In many posts on this blog, and on various message boards,
and on my sites, I have promoted InstantBuzz as a great way
to build a list, promote a product, and gain exposure for your website.

I also, on many occasions, stated that InstantBuzz does not generate pop-ups.

I have now seen irrefutable evidence that some marketers have discovered a way to use the IB toolbar to generate pop-ups (which, incidentally, are not blocked by adblocker software).

I have no idea if the site owner will take action on this, or if it’s all just part of the game, but I personally will not continue to promote the system as long as the ability to cause undesired pop-ups remains.

And to those who took action based on my recommendations… I am truly sorry.

Wendy

After reading a few people comment positively about LinkMetro.com, I decided to give it a go.

I added three sites, the three most likely to have link partners in such a directory, and got immediate responses for each.

Unfortunately, the responses were from online pharmacy sites which aren’t exactly related, and definitely are not the types of sites I’m interested in exchanging links with.

I checked back earlier this evening after I got a new email from Linkmetro saying a different site had requested a link, only to find that the site name and web address were completely blank. So was the space where I was supposed to be able to accept or reject the offer.

When I checked back again a few minutes ago, I did find the problem mostly fixed, and the site was marginally related, but the link to add or reject was still not working, so I will check again tomorrow.

While I was there, I added the site I just finished this afternoon to my list…. it seemed to work fine up until the site tried to calculate the pagerank (which, I am sure, is 0 since the site was just added to my DNS ten minutes ago). It decided my new site had a pagerank of 209 out of 10.

Wow, huh?

Well, needless to say the grapic for a pagerank of 209 didn’t exist, so there’s a big ugly missing image block beside my listing.

I have a feeling Linkmetro is not quite ready for the big time.

Still in need of a good link exchange program? The most reliable I’ve found so far is Site Sell’s Value Exchange.

After posting my last list of article directories (see Superfast content…), a few people pointed out some other sources of articles:

- Wikipedia articles are released under the GNU Free Documentation License which allows for copying, derivitave and commercial works based on the articles, with some restrictions. Read the license for details.

-Another reader suggested Article-Emporium.com and iSnare.com. Both are excellent. Thanks!

-I also stumbled across some excellent commercial filler articles available at NewsCanada.com

-And while it won’t help with Google, if you want a really quick and easy way to add fresh headlines to your site, FreshContent.net is as easy and fast as it gets.

I’m not forgetting that the Open Directory Project has free content by way of a directory of links (with some stipulations attached), and I’m certainly not ignoring RSS feeds as a source of content, but both of those require their own posts somewhere down the line.

Well, I’m still nowhere near $100 a day, but I’ve got a half a dozen sites up, and some of them are starting to bring in a little traffic even while they languish in Google’s sandbox.

My new sites (combined) are bringing in around $9 a day in AdSense revenue, $100+ a month in CJ commissions, and my last two bi-weekly Clickbank cheques contained between $90 and $100 in sales from the new sites. There is also a rather insignificant amount coming in from Amazon and TrafficPoint, which is hardly worth mentioning.

Sooo… even if I don’t make the ultimate goal of $100 per day in 12 weeks, this experiment certainly hasn’t been a failure.

Two more sites are on the way before Sunday, and who knows where things will head once all these sites wiggle out of the Google sandbox for their key search terms.

So, we poor Canadian taxpayers are spending millions on an inquiry to find out where millions more dollars got sent in the sponsorship scandal. To add more insult to injury we’re paying for the Liberal “secret war room” where they figure out how to minimize the impact of the revelations on the Liberal party. So far, the best they’ve managed to come up with is, “yes, we’re clearly corrupt, but the Conservatives are scaaaarrry.”