Sep 08

Parasitic Twitter Marketing

Can of SPAM, Cardinal Sin, Social abuse, Techniques, Web 2.0 Cutesy Bullshit 1 Comment »

There is a stupidly easy way to push your pages on twitter.

First of all, you will need to find a site that has some authority, but has no twitter presence. It sounds rare, but there are actually sites like that.

Create a twitter account for that site, as if it were your own, but do not claim that it is. In other words, use the same colors, the background, put the host’s url etc.

Now, go to twitterfeed and add your parasite. Add the host’s rss feeds to the loop, and also add your injection rss.

Do your usual twitter cycle for followers. If you don’t know how, here is a tool that rocks. Focus on getting followers in the host’s niche. As soon as you get to 500+ followers, start posting your links in the injection RSS feed (I suggest you use a new wordpress installation for that). It depends on the niche and your chosen host, but you can either promote your posts, niche offers, niche products or plain dating ads.

See? Easy peasy.

Popularity: 5% [?]

written by Glowleaf

Feb 07

Explore. Explained.

Cardinal Sin, Doodling, Techniques, Virtual War 4 Comments »

I mentioned the four X’es. Why do they matter so much? Because they are how you win a strategy game. Strategy games are simulations of war. Business is a civilized war.

So, lets talk about the first step, Explore.

Exploring means pushing back the fog of war. Means knowing, means learning, means hearing. On war, to explore would mean to send scouts, to know the lay of the land, to know any potential resources, fortified locations, camps of the enemy, quantity of troops etc etc. Whenever the enemy moves, you need to know about it. Whatever upgrades or special troops he has, you need to know about them. Whatever access to resources he gets, you need to know about it.

On big corporations, this step is taken very seriously. Yes, it is called industrial espionage. Now, on your small one man business, you cannot afford to hire professional spies. It would be silly, and an overkill. But the concept remains.

You need to know.

Knowing, means you need to read any news in your niche. You need to personally get familiar with some key people, in order to learn stuff before they hit the news. You need to know about the new tools, the new services, and the new competitors.

Of course, you also need to know everything about your current competitors.

And by everything, I mean everything. Become an e-stalker. What domains does he own, what kind of education does he have? How much money does he have available to throw into his business? Is he backed up by venture capitals, or is he alone? What other assets can he utilize to respond to your moves?

This is a very important step, because through the information you get now, you will weigh the importance of the competitor. You will assign a rank at him, and judge whether or not he is a threat.

Next come historical data. Those, you either collect by another source, or you create them yourself. The historical data instantly (at least in me) show a pattern (if you can’t make use of them, show them to an analyst). You can see whether that particular competitor is smart, stupid, following a long term strategy, or acting on a whim. How did he react to that problem a year ago? How did it work out for him? Was his reaction fast? What is too late? Did he simply pour money into the problem and solved it?

Of course, all of the above are a full time job by themselves. That means, you need to cut down on the crap info. You need to focus on your strong competitors, and in order to point them out, you need to know some stuff about them first. Yes, this step is inevitable.

And now, in order to get out of the theoretical stuff, lets talk about realistic solutions to this. What can you really do to explore?

  • You can reverse lookup your competitor. I will not get into details, it is an art by itself. If you cannot do it, hire someone who can. It is basically private investigation online. Online assets, online profiles, online accounts, emails, whatever he does. This step, if done right, will give a ton of data to dig.
  • Next comes the way back engine. It is an amazing tool to see the progress of some sites. Check out his sites over time. See the changes, the updates, the improvements, the growth.
  • If you run ppc, use a keyword spy tool, like keyword spy (!) or ppc bully. Those are a non stop, automatic spy on your competition. Cross referencing the data with the ones obtained through other means will give you a very good picture of the “battlefield”.
  • Use seobook’s rank checker, seoquake and spydermate to study his sites. Is he a good SEO? Does he have a weakness to exploit? Does he practice SEO full-time? (If your reply is, “how the fuck should I know?” then go read a comic book, kiddo.)
  • Follow his affiliate links, and find out which offers he promotes heavily. Join the networks, some of them have a public table of the progress each affiliate has. 
  • Social engineering. You can learn practically anything you want.
Why is the Explore step so important? 
Because it opens up the way for the next steps.
If you don’t know where the resources are, how can you take them? If you don’t look for opportunities, how can you grab them? If you don’t know where the problems are, how do you expect to handle them?
But, you might ask, can knowing avoid problems for me? 
Honestly, no. Problems will arise no matter what you do. But, by knowing, you will expect those problems beforehand. You will be prepared for them.
I used the word “step”, for Explore. Is it a one time thing? Do I do it once, and then focus on something else?
No. Does the battlefield stay the same? Of course it does not. It changes every day. Exploring is an ongoing process, an important one, and all those who ignore it are running blind to their slaughter.

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Popularity: 50% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: ,

Feb 01

Reverse engineering a bought link

Cardinal Sin, Feed the Spiders, Google, Mind over Pixels No Comments »

I have been thinking whether or not to write this post for about two months. Today, lucky for you, I was in a “what the hell” mood so I wrote it.

Why? Because the issue discussed here is a diamond. A real, valuable gem among the sea of trash. Seriously. Let me explain.

As I have posted before, I like selling links, it is a an easy/automatic way to monetize your sites with a very stable income. Also, it doesn’t clutter up your site. I use TLA on many of my sites. A few months ago, as I was checking out my network and stats, I saw something very interesting. It is not every day, that you see a well known domain in the “link buyers” section. Yes, a well known site, had bought a link from my site through TLA. As a paranoid affiliate marketer that I am, I couldn’t just feel good about my minute of fame and move on. I had to investigate.

Please do understand that I will not say the known site’s name, or the page that the link is located. I may be an asshole, but I am not a fool, and I don’t want to expose them (don’t bother looking for the link, you will not find it). I shine the light on this issue because it is valuable information for the right kind of man, not to harm a well known site. The site discussed is really, really well known. We are talking about an Alexa rank of ~3000. It is one of the blogs almost everyone knows about.

Ok, so, bigasssite.com bought a link from me, through TLA, with the anchor text widgets (the real keyword is a hot, high traffic and competitive one). The link has been live for 3 months I think, and it keeps going.

Why should we care? Well, I looked at the page linked, and I saw a post from 2006! Yes, 2006. Now that is interesting… 

I check the link price, its the standard TLA 8$. Nothing much, but someone bought the link! Someone on that site’s SEO team sat down and confirmed the sale. In order for that to happen, there must have been a reason. (Unless that site had a monkey as an SEO that did random things, there must have been some kind of logic behind this)

I check my page, the one the link resides on. It is a page that got a lot of traffic, a review that turned into a successful linkbait, getting diggs, links from other blogs, lots of social votes, and even linked from two high traffic forums. That means the page is a juicy one, making the bought link pretty valuable for SEO purposes (and a lot more valuable than 8$, but lets not get into that…)

Investigating the domain is pointless, it is one of the most trusted, old, ranking sites on the net. 20 million backlinks. Why does it need mine?

Ok, so, lets investigate the culprit page. It is a nice, PR3 page. Yahoo shows 200 links pointed at it, which is rather much for a single page, but not that weird. Its a fucking blog post, like the rest of the site…

There is a difference though. The site is separated in categories (technology and internet related). It is mostly a news site, and the culprit page is just another news story, almost like everything else in there. What was I missing?

I check the comments, a classic series of useless rants from nobodies on the net. The trackbacks on the other hand are something interesting!

There is a series of trackbacks, all from authority news sites, quoting the post. As it seems, badasssite.com managed to be first, or at least one of the first to announce the story. The other news sites in the niche had to link to the original article. Bear in mind, the story is classic industry news, nothing earth-shattering. The links are not many, but they surely are authoritative! (the widget keyword is included in the article title, so the incoming anchor is “blah blah widget”)

I closely inspect the page to find an affiliate link (the widget has a lot of paid services with nice affiliate programs to refer to). No aff links, no internal php files with redirects, nothing. Who would be crazy enough to not monetize a page and at the same time buy links to it? (The page has ads on it, the same ads all over the domain. I cannot say the exact keyword, but it is one that every SEO would monetize with an affiliate link without blinking)

To the SERPs then. I check the rankings for our widget keyword. To my surprise, or not that much because the keyword is competitive, I see a shitload of results. Top ranks are all from authority sites, and right there, on spot 19, I see our culprit page!

Now that is a ton of traffic. Even being on the second page is enough to bring in the visitors. I assume that the culprit page was ranking under #19, and it just needed a gentle push to get higher. The traffic is not converted right away, but since the badasssite.com is a, well, bad ass site, it gets more loyal readers by the minute.

The widget keyword is not one that the badasssite.com’s SEO team would normally strive to rank for, but it is certainly one that they would be happy to rank for. I would have done the same, if I saw my barely relevant site rank #22-23 for a keyword like that.

So, what do we learn from this experience?

  • Big sites buy links. Screw Google and their best practices.
  • Big sites can buy links and get away with it. Screw Google and their best practices.
  • Smart SEO means optimize even for the keyword that is not that relevant. Opportunities do not grow on trees.
  • If you see something being done by someone more experienced that you, that you don’t understand, study it better.
  • If there is a cheap, effective, easy way to optimize, by all means go for it.
  • Sometimes a slight push at the right direction is all that is needed.
  • If that slight push happens to come from a page with a lot of linkjuice, then you are set.

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Popularity: 48% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: ,

Dec 20

Acai affiliates, you suck

Blogs, Can of SPAM, Cardinal Sin, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, Moniez, Techniques, Virtual War 21 Comments »

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Yes, really, you do.

Why? Because you are doing it wrong. For those who are unfamiliar with the acai berry niche, 90% of affiliates do the following:

  1. Go to http://www.laurasweightloss.com/
  2. Register a girlsnameweightloss.com domain
  3. Set up a blog with the exact same pictures and exact same layout as laura’s
  4. Fire up a keyword tool, get approximately the same list as every other affiliate
  5. Set up prosper202 and,
  6. Fire up their adwords campaign
  7. Optimize the keyword list and bids.

What is wrong with that, one might ask. Well, if it happens 10, 12, 30, even 40 times its ok. When every single fucking acai berry affiliate does the exact same thing, then guess what? The niche gets saturated! And then all those affiliates whine about their profit loss, no sales days and google slaps. (update: as this post is written, there has been a report on wickedfire that an adwords account got deleted for promoting acai berries)

“Ok then you smartass, how would you do it?”

How would I dive in an oversaturated niche? Why, with a different angle of approach of course!

  • First of all, I would find a way to use Oprah’s name in my campaign. There is a guy who is already doing that, and the others call him an idiot. He is not, unless he gets caught. By using Russian dont-see-dont-care servers and fake whois (you dont need an amazing domain, even oprah-acai-berry-official.info will work) you can abuse this for a month or two, and then rotate everything to avoid getting caught. This is a downright scam, so newbies should not even attempt it (newbies in fraud, not IM). I did warn you.
  • Second idea. I would resurrect the whole damn history of weight loss supplements, and set up a blog with articles on why acai berry is better than each one. Why? Because I would create a keyword list for every old weight loss niche as if I were to promote it today. (it took me less than a minute to find 5 names http://www.philkaplan.com/thefitnesstruth/update.htm)

Why do that? Because, when you have the keyword lists of OLD weightloss niches, you can set your adgroups on each one, and write ads that say something like “Natural fat burners are a scam. Find out here”.

I would hire a good copywriter to make me articles debunking the INSERT OLD SCAMMY OFFER HERE, and gradually sell acai berry as the new “safe” offer. Rinse and repeat on every old niche. Cheap targetted clicks.

“People don’t look for old products!”

Yes they do.

  • Third idea. Hug and cuddle all the victims of the other acai berry affiliates. People got scammed, and the internet is full of scam reports and complaints and whatnot. Set up a site pointing out the scammy acai berry offers, and subtly suggest the “safe” acai offers. These visitors are interested in weightloss as well, they are just a bit more clever than the rest. If you can convince them, you can sell.

Visitors looking for acai scams can also get foraged for their emails by giving out free pdf reports. You can set up a forum on the site for repeat visits, you can tell them which phone numbers to call for credit cancellations, you can have instant non stop testimonials. You can also “rat out” the sites that are scammy from other affiliates, but of course you will not “rat out” the real ones. Simply ask for slapped abandoned acai blogs in #cakes and you got like a dozen to rat out every month. Make it look like a victory in your site “Another acai scammer taken down by ASR”.

Just play the good guy, find the least scammy acai berry offer, and point the visitors to it. “ASR approved” badge on the banner. (Acai Scam Revealed)

This is not just about acai berry niche, you should use your imagination on everything. This post will either rekindle the whole acai niche or rain a world of hatred on me. Maybe both.

The precious few will get the hint.

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Popularity: 61% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: ,

Nov 11

Zerg Rush!

Can of SPAM, Cardinal Sin, Doodling, Fire and Forget, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, Moniez, Noobs, RGBhat, Social abuse, Techniques, WebWriMo challenge 1 Comment »

zerg-rush.jpgzerg_rush.pngzergling-rush-small.jpgzergrush_qjpreviewth.jpg

 

I could not decide which pic to use on this post, so I decided to settle this issue the way I settle all my dilemmas: I just put them all up there.

You decide which is the best one. The demotivational? The in game pwnage? The Starcraft 2 Zerg Rush with cool 3D graphics? Or the real face of Starcraft? I got no poll plugin on this site, so just vote at the comment section.

What does a jergling have to do with affiliate marketing?

Nothing actually, and it would be very weird if I actually had an answer to that… Oh wait, I do.

How can we leverage on the Battlenet system to make sales? Here is a technique that is neither new nor secret, and works fine if you do it right.

The idea is to use your battlenet account to host a game on battlenet, and in the title area put up your url. Simple as that!

But, every hardcore Battlenet player knows that the games need their slots to be refreshed in order to stay visible on the queue. So, download this little script, and there it is, auto refresh!

Here is the to do list:

  • Get a warcraft/starcraft account.
  • Register a free Battlenet account.
  • Download the battlenet refresher.
  • Get a CPA offer, direct link it from a domain name. Something with starcraft/warcraft/game/cheat/maps/patches in it.
  • Run the refresher script.
  • Fire up a game, host it. In the game’s title put up your domain name.
  • Make sure it refreshes and people join and quit.
  • Leave the pc box running till it crashes.
What will happen? People look for games to join, and the refresher script will close and open your gamer slots, maintaining your hosted game in the list. People will join your game, look around, see the link, and leave after they figure out you are never going to start the game. Hopefully somewhere along the way, your url will seem interesting enough for them to Alt+Tab and type it in their browser.

This technique works, but you need some imagination, trial and error, and some intimate knowledge of the online gamer community to make it a killer.

A hint is to use warcraft III maps that have cool thumbnails and look interesting, and are not well known. People will join to check it out and download it. Also, DOTA latest maps work too, people join so they can download the map without getting kicked, and in return they notice your url. If you make it look interesting, they will visit.

Keep in mind that the online gamer crowd is more tech savvy on average, you will need something more than a random CPA to make this work. You might find some idiots to rip off with some crush offers, but in general those kids know how to navigate the net. Think minisites with warcraft maps, think cheats, think mods, think warcraft/starcraft jokes, etc.

So, if you have a copy of Warcraft III, this is a simple method to promote some offers. Depending on your chosen domain name, your chosen map and the traffic at that point in Battlenet, you can easily get 400 uniques in a day with this. I used to leave an old pc running this 24/7. Your promo will stumble on diminishing returns after a few days, so try to refresh the whole presentation a bit.

EDIT: This post had so many spelling and grammatical errors, that it was enough to convince me to go for a walk. C ya tomorrow.

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Popularity: 96% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , ,

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