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I Am Going To Steal Your Ebook!

by Melvin · Oct 24, 2009

Disclaimer: This is not a post teaching you to do this evil thing. I, myself HAVE NEVER EVER stolen any eBook. I don’t need to, I make enough money to live. Just look at this post as a guide to have a basic understanding on how this process works and how you can protect yourself when you do selling eBooks.

Internet Marketing in whatever niche you are, involves a lot of selling. And 90% of the products is what we known as info products or eBooks. But do you know that most of the eBooks that these people are selling are usually just ripped off for free? Or do you know that a lot of people have a ton of good quality eBooks they don’t even pay for? Well I’m sure you, as a reader of this blog are selling ebooks, or have plans of doing it, so this post can be a good read for you.

So most people do sell ebook via Clickbank. In selling, you are required to do two pages. First is the salespage itself, where you would pitch your offer and the second is the thank you page, a page where a paying customer would be redirected once they have made the payment. The problem that I see most of the time is that any user can easily access the thank you page!

One good example is the sales page Problogging BluePrint. So the main page is the index page while the download page is just located in /thanks.html part. Fortunately the link is broken (and its unfortunate for paying customers!). The surprising thing is that most salespage function that way! They have their download page accessible almost by anyone! I mean the usual locations are the ff:

/thanks.html
/thanks.php
/download
/download.html
several variations

That’s why Im not surprised that a lot of info products just leak like crazy. Another bone head mistake most marketers do is make use of robots.txt. Oh my god! I mean yes you can tell the search engine to hide your download page but have you forgotten humans can read it? So if you guys want to steal someone’s ebook all you have to do is try to go /robots.txt and see the page that they disallow, LOLS… Another problem is the noticeable increase of PDF search engines. It’s surprising that a lot of popular eBook shows up on sites like pdfsearchengine. So altogether, it’s an uphill battle to combat eBook fraud and many people so far fail to do it!

How Do I Protect My Ebook?

Well this post is not really a guide on info product protection but since we’re here Im going to give you some brief explanation of what I know. If you’re a clickbank merchant, make sure to have a third party plugin to protect your download page. One that I came across through is DlGuard. Since I have never done any clickbank thing I would suggest you to do your own research as to what the reliable third party plugins are.

If you’re just selling a product yourself, using e-junkie is the smartest thing. E-Junkie is one of the leaders in terms of handling info product automation, payment and delivering the product itself. So far I haven’t heard any issues about using it and even the top marketers like Darren Rowse is using it. $10 per month is a reasonable price for the protection that it gives.

Lastly, always do a simple Google check for your eBook to see if some asshole is sharing it. Use the query “title of your ebook” filetype:PDF, and then scan the search results THOROUGHLY. It’s because sometimes you protect your download page a lot that you forget the file itself. Again some morons do buy it only to share it to other people while other people accidentally (or not) stores it on their server only to leak when someone does a search. Just consider doing this like a maintenance thing.

It can also be a good option to use the PDF search engines we mentioned earlier to your advantage. Search for your eBook, then if you find it, contact the site owner and tell him to remove it (or send him a DMCA notice). Obviously when someone shares it, he knows it’s illegal so he’d just more likely laugh at you when you contact him. The best thing to do is send the notice to their hosting provider by doing a quick whois on the site that distributes your copy illegally.

Conclusion:

Selling eBooks is a big and still growing industry and unfortunately not a lot of people are techy enough to protect the hardwork they exerted. Protecting your own info product can be really hard but there are ways. Im not saying people are evil but put yourself in their situation. You are craving for some expensive info product and you see a flaw that would make it free for you, are you not going to download it? The obvious answer is the answer for 98% of us!

I don’t know about you but if you’re just letting your product leak like waterpipes, then I think your product and you deserves to be ripped off for free. After all security is part of any business model both online and offline that should never be neglected. I would really love to have your opinion about it. Or maybe you can share your own tips that you implement yourself!

A Social Bookmarking Site That Can Earn You Money

by Melvin · Oct 22, 2009

This is a paid review sponsored by James of Shetoldme.com

Social bookmarking sites are literally everywhere. You find a lot of good ones, and even a bigger number of “not-so” pleasing ones. Of course, popular social sites are the better ones because bloggers know themselves they can get more traffic with it. It can give their blog a brand awareness in front of a huge number of audience.

But what if you could also earn while trying to drive the most traffic you can to your blog? What if you could place more than 1 ad that would earn you inside a high traffic subpage? Well enough fluffs, what I am talking about here is the Social Bookmarking site She Told Me, a social bookmarking site that could help you earn using Google Adsense. Here’s a small portion of what the site looks like:

When James ordered this review and when I quickly saw the link, I was like ‘oh, this is another crappy site and I may not accept this review”. But then I went to the site and was flabbergasted by the amount of traffic it renders. Another is that it gives the best posts a direct link (dofollow) back to the blog instead of a subpage which would later direct people to the blog. In my opinion, it’s a good thing since most people don’t have really time to scan and scan pages, and later get redirected to a different site.

So to the adsense thing. Basically it all starts by putting your publisher id in your account details. Then, when you add a post to the site, your adsense account would be the one catering the ad in that page. What specific ad? Your adsense ad would be the one placed closest to the title (and according the the owner, the one with highest CTR).

So imagine, you submitted a good post. Your page went to the front page and you get the most traffic. And at the back end, there’s also a good chance for you to get as much click as possible for your ad. SheToldMe.com has an Alexa Rank of below 50,000 so that’s a pretty reasonable amount of traffic to deal with. Just to clear things off, Adsense Sharing is not against Google Terms of Services. For more info read their Program Policies here.

Now is their referral system. The lucrative part according to them is that your ad would be displayed on every pages your referred user submits. So that’s more than doubling the income potential if the one user you referred is a quality user who submits good content. Now imagine having referred 10 of them. 🙂 For more information, there’s a page solely dedicated to the Revenue sharing part of the site

Critiques and Suggestions

Well let’s go to the “bad” side. The first thing that didn’t go well with me was the domain name. Sure, digg, sphinn, del.ic.ous, are not really premium ones but i think the owner could’ve had picked a better one. Again its entirely my opinion that the domain doesn’t really suit the sites’ function that much.

Another probably is the design. Most bookmarking sites are Web 2.0ish in looks and shetoldme prefers not to be one of them. It’s understandable since the site is an adsense sharing site (w/c means it would serve a TON of adsense ads) and needs a big space to cater those ads. The logo is related to the domain but again I am quite puzzled with the domain and so as the logo. Aside from Adsense, the site also serves Project Wonderful ads although its very minimal. I really wish a more stylish design for the social site as it’s been time proven that attractive design is a MAJOR bait to attract users.

FINAL VERDICT

So if you guys would ask me if I would use that program, the answer is definitely yes! It’s free, takes 30 seconds to register and get approved, and just like any other bookmarking sites, it can yield traffic and quality links to your blog. The Adsense thing is not something I’m really interested with (I’m long banned from Adsense), but let alone the bookmarking capabilities judge for it.

And what is its difference from the bigger bookmarking sites? None! Well for me, I would always prefer to submit to smaller social sites because it doesn’t really take that much work to go up in the front page rather than with bigger social sites.. There is a considerable difference between the traffic but I would rather want to get some than totally none at all (due to the fact that it’s harder to get in the front page of popular social sites like digg…).

All in all Shetoldme.com is a pretty decent social bookmarking site coupled with the lucrative option of earning money from Adsense Ads. Joining is free and you could start earning soon. Still, DON’T expect too much from it, money wise. Over the years, I’ve seen a ton of Adsense revenue sharing sites, mostly forums and all I can say is that 80% of the time, people’s expectations weren’t met. Again it’s a pretty good site and definitely something that “might” worth a look. Check out She Told Me

Hey, Is Your Blog’s Layout Just Fine?

by Melvin · Oct 17, 2009

This post isn’t really about the blog’s theme or the how beautiful the design is. We all know people who can spend can have the “best” theme while people who don’t have the money can settle for the average. The post that I am going to tackle is about blog design resolution of your website/blog. Why resolution? Well the layout of your blog, might it be the best or the worst, highly depends on the monitor’s resolution of your readers. In short, good design is useless if your readers still have to scroll horizontally just to view every part of your content.

So to kick things, this is how MelvinBlog looks in my laptop (1280X800) (click for larger view):

While on most computers w/c have the 1024X768 screen resolution, it does show like this:

What you would notice is the fact that in my laptop, there is still a space both in the left and right side part while in most screen resolutions, there’s no margin anymore and the content is like stretched. And still it doesn’t look annoying at all!

The main point here is that don’t try to base the design of your blog in your wide screen computer’s resolution. In a certain survey about screen resolutions, it’s been proven that a lot of people are still using the old fashioned 800X600 and 1024X768 screen resolution. In the end it just means that don’t decide based on your personal preference. Remember that our readers’ user experience is still the one that counts the most. We, liking the look of our blog is no match against them, not finding it good enough.

So, what does my blog look like in your computer? Scannable enough or completely crappy? How about you, have you already asked other people on what they think about the design of your blog based on their own screen’s resolution? Or maybe you haven’t even considered resolutions on carving out your design? Hmm..

The Best Birthday Gift For the Girl I Care

by Melvin · Oct 11, 2009

So a little offtopic post here. 🙂 Post Alert: Remember this is a blog owned by a teenager, so love stories are just fine as posts. 😉

Last year, I also did have this post asking for the best birthday gift which yielded a lot of responses from people. Since most of the commenters back before were not commenting now (or have stop reading this blog), I just thought I would again reiterate the scenario. So way back in early years in college I used to have a big crush on someone in our school. What I know is it’s more than infatuation and being attracted because I have to dwell with the feelings that I have for her for up to now (3+ years)..

I started giving gifts to her since first year without me revealing my personality and she not really knowing I exist. We just started to get to know each other and eventually talk more during our 3rd year (last year). Much to my dismay, that was her last year in school as she was a graduating student then (very short time. 🙁 ). And yes I was able to say goodbye but then its sad because 1: you know you’re not going to meet anymore (debatable) 2: as I’ve said we’re just starting to build our friendship back then. I really miss her so much and yes its love, puppy love maybe.

So 8 days from now is her birthday. I don’t know, but over the years I really don’t think I make great decisions on what is the right gift . You get my situation? The girl is not my girlfriend (I never had any gf’s before), I’m not courting here nor dating her, we’re good friends and I know I want more than just that, lols. And to add I am really a shy person and everytime we talk face to face I still have that nagging pressure that I always feel.

I always thought a ring would do it, but people around me say its not a good one and I respect their opinion a lot. I want to be romantic but not too much. Confused? I am as well. So here I am taking any suggestions you guys/girls can suggest. I believe most of you here are teens like me and if not (means you’re old), Im sure you have gone with this “cheesy” situation as well, Hahahaha… Fire away your take.

and yes taking her out for a dinner is a big dream.

Blog Updates And Announcements

by Melvin · Oct 6, 2009

September was a pretty good month for me because that was the month that I didn’t have to wake up early and sleep early to prepare for stupid internships. I was able to take the much needed rest and relaxation while also being productive doing what I want and what I need. It was good also because I was able to raise enough money to support myself and my expenses without needing to annoy my parents asking for allowance.

Anyways for this version of blog updates here are some of the more notable happenings and changes to the blog.

Pagination Problems Resolved
No theme change up to the end of the year
WWSGD plugin removed
Guest Posting galores on some blogs
Loyal Commenters Awarded.

So first is the pagination thing. You can now look at the footer part and click the next page or paged number as its completely working well now. I have also decided not to change the blog’s theme up to the end of the year at least! You can remember me posting an article asking you on whether to change the theme or not and the final decision is not yet. Meanwhile the popular WWSGD plugin w/c analyzes cookies and sends out different message for different visitor has been removed. I really love the plugin but since it’s hurting my search rankings, I have decided to pull it off. Credits to Mihaela. I’ve also guest posted on some of the blogs and well most of my guest posts are still not up. Hmm. Lastly all the the people on the top commentator’s list were rewarded with free advertising for a month. These are bloggers who kept on reading and commenting on my posts despite the atrocity of it. 😀

Announcement

The major announcement that I am going to make is the launch of Great Deals in the near future. Great Deals is eventually just a part of the site (a page actually) where you can see offers you’ve never really seen before. OIO Publisher for $27? How about the Ultimate Blogging Theme for just $47? Most offers are UNBELIEVABLE and those things mentioned are just preludes. Yeah, you’re not gonna believe it. 😀

And yes, suggestions, criticisms, opinions, advice is always entertained. If you have something to say which you think can really improve it would be highly ridiculed appreciated.

Problogger Forums Is Fine As Long As…

by Melvin · Oct 3, 2009

Darren Rowse, the genius behind the popular blog Problogger has already launched the forum which is more known as the Problogger Community. Although he hasn’t yet made a formal announcement of it in his blog, the community is rapidly growing already with over 3000 members on board . Some of the prominent figures I’ve seen there are the likes of Daniel Scocco (DailyBlogTips), Jim Kukral (JimKukral.com), David Risley (DavidRisley.com) and more.

Although there is no scarcity in blogging forums, the Problogger Community is still expected to surpass all other forums and get to the top in no time. Registration is NOT free but at $1.95, heck it’s a bargain. According to most, this registration fee exists to filter out spammers. The price is set to increase soon so if you’re planning to register then the best time to do it is now.

The forum is going to be big soon and there’s no doubt about it. But on whether it can be different on other blogging forums remains to be unseen. I have been doing some detective works and observing the forums. To be honest, the forum is really good because there aren’t so many categories yet it’s not lacking anything it seems. But still I am seeing a lot of reasons why this forum can be just your another average blogging forum and here are the reasons:

Experts Are NOT going to lurk there – The main selling point of the forum I believe is that it’s packed with several authorities in the niche. While it can really be exciting (and astounding), it’s still the fact that these bloggers won’t devote 10% of their time in that forum. I mean these bloggers are business guys and they are busy for most part of the day so I don’t see any reason for them to lurk over there. And if I’m correct, then the main selling point is canceled out already.
New Forum, Same Mindset – People who go to forums usually just go there to make promotions and marketing, both direct and indirect (debatable). Aside from its a paid membership, there is really no difference between it and other blogging forums. The rules are kinda the same. You still see people drop gazillion of links (like me, or Im just joking!), see annoying members, and see a lot of blog critiques with less than 2 critiques! The forums shows leniency and in my opinion I think it needs to be more strict.
Lurking is Bad – Like what I’ve talked here in the blog about lurking on forums, I think it can still harm people’s productivity. Most bloggers love to lurk and waste their time lurking. Im sure they enjoy it but since they joined the Problogger Community, then I’m assuming they want to be a professional blogger. And hurting your productivity doesn’t help to become a Pro Blogger.
Getting Bigger – Theoretically there’s nothing wrong on having a large forums, but I always prefer smaller forums. Why? Because a smaller forum can give you a tighter community where everyone really gets to maximize every benefit they could ever gain. It builds better relationship amongst bloggers and it can really help benefit everyone. Digital Point Forums and Warrior Forum used to be a good forum and it only gets out of hand when it became highly populated. You can post a thread asking for something and in the next 20 minutes your thread is already on the third page w/no replies. Big is good, but toooo big is not!

I don’t have anything against the new community. If I have, then why would I join? Why would I care about writing this post? It’s a good forum that can be a future source of awesome content to the right person. But as far as seeing the difference of it to other blogging or webmaster-related forums, I don’t see much. I may be correct and I may not be. And someone can prove me wrong here.

Do You Appreciate Your Readers?

by Melvin · Sep 28, 2009

It’s kinda sad that most bloggers (even popular ones) don’t seem to show they appreciate they readers/audience. There is a big imbalance between bloggers wanting to get too much traffic and bloggers showing their appreciation to their readers. One crucial factor I think why blogs get loyal readers is the fact that readers feel appreciated and therefore they keep returning because they know the author “care” for them.

Many people misunderstood my posts about not caring for PM’s on contact form and not replying on blog comments as a proof that I really don’t give much value to my readers. It’s understandable but it’s totally untrue. The value that I place to the blog readers is the highest (higher than advertisers). Because no readers literally means no money made at all and no fun.

Well today I am going to list ways on how you can show appreciation to your readers and I hope you guys like it.

Read and reply to their comments – It sure did take long for me to realize this one. Contrary to what I believed before, its not true that readers comment on blogs and don’t come back anymore. It surprises me a lot of times when I replied to a comment that the readers comes back and say thanks for replying. Replying to every comment may look silly but it builds readership and loyalty.
Link out to them – Although its impossible to link out to all your commenters, giving a link love to some of their best posts can be helpful. Believe me, bloggers feel appreciated when someone links out to them, may it be a big blog or a small blog. Most people are afraid to give links because they don’t want to dilute their pagerank w/c is a lame reason. Readers > Pagerank/Metrics.
Ask for their opinion – If you’re a long time reader of this blog, there is a customary question and answer thing here wherein a reader can ask a question and me hopefully me being able to answer it. The mistake that most blogs do is they stuff their readers so much that they are an expert in their niche that their readers won’t anymore do anything which is completely wrong. Ask out your readers for something, post a poll or just simply encourage them to do interactions with you.
Give out incentives – Ok, so here I have never had given an ipod or a flip (and I think it’s far-fetched). The blogosphere is a tight community that every incentive received is a big thing. I can’t stress this more. It doesn’t have to be a physical product or a cash prize but anything that can be useful to them is a nice thing.
Show Social Media Love – I always feel good when someone retweets my post or stumbles something here and stuffs. Another good way to show your appreciation is to actually do the same for them. If you’re into social media (who’s not?), a simple digg, or some buzz on their article can mean a lot to them. Remember it’s ALWAYS giving first then receiving second.
Network With Them! – The reason I put the little social bookmark/network icon on the sidebar is to network more with my readers. Everything we are doing online is marketing. Marketing is not business, but it’s a function of the business. It helps big when you connect to your readers via other social means like Facebook, Friendfeed or maybe Youtube and etc. The good thing with blogging is that it enables us to maximize networking with other people w/c at the end leads to bigger business relationships, joint ventures or just simple friendships. If you’re not doing this, then you’re missing out a lot!

Showing your audience that you appreciate them is a big factor on having a successful blog, successful business. Sad state is that most people don’t even pay attention to it. What do you think? I would love to have your own take about it and you can do so in the comment form.

Note: Interestingly, all people who are in my top commentators list (@ sidebar) would be able to get a free advertising for one month. Just comment here and I would hook you up on something. Thanks. 😉