If you haven’t tried to unsubscribe yourself from a paypal subscription you would think me an idiot to even thin anyone could struggle with this, but it is harder than it should be.

To Unsubscribe From A PayPal Subscription Vist PayPal.com And Click:

1. My Account
2. History
3. Sort by Subscriptions
4. Chose the time period for when you first subscribed
5. Click “cancel subscription”

People struggle because the “cancel subscription” link only appears if you view the history of the first payment to that subscription, when it would make sense for it to appear next to each payment.

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Today is an exiting day because Google has given Blogging Fingers Sitelinks!

Blogging Fingers started way back on July 2nd 2007, which makes it over 10 months old. Since starting it has been penalized by Google, then sold for $6000, then forgiven by Google, then penalized again and now finally given Sitelinks, while still suffering from a severe tool bar PageRank penalty!

What a story!

You can view the Sitelinks in action by Googling Blogging Fingers or bloggingfingers, or just check out the screen shot below:

The penalizations mentioned above were purely tool bar penalizations to stop me from selling links that pass PageRank. The search engine rankings were not effected. However, there were other penalizations.

For example when I launched the Blog Monetization Strategies e-book with a contest, it went off with such a bang that Google penalized that page for gaining links at an unnaturally fast rate. You will see if you Google “blog monetization strategies” or even “blog monetization strategies e-book” there will be no sign of the Blogging Fingers page, despite almost all the other results being bloggers writing about the e-book.

For a brief time during the contest the page did appear at position number 1, so I can be sure there are no indexing issues going on.

All the same, getting Sitelinks with a tool bar PageRank of 2 shows Google can still love you, even when it pretends to hate you. I know you love me really Google.

On a previous blog of mine, which I sold (naturally), I wrote about making money as an SFI affiliate.

You can think of SFI as the opposite of Amazon Associates. SFI has a small selection of products, and the focus is on building a team/referral network to sell those products for you.

SFI marketing group are about network marketing and they are borderline MLM (multi-level marketing), which is not something I am generally involved with. However, on this previous blog I wrote some pretty in depth reviews about SFI and decided they were legit, but that I wouldn’t promote them because they didn’t have many products available to for affiliates to sell, which put too much emphasis on growing a downline that had the main purpose of growing their own downline.

Nevertheless, the couple of posts I wrote became fairly popular and ended up giving me 74 referrals. As an experiment and in the quest for answers to readers of that blog and my newly acquired referrals I paid to upgrade to an “executive affiliate”, which promised bonsues beyond the cost of upgrade.

The result was earnings of $24, but I had paid $30 to stay upgraded for 1 month, so I had lost $6 and not been paid the $24. I wanted to focus on other things and so I didn’t bother upgrading again.

Months went by and a few of my referrals made sales (see screenshot below to see my earnings gradually increasing).

Without doing anything and forgetting about SFI completely, my earnings increased to $72, which to my surprise arrived in my PayPal account yesterday. (see screensshot below - click to enlarge, SFI is a division of Carson Services)

I re-investigated SFI and they have added lots of new products for their affiliates to sell and so the MLM aspect has been diluted. You can now sell a much wider range of products, from shampoo to tech services. Alternatively you could focus on growing a sales team to sell those products for you. I wont dive straight back into SFI, but I may get back togethor with them again in the future.

If you want to play the SFI game you are welcome to join my SFI as part of my network.

It is rare for me to hate anything, especially a sponsor of Blogging Fingers. I am banning Reverse Funnel System banners from being bought on Blogging Fingers once the time for the current ad has expired.

Alex of ThousandDollarProfits is using the Reverse Funnel System and he ordered up this review.

Reverse Funnel System is the classic “pay a massive amount of money to be allowed to charge others a massive amount of money by selling the same thing”. A look at their disclaimer reveals they take no responsibility for any money you lose with them and also that the testimonials have not been verified as accurate.

I wanted to find out more about the Reverse Funnel System so naturally I Googled “reverse funnel system review”. The first result is a landing page for the system. Doing my duty, I entered my email address at the bottom to be sent to another page filled with videos, most of which were unavailable.

I endured this and entered my email address AGAIN into the box at the bottom of this page, which was required to proceed because the other ‘click here” link lead to a 404 error. I was sent an email telling me to watch another video on Youtube which contained more salesmanship and offerings of “free” DVDs and e-books. The video told me to visit long hyped up landing page, which, grudgingly I did (to fulfill my duty as a reviewer). I entered my email address AGAIN here, only to be sent back to the first sales page! (Must be the “reverse” system kicking in!)

These sales pages I just described are not the actual sales pages of Alex, who ordered this review, although he did not actually write any of his own sales pages because the person on his is called “Ty”. Alex must be an affiliate.

If you enter your email address on Alex’s ThousandDollarProfits Page, which is promoting the Reverse Funnel System it takes you to a sales page longer than the bridge of kazadoom and it is at this page I decided I shall not pass. A payment of $50 is required to receive an online “Mentorship Application” (note that is just an application and not actual access into the program).

I have 3 Pieces Of Advice To Give:

1. If you are a newbie to making money online, stay away from hyped up schemes like this one.
2. If you are a blogger, don’t write a flattering review of the Reverse Funnel System just because they paid you.
3. If you are a Reverse Funnel System promoter don’t order reviews from honest bloggers.

Everyone knows leaving comments on related blogs is a way to send relatively small amounts of traffic to your blog and can be a good way to get some attention in the early days of your blogs life, as well as possibly gaining some backlinks if the blog is a DoFollow blog.

Surely everyone who knows that is intelligent enough to realize that if they leave more attention grabbing comments they will receive more traffic and that by leaving a stupid comment they could damage their reputation.

No one needs help with that.

I’e seen 2 posts recently on popular blogs that give out tips for “how you should (or should not) comment” and I must say the reading these posts makes me think the authors are stuck in their own crazy little world.

There is no need to hide in the dark, I’d rather be open with who thinks what.

On caroline-middlebrook.com she attacks a commentor who had left rather average comments only 1 sentence long:

“It looks like he was trying to get a backlink by jumping to the top of my Top Commentator plugin because he left just enough comments to surpass Mark Mason who is currently top of the list. I see people do this quite often and it always raises an eyebrow. However the key question that I ask as a blog owner is “does this comment provide any value to my readers?”

(emphasis is mine)

Why I Disagree With Caroline On This One

1. The purpose of the top commentator plugin is to encourage comments by offering them free promotion. The free promotion is the motive behind the comment. If you don’t want people to leave comments the way they do, take the plugin it down.
2. The comments don’t have to provide value to your readers. They are the voice of your readers.

In addition, not everyone who leaves a blog comment is a marketer trying to gain traffic. Some people just want to say they found something funny or interesting and shouldn’t be required to “add value”. I very rarely leave comments with the purpose to drive traffic anymore. If something I read makes me want to comment, I comment.

Which is more spammy, a lengthy knowledgeable comment made by a marketer with the intent to drive traffic or a “LOL that was hilarious!” from an innocent passer by? Surely the comment left by the marketer is the closest to spam.

Censoring what people say on your blog because it “doesn’t provide value to your readers” is nuts - the commentors ARE your readers! It is the blog authors job to provide value, let the readers say what they like.