All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.
Blogging, Internet

Guest Posting Scams

31 Comments

You know, it probably seems like I’m totally against guest posting lately. I’m not, even if I did write a post about guest posting lies. I just tell it like it is, and then I show you what I mean.

In this case, I’m going to share what I believe turns out to be a guest posting scam by someone representing themselves as working at a company called Greenlight Digital. It turns out this is a legitimate company; how legitimate the person who wrote me is makes me curious. My issues were thus:

1. She seemed to not know what she was doing. She kept having problems understanding me, as I did her.

2. She parceled out information one bit at a time.

3. She tried to get me to sign up for something where I could “get” articles to put on my finance blog that they were going to pay for, but she sent me the first one.

4. She tried to tell me that I wouldn’t get paid for two weeks, but I had to run the article with their links during that time.

Those are just the highlights. It’s better to share our correspondence here, and you tell me your thoughts on the matter. Hers will be italicized, and mine will be in blue; I know you like that. 🙂 Here we go:

Hi,

We are currently running a campaign in combination with one of our major UK clients, and were wondering if you would be interested in hosting content on http://www.topfinanceblog.com/

One of our major clients is currently focusing on increasing the visibility of their pages on the web, and it would be great if you could play a part.

I have several flexible possibilities in mind including bespoke guest posts and articles.

Our writers are flexible and are willing to write the articles based on your focus (also being happy to take topic suggestions should you have any particular topics in mind). The content is bespoke and based on your site so will certainly be in regards to your site’s subject – once it is written you are, of course, free to review the content before placing it on your site and any changes you wish can be made for you to ensure you are comfortable with the content.

In exchange we would offer you payment dependent on the visibility of the content.

If you would like further information or if this has sparked your enthusiasm then please feel free to contact me via email Veronika.Kustrova@greenlightdigital.com .

I look forward to hearing from you!

Kind Regards,

Veronika Kustrova
Web Relations Executive | Greenlight

Greetings,

This is the advertising policy of Top Finance Blog: (not sharing advertising policy here, but it’s my standard policy for that blog)

Hi Mitch,

Thank you for your reply.

We are currently running a campaign for our finance clients such as XXX and XXX (not going to “out” her clients, in case they’re not her clients) and were wondering if you would be interested in this advertising opportunity. I have briefly outlined below exactly what we do and what we are looking for from you.

All we are looking for up to 3 article/blog posts. Our writers are flexible and are willing to write the articles based on your focus (also being happy to take topic suggestions should you have any particular topics in mind). The content is bespoke and based on your site so will certainly be in regards to your site’s subject – once it is written you are, of course, free to review the content before placing it on your site and any changes you wish can be made for you to ensure you are comfortable with the content.

The content can remain live for as long as you like unless the specification of the client changes, in which case we would ask you to remove the content. We do ask that there be a homepage link (internal) to the content so that your users can read it. Each post must meet CAP regulations, we provide details on this alongside the content.

You can see some examples of our articles at XXX & XXX. Please note these are examples, do not place this on your site and that your articles will be based on the focus of your site and so will be different from these examples

For the posts we offer a one-off payment per article of ÂŁ75.

Do you have price for one-off payment per article?

The reason for offering this price is that I expect that the review will be posted in the form of a blog post, which would be top news while it is still fresh (a month or so), to be replaced with newer content as time wears on.

Our partnerships are built on maximum flexibility as we recognise that circumstances can change, for example you may wish to redevelop or refresh your site and may no longer wish to have our items on the site. If the case arises where circumstances do change you need only inform us and we can either renegotiate or end the partnership, and vice versa.

What are your thoughts on this?

Regards,

Veronika

Hi Veronika,

We’re going to have to clear up some terminology because I’m not sure what you’re saying.

One, I have no idea what CAP regulations are. Two, I have no idea what “one-off” means. I can’t respond to this without that knowledge. At least I knew what “bespoke” meant; not a term used here in the U.S. I want to make clear that this site is in the United States, and all content on the blog must be geared towards an American audience. As long as it’s on a finance topic and not something we’ve had on the blog within the last month, all should be fine.

I will answer what I do know. Each article gets to have a link in it going back to the site in question, but the link can’t be a blatant ad, and the link has to have relevance to the word it’s linking to. For instance, if the article says “credit card” and the link goes to a credit card company, or a finance company of some kind, it’s a good link. If the article says “credit score” but links back to “Bob’s Young Horses”, that wouldn’t work at all. I’m sure you know this, but I’m just making sure.

Hi Mitch,

Thank you for your reply.

One-off payment means paid just once and CAP regulations mean that the article content and publishing needs to follow correct SEO rules.

As I mentioned in the previous article the content is unique and it is relevant.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Kind regards,

Veronika

Greetings Veronika,

Just to clarify this part first, you’re saying you’d pay $XX to place each article? Second, I do SEO as one of my businesses, but even a paid post follows the rules of this blog, although I don’t often turn down what’s requested unless it goes against the format of the blog. I still need to see the websites being linked to ahead of time, and need to mention that anything regarding payday loans, either in an article or the website being linked to, won’t be accepted.

If I’m clear in what you’re saying then we can go forward and I will gladly take a look at the posts you have.

Hi Mitch,

Yes that is correct we would pay $XX/ÂŁXX per article.

I have already sent you a few examples of our articles for Santander.

I am also happy to take any suggestion of the topic for the article to make sure it will fit your audience.

If you are interested please send me your full contact details for our records (Payee Name, Payment Method (Paypal) Phone Number, & Address) and I shall get the content commissioned for you; you should have it within a few weeks.

Kind regards,

Veronika

Hi Veronika,

I’d be interested, but the two articles you sent me had blatant advertising in them, and that wouldn’t be allowed, even for a paid post. I just want to be clear on that up front. As long as the articles pertain to something that would interest an American audience, we can take a shot at it. I’d like to see an article to review before I send my payment information, and please remember that every article must have a one line bio with a person’s name that will be responsible for responding to any comments the article receives on the blog.

Hi Mitch,

Please see the article in the attachment.

Kind regards,

Veronika

Greetings Veronika,

I have to modify a couple of lines but otherwise the article works, and your link will still show. If you don’t have a problem with that then I’ll go ahead and schedule it and let you know when it’ll be going live.

Hi Mitch,

Yes that is fine the article can be modify by yourself.

Please can you add the attached text image “advertorial promotion” to the bottom of the article. Just save file on your pc – please ensure image remains GIF format. Please rename the image to any number, e.g. “23”.gif.

When the article will be publish send us the link and we just check if it meets the CAP regulations.

Please send me your full contact details for our records (Payee Name, Payment Method (Paypal) Phone Number, & Address).

Kind regards,

Veronika

Hi Veronika,

If I add that image I’m going to have to charge you an extra $XX for it, since that’s obvious advertising. This means the cost of the article is $XXX. If you agree I’ll add the image; otherwise, it’ll still be $XX for the article itself.

My pay information is thus:

Hi Mitch,

Unfortunately we have to use this image according the CAP regulations that is beneficial for both sites.

I understand your point. Please can we try to negotiate for $XXX/ÂŁXX per article? The price would include also the PayPal fees.

Thanks,

Veronika

Before I had time to respond to the earlier email, I received another email from someone that said the same exact thing as Veronika’s original email. I wrote her back mentioning Veronika, and she wrote back saying to just work with Veronika. Then I got this:

Hi Mitch,

We contacted you recently about hosting content on your site for some of our clients, and you’ll be pleased to know we may have some content for you.

We’re doing some work for XXX, and wanted to know if you’d consider the following proposal.

Proposal details (this lead to a link that wasn’t on their site, and, because I have Mailwasher, would have led to one of those strange links that would have altered the link on my site, something I warned about Gera Agency)

As soon as you’ve accepted, one of our editors will prepare the content for you, and get it over for you to approve.

Also…please note that if you haven’t accepted or declined within 7 days we may automatically assume you’ve declined, and this opportunity will expire, so please be sure to let us know either way.

If you have any questions about this request, or email, please don’t hesitate to contact us, either directly on the number below.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Veronika Kustrova

I had actually scheduled the article for publication and sent a date telling her when it would go live; then the email above showed up and irked me to no end, to whit:

Veronika,

No, I’m not doing that, and I’m not clicking on that link. If that’s the only way for me to participate then I don’t want any part of it. If that’s how this works and the only way it works, then I’ll just delete the article I already have ready to go next week and we’ll part ways now.

Hi Mitch,

I am afraid I have to do this. Otherwise I am not allowed to raise the payment for you.

Kind regards,

Veronika

Then I’m sorry we can’t work together. I will remove the article so you can place it elsewhere. Maybe another time.

Hi Mitch,

After talking with my manager. I can approve it.

Please let me know when the content is life.

Thanks,

Veronika

Hi Veronika,

As I previously mentioned, the article will go live on XXX by 10AM EST. I won’t be around, so you’ll have to check based on time conversion. Hopefully payment will be made within 24 hours of its going live. Thanks.

Hi Mitch,

Thank you for your reply.

Unfortunately the payment takes approximately 1-2 weeks to transfer. I will try my best to proceed the payment as soon as possible.

Cheers,

Veronika

Hi Veronika,

Your company seems to have a lot of rules I’ve never had to deal with before with anyone else. I’ll wait 24 hours and then I’ll remove the links until I’m paid; that is, if you still wish to go through with this project. I’m not feeling like a valued partner, and thus I will not feel like being taken advantage of for one or two weeks of links to your client’s sites without payment.

Hi Mitch,

Apologies I cannot proceed further.

Best,

Veronika

And that was that. Now, I mentioned the 4 issues I had with what went on; was I sensitive, overly protective, or spot on in my assessment of the situation?

Here’s the thing. I’ve talked before about how we get offered certain amounts of money and it can help to make us kind of stupid sometimes. If you’ll do anything to make money, you set yourself up to be taken and scammed. There was just too many strange things that occurred here for my comfort level. If I was making the contact, I’d have put it all up front so there wouldn’t be any questions. I should have known earlier that they’d want to add a banner ad, that they’d think I would want to sign up at some kind of link go to get articles (which makes no sense) and that they hoped not to pay me for two weeks. I wouldn’t have gone for it, but at least it would have been honest.

That’s why I share this stuff. It just feels like a scam, and it leaves me wondering if it’s legitimate or not. The link make me suspect. Always take care of yourself, because it’s your blog or website. Don’t allow yourself to be taken advantage of for pursuit of the almighty dollar.
 

Internet

DuckDuckGo Search Engine

40 Comments

A couple of days ago I was talking about whether it was a good thing or not to trust companies that end up being too big. I mentioned Google specifically because these days they’re in the news almost as often as Facebook. I wondered if there was an alternative to some of these large companies.

Of course I already knew of one when it comes to search engines, and it’s called Duck Duck Go. It sounds like a silly name but it’s a serious search engine and fast becoming the nerds option for searches where they don’t want to be tracked by cookies. Indeed, it’s what Google used to be at the beginning; a clean interface that only does searches, with no advertising, no tracking, and sometimes more accurate results than what you might find on Google. Sometimes, that is.

You’re asking about the “more accurate” part I assume (of course you are lol). I did a test by running a search term for one of my business sites. On Google I’m not even listed in the top 100 for the term; on Duck Duck Go I came up at #22. Why I say it’s more accurate is because on Google all these sites come up that aren’t local, that somewhere on their site might have “Syracuse” listed but, because it’s a large site, they end up outranking me for the term. On The Duck (I think I’m going to call it that) it eliminated almost all of those sites, although there were still a bunch in front of me. Still, more sites that were above me were local, even if they don’t do one of the terms I mentioned, using it a much different way than I meant it.

You want to talk tracking? They have a link where they tell you how they don’t track you. They also have a privacy policy that’s much easier to understand.

Now, before you say you like something like this and will leave Google forever, there are some things you need to know. Right now it only does searches for pages. If you want to search for images, news, blogs, etc, it doesn’t do any of that. That’s why I have them side by side in my toolbar, so I can select which one I want to use for which purpose. And there seems to be some relationship between them and the Mozilla folks, but since I’m a major Firefox fan I don’t have a problem with that.

Anyway, it’s a nice alternative, and one I’ll be using more often. One can only hope that when they get bigger, and they will, that they hold true to their mission in some fashion. I will never have a problem with them adding advertising, but I don’t want to be tracked and, well, imposed upon all the time.
 

Blogging

Post #1,300, And On Friday To Boot

11 Comments

What a great way to end the weekend, with a monument post. This is #1,300, and it took me just over 5 months to get there. I had said I was going to slow down some, and based on what’s occurred I can’t see me writing 300 posts this year. Still, I’m on pace for 240 posts on the year, and that’s still saying something, though I’m not holding myself to that number. Whether it’ll end up higher or lower… well, we’ll see.

It’s been an odd last 5 months since we reached #1,200. It’s a period where my traffic dropped drastically because of Google; that’s just how it goes, and of course if you saw yesterday’s post you know how I feel about some of this. It’s a period where only two posts written in it made the top 10 viewed, those being the posts about the Smush-It issue (which was written just a month ago so that’s pretty good) and the one about my biggest issues with social media. It’s a period where I did what I said I was going to do, that being to write my Black Web Friday series and the prediction that traffic wouldn’t support it; man, I hate being correct about that.

It’s a period where I created a custom header for the site, which I like but just can’t seem to get it to want to stay in place. It was a period where most of the posts were on blogging and social media again, but I took some strides forward in talking about marketing, real marketing, which isn’t easy. And it was a period where I wrote some nice motivational posts, something I think we can never get enough of.

That’s what I’ve done. What’s coming? Truthfully, I have no idea. Strange as this sounds, as I write this I really don’t know what’s upcoming here or anywhere else. I’m close to reaching my 1,000th post on my business blog, I just passed #600 on my finance blog, and I’ve still yet to hit 100 posts on either of my other two blogs. Frankly, a part of me is thinking that I need to start concentrating on business as much as I’ve been concentrating on blogging.

This means I could slow down across the board or continue as I’m going and find a business focus that brings in more income so I can keep blogging as much as I want to. The one thing you don’t have to worry about is that I will stop blogging; I still have too much to say and too much to share.

Of course, there’s an intriguing change that’s come because of Google. They’re started ranking and penalizing sites with a couple of things known as Penguin and Panda. This is a landscape changing bit of work, so let’s briefly talk about it.

Penguin is going after sites that have a lot of unnatural links. It’s actually ironic because they’re the ones who created this culture, and most of us have had to deal with people trying to get us to trade links to their sites or write guest posts for us that, mostly, aren’t up to snuff. I know what’s coming; lots of people are going to be scrambling and asking us to remove links that they paid someone to leave; ugh! That’s going to be messy, and none of us really want to deal with that.

Panda is going after sites where it considers that a lot of the content isn’t all that useful. Initially that’s going to be scary because how does one analyze what’s useful? Are we expected to write longer posts or posts that are educational and well researched? Are we not allowed to offer our opinions anymore because, well, how would that be considered useful? Does it change the overall culture of blogging or web content? Finally, do we all acquiesce to the Big G and only write content that satisfies them?

Well… yes and no. What it’s going to take is an observation of rankings of some type. You might have to look more deeply at your traffic figures, like I mentioned above while talking about mine. I’ve gone from one of the highest ranking blogs in the United States to a place I don’t really recognize. I can only hope that I don’t end up having to go back through all 1,300 articles and having to either edit them or rewrite them; what a project that would be! lol

In any case, I hope you stick with me as I enter this next phase of exploration. I think this next 5 months is going to bring great strides; that is, if I can get beyond these Google updates and get some of my traffic back. Now there’s a subject I hope I don’t have to talk about again in the next 100 posts.
 

Business

Are We Right To Fear “Too Big”

12 Comments

In the last few weeks the names Facebook and Google have come up a lot in conversations around the world. To many it’s for different reasons; to me, it’s for the same exact reason. Yes, it’s time for a minor rant.


by Henri Bergius via Flickr

People have been talking about Facebook for two things; going public and having their stock price not meet expectations, and of course for the privacy issue. For Google, it’s been their Penguin and Panda updates and a changing of SEO rules that have been standard for many years, rules they actually gave to us to follow.

However, what it boils down to in the end is our distrust for entities that have gotten too big, so big that they affect our lives even if we’re not a part of them. For instance, it’s my belief that every person in the U.S. is on either Google or Facebook, whether they know it or not. Either they have voluntarily “outed” themselves to establish a presence online or someone else has outed them. My grandmother never looked at a computer in her life, yet before I mentioned her when she got sick I could look up her name and find at least cursory information on her.

Why do we fear “too big” and should we? I tend to believe we should. After all, “too big” is what’s responsible for us being in the financial mess we’ve been in for the last 6 years, and trust me it’s been 6 years. The mega-banks were responsible for the housing crisis, and those same banks, along with many mega-international banks, were responsible for so many countries having their countries credit ratings drop and have some of those countries go into default.

In some countries Microsoft and Google are considered a monopoly. In this country, AT&T was broken up decades ago because they pretty much monopolized telecommunications, and they’re slowly working their way back into that same position. And have you wondered why so few cable companies control more than 95% of our cable access? Is there anyone in the country that actually has more than one cable choice in their area?

When companies get too big, they tell us it’s in our benefit because they can offer us services to make our lives easier. What we find in reality is that we pay more money for things and that they decide how to control our lives. Without Google being such a big deal, do you really think our traffic would have fallen do drastically over the past year? After all, there are other search engines; does a Google change in algorithms change how they work? And has anyone else noticed that at the same time the initial changes went through that Google reduced the amount they pay on your Adsense account per click?

There has never been a single company that’s grown big that’s benefited anyone. The auto industry needs to have multiple car makers so prices stay relatively low. We need multiple gas stations to help keep gas prices low. We need multiple mobile phone operators to help keep those prices low and offer choices when it comes to the services we want to avail ourselves of. We need multiple airlines so that they’ll compete for our business, even if the government is doing what it can to make air travel unpalatable.

Think about this; why don’t we trust our government, the people we elect to represent us? Because they’re too big, to the point where the majority of people that get elected have no idea what most of us go through because they haven’t been “us” in years, if ever. That goes for all branches of government, even some local town governments, which in my mind we don’t really need because it just means there are more levels of government to deal with and everyone passing the buck when we have specific issues we need addressed.

Unfortunately, I’d have to agree that we do have to worry about “too big”. I’d also have to say that there’s not much we can do about it either. Big government stinks, but look at what the Tea Party has done to it as a small group of politicians. Big cable stinks but look at all the services they can offer as opposed to the other companies that can offer some comparable channels, but nothing like what the big boys can. There aren’t a lot of options when it comes to operating systems for either computers or cellphones, and usually only the one option in a community for landlines.

Ah, but we do have some online options don’t we? There are other search engines, and if we stop catering to Google as much they’ll come around and start treating us fairly. You don’t have to use Facebook, as there are new networking opportunities coming up every day. You don’t have to use Twitter and based on figures an overwhelming number of people who sign up aren’t using it. If there’s the one place all of us really have options, it’s online. Sure, the big boys offer things we can’t get anywhere else as far as completeness goes, but there are multiple companies that offer at least pieces of things we want.

In other words, there are always choices online, and when we start thinking that one company has too much leeway over us we can choose someone else and help them grow. or create something yourself and become the player you were always meant to be.

Just stay humble; otherwise, we’ll have to think about leaving you as well. 🙂
 

Blogging

Internet Protection Act

8 Comments

Most of you aren’t used to my writing shorter posts, but I think this one should qualify as that, even if the video adds another 4 1/2 minutes to your pleasure. lol

In New York, there’s something new that’s been introduced in Albany that’s going after anonymous trolls online. It was introduced by two downstate state senators and it’s purpose is to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.”

Serious stuff. What’s my take on it? See below:

Now, what’s your opinion on this?