Myspam

I'm on Myspace, because if everyone else jumped off a bridge, I'd want to see the blog that made them do it.

Actually, I'm on Myspace to promote my weekly radio show, which airs on 91.5, WMFO, and has little or nothing to do with baked goods and everything to do with comedy and politics. It's called Hbee Inc. Radio, and it airs on Thursdays from 6-8 PM. It's also simulcast on the Web, and if you decide to tune in, be prepared for shouting, eclectic music, and the occasional joke that goes too far.

Myspace is a good place to promote this sort of thing. It gives me the chance to post four free MP3s and reaches millions. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the spammers caught on to this.

On Monday morning, I received an invitation to join a group from MySpace. These invites don't always tell you what the group is, and I know a few folks with groups, usually based around a comedy show, so I clicked the link and found myself in the "Get Paid to Take Online Surveys" group. Unlike all the other "Get Paid to Take Online Surveys" links I'd seen, this one promised to get me access to the surveys that really pay, complete with testimonials from folks who had quit their jobs and were now raking in $300 a day by filling out forms in their pajamas.

Man I'd love to have that gig. Too bad it's fictional. Folks, if you want to make $300 a day for an hour's work, here's how you do it:

1. Be born really funny.
2. Learn to be a great writer.
3. Spend 10 years losing your dignity and confidence five minutes at a time in comedy clubs.
4. Promote yourself relentlessly.
5. Develop an hour of material and hope that bookers and audiences like you.

If you can do that, you, too, can make $300 for a night's work, although it isn't really a night's work, more like a lifetime. That's how standup comics do it, and precious few succeed, though more people are actually making a living by doing this than by clicking on online surveys.

Myspace seems to be doing a good job stopping the spammers, as the group was deleted by midday. That didn't stop the spammer from setting up another group and sending me another invite, but that group was also deleted.

It'll be interesting to see how long Myspace can keep the spammers at bay. My guess: Not long. They always seem to find a way. At least I haven't been asked to join the "Help me transfer $10 million from Nigeria" group yet. That would be hard to resist.

Deadlines, Closures, and Such

Pretty holy week coming up for the Christians and the Jews this week. Passover begins on Wednesday, and the Easter celebration starts on Friday. If you haven't ordered something for Easter yet, do it soon. We're closing orders for our Easter specialties at Noon Eastern tomorrow (Tuesday, April 11).

This is another one of those busy shipping cycles, so if you need something by the end of this week, please try to order by Tuesday.

From Wednesday, April 19, through Monday, April 24, we will be unable to deliver products from Steve's Mom Bakery, Bittersweet Pastries (except for the Vanilla and Chocolate Birthday Cakes), and Solomon's Gourmet Cookies. So don't panic if you see a lot of "Out of Stock" labels floating around on the site--those items will be back at the end of the month.

Nothing really to report as far as our Top 10 Sellers are concerned, except for the growing popularity of our Demitasse Party Petits Fours, which were recently featured in both Shop Etc. and In Style magazines.

Chocolate Birthday Cake still has a considerable lead on Vanilla Birthday cake, but as I was breaking down the sales, I noticed that for February and March, Vanilla was outselling Chocolate, save for one week when it seems that half of America needed a chocolate cake. Is it possible that the time of year you're born has some influence on your preference for chocolate or vanilla? Why isn't our government spending our tax dollars to learn this invaluable information? I certainly can't afford it.

The New Deceivers

There are two truths about new technology:

1. It won't work the way it's supposed to.

2. Someone will find a way to use it to deceive people.

In the past, I've exposed the Free Shipping Phonies and the Dubious Discounters, and today I'd like to add the Customer Confusers to the list, in the form of shopping.com, who don't get a link because they're a bunch of hooligans.

Shopping.com is basically a giant pay-per-click (PPC) shopping site that tries to recruit online businesses to be listed in their directory. If they can't get a popular site legitimately, they're apparently not above doing an end-run to deceive people into visiting their site. This gets a little tricky, so pay close attention.

Google provides two outstanding online services: AdWords, for my money the best PPC value online, and AdSense. AdWords lets you create those little ads that you see to the right of your search results. AdSense lets you run AdWords ads on your site and get a commission every time somebody clicks on them. There are people online attempting to make a living off Google's AdSense by creating gateway pages for popular search phrases and filling them with AdSense ads. They're called "Scrapers," and they're universally loathed by people looking for actual information online, because their sites contain no content.

Shopping.com has developed a variant of the Scraper tactic. If you search for 1-800-Bakery in Google, you'll see a Shopping.com ad. I've said this before, but I'll be as specific here as possible:

We are not affiliated with Shopping.com.

What they've done is created a search gateway page linked to our domain name. When you click the link, you're shown some products from our competitors (that will cost more than what we offer) and our AdWords ad, among others. No matter what you click, shopping.com gets a commission. Never mind that you're confused as to where you are, they're making money by leeching off our domain name.

I tried to solve this problem with an AdWords campaign that said the same thing as the bolded text above. Google won't let me do that, because Shopping.com is trademarked.

If I ever start deceiving people, remind me to trademark my domain name first so that nobody can fight back. In the meantime, I'm sure that shopping.com will be happy to see the phrase, "Who needs a directory?" every time somebody clicks on their AdWords link.