I have long been a ‘AGLOCO supporter’ but the route AGLOCO took is a long and twisted road. Looking back, these are the main events of AGLOCO’s history. They have been called a scam, a waste of time and even to have an upside-down business plan by some, yet they continue to grow. This is the AGLOCO story so far:

1. November 21, 2006:
AGLOCO launches its referral program. It takes of like wildfire and grows at a phenomenal rate, being fuelled by some of the big boys like John Chow. A few critics are already sceptical about AGLOCO. At this stage they are not widely believed. The blogosphere wants a good internet money making program and trusts in John Chow.

2. February 10th 2007
The AGLOCO Viewbar release date is predicted to be in March. This causes even more excitement and the promotion of AGLOCO soars.

3. Even after the Viewbar is delayed, referrals keep being made at record levels. The AGLOCO critiques start to be listened to by some old AGLOCO members. Overall AGLOCO numbers are growing. Many old members (including John Chow) make the excuse that they are glad the Vewbar release has been delayed because it gives them more time to grow their AGLOCO network. The reality is that many of the members they first referred have forgotten about AGLOCO, which cancels out a large percentage of the hoards of new referrals.

4. The AGLOCO Viewbar gets seriously delayed. Most of us can understand a young company can be set back a few weeks, maybe even a month or so. However, the extended delays lasting months allowed the AGOCO critiques to really profit from their topical and controversial jokes about AGLOCO being a scam.

May 14th 2007
5. Number 4 seems to have lasted for a very long time, but at last a new stage has been entered. John Chow makes a video of him using the AGLOCO Viewbar. This is currently having the effect of providing relief to the masses, but the AGLOCO critiques are now too strong to be swatted away by this video.

The main argument against AGLOCO is that it takes time to make referrals and so if it doesn’t pay off, it could be called a scam in the sense that members time has been wasted. Even if the Viewbar launched today, that point remains to be true because of the massive delays and time taken up. Many old referrals have become/stayed inactive and are unlikely to ever use the Viewbar and so are valueless.

I remain an AGLOCO supporter. The video makes it obvious they are not anywhere near being a mere Internet money making scam. I believe the hardest part of the AGLOCO journey is ending and we can look forward to the Viewbar release and success with AGLOCO.

I have previously written about how Internet money making requires a spread of ventures. Some will be reliable and provide a solid, steady lower level of income. Others will be at the other end of the spectrum. I consider ALOCO to be at this other end. It can hardly be called high risk as no money spent, but time wise AGLOCO is potentially high risk and high yield. For this reason it is in my recommended affiliate programs section.

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I recently wrote a review of Zotspot, which is similar to SlashMySearch in many ways, the most obvious being they are both ‘paid to search’ sites. Zotspot didn’t make it to my recommended affiliate programs section but will SlashMySearch?

As expected the promotional tools are functional. They provide a number of ‘OK looking’ banners and the usual affiliate link. There are also some fairly useful tools for analysing your referrals activity. Earnings are updated several times day which can be nice to see if your earnings are steadily increasing.

A big Positive is that SlashMySearch has a much higher pay rate than Zotspot. The screenshot below shows the payment plan:

As you can see, the proposed levels of earnings are significantly higher that Zotspot, which offers only $280 per year with a downline of 1110 people. The second level SlashMySearch referrals allow for some potentially large earnings. You and your referrals earn by using the SlashMySearch search engine and also for reading and posting on the forum.

Unfortunately, that pretty diagram is just about the only good thing about SlashMySearch. Take note of the small print in the corner, “Payment terms are Subject to Change”. SlashMySearch is one of the few programs where I have actually seen the Payment terms change dramatically; and in case you are wondering, they changed downwards

Above is a screenshot of the Alexa tracking of SlashMySearch’s Pageviews. Alexa is infamous for being an unreliable tool, but what it shows fits perfectly with my experience with SlashMySearch.

The SlashMySearch site is often down. They are very unreliable and the search engine is terrible (Hence the dramatic drops in traffic). This is the cause of the decrease in payments; they simply cannot afford their promised plan because the site is down for ‘maintenance’ so often. Admittedly they are still in ‘BETA’ and so frequent updates and additions to the site are to be expected.

In addition to these problems, they claim (much like Zotspot) that it takes them two months to collect their money from advertisers. This means you have to wait at least two months till your first payment, which is way to long!

The Alexa graph shows that SlashMySearch got off to a flying start. There was a lot of hype about them flying around in the blogosphere which has died down due to all of the problems I listed above.

Conclusion
I doubt they are an Internet scam, I trust SlashMySearch’s ‘intentions’ but not its ability to payout. For all of the reasons I mentioned SlashMySearch has not made it to my recommended affiliate programs section. In the FAQ SlashMySearch say they will be out of BETA “soon” and by then all those problems will be fixed. When that day comes I will re-review them. Fingers crossed that they fix them.

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Zotspot is one of the ‘get paid to search the web’ affiliate programs that has sprung up over the past year or so. A similar program is Slashmysearch. The basic idea is simple, search the web using their search engine and they share part of the revenue they make from the advertisements with you. However there are several problems along the way.

The first and most significant disincentive for using Zotspot is the low pay rate. Below is the referral structure:

As you can see the payment is somewhat unusual. Instead of decreasing percentages of earnings the further down the chain you go, there is a flat rate of $0.25 per referral. This is per referral per year!. This means that if you have a downline of 1110 people who use zotspot as their main search engine you will make approximately $278 per year.

This is extremely low. A downline of over 1000 active referrals is pretty big in any affiliate marketers book and could make a lot of money by using numerous other affiliate programs. The latest alternative, SlashMySearch has better earnings than that despite its server being down half the time.

More of the bad

We will pay you on a monthly basis. Note that there is a 60 day delay between the time that the month closes and the time when we allocate money to your account. So it will take a month or two before you see your first earnings. After the first earnings are allocated to your account, if you continue to use zotspot search, more money will be allocated to your account approximately every 30 days.

Basically, your earnings don’t update for one whole month, so you don’t know how much you have earned. Then you have to wait another two months for the payment to be made to you. I shouldn’t have to say that this is rubbish!. They claim that the 60-day wait is for the advertisers to pay them, but even if that is true 3 months is way to long to wait to collect a few cents.

The final nail in the coffin is the distinct lack of ‘proof of payment’ floating around on the net. You would think that if people have actually been paid reasonable sums of money they would boast about it in order to recruit more referrals; but it is a challenge to find any sort of convincing proof of payment. On most of the forums no-one seems to know if Zotspot a ’scam or not’. Some people claim to have been paid pitiful amounts like $0.23, but there is no hard proof or even claims of payment for larger amounts of money.

Is there anything good?
If you have read this far given the amount of stick Zotspot has taken from me you must really be desperate to hear something good about it.

You are in luck. Just about…

The Zotspot search engine is much better than competitors like SlashMySearch, which currently has a pretty terrible search engine (it’s quality of results changes depending on your location too). Zotspot is actually good enough to use as your primary search engine and isn’t crammed full of ads. (Perhaps that’s why the pay rate is so low?).

Nevertheless this presents a problem. Many of the people who may be interested in using the Zotspot search engine are going to be affiliate marketers (like you and I). The simple fact is that no matter how accurate and fair Zotspot is, it is not Google.

I don’t use Google to merely find results, if for example I were looking for a related site to exchange links with I would use a Google search. If the site didn’t appear high enough up I would never reach it and wouldn’t offer a link exchange. This is important because most people use Google and so the ranking of a site in Google indicates it’s level of traffic and authority better than a sites ranking in Zotspot. Also the number of results is not stated on Zotspot, which is annoying for me because I use that for keyword research.

Promotional tools wise Zotspot is functional. The banner above is good enough to do the job and they provide an e-mail service, which makes it easier to mail to Hotmail addresses.

Payment is via Paypal, but remember with Zotspot that doesn’t mean fast payment.

Conclusion
It is hard to tell for sure whether Zotspot is an Internet scam. However, this is not really the issue. The pay rate is far too low to justify joining (even if they do pay) and the lengthy wait for earnings is ridiculous. For those reasons Zotspot has not made it into my recommended affiliate programs list. I should quickly mention that Zotspot has a Toolbar, which just means you can search with Zotspot with out having to visit the main page. This is no way near enough to make me change my mind about them.

I would recommend an alternative affiliate program that involves getting paid to search the web, but without a more well thought out business model that idea simply doesn’t stand up. AGLOCO is the most closely related alternative. They have taken a long time perfecting their Custom Toolbar (which is yet to be released) and so I have much more faith in them. You can read my review of AGLOCO here.

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AGLOCO has been the centre of focus in the affiliate marketing world for some time now and it has become somewhat old-hat to still be talking about it. But this is not take away the fact AGLOCO has got off to a very promising start with over “50,000″ founding members, as they reported in their recent email newsletter. (a founding member is what they call active members who have made at least 1 referral). In short it has become one of the leading affiliate programs.

AGLOCO stands for ‘A Global Community’ and is designed by the a creators of Alladvantage; which failed mostly due to an ‘over-payout’, where Alladvantage stuck to their guns and paid their members what they owed, despite not being able to afford it.  We can feel safe in the fact that AGLOCO almost definatly won’t be an internet scam and will be a paying affiliate program.  AGLOCO will not make the same ‘over payment’ mistake due to their improved custom Viewbar technology and improved business plan, which will enable them to afford the payouts. Some famous bloggers including John Chow (who make $250,000 with Alladvantage) have displayed their support for AGLOCO and have some useful tips about how to make referrals.

How can you make money with AGLOCO?
As mentioned above AGLOCO have designed a Custom Viewbar that everyone can download for free. It sits very discreetly on the screen (see the screen shot below) and tracks the sites you visit. (it is not spyware because it does this visibly and can be easily uninstalled). The tracking allows it to target advertisements to your interests with great precision. The Viewbar can be minimised at anytime and there are not popup ads or anything that will detract from your web usage.

Spot the Viewbar - its pretty unnoticeable isn’t it!

Each time anyone makes a purchase via a Viewbar advertisement a large portion goes to AGLOCO. This is how AGLOCO makes its money, 90% of which go straight to its founding members, you!.

Note: You do not have to make any purchases, just browse the web as usual using the AGLOCO Viewbar and you will earn.

At the moment you can earn by using the Viewbar for up to 5 hours per month, this figure may rise or fall as AGLOCO continues. The Viewbar is set to be released in approximately 4-8 weeks. You earn more if you make referrals. (Read more for earnings predictions).

AGLOCO is planning to float on the stock market by the end of the year. Members have the chance to ‘earn shares’ in AGLOCO. They do this by them and their referrals using the Viewbar. The AGLOCO member calculator can be used to calculate the number of hours you and your referrals can rack up using the Viewbar each month; which gives an indication of monthly earnings and the number of shares you will earn.

How Much money can you make with AGLOCO?
According to The Simmons Report:

- A user who has no referrals should receive ownership in AGLOCO worth on average about $150. (plus monthly cash distributions)
- The average value of an AGLOCO user’s referral network should be $30 each in ownership shares plus the referrer’s share of monthly cash distribution.
- The average AGLOCO direct referral should be worth in excess of $3,000 each
- The analysis also shows a range of monthly cash distributions of between $5 and $15 a month per user.
- The AGLOCO business model looks theoretically sound – (assuming they get to a decent size quickly - at least 500,000 users within nine months to a year)

Scam or Not?
Given the history of the company (Alladvantage) and the fact that several famous bloggers have staked their reputation upon AGLOCO’s success it seems very unlikely that AGLOCO is a scam. If you are serious about affiliate programs, the real question is:

Is there enough time left to make referrals?
The answer is yet, but you need to start quickly. Once the Viewbar is released there will be many more potential referrals but the competition will hot up too. You can get ahead of the game and join AGLOCO.

Read the AGLOCO Story here.

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