Warning: You’re going to be kicking yourself and muttering, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Well, you didn’t, so it was up to Ben Tao, co-founder of Extra Lunch Money (NSFW), to do it for you. The premise is simple: Some people have enough money, but you can never have enough porn. On ELM’s open marketplace, you can be a Service Provider or a Job Buyer. Deliverables on Extra Lunch Money are called Jobs, and yes, they are largely done by hand. Homemade porn, coming right up, hot and just the way you like it.

(Oh, this story is making our job too easy. The jokes write themselves!)

It’s quite similar to Fiverr, except that on Fiverr you don’t have to do the work in the nude. What makes ELM revolutionary, though, is that through a third party crowdsourcing platform that prefers to remain nameless, ordinary clothed would-be Job Buyers can perform microtasks to “earn” porn credits. (A credit is roughly equivalent to $1.) Tasks are typically similar to those you find on Mechanical Turk, like flagging inappropriate content, answering questions about a Google search or rating relevancy of search engine results. Basically it’s like trash pickup on the side of the information highway but you don’t have to wear an orange jumpsuit or worry about getting creamed by a speeding Lamborghini.

Anyhoo, Fiverr workers frustrated with the lack of gig sales just may find Extra Lunch Money appealing. Nothing illegal, of course, just good dirty fun.

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In our Fiverr adventures we’ve found a number of helpful bloggers who are willing to publish our (and your) article on their blog. Some even write the article themselves. The SEO goal here is to have a keyworded link back to your site, usually a deep link rather than your home page. Google loves link diversity. The article may also get you some traffic, so it can be a very good deal indeed for $5. Bloggers offer this gig because they get paid and they also get a free piece of content.

In the gig description the blogger will tell you what Page Rank her blog has, whether or not you supply the article and how many links you’ll be allowed.

But recently we ran across a spate of gig offers that unfortunately are too darned good to be true. So it’s time to show you how to do due diligence before plunking down your hard-earned Lincoln.

What to do before buying a blog post gig:

1. Find out the blog’s URL. If the blogger won’t tell you, run the other way.
2. Visit the blog and see what it links to. If the blogger has sold lots of links, you don’t want to be in this company.
3. Doublecheck the claimed Page Rank. Use a tool like prchecker.info.
4. Realize Page Rank can be easily faked. This article shows you how.
5. Check the blog’s Alexa ranking. This isn’t precise, but Alexa.com will give you an idea how many inbound links there are. (See our listing below.) If the blogger is claiming a very high PR like 6 or higher, there should be thousands of inbound links. And one last check…
6. Do a lookup on the Wayback Machine. This is archive.org, which takes snapshots of web pages. This will tell you if the blog has a high PR because it used to have a different kind of content. There’s a good reason for doing this. Heed our tale of woe:
   We bought a place on a PR6 blog. Turns out this was a dropped domain — the original owner forgot to renew it, the Fiverr seller picked it up, and removed the original content. Then he started selling blog posts on Fiverr.

   The original owner, a politician, had trademarked his name and so the Fiverr seller ultimately had to surrender the domain. Poof! went the blog and our article. We lost $5, not a tragedy but not much fun either. Don’t let this happen to you.

If this all sounds like way too much legwork, we understand. That’s what we’re here for. Stay with the BOF-approved bloggers in the Blogging category and you’ll do fine. But you really do want to get blog post placements for your business because the twin rewards of backlinks and traffic are too good to pass up.

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In every discussion of internet marketing, usually one expert or another will mention making and distributing videos on YouTube.

Intrepid Fiverr seller dingdangler took this message to heart. What he did was take a parody of the 1987 Stanley Kubrick film “Full Metal Jacket” that someone had dubbed in ducktalk. Donald Duck, that is. He then captioned this video and added a description with a link to his Donald Duck Fiverr gig. The mashup video’s called Full Metal Disney. (Click to play, embedding’s been disabled.)

Copyright considerations aside, this seems pretty clever. Right?

Except that dingdangler never sold a single ducktalk gig on Fiverr. And this video was uploaded in August 2010. 1,204,738 views, no ducky purchases. Wasted effort.

So what went wrong?

dingdangler tagged the video heavily: full metal jacket disney donald duck mickey mouse goofy pluto drill army. But nothing about Fiver, gigs, duck voice, etc. So the views he got were from people who wanted to see that particular movie mashup or a Disney parody, not necessarily people who were looking for a funny answering machine message or ring tone.

When you advertise your gig, take the time to make sure the right target audience will see your clever promotion. YouTube may not be the best channel.

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