I knew something had to be wrong with the “deal” I talked about in this post here. I just KNEW it!

Well, the other day, the other shoe dropped over on ABestWeb. Seems that they just weren’t satisfied with having that content on only the sites they paid to have it on!

So they stole it.

And then offered it out “free” to all their other affiliates.

Now, obviously, that’s lowdown and rot. But it’s also probably the STUPIDEST most idiotic move I’ve seen in ages!!! What’s stupid about it? Oh where do I start?!?

1. The type of affiliate links they have don’t pass any page rank. Having more of them will STILL not pass Page Rank. So their apparent desire to improve SEO value remains unsatisfied.

2. It’d be duplicate content. Know what Google does when it spots that? IGNORES IT. Which does not mean “they’ll miss it.” It means, “they will only list one version of it in any remotely findable position.”

2a. If the merchant doesn’t have the highest PR, one of the sites that’ll be booted for dup content will most likely be THEIRS!

3. Their name is now MUD! Affiliates demanded their content removed, or else. (Which it then was.) Then their affiliate management service quit in protest of the theft (and to keep affiliates willing to work with their other clients). And, their affected affiliates are GONE. There’s also now a thread on ABW that’ll come jumping right up into the face of anyone who searches on that merchant name.

3a. That merchant was doing a branding campaign, which will probably be shifted to a different branding campaign now. What happens from a branding campaign? People search on the merchant’s name! See last line of above. What those searchers are going to see, is that that company is a content-stealing, copyright infringing, bunch of no goods. That oughtta convert reeaallll well. Not.

I’m glad my fish-o-meter went off when I saw that deal. I would have just had to buy a domain name to come up with a “qualifying site” and make a profit…but something told me not to do it. Now I’m glad I didn’t. The last thing I would have needed would have been to see copies of my pitch all over my competitor’s sites!

Now I’m just waiting for when that merchant realizes it doesn’t want to fork up those 50 bucks-es and starts reversing. Many people on boards would show a popcorn icon now (getting ready to watch the show)–but I think a big stick of marshmallows is more appropriate. There’s going to be a hell of a bonfire.

Current Mood: Erm…

Yesterday, I saw an offer from a merchant that’s really lucrative for affiliates. But, since his specs aren’t something that fits me, I can go ahead and say my real opinion of it…

He’s smoking something.

Not the guy that they stuck into publicizing the offer, but the actual merchant. See, this merchant is paying $50 for ONE PAGE of boring info-content dreck. Er…I mean, a “content rich” page on either a content site or a site that’s dedicated to promoting his category of stuff. And, the site must be on its own domain, or “loved by the search engines” (or very similar wording), too.

Clearly this merchant is after branding:

The merchant knows this kind of a page is nothing but a branding page, hence the $50. But since he’s making this offer to affiliates, he’s also promising double commissions! So what’s wrong with that? 2×0 = 0, that’s what. If they want to make any commissions, they’d better put a real sales page up. If affiliates just wait for the branding effect to kick in, their cookies will be long expired!

So what’s “smoking something” about this merchant’s plan? He seems to want branding and possibly a pop in his own search ranks. But:

1. Branding Takes Ages.
It could be months before he sees an increase in type-ins.

2. Branding takes a LOT of exposure, over a long period of time, before anything happens!!!

As in hundreds of sites of exposure. At $50 a pop, that’s going to get damned expensive. I’m sure they’d say they were rich enough to afford it. But from what I’ve read in the Wall St. Journal, NO company is “rich enough” to keep wasting money. Financial inefficiency adds up!

3. He’s paying WAY too much. Doesn’t he know he can get people to post for way less? Granted, 90% of those aren’t “loved by the search engines.” But not banned is good enough, as long as they’re getting some traffic.

4. He isn’t getting any SEO value from those “SE loved” sites he’s after: Affiliate links go through the network’s server before redirecting to the merchant–leaving the Googlebot on the other side! Check the robots.txt at the affiliate network. Usually bots are banned from their redirectors.

So, I pronounce his plan to be made of lose.

Still, it’s worth $50 to anyone willing to put a page of not-salesy-enough c*ntent on their site, so if you’re interested in parting that merchant from his money, leave a comment to that effect, and I’ll drop ya a link to the forum where they’ve got their affiliate manager peddling this. There’s probably a deadline, so look at the date on this post first. (If it’s a year later, I’m not going to try to refind that link.)

Current Mood: Really Sad & Angry

As an affiliate marketer, there is one thing that’s dreaded: Reversals. Waiting to see if an order will “stick” is like walking on light bulbs.

This effect is greatly lessened as a merchant, but occasionally, something happens that condenses all the pain into an exquisitely tortuous experience!

An order cancellation.

I’m going to have to reverse ON MYSELF! Oh, that sucks! Suuuuccckkkkssss!!!

Affiliates may think that “at least the merchant knows the real reason.” But, NOT! I don’t know the real reason! He just said “[product] isn’t going to work for us.” Which is as good as the notorious “reversal reason: other” of affiliate networks.

Current Mood: Playful

OK I guess some people would think this is nuts, but…

About 10 minutes ago, a tornado alert was broadcast over the “Emergency” service (whatevertheycallit). My first thoughts?

“They’re finally using that for something other than broadcasting that annoying elongated beep!”

And then…

“Uh oh…the power may go off! I’d better get this coupon up, quick!”

And that’s what I did, I quick typed that out and hit POST! And now I’m typing this.

What’s the weather actually doing, here? Right now there’s a decent thunderstorm going. A goodly bit of rain, nice temperature drop, thunder in the background. Not quite enough lightning for a show, but that could be just because it’s still light out. Oh, and now that I typed that, it’s lulling a bit

Personally I love storms, as long as they don’t knock out the lights and don’t wreck anything of note. As for a tornado? We’d end up spending half the summer downstairs if we paid attention to all the warnings this area gets. If I hear trees breaking, then I MAY unplant myself from this chair… otherwise I’ll put this in the “tornado warning = ‘We may finally get a decent storm’…and the power may go off” file, as always!

Current Mood: Happy

It’s rainy and dreary today, and expected to keep on raining all day.

Which is good. It means I won’t have to go out and plant! Or water!

That said, I’m not going to turn this into a do-nothing day like I usually would. I’m going to keep at that affiliate marketing sales site I redesigned yesterday.

I got the theme onto it, after messing with several different ones, which took longer than I expected. Red isn’t a good color for selling stuff, but when I tried to blue-en the template, it looked pretty bad, so I ended up with red for now anyway. At least with the new blog format, if I see a nicer-looking template available, I can put it on without having to redo the whole site!

In any case, today I need to write more sales pages. It should be interesting to see how traffic is affected.

Current Mood: Cool

It’s been about a day since I last cleared the spams on Blog #3, and I can now say that the volume has dropped about 60%. It went from 101 the other day, to just 41 total for today.

So I think that at least some spambots know not to bother when that “spam blocked” widget is showing. Of course, if the amount spikes back up, I’ll know it was just a fluke.

On another topic,
I got an uber sale today!
Gotta love B2B

Retail sales are more frequent, but when a nice big corporate order comes in, it really makes for a nice day. And makes me sooo glad I went for the merchant side. Now I’m motivated to put up Merchant Site #3. And 4, and 5… LOL I don’t collect mere domains, I end up with collections of sites!

But really, who needs to settle for affiliate commissions when you can have the whole apple?