Phone verification works against spammers on most sites because of one thing. It’s currently too expensive to buy phone numbers to verify accounts to make spamming worthwhile. Now that Gmail, Facebook, and Craigslist are all starting to use phone verification as a means of preventing spam not only are they turning away legitimate users who don’t own a cellphone or landline but they’re actually making it more cost effective for spammers. A phone number to a spammer might cost a $1 from Twilio. Well a $1 per verified Gmail account is rather expensive, but throw in the fact you can now make accounts for Facebook and Craigslist (although technically Twilio numbers won’t work on craigslist because they’re marked as VOIP), the actual cost of an account goes down to roughly 33 cents. Include a couple more sites whom I’m sure will take up phone verification in the future, and that cost goes down even further. The more sites that start using phone verification will be the down fall of phone verification. Just my two cents.

I’ve been doing some freelance work just to keep my PHP skills up-to-date.

Here are some tips to get great freelancers and great work.

1) It is so frustrating but I see this every day. People put in their job descriptions, “I don’t want to pay more than $50″, or “I am looking for the lowest bid”. What this says is you’re a cheap ass who wants a lot of work for very little money. I never bid on these projects because immediately I can tell the person wants a really good job for practically free. The only people who do bid on these projects are very inexperienced people from 3rd world countries. The code you end up receiving will suck I can almost guarantee it.

2) If you’re going to post a project, make the budget higher than you actually intend to pay. It’ll draw more attention to your project and get better coders bidding on it. They may bid higher than the budget you had in mind but you might find someone who can do the job really well and is worth the extra money, or you can always negotiate with them privately to get the bid down to a budget you can agree with.

3) If you plan to pay per hour, remember there is something in the programming world called a 10X Coder. 10X means they can develop code 10X faster than someone with less experience. So just because the bid may be for $40 an hour against someone charging $10 an hour, it does not necessarily mean the $10 an hour person is going to end up being cheaper, and most likely the code won’t end up being better.

4) If you plan to pay per hour on something like Odesk, have the person estimate the exact amount of time it’ll take to get the project done. If they say 3 hours, set their max hours at 3. Also, negotiate with them saying if they go over the 3 hours, the price per hour drops 50%, or something along those lines. Coders will draw a project out when you’re paying per hour because as long as their is movement on their computer screen they get paid. If they have 4 hours, they’ll try to use all of it because it’s money in the bank.

5) Have faith in people with little or no ratings yet on freelance sites. I’ve had some very good experiences hiring people with no feedback simply because they wanted good initial feedback and were willing to go the extra mile to make sure that happened.

I’m one of those people that can’t stand PPV. I stopped doing it long before the hype came about. I think the traffic quality is a complete joke, long term sustainability is impossible because you’re advertising the same product to almost the same set of users every day, and lastly the competition is now fierce because every blogger is talking about it. If you’re a newb, don’t touch PPV, you’ll go through a decent size ad budget in literally 30 seconds, drop your ad server even faster than that, and lose a ton of money! With that said, here’s what I learned about PPV when I did it, and maybe this can help some of you that are still interested in doing it.

1) For the best results, create a landing page that looks similar to your target site to convert the user. You’ll essentially trick them into thinking your site is the site they were looking for and they’ll dish out a lot of information. It’s sort of like legal phishing. This will skyrocket conversions but also lower quality quite a bit so it’s not perfect for every product. Either way, I did have a lot of success doing this.

2) I can’t recommend rackspace.com’s cloudsites enough. I thought my servers were good until I realized I could send thousands of impressions a second to them with PPV traffic instantly dropping them and spending $100s sending traffic to a down site. With that said, I moved all my PPV landing pages to cloudsites on the cheap and haven’t been happier. In fact, I use cloudsites for most of my static landing pages now.

3) Remember the pros have automated much of PPV, which means people are using programs to auto adjust their bids to out bid you by a penny on every target. If you raise your bid, I can guarantee you any legitimate competition will be automatically raising that bid higher than yours within the next hour. If you’re running manually this is going to cause you a complete headache. With that said it usually doesn’t matter too much to be in the second or third spot providing your competition isn’t advertising the same product. I did research on this awhile back looking at the conversion statistics of a 2nd view of my product compared to a first but I can’t remember the results at the moment. I’m fairly certain first views converted much higher. If you decide to do your own research let me know what you find.

4) Cloaking is used quite a bit by the bigger PPV guys to add sound to their landing pages and beat the landing page approval process. This does increase conversions although it’s generally against any PPV network’s TOS so be careful.

5) Finding a white label offer and creating it to look like the target site is a winner.

I haven’t used this tool much, but I’m definitely going to start using it more after seeing how accurate it is. Basically what this tool does is find related keywords to a particular keyword or phrase you throw in. For example I used to the dig tool on the word “dating” and here are some of the results:

dating
online dating
singles
personals
love
matchmaking
romance
dating service
matchmaker
date
relationships
internet dating
dating site
marriage
free online dating
chat
personal ads
relationship
match
single
women
dating advice
Most of these words/phrases are really dead on related to dating and you’ll get the same type of accuracy for any other keyword out there. It’s a really quick way to find a good niche.

So it’s not really a new concept but it’s one that’s been at the back of my mind lately. Uploading torrents and requiring people to visit your website and complete a task to get the password to the zip/rar file you just downloaded. If you download torrents at all I’m sure you’ve run across these. They are annoying as heck but sometimes when you’re desperate enough for the content you’ll do whatever it asks. This idea brings me back to my Hotline/FTP days when people used to do this when CPC was still huge. Back then you could make .25 cents every time someone clicked your banner on your site. With enough advertising it wasn’t uncommon to make a $1k a day running a Warez Hotline/FTP server. Those were the days. With that said, I’m honestly surprised people have not began to exploit torrents more so. Why torrents haven’t become a complete wasteland I don’t understand since it’s so easy to fake file size, multiple users who say content is good, spammers to upload the torrents to multiple sites etc. Someone needs to get on this and make me proud.