Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Blog money: Added note

The preceding post discusses Mark Penn's inane assertion that one can make $75,000 writing a blog that attracts 100,000 visitors a day. His claim has made lots of folks in the blogsphere laugh. Alas, this silliness has a serious side.

Right now, an omnipresent ad campaign promotes the idea that one can make hundreds of dollars -- if not thousands of dollars -- each and every day, by setting up dozens of insta-blogs. These ads often attract the viewer's eye by presenting a picture of a check which allegedly came from Google -- although, strangely enough, the green check in the picture never resembles the actual Google checks I have received. (The real ones are white with no background motif.) In one spectacular variant, the person holding the green check is a buxom lass displaying the kind of cleavage one associates with 18th century bar wenches in Hammer horror movies.

These offers have obvious appeal to people who have lost their jobs. Alas, such ads (text versions of which have appeared on this very page) are a scam. Always.

Rubes are asked to fork over hundreds of dollars for a blogging "kit." Some of the information in the kit is false; the rest is available for free online. In short and in sum, marks are instructed to set up dozens of fake insta-blogs which present no original content. These "blogs" exist for one reason: To present links provided by Google's Adsense program. In the real world, few people visit those fake blogs -- and those who do stumble across them instantly see what's going on. Nobody clicks on the advertising links. (Well, almost nobody. A few dollars may trickle in over the course of a year -- hardly enough to cover the cost of the kit.)

The only people making money are the grifters selling kits. The marks who follow the instructions set out by these kits end up wasting hundreds of hours -- time more productively spent looking for a new job.

Mark Penn's egregious article gives false legitimacy to the grifters' spiel.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Obviously, having made your fortune, you wish to deny others the same opportunity.

Terry said...

These techniques, once discovered by Google, will get you banned from their index too. And on the net, being ostracized by Google is akin to being dead or not having existed at all!

Erick L. said...

Between smart venture capital, stupid venture captial, honest revenue and shady accountiung, how can anyone sort though the numbers behind the web economy?

When I think about the web economy it often reminds me of some of the shops and boutiques that I see downtown and at strip malls. No one ever seems to go inside these places, but they stay open for years. Somebody has to be paying the rent, but who?

Joseph Cannon said...

I dunno, Erick. I've wondered about that myself.

But I know this: Penn's an idiot. Now I know why Gore and Hillary canned his ass.

Caro said...

Well, I always heard that to take advantage of a gold rush, go in business to sell shovels to the miners.

Hey, maybe Mark Penn’s firm was hired to promote those kits!

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

RedDragon said...

I've seen the ad you describe, the booby girl with the check, on Drudge