Nickycakes would like to start this fun little article out by letting you know who Joel Comm is. He’s a walking infomercial. Visiting his site (which isn’t even worth a linkback) will present you with 6 different e-products with pictures superimposed onto a box of some sort, to make it look like it’s an actual material good. He’s an e-book peddler, basically. And as almost everyone with half a brain in this industry knows, “make money” e-books are worthless. If the information they contained had any value, they’d be picked up by a regular publisher and sold in stores, period. But that’s not the point of this story.
The story begins with Joel marketing his “make money online” e-book, which he normally sells to idiots from Digital Point forums for $97 per copy (lol) at the reduced price of $9.95 (still not even close to worth it). The only catch is, when you buy the book, the fine print says you’ll be automatically subscribed to his $29.95 per month newsletter. Wow, the guy had an epiphany and somehow was bestowed with a brief flash of good market sense! It would be short lived, however.
When he announced the new pricing scheme and new version of his e-book, John Chow, Zac Johnson, and other idiots who have lost enough credibility to stoop as low as promoting scammy e-books on their sites with a straight face, all gave it the douchebag stamp of approval without realizing that there was a recurring fee involved.
When people started taking their advice and actually ordering that crap, they soon realized they were being charged an outrageous monthly fee and naturally whined up a storm, even though it was their own fault for not reading what they were buying and running off the “waste money online” cliff like lemmings. John Chow, Zac Johnson, and others, made blog posts saying how they would have NEVER promoted this product had they known the real deal.
Now up until this point, Joel Comm had done nothing wrong. His pricing structure was completely legit. There’s absolutely NOTHING legally wrong with how he was selling his product. But he made a fatal error. He admitted he was somehow in the wrong and changed his sales page around, and offered refunds to people who were too stupid to read what they were buying. Now people really DO think he has tried to scam people (which he really hasn’t). He should have just defended his position, especially in an industry like internet/affiliate marketing, and here’s why:
HALF THE DAMN OFFERS ON AFFILIATE NETWORKS HAVE A “FREE” TRIAL FOLLOWED BY A HEFTY MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION FEE. It’s absolutely hilarious to hear self-proclaimed “super affiliates” getting on this guy’s case when they’ve no-doubt promoted plenty of products with the EXACT SAME PRICING STRUCTURE. How do you think they can afford to pay you $30 for every person who signs up for a $1.99 trial bottle of hoodia? Honestly, folks, get a grip on reality here.
It all started exactly a year ago. On March 9, 2007, Stojan, member of Wickedfire forums made a post inquiring about the status of Clickbooth. He had not heard back from them after repeated attempts to contact the company, and had not received the money owed to him for over 2 months. Obviously concerned, he asked what the deal was. His issue was apparently resolved rather quickly, however, something funny happened. Other members of the forum started chiming in about how they had been screwed over by clickbooth and then lied to about where their money was, or ignored completely. Lisa, an employee of ClickBooth then responded to one of these claims by saying the individual had been sending them spammy traffic from Craigslist, and proceeded to post their private affiliate stats on the forum to prove it. Naturally, people on WF got pretty upset about this. Eli, WF moderator, and author of BlueHatSEO, jumped in and edited out the private information that the ClickBooth employee had posted. The thread got fun after that. Another member of WF, posted that it was kind of a joke that they would withhold payment because traffic was coming from Craigslist, implying that they normally accept this kind of traffic. That’s when things got interesting.
Rather than apologize for posting one of their members private information on a public forum, as they should have done, John Lemp (owner of ClickBooth) contacted Jon (owner of WickedFire) demanding that the posts by the WF member implying that ClickBooth accepted spammy traffic from Craigslist be removed, and that Eli be fired for erasing the information posted by his employee. Jon was understandably completely floored by this laughable demand and was naturally upset.
Please keep in mind that, at this point, Jon (WF owner) was a little bit biased because he had recently been in negotiations with John Lemp over some domain deal which Lemp had apparently lied about and tried to pull some shady maneuvers in the contract or something. Not really sure about that part, as it was too boring to follow, but it’s important to keep in mind.
So after getting upset over Lemp’s demands, on May 15th, 2007, Jon made the notorious ClickBooth Poll post on Wickedfire. In this post, Jon presented most of the information he had available to him at the time about the situation, and asked the users of Wickedfire to decide if John Lemp, Lisa, and the rest of the employees should be banned from WickedFire. If you have some time to spare, please read the post. It is absolutely hilarious at parts. They both get into a giant e-peen battle, throwing insults back and forth, but in the end, it’s pretty clear that Jon was the winner. He had asked Lemp several key questions over and over throughout the thread, which, had they been answered, would have probably spared ClickBooth’s reputation and let them continue business as usual. They were, however, never answered, and the results of the poll were clear. Over 86% voted to ban ClickBooth from Wickedfire.
ClickBooth proceeded to send 2 Cease and Desist letters to WickedFire in a feeble attempt to get all this bad press erased from the forum. They promised to sue if their demands were not met. Jon said that he would not be removing anything, and to bring on the lawsuit, knowing they had no case.
In December, 2007, a few months ago, a poll thread pops up on WickedFire by a disgruntled affiliate called More ClickBooth Fraud. He claims to have been screwed out of several thousand dollars by ClickBooth for no reason, and says he can’t even get in contact with them to ask why. Many people replied saying they had been completely screwed by ClickBooth too, for much more money. Some for over $30k.
Fast forward to the present. Clickbooth is now making good on their threat to sue Jon and WickedFire if their demands to erase the negative press were not met. What are they suing for, exactly? Among other things, Emotional Distress. Sounds like Shoemoney will have a friend for his legal threat crybaby club. Now, where’s that Kleenex affiliate program when you really need it…
Well, it looks like the Democratic primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is neck and neck. Hillary started out strong, but Obama has been gaining momentum and has just overtaken Hillary in the race for the nomination. Obviously, the Democrats in this country are torn between the two candidates, so this post should help those in Internet Marketing circles decide on the best candidate by judging the strength of their online campaign efforts.
Nickycakes has compiled ten areas for judging the strength of both Obama and Hillary’s websites and campaigns. Here goes:
Inbound Links In judging online popularity of a website, nothing says it better than the number of inbound links your website has. According to Yahoo Site Explorer, BarackObama.com has 1,240,000 inbound links while HillaryClinton.com has 636,000 inbound links. Obama totally schools her with almost twice the inbound links.
Indexed Pages This one was pretty surprising. A google site: search showed that BarackObama.com has 451,000 indexed pages while HillaryClinton.com has 49,000 indexed pages. Talk about pwned.
Title Tag SEO Neither Obama’s or Hillary’s websites keyword stuff the title tag or anything. Both are fairly well done and do farily well in describing the site. Both get a win for this one.
Meta Tags Barack Obama’s site wins again on this one. Barack’s site has complete meta tags with comma delineated keywords, descriptions, copyright, and instructions for search engine bots, while Hillary’s only has the description and a few keywords, almost identical to the title.
Alexa Traffic Rank
Another win for Barack Obama. The current traffic rank for BarackObama.com is 5643 whereas the rank for HillaryClinton.com is 18364.
Google Pagerank With the huge lead BarackObama.com has in inbound links, these results are not surprising. Both domains are PR6.
Domain Age Looks like Clinton has got this one in the bag. HillaryClinton.com has been around for 9 years 2 months. BarackObama.com has only been registered for 3 years 9 months.
Viral Marketing Clinton certainly got a very early lead on this one. Nickycakes can remember several years ago getting spammed by myspace group invites for a Hillary 08 group. This was back when viral marketing wasn’t really even a retardedly overused stupid buzzword like it is now (who else is tired of digital point morons talking about GOING VIRAL!!!@#$!!111). Anyway, the top most viewed Youtube video when searching for Hillary Clinton is actually a really cool Obama video modeled after a Mac commercial back in the day called Vote Different with about 4.5 million views. He’s also got that video with the Black Eyed Peas guy called Yes We Can which is actually posted twice on Youtube with about 7million combined views. The majority of the Hillary videos with any significant number of views are videos of her getting pissed about stuff, so that’s not exactly working her favor. Clear win for Barack.
Landing Page Quality So, Obama’s webpage overall is a lot cooler than Hillary’s in terms of usability and overall looking cool, we’re just judging the landing page right now. They both do this a little differently. On Barack’s site, first time visitors are shown a landing page with a clear “call to action” email submit style in the middle of the page for signing up for the email list. Return visitors are sent right to the main page without the email submit form, leaving room for good content. Hillary’s front page has the “call to action”, same style, above the fold, middle of the page, and there it stays for return visits. Both do well for following good marketing practices for getting people to subscribe, so both are winners for this one.
Money Spent on Internet Media This part is huge. When you run for president, you certainly want some google ads to show up for your campaign when users search for politics related stuff. You want to put banners on related websites, etc. You want people properly running your website, handling campaign media, managing your mailing lists, etc. All that takes money. Opensecrets.org lists campaign spending for all the candidates, so it’s easy to see who has spent more. Obama has cranked out $1.7million on internet media while Hillary has spent only $1.3mil.
Well, that’s pretty much it. It is worth noting that the demographic of Hillary Clinton’s supporters are generally older and more blue collar compared to Barack’s, so it would make sense that her website and web campaign would not be getting as much support. However, this is all the more reason for her to spend more on web marketing and make every opportunity available for her to get the support of the young voters.
Anyway, if you’re involved with internet marketing in any capacity, then the above 10 things are the issues that matter the most to you, and should give you an idea of who to support if you haven’t decided yet. Here is the final tally:
