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!

For some time now I used to have this perplexing problem where I simply couldn’t access the administrative section of my blog without it timing out on me. I couldn’t figure out what was causing the latency issues, and I also noticed that if I tried to access it from a different browser or different IP address, the issue would usually clear itself up. It was an anomaly that only occurred every now and then, so I wasn’t too worried.

Then yesterday it started happening again. Only it got worse. MUCH worse. So bad in fact, that I couldn’t access the Admin page at all. Then I started getting 500 internal server errors after trying to access my admin from different browsers and different IP addresses. Nothing seemed to work.

I finally submitted a ticket to my hosting service, Hostgator. I was a little worried that I would get some half baked tech support dude, but these guys really rose to the occasion. After scouring over every nook and cranny of my blog, a network admin emailed me to let me know they they had been experiencing a lot of issues with WordPress blogs that day, and the only common denominator that they could find was that we all had Akismet installed. They since learned that it was an issue on the manufacturer’s side. The network admin then deactivated my plugin and asked me to check my blog again.

Instant access! Yaaaaaay! My admin page was now loading, and it was smoking fast too. I couldn’t believe it.

But now I had another problem. I no longer had protection from comment spammers, and my blog suddenly became open season for these scumballs. I was already getting comment spam while I raced to my options page and set all future comments to moderated status as a temporary fix.

I then went to the home site for Akismet (which is developed by Automattic,) to see what news there were regarding this issue that was apparently affecting quite a few WordPress based blogs.

Nothing. There was no update to speak of, and the Akismet blog itself hadn’t even been updated in a month. So I used their contact form to send them a polite note inquiring about this issue and how soon it would be resolved. No response. So not only did they hose the administrative portion of my blog, but they blow me off on top of that?

Suck it, Automattic. It’s obvious your support system isn’t worth a hill of smelly beans. This was a problem that had the capacity to lock out God only knows how many WordPress users from accessing the admin portion of their blogs, but this seems to matter to you, not at all.

I suspect this might have something to do with using an older version of the Akismet plugin though (I was using 2.0). When I upgraded to 2.02, everything seemed to work fine. But just by going to their website, you’d have no idea that there had been any updates since 2.0. There’s no changelog or even any other basic information, except for a download link for “2.0″ which in actuality was really 2.02.

This wouldn’t frost my cookies so much if it had been any other typical third party plugin, where you can only expect so much support from its developer. This was a plugin developed by the makers of WordPress itself, and one that required API access to their servers. If something goes wrong, it’s liable to create problems not just for them, but for your blog as well.

So… how about a little bit of courtesy here for us little people, mmmm-kay?