Apologies, Apologies, Apologies. I know I have been remiss inn posting to this blog. Forgive me.
Moving On:
In today’s poor economy many of us are using various methods to generate extra income and for those who use their blog or website
the lure of easy cash for merely posting links or ads on your site is very tempting. It’s the lore of “Easy Money” that can draw us into dangerously deceptive territory.So how can you protect your identity when signing up for ad revenue programs?
Since I don’t like reading “Wordy” blogs, where the articles author goes on and on before getting to the point, I gave give you the tips to protect yourself NOW, instead of making you reading forever.
1. There is NEVER any reason to give your Date of Birth upfront if you also have to give your social security number for tax information.
When you are a part of an blog or website monetization program, there comes a time when you will have to post "secure" information, so that web monetization programs can make payments to you.
Usually they need Tax identification information and if your website is your business then you already know what to do, but if you like me, someone who wants extra money for Starbucks, then you may be unaware that once Identity thieves have your: Name, Address, Social Security Number and Date of Birth it is inevitable that bad things will happen.
Reputable web monetization sites aren’t so invasive. I have used Google’s Adsense, Adbrite, Smowtion, InfoLinks and Intellelinks and I wasn’t asked to give my date of birth.
Research Research Research.
Don’t believe in online Testimonials, people who are interested on stealing someone’s identity will use whatever means are required to achieve their goal.
When you come across a new monetization programs, what will you do to determine whether it is worth for you to join and participate? I often surf over the net and come across many forums to talk about new opportunities for generating income for your site(s). I can tell you there are so many different kinds of monetization programs available on the net that it almost comes up a new one every day.
However, I can also tell you that some of them are in fact scams that will never pay you after you did a lot of things or work for them. That will be too late if you fail to receive to payments from these programs.
To avoid scams, I need to do something. The way I normally do is to first check the Page Rank of the website first. By using some free PR checker, it is very convenient to check it. One example is http://www.popuri.us/, and apart from Page Rank, you can also check the link popularity in Technorati, Alexa Ranking (a ranking to indicate the relative traffic flow of a site) and the number of backlinks in Google. All these are very valuable information to help you to determine. If the program is a scam, it is normally a new site. A new site probably can't have a good PR, Alexa ranking, and most importantly, the number of backlinks. Another good way to check is the Google Toolbar since it shows the PR of every site you visit and block the pop-up windows too.
