Posted on April 21st, 2008 in Funny, Retards
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.
Cakes, out.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on March 27th, 2008 in Retards
Affspy launched it’s private beta last month at Affiliate Summit. The service was hyped by uberaffiliate in january, back when people still thought he posted useful information, so it had a little buzz going. But in the end, just like most overhyped services like izea ranks, blogrush, ttz media, agloco, etc, it’s just that, overhyped crap, and here’s why:
First, what is Affspy? The idea is kinda cool, aggregate payouts from all the affiliate networks so affiliates can see if they could get a better offer elsewhere. Well, the idea WAS cool back when Offer Vault already made the exact same service. But, after investigating, only the idea is cool, the service (both offer vault and affspy) is pretty much worthless.
So what’s the big deal? Why does a website that pulls all the payout data from all the networks and displays it to help affiliates get a higher payout suck so bad? Let Nickycakes count the ways.
- The street payouts for an offer on ANY network are NEVER EVER the highest amount they can give you for that offer…EVER. In fact, as a new affiliate to a network, you can nearly always get a higher payout than what is advertised simply by asking your AM “hey, can i get a higher payout on offer X?” So right off the bat, the service is completely inaccurate. Using AffSpy to check the payouts will never NEVER give you an accurate picture of what the highest payout is.
- They make the networks do the work for them. It would literally take an evening or two to make a scraper to grab the payout data, creatives, etc, from all the networks automatically every day, but they actually make the affiliate networks sign up and do work, and then end up charging the networks for the referrals they send.
- They literally have a “team” of people for something that would literally require one person a couple hours a day to run. At Affiliate Summit West, Nickycakes was surprised to see that a service this stupid and simple actually had a booth with several people running it.
There was at least one semi-hot girl there who probably had the excuse of being hired by affspy to attract people to the booth, but other than that….over 5 people to run what’s basically a scraper site…?
- AffSpy is designed to screw affiliates. Affspy makes its money by referring affiliates to networks. They get a cut of anywhere from 2-5% for the lifetime commissions made by those affiliates, in general. The network referral programs are designed to let affiliates recommend good networks to their friends and contacts, and the commission is supposed to be payment for bringing your friends to do business with the company. Affspy is no better than someone cybersquatting neverblueads.cm and redirecting it to a neverblue referral link to catch typo traffic and leech referral revenue. Just remember, every referral they get from you could have easily gone to one of your friends in the industry, or someone who’s given you some help getting started in the business and has actually helped you make money. These people deserve a chunk of your profit, not some retarded non-service like affspy.
- AffSpy is unoriginal. As was mentioned earlier, this ENTIRE WEBSITE was already created by the idiots at affiliate radar, and is called OfferVault.com. It’s also not in some d-bag “exclusive” private beta designed to make people think they need to join the cool guy club and join it. Keep in mind that both services are equally crappy, but offervault.com gets points for not needing 20 people to run it and not being associated with mediocre john chow knockoffs.
But not all is bad with affspy! The “exclusive affiliate summit beta invite” cards they were handing out make decent coasters and the t-shirt they gave Nickycakes proved awesome for cleaning up spills in the kitchen!
Published by nickycakes //
Ok, so Nickycakes doesn’t mind being contacted on aim/msn/whatever, otherwise he wouldn’t put his contact information on this site. But sometimes, things get a little out of hand. It’s really hard to walk every newb through step by step how to make money with PPC. Some people even go so far as to offer half of the profits from whatever campaigns the Cakes helps out with, which is generous, but honestly, there’s not enough time in the day. And Nicky could just make the campaigns himself and keep all the profits.
So where can you get started with learning the ins and outs of the PPC affiliate marketing game?
Let me first say that Nickycakes will never even talk about a network/service/whatever unless it’s something he’s personally used and found to be good, unlike other bloggers who promote worthless crap like affspy.
Anyway, at the end of January, Nickycakes was chattin with Ruck from CashTactics about adwords. More specifically, ways the Cakes could suck less at it. Ruck was like…look, go check out this site called PPC Coach run by this dude from WickedFire forums. Let’s just say that Nicky hates paying for anything, especially services that sound like a subscription to a big e-book, but whatever. If it sucked, then it would be fun to post about what a crappy service it was anyway.
PPC Coach is basically a forum, tools, and videos about affiliate marketing with search engine ppc. As far as the forums go, you start out with access to the general forum, and the Month 1 section which teaches you how to do basic stuff like google content network to zip submits. Every month after that, a newer, more advanced section is opened for you, giving you time to get a full grasp of the basics before trying to move on to harder stuff and potentially losing a lot of money.
Another benefit of that incremental system is account history. A month is plenty of time to build up a good account history with adwords so you won’t be paying out the ass when starting your big money campaigns.
The videos were pretty helpful too. They’re basically just vids of the dude running the website showing you how to set up campaigns and use different tools to get keywords, build landing pages for good quality score, and other stuff like that.
The real good part of the site, though, is the tools section. Even for someone with a lot of experience with adwords, it would be worth the money to sign up just for the tools. Seriously. Want to build a 5k keyword campaign without garbage keywords in like 15 minutes, complete with ads, bids, destination urls, and everything else? Yeah, they got a tool for that.
There are a few things they probably should have included on the site that Nickycakes thinks were missing. One of the biggest things new affiliates miss when getting started with PPC is good tracking and testing software. It’s SOOO important to be able to track down to the keyword, location, time of day, etc, how well your traffic is converting. When you start getting to the point where you’re spending thousands a day on traffic, this can mean the difference between making 300% back on what you spend, or having a mediocre campaign where you make less in profit than what you spend.
Anyway, it’s worth checking out if you’re struggling to get into affiliate marketing. Here’s the link again: PPC Coach.
If you know of any other good resources for newbs getting started, send em along to Nickycakes so he can take a look. There may be a newbie resource guide in the works or something, who knows.
Edit: If you’ve used this service, or signed up through this post, please leave a comment about how you like it.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on January 25th, 2008 in Retards
So yesterday Nickycakes posted an article about Facebook ads. He researched it, wrote stuff down, put a lot of time and effort into it, etc. Since this blog started, it has been known as the spot for getting the lowdown on facebook ads because, let’s face it, the Cakes gets more clicks than a tribe of Bantu speaking Nigerians.
Yesterday, the post went up, and Nickycakes kindly asked his friends and fans on IRC to sphinn the article if they truly enjoyed it, which some of them did. Some of them already had sphinn accounts, some didn’t. Cakes explained how easy it was to register and how awesome sphinn was, and the merits of a digg style internet marketing site.
Anyway, over the period of an hour or two, the article was sphunn maybe…13 times. And then…it was gone. Vanished from the site. Wtf? Nickycakes knew what was probably going on. People on sphinn apparently hate affiliate marketing, and generally scoff at affiliate marketing posts. While this post wasn’t really about affiliate marketing, some others were, some maybe some mod didn’t like it and canned it or whatever.
So, a little bitter at the whole situation, the Cakes emails the support staff to try and figure out what the deal was. About 8 hours later this gem comes rolling into the inbox:
Hi Nick,
Your story was discarded as you broke the member guidelines by vote
rigging. All Sphinns for your story were by new user accounts, which
can all be linked back to you. Sphinn uses a democratic system, where
the community decides which stories are important. By asking people on
different IP addresses to vote for the story, you are artificially
inflating the stories popularity.
Your account (and those of your friends/proxies) were marked for
banning by the Sphinn team, however as I’m in a good mood today I’ll
give you another chance. Any future stories or comments that you submit
however will be closely monitored, and any further breach of our
guidelines will result in your accounts, websites and IP addresses
being banned from Sphinn.
In the mean time, please familiarise yourself with the following guidelines:
About Sphinn: http://sphinn.com/about.php
News Submission Guidelines: http://sphinn.com/guidelines.php
Discussion Submission Guidelines: http://sphinn.com/discussion.php
Rob Kerry
evilgreenmonkey
Sphinn Editor
LOL. While Nickycakes does, from time to time, like to find ways to beat the system, some traffic from the sphinn front page certainly isn’t worth the effort. Not to mention, the service is actually pretty cool, and he’d have a problem with fucking with them. Never once has the Cakes set up a proxy’d account with sphinn (or anything on the web, since he hates using proxies).
Furthermore, nowhere in the linked guidelines could I find any rule that says you can’t ask your friends to sphinn your story. Hell, Nickycakes gets probably 5 pm’s a day from people with some story they want dugg/spunn/whatever’d.
Nickycakes would really love to see any evidence of these votes being “linked back to him.” What a joke.
The Cakes will leave the sphinn it button on his posts for now since he really does like their site and reads it often. He’s not one to let the douchebaggery of one dickhead mod ruin his entire experience. Hopefully others haven’t had the same problems, as he’s been recommending sphinn to friends for a while now as a good site and would hate to be proven wrong.
Anyway, rant over, sphinn it if you’re down. Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on January 22nd, 2008 in Retards
Last week, IZEA, proud owner of PayPerPost, the widely hated service that lets merchants pay bloggers to give them good product reviews, released IZEA Ranks. Izea ranks is supposed to give a more accurate ranking of traffic and backlinks than Google Pagerank and Alexa. Keep in mind, that they still describe their service as being in “Alpha” so hopefully some of this stuff will change, but the system is seriously flawed, and in some ways scary. Here are the reasons why you should remove this service from your blog if you have already installed it.
Page Load Time Increase
In order to be ranked by Izea Ranks, you are required to install a piece of javascript on your page, supposedly to track your traffic. The one line piece of javascript seems harmless enough, but it actually proceeds to load 82kb worth of javascript before anything else on the page is even loaded. In tests on nickycakes.com, the Izea javascript code (actually 4 pieces of javascript are loaded by Izea) caused a…get this…. 43% Load Time Increase on the front page. Keep in mind for a second that nickycakes.com is terribly optimized (red: not optimized at all) for load times, so for some pages that are designed properly, this will cause an even bigger increase percentage wise. To put things into perspective, the files are roughly 10 times larger than the javascript loaded by Google Analytics. Screenshot of Firebug stats for loading the javascript:
Potential Credibility Issues
So how is this service supposed to work if not everyone is using it? The reason that people rely on metrics provided by Google and Alexa is that they judge EVERYONE’s website, regardless of if they want to be judged or not. With IZEA, only the people who install the software are going to be included in the listing, which makes it’s reliability pretty much nothing right off the bat. Any site ranking high on Izea’s ranking system will already be ranking high in Alexa, so what’s the point exactly?
Scary Javascript Code
So what exactly is packed into that 82k of javascript? Here’s a few cute functions they included:
function ppp_set_up_sponsorship()
function ppp_generatePopup()
function ppp_mouse_trail() (tracks mouse movements)
function ppp_createCookie(name,value,days)
function ppp_readCookie(name)
function ppp_eraseCookie(name)
So what’s that all mean? Well, first of all, they’re tracking much more than just basic visitor information. They have functions setup to track everything the user does while on your page and upload it back to them. Mouse movements, ad clicks, everything. They can essentially play back each user’s visit and watch the mouse movements and clicks on your page in real time if they want to. But why would they want to do that? How would that benefit them? Well, let’s take a little peek at the privacy policy, shall we?
“We may share with third parties certain pieces of aggregated, non-personal information, such as the number of users who searched for a particular term, for example, or how many users clicked on a particular advertisement. Such information does not identify you individually.”
So yeah, they can sell your visitor’s data to 3rd parties. Hope you’re cool with that.
And how about the cookie functions? What potential problems could that create? Well, they can create cookies on the user’s hard drive with whatever they want, and it will be coming from your domain. That’s not terribly bad. They could erase your session cookies or something, but that wouldn’t really do too much. The scary part is, they have functions set up to READ cookies from the user’s hard drive from your domain. For those less technically inclined, this means they can steal your session information and hack into your blog, at will. Hope you’re cool with that too.
Anytime they choose, they could insert their own ads into your page, install popup ads on your blog, whatever. They’ve already got all the code ready to go.
Not to mention, the entire thing is half stolen from qwirksmode and half sloppily coded so poorly that it creates noticeable resource hogging due to function calls every time the window is resized, scrollbar is moved, etc (all this information is recorded for sending back to IZEA).
So, long story short, this service will never be a really reliable metric for ranking blogs, and you should probably get rid of the code immediately if you haven’t already.
Published by nickycakes //
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