A while back I wrote an in-depth post on how an online scammer was promoting cures for ulcers, shingles, warts and whatnot, all packaged in eBooks you download for a fee.

It’s time to take that a little further and dissect how these scumbags run their games online, especially when they’re working as affiliate marketers.

One particular affiliate marketer recently clued his audience in on how he might typically run his campaigns, and what he reveals is pretty telling. It starts out by picking out what affiliate programs they want to join, which is often accomplished by joining a major affiliate network like Commission Junction, and then performing a search for affiliate programs that offer the highest payouts in the niches they’re interested in.

In this case, diet pills were chosen. The marketer then set out to build what’s called a landing page (in this case a landing page is a website that’s designed to encourage the visitor to click on affiliate links and eventually buy the products mentioned, resulting in commission profits for the marketer.) Look at what he writes:

…I used a review page. I included those offers in a list, and picked an order I wanted. Based on the EPCs my affiliate managers told me, I put the highest offer as the #1 and called it the “Top Rated”, and then the lowest EPC I put at the bottom and rated “Good Choice”. They each were rated 1 to 5 stars. The top rated was 5 stars, and the bottom of the list was 3 stars. You don’t want to rate everything five stars or else it looks fake, and people can tell.

He built a fake review page with a ratings system that had nothing to do with the quality of the products in question. They were actually rated in terms of what would generate the most profits for him!

I sold myself as a legit review site that was there to help the visitor find the best diet pill for them.

In truth he had no interest in helping the visitor make an informed decision at all, but every interest in getting their money. Virtually no effort was made to research the quality of the products he was marketing, or provide original content that weren’t merely borrowed advertising slogans. The only thing that mattered was the bottom line: converting visits to profits. That he would lie and provide misleading information to do so bothers him, not at all.

It’s disconcerting to see a 19 year old punk exhibit such moral ineptness so early in his life, perfectly content in sacrificing his integrity and promoting low quality goods that pollute the Internet, just so he can churn a good profit. And why not? After all, he has already raked in close to a million dollars already with his “marketing” efforts. But then again, drug dealers do pretty good for themselves as well. So do scumbag lawyers. And spammers. And the Russian mob.

This post is already a bit long, so in another post I’ll analyze how these “landing pages” operate, and provide a live example so readers can learn how to successfully detect whether a website was built by an affiliate spammer or not. Stay tuned!

Today marks the one year anniversary of the Habitation of Justice. I should say something profound, so here it is:

The chocolate moose is not in season.

If you can figure that out, let me know. On a more serious note, as far as blogs go, this has been a pretty quiet year for me. There were times when I literally would get only one visitor a day, and sometimes I’d let weeks go by before blogging another post. I had been focused on other things, (like going to law school), but as soon as it became clear that my life wouldn’t be going anywhere any time soon, I started to pay more attention to my blog. The last few months were all about promoting my site and optimizing it for search engines so I could bring in more traffic. Now I’m getting upwards of about 100 visits a day, which is still nowhere close to my goal, but at least it’s much better than what it used to be.

Sooooo, now that it’s been a year, where do I go from here? What direction should I take this blog in? Ever since my law school dream bombed out, I’ve been entertaining fantasies on how I could make a living out of blogging instead, quitting my dead end job and hitting the road, living the life of a nomad as I moved from place to place, finding ways to help people I encountered in my travels, and experiencing exciting new adventures that would endlessly provide great writing fodder for my blog.

Could it happen? Not unless I can find a way to monetize my blog so that it brings in a full time income, a feat that only one half of one percent of all bloggers on the Internet have been able to accomplish. And usually those types of blogs have the kind of niches where they tell everyone else how THEY can make money off their sites. Either that, or it’s rife with affiliate marketing and other business related themes that I simply can’t get into. I just don’t have the mentality for it. I can only tell a story, and telling stories through this particularly venue has not proven to be an especially profitable one for most people.

But…. it’s all I got. After racking my brain trying to come up with a niche suitable for me, I decided that it had to be something that I could always love doing, rather than delving into a niche only because it might prove to be more of a money maker. I loved to write, but not about products and marketing and technology and business and whatnot, but about life in general. About what’s real. About my deepest emotions, hopes, and despairs. About my life experiences, and how readers could relate to it. But I realized in order to blog about life, I had to first HAVE a life.

So I guess that’s what will define my second year: finding a life worthy of blogging about, and telling a story that could immerse the reader in my riveting world. Well… at least as riveting as I can possibly make it.

Only time will tell if this will be my breakout year (both online and offline), and whether I’ll be able to generate the kind of readership that I’ve been looking for.

So stay tuned, it’s going to get very interesting from here on out.