Archive for July, 2009
First Month Summary – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment
As mentioned in my last daily update, I’ve already come to the end of my first month of using The Keyword Academy system. I just wanted to take a second to give a quick overview of what all has been done. Note: these are in more of a logical order, not necessarily the order I did them in.
- Watched and downloaded all of the core videos
- Made a keyword “brainstorm” list
- Narrowed down that list to only keywords that have enough income potential and won’t be too competitive
- Selected 20 of the best keywords
- Registered 20 domains (one for each keyword)
- Setup hosting for all 20 sites
- Installed WordPress, WordPress themes, and an SEO plugin on all 20 sites
- Completed configuring and creating content for 2 sites (almost 2, my wife only has half an article to go on hers and she’ll finish today)
- Installed Adsense and Statcounter on both of those sites
- Completed the first month’s link building schedule on 1 site
- Created 1 page of content for 2 other sites
- Made almost $12 from Adsense revenue
Whew! It has been a really active month! It’s definitely been work, but it’s been a lot of fun too. It’s really neat to see sites that you created rising up the Google results pages and it’s even better to see people clicking your ads! Like I said at the beginning of the experiment, I am a total newbie to Internet marketing, so this is all new to me and VERY exciting. I find myself daydreaming quite often, of quitting my job and doing this instead. I really hope this all pans out, because I could totally do this full-time.
There have been a few missteps and frustration points, but overall I have been very pleased. I cannot even begin to imagine how much frustration, time, and effort it would have taken me to figure this stuff out on my own (if I ever even could). My advice to anyone thinking about joining The Keyword Academy is: do it! It’s only $1 (really, you get access to everything for that 1 dollar). Even if you just want to try it out, or even if you just want to watch the videos or peruse the forums. It’s only $1.
You might be thinking: “But what about domain registration and hosting costs?” I’m pretty sure I mentioned this before at some point, but if not: you don’t HAVE TO register and host your own sites. You can use The Keyword Academy’s methods on free blog sites if you want to. They encourage buying your sites because if you do, you can sell them later. But if you don’t have the money then just make a free blog! In fact, “hubpages” are all the rage right now in The Keyword Academy forums. They are free and apparently earn pretty decent revenue. I plan on setting some up later myself.
I know I said that I wouldn’t advocate this system to other people until I had proved to myself that it works, and that’s still true. However, what I do advocate and, in fact, highly recommend, is that you take the Keyword Academy up on their offer of $1 for the first month’s membership. It’s 1 dollar! What else are you going to spend it on? A chicken sandwich at McDonalds? I can assure you that while the chicken sandwich may be tasty, the Keyword Academy is much more valuable and much less fattening.
Here is the link: join The Keyword Academy for a buck
I do want to be up front with you about that link above. Yes, it is my affiliate link. I get paid a commission when people join using that link. My commission is 35% of what you pay, for every month that you’re an active member. So, if you join for the 1st month, then quit, I stand to make exactly 35 cents from you. I hope that helps to convince you that I am not recommending this for the money. I genuinely believe that your dollar spent joining The Keyword Academy is one of the best you’ll ever spend.
So, what are you waiting for?
Day 30: More Article Distribution – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment
(Monday July, 20th)
Due to a combination of being very busy for 2 days and very lazy for the next day, I haven’t worked on my sites in 3 days. I was feeling really guilty about this today so I got back to work. If you’ll recall, I needed to write 2 more articles for article distribution for promoting my first site. I wrote and submitted both of those today. That gives me 5 links from articles and 3 links from link exchanges. That means I have fulfilled the first month’s site promotion minimums for that site and it only took me 15 days (including the last 3 that I did nothing)!
In the Keyword Academy videos they said you are supposed to write between 5 and 10 articles per site for distribution in the first month, but that there are diminishing returns, especially above 10. If I only had the one site to work on, I might go ahead and write 10 articles instead of just the bare minimum 5. But since I have 19 other domains that need to be worked on, I think my time will be better spent working on those.
I still haven’t heard back from The Keyword Academy support team about my accidentally canceled subscription (if you missed the whole PayPal fiasco, you can read about it in day 26). But, I wrote the email late Thursday night, so they’ve really only had 2 business days to respond. When I first joined the Keyword Academy I sent an email to them through the support portal and got a same day response, but that was when my account was still active, so I’m sure that they give members priority over non-members. I’ll give them a couple more days to respond before I write again.
More good news on the Adsense front: I got a few more clicks that have brought my revenue up to $11.41! I love seeing those clicks!
One more thing: today is day 30th of The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment! (please, hold your applause) I feel that I have accomplished quite a bit this month. To commemorate this historic event 
I’ll be writing a “first month overview” post soon. I know you’ll all be waiting with bated breath to read it.
See you next post!
Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 1.5 hours
The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $192.76
Time costs – 49 hours @ $8.40 = $411.60
Revenue:
Google Adsense – $11.41
GRAND TOTAL:
-($592.95)
Day 26: A Third New Site and Stupid Stupid PayPal – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment
(Thursday July, 16th)
I forgot to mention yesterday that I got that other link exchange I was hoping for on my first site. That makes 3 links from exchanges and 1 link from the article distribution site.
Following the whole “planting a lot of seeds at one time” strategy (if you don’t know what I’m talking about read Day 23), I wrote one page of content for another site, and got it up and going. It’s nice because it’s related to the site I started yesterday, so I got to exchange links between those 2 sites. That was a nice little bonus.
So, for those of you counting, I now have 3 sites (excluding this one) and my wife has 1, for a total of 4.
I helped my wife put Adsense and StatCounter on her site today. She just needs to write one more page of content for it, then she can start link building.
I checked Adsense today, which I hadn’t done for a while and found that I had some more clicks! In the last 3 days I got 4 clicks. 1 of them was on this site and the other 4 were on my niche site! I’m really excited about those 3, since my goal after all is to make Adsense revenue from my niche sites. It doesn’t sound like much but results are results! Woo Hoo!
Near the end of the day I did something that seems completely unrelated to The Keyword Academy and my scam experiment, but stick with me. I logged into PayPal because I needed to update my payment method (I just got a new debit card and bank account number). So, I added a new bank account and a new credit card, went through the confirmation process for both, then I deleted the old ones. A couple minutes later I get 2 emails from PayPal letting me know that both my subscription to The Keyword Academy, and to Host Gator had been successfully canceled. SAY WHAT!?
I logged back in to PayPal, and sure enough, in my recent transactions they showed up as canceled. I tried to look for a way to reactive them on the website, but I couldn’t find one. So, I found their customer service number and called. I explained to the rep what had happened and asked if she could reactivate those subscriptions. Nope! Apparently that is the expected behavior when you delete an old payment method. Instead of switching to the new payment method, any active subscriptions are just canceled. Wow… what a stupid, stupid idea! She informed me that I would have to contact the merchants for each subscription to get them going again. Oh boy, sounds like fun…
I called Host Gator first. The tech support guy there told me that I will have to wait till the next billing cycle, then when my next invoice shows up on the billing site, I can just choose to pay it with PayPal again and that will allow me to setup the subscription. Also, I asked if they have a grace period before they shut off your account. They do; it’s 10 day from the day you get billed.
I then went to The Keyword Accademy site, logged in, and tried to open the support page. However, it must have already detected that my PayPal subscription was canceled, because it gave me a message that this page is only for active members. It did however have a support email address that you can contact if you feel that your account should still be active. I shot an email to them explaining the issue and asking how they recommend I resolve it. I’ll let you know what I hear back.
I thought about just going through the sign up process again, but I wasn’t sure if that would force me to choose a new user name, etc. I’d rather just keep the one I have. Plus I think it’s linked to the affiliate account I set up, and (hopefully) plan on using in the future.
So the moral of the story is: be careful with PayPal subscriptions! They are quite fragile and break easily. Handle with care.
I mentioned when I started the Keyword Academy, that one of the things that convinced me to join was the PayPal subscription thing, because I could easily cancel if I wanted to. Apparently, it’s easy to cancel even if I don’t want to!
Don’t get me wrong though, I am not faulting The Keyword Academy for this one. I think using Pay Pal subscriptions was a great choice. I think the blame for this design flaw rests squarely on PayPal. People have to change payment methods all the time. Migrating your subscriptions from a payment method you’re deleting, to another active one should be automatic. Or if not automatic, they should at least warn you that any subscriptions connected to that payment method will be canceled. How dumb is it to just cancel them and then tell you about it after the fact and not offer any way to undo it?
Well, after that little fiasco I’m done for today. G’night all.
Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 2 hours
The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $192.76
Time costs – 47.5 hours @ $8.40 = $399
Revenue:
Google Adsense – $7.72
GRAND TOTAL:
-($584.04)