Internet Profits Blog

I’m not the first to make this comment, but after many years of marketing online, it certainly seems that the more someone proclaims their ‘religiousness’ the more likely they are to be a problem customer or just a scammer.

In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of many instances where someone like that wasn’t out to just rip-off products, try to get them for free, etc. Just had a recent example with a “Faith Management” marketing company. Seemed to be just looking to get something for nothing, going out of its way to make bogus claims over products I’ve never seen in more than 16 years of online marketing.

In my view, this has nothing to do with being religious. I’m religious. But I don’t promote first and foremost my company is a religious company. And I don’t thank God in every email or communication. Unfortunately, that over-the-top approach is all-too-often a red-flag of someone trying to take advantage of truly sincere people.

In fact, looking further at this “Faith Management” company, once you get past all the blessings on their website, I see a bunch of scammy crap and use of junk freebie stuff that gives so many online marketers a bad name.

So beware. Why is someone promoting themselves as ‘religious’? Are they truly tied to a religious organization? Or, is it someone trying to trade in on religious goodwill to separate your hard-earned money from your wallet?

Some programs and web browser plugins, such as Adblock Plus for FireFox, block ads from being seen on websites. This is great (I use them) for web browsers as it makes the browsing faster and it gets rid of the ads. On the flip side, this is not so good for website owners wanting to make money from ads being clicked on.

Here is how to circumvent the ad blockers:

Copy the ads to your web host. Thus, instead of showing an ad from the url bigadcompany.com/ad.jpg, copy the ad to your server and show an ad from yourwebsite.com/ad.jpg. This is because the ad blockers see the bigadcompany.com url and block any graphics from it.

The second step is to change the name of that ad. Forget ad.jpg or anything with common Adsense sizes in the name, such as ad-160×600.jpg. Again, the ad blockers work by looking for names. If they see a subdirectory or name called ad, or anything similar, or something like 160×600 in the graphic name, it gets blocked.

Keep in mind that ad blockers cannot ’see’ the graphic to know if it is an ad or a picture of your grandma. Instead, they have to rely solely on url information. If you fix that, it’s clear sailing to getting your ads seen.

As an extra benefit, your pages will load faster because the graphics are on your site and you’re not waiting for an ad server to send you an ad from a million competing ad delivery requests happening at the same time.

WordPress sites have a built in RSS feed that can be distributed for more traffic and backlinks. But what about regular, static web pages? How do you get RSS feeds for those web sites?

Fortunately, there are several free services that will do the trick:

1. html2rss.com – This site will easily take a number of urls and convert them into an RSS feed. One downside, the owner of the site includes a couple of links to his websites within your feeds. To remove them you’ll have to use Yahoo pipes to filter them out while creating a new feed.

2. RSS Headliner – This is a slow process where you have to manually enter your information to create an RSS feed. I’m told this works really well – but I passed because I didn’t want to spend the time.

3. Feedage – Very fast service will spider a few pages from your root url and create an RSS feed. Feedage also sneaks in a link back to their website within your RSS feed.

There is also a script called RSS Spider that you install on a website. It will spider a domain’s static web pages and create a RSS feed you can use. Very nice. No advertising links snuck in. The RSS feed is your url. Unfortunately, I do not believe it is being sold anymore, so you may have to search for it.