his blog and every time I get a link from him, in my WordPress dashboard I see links coming at me from probably 10 scraper blogs before I see the links show up from John. It’s amazing that there are that many people who can’t, or won’t, do something original.

I saw a similar thing in an online forum where someone asked for a review of their financial blog and allthough it wasn’t a scraper site, the person had copied every bit of content from financial news and information sites. Every snippet of content I checked by copying and pasting it into Google was from another web site and this person had 20 or 30 posts already. What did they think they were doing and where did they get the idea they could make money long term with a blog built this way?

One of the cruelest things the Nazi’s did to prisoners during WWII, besides the heinous experiments they did on them, was in giving them meaningless work. Nazi guards would one day have prisoners move a huge pile of bricks across a 100 yard field, only to have them move the pile back the next day and and repeat that action again for several days. Or prisoners would be told dig a deep trench only to be told the next day to bury it and again the next day to dig the trench in the exact same spot. Madness soon set in for the captives.

I’m beginning to wonder how far behind the captives these scrapers are. There’s really no end to the work if you think your going to scrape your way to the top. You’ll never get there.

The search engine gods, or at least the minor deities, that reside at Google have seen fit to throw a little page rank boost my way in the latest update. I first read about a page rank update being in progress yesterday on John Chow’s blog, but didn’t see anything happening my way until first thing this morning.

After starting this blog on November 1, 2007 and posting at least 1 entry every day since November 21st apparently the hard work has paid off. I can’t remember when I first got a page rank, but it was a measly 1 and stayed that way for several months. However, Google now has boosted Affiliate Confession to a PR 3.

Thanks goes out to everyone who reads and links to an interesting article here at this blog. I am immensely grateful for that. You were all part of helping to receive a better page rank here.

Of course the big question now is, does it even matter? If I get more organic search engine traffic from Google that’s the result that would make a difference. Whatever the result I will continue to blog consistently on programs, news, goofy stuff and ways to make money in affiliate marketing.

Thanks Google for a little more green in the bar up top there, now please send more traffic my way.

I’m souring on Entrecard as of late because it consumes an inordinate amount of time in relation to the actual benefits it provides. But, if you want to take earning credits by mindless card dropping out of the equation and save some time, then head over to John Chow’s blog for a chance to win $10,000 Entrecard credits he is giving away.

John has managed to accumulate more than 18,000 credits and is giving away 10,000 of them. Bloggers like John who get around 5,000 to 6,000 visitors a day have no trouble earning a huge amount of Entrecard credits, because everyone wants to drop their card on John and everyone wants to advertise on his blog. But those of us that don’t get quite the amount of traffic the Dot Com Mogul does have to mindlessly drop cards to earn lots of credits.

Entrecard does have it’s advantages in that if you earn enough credits, you can eventually advertise on high profile blogs like John’s or Problogger of which I just submitted an advertising request at 2,048 credits. This does allow those that don’t have a very big advertising budget to get some great exposure, but you have to work quite hard for only a singe day’s worth of advertising. This has been my biggest beef with Entrecard, the fact that your advertising on any one blog lasts a scant 24 hours. You can see my Massive Entrecard Advertising Experiment Results for more on how much time Entrecard consumes for the benefit it provides.

Okay, I’m off my rant now. So, if you want to avoid a lot of work earning credits and would like a chance to win 10,000 credits for free, check out John’s contest.

I had a strange thing happen to me this afternoon. Actually, it’s still going on. Perusing through a few blogs as is usual most every day, I tried to comment on a Shoemoney post and my comment didn’t show up. WTH(heck)? Then I went over to John Chow and commented, same thing? Problogger, Entrepreneur’s Journey, all the same. I can’t comment anywhere.

By this point I’m thinking, what the heck is going on? Has the Akismet database identified my email address as spam? It certainly shouldn’t, because my spammy days are over, and I’ve never done any spammy things with this email address in the first place.

I then wen’t over to WhatIsMyIPAddress.com and saw that my IP address is different that what it usually is. How did that happen? It also shows my location as being somewhere near Kissimmee Florida instead of Palm Bay, around 60 miles away.

Apparently since my IP address has been changed, every blog I’ve been commenting on no longer recognizes me for who I am and requires that my comments get prior approval before being published.

This is a drag. Hopefully I won’t have to wait too long before I’m able to carry on the conversation again. I’m still who I am and no one is impersonating me, at least I don’t think so?

Freaky…

The Massive Entrecard Advertising Experiment ended a few days ago (advertising ran out earlier than expected) and the results are somewhat different than anticipated. Just to review, I accumulated 8,000 Entrecard credits around mid February and in a mad advertising blitz, spent every last one of them in about 4 days time, placing 13 days worth of advertising to test out the viability of the networking and advertising system.

The test was purely to see how many visitors I could get via advertising through Entrecard, instead of dropping cards. I was looking to test it as an advertising medium only. I didn’t completely stop dropping cards during the experiment, but I did not go out of my way to do so. If I was on a blog that had the widget, I would drop my card, otherwise I did not go to the Entrecard interface and just drop cards to earn points. See advertising clicks below:

The goal of the test was to gain 75 new rss readers to a new total of 226 and have 250 unique visitors per day. While the traffic increased to that unique visitor goal, the rss reader goal was off by a large margin. Rss readers reached a high of 193, while visitors averaged 263 per day over the course of the experiment.

Massive Entrecard Advertising Experiment Stats:

Entrecard credits used: 8,000
Number of advertisements placed: 180
Days to run advertising: 13
Average number of ads shown per day: 14
Total number of visitors from ads: 934
Total advertising visitors according to Google Analytics: 658
Average visitors per day from ads: 72
Time spent placing ads: 10 hours
Visitors per hour of work: 93

As mentioned earlier, the results were different than expected mostly because of the additional cards that were dropped on my blog during the time ads we running. Have a look at the trend below:

I can only assume many of the clicks on advertising I placed were Entrecard users as well and they dropped their cards while visiting this blog.

Conclusion:

While I did get a few visitors from all the ads placed, it doesn’t seem like the average of 72 additional per day paid off in the end. What I find most disturbing about the whole Entrecard experiment is that Google Analytics is showing me 30% less visitors than what the Entrecard stats are showing. This huge inconsistency makes me very suspect as to what’s really going on with their reporting and the viability of the whole system. You may also notice that of the 180 ads I placed, only 105 brought me traffic.

Spending 10 hours to get a supposed 93 visitors, with a bounce rate of 85%, per hour of work, hardly seems like it’s worth the effort. I think my time would have been much better spent leaving comments on my favorite blogs and adding to or starting discussions in forums.

I’m also having difficulty with the entire economy of Entrecard as well. Blogs like JohnChow.com and Problogger.net that have Alexa rankings 80,000 places higher than the most costly advertising spots at Entrecard, cost about one third the price to advertise on as the top spots do. That’s just insane and several people must be hosing the system. You have to be able to get your money’s worth out of online media or the whole thing will collapse (kind of makes you think of Google Adwords).

Because of the difficulty of finding blogs that fit my original criteria for advertising on, I eventually ended up going to the appropriate categories for my blog, staring at the bottom and working my way up the category till I got to blogs that cost around 30 or 40 credits to advertise on. Being that the few blogs I spent more than 300 credits for apparently produced next to no results (not showing up in my top 10), this seems to be the better way to advertise. You can get a massive amount of advertising with 1,000 credits and by placing ads on blogs that cost between 2 to 15 credits. All I’m looking for now is a blog that has a decently placed widget and doesn’t have a grayed out Google page rank.

After my advertising effort produced dismal results and the outrageous cost of the top ad spots, seemingly the best thing to do is to blanket the system with cheap advertising. Unless you know for sure a high priced ad will produce good results, this looks to be the best system. I believe Entrecard advertising would be a much better value if ads were shown for 48 hours instead of the present 24 hours. Too much time is spent finding good advertising only to have it used up in a day. Saturday traffic on the net is notoriously low and if that’s the day an expensive ad is scheduled to show, tough luck because you don’t have any control over it.

I will continue to use Entrecard for the time being because of the networking results it has produced. Meeting other bloggers, trading ideas, getting mentioned on other blogs and returning the favor has been worth the effort of being an Entrecard member, even if the advertising side of things has produced dismal results.