ownakeyword-logoImagine if Google offered you a cut of the advertising revenue on a profitable keyword, a keyword that was well searched and  you knew was going to attract an abundance of high-end advertisers, providing you with a reliable long-term income.

When we’re talking a search engine that has the traffic Google gets, this would be a wise investment.

When we’re talking a search engine that nobody has ever heard of and is unlikely to use – the investment becomes worthless.

Read on for a full review of the OwnAKeyword MLM business opportunity.

The Company

The OwnAKeyword domain was registered in early October 2011 and the registration information for the domain is set to private.

The company website also provides no information as to who is running the opportunity.

As always, if a company is not upfront about who is running things and behind the opportunity, think long and hard before you hand over any money to them.

There’s no legitimate reason a MLM opportunity should be hiding this information from you.

The OwnAKeyword Product

OwnAKeyword don’t really have any tangible products to sell, retail or otherwise. Upon joining the company, members are able to purchase ‘keywords’ from the company.

These keywords are then given a virtual value by OwnAKeyword in relation to their search engine. Obviously the more people using a particular keyword to search, the more valuable the keyword is.

It’s important to note however that no matter how valuable a keyword is within OwnAKeyword, it’s still nothing more than a virtual value. Outside of the OwnAKeyword opportunity the keywords are worthless.

The OwnAKeyword Compensation Plan

Being that members buy keywords directly from the company themselves, OwnAKeyword thus only pay commissions on advertising revenue generated by these keywords.

OwnAKeyword also pay out a percentage of the commissions members make to their uplines too;

refer other potential affiliates and bank commissions from your sponsoring efforts.

At the bottom of the OwnAKeyword page is the text ‘X Pay Pro is available from NetworkMarketingScripts.com’.

X Pay Pro is a network marketing script available from networkmarketingscripts.com that allows an admin to set up a simple MLM database that pays members out on the recruitment of new members and their payments.

OwnAKeyword mention a ‘5 Tier affiliate program which pays you on earnings made by your referrals and keyword purchases that they make‘, so presumably the idea here is to refer enough people to the program in the hope that they purchase a keyword that proves to be valuable in the long run, making everybody a handsome residual income.

Interesting enough OwnAKeyword mention that they’re currently using Paypal as a payment processor.

Meanwhile PayPal’s ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ clearly states that

You may not use the PayPal service for activities that relate to transactions that support pyramid or ponzi schemes, matrix programs, other “get rich quick” schemes or certain multi-level marketing programs.

If the ball gets rolling on this program, I imagine it won’t be long before Paypal shuts down OwnAKeyword’s account.

Currently it’s free to sign up to OwnAKeyword so revenue wise the company is solely relying on keyword sales along with advertising sales for their search engine.

Note that OwnAKeyword promise ‘100% of the advertising dollars generated from the keywords’ meaning they’re instead relying on actual advertisers signing up, rather than generating profits off the advertising network they run themselves.

How much it will pay out members I’m not too sure of just yet, but given the search engine powering OwnAKeyword is less than a month old (OakBoom), I imagine it’s not much.

Joining OwnAKeyword

OwnAKeyword is currently free to join, members simply sign up for an account on the company’s website.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the start of this review, a keyword is only as valuable as the search engine attached to it.

If we take a look at the OwnAKeyword homepage, the one thing you want to take note of is the mention of ‘OakBoom.com IASE Technology’ text.

Despite OwnAKeyword’s claim that OakBoom features ‘Intelligent Algorithm Search Engine’ (IASE) technology, the truth of the matter is that OakBoom is merely running the closed network search script called ‘Sphider’.

You can confirm this yourself by going over to the oakboom.com website and checking the source code. Right at the top, you should see this;

(title)Sphider(/title)

Sphider is a PHP based search engine script that allows the site owner to establish a PHP based search engine that crawls pages and sites they explicitly specify.

For example, run a search on OakBoom for OakBoom and you get the message

The search “oakboom” did not match any documents.

Run a search for ‘MLM’ however, and you get a whole bunch of spammy Ezine articles returned. The admin of the site has obviously already set up the Sphider based search engine to crawl pages on eZineArticles relevant to MLM.

Thus the business model of OwnAKeyword is revealed. No doubt the ‘MLM’ keyword is available for sale on OwnAKey or has already been purchased.

The basic idea is this, the OwnAKeyword admin decides what keywords he or she wants to put up for auction to OwnAKeyword members, and then tailors the Sphider powered OakBoom search engine to return results on these keywords.

The results don’t have to be relevant, that’s not the point. OakBoom merely wants people to be searching for the terms, as this then looks attractive to third-party advertisers who will then no doubt pay OakBoom (both sites are owned by the same admin) for a certain numbers of impressions of their ads.

OwnAKeyword is paid once this impression target is met, and the member that bought the keyword is paid if anyone clicks on the advertisers ad from the advertiser themselves.

The problem?

Well the search engine is utterly useless.

Sphider was never designed to be a global search engine, rather it’s designed to crawl specific websites and return results. No doubt for a fee, OwnAKeyword will add your site to their list of sites to be crawled.

As far as the end-user goes though, this is utterly useless. OakBoom doesn’t even return results for its own name… that’s how useless it is.

With severely limited functionality and having your search results more restrictive than a Google search from within China, it begs the question as to who exactly will be using OakBoom.

The answer?

Nobody.

No searchers means no advertisers, which means no keyword value and ultimately a worthless investment if you pay OwnAKeyword to purchase a keyword.

The idea of assigning a keyword a value and selling the advertising rights to it isn’t a bad idea, but attaching it to worthless search engine and expecting people to pay you most certainly is.

OwnAKeyword is probably a MLM opportunity you’ll want to steer clear of.