Today the Warrior Forum is throwing up on itself in excitement over some Amazon product referred to as AZ Crusher. I bought it for a huge sum of $18 and change. Fuck I am an idiot but there you go. You get what you pay for. I just *had* to check out the software for finding longtail keyword domains and the site builder. Holy shit is it crap. I figured it would make for a fun post and it didn’t disappoint much like their Azon Affiliate Crusher I reviewed earlier.

For the love of money every guburu with a list is exclaiming how fantastic the thing is. The comments on the offer page are glowing and I just have to wonder if I am retarded because I don’t get it. It’s like a cult of personality with these people licking the boots of their affiliate masters. Bunch of clapping moonbats.

The gist of the offer is two software products and a wad of “training” and “bonuses”.

As you may know, “curation” is the buzz word of the month. Everyone is talking about curating content onto their blog. Frankly, I have been curating shit for 5 years. Some of the best blogs and websites curate content. BFD. The AZ Site Builder no more curates content than my scrotum. It copies relevant sentences and creates a jumbled paragraph and subsequently a piece of shit webpage.

And of course the webpage it creates is a typical HTML page that anyone landing on will click out of as quickly as possible. The idea being that the thing is so much garbage that the fastest way out is via an Amazon link, ala 2004 directory generator sites.

The Longtail Domain Finder scrapes Google for keywords then checks to see if it is available as a domain. Then it helps you register it, no doubt, giving the guberus a tasty commission. Smart marketing but technically seemingly rather elementary. You don’t have the 20 seconds to take your new found keyword phrase and drop it into GoDaddy?

It has a bunch of “site traffic” videos that, really, who trusts this shit anymore? Besides it’s your typical article marketing, video, social crap you’ve seen a thousand times.

And yes there are bonuses. 1) They had a WSO a few months ago called Azon Affiliate Crusher that they are giving these new customers free access to. Fuck you old customers.

2) There is some Mindmap that nobody can figure out.

3) Something called “conversion mastery”. I can’t be bothered to even check this crap out.

4) Some keyword research guide from another website outfit. A standard Amazon affiliate guide and a super lame keyword research pack. Not sure how that works. Does everyone get the same refrigerator set of keywords and such?

5) You also get access to some Google Puss traffic package. Wonder where they got that PLR?

More? You bet. 6) A list of wiki and .edu sites which is their Google Panda and Penguin method. Oh and some tired content curation blueprint PLR PDF.

Still going. 7) An Amazon Review article pack. Might be useful but it too has been around the block a few years.

And lastly, I guess, I’m done looking, 8.) Amazon sales pages with graphics. I guess in case you find their site builder really crappy.

I am getting tired of all the products for Amazon. Is Amazon a money maker? Sure. Like most ideas for affiliate marketers it takes a lot of work to find the one site that will make you money. Most people give up way the hell before they are successful. Why people do not test ideas using Squidoo and other free sites is beyond me. They think that the next WSO is going to have the answer. No, it is going to be the answer to the marketer that wants your money and email address.

You know how salespages say “For the Price of a Medium-sized Pizza…”? Take the money and buy yourself a most delicious pizza. “For the Price of a Movie…” Yep. Go to the movies. “For the price of a latte…” Get yourself two cups. Take the dime sale money and fling it off a bridge. Glue it to the sidewalk and record the fun. Just don’t buy this WSO. Or really, any.

I really must be the crappiest Internet marketer in the business. I’m supposed to care about Google’s Penguin but I really could give a shit.

Of course my email was stuffed with marketers lamenting the great penguin assault. The idiot savants at Daddy G have nothing better to do than fuck around with the controls of the Internet. I guess unless you have new animal change every 3 months then you can’t justify packing the sewers of Google with academic elite.

The naming convention is getting old. I guess anti-spam marketers think if they name the fucking whirlwind they unleash on webmasters by some cute animal it will make strategic sense. I think it’s stupid.

So what happened to my sites during the latest website reaping? I dunno. See, I have no idea how to set my sites up to utilize Google’s analytics properly. All I do is build a site and go to Amazon, CJ, Linkshare, Shareasale and the like and see what I sold. I target as many 3-4-5 word keyword phrases that make sense and build a Tumblr site, Squidoo lens or Hubpage. Folks seem to really dig those sites. I’ve been pinning images onto Pinterest and that seems to make people happy.

Squidoo is killing it.

I built a site on Cinco de Mayo less than a week before it occurred. I still don’t know what it’s about but people in the U.S. will use any excuse to dress in a sexy outfit and get drunk.

The takeaway from this is that I should have built this site way before I did and I might have made a few more sales of skanky outfits.

I did no backlinking. I built it and hoped they would come. They did.

I went over to one of the IM forums and the dude running the thing said the penguin update was great for high level domain content. Put shit on Blogger, Squidoo and Livejournal and the like and you were golden. Everyone was crying because their 40-1,000 word tomes on self hosted blogs turned to shit. People were livid because they did all the backlinking the marketing guberus said to do. Wrote the lengthy posts. Socialized this. All for naught as the shithead with a YouTube account hit #1 with a bullet for their prized keyword. Shithead didn’t waste time with backlinking either.

I do very, very little backlinking. I have never been able to be bothered with the enterprise. I have always funneled traffic to where I wanted it to go with Tumblr sites and WordPress blogs. I suppose that is backlinking but really it’s giving the bored surfer another link to click before they leave their cubicle at 5.

What do I think of the Penguin update? Nothing. Unless you are a big corporate deal you will always mean nothing to Google. So that is why I take a ride on Squidoo and Tumblr. Google has finally taken their silver spoon out of their ass and realized that Squidoo and Tumblr are viable business entities that do a great job of encouraging people to create excellent content. They police their own. If it’s ranked well on Squidoo then Google finally, finally decided it’s good enough.

Nothing I build ever does better than the shit that I spray on third party platforms. I’ve been at this for 8 years. Idiot guberus run around telling their lists that you HAVE to self-host. That you HAVE to backlink. That it’s only a matter of time before Squidoo shuts down your lens or Squidoo itself is shut down. That Tumblr is a phase. That Hubpages are dead. I make as much with Hubpages Adsense rev sharing now as I ever did self-hosting niche sites. I sell plenty of Amazon crap off a lens.

I wish I was smart enough to enlighten you 3 or 4 readers about the intricacies of Google updates. I have no idea what they are about. The last one that hurt me was some version of panda that destroyed my Hubpages. That lasted about a month. I changed nothing. It sucked but everything recovered. I suppose that all your “content is king” sites will likewise recover the next time some educated elitist adds the decimal point back into his formula. The same one will probably kill Squidoo lenses. Bummer.

Try this on: Create web sites/pages that you like. If you want to sell 7″ survival knives then find long-ass-tail keyword phrases that a few hundred are searching on each month and get yourself over to Squidoo and build that page. Then build another. Go to Hubpages and build one. Go to Tumblr and build a survival blog and curate the shit out of existing content and link the mess to your salespage at Squidoo.

Use the free hosted sites and stop listening to these jackasses that say you can only make money buying a domain, hosting and building complicated WordPress blogs. If the whole enterprise collapses then you’ve spent nothing but time. Gather up all your XML files and load them into your self-hosted WordPress blog and carry on.

So the Penguin means nothing to me. My latest project is called SEAL (Squidoo Easily Activated Laziness). It consumes penguins.

I received an email from the PR department of a new start-up called Ukritic. I thought I’d pass it along  to you 3 or 4 readers. And of course I will have something to say about the enterprise…

Just wanted to connect about something your Lost Ball in High Weeds readers might find interesting…

It’s a startup called Ukritic.com. Essentially it’s a bit like Squidoo, except specifically for product reviews – and it’s purpose built for affiliate marketing.

For beginner affiliates it’s a good way to get their feet wet, reviewing a number of products and testing the waters in different markets before investing their time/energy into building a site of their own. And as you know, it often doesn’t take much traffic to see some results when they’re publishing quality reviews.

I spent some time going through the offering and frankly it looks pretty solid. Sites  like this are ripe for spammy delight but it seems like they are firewalling against the blackhat forces of greed. Doesn’t seem like much opportunity for SEO shenanigans so it may actually serve a useful purpose. The “Rules” for playing are seemingly strict so if you aren’t up to the task of delivering quality then you probably shouldn’t waste your time.

Personally I am swamped with shit. I am trying to create product sites via Squidoo, building a couple of  “curated” sites, figuring out Pinterest for monetary gain while it remains possible, working on Keyword Academy-type authority sites, as well as juggling a few funnels. I need another project like I need a Google slap.

But here’s the thing. Squidoo is perfect for what you can do with it: Create product mini sites. Google continues to tolerate Squidoo. You can’t do the same thing with Hubpages, Tumblr, Blogger, etc. Well,  you sort of can, but it doesn’t perform as well. It doesn’t look right. You can build a self hosted mini site using WordPress but I try to avoid that hassle. It’s why I Squidoo.

But Ukritic might be a way to double your product review efforts. They aren’t keen on unoriginal shit but you could re-write your Squidoo lens and post the shit on Ukritic. I think if I am taking time to create good and useful content on Squidoo then there is no reason I couldn’t utilize the effort on another platform. Double the fun.

Anyway, have a look at Ukritic. It’s free. I suppose they make money by splashing Google ads on your site. Maybe one day they will rev share like Squidoo. Whatever. I’m more interested in being able to put more eyeballs on some piece of crap I am promoting. Ukritic might be worthwhile.

His engineering imminence, the great Google Goob himself, Matt Cutts, got the Internet Marketing bilge pumpers in a tizzy by announcing  that Google is “aggressively targeting blog networks”.

What that means is esteemed outfits such as Build My Rank has come under attack and effectively shut down. It’s easy enough to do with the technology at Big Brother’s disposal. They simply have one of the minions join up and begin the trace through the sewage that G built.

We can’t have little mom and pops outdoing those million dollar multi-nationals paying big money for exposure in the greatest search engine of all time can we? No. No. No. So consider your dinky backlinks floating about on crap blog networks terminated.

Can’t say I ever participated in private blog networks. I’m too cheap. Too afraid of the G.

So what do you do for backlinks? I have a neat solution. That is free. Or you can pay if you want. Your cabbage, natch.

Try out Content Facilitator.

You can add your blog to the “system” and have articles added to your blog. In doing so you get credits allowing you to post articles to blogs.

It’s pretty cool for adding content to your blogs. You can either choose unique or open publishing rights to post. Basically unique will be unique to your blog. Open will be distributed as many credits as homeboy wants to spend.

Basically as long as you have blogs that can and do accept articles then you will gain credits allowing you to submit articles into the system for people to pick up and post to their blog. And the more you accept the more you can post for nada, you cheap bastards.

Definitely not a private blog network. I’ll take good content written by others all day long on my blogs. And when  backlinks are needed I can add one of my word collections to the system for posting. Win-win.

Oh and they will be opening up Tumblr and Blogger. Perfect for filling up your own backlink farms, dig?

I trust all is well with the few among the herd who actually visit this site. I understand if you have better things to do with your time. So many WSO’s so little time as it were. I’m not a very smart web sewer magician in many regards. I should be offering copious amount of pages of well sorted words detailing the intricacies of making money online, but alas I am not inclined. Sadly it appears many are thereby making said purchases from the top hatters on the forum.

As for me I continue to make my own way through the web sewers. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that I am trying out Video Forward. It is a mostly scummy service that allows one to post videos onto money pages for the glory of coin collection. You can put most any kind of advertisement you like on your video pages including Adsense. You can post any kind of video as long as you can embed the code into the template.

Am I making money? Indeed. Does it have long term potential to justify the time posting delightful video fare? I don’t know.  Thing is it has given me ideas for use on other venues. I like the idea of video pimping but I’m not sure I’ll continue, per se, on VF.

One nice thing about the service is that it provides a tasty RSS URL that you can post to many RSS directories like Feedburner, Feedagg, Feedbite and the like. Nice backlinks I suppose. I certainly have a knack of getting traffic to the videos…thanks to numerous high volume traffic WordPress sites that I use as a funnel. Keeping up with free WordPress hosted blogs over the last 5 years or so has its advantages today.

What kind of videos do I post? Celebrity, food, workout, travel, sports, funny, etc. You name it I’m giving it a go. Surf around. Find a video. Add relevant title, keywords and description in the template. Do a quick backlink promotion and move on to the next one. The more the merrier.

Do I recommend it? Fuck if I care. This shit won’t work for most people because they won’t have a way to drive traffic to the pages. No traffic. No money. After about a week of posting shit and not making money they’ll move on to something shinier.

Which brings me to Pinterest. I’m trying to figure out how to best utilize this photo orgy. One idea is that since my video posts on Video Forward utilize a screen shot I grabbed I can Pin that fucker onto Pinterest and add it to my board. Hopefully they’ll click over to the video and see a relevant Adsense ad and click the fuck out of it. At least that’s the plan. One plan anyway. Pinterest has potential.

Unfortunately I am working on adding the complete Amazon catalog of products onto Squidoo. I love Squidoo. I have a single account, for instance, dedicated solely to costumes. St. Paddy’s Day is surprisingly active in this regard. And you might be surprised how many folks still like to buy “Halloween” costumes like slutty school girl costumes in March. It’s a blast. Who knew I could sell in-ear headphones from a simple one page…advertisement…on Squidoo? Selling affiliate shit from CJ companies and Amazon is quite righteous.

And of course Hubpages is back in the game. My Adsense revenue dropped like 80% a couple months ago and now has completely recovered. Not that it was that impressive but it does pay for play. All passive which is a delight for such a lazy fuck as I.

I have dropped numerous self-hosted blogs and websites. In this psycho age of social sites chewing through Google I see no reason to mess around with hosting and domains. No, your Internet marketing email buddy listers surely don’t agree because , you know, you can’t build a business on Tumblr and shit, right? But I am just going to continue my hobby adding pages to Squidoo, Hubpages, Tumblr and Pinterest while collecting unprofessional additions to my bank account.

I will only host when I feel the need to expound on some lofty ideal that needs constant posting.

I went from 1,500 visitors a day on Hubpages a month ago to a flat line of roughly 200 visitors a day. Inconsequential traffic that completely aborted any decent Adsense income that I was collecting. By happenstance I was checking some Analytic stats today and, behold, the Phoenix rises. Yesterday the graph showed an erection of over 1,000 surfers. Literally all my Hubpages for key keywords were flung back to the top of the Google listings. Helluva thing.

I suspect it will about 17 days before Google flings Hubpages back into the traffic wall again.

It has been about 7 years that I have been swimming with the Internet Marketing turds. You stick around long enough you will see that nothing really changes except the length of your mustache. I started out in this garbage flinging keyword generated pages into the web sewage. Speed was essential. Garbage was gold.

Today new clowns are juggling their pretty wares in front of the herd. Dipshit WSO hucksters are working new angles to get you to pry a buck out of your flat wallet. It’s all the same. Easy money. Projectile vomit quick content into the web sewers.

Email lists are king. If you so desire you can get smothered in spammy delight. Like most long in the toofers I create crap email accounts and let them spam my ghost. I have no interest in anything these people are offering.

WSO’s are particularly vexing. I fucking hate the whole enterprise with every fiber of my being. Today putrid products are dropped on the forum in the hopes of luring unsuspecting dumbshits into purchasing page after page of upsell slime. WSO ebooks full of so much rehash from the dust bin of years past.

I honestly cannot believe how disgusting IM has remained. You folks buying this shit are getting reamed. I trolled into the WSO forum the other day and decided to see how far the rod goes. I bought an Amazon course impaled on one of the time sensitive tickers and got it for cheap. I no more got past paying for the thing before I was hit with “BUY THIS UPSELL NOW BEFORE WE TAKE IT DOWN AND YOU DIE!” page one and then a subsequent upsell on page two. Then they allowed me to dutifully download the piece of shit.

These fuckers had the gall to send me an email after buying this dreck to attend an “UNANNOUNCED BONUS WEBINAR!” where they will teach the intricacies of obtaining stupendously generous Amazon niche ideas. Fuck if I was going to sit thought that shit when I had bullets to sling downrange with the missus that evening.

The next day I received an email that said they had posted the video of the webinar, but only for the next 72 hours. Being used to the quality and honor of a Keyword Academy webinar I did not expect to be slapped upside the face with their fishy Amazon sniper product. $197 fuckers. HA HA!

Welcome to the wonderful world of Azon Affiliate Crusher.

Please allow my token deposit of soon to be worthless U.S. dollars into the putrid coffers of WF and AAC to be your warning. I am your nightwatchman gliding though the misty web sewers of affiliate disrepute. Heed my counsel well.

Sadly my Adsense revenue via Hubpages has hit the Google fan being shredded into a bloody gore of lifeless pulp. I figured that the goodness would not last given Google’s on-again/off-again dance with Hubpage content. Unfortunately I figured correct.

Tracking a couple of my best keywords in which I use across various platforms including WordPress.com, Tumblr, Squidoo, self hosted, and until recently, the withering Hubpages, I find myself well regarded in Google’s sphere. The first couple of pages shows my prowess at ranking for my keyword within all those entities, until about 10 days ago when my Hubpage splattered itself into the bowels of the Google beast.

Unfortunately this occurred across many of my Hubpages. I was first concerned with my lack of Google earnings, cut well in half for the earnings period. Then upon noticing the ranking tankage decided to spend a few days lifting the pages via content improvement and additions. It has done little good for either my earnings or page rankings.

It is an annoyance. Google has flaunted Hubpages’ relevance time and again. Their constant algorithm jerk-offs leaves little consistency in the rankings. I have no idea if this is related to my personal mis-fortune with Hubpages/Google or if more people are seeing a revenue/ranking decline recently.

I really don’t care.

Neither Hubpages nor Adsense on Hubpages is worth the time and effort to get bent. I despise Adsense. I despise Google. I am completely ambivalent to Hubpages. If I can make some passive Adsense cash then that’s great. But I will not spend time chasing a payout from Google.

So I will push ahead undaunted in my desire to collect affiliate payouts. I stood peering into the shadows at my favorite urinal at the gym when something caught my eye above the rim. Advertisements from local enterprises. I made note of one sales page full of products and juicy keywords that I will collect onto a webpage over this weekend.

I try to stay alert for potential opportunities. I am a scavenger. Motivated marketers are keen on doing a grand job of determining what will sell for their product masters. I enjoy slinking about and snitching their ideas. They pay thousands of dollars for marketing advice. I simply pay attention.