While I’ve already begun to set up my e-commerce website (not even close to being complete, BTW) using OSCommerce, I’m still not 100% convinced that I’ve made the right decision. One of my ecommerce mentors Dave Pitlyuk (he doesn’t even know it yet) has suggested that I use ZenCart instead, but that has made the indecision even worse here. With that in mind, I continue looking for quality ecommerce shopping cart solutions while SLOWLY building the framework of my shopping site.

Introducing E-Junkie “Fat-Free” Shopping Cart

I don’t actually know much about E-Junkie other than what I’ve seen on their site and a few other resources, but their technology looks very promising. Essentially, you can add their shopping cart to any site, including blogs, myspace, etc. Their service provides a pop-up-like cart that is not really a pop-up, which integrates with Paypal and Google checkout. It looks like it is really easy to use and it could make setting up an ecommerce site quite simple. In fact, it seems like it only takes minutes to get things up and running, and to be honest, I am quite tempted to really try it out.

The problem for me is, however, that I haven’t heard very much about the company. In addition, I cannot find any real contact information on the website. Seems like a company offering this kind of service would go out of their way to publicize a phone number or real address. I guess I’d like to see a few more websites using their shopping cart solution.

If anyone out there knows anything about E-Junkie, please let me know. I’ll add any resources regarding the company to this page in an effort to inform other out there who are curious. Here are a few that I’ve been able to scrounge up:

E-Junkie Articles and Reviews

• Weekly Site Review – E-junkie
• E-junkie is addictive
• Review: E-junkie is an Addicting Storefront Solution
• E-JUNKIE Shopping Cart… sharp product, sharp price
• Another Plug for e-junkie (More on E-Junkie from a regular user)

E-Junkie in Action: Some sites Using the Cart

• MUVAudio.com
• TheoWorlds
• Bingo Card Creator

Again, please let me know if you have anything to say about this company, good or bad. Thanks!

It is hard to go very far without running into a site with entries in Darren Rowse’s latest group writing project; it was a huge hit with close to 900 entries. While it is great that people are linking to one another from this thing, it seems that many involved in the project are simply linking to the entire list of submissions. While I did participate (on another blog) and don’t ever mind new backlinks, I’m a bit disappointed that people haven’t really broken this thing down a bit.

Why link to every post? While many were good, there were some really bad posts in that batch. Do you really want to link to (and give your support to) blogs that don’t make the cut? I went through the entire list a few times to pull out posts that I thought would be interesting or helpful for the readers of this blog.

Here are a few that I felt were actually useful and worth a read (yes, I actually read every internet related post on the list!):

AdSense
• Top 5 AdSense Boo-Boos
  Blogging

• Top Five Ways Blog Carnivals Make Blogging Better
• Top 5 Tips to be the next Darren Rowse
• Top 5 Methods to Increase Comments on Your Blog
• Top 5 tips for beating blogger’s block
• Top 5 Best and Youngest Bloggers
• Top 5 Tips for a Successful Link Train
• 5 Things You Should do Before Launching Your Own Blog
• 5 Tips to Break Free From The Blogger’s Bubble
  Blogging Tools

• Top Five Little Known Wordpress Plugins
• Top 5 Must-Have Blog Monitoring Tools
• Top 5 WordPress Plugins That Help Increase Comments
• Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use
• Top 5 OS X Dashboard Widgets for Bloggers
  SEO

• The Top 5 Free Search Engine Optimization Tools
• Top 5 Top Blog Posts in SEO
  Assorted

• Top Five Challenges Newbies Face Online
• Five Ways to Grow Your StumbleUpon Network: An Ode to Altruistic Stumbling
• Five Tips for Running a Successful Online Giveaway

What I thought was most impressive was that many of these great posts were written by fairly unknown bloggers. This is another sign that there will always be great new talents emerging in the blogging world and you must keep exploring to find them!

I make it a habit to support my fellow bloggers through both socializing their posts and visiting their advertisers when appropriate. Make sure you do the same! While linking is great, these things are just as important!

Finally, I’d like to mention that many of the blogs I went through were still using Blogger or some other hosted blog solution, and many others were making some of the most basic blogging mistakes. If you haven’t already, read the The Top 77 Mistakes New Bloggers Make so you’re not out there making some of these yourself!

We’ve all seen them . . . new blogs with ads at every turn, with nothing to say other then “I make money online” and “I blog about my blog.” Typically, when I come across a site like this I leave and do not return. I realize that these sites offer nothing useful to me or anyone else . . . The sad fact is that thanks to different gimmicks out there, sites like these seem to becoming more and more popular every day.

You can’t really go through more than a handful of blogs these days without reading about making money online using Adsense, Chitika, BlogAds, AuctionAds, Text Link Ads, etc. The purpose of these sites is to push affiliate programs and ad networks without offering anything concrete to anyone except how they are becoming more popular by doing nothing. It seems like we’re in some kind of vicious cycle now:

The Vicious Cycle Started by Bloggers who Blog About Nothing But How to Make Money Online

1. Person sees that others are “making money online” with their blog (most fail to provide any proof and likely don’t make any money at all)
2. Person wants to make money with a blog of their own
3. Person sets up blog and claims to be a “money making” blogger
4. Person monetizes their blog as soon as possible, throwing up as many ads as possible
5. Person starts joining every blog train, meme, link exchange, favorite exchange, etc. to start building up their Technorati ranking, PR, feed subscribers, etc.
6. Person starts to blog about the same crap as every other blog about making money online (typically nothing . . . many of these sites just blog about the ads that they just put on their site and then just fill their site with all the crap mentioned in #5)
7. Person sees their site begin to become “popular” and starts to tell all their friends about their “success”. They then encourage their friends to start blogging. Amazed by how easy it sounds, these friends go to #1.

   Note: The site has actually not become popular at all. It is just another site that other sites have used to grow their own useless sites through blogging gimmicks. All the people who have added it as a favorite, as a subscribed feed, or as any other kind of “friend” fail to come back because the site really has nothing to offer, just like their own sites. A network of useless “popular” blogs begin to climb the charts with nothing to contribute to anything but their own existence.

8. Person realizes that they have nothing to offer the world other than a bunch of crap that has been repeated a thousand times before, yet continue to offer that crap because they are now actually making a few bucks a month.
9. Person begins to be seen as an authority by other newbies and actually begins to get real traction, despite having nothing to offer but the popularity of their site that has nothing to offer.
10. Sadly, eventually that person really begins to believe their own hype. Many times, this person still knows nothing about anything, yet offers their advice to others who are too green to know any better.
11. Bad advice follows bad advice and the internet becomes overwhealmed by people following the one guy with nothing to offer but a bunch of bad advice.
12. People who actually do have something to offer others, for some reason, start to follow the path set by these know nothing “authorities” and make their advice even more popular.
13. The entire internet goes down in flames as 1 billion people around the world are all doing the same thing trying to make money by doing nothing but blogging about blogging about making money online by saying a whole lot of nothing!

Pretty Scary, huh?!?

I was approached this afternoon by someone who was interested in promoting their real estate-related program to my site’s users. This advertiser wanted me to promote an online webinar and was willing to give me a commission for any sale made from people who went through the seminar and purchased their service. While the commission was fairly good, we felt that the odds of someone actually going through their entire webinar and then purchasing their product were not phenominal.

Choosing Between a Guaranteed Return and a Potential Greater One

We considered proposing a PPL (pay per lead) model to them, but felt that by doing so we were providing this company with tons of free branding for little in return. As a result, we decided that we would only work with them as pure advertises. They were welcome to advertise their program on our site, but would have to pay our full rates. If they generated any sales or leads, that depended on the users of our site.

What would you have done?

Do you go with the guaranteed advertising buy or do you provide free branding for someone on the remote chance that someone will go through all the steps (sign-up, webinar, sale) and buy their product?

In the best case scenario, we’d be able to charge for advertising and also get an affiliate payment per sale, but that isn’t ever going to happen. I tried to negotiate a few deals like that years ago and was simply laughed at. Was worth a shot, though!

Every heard of affiliate link cloaking? It is basically the practice of hiding affiliate links so your users don’t bypass them, and deprive you of a commission. Some people will argue that affiliate link cloaking is deceptive or unethical, but I’m still unconvinced either way. I thought it would be useful to dedicate a post to the subject and I hope you all find this to be helpful!

How to Hide Affiliate Links

There are now free services out there that do all the work for you, like AddMe’s Link Cloaker (which happens to be broken) or this one, and there are plenty of other guides and tutorials to help you hide your links. Last week, even the famous infamous John Chow gave a primer on hiding affiliate links. Another good post, called Cloaking and Ranking Your Affiliate Links can be found over at the Earner’s Blog. This post discusses one technique in particular that you can use to hide those affiliate links you’ve got on your website.

Is link cloaking ethical?

Should we tell everyone which links on our sites are affiliate links? I believe that most internet users aren’t very aware of affiliate linking, and probably wouldn’t care much either way. I look at affiliate links like parked domains. The majority of internet users don’t know what domain parking is and likely could care less, but will go to a parked site and click on a link regardless. I think the only way this will stop is if either the government or a major player like Google begins to clamp down on the practice.

More on Link Cloaking

• Dave Taylor writes a good discussion of link cloaking in his post Should I Cloak External Site Links? It covers a few different viewpoints on the issue and is a must read for anyone considering doing a bt of cloaking.
• Another good piece comes from Search Engine Land, and is titled Good Cloaking, Evil Cloaking & Detection. This article talks about different types of cloaking, and discusses which, if any are good and/or evil.
• Andrew Girdwood wrote a rant on cloaking, arguing that it is a sneaky and deceptive practice.

  What do you think?

  If you know of any other cool tools or posts on the subject, please share them with us!

I recently read a webmaster forum post from a guy whose friends keep asking him to teach them how to make money online. There are a few approaches to take in this situation:

Three Approaches to Dealing With a Friend Who Wants Free Advice on Making Money Online

1. Tell him to piss off and figure it out himself
2. Be a good friend and actually help him out
3. Scare him off by telling him how hard it is

The Fourth and Only Approach to Take In This Situation: Create a Partnership

While I’d typically reccommend the second approach listed above, there is actually a better route to take here. Instead of just giving away all the pearls of wisdom that you spent your hard time learning, do like they do in 24 . . . cut a deal!

How To Create An Online Partnership

1. Convince your friend of your know-how and let them know that you can relpicate your previous successes
2. Let them know that while you’d love to just give them all the knowledge you’ve gained, it would be easier if you partnered up
3. Cut a deal. In exchange for you helping them create a successful online money-making website, you absolutely deserve a cut. It is up to you to negotiate your share based on your ongoing participation in the site, the work you put in to get them started, etc. For example, I’ve partnered with a friend on a blog site, where I am responsible for the setup of the site, maintenance, monetization, and publicity; he is responsible for content. We have come to a 50/50 arangement.
4. Put everything in writing. Working with friends can lead to problems if expectations are not clear. In creating a contract for this partnership, consider the following questions (this is by no means comprehensive):
   • What will each partner’s role be in the day to day care of the website? (consider little things like who wants to be woken up at 3 AM if the is a problem with the site)

   • Do you want to create a company, which will own the site, or will it be in your names
   • Who will be the registrant of record?
   • Who will finance the site’s startup costs?
   • How will expenses be covered?
   • How will any income/profits be split?
   • If sold, how will the proceeds be split?
5. Once you’ve got everything in writing, be sure there is absolutely no debate over any of the expectations.
6. Sign your partnership agreement and start making money!

If the online business is a success, you will both benefit. If the partnered site(s) is(are) better then any of your personal sites, then you won’t be kicking yourself in a jealous rage . . . you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank!

9 Steps To Successfully Market to a Forum Community
In a previous post The Direct and Indirect Approaches to Forum Marketing we talked about the two approaches to forum marketing. I’d like to share the 9 steps you will want to follow to forum marketing success; this is basically a primer on indirect forum marketing (the only approach I fully endorse).

1. Find a forum in the niche you want to market to
2. Check to be sure the site allows you to create a forum signature with a link to your business
3. Set up an account
4. Create a forum signature that includes the following information: your name, website/business name, web address, contact info (if any), description of the website/business (DO NOT USE A SALES PITCH – e.g. The Best Car Parts Shop Around – that stuff is useless). Be descriptive!
5. Find the forum introductions section (most good forums will have one) and tell people about yourself. Talk about your business, but don’t just drop a sales pitch. Let people know what your interests are in the topic beyond your business.
6. PARTICIPATE! Become an active member of the forums. Help others on the site. Get involved in the debate. POST, POST, POST! In time, the members will see you as an expert in the topic. With more posts, your site/business will have more exposure, and you will see results.
7. If the forum has an area for members to advertise in, use it. (if not, don’t post ads on the site; just use your forum signature and your knowledge to do the selling for you)
8. Volunteer to become a moderator on the site (forum administrators will often be willing to trade advertising for good moderators). In addition to the opportunity of getting more exposure, moderators are typically given more respect and looked at with even more authority then other members. With this comes more clicks and more business!
9. Find other forums in the same area of interest and repeat steps 1-8.

Not only have I used these techniques, but I see others use them every day on my site! It is a proven formula. Give it a try and I know you won’t be disappointed!