Posted on May 24th, 2008 in Retards
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Having recently conquered the storyline of Grand Theft Auto IV for Xbox 360, Nickycakes was interested in learning some of what he had missed in his days, nay, weeks of reclusive gameplay obsession. No problem, a quick search of google will surely return some highly relevant results to clue any user in on the game behind the game. Expecting a page from IGN or a similar gaming site with tons of cheat codes, maps, easter eggs, etc, to be returned as the first result, the Cakes searched google for “gta 4 secrets”. Much to his surprise, the first result was a Mahalo page called “Grand Theft Auto Secrets.”
“Why is this surprising?” you may be asking yourself. Well, Mahalo is supposed to be a search engine. In fact, on the site it says “Mahalo is the world’s first human-powered search engine.” And since when are search engine results indexed in OTHER search engines? When you search yahoo for “motorcycles” would you expect the top result to be the google search result page for “motorcycles”? No. Wikipedia, maybe, but another search engine, surely not.
Ok, well apparently that’s old news, so Nickycakes brushed it aside and decided to see what was on the Mahalo page. Why even bother with this? Why not just skip to the next result in google? Well, a few reasons, actually. Mahalo is the brainchild of Jason Calacanis (no idea of that is the correct spelling, and who really cares anyhow). This Calacanis dude goes to SEO conferences and gives keynotes about why SEOs are spammers. He gets invited to speak at Affiliate Marketing conferences and tells everyone they’re polluting the internet. So his Mahalo pages must be just packed full of useful information, because such a flamboyant crusader for the anti-spam cause would never allow his own masterpiece to look like a crappy MFA site which would be improved by a $2 article about GTA4 cheats outsourced to some barely literate Digital Point member.
Think again.
The first thing you notice upon entering the page is the content. Err, sorry, lack thereof. Under the giant “Grant Theft Auto 4 Secrets” heading (that phrase is repeated 8 times with different levels of Heading tags for ultimate captain-planet-like seo spam effect) you will find a small link farm of gta 4 cheats sites which range in quality from mediocre to way-less-than-mediocre.
Underneath this stunning content you will find a giant adsense block, with colors perfectly matching every other link on the page. Coincidentally (or probably not so coincidentally) the majority of the text links on the site match the font and font size of the adsense ads. Almost as if the page were made…..for………adsense…
Below these ads, you’ll find a copied block of links to sites about GTA 4 in general (which are repeated on almost every GTA page on Mahalo, and are also completely useless). Below that are 27 links to other GTA related pages on Mahalo, providing more interlinking and internal link juice than a Chinese/Russian xrumer’d viagra store.
After searching, you actually can find some unique content on this page. Squished into the right hand navigation bar is a tiny heading called Secrets. Under this heading are 2 GTA4 “secrets” written out in 2 sentences. These “secrets” are probably the least “secret” “secrets” of any game in history. They were actually published on websites months before the game was even released. Good job guys, way to do your part in cleaning up the internet.
Naturally (and this is more a dig at google than mahalo) you would expect a site ranking #1 for such a popular search term to have a metric fuckton of backlinks from high authority sites. But a quick search of yahoo site explorer shows that the entirety of the backlinking is from other Mahalo pages, and links from Jason Calacanis’ blog. They clearly deserve the top spot.
What a bunch of amateurs.
Published by nickycakes //
So it’s 5 am and Nickycakes is just getting the last of his crap together for his trip to LA today. He’ll be back in a week so posting may be sparse (not that this is a big change or anything). Anyhow, if you’re an affiliate or work for an affiliate network or something and want to kick it while im out there, shoot me an email. I may have a day free mixed in with work.
What’s the Cakes doin’ work in LA for? Well, some may be familiar with what’s called “white-label” affiliate programs. This term is generally used when someone starts running an offer directly with the merchant, cutting out the middle man, OR the merchant/network setting up an affiliate’s own branded site for an offer. Going direct with a merchant on an offer can generally get you higher payouts, better tracking, and less bullshit, but is not always easy to pull off, or desirable. There are downsides, but that’s another tangent.
So what if you were to go a step further? What if a company has no affiliate program and isn’t marketing their products online at all? And what if you were to convince them that they need to be doing online marketing and taking you on as their only affiliate as well as paying your airfare, and all that jazz to come set up some online ad campaigns and get a (big big) payout for leads? Well that would be above and beyond a normal white-label deal. This is also what Nickycakes will be up to for the next week.
More to come! Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on May 18th, 2008 in General
Okay, right now Nickycakes has the LG enV (vx9900) which he got around christmas time and has been pretty good. There are, however, a few lacking features that could really help for affiliate marketing/webmastering/networking/whatever that the vx9900 does not have.
The most important feature that the enV doesn’t have that Nickycakes needs is a SSH client. These verizon phones have some crappy OS that makes it very expensive to write software for it, which means applications like SSH and stuff are nonexistent. Although it hasn’t happened yet, at some point, one of the Cakes’ servers is going to go down while he’s on vacation or something with no internet access and there will be no way to fix stuff remotely on the cell.
The web browser sucks. There is no way to save passwords so logging into twitter each time is a pain. Checking affiliate stats is impossible because of some security issue with website encryption keys and the phones system. So there needs to be a good web browser.
This kinda ties in with the SSH thing, but an IRC client would be nice too. The enV has instant messaging and all that, which is pretty sweet, but there is no IRC client.
I’m sure the obvious answer is to just get an iPhone, but the enV has a few things that are way better than the iPhone. First, the flip open qwerty keyboard is great. Iphones keyboard system blows. The fact that you can feel the buttons when you dial instead of having to look at the phone when dialing is great as well. Iphones break too easily, are bulky, kinda ugly, too expensive, trendy, and locked into using AT&T (the worst cellphone provider) for a lot of the features. They do have wireless internet and stuff though which looks pretty sweet.
Anyway, the Cakes wants your input. What’s the best phone for internet marketing?
Published by nickycakes //
This topic comes up time and time again on affiliate forums and blogs. Good affiliate marketing data is extremely valuable. If you find a good set of keywords, a good traffic source, a good unsaturated offer, or something similar, you stand to make a good deal of money if you can keep your competition from finding out exactly what you’re doing. Just one more affiliate doing exactly what you are can significantly hurt your earnings. But it’s not just affiliates you need to worry about. Many affiliate networks have in-house search marketing departments that run their own campaigns, and almost all merchants run their own in-house campaigns as well. So what can you do to prevent the competition from cashing in on your discoveries?
- Keep Your Mouth Shut
It’s tempting when you find a potential goldmine to brag to your online friends about how much you’re making with it. If you take a look at year-old posts on internet marketing forums, you will likely find information about campaign ideas that are now completely saturated. Why are they saturated? Cause they were winners. If they had been kept quiet, they may have generated a lot more income for a longer period of time. The internet is a big place and there are many greedy people who want to make money without working for it. Don’t give them the opportunity if you can avoid it.
- Affiliate Networks Don’t Need To Know Your Traffic Sources
Seriously. Almost every time Nickycakes joins a new network, the first thing they ask is where his traffic is coming from and what offers he’s currently running. They DON’T NEED THIS INFORMATION. Even if you are running an offer for them, the ONLY time this information is relevant to them is if the merchant comes to them and complains about your lead quality. Even then, the only reason they would want your keyword data or any level of access to your landing page is to STEAL YOUR DATA. But aren’t the Affiliate Networks on your side? NO. They’re on THEIR side. They want to make as much money as possible. If you are successfully running a campaign on their network, and they find out exactly how you’re promoting it, they would love to give this information to their hundreds of other affiliates to generate more income for themselves. Affiliate managers get commissions. The only incentive for them to keep your data private is to keep you as an affiliate, but affiliates rarely have any way of knowing if an affiliate network is sharing their data with other affiliates. If they insist on you giving them your traffic sources for any reason other than the merchant witholding payment, then tell them you are unwilling to share it. If they still make an issue about it, move to one of the other hundreds of networks out there.
- Hide Your Referer Data
For the less technically savvy internet marketers, when you send traffic to an offer, the merchant as well as the affiliate network can see the page the traffic came from. This information is sent by the browser. If you market offers without a landing page, this means they can see exactly what keywords you are paying for on adwords/ysm/msn/whatever. They can and do use this information to build in-house campaigns so you need to make sure to hide this information. How you can you get rid of the referer information? There are several methods of doing so, but the most effective seems to be a double meta redirect, or a meta redirect with a delayed javascript redirect as a backup (thanks slightlyshady). If this is too advanced, just get on google and look up meta redirect and use a simple version of that for stripping the referer data.
- Hide Your Landing Pages and Affiliate Sites
If you run a VPS with all your landing pages on the same IP, it’s just a matter of time before someone uses one of the various online tools like myIpNeighbors to find them all. Spreading out your pages over several shared hosting accounts or buying a bunch of IP’s will help you keep your stuff hidden.
Obviously Nickycakes’ goal for this blog is to help people with internet marketing, and yes, there is a ton of information on here that can make you a ton of money if used properly, but you won’t see all of Nickycakes’ campaigns listed here, especially not the big moneymakers. Helping people is different from sharing your data. Keep in mind that there is a big difference between being secretive about your campaign data and being an unhelpful prick. Don’t be that prick, but don’t let people steal your dinner off your plate.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
