WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

I’m on a mission to get traffic to this site through social networking. I originally went to duhh. The Social Bookmarking Blog because I was looking for widgets to make it easier for visitors to social-bookmark WebDiggin. I found duhh doing a search at BlogCatalog - the site seemed okay, so I clicked. Then, I got hooked.

Duhh has a nice little text link in the left sidebar. A little innocent Send me One Million FREE Guaranteed Visitors message. I usually skip those, but seeing as how I’m on a mission to get traffic to this site through social networking, I thought why not. Besides, Duhh has a nice, professional look, which, in retrospect, helped to build trust and made me feel good about clicking the One Million FREE Guaranteed Visitors link.

In contrast, the landing page for FreeViral.com looks like your typical one page here’s-why-you-should-sign-over-your-first-born-child ad. Big font so I didn’t have to read anything until I got hooked in. If I had landed here from a Google Ad, I just would have closed the window.

It’s a pyramid scheme and it’s completely free. (But, ofcourse, there is a catch, so read on.) At the bottom of the page are sign-up instructions. There are 6 text links to websites with 1 sponsored link at the top. You have to view all 7 websites. At each website, you don’t have to do anything but look at the sites while the FreeViral.com link code in the top frame loads up (about 10 sec). Then you copy and paste the code into the appropriate box in the sign-up instructions and move on to the next website.
Once you’ve visited all 6 websites and 1 sponsor, you take a second to create an account, give an email address, and type in a brief ad for your own website. Your website then becomes Ad #1 and all of the other sites get bumped down one spot. You’re given the url for your landing page where you send people to sign up to get their one million visitors.

So. What’s the catch?

It took about 10 minutes from the time I clicked on the link on Duhh’s page to the time I’m writing about the experience.

1. The first ad was for Duhh where I first heard about FreeViral.com (Their Click Here to Get One Million FREE Guaranteed Visitors link hooked me in.)
2. Ad #2 didn’t load. The blog was dead, but interesting that this initial sign up is still working for him. Switch.
3. Ad #3 was a free blogspot blog, that well, looked like a free blogspot blog. (with heaps of Google Videos. Last updated June 3, 2007 - but it’s still getting traffic from this silly little viral pyramid chain. Click.
4. Ad #4 was the only one that actually caught my attention. Kind’ve like youtube, but a different niche market? I did click around a little bit but it didn’t keep my attention, so… Switch.
5. Ad #5 was for a personal blog. Looked interesting, but was in a different language. I wasn’t that interested in getting Google to translate it for me, so skip.
6. Ad #6 was for a Learn-To-Sell-on-eBay site trying to get me to buy something that has a retail value of $99 but on sale for $19. I could have had all 11 training videos! Skip.
7. The Sponsored Ad looked very spammy - a one page ad that’s typical of the kind of people who bid exorbitant amounts of Google Ads. Skip.

None of the websites really tickled my fancy (except the first one, Duhh). But that’s not the point. I visited each of these sites with my Alexa toolbar. So that helped their Alexa ranking, which in turn would help them access more opportunities with PayPerPost if they wrote sponsored reviews. There was a chance that I might have been interested in the site, in which point I would have stayed.

I signed up, anyways. I’ve never done anything pyramid like this before. Once you sign up, you get access to a stats page where you can see how many people you brought on (Level 1), how many people the people you brought on brought on (Level 2), etc all the way to Level 6.

Here’s the first catch. Do not give an email address that you actually use. They send account information there, but they also send marketing information. They explain on their cancellation page the following information to keep you from cancelling:

Members will receive up to 2 emails per week. This is the “cost” of using the FreeViral system. (and we think you’ll agree, that is an incredible deal!)

Presumably their business model is 1. sell the sponsored website spot. (Remember, you have to get codes from 6 websites that you have to check out and 1 sponsored site), and 2 sell spots on their email list. (They don’t sell your email address, but you do have to agree to receive the promotional blitz.)

Here’s the Second Catch. Although the link to their site says, Send me One Million FREE Guaranteed Visitors, the actual terms of service states the following:

NO GUARANTEES ON RESULTS
eHits makes no promises or guarantees on how the FreeViral.com members site may affect your website visitor traffic or your financial success.

It’s easy enough to delete your account. They warn you that they can’t reactivate deleted accounts, and provide a few tidbits of information to curtail you cancelling.

Here’s the Third Catch. Their tactics are a little bit spammy. They “highly” recommend pop-behinds and provide you with the code to be able to do it on your site.

Note: We highly recommend “pop-behinds” (promotion method #2). If you want to be a FreeViral.com power user, then use pop-behinds! We suggest you use pop-behinds in addition to text links or banners.

Bottom Line: We got suckered by the little innocent Send me One Million FREE Guaranteed Visitors message, but in the end, if it actually improves our Alexa ranking, excellent. And if we get any readers from it, even better. But aside from the 10 minutes to sign up, and the time it took to write this post and include the link on our website, we’ll see what kind of return we get. We’ll keep you posted.

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