The Honest Way

Following my last post , I’m breaking with my freelance schedule for a moment to make a post that was prompted by an email I receieved this morning.

First a little background.

Its no secret that I lost my adsense account back at the start of 2007 mainly due to my own inexperience and lack of knowledge, so to gain any kind of revenue, I had to look at alternatives. Several months went by with no real alternative so I concentrated on promoting affiliate products instead, which was a partial success, but nowhere near what I could have been making with a decent PPC publishing campaign.

I signed up for the Fair Ads Network (FAN) as they claimed to be creating a viable alternative to adsense with which invalid clicks could not be generated - one of the main reasons people lose their accounts either through their own foolishness, or by malicious rivals clicking their links via TOR proxies so as to avoid revealing their true identities. This would be the ideal PPC rival to a rigid and unrepenting adsense that would not under any circumstances listen to any arguments to reinstate the account.

Unfortunately, FAN was only in Beta and remained so until ealy this year, when they migrated to Gamma and finaly went live on 1st May 2008.

In the meantime, I investigated alternatives for those of use who do not dwell in the US (as a good many of Internet Marketers are not US citizens). Yahoo’s PPC is very good, but not available to us Johnny Foreigners. The next best effort was Bidvertiser.

Bidvertiser is a lot more work than Adsense or Yahoo and the potential to make money is much lower, but it works as an income stream. I put a lot of time in setting up my account on my various websites and started seeing my income gradually increase as my websites attracted gradually more traffic.

Well, up until yesterday, all was well.

Then I checked through my sites on Google Webmaster Tools and found that one of them still contained some of the malware that hackers had dumped on several sites on my server about a month ago. I went in and cleaned it out but instead of seeing the red mist and hitting the delete button, I copied some of the multitude of bad neighbourhood links that were “hidden” inside some of the blog’s posts with invisible “<ul>” tags.

I was already mad as hell so I investigated the owner of the url that featured heavily in that list and found a www. miniamo.com. That domain is owned by a certain person called:

Victoria walsh
PO Box 305
Edgecliff, NSW 2027
AU - That’s Australia, by the way
Tel: 0415144859
email: victoriawalsh@ciroahomewares.com

Oh, I hope she doesn’t mind me publishing her name and details here. Oops, is that an email address that spambots might be able to scrape from this post? Good. You see I probably made the mistake of emailing her yesterday to point out that her site might be the unwary victim of a hacking attack and malware added to certain sub-pages, which are MFA pages. She didn’t respond to my kindly attempt at assistance.

Well, this morning I got an email from Bidvertiser telling me that my account was terminated for generating invalid clicks.

If I was mad yesterday, I blew a damn fuse this morning.

There was no need to return my kindness with malice. I can only assume that she knew perfectly well what was lurking on her website and that she probably knew all about the hacking attack on my server. If that bitch has made a load of clicks on that site she hacked, then she had better watch out.

People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

If Bidvertiser do not reinstate my account because of that evil bitch, then I’m afraid I’ll be doing a little more than simply publishing her details.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way