Today I was reading johnchow.com and I saw an interesting post (paid review) about a blog claiming to have 87864 readers! I was surprised by the amount of readers the blog was having and it was still not a known name in the blogger community!
So I visited the blog and did some R&D. Below is the facts about How UberaffiliateMarketingBlog fooling readers with false stats:
The actual subscribers of UberaffiliateMarketingBlog:
The subscribers shown on his blog:
I have seen many bloggers doing this. The result of doing this will only hurt you. You can’t fool your readers anymore. The reader community is now intelligent enough and trying to fool them, you will only lose their trust!
The ‘Guru Mantra’ for success is ‘Honesty‘! Be honest with whatever you write or whatever you show! The numbers may be small today, but they will grow as you focus on serving your readers and not fooling them.
November 5th, 2007 at 4:31 am
I don’t think he’s cheating - he has his proper feed count showing the day before and yesterday the Feedburner counter stopped showing Google Feedfetcher numbers thus dropping everybody’s feed counts down. I’m fairly sure that this is just a joke on UberAffiliate’s part and the counter will be back to normal soon.
Don’t be too quick to accuse people of cheating
November 5th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Sounds like a good way to get back links
November 6th, 2007 at 12:39 am
Thanks Caroline Middlebrook and Michael Dunlop for yr comments!
@Caroline Middlebrook
The reason that I feel of him being dishonest is he changed the stats to the forged image before he ordered a review from John Chow.
There was no indication of the so called JOKE anywhere on the blog. Its only after so many bloggers exposed him, the entire episode was described as a Joke.
November 11th, 2007 at 10:09 am
I couldn’t agree more, this is cheating, and once you get found out, that’s your credibility down the toilet. Credibility is very important for a blog IMO.
November 18th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
eh, i don’t see what the point of that was… i mean, it was a good way of getting people to go to his site but he lost creditability with that…
Jay
DatMoney.com
DatCurious.com
November 19th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Transparency,honesty,simply being true is the way to go.It’s good you touched on the subject.