Posted on January 31st, 2008 in Uncategorized
If there’s one thing that’s for sure, it’s that Nickycakes has needed a new monitor for a long ass time. In fact, next month he was thinking about shelling out a few extra bucks for a new one. That was until last week when good buddy Yi Lu from http://www.findmeseo.com sent him a message about a 20″ flatscreen he was replacing.
Long story short, the thing came in the mail today from DHL complete with a metric fuckton of packing peanuts. So the Cakes threw it up side-by-side with his old 17 incher and is currently living in the new and exciting world of dual-monitor heaven.
The Nvidia card has decent support for dual monitors, however, to get things running right, you gotta install http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/. It adds a bunch of cool stuff like an extra taskbar for the secondary monitor and is workin’ pretty well.
Thanks for the hookup man, good lookin out. Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Last November, Myspace announced that it would be releasing a self-serve ad platform in early 2008. The ad platform would resemble Facebook’s current self serve social ad system. Early news indicated that the platform would only allow for promotion of a user’s myspace page, however, things can change quite a bit.
Next week Myspace will be launching their long awaited (yawn…zzzzz) Developer Platform, which Nickycakes can only assume is supposed to be their version of Facebook Applications. As everyone knows, facebook applications pretty much ruined facebook’s clean functionality, but it’s hard to imagine a crappy site like myspace getting any worse, so maybe it will bring on some sort of improvement.
The dev platform was announced in October, and the self serve ad platform was announced in early November. So one can only hope that the ad platform will be right on the heels of next week’s release.
Get your curl scripts ready boys. It may be party time once again.
Published by nickycakes //
As a followup to the post on affiliate networks, transparency, and trust, Nickycakes would like to talk a little bit more about the scary reality of shady affiliate deals.
Just as a refresher for anyone who’s not too familiar with how affiliate networking generally works in the scope of search PPC (like nickycakes’ parents who apparently read this blog but never leave comments), here’s what’s happening:
Advertisement On Search Engine -> Affiliate Network -> Merchant
The merchant then reports the clicks and conversions to the affiliate network, who then shows you how much money you made and hopefully pays you at the end of the month. Ok, pretty basic.
So the problem is this: As a programmer, Nickycakes knows it would take less than 5 minutes for the merchant to write the few lines of code required to drop 20% of the leads generated, and simply not have to pay for them (20% could be 50%, whatever they decide). Paranoia? Nah, this stuff is real and has happened plenty in the past. The question is, what can you do to avoid it?
- Ask around.
Your best resource (besides yourself, of course) is someone who’s been in the business for a while and knows who is trustworthy and who is shady. There are a few well-known networks out there that the guys with experience know to stay away from (*cough* clickbooth). Same goes for offers (*cough*elitemate*cough*pretty much every zip submit*cough cough*). The guys/girls who have been doing this for a long time won’t usually give up the dirty secrets on how they’re banking lots of money, but it takes a coldhearted bastard to not let someone know if they’re gonna get completely burned if they spend their life savings on XYZ offer.
- Don’t run traffic with new networks until you know someone who’s been paid.
There are plenty of other idiots out there that can make your mistakes for you. Don’t let yourself be that guy. Just cause Shoemoney thinks Blogrush is the best thing since McGriddles bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast combo, doesn’t take away from the fact that it blows. Same goes for affiliate networks, just cause the day old network is being pumped by the high traffic “make money online” blogs with their affiliate link smeared so thick you need to roll up your pantlegs to wade through the bullshit, doesn’t mean they’re gonna pay you.
- Watch out for 24 hour delayed tracking
It’s a different story on CJ, because CJ’s reporting software only allows for updates every 24 hours, but for affiliate networks that offer realtime tracking (most all of them), watch out for offers that will only update your leads once a day. The only realistic reason for delayed batch reporting like this is so they can fuck with your stats. Although it’s still very possible to mess with the stats in realtime, it’s significantly less likely in comparison.
- Be wary of merchants who refuse to let you put a tracking pixel on the confirmation page
Other than maybe a slight hassle in setting it up, there should be no reason why any merchant would deny you this level of transparency. If you don’t know what a tracking pixel is, you should ask your affiliate manager at whatever affiliate network you’re with about it.
- If it sounds too good to be true…
…it probably is. If you honestly believe that $3/lead zip submit is paying you $3 for every person who fills out that single field on the main page, you’re lying to yourself. You are your best tool for spotting something shady going on with an offer. Trust your instincts, or if you have a track record of falling for stupid stuff and getting scammed out of money, do exactly the opposite of what you think is the right thing to do. And then paypal all your money to nickycakes.
Published by nickycakes //
Today, Nickycakes is releasing Linky. Linky lets you input an unlimited number of anchor texts and urls, and generate random interlinking between all the urls. No links will be reciprocal, there are no self-links, and no links are displayed twice on the same page. There are an even number of incoming and outgoing links to each page.
Once the script has generated a database of the links, you put a simple code on each of your pages that will automatically detect what page it’s on and display the proper outgoing links.
Anyway, there’s a readme file in the zip. Hope someone finds it useful. Nickycakes sure did. If it doesn’t work properly, just shoot the Cakes an email.
Download: linky.zip
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on January 29th, 2008 in General, Promotion
So the old theme looked uglier than Courtney Love, so Nickycakes hacked up a new one. Hope you like it.
The traffic on this site has been growing pretty steadily since it was launched, and since the Cakes noticed his alexa rank above 100k today, he figured it was time to put a few ad spots up and try to pay for some textbooks and stuff. This blog gets quite a bit of traffic, so you won’t be disappointed if you grab one. Starting out at $30, Nickycakes would probably get more money just putting affiliate offers on them. And if you like this site then it’s a great way to show your appreciation and get some good traffic in the meantime. Anyway, enough with that plug, you know how to get ahold of the Cakes if you want to scoop one up.
Drop a comment if you like/hate/are indifferent about the new theme and/or have suggestions for improvement.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
