Working the System, Part Deux
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.
[...] The BookmarkMoney Blog wrote an interesting post today on Working the System, Part DeuxHere’s a quick excerptI’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, a… [...]
Sorry to hear about your -7386 EC credits. I also figured out that way and was called a “blackhatter” and “scripter” :(. I did not lose as many credits as you did; I lost only 600 credits, which was still quite painful.
It’s no big deal. It just means I have to wait a while until I can advertise on other peoples’ blogs. I was stupid enough to walk away for 15 minutes while the script was churning away.
I didn’t really have the intention of cheating the system per se, I was just curious as to how it worked. I figured it out, just to my detriment.
As I mentioned, my skills are nowhere near what your level is. I just gutted a script that auto incremented, and would churn out sequential Entrecard urls in bulk.
It was an ugly hack, but it taught me some more about PHP programming. In the end though, I’m trying to promote myself legitimately, not by cheating my way to the the top of the heap.
But if anyone else wants to cheat, I’m willing to accept some filthy lucre
[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]
Here’s how I did it - http://natespost.com/index.php/entrecard-scam-mongo-credits/
nate’s last blog post..Entrecard Scam - Mongo Credits