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)
Day 10: Content, Adsense (yay!), and WordPress tags (boo!) – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment
(Tuesday June, 30th)
I watched lesson 4 today. It’s all about creating content for your sites. So, I picked the site with the highest potential income and started generating content for it. It was a little boring because I honestly have no interest in the subject, but it amused me that The Keyword Academy course is right: you really don’t have to care about a subject at all to write a few articles about it. I’ve only completed the first one out of five, so we’ll see if I still feel the same way after the other 4.
After that, I decided to reward myself by working on something that I actually do care about: Adsense. I don’t know if this was smart or not, but I skipped ahead a few lessons (2 about link building, 1 about a wizard of some kind, and another about a stat counter) and watched the one about Adsense. I already had an Adsense account up and working, so I finished with this pretty quick. As always, the video was very helpful and step-by-step. As I am sure you noticed, I got Adsense working on this site as well.
However, while I was critiquing the look of my ads, I noticed something… something bad. There is no listing of tags in the sidebar on my sites.
First, let me explain why this is bad. Without going into too much detail, the Keyword Academy course teaches you that using tag pages to your advantage is a very important part of ranking well in search engine results, and thus is very important to making money. However, even if you add tags to your articles, if Google can’t find them, they don’t help you a bit! And since the themes I am using don’t have tag links in the sidebar, or on the post pages, or anywhere else I could find, Google hasn’t got the smallest chance of finding them.
This made me a little upset. After all, I downloaded and am using the themes recommended by the Keyword Academy course. So if the course teaches that tags are so important, why would they not make them show up in all their themes? This seems like a pretty bad oversight to me.
Then I remembered that:
1.I am a total WordPress newbie, and I could have just missed something,
2.Someone else must have run into this already.
So, I headed to the forums. I found a post by a guy named “strathy” who had pretty much the same question as me. The question had personally been answered by Mark and Court, and it linked to a video they had made, explaining how to add tags to a theme. Great! Or so I thought…
The video tells you how to add a tag cloud using widgets. Unfortunately, as brought out by strathy in the very next reply, this only works for themes that are compatible with widgets (or “widgitized”). Even more unfortunately, only a handful of the Keyword Academy recommended themes are widgitized. Most unfortunately of all, that is pretty much where the thread ended. Great…
Left with no other option, I went to the WordPress online manual (http://codex.wordpress.org/) and started reading. I never really found a way to properly put the tags in the sidebar. I could get the tag cloud to show up, but with no “Tags:” title above it, so it just looks like WordPress pooped some jumbled words onto your homepage. Grrr…
I finally found a very simple alternative. All you have to do is paste one line of code:
<p><?php the_tags(); ?></p>
into the “single post” template. This will make the tags for each post show up on that posts page. I think that’ll do the trick for getting them indexed by Google. I posted this info in the Keyword Academy forums and called it a day.
Now I know I sound like a big whiny baby. Boohoo, I had to read up on WordPress a little, the Keyword Academy didn’t hand me the answer on a plate, boohoo. But when I said I am a WordPress newbie, I am serious. I hadn’t ever even seen a wp-admin page before this week. I know ZERO about it. Thankfully, I’m a total computer nerd and I used to work for a software company so I have a rudimentary understanding of the way code is structured (I was tech support, not a programmer) . If I hadn’t had that to fall back on, I’d probably still be dinking around in the template pages.
My point is, if you are going to make something an integral part of your system, it needs to be easy. If you want to have some “extra credit” type things that take a little more work, fine. But don’t leave a complete newbie on their own to figure things out. That’s what we’re paying you for!
I can’t help but think of the people who aren’t computer nerds who made it to that point. Did they just give up? Did they even notice, or are they out there, getting nowhere with there sites and can’t figure out why? Who knows.
I can honestly say this is the first thing in the Keyword Academy system that has disappointed me. I know that the system (any system) is a work in progress and that bugs have to be worked out. I just hope this one gets worked out sooner rather than later.
Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 4 hours
The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $192.76
Time costs – 28.5 hours @ $8.40 = $239.40
Revenue:
Google Adsense – $0.00
GRAND TOTAL:
-($432.16)
Day 6: DNS, Addon Domains, and Plug-ins – The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment
Today, I decided to tackle the rest of the supplemental video stuff.
So first, I pointed all my domains at the Host Gator DNS servers. In the video, Court uses Proud Domains as his registrar, but their site seems to function almost exactly like GoDaddy, so I just pretty much followed his steps. One slight variation: his video shows how to change the DNS servers for a single domain, but I was doing 20. However, all you have to do is put a check mark beside all the domains you want to make the change for, and it will change them all at once, instead of having to change them one at a time. This part was cake.
Now, I needed to add all of my domains to my Host Gator account. I looked through the supplemental videos, but I didn’t see anything about how to do that. So, I turned to the Keyword Academy forums. A quick search for “addon domains” (that’s what Host Gator calls them) revealed a thread with a guy named Stede, asking the same question I had. The solution is pretty simple. In the Host Gator control panel there is a link called “addon domains” which takes you to a tool that you can use to add extra domains. (A word to the wise on this part, when you fill in the domain name you want to add, the tool auto populates the next 2 fields, just leave those alone. The auto populated defaults work fine. I cost myself some time messing around with these because I thought they did something other than they really do, lol).
It was at this point that I was very glad I had decided to spend the extra 4 bucks a month for the Premium plan. Probably would have taken me a lot longer to figure that out, without the benefit of those forums.
The next supplemental video shows you how to install WordPress to your site. WordPress is a tool that helps you build your wesite (more like builds it for you). I thought this part was going to be kind of time consuming, but boy was I wrong. Court shows you how to install WordPress using a tool that Host Gator has called “Fantastico De Luxe” (I think). I just followed the steps and had WordPress installed to my first domain in less than 5 minutes! I had it installed to all 20 domains in no time flat.
The next video shows you how to find and upload a WordPress theme to your site. I did this on one of my sites, just to get the hang of it, but I decided to wait and choose themes for all my sites later. This step is, once again, really easy especially if you’ve ever used Filezilla (or any other FTP client) before.
The last supplemental video shows you how to install a particular Search Engine Optimization plug-in to your site. The steps are almost the exact same ones you used to upload a WordPress theme in the last video.
However, I ran into another little speed bump here. My terrible ISP, Clearwire, is once again to blame. This step involves uploading files to your website through FTP, but because of my slow upload speed, the connection was timing out and failing on about every other domain. This means I would have to re-queue the files and try again. This was really frustrating. But then I thought to myself, “Since each site uses the same plug-in files, I really only need to upload the files to the server one time. After that I just need to find a way to copy them to each site’s ‘wp-content’ folder.” I couldn’t find a way to do this using Filezilla (but if there is one, please feel free to leave a comment explaining how). I remembered though, seeing a file manager in the Host Gator control panel. I opened it, and sure enough, it has a copy function, so I just used that to copy the set of plug-in files I had already uploaded to the “wp-content” folder of each of my sites. Tada!
That last video also talks a little about how to configure the SEO plug-in, but I decided to leave that for later, since it is covered more thoroughly in lesson 3 (I peeked).
Money spent: $0.00
Time spent: 4 hours
The Keyword Academy Scam Experiment – RUNNING TOTALS:
Costs:
Monetary costs – $192.76
Time costs – 20 hours @ $8.40 = $168.00
Revenue:
Google Adsense – $0.00
GRAND TOTAL:
- ($360.76)