Wednesday 5 March 2008

Dramatically increase your visitors - yeah right!

This year I've decided to try and boost my blog audience. Now, I've got to admit that my stats are slowly increasing, but I'd kind of like my daily viewing figures to be in the triple digits or higher.

So I've started looking at ways of boosting my readers. Some of them like BlogRush I've already said about as much as I need to (they don't really do much). Others (like BlogCatalog) actually do seem to help bring some visitors in, providing you actually take part in the various discussions.

Well, here is another way to boost your earnings beyond your wildest dreams: T-2000 Ultra!

Let's take a look at some of the claims, and as it is a free service let's also see how it works.

Explode Your Income!
Boost Your Sales by upto 4000%
And Drive 1 million Visitors to Your
Site Every Month!
All Totally FREE!


Any alarm bells ringing yet? Apart from abuses against capital letters, punctuation marks, spelling and grammar, does any of this sound too good to be true?

Damn right!

So how does this work in practice.

Well, once you've got past the scam-style verbiage (not to mention the poor spelling) there are six adverts that need clicking on, these should be opened in a new window and will take you to someone elses site, but with a black border at the top of the page. After ten seconds or so an "Ad Code" will be generated which you use as part of your sign-up process.

Fill in the six required codes, enter your details (and those of your one-line advert) and click submit. As a side note, all the sites listed were, without exception, Make Money Online type sites. As if I'm surprised.

At this point you'll need to confirm your name and email address again before the confirmation emails are sent to you.

If you can't find the confirmation email then it's probably in your junk folder (take that as a hint folks!).

Now, it could be that this is entirely on the level and that millions of readers are going to land on my site any minute now, start reading my blogs and I'll be an overnight success. If you believe that to be the case (and I'll provide updates to this over the next 30 days) then feel free to click the referrals link below and sign up too. I certainly wouldn't recommend it though.

Warning - Referrals Link - Warning

What are you waiting for? Millions of readers are waiting for you.


As if!

Remember kids: We are willing to sign up for crap so that you don't have to!

Update:

It has been pointed out to me that this sort of thing isn't a good idea if you want to use Adsense on your site. Although you may increase your page views (although I have my doubts about that) any increase would almost certainly end in you loosing the chance of using Adsense in the future. Plus, it would be a bit dishonest now wouldn't it?

So, rather than not blogging on things like this (and personally I think that it is a story that could do with being told) I've taken off all the advertising from this blog.

Once things return to normal (and I'm pretty sure that it won't take too long for that) then I'll consider putting the ads back on.

Just like I did with BlogRush I'll make weekly posts updating on how well (or not) this is doing. If anything amazing happens between then I'll be sure to let you know.

Update 2:

Just to keep track on the stats I've added a statscounter link to the blog. I'm keeping the results hidden (for now) and will reveal the number of page impressions at the end of the 30 days.

Update 3 - 12 hours on:

Well, there has been some extra traffic - all from BlogCatalog. Even then we are only talking about an extra five or six visitors. So from the point of view of people reading this post - great! As far as the extra traffic gained by T-2000 - not so great. No extra traffic at all.

Update 4 - 48 hours on:

There has been no increase to the traffic by having the link etc on the site (although telling people not to click on it probably weights things against me) so I've cut this short and removed the referrals link.

I'll decide the future of adverts on this site later on, but for now remember, as a rule of thumb for any scheme to increase your traffic: if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is!

4 comments:

KapalMukz said...

that wud be ok? to put a referral link under the "sign up here" ?? hehe just curious, i edit all my post with that referral link just to save my google ads!

DanO said...

Unless you are actually encouraging people to click on your ads then I don't really think this is likely to be a problem.

I could, however, be wrong.

If I am then I'll have a good subject for a follow-up post on this.

As I currently make next to nothing from google ads it isn't really that big a deal for me.

Thanks for commenting!

KapalMukz said...

for me to be safe Id rather delete all of referral link in my post!

how bout the referral link at the sidebar? wud that be ok?

sorry im just a newbie in this google ads! :)

DanO said...

I've Absolutely no idea.

Check back in a week or so. If I'm banned from adsense for having no sense then I'll certainly put up a big warning about it!

Like I said, I'm willing loose my adsense account as it really doesn't make anything for me. No great loss in other words. If you value yours then taking part in schemes like this may not be a good idea.