Is Schoemaker An Arbitrage Criminal?

In the latest edition of Forbes Magazine. Jeremy Schoemaker was potrayed as an elusive Adsense Arbitrager, that has beaten all of Google's efforts to sanitize and hack down the black hats in the industry.

Every genuine Adsense Publisher hates with a passion, those parasites who put up Made For Adsense (MFA) sites with nothing (No Content), built Google Adsense block units. Why, they lure away visitors and potential guests in your niche from your site, unto sites where there is nothing but frustrations. This could sufficiently provoke the ire of innocent, content-seeking visitors against your site.

What we do as Adsense publisher is to block the nuisance MFA sites with our competitive ads filter. It was therefore a shock to me to read that 'Shoemoney' was reported by Forbes as gloating over his alleged evasive tactics over Google.

This case really calls for thorough investigation to clear the air. Shoemoney is one personality held in high esteem, even by Google in the industry. Could it be that Forbes made a mistake and was painting him as a 'devil' we know?

Looking For Blogging Guinea Pigs?

My major headache with the web is that, it is a short-cut comunication device that carries with it the potential danger, (or is it risk now?) of promoting any unproven and untested business model to the fore, for the unsuspecting web audience. ReviewMe has generated an awesome buzz in the last one week on the web, so much so, that a Front Page Diggstory about it from John Chow's site got an amazing 189 diggs in just 24 hours!

There is one 'rule-of-the-thumb' given me by one of my web metors, whenever it comes to decision making on whether to "go along with the mob": "Keep your motives pure- seek to get rich, but not through the 'get-rich-quick' schemes on the net". I have always abided by this 'rule' since he taught me.

It is now obvious that the 1-week buzz over ReviewMe is bursting at the seams. Fundamental flaws discovered by John Chow (he diplomatically called it 'teething problems'), have exposed this experimental model designed as just another traffic-driving scheme for web relevance. It gives me the impresion that the architects of this scheme hurriedly left the drawing board, just because they thought they have a solution to the flaws inherent in the PayPerPost model.

The simplistic offer of $25,000 "GIVEAWAY" (that was the only attraction), could at best, cover only 500 bloggers at $50 per blogger. As at the time of this posting, the ReviewMe has jumped from 1.2 million to 100,202 on Alexa in one week!

In less than 24 hours Andy Hogans of ReviewMe has had to come on Jonn chow's blog to admit the flaws with a promise to rectify them. That 'fire-brigade response' smacks of experimenting with the soul of many a blogger's desire for monetization of their talents. I am an unashamed follower of Jason Calacanis on the philosophy of "Remunerated Talents", and I share his sentiments on why the Payperpost Model may not work.

For example, I have had my mailbox inundated with pending tasks from Blogsvertise- another pay per post site, Yes, I got enlisted, but lost my 'writing liver' when it comes to crass commercialization of my talents and toying with my subscribers and loyal readers. They are hard-won treasure that I would not be ready to trade for any payment, for a post or review that is inspired by monetary rewards. The truth is that: gurus like John Chow cannot go beyond the first review they did for ReviewMe, anything else would speedily whitle down the rising profile of his personal blog. I am certain he would not want to trade that for any mess of pottage too.

Soulcast was another example of this recent trend, after 6 months of experimenting, many enthusiatic bloggers are burnt out and have dropped out. It was just another fantasy. If you have noticed, the fella running the Soulcast has ran out of Adwords campaign too, (I haven't seen his ads on google for the past 3 to 4 weeks running now).

So long friends, please "Shine your eyes" before plunging.

Google Got Me Drunk

For some 10 weeks now that I've started my most successful blog till date, I have been on Sitemeter, as my metric tool. Recently however, I was reading from the blog of one of my secret mentors, of the inestimable value that the Google Analytics tool carries. So, I wizened up and got enlisted with the service. Having pasted the code on my Blogger's template yesterday at mid-day (noon), the report shown by the Google Analytic tool today, far outshines what the Sitemeter's FULL DAY report gave me.

Sitemeter showed me a Full-Day result of 410 visits and 1,130 page views, while Google Analytics showed me a HALF-DAY report of 669 visits and 1,129 page views. I am tempted to conclude from this result that Google has a greater capacity to capture more traffic data than Sitemeter. I have also not recovered from the the "Analytic Wine" served me by Google. For three hours I have been exploring the over 200 comparative metrics contained in the Google Analytic tool. Reason for my satiated drunkenness.

Many paid options of many web counter services could not match the ocean of in-depth analysis offered FREELY by Google Analytics. Particularly if a newbie like me, who naturally would prefer free services offered on the net, to experiment and test the 'web waters', before we become masters that can stand on our feet. The Google Analytics is best for us, far better and qualitative than many paid-plan, of many web counters.

With metrics like: Organic Traffic, Referral Sources, Most Viewed Pages, etc. there are no lack of thrills and excitements for a living website and, webmaster determined to make a living from the web. The responsiveness of the data depths would help in a qualitative way to determine what your audience (visitors cum customers) want, and that is what would bring them to come back again and again, having identified the desired trend of needs of your guests, and serving them just what they love, would make them to come again!

Alexa Dugg Deeper

A few hours ago, Alexa deployed her versatile tool for deeper comparative analysis of websites's traffic trends. Now you can compare the traffic trends for five different sites simultaneously. Before now, you can only compare traffic trends for two websites at a time. The depth of analysis has also been dug to five and a half years.

1-year Trend

I did a comparison of five leading blogers and their personal blogs, namely: Jason Calacanis, Jennifer Slegg, Jeremy Shoemaker, John Chow and Joel Comm. Coincidentally and interestingly, all their names started with letter J. The new Alexa tool is wonderful in the depth of which of them has the longest tail and which one has the greatest height.

5-year Trend

Another new feature of this release is the "Smoothing" adjustable scale that can be used to sharpen the line-images of the trend. Graduated into four points on a line: from extreme negative on the left, to extreme positive on the right. As you move this scale from left to right, your final picture become sharper and more discernible for pictoral analysis.

Two more depths in durations are introduced to enhance qualitative comparison. Now you can compare 7-day and 5-year trends. As Google Nigeria debuts on october 27th in Nigeria, it was a beauty to see the trend of her rise from 5million+ Alexa traffic rank to her current 25,048 1-week average raking.

Finally, Alexa seem to be gearing up for effective competiotion in the market as it switches her tool bar into beta vesion some three weeks ago. This is good for the industry.

The Heart of The Web Is Traffic!

The most common and most popular index of relevance on the web today is traffic.

Traffic has become like oxygen to any healthy website, to lack a constant flowstream of it, is to be choked up or 'malnourished'.

Your web relevance is determined by your level of traffic that you command: No Traffic, No Relevance.

There is a throne-room in the Palace of the web. Traffic is the pathway to that throne.

Traffic is what authenticate your 'rulership' in the web world. Without traffic, there are no 'netziens' (citizens) or subjects to 'rule' over.

Traffic is the democratic plebiscite that gives legitimacy for a florishing and victorious web career.

The big names in the internet industry became big, by reason of heavy patronage of visitors, not bwcause they have a beautifully designed website.

Content Is King, a value-driven site would magnetize traffic. If your content is of no value to your guests, you would naturally not experience patronage.