I recently got an email from a new blogger asking me about Kontera, so I thought I'd give a post on what I think about this evil contextual advertising.

What is Kontera? Kontera automatically turns normal words on your site into a real ad link. You as a publisher get paid for the clicks. It's kinda like Adsense, except really annoying in my opinion. You may have seen it on sites and wondered what it was. Well it's not links from the site itself. Kontera will make a link out of any word on your site that they want. You have no control over it. Damn that.

On my GPT tips page, I used to have a little trick on there that explained how you could use your same email address for GPT sign ups. I'm not going to explain how it's done. Because some readers may just go right on ahead and try it out.

Early last month in March, GetPaidTo got a review here on CashJuke. Thomas Dietzel from Dietzel and Dietzel Inc, who have many incentive sites under their belt kindly let me know how the dot trick resulted in 26,000 in chargebacks from one of their advertisers because of the low quality in the leads. CashJuke wasn't open in January 08' (we launched in February 08'), so obviously I did not invent the trick or contribute to hurting them. I had no knowledge of it. This isn't the only trick that gives low quality leads. Using private numbers also does it. But I also feel that without a couple of these things, not many people would be using GPT sites anymore.

The point of this post? Don't try to make easy money even easier. If I had any knowledge of the money and problems simple tricks would cost, I wouldn't have told anyone about them. Fraud forces GPT sites to close down, so you're out of another money maker. These guys spend a lot of time building a site and making money from it (with your help) and splitting that money with you. It is the fraud that will cause incentive sites to one day disappear. Also if you take a look, you can see that the amount of affiliate networks accepting GPT sites are decreasing in numbers. A lot of people use them correctly to make some extra money, do you want to ruin it for everyone? I'm just assuming that the majority of the "cheaters" are in their early teens.

Bum marketing is nothing new to many people who have been making money online for a while. But it is in fact a great method to make money by writing articles on article directories. EzineArticles is one example of an article site, but I'll list some more recommended directories later on in this post.

So what exactly is the bum marketing method? It's just another word for article marketing basically. It's a free way to market on other sites. Popular article sites tend to do very well in search engine rankings. I guess the "bum" comes in because you're using someone elses website to write your articles (on the article directories). These article sites allow you to link back to your website at the end of your article, also known as a "resource box". This is where you leave your link to your page all about the product or service you was just writing about. With of course your affiliate link. It's important that the article you're writing is related to the affiliate product or service you're trying to make money from.

Here are a few things you'll need to do before you begin your journey with bum marketing.

Let me run through this..

Lets say I see a good health or exercise campaign on one of my affiliate networks. Now I'll do some keyword research on something related to the product using a keyword suggestion tool. I won't use keywords that are too saturated of course, but I'll use some keywords that do get a good amount of searches per day.

Now I have my product and keywords I want to use. For example, "bowflex reviews" gets an estimated 56 searches per day on average. This might be something good you could market if they have an affiliate program. Your article could rank at the top of the searches in Google. Make sure to use the keyword in the title of your article, and a few times inside the article. I'll now begin writing a high quality article for it (make sure you do some research on the product so you know some stuff about it). Now leave your link at the bottom of the article inside your resource box.

Here are some article sites you can submit to..

Do you love to read? If you're determined to make money online, then you're going to need to add a handful of great blogs to your daily agenda for frequent visits. I honestly can't count the hours I've spent browsing blogs and learning what I know today. Operation Bob is one blog I recommend that you add to your list. I'm going to be honest here. I hate most blogs. The reason? They're blogging for all the wrong reasons. Operation Bob writes for the right reasons, and it shows in his articles. Any site filled with daily sponsored posts, I steer clear of. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with making money with your blog (that's one of the reasons for blogging) but if you actually love it, that sets you apart from the rest of the money hungries and will pay off in the end. Bob tells you his honest thoughts as well as some ways to make money online.

At Operation Bob, you can expect to see quality posts. This site is driven by a work at home dad. Go show him some love.

I'm constantly on the lookout for great referral programs and even better sign up bonus's. It doesn't matter if it's a GPT site or any other site - it's still free money. I know how tiring all those small referral programs can be. So here's a good deal on a program you just might like better than your current payment transfer service, which is probably PayPal.

Revolution Money Exchange is a new payment network similar to PayPal. I had heard about it sometime last year, but forgot about it until the other day when one of our forum members made a post about it. So I decided to look into it further.

When signing up, you're asked to fill out your personal info, including your social security number. That might make you feel a little nervous, but it's over a secure server and is a must-have to know who you are and to prevent frauds. So I sign up and automatically have $25 in my account. You can request a check, or fill out your bank info (not required) to have it deposited to your account. The referral program - Currently, you will get paid $10 per referral you send to them and sign up. They have a little button (shown below) that you can put on your personal profiles, websites or anywhere else.

After checkng out the user interface, I'm really liking this service as an alternative to PayPal. It has some cool features such as the "negotiation" one that allows you to suggest an amount that is different from the original amount sent or requested. The “suggest new amount” feature lets you negotiate transactions directly with another user. With their heavy promotion and the great referral program, I can see these guys getting pretty big. I'll report back and let you know how they're doing for me. As for now, enjoy your $25 sign up bonus. It ends April 15th 2008.