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Qassia - backlink building and ad revenue sharing
2008-04-22 19:18:00
I have read about this new site on a Squidoo lens and decided to signup. Qassia proudly names itself an 'Intelligence Engine'; it's basically a collection of random pieces of information (they call them 'intel') about anything and everything - be it articles, guides, a few lines about your favorite pet, or even poetry. After you submit your 'intel', it will be screened and rated by other members, and then linked from your profile page. It will also be added to Qassia's directory, where people can find it when browsing the topics.Qassia offers two things to it's members: free backlinks, and ad revenue sharing. First of all, you can place a link to your sites next to each of your 'intel' pieces. It's a good idea to write an article and link it to your website which speaks about the same topic. The backlinks aren't worth much right now, but when Qassia becomes more popular (it's still in closed beta right now) they might become quite beneficial from SEO point of view.Ad r...
More About: Building , Revenue Sharing , Revenue , Sharing

Feedburner Sucks
2008-04-18 22:21:00
Seems like a great tool to track your subscribers, as well as add other cool things to your blog, right? Wrong! FeedBurner has been down lately way to often, and if you have their FeedFlare added to your blog (a little neat script that adds automatic social bookmars to the footer of every post), it makes your blog load extremely slowly. It takes a few minutes for most browsers to 'realize' that the FeedFlare isn't loading and to stop attempting it. The end result is you loosing your visitors.Screw FeedBurner. In the butt.Edit (April 22nd): It hasn't been down since (or I didn't notice it). And apparently this problem might only be limited to specific geographical locations. I wouldn't want to badmouth something which otherwise is a great service - but I still think making my blog unloadable is the worst thing such service could do!
More About: Feedburner , Sucks

Another new blog
2008-04-10 21:36:00
Ah, it seems I'm starting new blogs pretty often nowadays (even though it's only my second one). This time it's closer to the topic of Andrew Owns Agloco (making money online), but much more specific. Squidoography is my new blog dedicated to Squidoo social network that lets you build small, simple web pages on a specific topic, and make money from them. The idea is great: just write about anything you like (everyone's an expert on something, right?) and get paid for the visitors you get and the sales that your lens (that's what they call the pages on Squidoo) generates.With Squidoography, I will be tracking my progress by posting my monthly payouts, as well as sharing interesting ideas and reviewing my own and other interesting lenses. If you are interested in making money by writing about topics you like, or getting more visitors for your own blog or website, consider joining Squidoo. I believe I already had mentioned this project a number of times on AoA, which just proves h...
More About: Blog

My new blog
2008-04-04 14:05:00
I'm glad to say that after a long period of inactivity in this area, I finally started a new weblog! Following the 'blog about something you like idea', I thought, why not write about the MMORPG I'm looking forward to playing? Thus, my brand new Age of Conan blog was born. It is hosted by Blog ger too, since I don't want to worry about server costs right now - only to post some of my thoughts about the upcoming game. Even if my new blog has a completely different topic from this one, I think several months of writing to Andrew Owns Agloco was a great and educating experience (seeing how this was my first blog ever). Hopefully the things I learned will help me with AoCBlog too.I suppose I should tell you more about the game, too. Or not. You can find out everything if you just go to my blog, or even better, the official site for Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. Suffice to say, it's one of the most anticipated games in 2008 and the first one of the big three MMORPGs coming out ...

Google's Blogger and GMail down
2008-03-08 22:59:00
Well, apparently the great Google isn't immune to errors either. For the last hour or so, my blog was down - I was getting the 502 error. I've seen some people reporting the same errors with their GMail accounts and such.This is by no means a complaint. Blogger .com is, in my opinion, the best free, hosted blogging platform. They let you park a domain, they let you add ads, they allow adult content if you're into this stuff - all this for free, and you don't have to worry about server costs, huge traffic spikes from Digg and such, etc.As for the recent downtime and server error 502, I believe there should soon be a post on Blogger Status about this.
More About: Gmail

Come, join the debate I started
2008-03-06 00:54:00
As I posted earlier, I'm a member of a cool social networking site called Squidoo. They already paid me more money than Agloco ever did (LOL). It's a great social network; I have fun creating lenses (as long as they don't crash, which regrettably happens as well). Recently they gave me this cool badge for getting my debate lens in top 50:It's about the eternal question of who would win in a fight: a pirate or a ninja. Please join!
More About: Debate , Join

Come on, have a go!
2008-02-18 18:51:00
I think I'll let people have a go at Agloco, especially those who never believed it would succeed in the first place. Post a comment, say "told you so!". Bet it will feel kind of good to be right.

Death of Agloco
2008-02-07 14:54:00
It seems Agloco has finally died off completely, because now even their site isn't loading. About time, too!As for me, I'm making some cash with Squidoo and Yuwie, but not too much. I'm still earning more doing occasional jobs for people that involve writing and translating. Hopefully, my income from affiliate marketing will be my #1 earner one day.My money maker blog is still in the planning stage because I'm playing around with some other ideas first.
More About: Death

Life after Agloco
2007-12-28 23:20:00
I thought I'd post a short update regarding this blog. I will only be updating it occasionally from now on. When I sort some things out, I am going to start a new blog on making on internet marketing, search engine optimization, and making money online in general. It will also have a little unique twist to it to set it apart from other blogs of this kind just a bit.After I start this blog, I'll announce it here and then stop updating Andrew-Owns-Agloco completely. I'll also be rewriting, improving and then porting some of the better articles to the new blog.Andrew-Owns-Agloco will stay online and link exchange will remain intact for unlimited time, so if you have a link exchange with me, you don't need to worry about it disappearing.
More About: Life

AGLOCO Update Notice (new e-mail)
2007-12-10 17:26:00
You probably received this new e-mail from Agloco management today:Dear Name,We would like to update you on the status of AGLOCO's operations. We continue to believe in the AGLOCO concept, but our revenue is currently not sufficient to give Members a meaningful distribution. And though there are increases in membership, the resulting revenue is not enough to support operating costs. As a development team we are unable to continue to use our savings to fund the operations. If any Member would like to pursue continuing the operations of AGLOCO, you may contact us at agloco1@live.com .We would like to thank every Member for supporting our effort to bring a piece of the Internet directly to the user. We hope that we can find a way to keep the operations going.AGLOCO Development TeamThat is as good as confirming what we already guessed. Agloco is not going to make any payments, and there's no reason to continue promoting it or using the Viewbar. Even their e-mail states that the re...
More About: Mail , E-Mail , Update , Notice

Is Agloco a scam?
2007-12-04 13:10:00
After another week, it is going to be 2 month without a word from Agloco. Their blog is dead, no one uses the Viewbar anymore, and even the security certificate for agloco.com has expired. Many people would call Agloco a scam. Many would probably say "told you so". I'm not so sure about that myself. I think there are two possible versions:1. Agloco was planned as a scam from the beginning. Their goal all this time was to collect private information from the members to sell it later, as well as make as much money as possible from the Viewbar and advertisements.I don't find this very likely, because if they were planning to scam people from the beginning, they could have done a better job of it. Scam mers should give the members daily updates, nice promises, answer each and every question, and make sure everyone is using the Viewbar so they can maximize their revenue. I'm saying they did a bad job if it was a scam, since they didn't realize any of potential revenue from the site o...

rssHugger - free advertising for your blog
2007-11-28 16:17:00
I read an interesting post at download-agloco dot com the other day. It was about a nice, web 2.0 style website called rssHugger, which gives free advertising for your blog.rssHugger is a lot like Technorati in a way. They take the RSS feed of your blog and publish it on their home page and top100 list. Of course, since rssHugger is rather new, they don't have many members yet. I believe that is going to change soon, though. They are using an interesting marketing tactic: apparently, at first the cost of adding your blog to rssHugger was $10, and now it's free. I think that's even more effective than offering a free service from the start. Plus, you need to review their site in order to add your blog (that's what I'm doing right now), and that generates some nice free advertising for them. Even big blogs like JohnChow dot com have joined rssHugger.So, head to rssHugger, write a short review, and enjoy the free traffic.
More About: Advertising , Free , Blog , Vert

Hit2Hit review
2007-11-25 10:57:00
It was a while since I reviewed my last traffic exchange. I've stopped using them for promoting this blog, but I still use splash pages in traffic exchanges to promote various money making opportunities like Yuwie. I'm reviewing Hit2Hit manual traffic exchange this time.Hit2Hit is a big traffic exchange with over 20k members. They have 10 second timer and not very generous 0.375:1 surfing ratio. Hit2Hit emphasizes upgrading, which I don't like at all. Overall, it seems like it's one of those traffic exchanges which are designed to get people to buy upgrades, and it's not very good for free members. I have to admit, however, that Hit2Hit's upgrades are more valuable than those in some other exchanges, although they don't even come close to the upgrades that SmileyTraffic has.One of the good points of Hit2Hit, in my opinion, is their strict policy towards sites in rotation. They don't allow PTP (paid-to-promote) pages, so surfing is smooth and without interruptions. I'm promo...
More About: Review

My first Text-Link-Ads affiliate comissions
2007-11-20 08:33:00
I wrote about TLA a long time ago. They had "accepted" my site back then, but I wasn't able to actually participate in their Publisher program because my PageRank was too low. Since this blog now has PR4, I hope eventually they might review it and allow me to sell links here. I suppose the news of Google manually reducing PageRank of sites selling links (and that effects both buyers and sellers) will be bad for TLA's business, but I don't think Google will pay any attention to a small blog like mine.Now for the real news - I logged in to my Text -Link -Ads affiliate account and saw that I earned some comissions a while ago (the referral name is blurred to protect their privacy):I have only been promoting TLA in SmileyTraffic exchange, so it took me quite a while to earn my first comissions. Their rules don't help either - first, you need a PR4+ site, which not everyone has, second, the publisher has to install the code for 7 days in order for the referrer to get comissions. As for...
More About: Affiliate , Text Link Ads , Missi

Agloco is dead
2007-11-13 17:44:00
Today a month has passed since the last official announcement on Agloco blog. With this, I might as well declare Agloco being dead. Of course, I'd like to believe that they are busy working on payout system, but that seems less likely with each passing day.The biggest problem is the lack of communication between Agloco management and it's members. I just can't believe how bad it is. I wouldn't even think that Agloco was planning to make money off it's members and then disappear just because there is no communication. They would keep us happy by feeding us promises each day, so the members would use Viewbar more - which they don't. This month my hour earnings are beyond pathetic, and it's bad not only for me, but for Agloco also, since they make less and less money.As for my course of action, I will still be updating my blog and using the Viewbar 5 hours a month, until this matter is resolved - one way or another.
More About: Dead

Submit your articles automatically
2007-11-06 20:18:00
One of the more important means that helped me achieve PageRank 4 on this blog was so called article marketing. I wrote several short articles on topics related to making money online, and put in the URL of this blog in my "resource" or "bio" box at the bottom. Once the articles were approved, this gave me a permanent, free backlink from the article directory site. What's more, bloggers are able to use content from article directories for free, as long as they include the resource box from the article author. I actually found one of my articles re-posted with a backlink on another blog which appeared on my visitor statistics.Of course, there are hundreds of directories where you can submit your article, but doing it manually is a lot of work. That's where ArticleMarketer comes in. They will do all the hard work of submitting your article to many article directory sites, for free. There is an upgrade to your membership, which lets you view article distribution reports, and submits ...
More About: Articles , Submit

Google PageRank update
2007-10-29 17:01:00
Google PageRank has finally been updated, and I'd like to congratulate myself for getting a PR4 on Andrew Owns Agloco. I'd also like to thank all my link partners who helped me achieve this. There are a few changes regarding link exchange. First of all: regrettably I had to cancel my mini review program due to lack of participation. Second, I'm still open for sidebar link exchange deals with Agloco related blogs only. The requirement stays the same - your blog must have a page rank of at least 3. This shouldn't be a problem, considering that most active blogs should have got a page rank assigned in the recent update. Naturally, this doesn't apply to already existing exchanges from older deals - your links will stay whatever your page rank or blog topic is. Finally, a short note about Agloco. There haven't been any updates ever since the Oct 12th post on the official blog, but I expect a news soon that should tell us whether payouts will be made of October or not.
More About: Google , Pagerank , Google Pagerank , Update , Gera

Making money with Bidvertiser
2007-10-22 21:08:00
I have recently joined Bidvertiser because a fellow Agloco member ismabera suggested it. You can see their ad at just above this post. I think it is a great idea to get some other revenue source from my blog, besides simply referring new Agloco members.With this, I've also removed my blog from all traffic exchanges I was a member of. I didn't do that because of Bidvertiser rules - actually, it's one of the few pay-per-click advertising systems which have a friendly approach to traffic exchanges and "get paid to" sites - but because I want to track how much "real" traffic I receive, and perhaps open up a way for this blog to show ads from other networks in the future.Putting Bidvertiser code on my blog here at Blogger proved to be a little tricky. After causing my blog to stop working altogether a few times, I took my time and read about widget tags that Blogger uses. I had to edit the HTML of my template and put the green code there:<div> <b:section showaddelement=...
More About: Money , Vert

Yuwie social network
2007-10-14 16:36:00
I mentioned Yuwie in passing when I was talking about Agloco's payment system in my last post. I think it deserves a little more attention than that, so here's a short review.Yuwie is a social networking site, like MySpace or Facebook. What makes it unlike others is that Yuwie pays it's members for using the site. To tell you the truth, I've never been a member of a social network before, and I probably wouldn't be, if money wasn't involved. I signed up for Yuwie since it looks like what Agloco could have become (a social network that shares it's profits) and I'm quite impressed with them.Yuwie pays you for page views you or your referrals (down 10 levels) generate. The payment rate, or RSR, is different each month and dependent on Yuwie's income. For example, this month's estimated RSR is around $0.18 CPM ($0.18 per thousand page views). Other people viewing your blog, pictures, or profile, and even you browsing around your control panel all count as page views.Since I'm...
More About: Social , Network , Social Network

My take on Agloco: payment plan and more
2007-10-06 21:32:00
It seems that latest post on Agloco's blog got quite a reaction from the community. Many members are complaining that the payment system Agloco introduced is a "joke" or a "scam". Agloco supporters are a minority. Some of the commentators at official blog threaten to close their accounts, but are seen again the next day, posting same negative comments. I'd like to post my opinion on this as well.First of all, the payment plan is not the problem. Of course, most complains about it are valid (getting only a few cents each month, not being able to cash out unless you have a lot of referrals, etc.) but that's not the point. The payment plan shouldn't be there in the first place! Agloco didn't make profit yet, so we shouldn't get paid either.The official blog itself said that this payment plan was created after the release of Viewbar (that is, it wasn't planned from the beginning). What's more, with it's losses, Agloco obviously cannot afford to pay $0.5 per hour, so it introdu...
More About: Payment , Plan

Member distributions
2007-09-29 02:04:00
The "important update" came, even if a bit late. I'm going to post a summary from Agloco's official blog post:1. Agloco will do Monthly Residual Payments - quoting the blog post, these are small monthly payments which will be made for hours earned each month and paid monthly for 10 years. This is much like my guess in Hours and shares post earlier.2. The following hourly rates have been set by Agloco (as you can see, monthly payments add up to the total hour value):• June $0.48 per hour - ($0.0040 per month for 120 months)• July $0.42 per hour - ($0.0035 per month for 120 months)• August $0.54 per hour - ($0.0045 per month for 120 months)3. Agloco lost slightly more than $100.000 during the last 3 months. Considering their slow start and mostly untargeted Viewbar ads (probably due to the lack of advertisers), this is not surprising. Agloco is still expecting losses in September ($10.000 to $15.000).4. Payments might or might not be made on October, depending on Agloco's rev...

Important update coming soon
2007-09-27 13:39:00
If you have been following Agloco's official blog, you probably know that they were supposed to make an official post regarding payments. Apparently, that post might take a little longer (anyone surprised)? However, after this announcement, I'm prepared to wait as long as needed:Quick note – we will be doing the distribution post very soon. I had hoped to have it done by the 25th, but in order to give exact distribution amounts for June, July and August hours we needed a couple more days to analyze the hourly data. Hopefully, exact distribution amounts will be worth waiting a couple of extra days for.The Agloco team is going to tell us exactly how much will they pay for hours we earned! That amount probably is going to be low (considering how they still don't have many revenue partners, or even geotargeting yet). But if what I posted just two weeks ago is true, we will keep getting paid for hours as long as we don't sell them, so I don't see much of a problem with first payme...
More About: Update

TrafficG exchange
2007-09-18 17:19:00
TrafficG is next in my series of traffic exchange reviews. I had mentioned it in my post about splash pages, and now a full review is due.TrafficG is a manual traffic exchange with 30 second timer and 1:1 surf ratio. It actually gets as high as 1.1:1 if you complete all skill cards (anti-cheat tests) correctly. This click exchange runs on a unique script and has some really useful features. It will deliver 24 hour unique traffic, without you having to adjust anything. That means you will reach a wider audience, because almost all visitors will be seeing your site for the first time that day. In addition, you can target visitors by country or interest. Only a few traffic exchanges can do this, and TrafficG is probably the best of those. Want to get visitors from US, and interested in art, only? No problem. The only downside is that TrafficG does not allow sites in other languages than English. Just think how effectively you could advertise to people in their native language!Surfing a...
More About: Exchange , Chang , Chan

Mini-reviews, batch 1
2007-09-16 19:53:00
Agloco Girls is a blog of a fellow Agloco member. He, like many others, is building his downline using a blog, however, his approach at this anything but ordinary. Instead of statistics and texts, you get photos of gorgeous girls. Does this work? A downline of nearly a thousand referrals says "yes".Another proof that Agloco is popular in many countries, a solid looking Polish blog and site about this company. It seems the owner did a great job of supplying all Agloco news in his native language, including the deal with Ask dot com.Johnny Fuery is Smart Guy who writes about a variety of geeky topics from real estate investing to affiliate marketing. Bloggers will find information on building links and traffic from his comprehensive posts. If you want to exchange links with me, all you have to do is link to my blog, or write a mini-review about it. Send me your URL and I'll write about your site in the next batch. Full details here.
More About: Reviews , Mini , Batch

Hours and shares
2007-09-11 17:13:00
While reading comments on Agloco's official blog, I came across an interesting piece of information regarding hours and payment.Alfred writes:BRYAN WARD - agloco does not have to go public for early members to be winners - when agloco starts paying monthly payments for the hours already booked then those hours will have quantifiable value. Brian has said that one thing agloco will do when it starts making payments is pay hours every month. Meaning the hours I owned in June will get paid every month after payments start.Even if the monthly payment is 1/2 cent a month (something even the skeptics may think is possible) then My Hours from June will have significant value. If an hour will earn me 1/2 cent a month that is 6 cents a year - how much is that worth if I sell the Hour - probably more than 50 cents (even more if the 1/2cent monthly payment looks like it will rise over time.)AGLOCO Official replied to this:Alfred – you are very close with your comment This is by no means ac...
More About: Shares , Ares

Mini review link exchange
2007-09-06 22:31:00
I am offering a mini-review link exchange with my blog. At the time of this post, Andrew Owns Agloco has a Google PageRank 3 and Technorati authority of 47. During it's lifetime of 5 months and 18 days (or 171 days in total) it was visited by 3,197 (unique) people and got 3,958 pageloads. It is also included in a number of directories, article sites, and linked from some popular blogs, like JohnChow dot com. It does have it's own domain name, but it's working only as a redirect due to the problems with Yahoo! SmallBusiness and Blogger's parking.The rules of the link exchange are:1) Your blog must not contain anything illegal. Original blogs of any topic are welcome, although "making money online" related blogs are preferred. Exceptions are: adult, pharmacy, gambling blogs.2) Link back to my blog using link "http://andrew-owns-agloco.blogspot.com" and text "Andrew Owns Agloco" or similar. You can link back in either of two ways: Write a mini-review of my blog in your post, OR Ad...
More About: Link Exchange , Review , Exchange , Mini

Monthly update on my Agloco stats
2007-08-31 03:40:00
It has become my habit to log and post my Agloco network statistics at the end of each month. This time, however, I don't have a screenshot, because I didn't manage to make one before Agloco stats moved to the next month :-) I have calculated my earnings for the month, though - and they are lower than usual. Apparently, I only made 46 new referrals and earned 70 hours from my downline.I see several reasons for this, most obvious one being that I was away for most of July and August, not marketing actively, and updating my sites only occasionally. (A slight offtopic here - it would have helped me a lot if it would be possible to schedule a future post here in Blogger, like Wordpress can do). This does not, however, explain declining hours. Other reasons might be August being a 'slow' month, or some members getting discouraged with Agloco since it's not clear when it will make payouts. Or maybe it's none of these, and happening only to my network?I'm not worried by this, howeve...
More About: Update , Stats , Month , Mont

TrafficPods exchange
2007-08-13 19:21:00
TrafficPods is another manual traffic exchange that I've been planning to review. It's a bit unusual and different from other surf exchanges, because it has a ladder system. The more you surf, the more 'pod points' you earn per each click, which later can be converted into credits - if you own a 'traffic pod'. Otherwise your pod point balance is locked. To obtain a traffic pod, you have either to upgrade to premium membership ($20/mo) or participate in surfing competition as a free member. You will need to surf about 1500 sites in one week to win the pod, and 1000 sites each following week to keep it.As you can see, this system rewards 'heavy surfers' most, and you won't earn much traffic if you only surf occasionally. I do not recommend using this traffic exchange if you don't plan to upgrade or surf often, but if you do, it can be quite rewarding.
More About: Exchange , Chang , Chan

My Agloco statistics for July
2007-07-31 18:21:00
It's the end of July and time to brag about all new referrals and hours I got this month:There is an increase in referral growth compared to June, although not a big one. That's not surprising, considering I'm on a holiday in London and don't have an internet access, so I don't do much more besides updating my blog occasionaly from internet cafes. I do have some posts written just waiting to be posted, but they will be more like short articles about marketing tools I use (such as forum signatures or traffic exchanges I wrote about before), rather than updates and bits of interesting news from Agloco.I will be returning home to Lithuania at the end of August and returning to my normal posting frequency of at least once a week. Until then, it seems my Agloco network is growing pretty nicely on it's own.
More About: Statistics

Marketing with forum signatures
2007-07-19 17:32:00
By using online forums, you can get publicity for your site very fast. You can't, however, just post your link randomly. Some forums have "advertisement" sections, but most are very strict about posting affiliate links or even regular websites. In that case, you can add them to your signature. BBCode is usually used for signatures, like this:[url=http://wikipedia.org]Wikipedia[ /url]Having a forum signature that links to your site can be useful in several ways. First, if you are an active forum member who posts often, you will be getting free targeted traffic. For instance, if you are participating in a forum about fishing, it's likely that the members of the forum will be interested in your site about fishing products. Of course, you can also advertise a website that is completely unrelated to the forum topic. It won't be as effective, but you might get visitors from a different audience.Second, a forum signature that links to your site is useful from SEO perspective. Active foru...
More About: Marketing , Forum , Signature