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Review: Joomla Shop Builder - avoid this company like the plague

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:21:00 -0700

Well, I didn't want it to have to come to this.;nbsp; I really didn't.;nbsp; What follows is a story explaining why you should never, ever buy Joomla ShopBuilder.;nbsp; To cut a long story short, the terms and conditions are inaccurate and they stole my money.

Back in January a friend and I opted to buy JoomlaShopBuilder - a plugin for Joomla that can essentially generate affiliate sites based on feeds from affiliate networks - i.e give it a computing feed from Clickbank or something similar and it'll create you pages based around those products.;nbsp; It wasn't quite what we needed but it was a great starting point.;nbsp; The terms and conditions (which appear to have been revised since) stated that:

;quot;You are authorized to make any necessary modification(s) to our products to fit your purposes.;quot;

So we bought the plugin for $100 or so.;nbsp; However, the plugin was encrypted - not what we were expecting.;nbsp; So I emailed JoomlaShopBuilder requesting the unencrypted plugin.

The response
I actually did get a response back.;nbsp; It was a long, personally written response explaining that the encyption had only been done recently and the various reasons behind it.;nbsp; ;quot;Mack;quot; explained that people were making modifications to the source and then complaining when updates didn't work, or when affiliate networks changed their web-services.;nbsp; He explained that supporting all these modifications was impossible.

My solution
I'm a web developer, hell, I'll happily waive the support contract for an unencrypted version if that's the problem.;nbsp; I explained that I needed to make bespoke modifications and should be entitled to do so based on the terms and conditions.;nbsp;

I never heard from JoomlaShopBuilder again.

Dates and emails
I received Mack's response in January 26th 2009.;nbsp; Since then I have sent 5-6 emails through their official technical support and 1 to Mack's personal email account.;nbsp; I have received no replies.

So the bottom line
I paid $100 for a plugin that specified in the terms and conditions that you can make modifications to the source code.;nbsp; This wasn't the case so I requested a refund (trades description act being in breach for one thing).;nbsp; He has not responded and considering he's based in the US and I'm based in the UK there's nothing I can do.;nbsp;

So 6 months later I've decided enough is enough and I'm going telling people.;nbsp; Never buy anything from JoomlaShopBuilder. ;nbsp; Found this interesting?;nbsp; Maybe you should email roadmack@gmail.com to let him know.

Mack, if you read this - it's not nice to ignore emails.

;nbsp;

Review: ActualKeywords - making keyword research a lot easier

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:28:53 -0700

One of the more time consuming aspects of either SEO or PPC is keyword research; after all, there's no point using keywords no one is using is there?

That's where the subject of this review comes in. ActualKeywords.com ordered this review from ReviewMe to tell the world about their service. ActualKeywords intend to take all the hard work out of keyword research by giving you up-to-date real keyphrases that people are using daily on the search engines. ;nbsp;

Therefore it means that instead of you trying to work out trends and niche keywords, they can provide you with a list of keywords ranked by popularity so you know exactly what is likely to pay dividends and what isn't. ;nbsp;

They're quite keen to highlight some very impressive statistics; that they have over 174,000,000 distinct keyphrases which is astonishing.

So what can I get from them?
Essentially you can create a package of keywords based on some specific keywords or phrases that you specify; so you can give it a short description of the niche you're in and it can provide an extensive list of keywords. Equally astonishingly, they can provide packages from only $10 per niche. If you consider how much an hour of your time is worth, it almost certainly should be more than $10 so I find it hard to believe how you could go wrong with such a service.

Free stuff?
Absolutely, someone has taught the guys at ActualKeywords a thing about offering value, as they've got a free keyword tool. Some of the free keyword packages on offer have up to 52,000 keywords in them and cover quite a broad range of subjects so if you're unsure about buying a package, it might be worth looking into a generic one they provide for free.

But is it updated often?
One of the biggest worries with keyword tools such as this is whether they're updated to reflect current search trends. They claim to update the keywords every month which seems about right; any more frequent would be overkill and any less would stop it being useful.

I genuinely like ActualKeywords because it can make your life a lot easier for only a few dollars and I invariably value my time a lot more than that, so if you're a time sensitive cat with a few dollars spare, I fail to see how you could go wrong buying a niche set of keywords from these guys.

Site note
Their site looks professional and well designed which will help them win over customers. But I'm going to give them a big thumbs up, something I don't normally do on paid reviews.

So what is cookie stuffing? Black hat SEO, black hat affiliates

Sun, 31 May 2009 16:05:20 -0700

While browsing the Internet I quite naively stumbled across the term ;quot;cookie stuffing;quot; and had to do some research on it.;nbsp; I'm not overly well versed in black hat SEO techniques, but this one is both clever and morally shady.

Black Hat SEO is the art of doing questionable (read ;quot;bad;quot;) things in order to improve SEO, therefore Black Hat Affiliates will do questionable things in order to make money.

So what is cookie stuffing?
The act of cookie stuffing is the means of injecting affiliate information into an unknowing visitor's cookie.;nbsp; Therefore if you inject your own Dell affiliate details into a user's cookie, if that user then goes and buys a product from Dell, you're seen as being the referer and therefore you are paid commission.

Understanding how cookies work
A cookie will remain on a machine for a finite period, be that until it's set to expire or the user manually clears their cookies.;nbsp; Most affiliate schemes have cookie-referal lifespans of about 30 days, so if you inject your Dell cookie into every user, if any of them buy something from Dell within 30 days, you get the commission.

Seems like a great way to make money!
It's a way to make a lot of money I'm sure, but not only is it immoral to do it, but you can expect to be banned from your affiliate vendor should they ever catch you (which will become increasingly likely if the practice starts to pick up).;nbsp;

My advice would be to understand what it is and never do it.;nbsp; Karma will always catch up with the dishonest.

Wordpress Campaign Manager - the ultimate affiliate link management plugin

Sun, 24 May 2009 10:11:22 -0700

Around November last year I dedicated a reasonable amount of time to build a Wordpress plugin to make managing affiliate links and campaigns very easy.;nbsp;

Unfortunately someone else released their almost identical plugin 2 weeks before I was ready, so I've sat on it for all this time.;nbsp; Now, I've released it.

What it does
Wordpress Campaign Manager allows you to replace any keyword or keyphrase in your blogs content with an incentivised link.;nbsp; So I can take the word ;quot;hosting;quot; and replace every instance of that word with a link to a hosting affiliate scheme.;nbsp; From one administration panel I can manage site-wide campaigns on every post ever written.

Affiliate Link Masking
Another crucial feature is the ability to cloak affiliate links, so www.alongunfriendlyurl.com?affiliate_id=123456789 can become www.yourwebsite.com/go.php?l=kitten.;nbsp; This means you can assign a friendly alias (kitten in that example) which will then redirect the user to the affiliate campaign, but the link they saw in their browser was on yourdomain.com.;nbsp; All the big affiliate money-makers do this and it's an important factor in making money online.

As a bonus, Wordpress Campaign Manager will also tell you how many times your masked links have been clicked.

It won't mess with your other campaigns
Wordpress Campaign Manager has been created so that it won't hijack links or break your content, instead it only uses instances of your keyword (e.g. hosting) that aren't being used in titles, forms, images or other links.;nbsp; Therefore it does no harm to your pre-existing affiliate campaigns but allows you to leverage unused keywords.

The price
All of the competing products retail for $97 which I think is too much for what they do.;nbsp; Wordpress Campaign Manager retails for only $40, not because it's worth less than the competitors (in fact, it does more!) but because I think $40 is a more realistic price for a Wordpress plugin.

Click here to visit the site and purchase Wordpress Campaign Manager.

;nbsp;

Working with the Twitter API

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 16:49:44 -0700

Recently I've been working with the Twitter API quite a lot (can't explain why... ;nbsp;for now) and at face value, it's not the easiest thing to deal with. ;nbsp;Their API isn't terribly hard but it will add time to your project while you get to grips with it.

The Twitter API documentation is okay, but again, as with all APIs you'll spend a fair portion of your time interfacing with it. ;nbsp;However, I was recently pointed towards lab.arc90.com's Twitter API client which makes life somewhat easier.

Suddenly it's a case of instantiating the class with your username and password, as such:

$twitter = new Arc90_Service_Twitter('username', 'password'); ;nbsp;

Updating your Twitter status using the Arc90 client is a 4-lines-of-code affair, from start to finish. ;nbsp;Which makes life easy, tidy and more importantly quick. ;nbsp;

I thoroughly recommend investigating it if you're doing some development using the Twitter API. ;nbsp;Thanks to Stephen Beattie for finding and referring the client.;nbsp;

How user generated porn completely changed the online adult industry

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:07:02 -0700

It's common knowledge that pornography helped shape and grow the Internet. While it was founded as a means to share data and then rationalised as a good way for people to connect; human nature is always destined to take over and therefore adult sites started to pop up.

Previously premium cable/satelite channels were the only means for users to see adult content with printed media taking the backseat. However once the adult industry found its way online one of the biggest businesses in the history of mankind found a way to grow exponentially.

Porn helped grow the Internet
As the Internet gained in popularity, the number of adult oriented websites exploded exponentially and a business model was born; using the same subscription model used television, sites were established that allowed users to pay a fixed fee and have access to instant content.

Obviously as technology improved the adult industry followed - faster connections brought around an increase in video and said goodbye to premium-rate dialers. However, with the second dot-com boom (the often cited ;quot;web2.0 boom;quot;) the whole industry started to shift.

Web2.0 moved the goalposts dramatically
Web2.0 was a term banded around to represent user generated content and various forms of data syndication; it was obvious once Youtube became popular that a user-generated pornography video site wouldn't be far behind. User submitted content could then be uploaded to the site and served for free...

Suddenly sites such as Youporn, Pornotube and Redtube (to name the only three I am aware of) sprung up and changed the business model. Users could see all content, all the time. No subscriptions, no fees, just user submitted content.

Free content = no more paid subscriptions
Suddenly new subscriptions to premium paid services dwindled as users found comparable content for free on these new sites; which in turn spawned dozens of similar sites and moved the goalposts for the adult industry. So how can the conventional, premium sites still survive? I don't know. I can only imagine they survive by creating their own services and monetise them correctly (i.e. not with subscriptions but heavily promoted CPA campaigns).

So one of the core industries that helped found the Internet has had to adapt and shift with the times and there probably won't be a way back. Even if they clamp down on copyrighted material there's still such a volume of genuine user generated content (read amateur) footage that the damage is already done.

Pornography is free because of the web2.0 trend and the only battle for the adult industry is whether they can monopolise on the situation as they always have.