Ezine Advertising

First of all, what is SpinSuccess?

According to their website, SpinSuccess is a search engine submission service specialized in “promoting top earning affiliate web sites” that guarantees that they can do the same for you “no matter what type of web site that you use for your business“.

Here is one of their first statements:

“Here at SpinSuccess, we have been helping our clients gain staggering amounts of search engine exposure since December of 1999.”

If you check WhoIs database you find out that SpinSuccess.com has been created on March 2004. Oops!

One of their first promises is that “Our team will first manually submit your site to the top 15 search engines“. What exactly are these top 15 search engines in their opinon it’s not very clear. However, they use some logos on their website and you may suppose that the logos belongs to these top 15 search engine.

Let’s take a look at some of the logos:

1) DMOZ – this is not a search engine but a directory. More than this, your affiliate website will never be accepted in this directory. Read here DMOZ policy.

2) Altavista – this is finally a search engine but … Altavista does not have its database of websites but use Yahoo!’s database. So … no one can submit your website to Altavista. Check here and see for yourself.

3-4) Lycos & Hotbot – Hotbot’s Help page states very clear that “Lycos does not have a website submission form for Lycos Search or HotBot“. No one can submit your website to Hotbot or Lycos …

5) AOL – AOL uses Google, no one can submit your website to AOL.

6) About.com – is not a search engine

No more comments … but a final remark …

SpinSuccess also states that “in order to ensure indexing, your site must be submitted to the major search engines by hand“.

Sorry, but that’s a lie. There is nothing wrong to submit your website by hand to the major search engines, but this is NOT a must for ensuring indexing of your website.

Get a free blog hosted by WordPress, post a few posts for a couple of days and you’ll see that your website will be indexed by Google very soon if your website’s link is inserted in the posts of your blog. Or register with a forum having a high traffic – like Warrior Forum – setup your signature so that to contain your website’s URL, post a few comments on the forum and within a few days your website is indexed by Google. Without ANYONE submitting your website “to the major search engines by hand”.

Now you decide what is the answer to the question from the title of this article …

Usually when there is something wrong with a company or program, the people immediatelly start screaming SCAM! Well, in the real world there are more colors than black and white. That’s why I really cannot say that SpinSuccess is a scam. However, what it’s very clear is that they don’t know what they are talking about … or … they mislead the visitors in order to make them buy (not very nice marketing technique anyway).

During the last weeks I’ve noticed a certain buzz around 1on40. People discuss about it on forums, people purchase ezine ads for promoting them …

Let’s see what they promise:

Promise # 1: “Our service will submit and GET the NUMBER ONE position for any other type of web site on the TOP 40 top engines within 120 days”

Promise # 2: “Once at NUMBER ONE position we will leave YOUR web site there for 7 days to prove our ground breaking service.”

Now let’s do a simple math …

Suppose that today 19 people join and all of them compete for the SAME keyword.

1on40 promised that each site will remain as No. 1 for 7 days.

7 days each website x 18 websites = 126 days. This means that the 19th website is outside the 120 days deadline.

I can continue showing other examples of situations that may occur … but it doesn’t make any sense. If you do the math you see that not even Google can do what they promise unless the math is changed

Or it may be another explanation: 1on40 staff doesn’t know what Number One means. Maybe by Number One they understand the first 100 positions, or 1,000 positions

Now answer yourself to the question from the title!

Today’s question sounds quite strange and I bet everybody’s answer is

“No, why should I pay for freebies? It’s a nonsense. Do you know what freebies mean?”

Well, yes, I know what a freebie is, but it seems that many people pay for freebies …

While browsing forums or other places containing information about ezine advertising I noticed from time to time people being quite happy that they got nice results from their DOE membership. DOE stands for Directory of Ezines and is one of the few directories of ezines where you have to pay to get access to the ezines database. And the fee is not insignificant. It has 3 figures …

In the first instance I thought that the advertisers get special deals from the publishers but when I’ve read the terms for ezines publishers … nothing special. The ezine publishers are not required to offer any deal for DOE advertisers (the publishers may or may not offer a deal).

Then I really wonder why are they paying for their membership?

Is it too cheap and easy to search on Google for ezines targeted on their niche? They cannot afford to get something free? Huh?

On the other hand, when an ezine publisher needs to make an update, what she or he updates first? Her or his website or the DOE listing? What do you think?

So why pay for information you can get at no cost and updated 100%?

I really don’t know … but there are people out there paying …

If you want my advise … get at no cost what is at no cost and pay for what you really need to pay!

Adrian

P.S. Of course that if you’re very busy, or very lazy or just a helpless newbie, then the “Directory of Ezines” is a resource that may be quite useful for you. Such an aggregate information that you find in the directory is hard to find somewhere else. It cannot be very updated (see the reason above), but it’s useful.