The BookmarkMoney Blog

This week I signed up with Entrecard and their webmaster traffic share program. It’s a pretty nifty way of dropping off a digital business card to webmasters of a similar mind. The whole system works on credits. You get 1 credit when you card someone, and another when someone clicks from your site to somebody else’s. You also get credits for allowing other people to advertise on your site, which you split with Entrecard. Your ad rate is based on an average of how many cards you’ve dropped over the previous five days. You can also use credits to advertise on other sites. It’s an interesting system, and I’m having fun with it.

After 4 days, my account is -7386 credits. You read that right, negative 7386 credits.

About ten minutes after I signed up for my account, I figured out how to break their carding system. I’m no programmer - not even a talented amateur, but 4 hours later, a little hacking on a MySpace whoretrain script, and a little help from Yahoo Answers, and I had cobbled a script together that would automatically collect my 300 drops a day. Without thinking, I uploaded it and started playing with it, trying to fine tune it.

After an hour of putting the script through its paces I logged into my Entrecard account. At which point I noticed I was almost 7900 credits to the negative. Let that be a lesson to you boys and girls: always clear your cookies before you try out any black hat tactics.

I went back and looked at my script, and figured out what I did wrong - besides trying to cheat the system - and adjusted it so that it would work right. But, considering how far my curiosity dug me into the hole, I’m going to back shelf it, since it’s going to take me a month, or $50 on eBay to dig myself out again. Still, I did learn a couple things about programming, and I finally got to actually test out my observations on system weaknesses. Plus I gave it a cool name: ForcedEntre.

Speaking of scripts, Online Business Life released scripts to make your Entrecarding much easier. They’re both white hat tactics, but they do speed up the process immensely. Script one lets you quickly build a list of people that card you, and script two dumps out the list of a certain category. Both are excellent at what they do.

Walt debuted a new site this week: PowerDropping.com. PowerDropping.com lists the 300 fastest loading sites with the Entrecard widget on them, which helps the dedicated EntreCard droppers achieve a nice shotgun effect of coverage.

Finally, today is my third day of missed work, and I’m really not missing it at all. I called in Friday for shits and grins. Sunday we got hammered by almost six inches of snow being tossed around by 40mph winds, my adventure in which I detailed in a previous post. My dad was stranded here in town, as was my cousin, who is a delivery driver for a beverage distributor. He wasn’t aware that we lived in town, but in a lucky coincidence the godmother of our daughter was working at the only hotel in town, and was able to steer him in our direction. We had a full house last night, although my dad ended up sleeping at my brother’s house.

When I woke up this morning, the weather was still pretty putrid. Every major road around here was flagged Travel Not Advised, and every school within 30 miles was closed, so I decided to call it a day at 6:30 am. My father called me around 8 am, and told me he counted 55 cars in the ditches between here and the halfway point of his commute. My brother went to work today and said the drive wasn’t too bad. I had thought about pulling a half day, but lost track of the time, and missed the point of departure.

Anyway, I’ve put a lot of work into BookMark Money and this blog over the last few days. I’ve done some decent networking, and I’m starting to get noticed in the blogosphere. I have a contest coming up that I think people will find exciting. My RSS subscribers went from 2 to 13 in the space of two days, and I got my first user on the main BookMark Money site.

My first week of affiliate marketing is over. I made one sale of $18, and spent about $25 on that campaign. With all of the other campaigns I’m out about $50 for this week. Not an auspicious start, but now I’m getting ideas on what works and what doesn’t, and I’m starting to refocus and attack this beast from another angle.

Oh, and if anybody’s interested, I’ll sell them a copy of ForcedEntre for $6.95.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Entrecard, Pay Per Click (PPC), Site News by Jotun
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Well it has been a few days since I started my first Adwords campaign. 9,000 impressions, 0 clicks. Time to rewrite that one I think.

I created two more on the spur of the moment on Wednesday night. Campaign 1: 900 impressions, one click. Campaign 2: 2,500 impressions, three clicks. Slightly better than my first campaign, but only in very relative terms.

Total time spent to setup my campaigns - 50 minutes. Total cost to me - $.38. Money made - 0. Time to dust off the old thinking cap.

Still, I’m not really discouraged. I am getting ideas and insights from the campaigns I’m running, and since I’m a kinesthetic learner, I’m learning by doing. I have a thousands of ideas, so two spur of the moment ones not making money isn’t a heartbreaker. What I’m learning is well worth the $.38 I’m out so far.

Never Blue Ads called yesterday. I need to find a minute and call them back. If I’m not home I’m working, and if I am home I have to use a spatula to pry the kid off of my leg. *sigh* I really wish I had started this two years ago when I wanted to, before the mortgage and kid.

I’m working my way through Ruck’s 60 Days to List Profits in fits and starts. I know I write about him a lot, and it makes me feel like a suck-boy, but I can’t help it. He’s the first affiliate marketer that isn’t peddling re-heated two year old material (on his blog at least), and his insights make me feel like I can do it too. His recent series on the potential of Kaboodle are amazing. Catch up on them: Day 1 |Day 2 |Day 3 |Day 4

I see from my referral logs that Ruck visited here after a trackback. Probably laughed his ass off. I know that’s probably what I would do if the roles were reversed. That’s ok, hate makes me stronger

Spent 4 hours last night looking for software to power the backend of my as yet unannounced project. I swear it’ll blow your mind if I can afford to pay somebody off of eLance to write it for me. I spent a couple hours noodling around with Yahoo Pipes. Talk about your object oriented programming! Very powerful and yet very limited. Spent hours trying to get yahoo to categorize 3 different sets of rss feed items by date posted without regards to the blog they were coming from, but the closest I ever got was listing them by date yet still seperated.

Finally, I’ve noticed that every time I break out “Are You Dead Yet?” by Children of Bodom, it always starts with “In Your Face,” which is my favorite song on the album, and may just be the best one too. I’m definately looking forward to the new album and hopefully I can catch them on tour again. The last time I saw them, they were with Slayer and Mastodon. Mastodon sucked ungodly amounts of ass, and the only reason I stayed for Slayer was so that my friend could say he had seen them. Two songs later we were gone.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Music, Site News by Jotun
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(Cross Posted to Fascination Street )Following up on my previous post, I am starting down the path towards becoming an Internet Marketer. I have opened my AdWords account, and started my first campaign. I’m trying to remain cautiously optimistic. I’ve set a limit of $5/day, and I’m going to probably burn through $20 to $25 just testing the waters.

I don’t expect that I’m going to make a crapload of money. I’m not even expecting to make money at all. I don’t have a defeatist attitude, getting rich isn’t the point of this first campaign. The point is to start getting results. I’m eyeballing what seems to be an absolutely massive market that isn’t even remotely being tapped. The question is, how to tap into it.

Hence my first AdWords campaign. I’ve spent years now reading the latest and greatest e-books promising to teach me all of the “Insider’s Secrets” and such. The problem being is that actions are the most important thing when it comes to determining one’s future. I don’t pretend that I’m a guru, or even on the path to becoming one, but I know what my strengths are, and I intend to utilize them to the fullest.

My father is an engineer, my mother an artist. Opposites really do attract, eh? I’ve always had an innate ability to solve problems, generally thinking laterally. I am proud to say that my efforts to break the various systems that I have worked in have led to rules specifically designed to thwart my efforts. Of course, that just generally just encourages me to find new ways around my problems. I digg pissing people off. Moreso, I love to get inside of their heads and just drive them to the brink of madness. I am a psychological sadist who has the ability to observe in a detatched manner the subject I’m working on. I have the brain of a lawyer, but the heart of a used car salesman.

For all of my life I’ve had to deal with the war raging inside of me: logic versus passion. I’m very analytical in my outlook, but I tend to flip to passionate in a heartbeat. My bullshit tolerance is low as a result, and getting lower the older I get. I have a wife, a kid, and a mortgage, so I have to deal with shit, since I can’t just up and quit when I get pissed off, as I was once wont to do.

I stand out at work. I hate working. Detest it. But, the way I see it, if I’m going to be there I’m going to do as much as possible to fill the time. Once I figure out my job, I usually start coasting at about 125% of productivity. That doesn’t make me popular. The fact that I can do it using half the energy of the guy next to me who is struggling at around 80% productivity doesn’t make me many friends either. Add in that I’m a non union worker in a union shop, and it’s amazing I don’t have more “accidents.” The thing is, I’m tired of having to put forth 125% effort just to keep my mind occupied, all the while lining somebody else’s pockets. I want to fill my own pockets with my effort.

That’s why I’m embarking on this venture, so I don’t have to deal with anybody’s crap anymore.

I’ve recently become a reader of Cash Tactics. The author of the blog is “Ruck,” and two years ago he was in my place - wife, two jobs, and trying to get out. Two years later, he’s hit the big time. That’s my inspiration. The ‘only in America‘ type of success story that Ruck is enjoying. I admire his honesty. He shoots from the hip, straight from the hip. When he recommends things, he doesn’t even use affiliate links, unless he’s cloaking them some way I can’t figure out.

Recently he wrote a post entitled Stop Looking For Handouts And Start Busting Tail. Articles like this really help to keep my motivation high, and this is the second post in the space of about three days that really spoke to me. I don’t believe in coincidences, but I do believe in synchronicity - the points where everything in the universe seems to actually fit.

I notice synchronicities all the time, but by the time I squash the Woody Allen voice inside of me, the window has closed, and I’m left waiting for the next opportunity. There’s a saying in certain political circles that “Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Political views aside, that sums my life up in a nutshell.

Last Tuesday/Wednesday was one of those times, however instead of debating, I kicked my inner nebbish in the face, and decided to act on an idea that came to me out of the blue. On an impulse I registered BookMarkMoney.com, and actually paid for hosting instead of slaving it to my main hosting account. Then I went to work.

And that’s where I am today. I’m still working, behind the scenes. I’m splitting my time between backend stuff on this site, AdWords, some speculation on eBay, redesigning my brother’s website, snowblowing the damned driveway every two to three days, and my wife and kid. Plus I have an amazing idea in the pipeline, and if I can wrangle it, I’m going to install the software and play around with it this weekend.

It sounds like a lot of work. And it is. But it’s 125%, and that’s nothing new. The fact that I’m doing it for myself, now that’s new.

Tags: Gurus, Psychology, Site News by Jotun
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