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StumbleUpon Spring Cleaning: Accounts Banned

Evidently StumbleUpon has been doing some heavy duty spring cleaning, banning some users from the system. I would generally pass this kind of news without paying too much attention to it. However, there is one thing puzzled me a bit. Namely their PPC advertising. I advertised using this option a little. I don’t remember spending more that $200 on their ads due to the low conversion rates.

So StumbleUpon wants their users to submit pages about dogs and cats and and then they offer you to create a PPC campaign to drive traffic to those pages. But if you submit a page that actually is made to make you money, you are braking their TOS? Are you kidding me? I don’t understand the logic. If you do please enlighten me.

Here is one more account for you to ban http://vladtheaffiliate.stumbleupon.com - I probably have broken your TOS, besides I don’t need your traffic. You can have it all.

I lately have come to realize that all the posts about StumbleUpons quality of traffic are bunch of BS. If their traffic was so good people would exit AdWords in thousands. The truth is StumbleUpon’s traffic does not convert and can actually hurt your AdSense earnings. I also have not seen a single conversion from their PPC. I don’t even know why do people even bother using their PPC. Spend that money in AdWords at least the traffic from Google converts better.

I guess you can call it a rant day???

Posted in Affiliate Networks, Blogging |

WordPress 2.5. Goodbye Fantastico! Hello Simple Scripts!

The snapshot to the right should speak for it self. That’s right I have updated my WordPress installation to the latest version. While several plugins are not compatible yet with the latest version of WordPress, Semiologic Extract Terms Plugin being one of them, I am still glad I went ahead through this upgrade.

This is the first time ever that I have upgraded the WordPress to the latest version long before it became available via Fantastico. In fact I said goodbye to Fnatastico for good. Unless you are hosting your blog with Bluehost, Hostmonster or FastDomain, you probably have not heard about Simple Scripts. You can on my other blog about initial impression Simple Script made on me.

I have to say that ability to upgrade your scripts within hours of them being available on the Internet sounds like a sweet idea.

Just a quick tip. If you decide to test the Simple Script, before doing anything else back up your databases as well as your current installations. If upgrading a installation made by Fantastico, do not opt to create new administrator and new database. Just fire up the script and at the end replace the new wp-config.php with the one you backed up, or enter the information needed to connect to your database in wp-config.php file.

On a personal note. I do hope many other web hosting providers will integrate Simple Scripts into their control panels. Feel free to point your own web hosting provider to Simple Scripts. I can’t praise enough Simple Scripts. This new way of installing and upgrading self-hosted platforms like WordPress will come very handy around the times when “crucial security updates” will be implemented. Unlike Fantastico, Simple Scripts will have the latest versions available for installation within hours, not weeks.

And of course as always, since this upgrade took place less than an hour ago I ask you to please report to me any bugs you may encounter.

Tags: wordpress upgrade

Posted in Blogging, WordPress |

Black Ink Project With Jeremy Palmer.

Few days ago Jeremy Palmer of Quit Your Day Job announced the his new Black Ink Project. If you are new to affiliate marketing, you should give this project serious consideration.

First time I have learned about Jeremy Palmer in 2005 shortly after joining Commission Junction, and eventually ended up buying Jeremy’s e-book. Even through Jeremy no longer charges for his book, I still think it was money well spent on my part.

Jeremy is a supper affiliate and has been in the business over 10 years. One of the things that got my attention about Jeremy and his e-book was the complete lack of hype. Even now announcing his new project he is straight forward with you:

I’ve been online for over 10 years, and still haven’t found a business opportunity that delivered on the “$100,000/month in 5 minutes a day” promise.

Even though I have been doing affiliate marketing for 3 years, I still consider myself newbie. I am look forward to participate Black Ink Project and so should you. It appears though that space is limited to 1000 participants, so you better make sure to mark this on your calendar. The registration will begin on April 16th at 12 PM (PTS).

Tags: Affiliate Marketing

Posted in Affiliate Marketing |

Have You Seen The LinkConnector’s Widget?

Yesterday I received a call from John Nardolilli of LinkConnector. I have to say that none other Affiliate Network comes even close in customer care. Seriously! I have barely made $200 with this network and yet they treat me as I was their top affiliate.

Last November I had chance to meet in person with John in Cary, NC. If you have just recently signed up with Link Connector and John is your account representative- congratulations! Your are in good hands!

Anyway, one of the reasons for John’s call was to let me know about their new widget. You can see it in action on the right.

Although you will not benefit much for SEO purposes while using this widget, it is nice little (or big- depends how you you configure it) “devil”. You ave absolute freedom as to the size of this widget.

This is something new at LinkConnector. In fact, yesterday you may have noticed a test post. There was a glitch in the code, and the script did not display properly within a blog post, should you decide to use the widget within a blog posts (WordPress).

For the short time of playing with this new widget, I can say that I like it a lot. It is fast and it is configuarable on many levels. If you have not been to you LinkConnector account, you should take a look at this new widget.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Networks, LinkConnector |

103Bees. Did Hittail Finally Found Its Match?

I have always been a big fan of Hittail. Hittail saved me thousands of dollars, not only by brining my websites to the top 10 position on the search engines for some quiet competitive keywords but also by helping to optimize my PPC campaigns. PPC campings really was a “side effect” for me. I noticed that if I optimized a page to Hittail’s suggestion, I could then maintain very low bids on the same suggestion without compromising the quality score. Not so long ago I signed up for a paid account with Hittail, at $90 a year I believe it is a steal.

When Darren from Problogger mentioned 103bees.com in one of his recent videos, I was immediately reminded of Hittail. I knew that I had to try this site. I have only been testing 103bees.com since yesterday, but I can see some very promising features. It offers a particular report called “top questions”. In essence this report provides you with information on how the keywords used to find your website are also used in the question queries. I have no idea how do they hey do it, but this information can be very useful if you write a lot of “how to” articles. In fact 103bees.com has already provided me with an idea for a “how to” article.

I am not ready to give up Hittail just yet. It has a proven record as far as I am concerned. 103bees.com will have to prove it’s effectiveness.

Tags: 103bees, Hittail

Posted in Blogging |