But in all seriousness, follow me if you’re on twitter and let me know you’re not a dirty Twitter spammer and I’ll follow you back. I don’t have time to write up long blog posts, but I’m hoping I’ll use twitter more often than I’ve been posting here (which has been never, lately).

Welcome to Lameville!

I’ve started buying some links for one of my sites (not this one!). I started using TNX and I’ve been pretty happy with the results. I looked at some other link buying platforms, but the problem is that they expose the sites that are participating. With Google supposedly cracking down on paid links that business model just doesn’t work anymore.

It was pretty easy to get started with TNX: I signed up and created a campaign to advertise one of my gray hat sites. It then took a couple days (I think) for them to approve the site. I didn’t get notified, but the next time I logged in it was approved. I wish they had sent me an email or smoke signal or something to let me know.

I also tried to sell links on one of my black hat sites, but that site wasn’t approved. Trust me when I say that this is a good thing for TNX. Had they approved that site I would have questioned buying links from them. I do think they allow you to buy links TO your BH sites, but they don’t allow you to sell links FROM them.

Once my site was approved I added $50 to my account and started creating “orders” which is how they fulfill your link requests. Each order is a combination of PR, number of Yahoo backlinks, category, and language. I think the ability to specify PR, Yahoo backlinks, and language is HUGE. PR has become the de facto method of measuring a link’s worth, but we all know it isn’t effective. Adding the number of backlinks at Yahoo gives another data point that can help you decide if a link is worth it or not.

Just as an example, one of my orders is for sites that have a PR2, with at 500-5000 Yahoo backlinks, in the E-commerce niche, with english as the primary language. There are 4000+ combinations of orders and the TNX system encourages you to create at least 50 of them to make sure you get all links you order.

If you’re interested in signing up (they have a great affiliate program, BTW) make sure you check out their offer on digitalpoint for free text links.

And if you want to go through my affiliate link, that would make my day.

I thought maybe it was because they decided they didn’t like my IP anymore, so I moved IPs. They still wouldn’t send me any traffic. I thought it was because of my template, so I changed it. They still wouldn’t send me any traffic. So then I decided to try a different TLD and went with .info. Two days later, my .infos are indexed and bringing traffic while my .cns I built weeks ago still haven’t seen the light of day.

Thinking back, it’s interesting that I heard Cutts mention .cn spam on two separate occasions at Pubcon. It must have been on his to-do list of things to obliterate.

This is obviously just my experience, so I’d be interested in hearing from anyone else who are using .cn domains. Are you still getting them in Google?

My overall impression is that if you’re reading this blog you’re probably way ahead of everyone else. A large number of attendees weren’t technical at all and wouldn’t know a 301 from a 404.

Here are a few of my notes:

If you need niche ideas, attend the site review sessions
The people who are naive enough to put their sites on review in front of a whole bunch of other webmasters (exposing their keywords, niches, strategies, etc.) are the same people who don’t know what they’re doing. I only went to a couple of these sessions, but one of the sites was ranking top 10 for a fairly competitive keyword even though the root of the domain was a javascript redirect! I’m building a handful of sites in that niche as I write this.

The first day was the best day
I asked around and there were mixed feelings on which day was the most useful. I guess it depends on your goals and experience level, but I found the first day to be the most informational. I liked the social networking sessions and came away with a few good ideas. Here’s my tip for anyone going to any conference: To get the most out of any of the sessions you have to listen to how the panelists are talking about the subject more than what they’re saying. If you can read between the lines you can get a better understanding of what they’re doing than they want to spell out in their presentations.

Matt Cutts has a tough job
He can’t go anywhere without being surrounded by 5-20 people. He gets asked the same questions 30 times per day. He has to remain diplomatic even though people are pushing his buttons to see if they can get more info out of him. I’m glad for him that Google’s stock is doing so well because I can’t imagine his salary is justifying the work he has to do.

The poker tournament was a good time
As I mentioned before, the poker tournament was a no lose proposition. I didn’t win, but I did come in 13th. Finishing four places out of the money hurts, but I was able to play poker with some really smart people including Neil Patel (who plays extremely loose, by the way) and Shoemoney (who came in second and owned a few of my chips). The complete rundown with pictures is here.

For those who are interested, I went all in with a short stack with 10-J suited, four away from the button. Two people called and the flop gave me an open ended straight draw with 8-9. I couldn’t get the Q or the 7, and the big blind who called with K-9 took it down. If I go again next year, the poker tournament will be a must play event.

All in all, Pubcon was a good time.

The buy-in is $200, with $50 going to charity, $40 going to the poker room, and the other $110 will be added to the pot and split amongst the winner(s).

Here’s why you should sign up, even if you’ve never played poker before:

1. Support some great charities
The $50 goes to several different charities, including firefighters who were injured fighting the San Diego fires and the Lost Boys of Sudan.

2. Networking
What’s in it for you? Well, how about the opportunity to sit down with some of the most prolific names in internet marketing? Even if you fold every hand you should be able to hang around for at least an hour. If you don’t learn $200 worth of information during the game you aren’t paying attention.

3. Free link!
You get a link from Purposeinc.com, which is gaining authority quickly. See here, here, and here for examples.

4. Free drinks!
Free drinks aren’t hard to come by in Vegas, but it’s still nice. I recommend RedBull, especially for my fellow East Coasters (the tournament doesn’t start until midnight ET!).

5. Free T-shirt!
You may not be able to get into Rain with this shirt on, but it might get you some attention on Friday during the networking session.

6. You might win
Poker takes more skill than other casino games, but if you get the right cards at the right time you can’t lose. I’m willing to bet the winner will get some link love as well as a stack of cash.

So, remind me again: why aren’t you signed up yet?

If you want to meet up leave a comment with some times that may work for you. Just make sure you use a real email address (which isn’t displayed) so I can get in touch with you to set something up.

Or you can just send an email to cdc@wagerank.com. If you want to send me your MSN/AIM/YM/Gtalk/whatever handle that is cool too.

My schedule for next week is filling up fast but I think it would be awesome to chat with some like-minded BH’ers, exchange some ideas, and talk about possible partnerships, etc. If you like playing poker be sure to let me know because maybe we can get a few people sitting down talking over a game of Hold’em.

Looking forward to it!

I’ve talked before about how YPN sucks and now with the recent Adsense changes it’s becoming evident Google’s goal is to keep their publishers in the poor house too.

So, what is the Adsense alternative for blackhat SEO? Well, I’ve been using Peakclick and I’ve been extremely surprised at how well it’s working, especially since I never thought I would ever use them.

I signed up with Peakclick a couple of years ago just to get an idea of how the second-tier PPC programs worked. Those were the “good old days” when Adsense wasn’t banning MFA accounts and Adsense was still new enough that your users gave you 60% CTR. I was naive enough to believe that it would never end when I scoffed at how much Peakclick was paying per click compared to my Adsense numbers; I wrote them off and didn’t login to my account for many months.

However, now that Adsense is dead, PPC is more popular, and the dollar has crashed (Peakclick benefits because they are an Austrian company) I’m seeing Peakclick’s payout at about 60-75% of Adsense. While it’s true I’m giving up 25-40% of my revenue, what I’m getting in return is worth it.

Here’s the rundown:

1. Bid Transparency
The best thing about Peakclick is that I can see how much a keyword is paying before I buy any domains. I don’t have to worry about an advertiser I see on a Google search opting out of the content network or Google keeping all the high paying ads for themselves. What you see is what you get with Peakclick.

2. Longer SERP Domination
Do you have your Adsense code published on thousands of sites across different servers with different templates? Ever wonder how Google can wipe them all out at once? The answer is simple: your adsense code is your footprint. It’s very easy for them to find all the sites that your code has ever run on and wipe them out. I’m seeing my sites get Google traffic for months instead of weeks since I moved away from Adsense. Even though the clicks are worth less, I’m making more money because my sites are getting four times as much traffic.

3. Better Sleep at Night
I no longer worry about waking up to find an email from my PPC company telling me to take a hike.

4. Better Stats
You can have an infinite amount of Peakclick subaccounts (like Adsense channels) for tracking purposes. Peakclick also tells you what keywords are making you the most money, allowing you to break down your stats by CPC and total money made. This is vital information when you’re looking for a new niche to destroy. They also let you see stats for each of your domains and by your users’ geo-location. Very cool stuff that Google would NEVER let you see!

5. 15-day Payouts with Net 0
I used to hate waiting 30 days for Google to send me my money. It is particularly stressful if they owe you five figures and you’re nervous about them banning your account in the meantime. Peakclick lets you cash your money every 15 days, and they don’t use the net 30 system like Google and Yahoo (where you have to wait 30 days to get your money). When you cash with Peakclick you’re cashing money you made just 24 hours beforehand.

6. International Ads
I know Google supports international ads, but I’ve never been impressed with their inventory for the smaller markets. Just looking at my country stats for yesterday shows that I am monetizing traffic from Croatia, Slovakia, and Iran.

7. Targeting
Adsense has really great ad targeting, especially when compared to YPN. However, every once in a while they get it wrong. They either get confused and show PSAs or see some high paying keyword that is mentioned once in an article and show ads for that. The great thing about Peakclick is that you send them a query with your keywords and they return targeted ads. This allows me to experiment with variations to find the most profitable keywords. YPN, are you paying attention?

8. Different Ad Formats
Adsense, YPN, Chitika, etc. all offer the same boring ad formats and they expect us to be happy when they add rounded corners. Yawn. Because Peakclick delivers the ads in a feed you are free to format them any way you want. Put images next to them if you’d like. Or format them so they no longer look like ads. If you’re not technical enough to use the feed they also offer the old JavaScript-style ads as well so you just replace your Adsense code with no worries. (I just checked their website and they say they will help you install their feed if you need it!)

9. Payment Methods
Peakclick pays with PayPal, which is much easier than jumping through all the hoops to verify your bank account. They also support check, wire transfer, ePassporte, Western Union, Fethard, or WebMoney, although I’ve never used anything besides PayPal. And yes, they absorb the PayPal fees.

10. More tools
You can send your traffic to their optimized PPC landing pages (they offer several different types, including adult) if you find that your own pages aren’t getting enough clicks. I’ve honestly never done this, but I should try it! They also offer a toolbar install which sets the user’s homepage to your landing page and you get paid for every click. I’ve never tried this either…time to get to work!

11. Great Customer Support
I asked a question at 10am ET on a Saturday and had a detailed response from a knowledgeable person within a half-hour.

12. Negotiate Your Rate
Part of having great customer support is they know how to take care of their publishers who send them traffic. Once you start sending them search engine traffic be sure to contact them and have them bump your payout percentage higher.

13. Get Paid In Euros
With the dollar plummeting into oblivion, I wish I had setup my account in Euros to begin with. The small amount of money I made a couple years ago would be worth alot more now! Oh well. If you’re in Europe I’m sure having your PPC company pay in Euros is going to save you a TON of money, especially considering that by the time Google finally sends you your money it’s worth less than toilet paper.

14. Webmaster Contests
Every month Peakclick gives away $5,000.00 to their publishers. The publisher who sends the greatest number of referrals gets $1,000.00. The publisher who is the most improved gets $1,000.00. One publisher chosen at random gets $1,000.00 and two others get $500.00 each. The Rookie Of The Month, which is the publisher who makes the most money in their first month, also gets $1,000.00. This could be you, but you have to sign up first!

So, how much can you make with Peakclick? Well, part of them being transparent is that they let you see how much the top webmasters are making. The top publisher today has made $4,913.48. Their average CPC is $.56. Not too shabby for a day’s work! Just to show that it’s not a fluke, the 10th best webmaster made $587.47 today with a CPC of $.46.

This is the most sales-pitchy post I’ve ever done on this blog, but I’m not just doing it for the sake of it. I really am using this network and think it’s pretty damn good. Besides, if more people use this network, it will attract more advertisers, and the ads I’m showing will pay me more.

So use it!

Why not sign up just to enter your name in the monthly contest for $2,000.00?

If you have any specific questions about Peakclick let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

This is the most uniformed article I’ve ever read in my entire life.

The headline is Google plans network to rival Facebook.

However, the article goes on to explain that Google isn’t creating a network. It isn’t creating ANYTHING to “rival” Facebook. It’s creating something that will allow application developers to develop Facebook (or Myspace) apps and port them between the social networking sites seamlessly.

I’m willing to bet the authors own a fair amount of GOOG stock and knowing FT.com’s reach, made a pretty penny when this article shot the price through $700. Of course we’ll never know because FT.com doesn’t have a disclosure policy on its website. However, if you’re selling $10 links on your blog you better make sure they are clearly marked.

You can find spam in the weirdest places…

I was using YPN for a while with limited success. Their targeting is absolutely horrible (even if you follow their tips), but their CPC is usually a little higher than what you will see with Adsense and other PPC programs.

About a week ago (on the 17th, to be exact) I saw the CPC drop to unacceptable levels. This seems to be aligned with YSM rolling out blocked domains.

Using YPN now means that your ads are not targeted and, in the rare opportunity that someone actually clicks on one of them, they don’t pay.

Needless to say, I’m not running YPN anymore…

If you search on Yahoo, all of their organic results (not the sponsored links) are redirected through http://rds.yahoo.com. This is nothing new and they have been doing this for quite some time to record click metrics.

However, sometimes Yahoo gets sneaky and slips some affiliate links in those redirects. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a close look at the results for “cheap flights:”

This all looks innocuous until you view the source code. Taking a close look reveals that the #4 result that goes to Orbitz.com is redirected through more than just http://rds.yahoo.com. The URL is too long to fit in my site’s theme so I’ll just link to it here.

If you watch your browser’s HTTP headers after clicking the link you’ll notice that you aren’t taken directly to an Orbitz page after hitting http://rds.yahoo.com. Instead, your browser is redirected to a second Yahoo URL: http://rdre1.yahoo.com. Then, the browser loads a page on http://na.link.decdna.net, which is a domain owned by an internet marketing company!

If you were paying attention to your cookies, you would also notice that when you finally did land on the Orbitz domain you received a cookie that looks something like this:

AffiliateLinks=SEM|C0000×000-homepage|Orbitz|000000; domain=.orbitz.com; expires=Wednesday, 31-Oct-2007 19:16:31 GMT; path=/

So, here’s what happened: We clicked on a link in Yahoo’s organic results and we were redirected to an extra Yahoo URL which sent us to an internet marketing company, who then sent us to our destination page where an affiliate cookie is dropped in our browser.

Shame on you Yahoo!