When I posted about Being “Evil” with the Technorati bug thus making more money, I also took the chance of being noticed by bigger blogs that I visit daily and it worked with John Chow. Steve, what did you do? I did a few things right:
  • I trackback to him and a few others on there post about the bug. I did not over do it
  • I had an original title that used "Evil" and "Make Money". My title did not mentioned I was number 1 on Technorati like many did
  • I went a step further than just posting about the bug itself. I had ranking more in my mind lately and that's why I taught of it.
  • I remained honest by keeping my current price on ReviewME
  • I took a chance
Steve, did it change your life? Yes, I'm now a millionaire. Just kidding :D But I'm working on that with 1 Cool File and the MIS specification. Thanks to John's post, I was able to get more traffic from him and a few others. And because many had installed the Alexa Toolbar for Firefox(you have it installed, don't you?), my Alexa ranking can only improve for this blog and 1 Cool File. Steve, show me some numbers, please Ok, because you asked politely. I will use John Chow using Google Analytic. JohnChow.com 109 visitors with an average time of 00:14:27 with 1.64pages/visit. Via Google reader 33 visitors(est.) with an average time of 00:01:58 with 1.27pages/visit. The page itself was viewed 216 times excluding the front page views. Steve, did you see a negative side? Being semi-evil made me sick. Again, just kidding about the semi-evil part but I was really sick. Was it a message from the Man upstairs? Some may think so. ;) It started Saturday evening with the worst on Monday. On Sunday, I tried to reply to comments but I was not 100% so I think my replies did not reflect very well. So on Monday and seeing my comments from the previous day, I decided to rest and not reply to no one even if I wanted too. I did some very, very light browsing when possible since then. The other negative was that some had the wrong impression that I made money from that. I did not. I would had needed to have a review offer that day. Also, I kept my price the same just in case. With the bad timing of getting sick, I did not properly used the new traffic sent by John and the others. I wanted to publish this current post on Monday(24h later). Steve, did you see a positive side? Yes, I sure did because I lost a few pounds. Sorry, I taught you were asking about me being sick. The upside of being sick is that had more numbers for this post and more information. My gain was mostly in traffic. It also showed a flaw in the system. Again, many companies that use third party rankings must be able to get a quick turn around if that scenario occurs. Hopefully, it won't happen often and if does, the negative impact will be very short. I did got a few more entries for my current contest. ;) Steve, what about ReviewMe in all that? ReviewMe chose to use that criteria and it's their choices. Like I already mentioned, it could happen to any other rank being used. Overall, the impact on ReviewMe was small because:
  • It's the weekend and not many orders are sent anyway
  • An advertiser would not base it's decision only on that criteria alone. Seeing 5 stars for many blogs would had been strange
  • If you had read my experience with ReviewMe on my blog, you would know that sending an email is no use for a fast response during the week. They don't work on the weekend so warning them was pointless. I hope someone did tell them since then.
  • I just remembered that not everybody can change their rank/price so maybe that is why not many bloggers took the evil opportunity to have some fun with it. Those that did, I just hope they kept their price and did another update afterward once it was corrected. When it was corrected, I was sleeping or not in front of my computer but did soon after.
Here is my recommendation to ReviewMe:
  • Don't let users update their rank on weekends or at least have someone on staff/call in case of emergency
  • Update all profiles if it was not already done
Steve, it's not evil but unethical,cheating You are right and can't agree more if someone did got an offer at the higher price. You don't need a bachelor degree to know that because it's common sense. Posting about it may had warned potential weekend advertisers. If an advertiser would had click on my blog, then he/she would had seen the post about the bug and take the necessary measures. When a searched for a publisher when a was an advertiser on ReviewMe, I also went to read the blog first. Steve, what could be done about ranking? I will write about it later because it deserve it's own post. Conclusion I'm a programmer and learned from my experience that user will always do the unexpected. In this case, I did think out of the box and I could had used the bug to my own advantages but I did not. Some did not like the way I did it. Again, by making a post about it and being mentioned by John, it may had warned new advertisers to the bug on that day. In the end, it was more funny to most bloggers that anything else. Now, I'm 95% ok and more rested. I should clone myself when this happen but is the world ready for another Steve? So, what do you think? Did you rank in ReviewMe been updated since even if you did not touched it?

 

Keywords: Blogging, Ranking, Traffic