Moola is a sort of online game like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. The person starts with 1 penny and it doubles each round you win until you get up to $10 Million. Of course the odds of that happening are nearly impossible. If you get into the $100 range you got really lucky.

Anyways, They have an affiliate program in which you can give away Moola Invites. I have that link on many sites just because people tend to want to play Moola and win some quick cash. It works pretty simply. You have 4 tiers for your affiliates and it starts with 1st generations affiliates making you 4% of their winnings on down to 1% for your final generation.

Now this may sound like it could pay off big time, and certainly it can if I actually believed someone was going to keep playing until they hit the $10,000+ range. I have about 150 people in my tiers at this point and I get e-mails for my affiliate bonuses for things like “You have earned $0.02″ as an affiliate bonus. Whoopie! That is going to almost pay for 1 second of my phone bill.

Anyways, I suppose it could pay off eventually, but I have never been blessed enough to pull more than a 5 cent bonus in over a year. I don’t readily promote it, but hey, as background noise it may pay off one day if some ambitious person hacks the system or something and wins $10 Million and I get 4% of it. I’ll take a free $400,000 wouldn’t you? The only good thing about Moola is that you can’t join it unless you use a Moola Invite. So if people happen to be looking around for them you may as well provide the service. Who knows? Someone is bound to get lucky eventually.

A while back I had considered using StumbleUpon for directly Stumbling my own affiliate links. When you get a direct affiliate link for a product or service I figured there was probably no easier way to pimp it out than StumbleUpon right? Wrong.

Although, I had braced for the possibility that this was going to be frowned upon by Stumble so I decided to do it from a different IP address and account than I have my actual stumble account on. Just to be cautious.

Anyways, my plan was to use forums that had little Stumble groups to get a bunch of people to Stumble 4 of my affiliate links for various internet products. Each product was correctly categorized in Stumble for my target markets, with good buying term tags for them each. I probably was able to pick up a good 75-100 Stumbles for my links and was pretty proud of myself. This was really just a test to see if Stumblers actually went for these types of programs when they were randomly selected to see it.

After about a week I think I tracked approximately 1500 views from Stumble directly to my aff links. Really not quite as high as I had expected, but none-the-less, a pretty good picture of noticing a small trend at least. My purchase rate on these particular affiliates for PPC campaigns was around 8% so it wasn’t exactly a sure thing either way. How many sales did they create? Zero.

What else happened? Surprisingly there must have been a rash of “Thumbs Down” for my links because they fell completely off the map. Eventually my account was closed as well because I guess Stumble isn’t real excited about people submitting affiliate links into their system.

So…how else can Stumble be used? I am trying a couple different methods now. The obvious is directly writing blog posts and use it as articles (This is the recommended way), and the other, which can be more extensive is to try and create a number of lenses in Squidoo that I can simultaneously Stumble with basically the same content as the blog post, and even more related affiliates to the ones I am currently promoting.

Realistically there are better ways to go about this, but I figured I’d run some tests with Stumble and see just what I can and can’t get away with in regards to affiliate marketing. Squidoo is great for SEO regardless for any site so I figure at least that will be less intrusive to Stumble. IT also probably has a bit of a more professional look than many of the crappy sales pages for affiliates.

None of this is particularly a great way to work affiliates, but since3 I tend to use Squidoo and Stumble often for boosting SEO links I figured I’d try to combine them a bit and look for quicker ways to pump aff links out with out having to spend money on PPC, or write a ton of articles.

UPDATE: The AGLOCO Viewbar, just like Agloco is dead. I would encourage you to uninstall it from your computer as it has no use anymore.

Finally, after the long wait the Viewbar has officially been released to all the Agloco members and you can download it now. I got the e-mail a day ago, and went to get the viewbar immediately. I have run it for a few hours and find that it is not obtrusive in any way to my regular browsing.

The file itself to install the Viewbar is 2.2 MB in the download. May be a little slow right now because EVERYONE is trying to download theirs right now so you may have to check in a few times to get yours. Install takes just a couple minutes from the icon and you are ready to go. Launch the bar and enter your Agloco Username (I used my e-mail addy) and then the viewbar will show up at the bottom of your screen. It can be run with IE, or Firefox.

In the next post I’ll put up the Viewbar FAQs so that you can reference it and get started.

So NOW you can finally start using it and promote Agloco a little more since the Viewbar is finally here!

UPDATE: If you have been looking for the viewbar, don’t bother. Agloco is Dead. I would encourage you just to quit using the toolbar if you do have it. It is not going to do anything for you other than to put adware on your system anyways and you aren’t getting paid for it.

To uninstall the Viewbar in Windows all you need to do is click on your start menu, find it there and click on the “Uninstall” icon and you are all set.

Honestly I don’t know. I check in there every week or so to see if any new information is out, but it seems they have run into a bit of a snag with the ad servers. When will it be done? Who knows.

Apparently John Chow created a video recently using the viewbar and this is what he had to say:

The AGLOCO Viewbar is real and it does exist. I know because I’m using it right now. Akshay Mavani sent me a beta Viewbar to try out and give my impressions.

The Viewbar software is a 1.8 MB download. When installed, it takes up 5 MB of space. The Viewbar is not any bigger than the Windows task bar. The version I am running shows ads by Google and Google is the default search engine. The ads are not targeted at the moment because it hits only one ad server. The rest of the ad servers have not been connected.

You can view his video here

So…it is in testing phase still, but far enough along that it could be tested by one of the more active Agloco backers. Let’s hope it is ready soon.

I’ve been registered on that site for quite a while and noticed that everyone and their brother is still pimping it now. Good for them. It is another affiliate system in which you can “hope” to make some cash on if you happen to work it. Since I sign up for every affiliate system there is I figured I’d describe this one a bit and try to figure out what exactly makes it good or bad while I write.

Join DealDotCom

Does it make you any money? I’ve heard many claim that it is great, but once I actually looked into it I can’t find any real reason to promote it all that much. It is a classic pyramid scheme in which you only get paid when someone you refer as an affiliate actually BUYs something from them. Pretty lame right?

Interestingly enough I see quite a few products on there that would be helpful to affiliates in that they don’t really try and hide shady software packages, nor do they rally try and hide that fact that DealDotCom itself wants you to basically spam people.

The major issue with the program is that you really aren’t promoting products that you can sell yourself. They make you promote the affiliate program and then when someone buys something you get a cut. Pretty hard sell isn’t it? You don’t have referral links for products to use. People must sign up first through your affiliate program link, and THEN buy the product. Great scam on their part as it essentially means that the majority of people who buy something won’t be referrals of someone else. IF you promote a product through them you are essentially cutting yourself out of the deal because you are going to have to make the person who wants to buy go through an additional step just so that you are able to get paid on the transaction.

Here’s what their site says:

How do I become a DealDotCom affiliate?

If you have a free DealDotCom account, then you already are one. Just go to the Your Account page to find your affiliate link. Whenever you tell someone about DealDotCom, just make sure they click on that link so you get credit for the referral. To make it even easier, on the Your Account Page there is a link “click here to send this link to your friends” that will automatically open up your email for those of you who are too lazy to copy and paste.

What is this two-tier affiliate business?

Whenever you refer someone to DealDotCom via your handy-dandy affiliate link, you get paid 35% of DealDotCom’s profit for every item that they buy. If someone you referred to DealDotCom refers someone else, you get paid 15% of DealDotCom’s profit every time they buy something for the rest of your life. This is a big commitment, so we suggest you take it very seriously.

Essentially you really have no reason to promote their products, and they don’t give you product affiliate links. What’s the point of just promoting DealDotCom itself then? Well…I suppose if you have an affiliate site and your readers are mainly affiliate marketers the products will be targeted to them in most cases. So if they sign up for it they may want to buy one of the products they are promoting on a daily basis.

IS there potential to make money with it? Certainly. Is it designed in an affiliate friendly way? Not particularly when you don’t get actual product affiliate links IMO.

Join DealDotCom