Maybe I should just start a blog following the perils of big Internet Marketing gurus. Seems like I’ve been posting quite a bit about them lately. I was reading a recent post on Shoemoney.com where Jeremy was calling out some dude named Patrick Curl (Patrick Curl – The Social Media Idiot) because Patrick made what appears to be one comment bashing Shoe and his new Shoemoney System on behalf of someone else who felt wronged by Shoemoney support. Now I know most of the big guys like Shoe and Chow have egos that match their monthly earnings. Hey, it’s part of what makes them great in Internet/Affiliate Marketing. This post was a bit of an odd one though in my opinion.

Shoe flew off at Patrick for what seems to be a single comment. Sure Patrick was talking out of his butt making judgment calls against Shoe even though he didn’t even have any experience with the Shoemoney System. But Shoe went off and created almost a David vs. Goliath firefight (the only problem is I’m pretty sure God wasn’t backing Patrick on this one). It left me scratching my head a bit…unless that was Shoe’s intention. By the way, I completely get his side of it and getting sick and tired of people coming out of the woodwork to give you a hard time when you’re trying to make a living by TRULY helping people. In fact, shouldn’t a guy be rewarded handsomely for doing a kick butt job at that? I think he should.

Regardless of who is right or wrong, who said what or what the intentions were, or whether or not Shoe should have created such a brewhaha in the first place, it got me to thinking about how Patrick could end up being the big winner here. Think about it. The dude is now on the radar of a lot of blogs, sites and other gurus in the industry. He’s also got people looking at his sites, linking to his sites and writing about him. Sure die hard Shoemoney followers will forever hate the guy for slandering their guru, but this guy could leverage the publicity to his gain if he put half a brain to it.

This reminded me of a JohnChow.com post I read a couple of years ago titled There Really Is No Such Thing As Bad Press. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth the 5 minutes it’ll take you to go through it. Chow ends his post with an interesting statement: “Remember, if you’re not pissing somebody off, you’re not doing it right.” I don’t completely agree, but it does make you think a bit about negative stuff and how to put it into perspective. He also gives a couple of great examples in his post of companies that took bad press to the BANK…literally.

I also thought of Kayne West, who we all will likely agree was a complete moron for what he did to Taylor Swift during her Video Music Awards acceptance speech. He made a fool of himself and disrespected what I believe is a truly great artist deserving of the award she received. However, don’t you think what he did showed some signs of brilliance? To be honest, before that incident, I wouldn’t have come up with Kayne West’s name for anything. Now he’s firmly planted in my mind. I know what he looks like. I have an opinion formed about him. He put himself ON THE MAP with 14 seconds of stage time. I don’t believe for a second he did that solely because he really really wanted Beyonce to win.

I guess all of this comes down to making some lemonade out of lemons. It’s just a matter of time before someone takes us to task for one of our projects. Whether it be because of an actual screw up or simply because jealously tends to bring out the worst in people. No matter the reason, being thrust into the limelight can pretty much always be a good thing. Figure out how to make it work to your favor.

If you’ve spent any amount of time working in the online world, you’ve likely let a domain lapse accidentally or heard of someone who has. For me, the first offense was a stock photography site I was working on with two other business partners. This was before stock photo sites were all the rage and we had a ton of great images to start us off along with a great business plan. I singlehandedly shot the whole thing down by losing the domain due to expiration. Everyone lost interest after that.

It seems like such a simple thing, but is often overlooked. Nowadays in the world of domains, things have changed significantly. We have redemption periods offering lots of grace for absent minded site owners. You’d have to try pretty hard to lose a domain anymore. Course there are still ways to screw things up for your site due to inattentiveness to your domain expiration.

The latest mishap took Foursquare offline for the better part of the day on Thursday. I bet GoDaddy was enjoying the traffic to their ads though. Foursquare, for those of you who aren’t familiar with them, is a location based social network that incorporates gaming elements. Users share their location with friends by making a “check in”.

Here’s what the Foursquare page looked like on Thursday:

Here’s the thing. Foursquare is working on a new round of funding to the tune of $10 million. At one point recently, they were valued at over $60 million. Renewing a domain name seems like the last thing a company worth $60 million would overlook. Especially when that domain name was key to your service being available to your critically important customer base.

The lesson in all of this is simple: Keep an eye on your domain names. Check them regularly. Make sure your email contacts are up to date and headed to a box you’re sure to see. A sure fire way to avoid disaster is simply use the auto renew feature. When you’re ready to drop a domain you’re no longer going to use, just log in and set it to manual renewal.

The domain I lost changed my attentiveness to my domains. Now that I have over 1,000 I’m actively using, it was good I learned the hard way early on.

Make sure you’re current on your domain renewals.

Today I finally disabled Infolinks for good. No, I’m not going back to Kontera either. I’m going sans in text links altogether. I decided to make the move last night after a comment from Laptop Briefcase, a long time reader on Blueverse.com. It wasn’t the comment that made me decide to do away with the in text links, but a culmination of things I’ve been thinking about over the past 6 months.

Here’s why I decided to say “Goodbye” to Infolinks:

1. In Text links are annoying and contribute to site clutter.

LB’s comment was…

“I am really surprised that people blanket their sites with the annoying in-content ads for a mere $10/month. In my opinion, the negative effect on the site outweighs that small profit. Basically you’re selling irrelevant links on your site for about $1/month/link. No offense, but you can get much more than that by selling text links in your blogroll. Plus they wouldn’t look like crap.”

After reading that last night, I had to agree and that’s what pushed me over the top. Making a few bucks is never worth a frustrating user experience. I personally hate the in text ads, especially when your mouse accidentally activates the popup (maybe that’s how they get their clicks…accidental clicking!), so why would I put you, my fine readers, through an experience like that?!

2. In Text links don’t make much money.

I’ve never made much from the in text ads. Infolinks was infinitely better than Kontera for this blog, but they still represent only a tiny fraction of the total income. This holds true with bigger blogs too as best as I can see.

For instance, when JohnChow.com was reporting earnings every month, Kontera links only made up 1/40th of his big month earnings. Sure he was making $1000 a month from Kontera, but my hunch is it wasn’t because of his click thru’s. John reported things down to the penny, yet Kontera remained the same month over month. That tells me he had some other type of arrangement with them. I doubt he would have cleared that much on a monthly basis if he was relying on click thru’s only for income generation from that source.

All that to say that the annoyance factor really glares at you when you consider the income potential based on the historical results. Not worth it.

3. In Text links slow your blog’s load times.

Although I don’t have specific data for this, I noticed an immediate improvement in performance once I switched from Kontera to Infolinks. I noticed a further improvement this morning when I disabled Infolinks. Sure it may only be a few milliseconds, but all of the plugins and stuff that gets loaded on an average blog adds up. Shaving off unnecessary plugins just helps keep things dialed in for as much speed as possible.

So what???…

I think an important lesson lurks in here. It’s spawned by a simple need to regularly review what you’re doing online from your customer’s/visitor’s point of view. An easy way to get clues into this is by just listening to what your visitors have to say. Making money blogging should be a result of providing a valuable resource. If you provide value, the dollars will follow. Sure there’s some science to it, but if you don’t have something solid to monetize, you’re going to be beating your head against the wall. That’s why the most successful sites are ones with great value. When’s the last time you saw an Adsense arbitrage site in the top of search results for a competitive keyword or phrase?

The other thing I wanted to mention is my action is also born out of a sense that we’re on the verge of a different way of monetizing blogs like Blueverse.com. I don’t think the old ways of making money blogging through ads, text links, intext links, etc are where it’s at. I’m not 100% sure what the model should look like this year, but I’m working fervently on ideas and trying different things.

Bottom line takeaway from all this: Constantly evaluate, learn and work to improve what you’re doing.