It’s Sunday night and in my time zone it’s past midnight. That means that my competition to win $100 is over. Unfortunately not enough people entered my contest so I had to reduce the prize to a pack of toothpicks. Only kidding! The winner will receive a full $100 in real money.

I put the names of everybody who entered into an Excel file and whizzed my mouse around with my eyes closed to select a winner. The first couple of times the pointer kind of ended up off the screen on the right-hand side. After calming my movements for another try, I finally landed on someone’s name. The winner of my contest is:

Ashwin Khanna

No, that’s a joke as well. The real winner is:

Becky from Pre Blogging

Although she thought the competition actually ended five weeks ago, it ended today and she has won. This means that I have to send her $100 by Paypal now, so Becky, send me your address. It also means that Becky now has a permanent link in my sidebar, and I will write a full review of her blog within the next week.

If you didn’t win the competition and would like a consolation prize, subscribe to my RSS feed for daily Angel.

In other blog news, John Cow has put a big question mark over Tyler Cruz’s head. Tyler is alleged to be trying to scheme people out of money by offering to act as a middle man between a designer and clients.

What I would say is that in situations like this, it always pays to wait for a response from the accused before you choose whose side you’re on. I’m waiting for Tyler’s comeback with interest.

Tags: Internet income by Angel
8 Comments »

Even more important than the Million Euro Wiki debate is my $100 gievaway. Yes, it may not be the huge amounts of money other people are giving away, but it’s coming out of my pocket so you can’t complain. All the details are here on my competition page. You have until Sunday to enter, at which point I’ll draw somebody at random to give myself something to blog about that has nothing to do with wikis or aggressive sales pitches – at last!

Tags: Internet income by Angel
2 Comments »

I can’t be the only person completely and utterly underwhelmed by the launch of Deal Dot Com, can I? John Cow called it “one of the biggest affiliate programs of the moment”. I think every post John Chow has written over the past seven days has been about Deal Dot Com. But as with most things, it was just hype, hype, hype.

Deal Dot Com, which launched today, is an affiliate program that offers a deal every day in the form of daily Internet marketing software for purchase and download. Today’s hot “deal”, the first deal on offer by Deal Dot Com, is for a $150 PHP membership script. That’s what’s got everybody so excited?

That’s pretty damn boring, and the ad copy for the product is just plain awful. I wasn’t even sure I was reading ad copy until I got right to the end of the ridiculous ramble.

The whole website at Deal Dot Com looks like a child made it and they seriously need to hire a decent writer. I just don’t understand why people are getting so worked about this thing. The real catch seems to be that they will pay commission for life on first- and second-tier referrals, but unless you are a webmaster or blogger reaching out to an extremely large, broad readership, the affiliate program has limited value; ask yourself if the people you can refer will buy a product like a $150 PHP membership script.

The top cats will make money here, but look at the website: it’s selling Internet marketing software. People who want these sorts of products are not your regular blogger or blog reader. Deal Dot Com is just an average affiliate program and if you only have a limited readership, your efforts are better spent elsewhere.

If they start offering something that myself or my readers might consider buying, then I will change my stance. Until then, forget it.

Bonus link: Before everybody shoots me down for being so negative, here’s something positive I found over at the Vandelay Design blog. It’s a detailed post about 10 ways to stand out as a blogger. That post was enough to earn my subscription to the RSS. Good job.

Tags: Internet income by Angel
3 Comments »