SE Conspiracy

From time to time, I test various methods of driving traffic to my site as a jump start.

In this case, I wanted to promote my forum, “Get Paid Hwy” (visit site) to the GPT or “Get Paid To…” community. Since Bux.to has an 887 alexa rank and touts incredible traffic related to “Paid to Click” traffic, I figured this would be very relevant traffic.

So, as always, I began by doing some research online. Despite a few posts in forums that bux.to didn’t pay them, there was little feedback. In most cases, they eventually reported being paid. However, from the advertising side, there was little to nothing to be found. I would be basically shooting in the dark on this one.

Although, I never advertise anything without setting up tracking and testing in various ways to make sure my purchase was worthwhile. That way, I know whether or not to use them again. In this case, I was using AWStats to verify the hits and referrer. I had two webmaster friends outside of the United States to help me verify that my ad was showing to members inside their system.

I bought two packages to test:

• 10,000 premium members (members who upgraded) at $179 and
• 2,500 regular members at $46.75

Here’s the screenshot of payment from my paypal account:

I started the 10,000 premium member campaign on the 28th, and that seemed to go fairly well. The visitors were coming in and showed in AWStats and in my forum stats. However, not one single sign-up out of 1,300+ visitors does seem odd. We had four(4) sign-ups, but the one I asked said she found us through “Free Ad Planet.” Since we have a very high conversion rate on sign-ups, I was a little suspicious but figured I would give the benefit of the doubt.

I figured not all of their members would read English but maybe I could get a boost by buying the 2,500 regular member option. So, I did that.

At first, I was shocked that my server began to crash shortly after my ad was approved. “Ok,” I thought, “they definitely do send some massive traffic …and quickly.” So, I quickly moved to shut down unnecessary services and sites on that server to dedicate more resources to the forum. That seemed to help, but the site was still slow because Apache was showing 250 simultaneous requests and more coming in constantly.

At any rate, once I got things under control, I asked my webmaster friend in Hungary to go ahead and log in to bux.to and go to “Surf Ads” to see if my ad was showing for him. As always, I asked him to make sure he cleared his cookies, cleared his cache, and opened a new browser. I nearly flipped when he told me the bux.to site wouldn’t come up for him. And, I nearly flipped again when he said another tab opened with “http://www.get-paid-hwy.com” in it. What’s odd about that was that I never told this webmaster friend which of my sites I was promoting. He sent me the following screenshot:

It’s kind of tough to see in that view, so here’s a zoomed in shot:

Whenever I went to the site, I would get the site without any popup. I asked my other webmaster friend in Peru to visit the site and he did not see any popup but said the site was VERY slow.

The bux.to site was very fast for me. So, it would seem that we were hitting two different servers, perhaps. That is just speculation but it would explain why foreigners were getting timeouts or extreme delays in loading while I could load the site instantly.

It would make sense then that they were driving massive amounts of traffic to their site to boost their Alexa and traffic ranking and then opening up pop-ups for certain foreign (probably Eastern Bloc and Asian) countries who could not even know what they were looking at anyway. That way, bux.to got the credit for the traffic while we got visitors in our log but whom we could never convert. Nice.

So, you can bet I will be demanding a refund immediately. Why?

Well, here’s what is going on:

1. Whenever you make a purchase for regular members, they purchase a ton of foreign traffic ultra-cheap
2. They pour that traffic into their site (hoping some will join) to boost their traffic stats
3. They redirect a pop-up that opens up the purchaser’s site
4. Since the poor sap who bought the traffic is most likely in a country not seeing the pop-up, they would never be the wiser and they will see all the hits and simply wonder why no one joined or signed up

So, my advice is to stay away from Bux.to for buying traffic. In fact, this is most likely the type of scam being run by most of the “buy traffic” websites. So, the moral is definitely: “Buyer Beware!”

I knew a guy who bought a “go-phone” and some people use those phones to talk to creditors because they can be thrown away as needed. So, anyway, this guy used to get all kinds of bill collector’s calling him for information regarding past due invoices.Now, let me ask you. If you have someone else call any creditor who holds your personal information, how difficult is it to get information out of them? How much proof do you need before they discuss your details? Yeah, it takes a lot. It takes a full name, a social security number, an account number, and more.

Now, this blew my mind too. This guy was so sick of getting these calls that he decided to toy with a couple of the creditors before getting a new number. All in all, out of three different creditors, he was able to get the person’s full name, social security number, telephone account number, previous home telephone number, gas bill account number, home address, previous address, date of birth, county of birth, and a few other details. You wouldn’t believe. Those pieces of information he obtained without proving who he was and by simply ASKING for the information.

Now, if you’ve ever been late on a bill… you can rest assured that your personal information could end up in the hands of just about anyone.

So, yeah… you gotta love the system.

This is by no means a revolutionary idea, but I’ve been wanting to turn my “get paid forum” -known as “Get Paid Hwy”- into a revenue sharing forum for quite a while. It’s perfect for doing so, because the community is the fastest growing on the Net within its niche and they are all looking to make money. So, what better way than to earn money while sharing ideas?

Finally, after more than a year of wanting to do this, I have finished integrating this feature into “Get Paid Hwy” (visit site) and will be splitting revenue from the forum with the helpful members there. This is one easy and quick way to earn from just being helpful in your spare time. So, I am glad to see it finally up-and-running in this way.

In short, Google Ads and Yahoo Ads are now being shown on the site pages. Anyone who joins is asked to input their Google or Yahoo publisher ID -which will then be shown on threads they started and a percentage of threads to which they last replied.

To learn more about participating or joining as a Google/Yahoo publisher, visit the explanation page (visit AdSense explanation page).

I will update periodically on my success in this venture, so that you may make an informed decision on whether starting your own forum might be something to consider.

After receiving spam complaints and lawsuit threats at regular intervals for over a year and after many arduous hours of research, I finally found some methods to help combat what has become known as a “JoeJob” spam attack.

If you are the victim of a “Joe Job Spam Attack”, let me save you some time and tell you how to configure a few items to help thwart the spammers:

I sure hope this helps you and me. I just configured this tonight, but from what I’ve read in my research, I am very hopeful. I guess we will see once the spammer launch their next attack. Or, if it works really well, the spammers will have a hell of a headache on their hands when they are discovered and I guess I won’t know after all. Lol.

Today, just like every month, I got an email from one of my vendors for dedicated server service. The reason that irks me is that I cancelled my services with this vendor on the 8th of this month (two weeks ago).

You see, I have had enough experience in my life to know that companies seem to ignore cancellations and ALMOST ALWAYS keep on billing me (don’t get me started about Globat.com Web Hosting!!). In this case, I called to confirm my cancellation and get a confirmation number (imperative that you always get a confirmation number!). However, I was told that there were no confirmation numbers and that the billing would cease and the account was cancelled. Although that was not good enough for me, they insisted there was no way to track cancellations.

Odd. Very odd.

At any rate, I decided to immediately log in and put a fake credit card on file -just in case. As it turns out, it was a good move on my part. Today’s email was stating that the billing failed and they want me to pay the amount due immediately.

Yeah, right.

I called up there and was told that *I* made the mistake of cancelling my extra services and did not cancel my servers themselves. “Hmm”, I thought. Istdontthinkso.

Let’s suppose that somehow I “thought” I checked off the box to cancel the services AND missed the one for the server itself and it was my mistake. Why then did the invoice today have the FULL balance including the extra services? I thought those were cancelled? Hmm.

I have -once again- gone through the trouble of cancelling, but I was told -once again- that there are no confirmation numbers and no way for me to prove that I cancelled. The only consolation I got was that the person helping me said that he would make notes of all I had explained to him about my situation. I hope that’s enough.

At least they cannot bill my credit card anymore.

This is not the first time and has happened on many occasions with many companies (I’ve done business with a lot of places). They always claim that it is either my fault or “they didn’t know.” Is it truly ignorance or is it subterfuge? I truly feel “defrauded” every time this happens.

I am beginning to believe that this is how big business is done.

Although I can be very diplomatic and cordial on behalf of my clients in their problems, I tend to take spammers and hackers personally –especially when they are costing me money.

Here’s the transcript of my incident with ThePlanet today. They ended up wasting hours of my time today because of some stupid spammer (see related story). Maybe someone will get a kick out of this.

*** Names have been changed to protect the innocent ***

Update: I got a response from them (12.19.2007)

Update: Having this issue?

Read how to combat a Joe Job Spam Attack.

After that support incident chain; the spam bounces have stopped coming in. If this were spam originating from my server, it would not stop without some sort of intervention.

In any case, here’s a couple of things to note:

• Professional services they recommend are $150/hour
• ThePlanet is not as bad as this incident might make them seem

Generally speaking, I have been VERY pleased with the support from ThePlanet. They are quick to respond and very knowledgeable. In many cases, they work quickly and give detailed explanations of how they fixed things. It’s just these cases of “abuse” where the support seems to break down. To their defense, these spammers are very good at what they do, and it is understandable how -at first glance- these emails can point to my server being the culprit. However, I have a repeated history of proving my points and my opinions should carry a little more weight. That department is really quick to point a finger and let you resolve it. They should spend more time investigating before they jump the gun. That’s all.

p.s. At least they are WORLDS BEYOND Hostgator -where I originally started hosting all of my sites. Man, don’t get me started. I think that might have been some of the worst couple of years of my life, and I’ll spare you the miles of support tickets from them. Something like:

Me - “All of my sites are down!!”

Hostgator (2 hours later) - “Who are you? What is your account?”

Me - “Oh my God! My account number is in the original ticket”

Hostgator (6 hours later) - “Ok. I can reboot your server, but I need your password to verify your account”

That’s only a “slight” exaggeration of the kinds of support they gave me! I just don’t want to sift through my old emails to get the wording right. That’s basically how it went. Whew. I’m glad those days are over! lol.

Well, I have ended up mostly wasting away another day because of spammers. Once every month or two, I have to spend a couple of days dealing with spammers or hackers. I’ve had to deal with them for so many years, that I’ve become efficient at it. However, the anger I feel towards these “faceless” persons and the money I lose grows each time I have to deal with them.

Today, I was dealing with someone (indirectly) who has been spamming millions of emails with various lewd offers and they spoofed (i.e. faked) that it came from one of my domains (bitcorp.net). However, I purposely disabled email (and routed the MX record to a non-existant domain) just to ensure that spamming off of that domain would never be possible. The domain itself is merely a placeholder with a static HTML page -no scripts and no formmail available. There is virtually no way to spam from that account.

Every couple of months, this particular spammer collects all of the servers his script has hacked and will send out a blast containing millions upon millions of email addresses. Naturally, all of the bounce messages, complaints, and legal threats come directly to me –since it appears that my domain sent them. How nice of the spammer, eh?

It is usually only a minor inconvenience because I’ve gotten good at keeping server load low by ignoring the bounces and I have been quick to prove that the emails were spoofed by showing that the IP address from which they originated was not my server.

Well, spammers aren’t stupid. They’re just like you and me and the professionals have a lot of experience, knowledge, and powerful tools at their disposal. Typically, these kind of spam rings are run by mafia-like organizations that have a lot of money –generated by the crap they peddle. This spammer has evolved his script a bit and now spoofs even the correct IP address in many of his emails. So, today, I had to spend 3 hours to do a tracelog and backtrack exactly where the email came from. It took me all that time just to prove I was innocent. Oh well, I guess it’s old hat by now. I’m used to proving my innocence (see my bio).

At any rate, this cost me a lot of time and money. I really despise these people and would love to get my hands on any one of them -even if only for a few minutes. It’s all I would need to make them think twice about sending more spam. I suppose the irony of the situation is that their profession is a constant battle and wrought with just as many headaches in their never-ending struggle to hack more servers to send their junk as it is for people like me to block it.

Anyway, the moral of the story -especially for beginners in online businesses- is to find a reputable hosting company and get a shared account or get a dedicated server that is managed, if you have the money. That way, you won’t have to deal with the headaches I have to deal with. If only I had the income I used to have, I would upgrade my servers to fully managed servers over at RackSpace (see review) instead of the lower-price but self-managed servers at ThePlanet (see review).

Google must be in the holiday spirit, because they actually gave me some good news for once.

They have removed my forum, Get Paid Hwy, (visit site) from being disabled for serving adsense ads. Hooray. Surprisingly, I just took a minute to read through their policies and noticed that they disabled that domain more than a year ago because of an obscure policy.

I corrected the issue (i.e. removed a little content) and sent an email asking to have the domain ad serving re-enabled. Two days later, they agreed. Wow!

That’s really good news for members of my little community because I have finally been able to turn the forum into an Ad-Revenue Sharing forum. That way, helpful active members will be rewarded financially -directly into their bank accounts!- for their efforts in helping others learn how to make money online. That’s something I’ve wanted to offer for a long time, and I thought it wouldn’t be possible. But, Google has made my day today and now I can move forward and help a lot of people make even more money from my forum. Hoorah!

I will write a little bit today after all. We just checked the stats for Zakioo.com, our new online video game store, and even though it has not yet been launched; we are seeing more than 20 visitors per day from Google and a growing trickle from Yahoo and MSN.

This is a good sign. The META tags and content are doing their job -that’s with no backlinks (except from whois.sc -given automatically to every registered website) and no marketing. That’s not bad. We should launch in a few days and finally monetize that incoming traffic. Then, we’ll update on the success of that versus the affiliate traffic (probably a 1-month delay in reporting).

No new theories today and no time to check the latest search engine news.

I’ve been under-the-gun to get a problem resolved with the supplier of video games for our new online video game store, Zakioo.com (visit site). We cannot launch the store until that’s done, so it’s been a crazy, hectic day between that, a proposal I finished, and some web design work I’m working on.

For that store, though, I should mention that we are using affiliates alone to promote the store. That, plus the comprehensive selection and text should drive decent amounts of buying traffic. I will update here with results as they come in. We already launched one store in Hungary as a BETA test and it is working great -i.e. ten (10) sales per day average after only two (2) months operational. That’s pretty darn good with no other outside marketing efforts –content and affiliates only.

Alas, tomorrow is another day.