Does Reading Blogs Cause Blindness?

I apologize in advance for the linkbait title. Now that you are here though, fine reader, I need your help. Since the start of this blog I have always had a reverse-type theme. This means a light font on a dark background. I chose this look because I wanted to stand out from all the other make money online blogs that all looked like copies of each other (black font on white background, typically blue header and theme).

Recently though, I was reading Ca$hvertising, an excellent book on marketing by Drew Eric Whitman (check it out if you haven’t already), and in one section he goes off about the evils of reverse-type fonts and how they are much harder to read and cause more eye strain on people. I know this blog isn’t an advertisement, but now that a few of you are actually reading this blog on a regular basis I thought I would leave it up to you.

So here’s a little poll… The future of Inside Affiliate’s theme is in your hands.

[poll id=”2″]

Dealing With FTC Rules For Bloggers

Since it is December and the new FTC rules for bloggers have taken effect, I have been looking for the easiest way to make everything compliant.  I know that it’s probably a long shot that the FTC would ever take an interest in my blog, but better safe than sorry, since I found a pretty easy way to do it.  Of course you could write your own custom disclosure like Shoemoney does, but who wants to take the 15 minutes to write it…CMP.lyThat’s where CMP.ly comes in.  They have created a simple way to add the proper disclosure to your page, similar to the URL shorteners that you know and love.  CMP.ly is totally free, and there are 5 levels of their standard disclosure, as well as a custom one that you can create if you want to sign up for an account and take the time to do it.  For most people though, the standard ones will work fine.  They are:

  • CMP.ly/0 – No Connection, Unpaid, My Own Opinions (Legit post)
  • CMP.ly/1 – Based Upon a Review Copy (Review copies plz?)
  • CMP.ly/2 – Given a Sample (Sample of what?)
  • CMP.ly/3 – Paid Post (Zac Johnson’s favorite)
  • CMP.ly/4 – Employee/Shareholder/Business Relationship (Matt Cutts’ favorite)
  • CMP.ly/5 – Affiliate Marketing Links (My favorite)

So it might not be the sexiest thing to spend an hour doing, adding these links to all your blog posts.  But it’s not that much work and it’s definitely not worth it to get busted by the FTC in case some young buck in the department is trying to make a name for himself by taking down the evil affiliate bloggers that are polluting the online world for all the rest of us. (/sarcasm)

SiteSnatcher Has Landed

If there’s one thing that Internet and Affiliate Marketers can’t get enough of, it is tools & shortcuts.  Every process that can be automated gives us more time to focus on being creative and the next big idea.  A good friend of mine launched his own set of tools this week, and it is called SiteSnatcher.  I immediately signed up and gave it a test run, so I thought I would share my first impressions.

The first tool I tried was the Blog Commentor.  When you are trying to get a new site indexed and get some link juice to it, one of the easiest ways to do that is to comment on related blogs using your URL to link back to your site.  The Blog Commentor will take any keyword that you choose, such as “golf”, and come up with a bunch of direct links to the posts that you can comment on.  It also has a built in iFrame so that you can just load the blog inside of SiteSnatcher, submit your comment, then hit “Next” and it loads the next blog into the window.  This makes the blog commenting process a breeze, you can knock out 100 comments in short order.

Next I tried out the Site Targeting Tool.  This is designed for PPC guys that are looking for specific sites to target for the Content Network in their niche.  One of the best ways to make the Content Network profitable is to site target instead of just letting Google do it for you.  This can be a tedious process of searching for sites in your niche that are running AdSense so that you can target them.  This tool does it all for you.  Simply put in your keyword, hit go, and it will grab anywhere from several hundred to 1,000 sites in your niche that AdSense on the page.  This can also work as a URL scraper for finding sites to target with PPV.

One thing I will mention is that you need to wait a little bit for the results to come in.  These tools are doing real-time scrapes of lots of data, so when you hit go it can take anywhere from 10-15 minutes to see the full results.  It is all designed to run in the background, so you can set a couple different tools to run, or just work on something else and come back later.

The pricing is based on how much you want to use it.  On the basic package, you get 50 “credits” per day.  As you see in the screenshot above, the Site Targeting Tool take 25 credits to run.  You can run it (or any other tool for 25 credits) twice per day on the basic package.  I think it’s a cool way to test it out without spending a ton of cash.  If you start using it a bunch on a daily basis, then you can get a bigger package with more credits.

All in all I think that this is definitely going to turn some heads.  I don’t recommend products or services very often on this blog, so take it from me, this is a solid service that is only going to get better.   If you do PPC on the Content Network, or PPV, or if you do any type of SEO including the EPN / McJiffy / BANS method, then SiteSnatcher is a tool you will want to check out.

P.S. If you click one of the SiteSnatcher links above, you will go through my affiliate link.  If you don’t want to use my affiliate link, just go to http://sitesnatcher.com.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5