This week lead-gen and continuity scheme scams hit the big time with influential blogs TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider running major posts on the subject, and Facebook, MySpace, Offerpal and Zynga scrambling to put a good face on it all. And then Dennis Yu confessed to a shady past which upset certain high-earning affiliates no end.

How to Spam Facebook Like a Pro

The TechCrunch article created something of a firestorm (sample comment: “In a nutshell, the offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users.”) which was fanned the next day by one of our favorite affiliate marketing bloggers, Dennis Yu of Blitz-Local. He guest posted a piece on TechCrunch called “How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession” in which he talked about publishers accessing personal user data and showing it on landing pages, cloaking pages so that Facebook employees couldn’t see them and being threatened with violence by the CEO of a top 25 ad network. Key graf:

There was no way that Facebook—and definitely not the Federal Trade Commission—could keep up with the “innovation” happening. Witness the virtual currency scam, where users complete the offers mentioned above to earn points in a game. It doesn’t take a genius to know that the quality of such leads is garbage—these users are filling out forms just to get the points.

Dennis admits he posted on TechCrunch to hustle for business, and he was inviting a negative reception from certain sections of the affiliate marketing community. Another of our blog-faves, Barman, made his feelings known with enthusiasm at ppc.bz.

New and existing customers alike, please check out this release. You will be glad you did.

Continuing our march towards the most complete business automation software for SMB’s in the licensing and digital goods market, we’re pleased to announce the release of SPBAS v1.2. This is the culmination of over two months work, and we hope that you will all enjoy and appreciate the changes.

Two of the main highlights for this release are the beginning of our tax support and also a fully featured promotions module. We feel our promotions module is particularly impressive, giving you numerous options to create varied and exciting promotions (coupons) for your users. As well as fixed value discounts in multiple currencies, along with the ability to define “percentage off” promotions, the promotions module used in conjunction with our pricing sheet system allows you fine grained control over the price of individual products - you really do need to try this feature out yourself to see its power and flexibility.
Along with the new features, we’ve also had some very useful feedback on the SPBAS User Interface, and so v1.2 includes an updated navigation structure along with a new skin. Along with this, we’ve also started to make available lots of information and summaries at your fingertips, with the new per-module dashboards to help you understand and see what is going on with your business. We hope you find these changes improve your SPBAS experience.

SPBAS Promotion - 25% off with coupon code NewRelease

To celebrate the new v1.2 release and promotions feature, we felt this would be a great time to run our own promotion on SPBAS licenses. All SPBAS licenses (SPBAS 1000, SPBAS 2500 & SPBAS 5000) will be discounted by 25% from now until Monday 16 November 2009. To take advantage of the promotion, enter coupon ‘NewRelease‘ during checkout - this makes the cheapest SPBAS license only $149!

A fully supported product with great features including Paypal support; Google checkout; multi-currency support; a complete licensing, invoicing and product management system; along with new features like our knowledgebase, CMS, and promotions system; makes SPBAS the ideal solution.

Click Here to visit SPBAS

Today I have received numerous emails form merchants on the Pepperjam network informing me that they are moving over to Linkshare.

Heres a copy of the email:

This may come to surprise to a lot of affiliates but upon reading Pepperjams Blog I discovered that PepperJam has been acquired by GSI Commerce. You can read about it here

If you are an affiliate of Pepperjam I advise you to check your links that are running and make sure you update your links in order to get commission.

Like most affiliates, I am not looking forward to this change. I am not a fan of Linkshares tracking system because of poor performance and low conversions. When running the same campaign and landing page with different networks I have better conversion results. But that is a different topic for another day.

There are a few contenders for licensing/distribution software available online. The top two are SPBAS (also known as SolidPHP and PHPAudit) and PHPLicengine.

SPBAS by SolidPHP - they have discontinued PHPAudit and Iono. After reviewing both products we ended up choosing SPBAS. It seemed to offer more features and have a larger support and community behind it.	PHPLicengine - I’m not familiar with this one, but we downloaded the demo and tried it out. Great for those we cannot afford SPBAS and are looking for someone simple.
Rating:	Rating:

These licensing/distribution systems usually use a couple of methods:

1.) A local key - Your clients are given a key file which they have to upload to their server. The key expires after a set time and they then have to upload another key. You can automate this and have your script fetch the key automatically and store it in the db. Clients will quickly get fed up with having to upload a license key file every month etc.

2.) A remote “call home” every so often. You’ll need to code it so that if your site is off line then your script still works, and also if you move servers or change domains etc you don’t want you clients’ sites to stop working.

Comparison

Comparison of PHPAudit, iono and PHPLicengine.

Note: PHPAudit and iono are now combined and called SPBAS

	PHPLicengine |	iono |	PHPAudit
Remote Licensing
Local Licensing
ionCube Licensing
Custom Key / Value Pairs
Dynamic Key / Value Pairs
Shopping Cart
Invoice Management
Order Management
Download Management
Client Management
Customizable Templates
Language Files
Email Templates
Kayako / eSupport
Cerberus HelpDesk v4.
Cerberus HelpDesk v3.
SupportTrio
Custom HelpDesk Integration
SMF Forums
phpBB Forums
MyBB Forums
Custom Forum Integration
minFraud
TeleSign
MaxMind Phone
API
Jrox Affiliate
iDev Affiliate
Testimonial Manager
News Manager
Google Analytics

Pricing

SPBAS

Order now to save $50 on SPBAS 1000 & 2500 and $100 on SPBAS 5000.

PHPLicengine

If you have a website and want to promote it then sign up BidVertiser today and get $20 in free advertising. This is just another way of getting your website name out there and driving sales/leads to your website. Become an advertiser with BidVertiser today.

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If you want to make money you can monetize your website or blog with BidVertiser with their web publisher program.

Web Publishers

Make money from your Website or Blog - get paid for every click!
Join BidVertiser now and we will turn your advertising space into cash!

Simply display the BidVertiser text ads on your website and let advertisers bid against each other!

We will always display the highest bidders to maximize your revenue so you will make more money!

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New Locations

Are you sick and tired of getting your websites spammed? Now you can finally cash in on all those spammers. This process is easy and the results can be rewarding.

*This method is in the gray zone and is not for everyone.

How this all happened

I had a forum running on a site of mine and for months it was getting so much spam that one day I decided to check the stats and was shocked to see how much traffic it was getting. I was receiving a lot of back links from other spammed blogs, sites, and forums. After thinking for awhile about restarting the forum and deleting everything I decided to just capitalize on all the traffic.

How it Works?

After awhile your site gets marked by spammers as an easy target, thus more spammers target you and try to spam your websites. Over time your forum/website/blog is so full of spam it useless and hard to recover. Not anymore, all you have to do is create a simple two page website that has an article that relates to your domain and the rest filled with ads. Then just sit back and watch all the spam traffic turn into profit!

Here is a screen shot of my adsense account for one day. (Below)

Do the math: $13 x 365 (Days in a Year) = $4,745 Year

A few tips before we start:

- Make sure you already have a website getting spammed heavily. This works best if you have a forum that you “left” and haven’t taken care of and is full of spam posts.

- An account with Adsense, Adbrite, or any other PPC network.

- About 30 minutes to create another quick site full of PPC ads.

What to do

Create a new site with two pages. The two pages are simple to make. First create a homepage for your website, then create a “404 page not found” and make sure you fill it with ads. I suggest using Wordpress and creating a blog and filling it with articles. That way you can easily configure your “404 Page not found”.

NOTE: Make sure you configure your server 404 page to point to your 404 page you created or you will be missing out on a lot of money.

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It is hard for new affiliates to get a proper start in affiliate marketing without being bombarded with numerous crap offers. When most new affiliates decide to join the industry they do what every other person does that is starting a new job, they research and try to learn as much as possible. This is where is becomes difficult to separate the crap from truth.

Why New Affiliates Fail

New affiliates fail because they are buying into something existing that worked for someone else. I still get offers for ebooks, software, free seminars, ect. on how I could make $1,000,000 just like Mr. $$$ did. They might even show you pictures of their house, boat, car, or whatever to show you that they are rich because they did this. The problem is that whatever that may be, it probably doesn’t work anymore and if it did, so many people are doing it right now that you are not going to make squat compared to the time and effort you put in.

Another reason affiliates fail is because they get scammed into paying for something that is already free or that they shouldn’t have to pay for. Read my story about Dan who was new to affiliate marketing and almost lost $250 he would have to pay to join an affiliate program. No affiliate program should ever charge you to join their network or to advertise their product.

To learn more about common mistakes new affiliates make, I suggest you read my article Top 10 New Affiliate Mistakes.

You can also search Unmastered Affiliate for more great tips and resources on becoming an affiliate marketer.