Warning: The information that follows was created solely for entertainment purposes and should in no way be seen as an endorsement of any methodologies that might break any company’s Terms of Service. The screenshots are fictitious recreations.

While out with some friends a few weeks ago, a discussion arose about how most of the jail-breaking utilities for the new iPhone updates were either a major PITA or have become vaporware and how much money someone could make by filling this void. Later that evening, while checking my email during a lull in conversation it occurred to me that I’d never tested to see if our WP Guardian plugin would display advertisements on an iPhone. As you can see in the screenshot above, they do. Not only do they load, but they function properly and will unload at the proper time after a link has been clicked and the user returns to the post. The fadeaway effect even looks really good.

So, we’ve got all the fixin’s for a good method:

• a captive audience
• lots of hot items
• a plugin that takes advantage of people’s need for instant gratification

To quickly test this idea, I threw together a really simple page using a popular sales/squeeze page theme. The “Click Here” link, which could just as easily be a nice, big “Download!” graphic, lead nowhere. The purpose was just to see how well it would work.

Obviously, we could have made this page look better, but this is what five minutes of work will get you. The next step was to put together a reasonably enticing ad. With WP Guardian, you can set how quickly the advertisement is displayed. We set it to pop very quickly so that the user wouldn’t have the time to explore the page and click the link.

The next step was choosing the right CPA offer to use. The key, and this is true of incentivizing offers in general, is taking advantage of short form offers. This is doubly-true when dealing with mobile users who are even less inclined to fill out detailed forms than your average desktop user. I decided to go with a few mobile-themed offers like the following:

You’ll want to make sure that the offer displays and functions properly on the iPhone before posting them into a live environment. This offer just requires the user to enter their name and email address, though many advertisers will end up blocking you from an offer if none of those initial sign-ups convert, so you’ll want to distribute your leads by rotating links. Rotating links is very easy with WP Guardian’s link management system.

The site was then spammed on various social networking and social news sites. One social news site in particular generated nearly 100 hits (and $XXX.XX* across 4 offers) in the 45 minutes or so before the link was flagged and taken down. Not bad for a site that took a mere 15 minutes to setup. The results proved to me that the concept was sound and with a little tweaking could be taken in very profitable directions.

Here are some ideas for taking the mobile method into different directions:

• Use PHP to grab the useragent and display a message to browsers that don’t identify as iPhone’s that says, “You must visit from your phone!”
• Offer legitimate mobile content to those who fill out the offers. Ringtones, instructional guides, downloads for people with jailbroken phones.
• Use the traffic and leads generated from these sites to buffer other campaigns. Mobile leads could make a great conversation piece to explain away other earnings to AM’s.

With a little ingenuity, I hope you’re able to take this method and run. WP Guardian is an extremely flexible, powerful plugin and we’re adding new features all of the time. If you have any questions about the post, comment below or click the “Questions” button on the left-hand side of your screen.

* – Hi, FTC.

Description:
When activated, this plugin will automatically pass all outbound links on a WordPress blog through one of four different services used to hide the referer of traffic.

Supported Services:

• Anonym.to
• HideRefer.com
• HideRefer.org
• Referer.us

Installation:
Simply unzip the wp-blank-referer.zip file and upload the wp-blank-referer directory to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory, and activate the plugin through the admin panel.

Support:
Since this is a free plugin, I won’t be providing any sort of specialized support, but if you have questions or feature requests, feel free to post comments here or email us by clicking the ‘Questions’ tab on the left side of the screen. We also make no guarantees that this will actually blank referers with all browsers, as these are not our services.

Download:
Download WP Blank Referer from the WordPress plugin directory.

I’m happy to announce that WP Guardian development is a bit ahead of schedule and we’ll be releasing the 1.2 update on Monday, a full 5 days ahead of schedule. This new version adds a feature that will let users block their entire blog with the click of a button as well as giving users the ability to select which advertisement is used when doing global blocks.

We’ll also be releasing version 1.0 of the first WP Guardian add-on which gives users the ability to automatically blank the referrer of blog users when they click on links in advertisements. Lots of people have requested this feature and so we’re really happy to be able to deliver it.

Current WP Guardian customers who opted in to the AWeber customer mailing list when they purchased will receive an email from us when 1.2 and the add-on are released.

We’ve also locked in the new features and improvement we’ll be adding for WP Guardian 1.3, which we hope to make available later this month. We’ll be adding the ability to assign ads to categories as well as pages. We’re also working on another add-on, which will WP Guardian users the option to force their users to sign-up as members to their blogs to view content.

Also, expect some big Forum Generator news early next week!