The below video is an attempt to regain traction as far as videoblogging is concerned, so you have to forgive my hmmms and ahhhs. I only wish it was on a different subject. Last two and a half weeks, instead of concentrating on affiliate marketing, I have spent countless ours speaking to my attorney, e-mailing Yahoo! Answers and otherwise trying to control the damage that one shady individual had inflicted on me. I would like to thank Matt in particular for starting Save Vlad Zablotskyy campaign. The rest of my friends and online buddies will get credit on other occasions. Below the video is the link to my other blog, explaining further the issue at hand.

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Things change. Our opinions change. In the past I was proponent and an advocate of paid or sponsored reviews. The change in this respect was slow. But maybe things that come to us slow stay with us longer. I certainly hope this to be true about me and realization how ugly paid reviews can be. Notice I said can be, because I still think that there are few remarkable bloggers who can make it work. But 99.9% bloggers who are writing paid reviews should not be blogging to begin with.

If you are still thinking that paid reviews is a good way to make money you should consider at least two things:

• Your paid review can send the chills down other people’s spines. Some may say that Matt Cutts example is way to extreme, however if you look around the web there are many examples of these reviews. As Matt points out, how would you feel if a relative of your or lets make it more personal. How would you feel if you were diagnosed with brain cancer to find that sort of paid reviews? Don’t you feel the chills going down your spine? I do.
• Your review can send the chills down your own spine. Now of course when I was still advocating paid reviews, I would have never written such a review. In fact the few opportunities I took, I even tried to provide some constructive criticism. However I had to learn a hard way how much advertisers really care about your so called “constructive criticism”. So when I received Cease and Desist letter, I definitely felt the chills going down my spine.

I really think with paid reviews it all boils down to links and page rank. Even with thousands of subscribers you are nothing, and no one really cares about your expertise and your so called “constructive criticism”. Sorry to bring it to you but your blog is not the center of the universe.

So I guess this chapter of my journey is closing for good. And if you ever decide to try your way in paid review, don’t waste your time. You can make more money by promoting reputable merchants than by writing a review about a startup that turns out to be a ripoff.

photo credit: permanently scatterbrainedSince moving to a new domain, I have become more and more frustrated with spam monkeys. So much so that I almost followed Scot’s lead in switching to “nofollow” again.

My frustration though was misplaced. There is no question that blogs from No-Nofollow Community are on many “must spam” list. But I think there is still a way to dofollow the comments while keeping the monkeys away.

Since moving to this domain, i have not bothered to install Spam Karma plugin until now. I just decided to go along with Akismet that comes by default with a new WordPress installation. I should have learned from the past and how this collective intelligence plugin had failed me in the past.

So today I have decided to say goodbye to Akismet once again, hopefully forever. Spam Karma is so much better solution for keeping the wrong people out and the right ones in. If you have installed Spam Karma on your blog but are not sure what is the best configuration for the plugin, take a look at Andy’s settings for SK2.

photo credit: dsearlsSince I was one of the first to criticize Affiliate Summit for inviting Jason to deliver the keynote address in at ASW08 in Las Vegas, I think I have to write something on the subject. Not being able to attend the Summit this time around I could not wait for the blogs to buzz about the keynote adress. Sam Harrelson did and outstanding job blogging live from the the floor. However listening to the podcast featuring Jason’s keynote, I realize that I may have overreacted on several occasions while commenting on the subject.

Did Jason brought valid points? Probably. However I can’t take his observation seriously as long as he continues to be hypocritical about his “search engine”.

My grief with Jason has a lot to do with paid reviews. My experience with the paid reviews ended in disappointment and conclusion that it is not the business model I would like to pursue. While testing that model I have burned myself badly. Not only my reputation was put on the line, I was faced with a possible law suit over a stupid review I wrote. Apparently after writing the review I also managed to write 160+ negative comments… as if I had nothing else to do with my time. Now to make the story short, the company in question abused their way buying reviews from bloggers whose blogs where not even near to being related to company’s industry. Google was fulled for a short time and company enjoyed great ranking and traffic. But things did not last that long. The company got spanked by Google and according to Alexa, the traffic declined after spanking as well.

photo credit: scottobearNot to my surprise, the website of the above mentioned company is “recommended” to Mahalo. I believe it is not the question if that page will be ever approved by one of the Mahalo “Guides”, it’s the question when. As long as that submission is there, even tough with nofollowed link, Mahalo will continue to remind me of a bad behaved and spiteful monkey. Bad monkeys get no banana.

I am planing to go to Boston, because I would like to learn more about my industry. But from what I hear that learning process is more fruitful when you talk to affiliates themselves. I do not mind to be challenged either. But I would rather listen to some one who knows a thing or two about affiliate marketing.

Do you find yourself linking to a particular blog or website often? Do you link to your older posts? Do you promote a particular product and would like to associate your affiliate links to a keyword or a key phrase? Would you like some of these tasks to be done automatically as soon as certain keyword is mentioned in your post? If you answered yes to one of the question you may be interested in the WordPress plugin called aLinks.

I have had my eyes on several plugins meant to do these sort of things. Some of them were free and some were not. After taking a closer look at aLinks, I have come to conclusion that this plugin will suite my needs completely.

The plugin comes with four four modules allowing you to:

• turn keywords into links to your own blog posts- might be very useful if you often links to your older posts
• turn keywords into links to any URL of your choice- as an affiliate I find this feature to be the most beneficial
• turn keywords into links to to the gada.be website- I never heard about this website until now
• turn keywords into links to Amazon.com – amazon affiliates might find this option useful

There are other aLinks modules available, including a module that allows you to link to your Commission Junction merchants. If you are a savvy programmer, you might be able to come up with your own module. If you do so, make sure to stop by here again and let me know about the module you have created. For time being, the module that I will be utilizing the most on my blogs are those allowing me to link to URLs of my choice. There is an option to cloak your links as well.

Finally I would like to thank Mark from 45n5 for pointing me to this plugin, even though he thinks that WordPress sucks.