Here is what ppv marketing is. Adware. I know you have heard the term, but may not be familiar with what it is. Have you ever had a virus like issue where, whenever you type a url in the address box or tried to perform a google search, and a new, seemingly random browser window opens up over your intended result? That is adware. I have never experienced it personally, but had it happen on a work computer several years ago after a co-worker downloaded the file sharing application kazaa. The two ways it can plant itself on a users computer is by the user downloading an application like kazaa, where in the fine print… let me correct myself… in the minuscule print, you agree to allow them to show you advertisements in exchange for their free application. The other way that a user can have this happen is, for no better term, a virus. A virus known as adware.

   The way ppv marketing works: An affiliate advertiser signs up with an adware company and from there it works in much the same way as google adwords. They can bid on the same keywords as they would on google, and when the user of an infected computer performs a search on that term, the user will get their normal google search results, but, the adware causes their computer to open a browser on top of their google search results with their ad. In addition, the affiliate marketer can also bid on URLs. This causes the adware to open their ad or page in a browser window when the user of an infected computer types a certain url into the address bar. Let’s say you are selling pet medications. You open an account with an adware company and bid on the url www.petmeds.com. Now when a user of an infected computer types www.petmeds.com into their address bar, your page will open up on top of the page they intended to view.

   The benefits of this form of advertising that will be thrown at you is that that keywords or urls are much cheaper to bid on compared to adwords. Even with the “ad blindness” and click fraud involved in adwords, you have to factor in one huge factor on the ppv, or pay per view, side. Most people, once their computer is infected with adware, get rid of it without interacting with a single ad. This explains the cheaper bidding prices. Your ad would be shown to many, many people who simply ignore it and eventually reformat their hard drive, (most adware is impossible for the average computer owner to remove) or sadly, pay someone to remove it. In addition to this equalization of the bidding prices, advertising through adware could very likely get your affiliate account banned. Most affiliate marketing companies specifically ban the use of adware advertising in their terms of service.

   OK, now that I have downed this so called “new” advertising method of ppv marketing, I am also somewhat intrigued. While I say that most people will clean their computer of the infected adware without interacting with a single pitch, I also know that this is a big world we live in. I also know that their are a lot of… well, less than intelligent people out there (explains camo stretchy pants) that know very little about computers or how internet browsers work. I also know that a good percentage of those people have credit cards. So while I can explain away the majority of the keyword cost difference between ppc and ppv marketing, it does seem that there may be a little wiggle room. This wiggle room could be provided by that fact that as I already mentioned, there is next to no information available as to what ppv marketing is, and therefore, less competition. This morning, I actually signed up for a ppv account. As further example of the secrecy involved here, you are not immediately approved, but must conduct a phone interview. Three of the major ppv marketing outfits that you can sign up for are: trafficvance.com, mediatraffic.com, and zango.com.

   Anyway, back to the full circle. As I mentioned, nobody will give you information on what ppv is like I have. Do a google search on ppv marketing as of today’s post, and you will find the same as I did. A few people touting this “new” form of marketing, but rather than tell you what it is, want you to buy the info. The guy I mentioned at the beginning is well known in the affiliate marketing field and makes excellent money with ppc. His sales pitch was that ppv (of which he explains nothing) is so wonderful that he has now completely cancelled his ppc ventures (laughable). Remember, he is an affiliate marketer! He is a good friend of a guy (whom he mentions several times) selling a ppv guide for several hundred dollars.

   In closing, I am happy to share this info with you for free and would like to ask each of you one thing. I’ll beg if you want me to. Please link to this post, foreword it, digg it, etc, so that in the future when someone wants info on this subject, they can get it for free. Hell, I’m not even making anything off adsense right now because I apparently threw away the letter with my pin in it and now I’m showing public service ads.

Post from: Natespost

What Is PPV or Pay Per View Marketing?

   After you have written your blog post, think of a rather short title that matches your post well. Enter that title into the keyword tool and scan the suggestions. Find one that has the best combination of the following four, with their importance in this order:

1. Relevance to your post
2. Decent search volume
3. Lack of competition
4. Nice sounding title

   So once you have decided on the title, go back through your post and make sure you have the exact title in your post a few times, but don’t overdo it. For me, I went with “blogging for traffic” for this post, and there is a very good chance you arrived here by searching that exact term. If so, I hope that this post has been the most quality search return you have ever read. If so, please feel free to comment and sign up for my rss feed.

Post from: Natespost

Blogging For Traffic

   A post I wrote several months ago, http://natespost.com/index.php/install-wordpress-on-yahoo-server/ had still been getting some traffic for me from google. When I was checking on things a few days ago, I noticed that it had completely stopped for the last few weeks. When I did a search for the keywords that I had ranked #1 for, I noticed that I had completely disappeared, and that another blog had taken my place as #1 using my content. The feeling was a little like seeing a stranger driving away in your car, I would assume. Time to get your car back…

   The first thing I did was report it to google. Two days later, I got a response from google explaining the process. To file a DMCA complaint, you have to fill out a form and fax it to the number they provide. Having filled out the form but yet to fax it, I thought I would give the offending party the chance to take my content off his blog first. My email request to him was replied to with a defiant sounding “Show me the proof that it is your content.” The feeling then is like the guy flipping you off as he drives away in your car. Time to do some research.

   Yesterday I published a post which gave an account of the ordeal along with his full name, home address, phone number, and a picture of his new baby. I had collected even more info to use in the future and would know if he was behind any of his friends’ future malicious attempts. Meanwhile, kudos to google. Although I had not faxed in the complaint, an employee there apparently laid human eyes on the situation and corrected the search engine response. (they do have access to detailed caching which can show who posted what and when) For all the bad things you hear and read, I was impressed that someone took the time to help me out. Anyway, after seeing the post about him, he emailed me agreeing to a trade. He would take my content off his blog if I would remove my post about him. Deal. The thing is, now that my “car has been returned”, I really have no ill feeling towards my new-found friend. He is trying to make a dollar like the rest of us, he just needs to go about it the right way. I sincerely hope he continues to be a reader and learns with the rest of us, giving his advice also.

   Now as a small measure of protection, I recommend that when feasible, when you publish a new post, refer to an older post of yours with a link. It can be in the form of “As we talked about in my august post {link to that post} …..” Anything to make it easier for the human eye at google to know that it is your content. Also, at shoemoney, I found a great plugin by Joost De Valk that you can download here. It automatically adds a footer to your post which links back to you when read (or scraped, copied, stolen) from your rss feed.

Post from: Natespost

Protect Your Content

   Recently, being a ringtone affiliate was pretty lucrative. You had (and still have) companies offering ringtones for sale with “no credit card needed”. What this means is that it is an extremely easy sell…all the buyer has to do is type in their cell phone number and BAM, you get paid as an affiliate for providing the lead. Early on, this was very lucrative because the concept of a third party (not verizon, sprint, at&t, etc.) being able to sell a product and bill it to the buyer’s phone number was a fresh idea. So many people signed up as affiliates for these companies, bought adword ads and directed the traffic to the companies offering the ringtone downloads and were paid for each signup. It was easy, because as I said, the concept was new and the affiliates could buy the ads for as little as .06 a click. Now, .06 won’t get you in the top 10 of ANY longtail adword keword for ringtones. If you sign up as a ringtone affiliate now and increase your bid on any keywords to the point that you get any traffic, your investment will be eaten up with no profit….the math just doesn’t work.

   Why is this? Well, as with any money making possibilities, a lot of people will jump on board. With the law of supply and demand, more people in the ringtone game, the price of adword keywords rose sharply for ringtones, to the point that it is not profitable for the affiliates to buy clicks and turn them over to the sellers.

  Now, what I don’t like, is that a few big time bloggers have moved to the other side of the ringtone equation, and are absolutely USING their readers to make their wallets fatter. Follow me closely here. Adwords= buying ads. Adsense= selling ads. OK…so buying adword ads and making money with ringtones is no longer feasible, yet these few big time bloggers are trumpeting the cause. They have massive readerships who cling to their every word and do what they say…hoping to make a dollar. They are taking advantage of this trust by telling their readers how much you can make by buying Adword ads for ringtones and directing the traffic to the merchant. BUT, all they are doing is jacking up the payout for ringtone ADSENSE. Meanwhile, they have built “made for adsense” pages where they are SELLING inflated ringtone adsense ads. Unethical? mostly Brilliant? yes

Post from: Natespost

Ringtones Buy or Sell?

1. Your blog doesn’t have the existing mass traffic (possible diggers) to push it from the upcoming category to the hot category.
2. You have no friends.

   By #2, I don’t mean that you are a reclusive hermit. I mean you aren’t playing the Digg game on a level playing field. Digg submissions need a certain number of diggs in order to remain in the game. If you don’t get around 20 diggs or so, your submission will just trickle down the upcoming list and never make it to the hotlist, which results in 10 or 15 hits max. Now I am not recommending that you engage in what is known as a “digg circle” which can get your digg account and possibly your blog banned. What I am recommending is that you add friends to your digg account and send them a shoutout when you submit a post. This will keep your submission from being buried before it has a chance to compete.

   How to make digg friends? Look at articles in your niche, and click on the profiles of the users that have dugg them, then add them as a friend. You will learn that even though you add them, they many times will not reciprocate. So to help us all get started, add me (ellie123) as your friend, and I will reciprocate. Also, add any of my friends that you see. Anyone that is listed as my friend will have originated from this post, so there should be no problem with people not adding you in turn.

Post from: Natespost

Get Dugg

  The main point here for a blogger is that you need to do some selling yourself instead of just providing a link in your sidebar. Home Shopping Network doesn’t just show a picture of a product with a phone number below it. They tell you why you need the product. Thy tell you how your life will be better with it. So here is what you do. Whatever affiliate ad you have in your sidebar, link it to a page within your blog. On that page, explain the product or service, why you use it, and what it does for you. Sell it. Then link to your affiliate from that page.

   If your header navigation bar links just to your categories, you are done. If they link to your pages, you need to do the following. Go to presentation, then theme editor. Open the header on the link at the right and find the line towards the bottom that looks something like this:(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=’); ?> Under your Manage tab, you can fine the page number for the page you created earlier, and you need to remove this from your navigation using the exclude command. Here is what mine looked like after excluding my shareasale warmup: (’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=&exclude=55′); ?> You might even want to leave it in your navigation bar, but it never hurts to learn how to play with your header. That didn’t sound dirty, did it?

Post from: Natespost

Affiliate Sale Warm-Up

   I was pretty proud of my response, but have yet to get anything back and honestly won’t waste my time by checking back in. I encourage any of you to read this post regarding another blogger’s experience with them : http://www.johncow.com/graham-langdon-have-you-been-naughty/  Pretty interesting stuff!

Post from: Natespost

Quick Conversation With Entrecard?

Nate :  Do you consider yourself more of a teacher, or a motivator?

Allan :  As a blogger, you have to be a little bit of both and that’s exactly 
what I am doing with TheRatingBlog.com. One the one hand, the results 
I am experiencing are definitely motivating and help me prove that it can be done… while, on the other hand, with my articles and podcasts, 
I am constantly answering the “how can it be done?” question.

Nate :  What goals did you set for your blog on day one?

Alan :  Building a community around my blog has been the most important one and I have to say that it’s great to see that things are on the right track. Aside from that, here are a few other important goals for 2008:
   - crossing the 100k unique monthly visits mark, crossing the 10k RSS  
      subscribers mark, and having my ebook read by at least 50k people.

Nate :  How have your goals changed at this point?

Alan :  Since my blog is only about 3 months old, they haven’t changed    yet. But since it seems that I will be able to reach my goals for 2008 way 
before December, setting higher ones will be in order.

Nate:  You get a fair amount of criticism. How do you deal with it?

Alan :  Receiving criticism is perfectly natural, it comes with the territory 
as a blogger. I always appreciate constructive criticism while, on the
other hand, when a person says something just for the sake of it and 
has no intention of contributing with something constructive, taking 
him or her seriously would simply be foolish.

Nate :  What is your biggest weakness as a blogger, and how do you overcome it?

Alan :  I have to admit that I used to be a notorious perfectionist, but since
such an attitude can keep you from maximizing results as far as 
productivity is concerned, it had to go.

Nate :  In ONE sentence, tell my readers how to make more money from their blogs.

Alan :  There’s no need for an entire sentence, one word will suffice: “value”

   He hit the nail on the head…..provide value for your readers and you will become an asset to them. I would love to hear your feedback on what he had to say…

Post from: Natespost

Blog Promotion With Alan Johnson

   If I had followed the latter advice, I wouldn’t have disregarded the former. After talking to Mr. Pratt and Anca, I realized how negative I was yesterday. There was no reason to be so critical of entrecard. While I was annoyed by the card droppers who spent 0 time on my blog, it was not a reason to lash out at entrecard. Like I said in yesterday’s post, they have a brilliant idea, and they are people like you and I….trying to provide something useful for as many bloggers as possible. I won’t discourage anyone from using their service….it is free after-all, and like several readers mentioned to me yesterday, you get out what you put into it. So what if some people drop cards without reading your blog…..ignore them and build on the contacts you have made otherwise.

   Although it definitely generated a good amount of discussion, in the future I would like to generate discussion by being positive. I will also strive to remember that there are people behind blogs, not just ones and zeros. If I offended anyone with my negativity, including the people behind entrecard, please accept my most sincere apologies.

Post from: Natespost

Don’t Be Over-Critical

   So what to do? I have this worthless widget installed on my blog that will never provide any useful results. Do I take it off, or try to play the system? I like the way you think…I played the system. I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to play the system like most….I was going to shake things up. I was going to have more of those worthless little credits than any man alive….and have my little ad on every blog in the zombie network.

   The first thing I did was download the firefox plugin iMacros. For those that don’t know about firefox, it is an open source web browser. Open source means that it is both free and open to programmers to write plugins and widgets for it, much like wordpress. So you can do much more with firefox as opposed to other web browsers and what iMacros does is allow you to record a series of actions within the browser and replay it as a loop.

   Next, if you are signed in to your entrecard account and go to an entrecard ad and scroll your mouse over the “drop” button, you will notice a link like this - http://entrecard.com/static/amazon/button.html?user_id=4607 where the number at the end is that users id. You get credit for the drop because your id is stored in a cookie. If you cut and paste that link into a new browser, you get nothing but the drop button…you don’t have to wait for their blog to load. Now I just needed to cycle that link, starting from 1 to infinity to cover every drop I could make. This took some thinking.

   I started thinking about page hit counters. They start at one and go to infinity, but how to make it work with the entrecard drop links? I created a blank html page and found some javascript code that uses cookies to display how many times you have viewed a particular page. I morphed this with the entracard drop url so that when the page was loaded, it displayed the text http://entrecard.com/static/amazon/button.html?user_id=1 Then, each time the page was refreshed, the drop url’s id number at the end increased by one. So now I could use iMacro to cycle through the act of dropping on every entrecard user id in existence. The javascript went as follows -

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>

<html>
<head>
 
 <title>Untitled</title>

</head>

<body>

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript”>
<!–
 function nameDefined(ckie,nme)
{
   var splitValues
   var i
   for (i=0;i<ckie.length;++i)
   {
      splitValues=ckie[i].split(”=”)
      if (splitValues[0]==nme) return true
   }
   return false
}

function delBlanks(strng)
{
   var result=”"
   var i
   var chrn
   for (i=0;i<strng.length;++i) {
      chrn=strng.charAt(i)
      if (chrn!=” “) result += chrn
   }
   return result
}
function getCookieValue(ckie,nme)
{
   var splitValues
   var i
   for(i=0;i<ckie.length;++i) {
      splitValues=ckie[i].split(”=”)
      if(splitValues[0]==nme) return splitValues[1]
   }
   return “”
}
function insertCounter() {
 readCookie()
 displayCounter()
}
 function displayCounter() {
 document.write(’<H3 ALIGN=”CENTER”>’)
 document.write(”http://entrecard.com/static/amazon/button.html?user_id=”)
 if(counter==1) document.write(”the first time.”)
 else document.write(counter)
 document.writeln(’</H3>’)
 }
function readCookie() {
 var cookie=document.cookie
 counter=0
 var chkdCookie=delBlanks(cookie)  //are on the client computer
 var nvpair=chkdCookie.split(”;”)
 if(nameDefined(nvpair,”pageCount”))
 counter=parseInt(getCookieValue(nvpair,”pageCount”))
 ++counter
 var futdate = new Date()
 var expdate = futdate.getTime()
 expdate += 3600000 * 24 *30  //expires in 1 hour
 futdate.setTime(expdate)

 var newCookie=”pageCount=”+counter
 newCookie += “; expires=” + futdate.toGMTString()
 window.document.cookie=newCookie
}
// –>
</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript”>
<!–
insertCounter()
// –>
</SCRIPT>

</body>
</html>

   Now what this did was display what I wanted, but in simple text form rather than a click-able link. To get around this problem, I downloaded the firefox linkification plugin which turns any segment of text beginning with “http:” into a click-able link. Then, using firefox, I was able to bring up the page I created, started recording actions, clicked the link, clicked drop, hit back twice, refreshed the page, then stopped recording. At that point, I just told firefox to replay the loop and there it went…..dropping on every entrecard user id from 1 to infinity…..all while I sat there laughing! In another browser, I kept refreshing my entrecard dashboard and watched the credits pile high. I was already writing down some of the laws I was going to make when I soon would rule the world, when the credits stopped piling up. Apparently entrecard has code that caught my sneaky act of defiance. My credits dropped to -47. Now even when I do a legitimate drop, I get no credit. BUSTED So for now at least, fluorescent stretchy camouflage pants are still legal.

   Thinking a little deeper….there is apparently no defense within entrecard to keep people from dropping from the direct drop url because for a while, I was getting mongo credits. It must be something regarding the number of credits amassed over a certain period of time. Hmmm…gets me thinking again…

Post from: Natespost

Entrecard Scam - Mongo Credits