Business Opportunities and Internet Marketing Systems that Don't Work |
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Dave's Cool Little WebsiteHere's a nice sounding little "easy money" scheme, that someone might fall for if they did not understand how the web operates.Dave's Cool Little Website is a replicated website, which you purchase from him, and which he hosts on his server. It makes money from three affiliate programs: eBay, AdSense, and ClickBank. The problems with this system are many. First, the whole thing is duplicate content. It is set up on the same server with hundreds of other copies of the same script. You do get your own domain name, but you do not get the ability to change the actual page content, except for a few minor changes. While he does say that it harvests articles from a certain database, all those sites harvesting from the same database are going to end up with duplicate content, just because most single article databases just do not have that many fresh articles in a given time period. Second, there are problems with each of the programs. AdSense is a valid way to make money, but it is dependent upon TRAFFIC. If you cannot get, or stay, indexed with search engines, you are going to have to pay for your traffic. And paying for AdSense Clicks is a losing proposition. Always. Some people say you can buy low and get high clicks out, but you really CANNOT control that, for a number of complex reasons. Also, AdSense payouts are declining over time, while AdWords clicks are increasing in price, especially for tacky sites. eBay also ONLY pays commissions for NEW accounts. So people can click through and make a purchase, and if they have done so with eBay before, you don't get a commission. eBay is also so common that most people who are likely to visit a site like this one will most likely already have an account with eBay. Clickbank is a different story altogether. They pay for each purchase, no matter whether it is a first, or a tenth. But they have become the selling venue for all sorts of scams and half-scams. If you choose to use them for earning on a site, and you do not screen the ads they are putting on your site, they will show ads for all kinds of dishonest stuff. I, personally, do not wish to make my money that way. I do in fact have a ClickBank account - I do not sell my books through them, because I do not want to have to raise my prices so high that my clients cannot afford them. I sell two items that I have carefully reviewed though, which are managed through ClickBank. And I have problems with how ClickBank does business. They apparently have such high fraud rates that they hold part of your payment to cover potential returns, and they will not issue a payment to you at all until orders from your links have been received from 5 different credit card accounts of at least two types. The reports do not show the totals in a way that you can figure out what is going on easily either, and if you go very long without a sale, they'll begin charging you a fee that reduces the amount in your account. This means that if you make occasional sales, but have not yet figured out how to make them efficiently, your earnings may take a long time to get to you, and they may be decreased while you are waiting for them to get to the point where ClickBank considers you qualified to receive a paycheck. Now, back to Dave's Website. Another thing that bothers me is that you pay a one time payment for hosting... for how long? Innumerable websites operating on the same server is going to be costly long term. Eventually his little game will run out, and he'll no longer think it is worth maintaining - unless he thinks that drop outs are so high that he'll always have more room for new suckers. Either case is a loser for the purchaser. The last issue is one of quality. Computers are just not good at judging useful information. The website harvests and categorizes articles from an article directory - until you have seen the results of auto-harvested articles, you will not BELIEVE how many BAD articles there are out there! Glorified ads, bad spelling, worse grammar, obscene references, and miscategorized stuff - so if your site is supposed to focus on babies, and you use auto harvested articles, you'll get spam articles that someone put in the wrong category. Further, a site that auto-harvests articles CANNOT do SEO effectively. Metatags will be either generic, stupid, or missing entirely, and page titles will also be non-targeted - article titles don't always cut it. I think this cannot help but be a loser, on virtually every point. I can't see how it could possibly actually MAKE money for anyone other than Dave. I can see how this basic idea could be modified in a way that did not fall into the "duplicate content" description, but it would take some work on the part of the site owner. In order to make something truly unique, you have to MAKE it unique, and that involves WORK. Nobody is going to hand you the secret to millions for a mere $100 and no work! Written by Laura Wheeler, MicroBusiness Website Developer, and founder of the MicroWebmasters Alliance |
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