Business Opportunities and Internet Marketing Systems that Don't Work |
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Pixel AdvertisingOnce upon a time, an individual set a goal to sell a million pixels on a web page, at $1 per pixel. He had a novel idea, the press thought it was cute, and because he got a lot of publicity for his site, and because it was unique, he sold every single pixel.Internet marketers fairly drooled at the potential of THIS idea as a replicated business! Someone had actually DONE this, so it would not be at all hard to persuade others that they now had the perfect ticket to easy wealth. Several marketers came out with "instant systems" for pixel advertising. And that is where the fairy tale turns ugly. The product was not a good idea to begin with - except for people selling it - they made out like bandits at the expense of the purchasers. The whole system is flawed at several levels. And they can harm you in much worse ways than just losing the money you put in. First of all, the package is only the first cost you will have in setting it up and actually using it. The system consists of a piece of software that you install on a server, along with a pre-made site. In order to do that, you have to pay for hosting and a domain name - good hosting, with a MySQL database and PHP enabled. The package will have a script, generally written in PHP, which you install. It will have a cookie cutter design. If you want it to be unique (and anything online that is not unique is dead in the water), then you have to either learn to customize it, or pay someone to do that for you. Second, Pixel advertising is very inefficient. You have a page filled with ads, and nothing but ads. Search engines don't like it. You have to pay for any effective advertising to it - another sucking hole in your budget. These systems are typically set to a minimum ad block size of 10X10 - which is a TINY block! And for that, they have to pay $100! No sane business owner will do that for a tiny piece of something that isn't even effective. So competition has lowered the price - you cannot charge $1 per pixel - in fact, you'd be hard pressed to get even $.01 per pixel. The value of advertising is tied directly to the traffic to the site. Lots of traffic, high ad value. Low traffic, no value. And who is gonna go looking for a page full of ads? There are millions of sites full of ads on the net, and every single one of them is ignored by both search engines, AND people. You will have nothing that I want on that page. If I hit it by accident, I'll not even stick around, I'll leave as soon as I realize what it is, and it WON'T be by clicking on an ad! If you cannot get traffic, and if you cannot get buyers because the system is inefficient, then you are dead in the water. Third, that script you were handed is downright dangerous. This is not an exaggeration. It was sold to you without any support whatsoever. Which means, if you have a problem with it, tough beans. See, someone hired a cheap programmer to write that script. They cared only about getting something that looked like it would function - most of them have buttons for features that do not work - to make it look like it does more than it really does. The programmer may or may not have been a reputable person - it is certain that they did not care about putting in good security routines, which means your site can easily be exploited. And it is certain that it will be. When one of those unsupported scripts is released, hackers are all over it. They quickly find where the security holes are (not hard to do since it was not well written to begin with), and they then go searching the net, day after day, to find the suckers that actually installed it. Then they hack into it and use YOUR site as a phishing site, and within a day or so, your site gets shut down, and YOU are the one accused of wrongdoing! This one is a loser all the way around - it fails on every point as a successful business option, and it has the potential to really harm you if you attempt to use it. Written by Laura Wheeler, MicroBusiness Website Developer, and founder of the MicroWebmasters Alliance
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