Pro Interneter

My flavor of the moment is the new DealDotCom Referral Program. DealDotCom is apparently the hottest next hot new thing to hit the internet since Agloco. The best thing about DealDotCom, of course, is the referral program. If you click my DealDotCom referral link when you signup, I get 35% of anything that you ever buy from DealDotCom. That could be big. Beyond that, if you then refer someone to DealDotCom,  I get 15% of anything that they buy - and you get %35 of anything that they buy from DealDotCom. Basically, DealDotCom has a two-level referral program.

Beyond DealDotCom’s referral program, the premise seems to be that they are going to sell one product per day, and they are going to sell that product at a discount so incredible that it will make your head spin. They will sell that product until it sells out, and then they start selling a new item. Here’s the quote from their website:

But, there’s a catch! Each day, we only have ONE product for sale. It’ll be for sale at an insanely low price, and there will be an extremely limited number of copies available. That product will only be available until it sells out, or until midnight the next night, when we pull it down and start selling a new product.

I’m also reading that DealDotCom will be selling “Anything and everything related to building an online business, increasing traffic, monetizing your websites, blogging, web design… in short, we sell all things Internet Marketing.” - so I’m not sure that this is going to apply to the everyday person or what exactly it is that they will be selling. We shall see. 

Pay Per Click (PPC) Arbitrage is something that I had read about a while ago. The basic idea is that if you can buy Google AdWords Ads for a low price, and then run ads / affiliates on your website that bring in more revenue than you are spending for your AdWords, then you’re turning a profit. It seemed like a reasonable idea, but I didn’t have the money to invest in it, since you do need some pocket change if you want to run a real AdWords campaign.

Yesterday I came across Zac Johnson’s blog and found these articles about how he tests AdWords Campaigns and how he made $10,000 using PPC with Google AdWords and NeverBlueAds.

This really blew my mind that you could squeeze that much of a profit out of arbitrage. I figured you’d be making maybe a few cents on each click/deal, but the information that Zac shares seems to suggest that on a good setup your income can be double your expenses (or better) - if you spend $100 on AdWords, you can make $200 from NeverBlueAds. That’s $100 profit.

Now of course there will about a billion people who are going to run out and try this. Literally tens of people are going to read this on my blog alone. My biggest problem has always been that I can’t get over the hump of finding a good niche to create a site around. Maybe I’m just making too big of a deal out of it, and it’s better to just pick something that is high profit and run with it. The fact is that if I make a site about credit reports, I don’t need to be a guru on the topic. I just need to find enough information to put together an informative site, and it can grow from there.

My interest of the moment is the Million Dollar Wiki. First I will say that I don’t know if John Chow has any connection to the Million Dollar Wiki, but he is pimping it pretty hard and has even posted about How to make money with the Million Dollar Wiki.

At this point I’m not really clear on why I would want a Million Dollar Wiki page, or how exactly people are driving traffic to their Million Dollar Wiki pages, but it seems to be generating some good buzz and some big name web personalities have started signing on. The main way of making money seems to be that you setup a page, and then post affiliate links on the page.

I’m trying to think this out, and I am wondering a few things:

• Are only big name bloggers making money from this?
• Are they making money only because they are driving traffic from their current websites?
• Is this going to be a useful tool in the future?
• Is the site going to simply be full of spam and affiliate links?

An interesting point is that you will have the directory for at least 15 years, as that is how long they have secured their web hosting. Beyond that, you are also allowed to sell the rights to your directory.

I’m just wondering if anyone other than big name bloggers are making money off of this? I mean sure John Chow and Shoemoney can drive a bunch of traffic to their Wiki pages, but is the average web user going to come across these Wiki pages and use them? There are still a lot of good usernames available, but as it gains more steam, these will be gone quickly. I’m going to think on it for a while, but I imagine I will be signing up something here soon.

When I posted about the first blog contest that I ever entered, I started get a few comments on this blog, from people other than my friends. The first comment was basically Spam. It said “Go to this website for more blog contests: www.somewebsite.com”.

For whatever reason, that didn’t really bother me. I think it’s partly because it was nice to get a “comment” even if it wasn’t legit. Then I woke up the next morning and there was a second comment on the same post. This second comment said

Sounds nice, but I don’t trust sites like these for two important reasons:
1. It’s very easy to fake a winner.
2. Participants keep linking to them and they get bigger and more popular, so they can repeat these contests again to continue the loop.

I’d rather earn my way towards getting a free wii

The kicker for me was that this commenter had left his name as “Free iPod Touch” and then linked that to a spam site that said “If you do these 3 steps, you will get a Free iPod Touch!” - Now, with the SEO knowledge that I’ve gained, it was obvious that this guy was getting a bunch of referral money from his website and he was trying to get it linked with the search term “Free iPod Touch”.

Now, I don’t disagree with with what the guy is saying, and I use the exact same SEO tactic when I post on other blogs, using the words PHP eBook as my name… but what this guy did just irked me. I feel like he’s saying “I think these blog contests are a rip-off… but click here and I can get you a great deal on an iPod Touch!”. That’s like me posting as “PHP eBook” and then saying “People that give away podcasts online are liars. They’re just doing it so they can drive more traffic to their site. Now CLICK HERE to get my FREE eBook!!!”

Anyways, I’m sure these people are finding my blog contest posts via the pingbacks (more on this later) and have no real interest in my blog - since he commented about winning a Wii, but the post was about winning $100 - but if the poster of the offending comment would like to respond, he is invited to do so.

After I signed up for the $100 blog contest yesterday, I went in search for some more possibilities. That’s when I came across John Cow’s $500 blog contest, which is 5 times more money!

JohnCow.com is supposedly a parody of JohnChow.com, but the blog is really about making money online. They’ve teamed up with Micfo Web Hosting for this contest, which isn’t the web host that I use, but I’m sure they do a fine job if a four-legged blogger is promoting them.

This is actually the second John Cow contest that I wanted to enter, but I’m not sure if I can win their Wii, because I’m not sure that I can signup for the associated referral program.

If I was to win $500, there isn’t anything in particular I would put the money towards. Right now I am getting ready to move to a new apartment and I have been hoping and wishing for a new MacBook for many years, so the $500 would go into my general operating fund. They also mentioned that if you are to somehow get them on a big-name news outlet such as CNN, then your chances of winning would skyrocket – so that of course leaves me wondering just how random the drawing will be.