This is something that more people need to read. As I mentioned in this story I am banned from Google adwords because I was a victim of internet marketers. The sad thing is, I'm a very technologically literate person, and I knew these things were shady so I thought I would test it out for myself. I only lost $20 to my test, but I also lost the ability to do anything on adwords, legitimately or otherwise. I even told the adwords support representative what had happened and they said there was nothing they could do for me.

I especially felt bad when I worked for adCenter as I would get calls from people who were victims of these scams, even if they didn't know it then. I could tell who they were when they were asking me for advice for optimizing their ads for their ebook on "Making money with online advertising". As I looked into it more I found that the most profitable internet marketing product were ebooks and systems for making money with internet marketing. These people would have sometimes hundreds of campaigns for hundreds of products and the only ones which got any positive return were those directed towards wannabe internet marketers.

Most of the advertisers I saw that didn't shut down after a month of spending hundreds of dollars on PPC advertising were those who were selling these IM products and usually only on 'brand keywords'; that's those keywords which were merely the brand names of the products. What they were essentially doing is like a man-in-the-middle attack: someone else sells a person on the product, the customer searches for the product and see the ad which usually looks like it's from the company who made the product and when they click on it the advertiser's affiliate id is added to the URL and they get the commission for someone else's work.

I could rant for a while about this, but I think I'm going to go play with my new martini shaker.