Reflective Thoughts on Subvert and Profit - 3 Months of Profits

It has been at least 3 months since I signed up for Subvert and Profit, a nice little social media marketing company that takes payments from advertisers looking to promote articles on Digg and StumbleUpon.  They then in turn pay users of Digg and StumbleUpon to vote for the articles that are to be advertised.

They actually have users vote on multiple articles so that the services targeted can not determine which articles are being promoted for paid reasons.

This is truly a subversion of Digg and StumbleUpon.

That said, I find Digg to be utterly without any merit or value.  I find no useful information on Digg and find even fewer useful conversations there, unless you find value in reading nasty snarky fan boy comments about the glories of Apple and the evil of everything else in the world.

StumbleUpon is a bit different.  I do find a slightly bit larger amount of potential in StumbleUpon, but again that potential is typically only realized by people that 'work' the system professionally, building up cliques of readers and followers, who get nothing for their effort of supporting someone on a pedestal.

The fallacy of social media is that it is socialism first, media second and added value primarily for the people at the top and never those people in the middle or the bottom.

To find benefit in too many social media platforms, you have to essentially get favors for nothing from your friends, readers and followers.

So when a company like Subvert and Profit comes along helping people essentially reward the people in the middle and the bottom with a little fundage, I do not mind the application of capitalism to a socialist system.  I do not see very many spammy topics float through Subvert and Profit.  Typically the articles promoted are actually very good, and the article creators are literally putting their money where there mouth is.  I've never seen spammy topics on goji juice or acne cure alls or one of those nasty survey links or made for affiliate landing pages.

Show Me the Money?

This is where Subvert and Profit is a little weak.  Their growth or maybe their advertisers sales may be a little low to keep up with their network of Subverters.

After 3 months or so, I've seen a bit more than $8 come in.

That's not a lot of money, and I have heard of people making a lot more. 

The issue in the system, actually seems to be that when they send you an assignment, you have to jump on it with inhuman lightening speed, before the job disappears before you have had a chance to do the thing.

More often than not, when I see an assignment in email, when I look on the site seconds later, it is already gone or filled.

Its not a lot of effort at all, so I continue and I usually use my funds to pay for my own advertising through the same system, but that's what I see so far.  I'm looking forward to watching the network continue to grow, but I think they need to lock down the assignments for people for just a little bit more time otherwise people will get too disgruntled.

Last Minute Steps to Meet Your EOM Adsense Quota

It happens to everyone now and then.  The end of the month is two days away and you check your Adsense account only to learn that you're a few dollars short of meeting your goals such that you can be paid by Google. To make matters worse, it's a Saturday, a Saturday like today just before the end of the month when people typically don't read or visit websites quite as much as they do during the week.

So what do you do to bring in traffic to your website, & Generate conversions on Adsense to meet your quota?

The answer is relatively simple, it's all about content. If you need more light, you turn on more lights or put more light bulbs in your light fixtures.  If you need more traffic, you have to create more content!

You need to publish additional content, and you need to do it fast. If you've got some great articles banked or sandbagged now is the time to roll them out and publish. You need to publish them as soon as you can, and if you need to publish multiple articles, you need to publish them in a batch all at once.

The reason for the batch publishing, is that it will give Google enough time to index all the articles and give you the traffic juice that you need in order to convert to meet your goals. Don't trickle out articles all weekend long on blog, right up until the end deadline. That just confuses Google as it comes to look at your homepage and finds that the articles on the homepage continue to change and roll off the end. Blast them all up there at the beginning and then let them sit there until the month's end.

Once they're published, then you need to do a little additional work to give your article some juice.

You need to promote a couple of those articles, preferably those articles that have good captions or pictures to go with them, and if they have video that would be even better.

Go visit your most reliable and regular social media hangouts such as digg.com, Utterz.com your favorite forums, publish a couple articles on your Facebook page, and get out there and start talking to some of your other bloggers and friends. Comments on their blogs, you don't have to mention your articles, just remind them that you're out there and leave really good comments so that their readers will find you interesting and possibly research you a little bit more by visiting your site.

If you're a member of the blog surfing exchange, get out on those networks and start networking. Again visit some sites that you know invisible to sites that you don't only of some comments. It's not good enough to go to blog surfing exchange and just rack up points, the real points are in the comments you leave. That will generate you more contacts, and more visitors of substance that are more likely to convert can earn you some money then any of the points you get from the actual exchange. The poison exchange can't hurt, but the substances in the networking and a valuable context that you meet and pick up while you are out there looking around talking to people.

Advanced Users Tip

If you have experience with Google Adwords, you can also boost your incoming traffic, by kicking off a short and inexpensive Adwords campaign on some keywords, pushing people to your site or to a couple of you better, more recent and relative articles.

This isn't for the faint of heart, inexperienced or people with cheap budgets.  However, it does work and it is allowed by Google, even encouraged by Google!

What You Shouldn't Do to increase your Adsense earnings to meet your goal!

NEVER EVER DO THESE  THINGS

• Never break the Google Adsense TOS
• Never ask a friend or someone to click on an ad to boost you over the top
• Don't pay for traffic to your site
• Don't change your site layout, your adsense layout
• Don't change your blog theme
• Don't do anything major to your site that might upset its indexed positions.

Blogworld 2008 - 1 Month and Counting!

If you are a blogger, you need to prepare to go to Blogworld in Las Vegas next month in Las Vegas.  It costs about $100 to get an exhibit hall pass, which is all you need if you have been before.

If this is your first time going, then you may want to spend some more money to attend the sessions.  That can cost a few hundred dollars, but if you have never been to one of these new media conferences or have never been to a WordCamp or PodCamp, then this can be a great investment in yourself, your site(s) and your future as a successful and profitable blogger.

Last year, I attended Blogworld during its first year, and I will be attending again this year as well.  I just got back last week from the New Media Expo in Vegas which focuses more on video and audio casting or podcasting.  There are some areas where these two conferences are redundant, but Blogworld is definitely for bloggers.  I'm not trying to airbrush over the value of this show, but it is focused on bloggers and if you are a blogger this is one show that you can't miss out on.

I won't miss it and hope to see you there!

The Adsense Lottery Ticket for Affiliate Marketers

Here's a great little video from Shawn Collins, founder of Affiliate Summit, describing among other things how he uses Adsense and how checking his Adsense account every day can feel like checking for the winning lottery ticket and more often than not finding it!

Adwords and Adsense can be a great tool for internet marketers whether they are working in affiliate marketing arbitrage covering everything from video games to real estate to car insurance and back again.

Could this be it for Twitter

There has been some speculation recently as to whether or not Twitter, a social networking engine, is on their way out. Fueling the speculation website magazine admin. who claims that Twitter is being "taken advantage of by spammers and others who have been able to leverage the network".

Apparently, there are people out there who have been utilizing Adjix (a url shortener) which wraps the linked page with your tweets and thus frames in advertising. Unfortunately services such as this will be the downfall of this legitimate networking tool. Currently Twitter is taking steps to ramp up spam security as well as suspending accounts. Unfortunately for Twitter, they are shifting resources from developing their service to protecting it which may ultimately be the downfall of the network.

Using Adwords for MLM Programs

The other day a friend of mine asked me for some advice about marketing their 'new website'.  The site was essentially one of these subdomain landing pages pushing the promotion of a multi level marketing program. 

The site in question offered $500 in gas rebates to be paid in $25 increments for the sign up of new referred members.

A new member must pay $199 to get this great benefit of $500 in rebates.  (ergo that's $200 paid out to have the opportunity of earning $25 commissions for referring people to also pay $200).

Now, this is one of those things that typically requires that you refer all your friends and family, who will likely not consider you as their favorite person after they shell out $200.  These things are always pitched by people who have recently become rich, bought a yacht and a second house in Vale and spent a lot of money on Vegas vacations, European vacations and any other vacation you can think of.  They rarely showcase the people that just lost $200 or more and wasted a bunch of time.

So when my friend asked for advice on marketing the site, my first response was that this looked like a pyramid scheme (although likely within the letter of the law) and that I wouldn't recommend investing any more money in it, and definitely wouldn't recommend trying to convince friends and family to jump on board either.

Anything short of that, I stated that if he really believed in this program, that he might consider using Adwords to market the site.  Who knows maybe my first impression was off and this is the greatest money making program since door to door bread loaf slicers.  At least advertising through adwords, would not upset all of his friends and family.

Adsense for Summer Slow Down Over

Well, fortunately with back to school and politics, the adsense slow down that typically happens every summer was very short and sweet this year.  Its over and many sites are back up to normal numbers.

Many more, even experienced no slow down at all this summer, hitting record months only to hit record months once again.  Its possible that the golden years of adsense for publishers might be on a temporary upswing.  Who knows maybe we'll be in publisher heaven soon like house cats provided new cat trees to lounge in, publishers might be able to once again swim in the adsense revenues.

Scrolling Adsense Ads, Does Anyone Scroll

So its been a few months now since Google Adsense added those silly little scroll buttons on their ads.  I have no idea who would ever look at an ad for say diet pills and think to themself,

"That's just not what I'm looking for in an advertisement.  Maybe I need to look further by scrolling for more ads!"

The concept just doesn't seem to make much sense.  That said, Google hasn't yanked the things.  Probably considers it to be something along the lines of 'no harm, no foul'.  I just can't understand why they even go to the energy of using them.  Plus, I have not found a metric or tool that can track whether or not anyone actually does click on the scroll button.

MacSpeech

I recently made the move over to an iMac from a P.C. and am amazed at all the differences. Granted, transferring from Windows OS to Leopard is "interesting" enough, I've found that numerous applications that I took for granted are either lacking the same punch or are absent. However, I find blogging to be much simpler on the Mac due to all the editing programs and accessibility of keyboard shortcuts and command options. It has been a process trying to locate a satisfactory dictation program.

I had been considering picking up Dragon Naturally Speaking for my P.C. due to all the great reviews I've read over the last few months, but I was upset to see that it is unavailable for my new OS. After doing a bit of research, I was able to find a couple of great programs out there that are compatible for my new OS. Out of the two, I found one from Nuance, the developers of Dragon Naturally Speaking, entitled MacSpeech.

MacSpeech looks to be the frontrunner right now, so I'm going to take it for a test drive in the near future.

Adsense Makes Sense

By now we are all familiar with Google Adsense, but the question that continuously crops up is how does Adsense determine what advertisements make it onto your blog or website. Well, as of the moment, Adsense ads are selected primarily based upon text from your websites.

Google has been working on many ways to improve their targeting technology to better place ads with sites. One of the main obstacles arises when a site maintains a heavy focus on pictures and videos. It is extremely important to include enough text in your site so that Google can place pertinent ads to your page. 

Other ways to improve your ad targeting include, titling images correctly by providing ALT tags and utilizing captions for images and video.