The Zana Zen

I’m using PayPal for more than a year now, the service is great but there are some flaws with it. I’m selling some digital products and I had some issues with serial refunders, those people who tries to get things for free. I’m not going to describe all the methods I know they use but there are methods that can cost you a lot and you (almost) always lose.

The most annoying thing is when the buyer doesn’t ask for a refund but rather just cancels his credit card transaction. When a buyer does this you can issue a charge-back, the first thing PayPal does is subtracting the amount that was canceled from your account. Then, a long 90 day journey begins where PayPal does you a “favor” and tries to get your money back. Along the way, you would find out that PayPal charged you $10 to handle this charge-back “as it is said in the user agreement”, but they don’t tell you this before you issue the charge-back. PayPal pays the credit card company in order to open a complaint against the buyer. The funny thing is, PayPal charges you with another $2.xx fee on those $10!! I don’t see the reason here…

If you sell digital products, issuing a charge-back would always turn out to be the wrong thing to do, as you will be paying some extra bucks and the buyer already got his reward. It is the credit card company interest to keep it’s customers satisfied, so no justice would be done. The bright side of the story is that you get the buyer’s name along with the transaction, so you can find your resort and send him anthrax to his house

I wonder if you can open a PayPal account, sell a digital product for $5,000 and buy it with your own credit card. then, all you need to do is close the PayPal account (withdraw the money) and cancel the credit card transaction…
Just kidding. kids, don’t try this at home

This is a test SEO link (don’t click) to prove my point: Free Making Money Tips.

A Known Google AdSense tactic for making money is to provide a website that is being automatically updated by some RSS feeds, like those ones of technorati for instance. If you write any kind of blog, you probably know that you can add your post to technorati so people can find you.

Now, those people that shows ads and provide updateable content from technorati are probably reading technorati’s RSS feeds and filtering on some specific keywords that have higher PPC (Pay Per Click). So if their website is dealing with how to make money (some of the highest bids in AdWords are about making money), they would filter the RSS for words like AdSesnse, Ads, Money, Rich and stuff like that. After a match have been found, they post the RSS data on their website.

A nice way to achieve some backlinks is to provide technorati a fake RSS with some keywords, so your post will end up on those websites, the first line of the RSS data must be a link to your website because some of those automatic content adsense website are showing just a few lines summaries, and won’t give you a direct link to your “blog post”.

Some ways to make it better:

• Place a search engine optimized link to your website, this will give you higher rank on search engines for certain keywords.
• Make sure that the link is opened in the same window (not target=”_blank”) so it won’t be a “suspicious” link.
• Make sure the link contain a directive to index the link (rel=”follow”)

That’s it,
Enjoy your new backlinks!

There is a web service which is called StatCounter, it gives it’s users a free log of their website’s statistics.

The problem is that the log size is limited to the last 100 visitors. StatCounter collects statistics by running javascript in the visitor’s browser. When you open an account at StatCounter, they giv you e a piece of javascript to put at the footer of your website, this javascripts collects the interesting information from the visitor’s browser and sends it to StatCounter for logging.

Bypassing the 100 limitation is kind of easy, because you can open multiple projects (each is limited seperately) for the same website. now, If you’ll open 10 projects, you’ll get 10 pieces of javascript. You should put a different JS for different visitors, anytime a new visitor comes (you should rotate the JS), the problem is that you’ll want to put the same visitor in the same StatCounter project, so you’ll have to maintain a table that translates IPs to the correct pieces of JS. My estimation is that it takes something like 20 minutes to setup such a thing with PHP/MySQL.

I haven’t seen a lot of info on this topic, so I thought I should post something about this:

Python IE automation is extremely easy using the InternetExplorer.Application COM object. Using this COM object you can automate IE to do all kind of stuff like automating any login process, downloading files or creating some underground bots

Here is how to acquire an interface to InternetExplorer.Application:

>>> from win32com.client import Dispatch
>>> ie = Dispatch(”InternetExplorer.Application”)
>>> ie.visible = 1
>>>
>>> # navigate to your favourite website
>>> ie.navigate(website_address)
>>>

Now your browser should navigate to the website address that you have specified, when the browser is finish loading the page, you can start doing the processing of the results…

This is how you wait for the page to finish loading:

>>> while (ie.ReadyState != 4):
>>> sleep(1)
>>>

When the page is done loading, you can get an interface to the document object, this is the same document that javascript & vbscript contains.

This gives you complete DOM control (domination!) over your current page that you last navigated to.

so let’s see how we can do some nice things with it:

>>> ie.navigate(”http://search.msn.com/“)
>>> ie.document.getElementById(”q”).value = “SinglePageMarketing”
>>> ie.document.getElementById(”srch_btn”).click()
>>>

ok, now what about parsing the results?
we can do this with a DOM like approach, or we can parse the text by ourselves… i chose the later method because it’s easier.

>>> result = ie.document.body.innerHtml
>>> len(result)
5619
>>>

Put aside that the result text is in unicode, to convert it to latin use the encode function:

>>> result = result.encode(’latin-1′, ‘ignore’)

ok, now let’s get a list of all the links that were found by the search engine:

>>> import re
>>> re.findall(”your favourite regexp”, result)

well that’s it! now you know how to do the basics… it’s up to you to build your tools upon it!