There are a number of ways to block spam. If you have a blog, you’ve probably tried a few. If you’ve ever commented on a blog, you’ve probably seen a few in use.

I’ve been using Akismet since I started blogging, and I’ve been happy with it. But there are other ways. Captcha images, math plugins, questions, and more.

For now it’s “Is fire hot or cold?” and “What is the sum of 7 and 4?” but who knows what the future holds. Someone out there is probably working on an anti-spam plugin that requires you to solve physics and/or calculus equations!

Before you can comment, we have to make sure you are qualified as a rocket scientist. Just answer this simple question and your comment will be approved:

What is the cosine of an ultraviolet wave traveling at a velocity of 27 kilojoules with a frequency of 3, as it extends perpendicular to the angle of inference, in an isotonic solution?

While the grad students go try to figure that out, let’s look at what the people with street smarts are doing: WP-SpamFree

It’s simple. Few spam bots can process JavaScript, and few can process cookies. Ever fewer can process both. However, 99% of your visitors will have no problems with either JavaScript or cookies.

So they made a plugin that uses JavaScript and cookies to block the bots while avoiding the need for captchas and math questions. It’s not rocket science - it’s better than rocket science. I prefer to use the term practical.

I’ve been using it for a week or so and it has blocked 100% of comment spam, giving Akismet a well-deserved vacation! The only thing that has made it past WP-SpamFree was trackback spam, but Akismet caught that with no problem.

WP-SpamFree gets Sucker’s Seal of Approval!

Photo credit: IRRI Images

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

Last week I submitted my How To Make Money Online By Exploiting Your Grandma tutorial to the DailyBlogTips.com writing contest, and now I have to choose my favorite entries from the 71 entrants. My favorites are below:

How to go from $0 to $7000 per month and back to $0 again by Patrick. This one gets my first vote because I loved the tutorial before I even knew about this writing contest. (Consequently, it was this post that lured me in to the contest!)

Absolute Guide to Losing Readers by Ronald. This might just be my number 1 favorite! Highly recommended for all my loyal readers!

Fussy’s Handy Ways To Ruin Your Marriage by Mrs. Fussypants. Another light-hearted post for your enjoyment.

A tutorial on mastering Digital Photography in minutes! by Praval. Tons of good advice for photography, which is much more fun than internet marketing!

Possessive vs. Plural: Getting it Right by Corner Scribe. Just because I’m a grammar nazi.

Those are my five faves. If I was programming myFaves into my T-Mobile phone, those would be them!

——————
Thanks to DailyBlogTips for holding the contest, thanks to everyone who voted for me, and thanks to the make money blogging carnival for including this too.

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

This video goes out to everyone that visits InternetMarketingSucks.com but does not understand sarcasm:

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

“Oh darling, I’m glad you could stop by to see little old me!”

“Shut it granny. Start knitting!”

If that’s how your last conversation with your grandma went, you might just be the next dot com mogul. But if not, there’s still time to exploit her in order to support your crack addiction.

I got the idea from the “Socks with a Story” story over at Springwise (an entrepreneurial ideas blog.) Once I saw it, I knew it would be perfect for the conniving internet marketing crowd!

In Switzerland, there is a company called NetGranny that is a collective of 15 grannies who knit socks “on demand” when someone orders online. Customers get that warm fuzzy feeling from knowing that the socks were made just for them by someone they saw online. And they certainly pay a premium for it - $38/pair at today’s exchange rates!

(Considering the terrible German to English translation on their site, I doubt many Americans are ordering from them. That leaves the market wide open!)

If a few grannies can get together and make money selling socks online, surely an internet marketing guru can put together a similar website with even better marketing materials to make it more convincing. It doesn’t matter if the socks are knitted by your grandma, yourself, a group of metrosexuals, or even if they come from your local thrift store. It only matters where the customer thinks they are coming from!

Follow this step-by-step tutorial and you’ll be raking in the dough in no time:

1. Find a source of knit products, whether they are socks, mittens, caps, whatever.

The point here is to find something that you can get your hands on.

2. Craft a story about where they come from.

It could be “a 100 year old grandma that immigrated from Norway in 1910 that had to knit socks to survive the cold” or “a group of grannies passing the time at Rose Shadow Nursing Home, knitting for the children they wish they had.” Just so it inspires feelings.

3. Make a website that tells the story but also uses slick sales techniques to convince visitors to shell out $50 per item.

(Big red font and fake testimonials will be great, but unfortunately there’s no need for a 3D ebook cover.)

4. Send some press releases and run some ads.

Now you need to exploit potential buyers, convincing them to buy your product. A TV infomercial would be good, because you could use that to show a happy family enjoying their knit socks.

5. Profit.

If you did steps 1-4, this should take care of itself.

6. Call a lawyer when you get exposed as a fraud.

Hire a good lawyer and they’ll keep you out of trouble. It worked for OJ Simpson.

7. Leave the country and live off the money you made and deposited in an off-shore bank account.

Just 7 steps gets you from a nobody to a millionaire with their own island. Who says internet marketing sucks?

[This post is being entered into the Tutorials writing project at DailyBlogTips.com]

Photo credit: caswell_tom (who does not exploit his grandma!)

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

For the past decade, millions of people have flocked online in search of instant riches. Whether they were going for free iPods, autosurf traffic, paid surveys, pro blogging, or a host of paid-to-click sites, they were just acting on a basic instinct that has been around for longer than I’ve been alive.

Before the internet was huge, it was envelope stuffing and chain letters. Before that, fool’s gold and snake oil. (Heck, some people are still doing work from home jobs like fishing for used golf balls!)

We know all the scams. But what were people doing in the 1930s and 40s?

According to that ad, people were buying how-to books! I’m not surprised. The How To Be a Taxidermist book is the same concept as today’s How To Make Money In Forex Markets ebooks. They take a complicated profession, dumb it down into an ebook, and write a sales letter that claims you’ll be able to be successful after doing nothing more than reading a short book.

So not only are people still looking for get-rich-quick scams, they still fall for the same tricks!

Want to see more crazy jobs and home-study courses, such as rabbit farming, toy making, crime detection, giant frogs, and even dentistry?

See the complete list (with images) here: Offbeat Jobs From The 30’s And 40’s

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

Have you noticed that Alexa redirect links don’t work anymore?

A few days ago I launched a new niche site and, not liking the ~8 million Alexa rank, decided to hit it with an Alexa redirect (http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?http://www.manipulatealexarank.com) a few times. Normally that would have been enough to get the site to a more hospitable 1 or 2 million rank, but in this case it just gave me a 404 error!

Yes, the coveted Alexa redirect, commonly used to lower your Alexa rank, is no longer available. It won’t make much of a difference for me, but think about the people that based their internal navigation menus on Alexa redirect links! Their entire site navigation would have gone to shit!

I think the lesson here is not to be stupid and try tricks like that to manipulate something useless.

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend

A few days ago I was thinking about high-paying affiliate programs after doing some reading about high PPC bids. I gave it a little thought but it wasn’t until just now that I found a very lucrative affiliate program (if I play my cards right.)

How lucrative? $2500 lucrative!

Good thing Vic posted about it instead of doing his TV dinner video!

This is when it would come in handy to have a site like HoustonJobs.com (HostGator is based there,) but I do have a number of connections down south that may help.

If you have any job or career related sites, or anything to do with Houston, you might be able to make some referrals and pocket a cool $2500.

Just be careful if you have a free job posting site. It was rumored that HostGator didn’t pay its regular affiliates who were operating free web hosting sites. (Biased against freebie seekers?)

However, that rumor could have started due to people trying to scam HostGator in the first place, in which case it’s a good thing they didn’t pay up.

Come to think of it, anytime an affiliate complains about not getting paid, it’s usually because they were trying to scam the affiliate program or doing something stupid.

So like I said in the beginning, if you want a big commission, this could be just the ticket!

Update: Back to the opportunity at hand…

I’m getting a few vague ideas in my head, but I’m kind of busy, so I want to post some ideas and maybe someone else can try them.

The first thing to keep in mind is that you have to refer someone to HostGator on your own by filling out a referral form before your referral goes in for an interview. That referral form is how they’ll track everything (there aren’t typical affiliate links for this.)

So if you’re paying attention so far, you will have realized that you need to have a relationship with your referral (at least enough to get their name, email, and phone number.) Along the same lines, you can’t just run some PPC ads direct to the Hostgator job application.

Which means… you have to collect their information!

You also have to wait and hope that your referral gets hired and stays employed for 90 days. Whew!

So what you need to do is set up your own job placement network. To make it quicker, it could be targeted to just Windows administrators. (Or Linux admins or whatever, but there are already sites like linux-jobs.com.) Then you market like normal to these potential employees and get them to come to your site and fill in a form with their name, email, and phone. Then you hand-submit the referrals to HostGator via the referral form.

That’s just one idea and it could be done in a variety of ways. There are other ways, too, but just remember, if you want a $2500 commission you have to take this seriously. Or I guess you could spam CraigsList!

Good luck!

(and by “good luck” I mean “I hope you don’t actually promote this because I’d rather keep the money to myself!”)

P.S. What would be sweet is if any super affiliate bloggers pushed this offer and published their results and/or strategies online…

Bookmark This Page or Email It To a Friend