Ok, so first off, who believed the title? Anyone?

Moments ago I received an issue of the Associate Programs Newsletter claiming to offer some very nice gifts for the holiday season. To be more specific…

“How would you like a no-catches gift of a domain name, lifetime web hosting and more?”

and…

“Jeremy Palmer, the million-dollar affiliate and author of High Performance Affiliate Marketing, and I have arranged a special gift for readers of this newsletter.”

“Here’s what you get - all for nothing, no catches: …”

He goes on to mention a free hosting account and domain name from Microsoft Office Live, a complimentary copy of High Performance Affiliate Marketing, and access to an exclusive webinar. And as usual, the offer is only valid for the next 24 hours. [But let me emphasize that part about “no catches”]

Well, of course I would love to get all of that for free! But what’s the catch?

First of all, why is Microsoft partnering with some internet marketers? I understand that the free webinar and ebook are just ways to collect email addresses so that these guys can push their next product launch, but what does Microsoft have to do with this? I mean, the title of their page (http://www.quityourdayjob.com/officelive/) is “Microsoft Office Live Exclusive Offer.” And to sign-up, you go through a special link - http://www.quityourdayjob.com/officelive/signup.php.

So far we’re looking at free lifetime web hosting and other goodies with no catches. No harm in signing up, right? We’ll just give them an old email address and fake name and see what we get…

And indeed, you do get a free hosting account and domain name from Microsoft Office Live. It’s the same one you get from http://officelive.microsoft.com/OfficeLiveBasic.aspx. (Whether you do a Google search for “free office live hosting” or go through the sneaky quityourdayjob.com redirect, you’ll end up at that page.)

But here’s the real catch - after you fill out a bunch of information, Microsoft asks for your credit card information. But wait, I thought it was free?

Have no fear, this is only a precaution Microsoft is taking to ward off spammers and scammers looking to build phishing websites. Or is it? If you read the fine print, they need your billing information so that when Office Live’s beta period is over, they can start charging you!

Taking a step back, we can see how this all went down:

1. Microsoft wants some subscribers to Office Live, so they offer a free trial to get people to sign-up. Nothing unusual.
2. Some internet marketing gurus piggyback on Microsoft’s offer and pass it off as their own “exclusive” offer only for their subscribers, only for 24 hours.
3. The gurus realize that if they say “no catch” that people will belive them and, in turn, signup for their mailing list.
4. The gurus then send subscribers over to a page on Microsoft’s site that can easily be found by anyone else.
5. And in the future we have step 5, consisting of the gurus promoting more get-rich-quick offers to the people they conned into subscribing.

Isn’t it interesting how far the gurus will go these days?

Wonder if Microsoft would go as far as shutting these people down, considering they are profiting off of Microsoft’s name? I doubt MS would hesitate to send off a Cease & Desist order, especially if people believe that MS is indeed associated with the gurus.

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Amongst all the celebrating, did anyone remember to wish Firefox a Merry Christmas? This browser has been with me more often than my friends, so I think it deserves some praise!

And if you’re a scrooge, you can take out your anger on Internet Explorer! I am getting sick of that browser.

If you’re getting sick of IE too, check out Tech-FAQ, where they have instructions on uninstalling IE. There are also instructions on re-installation, in case you decide to go back. The Tech-FAQ site has a ton of info on technological stuff, so if you have questions, they may have answers.

Ok, so if you have Firefox but other people still have IE, what can you do?

If you have a website, start using Explorer Destroyer. This is a neat script that tells your site visitors that they should switch to Firefox (it only comes up if the visitor is using IE.) And best of all, you can make money by getting people to download Firefox!

At the very least, check out Explorer Destroyer and Kill Bill’s Browser for some good reading!

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Few things are more annoying than setting up an affiliate site, only to realize that half the advertiser’s links are expired or point to an error page! I’ve had crap like that happen to me, and so has Rosalind Gardner.

And consequently, both of our problems stemmed from Linkshare!

Rosalind was nice about it, but I’m sick of being nice (ok, there’s nothing nice in this blog, but you get the point…)

Merchants, update the freaking links!

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We used to cherish links from DMOZ like they were some holy grail. It must have been our desire for a high PR link from an authority site, or perhaps the exclusivity (meaning that it was poorly managed and therefore very hard to get your link included.)

It has gotten to the point where getting a DMOZ link is virtually impossible, and not just due to the lazy editors. DMOZ had some serious database errors or something like that, causing lots of data to be lost. You can’t submit and you can’t edit.

And best of all, it shows no signs of improvement! The “unavailable” page has been up for months now, and SEOmoz has given up. I decided to follow suit, I mean, spamming Wikipedia is the cool thing to do anyway

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It doesn’t matter how competitive the category is, if you use these secrets, you’ll get top rankings in less than 24 hours! That is just one of the claims from Traffic Geyser, a new ebook that reveals how to “get massive traffic uploading videos to YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, etc.” Well, that sounds alright… it also sounds like they gave away the secret right there!

The sales letter and the screenshots basically give away the technique. And the fact that they say few internet marketers know about this, just means that many other people do! It’s no secret. You upload videos to YouTube, people watch them, then go to your website. And since YouTube, Google Video, and Myspace all have high rankings, your videos can get some good results in Google. Just be sure to have some good keywords in your video title.

Is it really a secret that Myspace is a popular website?

And if you want to see their videos, the URLs are all on the sales page. Just do a search for “internet infomercials” without the quotes and see if they are still ranked so well

To sum things up, here are two things to know about this product:

1. The strategy of uploading videos is nothing new.

2. Now there will be lots of spam going around YouTube and Google Video. (Myspace is already full of spammers.)

But have no fear, these are social sites - that means they have a rating and reporting system. The users themselves will take care of any cheesy videos that no one wants to see

If you read the user comments, you’ll see that the truth behind this video is already revealed.

But actually, the most important thing to note, is that now that sleazy internet marketers are implementing this technique, it will not help with great rankings. (Remember blog comment spam? They just used the “nofollow” tag and now that technique is worthless. The same will happen here.)

So here is the good way to do it: Make cool videos that people want to watch, and upload them. It’s that simple.

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Not much to say here, except that there is a new version of the VMN Toolbox out now. I mentioned this neat little tool a few months ago, and I’ve been using it myself ever since.

It’s free, it works, and it doesn’t screw anything up. What more could you ask for?

I just downloaded a copy, and you can too if you go here.

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How many webmasters are fed up with Wikipedia? I know I am.

Granted, it is a good site for information. But the crazy editors leave something to be desired. I don’t promote link spamming, but at least some people editing that site are ridiculous.

Here’s my story…

I was looking at the wiki page of a local college, and I noticed that a couple links were out of date. A new chapter of a sorority had been established at the school a year ago, but it was not included on this wiki page. So I simply added the link, which linked to another wiki page about the sorority. Exactly the same as the other sororities listed on the page already!

And that link was removed in minutes! Why??

I was not benefiting from that at all. I tried to help, and that was all I got in return. A “screw you, we would prefer to keep things outdated.”

That, plus news of their unorthodox blacklists and spammer lists, I don’t know what to think.

(P.S. Here is a good blog post about getting links on Wikipedia, although it is even under scrutiny from them. I’m sure this will be next!)

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