I know talking about Facebook Ad trouble is sort of like beating a dead horse now, but this is my damn blog and I reserve the right to bitch.

Everyone who is in the know knows that IQ offers are hot. By hot, of course, I mean they’re converting wonderfully and not quite as regulated as other profitable offers. At least, that is the impression one gets while perusing Facebook with the sheer abundance of IQ ads to the right.

Now, I know the old song and dance; resubmit, tweak, resubmit, resubmit, tweak, resubmit, until eventually you get an intern that isn’t a complete tool to approve your ad. That’s all fine and good. But after having about a dozen IQ ads rejected, I decided to do a little experiment.

Instead of linking to the Challenge IQ offer at Ads4Dough (which is the one I so dearly wanted to promote), I decided to link somewhere else. Are you ready for it? I linked to an ACTUAL FREE IQ WEB SITE. That’s right. I found a non-profit (as far as I could tell) website that offered 100% free, legitimate IQ tests.

Knowing fully well that most Facebook interns shit their pants when you use the word “free” in your ad copy, I made sure to omit it. I then submitted two separate ads both linking to the free site, both using puzzle type images with very simple title and body messages that got the point across (while still avoiding the term ‘free’).

The result? I bet you can guess.

The content advertised by this ad is restricted. Per sections 8 and 9 of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines, this content is prohibited from being advertised on Facebook. Ads for this product, service or site will not be accepted in any form, and may result in your account being disabled.

So, now Facebook is basically threatening me for trying to spend my advertising dollars to sate the desires of their enthusiastic userbase to demonstrate their intelligence quotient so that they may pat themselves on the back and revel in their computer generated recognition. As retarded as it may be, college kids love that shit. So in essence, I was trying to spend my own money to enhance user experience, and I was not allowed to do so. What a shame.

Oh, but don’t think I’m giving up. I’ve already started tracking down young women that work for Facebook ON Facebook, then cross checking their names on MySpace and adding them as friends (using a different social network I think will rule out any chance of suspicion). Budding online romances will soon ensue, followed shortly by a flurry of ads for online casinos and fuck buddies on Facebook. And you’re all gonna be like WTF!?

Psh, Facebook. More like poopbook.

I know this is old news to some folks, but lately a couple people I’ve spoken to about this particular method of quickly generating original content were surprised by the idea, so I guess it may be worth sharing with my GIGANTIC READER BASE anyway.

As you may already know, Google is a little bit retarded when it comes to sorting out quality content from absolute nonsense. There are some that will disagree, and coincidentally those same people disagreeing are also complete morons. Google doesn’t know the difference. I’m not saying you shouldn’t write or pay for QUALITY content for your sites, but if you’re just trying to amass a network of sites to push link juice to one or two money sites, you probably don’t give a shit how quality the content is on those small, expendable sites.

The solution is rather simple. Let’s say you’re promoting a site about weight loss (how original of you). Now let’s say your primary keyword is “lose weight fast”. If you don’t remember anything from that high school Spanish class (the one you got an A in), then head over to the Google translator and translate it. The result will be “perder peso rapido”. Go ahead and copy that text, then go and do a regular Google search for that exact string of text.

Now, as we all know, the SERPs are always changing. But on this day of our Lord, when I searched “perder peso rapido” (without quotes), the first result was this article. So then I went ahead and took that text, and then copy + pasted it in yet another Google translation, this time with the Spanish and English variables swapped. Since Google is a well-oiled machine, it only takes a moment to translate the text. I then took the first line of translated text, “We tend not to advise methods of rapid weight loss”, and then searched that exact string (with quotes) on Google to see if any indexed pages had that exact same string. The result? Nope. 100% unique.

If you want to be more thorough, of course, you could search other strings of text in that same article to be sure. Once you post your article you can go ahead and check it against Copyscape for further verification.

Now, you should know that this is not 100% foolproof. For instance, sites like Wikipedia have Spanish versions of their pages translated that are exact if not very near matches, and content translated from there will likely be duplicate. Ideal sites are those which are actually based in the country from which the language you are searching is from, as these are most likely to have been originally written in that language.

And don’t just depend on Spanish, this will theoretically work with any language you can translate. However, the quality of the translation will vary, especially with more obscure languages. German is actually very close to English in structure, so you might have success using German as well.

This concludes your linguistics lesson for the day.

Well, I am home and safe and sound from Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, NV. There are still trace amounts of booze in my system but I am sober for the most part.

To be honest, I probably spent about an hour at the actual Summit. If they really wanted me to be more involved, maybe they shouldn’t hold the thing in the most distracting city in the world. I spent the vast majority of my time drinking and swearing like a sailor as well as donating large amounts of cash to various casinos.

Sunday and Monday night were the highlights, due to the fantastic open bar events. Traveling with my partners in crime, Lucas and Franco, we headed out Sunday night in search of this mysterious “Red Rock Mansion”. Here we are attempting to hail a cab. Lucas is the seemingly already drunk one drinking that disgusting Miller High Life, and I am behind him.

Thanks to our awesome cab driver, Ritchie (from Long Beach!), we managed to find the Red Rock Mansion. Actually also thanks to Crack who got the address for me. The venue was in a residential neighborhood and pretty low profile from the street.

So, when we finally got there, we were greeted with complimentary cigars. What a nice touch! Here is myself and Franco living the life with our cigars and some sort of grey goose concoction.

I got to meet lots of people that I know from Wickedifre/Cakes Chat, which is awesome. More than I can really remember actually. Something about free booze makes me drink at an absurd pace. I kinda feel like we left this party prematurely, but my gambling itch just needed to be scratched. Since we had got Ritchie the cabby’s phone number (since we knew we wouldn’t find a better cab driver), we called him and had him come chauffer us over to Fremont St (old school Vegas!).

After Fremont St robbed me blind, we drunkenly stumbled into some foreign non-Ritchie cab driven by a woman, and headed back to the hotel.

Monday I popped into the convention to see what was going down, and also to snag a bunch of beers from Max Bounty. I should probably sign up with them now…I’m sure I’ll get around to that. Tangy was hanging out at the Shoemoney exhibit thingy. He appeared to somehow be equally as drunk as he was the night before. Impressive! No pictures though. After all, I had just rolled out of bed and had yet to do my hair.

I heard a lot of people talking about how they were burned by Copeac and didn’t get an invite to their fancy exclusive party at the Sky Villa Suite at the Palms. I had no hard feelings towards them, however, mainly because I was invited. Heh! However, I really wanted to show Lucas and Franco a good time. Lucas is a great designer, but doesn’t have much to do with affiliate marketing. Franco hardly speaks English (he is visiting from Argentina). How was I supposed to get them in?

Well, pretty easy. We just strolled in around 9:30 and hung out. Thank you everyone for your kind hearts and hospitality. Here is some documentation of all the fun we had:

I probably should have taken more pictures. If anything, it would probably jolt my memory and help me remember all the stuff that happened that I’ve completely forgotten about. There are still some folks that I didn’t get to meet in person, but hopefully next time I won’t be so preoccupied with abusing my liver and more proactive in the meet and greet department.

Until next time…

Since I planned to head to this year’s western Affiliate Summit with two of my cohorts who are considerably less interested in the summit and substantially more interested in the debauchery of Las Vegas as well as the deep weekday discounts, I was not able to arrive at the start of the conference yesterday. However, fear not, I will be leaving in a matter of hours for Sin City.

My suitcase is open on my bed, half packed, and my cat is resting comfortably on top of my clean clothes. Oh, to be a cat.

With all the free passes that were going around this year, I decided that the best method of obtaining a pass to ASW would be to snag one of the freebies. It is for this reason that I am relegated to my Silver pass. There are some restrictions that come along with having such an economy pass, but none that I feel will remotely affect my experience (at least not significantly). After all, networking doesn’t happen in panels. It happens in bars. Preferably the “strip” variety. Yes, I’m talking about bars on the strip.

I will surely report upon my return on Tuesday.

eThug Diaries

I swore off new years resolutions a long time ago, but not too long ago I realized something had to be done about my terrible organizational habits. So, since I took proactive action BEFORE new years and decided to turn over a new leaf in that department, I think I have safely evaded any actual “resolutions”, and have remained true to myself. But that’s not really the point…

Basically what I’m trying to say is that whether you believe in new years resolutions or not, you should have a goddamn whiteboard. And I don’t mean some gay software type whiteboard. I mean a real-life whiteboard that you can stick on your wall with a black, red, and blue marker (dry-erase of course) handy.

I didn’t come to the conclusion that a whiteboard would solve all of my organizational problems on my own. It was actually suggested to me by Eli of Blue Hat SEO, a man who obviously knows what the hell he is talking about.

Okay, so maybe it hasn’t solved “all” of my organization problems, but it has helped out a great deal. It doesn’t just help you remember things, it stares you in the face and mocks you for being a lazy ass. What more could you possibly ask for?

So cruise on over to Office Depot or Staples or wherever the hell it is you go to buy your CD-R spindles and pick up a dang whiteboard, stat!

PS They’re also great for doodles.