Qondio - Internet Marketing Made Simple

Internet marketing came kind of late to me. I built my first website, with the simple joy of being on the web and sold ebooks. Adsense wasn't even a blip on my horizon, although I threw it on one of three websites at the advice of the person who became my early marketing guru.

So, two years later, when I deliberately went to open an Adsense account and found out I already had an account with money in it, I was blown away.

I'm also older than your average internet marketer. Facebook and Twitter kind of passed right by me, even though I registered and have learned to keep a personal account for family. Although I've done it, the sheer schizophrenia and cynicism of using these online communities to sell things just didn't feel right to me. And when I did use them, something would always go wrong. I didn't know enough about the "new" way of doing business on the internet and I would always shoot myself in the foot.

I cut down on the amount of online communities I participated in and found several that I like - that make sense to me. One of these is Qondio.

The Qondio community is a mixed bag special.

When I joined, you needed an invitation. At first, I joined for article marketing. Qondio (or as it was known then Qassia,) was small. Every article or intel had to be rated by 12 community members who were not supposed to know who wrote the article, before it could be published and shown to the general public. Not moderators, just random community members who were logged into the system and were ready to ready to rank intel. The people who owned Qondio worked behind the scenes to stop anyone from gaming the community.

I watched them eliminate duplicate content and multiple accounts. Badly spun content rarely made it past the screeners or was ranked very low. You cannot rate your own intel, or the intel of the person who referred you or someone you referred. You are not allowed to write intel about Qondio.

As a matter of fact, a popular and prolific Qondio member was just banned for trying to slant results. Qondio notified its members of why it was done.

I am proud to have two articles ranked in the top 15 intels on the site, out of about 40,000 intels. Especially since the articles were blindly rated on their own merits - it serves as an inspiring example to me, of how well I could write when I feel passionate about something.

Now, when I say that I joined Qondio in the early going, I mean that it was small enough that when I emailed them to ask about an intel that was PLR and therefore duplicate content, they looked over my account and my published articles before they responded. I had posted a purely promotion article for, ehem, male enhancement, and one of the site owners advised me of the exact changes I had to make in order for the article to stay live.

I've never joined something early enough to have experienced this kind of attention to detail. So, when I'm in a funk, and real life interferes with the time I spend on the net, Qondio is one of the first sites I'll visit. I may not post a lot, but I'll stop to rate intel, so that fellow members can get it published, and then I might comment on some of the articles that have already been published. The number of screeners has been cut down to 9 for each piece of intel, and it rarely takes more than a day or two before a writer sees their work go live.

The people who belong to the Qondio community come in all ages and from all corners of the world, but there seem to be a lot of older Qondio members. Just like me.

I've met marketing experts who are promoting their own web 2.0 communities, small business owners who dream of making it to the number one spot on the web for their niche, and people who have personal sites they want to promote. I didn't have to dig them out or search for them, I first met them while anonymously ranking their intel. After the intel was published, I got to associate a face with their writing.

When I log into Qondio, the pictures of the users who have just rated content appear - and their faces are usually familiar. I've either rated their intel, had them comment on mine, or exchanged greetings with them.

Qondio provides several ways to rank your sites in their system. The benefit of high rankings is well placed do-follow links on high PR pages. The rules are simple and straight-forward, just like the rewards.