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Over the last few months I kept bumping into a “challenge” on Triond: people are either trying to get 1,000 articles by the end of 2010 or make $1,000 in any given 30 days (there are at least two versions of the challenge).  Judging by my not-so-good experience with Triond, to say the least, I might say these people are fucking nuts.

I almost shat a brick when I heard of writing 1,000 articles for Triond. My ever best paid article with them is some fashion writeup that brought me a whopping *drumrolls* $0.93 in one and a half years. Yes, that’s 93 cents, I shit you not. Multiply that by 1,000 and my top earnings would be $930 for 1,000 articles. Thanks but no, thanks, I can sell them on DP for $3-4,000.

The second version is even scarier. At a pay rate of $1-$2 per 1,000 views, you’d need 1,000,000 hits per month for the $1,000 mark. And no, traffic exchanges don’t count. So good luck spamming your friends on FB–1M hits in a month is a lot of traffic!

I’d rather post 1K articles on my own sites or even sell them for hard, cold cash. So no, I’ll pass this challenge.

<?php
ini_set('error_reporting', 0);

$scrapeURL		= 'http://ezinearticles.com/search/?q=';
$baseURL		= 'http://ezinearticles.com';
$query			= 'project+management';

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTMLFile($scrapeURL . $query);

$divs = $dom->getElementsByTagName('div');
foreach ($divs as $div) {
	if ($div->getAttribute('class') == 'srch_title') {
		foreach ($div->getElementsByTagName('a') as $a) {
			$articles[] = $a->getAttribute('href');
		}
	}
}
$articleURL = $baseURL . $articles[rand(0,count($articles)-1)];

$dom->loadHTMLFile($articleURL);
$article['title'] 	= $dom->getElementsByTagName('h1')->item(0)->textContent;
$article['body'] = $dom->getElementById('body')->textContent;

print "<pre>";
print_r($article);
print "</pre>";

?>

<?php
// DOMDocument()s throw shitty warnings for broken HTML
ini_set('display_errors', 0); 

$scrapeURL              = 'http://www.centurian.org/popular-proxies/?start=';

$startIndex             = 0;
$stop                   = FALSE;

while (!$stop) {
		//create the DOMDocument
        $dom = new DOMDocument();
        $stop = TRUE;
        if ($dom->loadHTMLFile($scrapeURL . $startIndex)) {
        		//get all links from the page
                $list = $dom->getElementsByTagName('a');
                for ($i = 0; $i < $list->length; $i++) {
                        $proxy = $list->item($i)->textContent;
                        //we only want the links that have "http://" in anchor
                        if (strpos($proxy, 'http://')!==FALSE) {
                                print $proxy."\r\n";
                                $stop = FALSE;
                        }
                }
        }
        $startIndex += 32;
}

?>

Usage:

pigpromoter@pleech:~/scrapers/centurianDOM$ php ./centurianDOM.php > proxies.txt
pigpromoter@pleech:~/scrapers/centurianDOM$ cat ./proxies.txt | wc -l
6277

… or simply put it in your htdocs and fire it up through the browser.

As I said, the script is trivial, but it’s a good way of seeing how DOM works. Enjoy!

AllowOverwrite on
AllowRetrieveRestart on
AllowStoreRestart on

Restart the server and  you’re done.

The report promises to be 30 pages long, and it’s only 16, filled with crap. Lots of phrases and ideas don’t make sense whatsoever:

PTC sites are usually a lil costly, but you must understand. You are getting targeted traffic. For eg. PTCAddicts.com has a cost of $1.19 per 100 referrals. Now you might see about 1000 visits in $3 only offers. But you must understand. This traffic is not targeted.

Someone please translate this…

If you advertise on PTC sites, it means 2 things. Firstly, the visitors who are coming to your ad are going to be PTC site users themselves. So, there is a fair chance that they are going to sign up for the PTC program you promote under them. This is a golden opportunity, and one of the best methods of targeted ads. Most of the sites that we have listed above have the ptc advertisement opportunities so you can use them and get the most of the PTC website promotion.

1) What’s the second thing? 2) The only remotely clueful idea here is that advertising PTC programs on other PTC sites gets you targeted traffic which might convert better. Well, no sh*t, silly ol’ me, I was going to advertise on fashion and real estate blogs! </rant>

And let’s get down the Seller’s “unheard of” promotion techniques:

1. Signatures in forums
Blah, blah, blah. Every new kid on the block hopes he’ll get hootloads of
referrals by spamming DP, GPF, WF and TG with spammy posts and sig links. It might have worked 10 years ago, it won’t do jack shit these days.

2. Advertising on PTC sites
I was hoping for some information on building landing pages that outline the benefits of that program. But no, the section only reiterates how advertising gets you referrals and how much money you’ll be making from your ref’s clicks. Thank you, Captain Obvious!

3. Mailing list
Lame attempt at a sales pitch for GetResponse’s services (advertises a ref link). No mentioning of other (free) options.

4. Article marketing
Presented as the only option of getting high in SERPs.

A research shows that people make about 53,992,923 searches on google every month for keywords related to PTC. So what does this mean for you? If you manage to get yourself on the top rankings for your referral links, you will be hit upon with so many users under you. I am sure it must be sounding insane! But it is a fact. It is so important to have your site on top of google, and cash would be coming in big proportions.

Good luck ranking #1 for such keywords, lol. The Seller obviously has no clue what s/he’s talking about.

The ebook is junk and doesn’t provide useful information for neither newbies nor seasoned users. The sales page is highly deceptive in this manner. The Seller *might* be making $30/day from PTC programs, but doesn’t show any reliable information on how to do it. If I were to hire a content writer to do such an ebook and got this piece of crap I’d turn it down.

I asked for a refund and got it within 24 hours. Thank you, Clickbank, for the prompt response!