Internet Business Blog

One simple reason…  It works!

One of my websites offers an information product using the 7 Dollars script and anyone can promote it without needing to sign up to anything.  All they need to do is to append their PayPal email onto a special version of the website URL and then they receive the proceeds of any sales from their referrals.

One particular affiliate decided it would be a good idea to spam a large number of people with his affiliate link. Judging by my website stats, if only a single-digit percentage of people actually followed his affiliate link then at least tens of thousands of people would have received his spam email.

Of course, this kind of action goes hand in hand with being reported to blacklist controllers such as SpamCop and eventually my host came knocking on my door asking me to deactivate the affiliate’s link.  This, I duely did.  Anyone following his link was then greeted with a message informing them of the situation, but also giving them an unaffiliated link to the products sales page just in case they were interested in it.

This resulted in a number of sales of which the proceeds went into my pocket instead of the (spamming) affiliate!

As his emails had been reported, I got to read a copy and was surprised that anyone would actually click through and buy, but they did.

So, there you have it.  Spam pays.  Period.

Yesterday, whilst browsing one of my regular blog reads on my PDA, I saw something that wasn’t quite right. Above all of the actual blog content were dozens of links with various financial terms. I was out for the day and didn’t have access to my computer until the evening, but when I returned I went to the blog in question using Firefox and saw that all appeared okay even though my PDA was still showing the spammy-looking links.

There were two possibilities, I thought. Either there’s a problem with my viewing i.e. my PDA or Internet connection had been compromised or there’s something not-so-obvious going awry with the blog. Since I couldn’t see any other sites affected in the same way, I decided the latter was actually the case. Looking at the underlying web page source code in Firefox confirmed this. Near the bottom of all of the legitimate source code was this:

The reason why nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary when viewed using a standard web browser was because CSS was being used to prevent the injected links from being displayed. That doesn’t mean that they’re not there or that search engines can see and index them. Using the Firefox Web Developer plugin to disable CSS for the current page showed what was underneath the CSS cloak:

Why you should upgrade to WordPress 2.5

If you’ve been wrangling about whether to upgrade or not, then consider the consequences of leaving your blog unpatched such as Technorati refusing to index compromised blogs. Even big names have been affected by the hacking of insecure blogs.

Also, if you’re using a freely distributed blog theme then you might want to check that too in case it’s been laced with code that will allow unscrupulous others to take over your website.

I’m off to upgrade all of my pre-2.5 WordPress blogs!

In my previous post, I mentioned that disabling the Bad Behaviour plugin (the latest version, 2.0.14) solved my problem with uploading images into a WordPress gallery.  As many others appear to be experiencing similar problems, I thought I’d try to confirm whether or not Bad Behaviour was the cause by reactivating the plugin and trying to upload a new gallery.  Well, I reactivated the plugin, started a new post, went to create a new gallery, choose a number of images to upload, and they were uploaded successfully!

Ah well, that’s my theory out of the window unless the act of disabling the plugin does resolve the issue whether you go on to reactivate it or not.

Long time no post! I’ve actually been on holiday in Hong Kong for the past few weeks, taking a break from everything including computers (well almost, but more on that later). Fortunately, whilst I was away all of the automated stuff did what it was supposed to so sales of products continued and consumers continued to click through my affiliate links. It’s always nice to know that the whole passive income thing works.

Hong Kong was fantastic. I’ve got some family and friends out there and I’ve been before so it wasn’t the usual sunbathing by the pool type of holiday. Quite a large group of us went including my wife’s parents (for the first time) so we visited many of the tourist hot spots as well as heading off the beaten track.

It was with this holiday that I decided it was time to reignite my interest in photography and purchased a Canon EOS 40D along with a trio of lenses (Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM, Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM, and Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0 L IS USM lenses for the buffs reading). I’ll test out the new WordPress 2.5 gallery feature and post a few pics.

As well as being a great place to visit, HK is also a great place to be a photographer as there are photo opportunities everywhere and you don’t necessarily have to stop once the sun goes down especially when you’ve got something as amazing as the Symphony of Lights - a daily light and music performance by some of the some of the buildings on the Hong Kong island (and Kowloon to some degree) waterfront.

I actually shot over 2,000 photos during our time in HK! Fortunately, I had a laptop computer with me and a portable external hard drive so a single storage card was sufficient. It also meant that I could look over my shots and keep an eye on things relating to my online businesses, but I promise I didn’t do any real work although I was inspired to contemplate starting a photography website.

Whilst HK was great, landing back at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 was nothing short of a farce. As well as our Heathrow to Manchester connecting flight being cancelled, our limited options for getting home resulted in us catching a coach to Birmingham and then getting picked up from there all the way back to Liverpool. It’s difficult to understand how such a massive project was so poorly planned and tested with little in the way of real contingency. Very unimpressed.

Now, back home, it’s time to get on with some work, start planning some photography trips and fleshing out my new photography website.

P.S. I tried to upload some photos into a WordPress gallery, but kept getting an error during ‘crunching’ so I’ll post them once it’s sorted.

Private Label Rights material can be a great way of getting content and products that you can call and sell as your own. It can also be a great way to spend good money on a load of rubbish.

As I see it, there are two main problems with most PLR material I come across:

1. The quality of the written content is poor. A lot of what’s produced is from the hands of cheap labour and this usually means it’s sourced from countries where English is not the primary language. It is possible to have a board vocabulary and a good grasp of English grammar, but often you need to be able to think in a westernised way before you can write content that reads like westernised content.
2. It’s already been distributed across the Internet so you can forget about it being original content in the eyes of search engines. It also means that it’s usually no good for submitting to article directories because someone else will have already beaten you to it.

Both of these problems result in the need for a further investment of either time or money or even both as rewriting the content to some degree is required before it can be used to benefit you.

Why do these issues exist?

As happens with many maturing markets, as demand increases for PLR products, the number of suppliers also increases. As the number of suppliers increase, people start thinking a step higher in the food chain, moving away from the end consumer and towards supplying the suppliers instead.

For the end user, this means instead of getting material that’s been produced by their supplier and supplied to a limited number of people, they’re getting material that’s being offered by any number of suppliers to even more end users. Therefore, the chances of someone else already using the same content increases greatly because instead of having one supplier selling 100 copies of an article pack you might have several suppliers each selling 100 copies of the same article pack.

If you’re publishing the same content as hundreds of other people, whether or not you believe in duplicate content penalties will be irrelevant because you’ll still be competing for all the same keywords as the other publishers.

For these reasons, I don’t believe you should consider the majority of PLR material on offer today as ready-to-use.

What do you think of using PLR? Do you use it yourself? Are you happy with the quality of the written content?