Internet Business Daily

I have seen 4 separate cases this weekend of my friends on facebook “liking” something that was clearly not intended. The links that are “liked” always have very catchy titles such as the image below. I clicked on the link and it took me to a page which just said “click here to continue.” I was smart enough not to click that link but I’m sure it would have installed malware on my computer. The image below is what the phishing attempt looked like (definition: phishing):

Five minutes later another friend of mine posted something to my wall saying something along the lines of “OH MY GOD I cannot believe how much MONEY I made in just 1 month.” The link sent me to an affiliate marketing play, one that is very obvious to an affiliate marketer. It was a page meant to look like a news website that promoted a “make money” offer.

I told all of my friends to change their passwords and delete the links. If you see any of these shady links on your profile page or see things you “like” that you don’t remember clicking, delete the link and change your password immediately. Be careful online!

2nd UPDATE: The page has been removed and the writer has been deleted.
UPDATE: I looked through all of this writer’s articles and they all contain shady affiliate links. Yahoo, you are stupid.

This must be the most ridiculous thing I have seen in a while. Either a writer at Yahoo! Shine’s account got hacked by an affiliate or someone at Yahoo got tricked into posting this article with affiliate links.

Using 50′s images (shown here) and a story about how 50 cent lost a bunch of weight for a movie, an affiliate marketer was able to get 2 of his affiliate links to weight loss products to the Yahoo homepage. Someone is definitely making a lot of money on this. Someone at Yahoo really messed up on this one. This is one of the shadiest (and funniest) affiliate marketing plays I’ve seen in my time.

Finally, after years with the Adsense product, Google finally reveals how much it takes from the revenue. The secret number: 32% worldwide. This means that publishers keep 68% of revenue generated from running Google Adsense on their site. You can read more about this from the Google Adsense blog post here.

Google has always been a black box when it comes to their cash cows: Adsense and Adwords (the two sides of their advertising product). I think this a great step towards transparency for Google, since for years they held the idea that as long as their stock price keeps going up, investors should be happy even if they had no idea how Google actually calculates revenue.

The 68% revenue is for Adsense for content publishers. Google’s search partners get less coming in at 51%. Google does go on to say that revenue from different products they offer differ because of costs to operate those products, which is understandable. Hopefully over time they will be even more transparant with their products since without partners (content publishers), Google would lose a lot of business.

I love when people get creative like this. A group of improv actors got together and did a funny Ghost Busters tribute in New York’s public library. Although it looks distracting to people trying to get work done, it was all done in good fun and people seemed to enjoy it. Check it out:

As you can see, I have added a simple Facebook “like” button to my blog on article pages. It’s a very easy way for people to share articles they like and also helps drive more traffic to your sites. Since it seems most people have Facebook accounts now-a-days, there should be plenty of users on blogs liking things. Best part is, it’s really easy to add to your blog too. Here is the code:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php the_permalink()?>&layout=standard&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:530px; height:60px"></iframe>

Simply add this on your single.php page anywhere you like. You can change the parameters to customize the link button however you want. I think this is an awesome little trick and will drive more traffic than any of those “share” buttons on most blogs (including mine).

I just did a Google search and a different look came up. This is the most significant change I’ve seen Google do at one time. I’m not sure if this new page has been rolled out to everyone, or is just being tested. The Google logo is now bigger and crisper. The search bar seems to be more 3D. Even the fonts look different. Check it out (click image to see bigger size):