On December 27, PayPal announced a “virtual debit card”, letting you make online purchases everywhere MasterCard is accepted.

Nice, but what I'd like is the ability for my users to use their credit card without having to create a PayPal account.

AdsBlacklist.com [is] a service which generates a list of URLs based on a URL and a set of keywords you provide. You can then copy & paste this list into your Google AdSense competitive ad filter* to (supposedly) increase ad revenues by up to 50%.

I'm going to try this and see if it actually works. I'll report back later. Note that up to 50% include increasing ad revenue by 1%.

This month, I've done the ReviewMe experience and posted several reviews. This entry is my wrap up. Two weeks ago, I posted a negative review of ReviewMe. Mostly because my readers were negative about me posting off topic. Within 24 hours, I received two on-topic review requests from ReviewMe. Convenient? Very! I posted those two reviews and didn't get any negative feedback at all from my readers. It was a much better experience, but I was very interested in the convenience of having received two on-topic review requests in the day after I complained that I was getting any on-topic review requests. Since then, I received no new review requests at all, even though I have four blogs in the ReviewMe database with excellent rankings.

• iBLOGthere4iM
• Besting Adwords
• The RSS Blog
• Destroy All Malware

1. HitTail
2. The ReviewMe Experience
3. AdSense pay 78.5%
4. ReviewMe Trial
5. Making money with ads? Not much longer...
6. Does AdSense Arbitrage Work?
7. AdBrite Sucks!
8. Free Advertising: Microsoft $200, Google $50
9. Double AdSense Income With One Simple Tweak
10. Making Money From A Blog - November Recap

Performancing, who runs an advertising network [cut] is being aquired by PayPerPost [cut].

I'm now recommending against anyone using BlogAds. I'm personally going to remove mine in the coming weeks, as the remaining ads expire. You may remember that my ads were not expiring properly, that is, ads that have run their complete term continued to run for days and weeks at no cost to the advertiser and no profit to me. I was in contact with a BlogAds person who fixed the problem. Unfortunately, he didn't fix it, he simply patched it. Expired ads are running again in my blogs. This problem has now persisted for more than a month total and more than 3 weeks since I first reported it. And this is far from the first bug I've had with BlogAds, there have been too many. In addition, I make very little money with BlogAds compared to FeedBurner FAN, AdSense and Amazon. I suspect the amount of money I make on BlogAds is less than the amount of money I lose having those ads push AdSense below the fold.

Blake Ross of Firefox fame also has trouble with Google's new ads or tips. He spells out a few advantages, like an image, that are giving Google an unfair advantage. Google needs to respond to this. Are these regular AdWords ads? Can anyone have an image?

http://www.blakeross.com/2006/12/25/google-tips/

Matt seems confused that Google is advertising their Blogger blog hosting in the search results. He also suggests that somehow this is unethical. Matt is a major competitor of Blogger. I think that explains the story. Do other ad networks think that advertising AdSense and AdWords in the SERPs is unethical?

More...

• http://photomatt.net/2006/12/24/blogger-ads/
• http://flickr.com/photos/photomatt/331691032/
• http://blog.outer-court.com/forum/80222.html

Barry Schwartz over at SERoundtable has capture the first sighting of the Google Quality score in an AdWords campaign.He has a screenshot of the new update that I have not been upgraded to yet in our many accounts. It appears as if Google has replaced...

As we wrap up 2006 we have some great news for 2007!  Beginning January 1, 2007, standard Amazon Associates payments will be monthly instead of quarterly, paid approximately 60 days after the end of each month. For example, referral fees earned in...

Great news. Well kinda. You won't actually get your money much earlier, but at least you'll get a monthly check instead of a quaterly one.

Immediately after I posted my first quite negative review of ReviewMe, I received two more ReviewMe requests. Amazing timing. Coincidence? In the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, "In my experience, there's no such thing as luck." Regardless, I had two more ReviewMe requests and these were much better than the previous request. Hopefully, the experience also proves better, because I was gun shy from the reader feedback I received in the first.

I just wrote the reviews this morning, so I'm gonna hold off any immediate feedback for a few days. Stay tuned till then. And if you want, you can read my ReviewMe reviews and tell me what you think of them.

My first review from last week.

• PokerOnAMac.com

My two newer reviews from this morning.

• SEO Glossary
• Norton Antivirus 2007

What I can say for now is that the first review was far off topic and I only engaged it because I had already waited a month and no other review requests was presented me. I didn't think I would get another chance, so I opted in. My readers didn't like that the review was so far off topic. These two newer reviews are perfectly on topic for the targeted blogs, so I was comfortable moving forward with them and giving ReviewMe another chance. Last, the first review was on The RSS Blog, which is a magnitude more popular than Besting AdWords or Destroy All Malware, the targets of the later reviews. This means that I'm paid much less also. The first review cost $250 to the advertiser, of which I earned $125. The second and third reviews cost $100 each, with $50 to me.

The following is a paid review:

Some of you may find yourself confused when I start using those SEO jumbo words like 301 or 404. What in the world is a 404? SEO Book actually has glossary that contains many of these terms. The glossary is very exhaustive, containing hundreds of definitions. You can also link directly to any of the definitions from your blog posts. For instance, if you want to link to a definition of Above the Fold, then you use the following link; http://www.seobook.com/glossary/#above-the-fold. Simply hover over any definition heading in the glossary and you'll see the bookmark link in the status bar. You can also suggest new definitions for the glossary by leaving a comment here for the author. The definitions are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. That means you copy the definitions to your website or blog, but you must give attribution back to the original glossary.

SEO Book also has a blog , which is quite informative and popular. It's a must subscribe for anybody that wants to know the ins and outs of search engine optimization. You can also get the SEO Book blog via Rmail by subscribing using the following form.

Last, there actually is an SEO Book written by the author called Aaron Wall and you can buy it on his website.

http://www.seobook.com/glossary/

Frank Gruber sent me a link to his review of ReviewMe. Frank is a B-list blogger and he received 4 reviews of which none were interesting to him. He declined them all and $500.

http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2006/12/reviewme_the_fi.html

Over a month ago, I signed up for ReviewMe. Then several weeks later, I got my first ReviewMe request. The website that wanted a review was completely off topic for the blog they wanted the review posted to. But, I wanted to check out the process and write this final report. I wrote the review and posted it to The RSS Blog.

The feedback was quick and all over the place. Some people hated it. OK most! 

• Mark Woodman wondered if this would affect my subscription count. The immediate answer is NO, as yesterday was the first time ever that my subscription count was above 6000 three days in-a-row.
• Another reader mentioned that I shouldn't review stuff this far off topic. I have to agree with him, but after a month, this was my only submitted review requests and I really wanted this experiment. Sorry to my readers.
• A third reader commented that I was simply encouraging my users to experiment with feed filtering services. She also asked if all my reviews would begin with the obvious disclaimer "The following is a paid review". I confirmed this would be true.
• A couple more readers were enraged. One suggested that I disclaim all my posts from there forward and the other wrote that I was being dropped from his must read list to his secondary reading list. The second guys IP address wasn't on my radar, so I don't know who it was, but they were reading The RSS Blog regularly enough according to the server logs.
• The last comment was from a reader that was happy that my ReviewMe earnings would be donated to Sick Kids. 

Now onto the process at ReviewMe. I have to admit their website was well laid out. I knew exactly what to do, which is the reason I used them in the first place. Other Pay Per Post services scared me off because it wasn't as easy to use. On the bad side, I submitted two 4 star blogs according to their rankings and two 3 star blogs, but only received one review request in over a month. Further, the review request was completely off topic, so I wouldn't normally have accepted it had their ad inventory not been so low. The low inventory suggests that ReviewMe won't be around for long. Last, I was paid $125 and the advertiser paid $250.  That's the amount that a 4 star blog would receive. I think this equates to a B-list blog. That's not really a lot of money for a B-list blogger. My 3-star ReviewMe blogs are C-list blogs, but reviews on those blogs would cost $100 with $50 going to the blogger. Conclusion; this doesn't seem like it would lead to any substantial revenues for any bloggers. Adding the lacking revenues to the negative readers reviews and you have an obvious answer.

Avoid ReviewMe until you hear otherwise.

Update: A couple hours after I posted this review, I got another review request. This one is very much on subject for the targeted blog. More to come.

Update II: In the 12 hours after this post, I got two review requests. Both on-topic for the target blog.

Every few weeks, I'm asked via email to help someone fix their AdSense, which isn't working with their XHTML. I thought I'd just re-iterate this entire problem. If you serve XHTML (not HTML) webpages with the Content-Type application/xhtml+xml, then your ads will not appear in Firefox (they will work in IE). This is because AdSense uses constructs that are not valid with XHTML. The solution is to return webpages with the Content-Type text/html.

More...

• http://keystonewebsites.com/articles/adsense.php

Google’s Matt Cutts is on debunking duty lately – everything from “Google is in bed with the CIA” to “the Google Toolbar indexes your page” – but there’s one big rumor that hasn’t been touched...

Hmmm! Phillip Lenssen reveals that a website read by Matt Cutts is break the rules and getting away with it. Can't wait to hear a response to this one.

It’s amazing just how heated of a subject “click fraud” is. When I published details of my conversation with Google, I made no attempt to cover both sides of the story. Long time readers will know that I’ve never believed the...

Randfish runs down what search engine panelists are saying about PayPerPost. The panelist suggest they won't be penalizing PayPerPost in their search engines. Matt Cutts replies otherwise.

http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1576

Andy Beal is reporting that Google click-fraud is less than 2%.

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/12/google-click-fraud-rate-two-percent.html

The sitemaps protocol is being adopted by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.  All three are now collaborating on a website to help promote this XML protocol.

http://www.sitemaps.org/

WebProNews interviews Vanessa Fox of Google about sitemaps and SEO (PageRank, indexing, linking, etc). Must view for anyone trying to SEO a website.

Thanks to Scott Kingery for the link [play tag with me].

Here's something I should've been using these last couple weeks; Amazon Gift Certificates. Go to Amazon Gift Certificate Central and get your own banners.

I got my first review request for ReviewMe. The post will be on The RSS Blog later today. I signed up just to trial the system, but I'm surprised how much money ($250) they are willing to pay me for 200 words. ReviewMe keeps half ($125). The pay amount is based on your blogs ranking, so most blogs will like much less (guessing $100; $50 post split).

http://www.reviewme.com/

Update: Let me add that this is 100% trial. All my ReviewMe earnings during the trial will be donated to SickKids. I'll post the receipt later.

Tis the season for online advertisers to attract new customers. If you have a website, blog, etc. and are looking for the perfect time to build exposure while freeloading, then these offers are for you. This is likely to be the best compilation of free offers available for some time.

read more | digg story

I tried the Microsoft $200 promotion and got error after error before giving up.

I've seen too many bloggers who constantly re-jig their blog(s). It's very common, even Scoble did it, even I did it. But, if you are going to re-jig your blog, here's 10 very Important rules.

1. Don't lose RSS readers. Never invalidate an RSS feed. You can use FeedBurner if you need to move your feed around.
2. When you make changes, tell your readers. They may need to update their reading routine, change a subscription, etc.
3. If you move your main blog homepage, then redirect your previous blog homepage. You can use <META> HTML tags or simply provide a really obvious link to the new blogsite.
4. Don't lose Google Juice. Never invalidate an existing link. Forward old links to your new blog or just leave the previous page intact.
5. Avoid duplicate content. If your content is found at multiple domains, then you may be penalized by Google's index. Either redirect your old URLs to the new blog or leave the previous page intact.

No business likes to be caught in Google's crosshairs.  But one small software outfit, Central Desktop (which competes with Google's recently acquired JotSpot), is charging that Google competes unfairly by using its own advertising system to boost...

An interesting point of view.

As most of you know, I’ve started running FeedBurner ads on the blog as well my full feed RSS. FeedBurner ads do really well and offers a high CPM rate. However, one of the problems I am facing is its inability to default to another network when...

A few weeks ago, I blogged about Casey Serin. He’s the 24 year old real estate investor from Sacramento who is facing foreclosures on all his properties because he didn’t follow basic investment rules. I Am Facing Foreclosure is Casey’s blog about...

Lower Traffic, Higher Income For the month of November, John Chow dot Com received 217,876 unique visitors and 329,853 page views. This is down from the record breaking 229,144 visitors and 360,967 page views posted in October. While traffic is...

John gives us insight into where he is making his money. In particular, he mentions Vibrant IntelliTXT as good sources of income. I'll have to check them out.

Toivo Lainevool reported which traffic referrers are converting best for him.

Today, I noticed that ads are not expiring properly on BlogAds. I have ads, that have long expired and are still running. In fact, I don't think any new ads since the last BlogAds upgrade have expired. This isn't the first time that BlogAds screwed up. But, it might be the last. At least for me.

Update: I got a response from BlogAds. It wasn't too impressive. They asked which blogs the expired ads are on. Add laziness to incompetent and consider all my BlogAds strips removed.

Update II: BlogAds fixed the problem, but now my readers have to refresh their cache in order to remove the expired ads. This is pathetic!