I’m looking for a broker to bring me paid review opportunities. I am willing to review stuff (web services, products, books, videos, personalities, historical blunders, just about anything) in exchange for a payment. I will disclose the review as “sponsored” as appropriate. I will respond to any requests for paid reviews within 2 days, and complete the review within 2 days of that acceptance.

Reviews will be positive or negative or neutral based on my opinion and experience alone. My reviews will generally include links to relevant web resources, as consitutes a quality read for my audience.

As broker for bringing me the review opportunities, you get 50% of the fee. Now here’s the catch: it has to be worth more than $30 to me.

Now I don’t care a hoot about your “review management system” or your gradient graphics with rounded corners, or how you approach advertisers - that’s your business. Don’t bother me with Alexa’s opinion of my rank, or your estimates of my RSS feed subscriptions (especially if you can’t seem to estimate that).  All I care is that you bring me opportunities, and they pay me better than $30. All I care is that you PERFORM.

And if you are smart, you might consider refraining from telling me about other blogs that get paid more than I do, or other blogs that you estimated to be of higher value than mine. All that craps does is lower my opinion of your value to my operations… I am quite aware of my own value, thank you, and if you can’t see it, well…. you suck and that’s really not my problem, is it?

It’s Holiday Blog Tag time, where if you get tagged by another blogger you write five things most people don’t know about you and then tag five others so they can do the same. I’ve been tagged several times over the past week so I give in.. here’s my 5 Things:

1. I worked for Publisher’s Clearing House (PCH) back in the day of the big magazine subscription sweepstakes, before Ed McMann put his face all over an American Family copy-cat. You might say that was my introduction to marketing (although I was just a kid working the night shift for beer money). By the way, Robert H. Treller didn’t exist, and you really didn’t need to buy magazines to have a chance at winning. I learned about corporate spying while with PCH, and alot about the competitive side of marketing. I also got to see first hand how someone working in the mail room gets to know almost everything and every one in a business.
2. I started my first real job when I was 14 years old, working as a dishwasher in a French restaurant on the Miracle Mile in Manhasset, NY (Brasserie St. Germaine). I lied and said I was 16. By age 15 I was a bus boy. I remember when the waitresses would bring me along to The Chalet in Roslyn after work (after 10pm) so they had someone with them besides the fresh-of-the-boat French chef trainees, who were hard-to-handle. Beer, women, and crazy French sous Chefs in bars at age 15… is there any wonder?
3. I have shot perfect 25 while trapshooting twice in my life, both times costing my dad a round for the boys at the yacht club bar. The first time he was happy to pay the bar bill, because he was proud of his kid. The second time, I am not so sure. I haven’t been invited back for a third opportunity yet, but I did get invited on their annual Sporting Clays outing last spring. I shot the high score. And by the way, just to keep it interesting, I shoot trap and sporting clays with a made-in-Japan Browning pump shotgun.
4. I once walked 50 miles in one day. No, it wasn’t for boy scouts, but it was during high school. I earned a patch, but there was no way I’d put that sucker on my junior varsity Lacrosse jacket. I did it to show I could. In case you were wondering, the first 24 miles are the easiest. Oh, and if you ever try that yourself, learn from my mistake and do not pack a salami sandwich and chocolate milk as your lunch. There are better choices.
5. Finally, because the idea of marketers who don’t watch TV is odd but also oddly common, I’ll admit that we tossed TV out of our house almost 3 years ago. Except for pro sports and late night infomercials from which cocktail party jokes are made (”…aw honey, sandwiches again?”), I don’t miss it.

Now to pass the Holiday BlogTag baton to 5 others… I tag Susan Torrico, Chris Snyder, Jeff Loiselle, Steve McArthur, and Hans Kaspersetz.

Some time ago in SEO Secret I joked that modern day “SEO” was ratting out your competitors to Google (click on the turtle). Nowadays some blogs make a living mocking spammers and poking at the beast that is search engine spam. Lately, referrer spam is taking off as a way to get the attention of SEOs and marketers (a.k.a. people who actually look at referer logs). I get tons of it… hits that do nothing but place URLs into the referrer list, with a high enough frequency to arouse curiosity and cause me to follow thru and see who is referring traffic to my blog.

Now this is different from traditional referrer spam, which sought back links via published stats (and referrers as live links), because it is hitting my blog (no exposed stats) and hitting it 20 times per day.

Enter “spammer outing via referrer spamming”. If you have a competitor exploiting weaknesses in phpbb or some other lame software package, spoof the referrer using that spam-filled domain, and hit a blog like mine a few dozen times to make it look like johnon.com is mentioned on that site. If I fall for it, I will follow through looking for my mention, and discover the spammy exploited site. If I am so inclined to blog about the spam, as I did here, you will have outed your competitor.  Like Spy. vs. Spy, it Spammer vs. Spammer.

Today it was feeltairarmarchive.com that was “outed” in my traffic logs. In addition to Vargas Girls and naval aviation stuff, it has tons of pharma spam via a phpbb exploit, and blogspot has been spammed to death with doorway pages sending traffic. You’ll have to interrupt the redirect to see the spam, because it sends the traffic on to your typical online drugstore sites.

Now in reality I suspect it was my online pharmacy post that got someone automated referrer spamming bot’s attention and not actually a spammer outing a spammer, but it could work this way also. In this case, Google is not getting it’s cut via AdSense, and blogspot is being used (for free) to generate the doorway pages, so I am guessing Google would shut this down sooner rather than later, no?

It is the referrer spam that bugs me.  Hitting my logs with an invalid IP and a fleetairarmarchive.com referrer…. pretty cheesy.