www.affiliateconfession.com

Watch the video below and weep. If this is the mindset we have in this nation, we are done.

Julio Osegueda is a 4 year employee of McDonalds and can’t get another job even though he’s going to school so he expects the government, or rather The Immaculate One (President Obama), to do something about it.

While I commend Julio for working and going to school to better himself, it’s not the job of the government to bail people like him out. Sorry, you want benefits from Uncle Sam because you’ve been at McD’s for 4 years, it doesn’t work like that, or at least it did’t used to. Julio, by the way, is quite excited about meeting The Immaculate One. Did you notice his shirt? It say’s “King Obama”…scary, just scary.

When is the government going to send a check my way for some of the stupid things I’ve tried to promote through PPC or because I’m still not making $2,000 a month through Adsense?

Popularity: 17% [?]

Occasionally I see blog posts declaring the death of Build A Niche Store (BANS) and receive comments on the blog here predicting the same. Many times when this happens I head over to the BANS forums expecting to see Hiroshima type devastation and read about all its users calling for some of Obama’s stimulus handouts. Funny though, that just doesn’t seem to be the case.

What I do find is BANS users complaining somewhat about Google’s unfairness (who doesn’t complaining about that?), but an equal or larger amount of users gleeful about new records their network of stores or usually just one or two stores are setting month after month. At least once a week some new user testifies about making it into the $1,000 per month club (Not a real club, just a serious achievement users like to point to) or some other record such as $2,000, $3,000 or $4,000 per month. Apparently BANS users making $500 to $4,000 per month don’t realize it’s no longer a good way to make money.

Where there is a problem with BANS there is a problem with just about anything else you do on the Internet. Saying BANS is dead because of what is happening to a few users is like saying WordPress is dead, or Amazon is dead, or Azoogle, Neverblue and Pepperjam are dead. Just because some affiliates spam forums, build horrid looking sites, misrepresent products or steal commissions and gets caught doesn’t mean whatever affiliate programs or tools they’re using is dead. It means those affiliates need to get into and understand, really understand the game or get out and work in a cubicle or go flip burgers for a living.

On the other hand, yes, BANS is dead. It is dead for those that put up crummy sites that have nothing but auctions, pages and pages of auctions with no content. It is dead for those that build one site with nothing but auctions and expect to get accepted into eBay’s affiliate program. It is dead for those affiliates that create 20 sites that have 1 paragraph on the home page and nothing else. It is dead for those that build a site with every category and try to make it look just like eBay. It is dead for those that build sites with 30 different categories totally unrelated to each other. How anyone can believe they can throw up, in other words, barf out, a BANS site with zero content and make money is beyond me. Have you not been reading the news that Google wants relevant and useful information in its index?

Get a grip, how do you feel when you run across crap sites when you’re looking for something? And you want visitors to your equally crappy BANS site to spend more than 1 second window shopping at your Expensive-Watches-With-No-Content-And-An-Ugly-Header.com website. Am I missing something here? Google certainly isn’t.

If you want to build a business on the net and are committed to putting together a quality portal with information for visitors in your particular niche then Build A Niche Store is still for you. However, if you just want to make a quick buck and plan on creating a network of spammy BANS sites to match your splog network, please, don’t clog up the system.

Popularity: 12% [?]

I’ve been messing around with these ridiculous Acai Berry Diet and Green Tea diet scams for some time now and I’m finally done with them for several reasons, but I’ll limit the reasons to just 5 for the sake of brevity. Honestly, a lot of stuff available on the ad networks aren’t good for the consumer because of the cost, but these things are the worst.

1. These Diet Programs Are Scams– Have you ever taken the time to read the terms of service for these supposed free trials of whatever diet pill you’re thinking of promoting? That’s where you read what these weight loss supplements will end up costing you. The fact is, they are rip-offs of the worst kind. When someone orders a free trial and types in their credit card info, their 14 or 15 day free trial begins immediately even before their supplement has been shipped. So, by the time they get their free Acai Berry diet pills in the mail, the ordering individual has just a few days to try this new weight loss deal.

Then Mr, or more likely Mrs, Desperate Dieter starts getting billed on a monthly basis for a bottle of pills. And this ends up being quite expensive because when you actually read the fine print in the terms (usually hidden at the bottom of the page) you see that the cost is somewhere between $59 and $89 and sometimes there’s even a monthly newsletter or advice forum that’s an additional $15 to $30 per month added to the bottom line. I’ve seen charges as high as a total of $129 per month when you add everything up. Does that seem like a good deal for anyone except for the people selling this garbage?

2. All of The Acai Berry Scam & Review Sites, Are Scam Sites – Have you tried googling acai berry scam? What you’re going to get on the first page of results are nothing but results, except for one, and ads that lead to sites that supposedly review these products and give you the straight facts, when in reality they’re just trying to sell you these products. So much for Google being able to guess the intent of what people are searching for.

If you want to find out the true number of people that are ticked off about these scams you have to head over to ComplaintsBoard.com and read the 30 pages of complaints about acai berry diet pills. This should tell you that these supposed free weight loss trials do little more than just piss people off.

3. Google Hates These Products Because They Are Scams – Have you tried running any of these things lately on the content network? Google must be letting long time advertisers get all the advertising space available because you still see lots of these ads (the ones that make Google lots of money), but many, including myself, have had their entire ability to run any ad on Google’s content network because we have used the words free and acai berry or green tea in our text ads.

That’s just when the trouble started with with me. I was happily getting some killer traffic from the content network, but when I started running diet type ads about 3 to 4 months ago everything started getting squirrley and just before Christmas things really started to go downhill. While I thought I recovered after Christmas, it was only for a short while as the content network one day sends me a little traffic and the next it barely even trickles in.

Oh yea, try running one of these offers on Facebook now. It ain’t happening there either.

4. Diet Pills Aren’t A Good Way To Lose Weight – Losing weight isn’t about taking pills, it’s about changing your lifestyle and changing what you put on the end of your fork. I don’t believe in taking most diet supplements so I shouldn’t be trying to make money with them.

If you want to learn how to lose weight, check out our healthy diet website.

5. Neither Oprah Winfrey Nor Rachael Ray Endorses Any Of These Products– Seeing some of the landing pages of these offers you think the queen of cooking and the queen of daytime TV must own stock in them. Their pictures are all over the place when it comes to acai berry supplements, but I’ve seen several warnings from affiliate managers not to associate these two individuals with diet offers such as this. Funny, then why do they keep showing up on banners and landing pages?

And why do we see offers being discontinued on what seems like a weekly basis and new offers showing up at nearly the same rate? And why do the landing pages look the same, but only with different names? And why do the bottles have similar labels, but different names? My theory is that Oprah’s lawyers find one acai diet offer and shut that down and all the manufacturers do is change the name, get a new domain name, change their landing page and boom, you have a brand spanking new Acai berry diet or green tea patch or diet offer.

The way Google and Facebook have been treating advertisers of these products lately just shows how decpetive they really are. It should also be a warning to affiliates that these diet offers will soon be revamped because of regulation by the FTC, or some other alphabet soup government agency that Obama creates, just like what happened with ringtones some time back. Look for payouts to drop, serious issues to crop up from using Oprah and Rachael Ray in your advertising and probably these offers to be regulated out of existence soon.

There are just too many opportunities and too much to do to get caught up in the latest diet fads. There are also too many real products to promote that offer long term money instead of promoting scams that just end up taking money from people in a deceptive manner. As for me and my business, I’m done with them.

Popularity: 19% [?]