First, for those who maybe aren’t familiar with what BookmarkWiz is and what it does: BMW is a powerful tool designed to lessen the workload when creating Social Bookmarks with emphasis on increasing the Page Rank for your web pages, blog posts and domains, build backlinks and ultimately attract more organic traffic from search engines. BookmarkWiz currently costs a one time fee of $97, and by looking around you can find discount codes to shave some off of that price.

Alternatives to BookmarkWiz

SE Nuke runs at respectively $67 and $127 per month for two different subscriptions, whichever you choose. Social Bookmarking is but one of many features it offers, but clearly it is pricey.

Bookmarking Demon is another alternative. With a one-time fee of $147 it lands slightly above BookmarkWiz on the price scale. Bookmarking Demon offers some unique features, such as being able to schedule automated bookmarking over time, adding your own Social Bookmark websites, and more.

A favorite among bloggers, OnlyWire offers a free basic membership with up to 300 submissions per month, in addition to their subscription based Pro and Enterprise memberships. What makes OnlyWire interesting is their membership plans. Below you’ll see two of their monthly plans:

• OnlyWire Pro w/1000 submissions + Captcha Solver = $13/month
• OnlyWire Pro w/2500 submissions + Captcha Solver = $30/month
• OnlyWire Enterprise w/5000 submissions + Captcha Solver = $200/month

But let’s move back on topic:

BookmarkWiz 1.36 Update requires a New Key – visiting the Forum

When I updated my copy of BMW and it told me my product key was invalid, I went to Nossie’s Support Forum to see what could be done about it. Others had already reported this issue and Nossie told us to contact Support via e-mail and ask for a new key. I promptly submitted my system ID, and a couple of hours later I received a new and working product key. Not bad at all.

A few words about Captcha Resolvers

Without Captcha Solver you will have to type in the Captcha answers by hand. This goes for BookmarkWiz as much as other Social Bookmarking and/or Scraping tools. BMW supports several Captcha Solver services, which is something you will want to pay a few dollars for, because otherwise, typing in every single answer by hand as dozens of Captcha windows pops up during a session, is annoying, and time consuming.

Following Captcha Resolve services are supported by and built into BookmarkWiz:

• DeCaptcher
• BypassCaptcha
• BeatCaptchas
• DeathByCaptcha

Other features of BookmarkWiz

Besides being mainly a pure Social Bookmarking tool, BookmarkWiz also offers some other, helpful features assisting me when establishing new domains and publishing blog posts and web articles among other things:

• Proxies: naturally, BMW supports free, public, shared and private proxies
• Blog Pinging Service (use it when publishing new content in your blog)
• Quick Index: QI moved one of my new domains to Page 2 within hours

Note: This is not a product review. I have owned and used BookmarkWiz for a while, and I am pleased with it overall. The reason I posted this update, “BookmarkWiz 1.36 Update requires a New Key,” is because the creator, Nossie, has shown time and time again that he is still working on and improving his product; new updates come out on a regular basis, old and no longer working Social Bookmark websites removed, and new ones added.

Updating your BookmarkWiz installation is as easy as locating the application folder in your (Windows) Start menu, right-click the Update icon and choose “Run as Administrator”. A moment later your copy of BMW has been updated.

BookmarkWiz is not an all-in-one solution for your traffic needs, but it takes care of the Social Bookmarking part pretty well. It is not a perfect and fully polished product, but as long as the creator continues improving upon it, and considering the price is merely a one-time fee of $97 (don’t forget the discount) and not a monthly subscription, it makes BMW an interesting choice still.

However, with the last Google update in mind I would probably use a free OnlyWire account for now, at least until I had updated myself enough on the recent update to fully understand its consequences and how it affects Social Bookmarking. I already know that profile back-linking has taken a blow with this Google update, so don’t go spending your money on lots of IM products not knowing exactly what it does.

Other than that, I will continue using my BookmarkWiz software, especially on my new domains, and I will report back here when I see the first results of my efforts.

It still doesn’t explain why their support did not get back to me with a personal response. At least my money got there after nearly a week, but I won’t spend any more with them after this incident, regardless.

Original post:

I’m sitting here watching my affiliate links getting their daily slam of list traffic, hoping some of it will result in a sale or two, that would be nice. In the meantime I feel like warning about one of many popular online communities where you can earn money posting, completing tasks and more. This one call themselves MyLot. I am not going to give them any link juice, but the URL is pretty obvious (hint: the name).

Why I am disappointed with MyLot: I transferred money from my PayPal account to get funds in the MyLot account, for posting tasks for other MyLot members to pick up and do for me. This is popular and there are probably thousands of tasks available at all times, paying mostly an abysmal amount for wasting a bit of your life signing up for something or writing an article, that kind of things. Many of the members enjoy doing the tasks, rather than worrying about the low rates.

This is what happened: my money disappeared. Liquidized, pulverized, atomized, gone. All I have left is the receipt from PayPal, the money never reached my MyLot account. After the initial calm smile and very relaxed mood accompanying what most likely caused my monitor to have shortened its already limited remaining life span, I submitted a support ticket and got a prompt answer. Excellent! Oh, wait. It was a machine.

While I was occupied with other things, one day passed, then the next and as I write this, it’s been three days without any kind of human response from the MyLot support. To make it better, their initial, non-human response:

We have received your message and we will get to it as quickly as we can. Depending on the nature of your inquiry we may or may not respond to you personally. Please be assured that we have received and read your message and will take action if it is deemed appropriate. There is no reason to send a follow up to your original message and follow up messages will be deleted.

Thank you
myLot

Friendly bunch, wouldn’t you say?

If this continues, I can only hope PayPal will help get my money back. I know MyLot is popular with their members, but they can’t treat their customers like this nevertheless. Whatever the reason is, it strikes me as odd for them to take this long to get back to their paying customers. They are probably expanding too quickly and cannot cope with the company’s rapid growth.

For now, don’t put too much time and effort into places like MyLot; you never know when it’s gone, together with your earnings, and if you really want to earn money online, you are better off working with a decent affiliate program in the first place, not MyLot or its numerous counterparts.

Note how I did not (ab)use the words “is it a scam?”. That’s what everybody trying to talk you into joining MyTalk usually say. I did a rather extensive search on the site yesterday, and I could not find one single honest, unbiased review, only shameless hype and bragging followed by a sign-up link.