The Ripoff Report’s business model

There are two things you need to know about earning money on the internet: 1. Getting traffic and 2. Monetizing traffic.

You already know I like to study the eBay Pulsers’ unusual methods of getting traffic. They then monetize their Pulse traffic by selling ebooks (or candy canes, holey socks, etc…) and getting eBay affiliate payments. I don’t review their ebooks. What’s the point in that? The Pulsers already state upfront that they have no accountability for the results of their system. ebooks are just a means to monetize traffic and I respect that they found a profitable niche.

Now look at the Ripofff Report who is accused of keyword spamming on the seomoz.org blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ripoff-report-responds-you-be-the-judge Like, heck yeah! That’s their entire business model.

What a coincidence, they sell ebooks too! It’s a small world.

The Ripoff Report is chock full of user generated spammy keywords which draw internet traffic. “Scam”, Scammed”, “ripoff”, “Jeff Paul”, “lawsuit”, etc… It’s a pretty effective traffic generating strategy:

I’ve had a good experience with the Ripoff Report. I’ll leave it up to the reader to find the actual Ripoff Report articles.

Two users wrote about their experience with Paramount Marketing Online. They said they were promised xyz results, later pressured for thousands of $$$ more by salespeople and finally they fought back using their credit card companies. These folks provided excellent information to my best friend’s father who was suckered into the deal with Paramount.

Of course, I don’t know for sure that the stories were from actual people and not planted by other companies.

Conclusion: It’s clear that the Ripoff Report is exactly like every other internet company. They get traffic and they make money from the traffic. The only higher power they have to answer to is Google. Google does not like keyword spammers and will take counter-measures against them. But Google has been pretty benevolent towards Ripoff Report so far.

Must Buy QuickBooks Pro 2008

Corporate tax filings are due tomorrow.  I have 6 forms that need to be postmarked “Jan 31”.  Even though it was just 7 degrees this morning, I was happy to be headed to my accountant’s office.

I tried to get away with using QuickBooks Simple Start.  But I found out the hard way that payroll tax filings are ridiculously cumbersome to do by hand, even for 1 employee.  Upgrading to QuickBooks Pro gets you the payroll filing capability.  

Intuit’s seasonal price for QuickBooks Pro 2008 increased from $170 to $200 since it’s tax time.  Office Depot has it for $200 and a $50 rebate for a net of $150.  That’s not bad.  I’m paying an accountant $150 today for my annual filings.   

 

Two new scripting eBay Pulsers

A couple of eBay Pulsers caught my eye today.  They are not new to the eBay Pulse, but I’ve not charted them until now.   http://www.esellerstreet.com/search.php5?catID=99

Kekoa64 is in the #1 spot.  Then eBay seller, the.rich.boy, is #2.  In the #3 place is UK seller, the-new-easy-cash-system.

Here’s Kekoa64 (#1) and the.rich.boy (#2) charted over the past 5 days. I think they are running scripts on the same server. Over 5 days, the number of watchers on each listing increases by ~5,500. The difference in watchers between the two listings remains constant at ~901.

The-new-easy-cash-system (#3) is not running on the same server but it’s pretty much the same script. It has the same start/stop and ramping patterns over time.   This chart is over the same time period as the other chart (Jan 23 – Jan 28).

 So I guess there are 5 eBay sellers running this script: kekoa64, MysteryGiant, jjfjq (Josh Kulp), the.rich.kid,  and the-new-easy-cash-system.  These are the top tier Pulsers.

Drew Peterson School of Marketing

Drew called into the Steve Dahl Chicago radio show yesterday. Yep, he’s been quiet for 5 weeks – time to fire up the ole Drew Peterson Marketing Machine.

First, let’s revisit the DP School of Marketing lessons from 2007:

1. Kill wife #3
2. Kill wife #4
3. Launch popular website for financial gain

At the DP School of Marketing, we can’t rest on our past accomplishments alone.  No, we must look to the future and leave nothing to fate.  Write these steps down:

1. Create an outrageous statement.
2. Use radio and TV personalities for publicity.
3. Launch popular website for financial gain. I see this one coming soon – DateDrew.com.

The dynamic Drewul called into the top Chicago radio morning show to proclaim Drew is ready to date. Joel Brodsky, attorney and oracle of missing persons theories, participated in yesterday’s on-air publicity stunt.

Like clockwork, Joel was featured on the Today show with Matt Lauer exactly 24 hours later (1/24). Paraphrasing the Today show ->

• Matt: Stacy’s been missing for 3 months.  Is Drew ready to date?
• Joel: He’s open to it since Stacy dumped him. He’s ready to move on.
• Matt: How can you say that she left him?
• Joel: She took $25K and she did what her mother did. She just left.
• Matt: How could a 23 year old mother, housewife and most famous missing person in America pull off such a mastermind disappearing act? If she left with another man, why isn’t he missing too?
• Joel: mumble, mumble, mumble….

Outrageous is as outrageous does. That’s our motto at the Drew Peterson School of Marketing.         

How many watchers does it take to make the eBay Pulse?

Zero, if you use a script. But seriously, how many watchers does it take to make the eBay Pulse?

The eBay Pulse has some filtering criteria other than just the number of watchers. The most watched items in a category are sometimes not shown. I don’t know why. Flickr.com imposes controls over their top photos of the day too.

Also, the number of listings shown on the Pulse varies from 0 to 10. This Pulse page for the Health & Beauty category shows no listings.

However, the watcher data from the eBay API shows a different story.

So, I’ll use eBay API watcher counts to show what it takes to be Pulse worthy.

Antiques: #1 most watched item has 162 watchers
Books: #1 has 90 watchers
Clothing, Shoes & Accessories: #1 has 164 watchers
Consumer Electronics: #1 has 270 watchers
Dolls & Bears: #1 has 206 watchers
Jewelry & Watches: #1 has 179 watchers
Musical Instruments: #1 has 184 watchers

Everything Else category: #1 -> 75,000 watchers and increasing by 1 watcher every 90 seconds.

BigCrumbs now saves you more than FatWallet

Vince at BigCrumbs.com brought this to my attention. In my previous post comparing the two savings sites, the numbers I used for BigCrumbs must have been CrumbEarner rates, not CrumbSaver rates.

BigCrumbs.com CrumbSavers save more than FatWallet.com users on 5 out of 6 randomly chosen online sites.

Here’s the apples to apples comparison – revised today 1/22:

1. SharperImage.com
   • BigCrumbs 7.2%
   • Fatwallet 6.6%
2. BestBuy.com
   • BigCrumbs 0.9 – 2.7%
   • FatWallet Not Offered
3. Dell.com
   • BigCrumbs 0.9%
   • FatWallet 3.0%
4. BarnesandNoble.com
   • BigCrumbs 4.5%
   • FatWallet 3%
5. Borders.com
   • BigCrumbs 5.4%
   • FatWallet 2%
6. Target.com
   • BigCrumbs 2.7 – 9.0%
   • FatWallet Not Offered

Of course the appeal of BigCrumbs is that you can sign up as a CrumbEarner to earn money on other people’s purchases. FatWallet has relationships with 553 online merchants, but notably, eBay is not one of them. BigCrumbs.com offers savings at 227 merchants.

Speaking of e-consumerism, check out the workmanship on my new DeMarini Diablo softball glove.

This Pulser lost watchers

OK, this one wins in the “very annoying gallery image” category. Right after Heather48IQ.

Their watchers are actually decreased on the last 2 days. Hmm… Each count on the x-axis is 15 minutes. This graph covers Jan 6 to Jan 15.

They have a slightly different implementation of the “force affiliate cookie” trick.  (update Feb 5 – I understand the official term is “cookie stuffing”.)

First they entice you to click on this link:

When you click that link, it takes you to
1. http://www.sh0pvictoriously.com/
which includes a frame of this:
2. http://robertaugustine.com/shopv/
which includes this frame:
3.

Basically, you get an eBay affiliate cookie on your machine when you visit their site.

This site is kind of unique – even the stolen eBay images are unusual. Usually the 2nd tier Pulser sites are all the same.

Chocolate Chip Cookie on the eBay Pulse

Yes, there’s always interesting stuff happening on the eBay Pulse.  Here’s a cookie from eBay seller ID auction-promotion.  This is the seller who won the candy cane auction.

Auction-promotion is not a “script kitten” like the top Pulsers.  Thanks Ray – love the term!  Their eBay watcher acquisition pattern follows natural traffic patterns for the US timezones.  eBay traffic is highest from 6 to 10 pm PT.  The chart is in ET.  But as always with the eBay Pulse, there is definitely something weird going on. 

The listing and me page has multiple links to www.auction-promotion.com which contains the “MakeTrack” trick. In fact, the auction-promotion home page has MakeTrack twice. Overkill – but there’s a typo in the first instance anyway.

You can see the watcher count on almost any eBay item.  Use this link and enter the eBay ID.  http://esellerstreet.com/search.php5?keywords=290196790022

or search by keywords or by category:  http://esellerstreet.com/search.php5?catID=99

The perfect business

My quest for the past 2 1/2 years has been the perfect business. I’m giving myself 6 years to build one. AshBo, a 17 year old, already has one with Whateverlife.com.

What makes a perfect business?

#1. The perfect business makes money when you are sleeping. Money has to be coming in the doors whether you are working that day or not. If you only make money when you work, then it’s a job. Some people mistakenly call this “passive income” but it’s not. It’s a revenue stream from an asset.

Examples of Perfect Business models: Any smart dot com – eBay, PayPal, Whateverlife.com, Flickr, MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, and yes – the eBay Pulsers’ eBook sales.

#2a. Minimal expenses. The business only needs a few servers and a couple of fast, efficient, smart people. No office, no furniture, no waste.

#2b. No inventory costs. Think of the risk when you hold inventory and the cash it ties up. This eliminates the sales of all physical goods. This eliminates Amazon and eBay sales of hard goods from the perfect business list.

#3. Scalable. You can serve thousands to millions of people.

#4. You can quickly respond to market changes. Think: morph the service to the next hot social networking scene.

#5. You can sustain your business even if someone quits. And no employees, just contractors.

To get started, get your domain name from GoDaddy for $6.95. Host your service on a shared server for $4.95 a month at Glowhost.com. Learn some basic HTML and CSS – it’s not that hard. Find someone who knows PHP and MySQL -> like, email me.  I love to help people.

Blog Stats

Here’s the weekly number of hits to this blog.

The week over week growth is promising. The dip is due to Christmas. Statcounter.com is my preferred traffic analysis tool. Here’s a screen shot.

The Statcounter stats on this blog are not perfect because WordPress disables JavaScript. JS is required to capture referring URLs and track visitor paths.

I like subscribing to blogs by email better than RSS. I use Feedburner to manage the email list for my blog. The only negative of Feedburner is they take up to 24 hours to send an email on a new post.

Sign up to receive new posts by “Watched Item Ending Soon” via RSS or email in the upper right hand corner.

FatWallet members rank on Big-Boards.com

A recent comment inspired another one of my researching jaunts when I should be working.

Mermaid said,

I joined fatwallet to see what it was all about… there’s absolutely no incentive to refer others and they aren’t very good at developing a community (no personal pictures). They simply don’t believe in the power of viral marketing. I don’t think I’ll go back.

To the contrary, FatWallet.com ranks up there on the Big-Boards.com forum rankings.

Their forum has 839,000 members (ranked #40) and has 155,000 visitors each day (ranked #5).

Big-Boards.com has a lot of interesing stats – daily unique visitors, posts, members online, and country of origin. They get the stats from their own statcounter scripts. They supply the hit counter code for forum owners to voluntarily use on their site.

I saved $3 this week when I purchased the http://www.WatchedItem.com domain name for $6.99. Someone posted the January GoDaddy.com codes on the FatWallet.com forum.

FatWallet is about saving money. BigCrumbs is about earning money. So which site you use just depends upon your immediate need.

———————————

Hey Vince! Where’s the chocolate chip cookie logo? I sorely miss it.

I sent my money to Azerbaijan

Wow, try to spell Azerbaijan without a dictionary!

I signed up for MicroPlace.com on Jan 1 and chose my debtor. $50 went to Azerbaijan. It was the best choice because:

1. 42% of the money goes to women
2. 3% annual yield – the highest on MicroPlace
3. 100% payback rate

OK. Now that that’s done, I can watch the grass grow for the next 4 years until I collect my $56.27.

Recall my last post on MicroPlace where I scoffed at Prosper.com. “Too many people wanting to consolidate their debt!”, I exclaimed. It’s true, but they have more exciting gambling action. The loan durations are much shorter, there’s more defaults, and you can talk with other lenders about the borrowers.

There’s even people borrowing money to become a bigger Prosper.com lender. A Parlay move! Sweet.

Prosper was down Sunday morning or I would be gaming with the rest of the “Haves” and dishing on the “Have Nots”.

—————–

Note to self and everyone else reading this -> sign up for Prosper.com’s affiliate program.