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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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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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: ,

Dec 13

Quick tip: Enable your Feedburner email subscriptions

Blogs, Mind over Pixels, Noobs, Web 2.0 Cutesy Bullshit 5 Comments »

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Here is a quick tip I discovered recently, give the option of email subscriptions to your readers.

I became aware of email subscriptions while being on IM, linking to my blog, and getting a reply: “Nice blog! WTF no email subscription?”

Yeah, embarrasing I know, but hey, I never said I am a good blogger!

So, in order to expand your reach at subscribers on your blog, and to avoid embarassment, enable the option on Feedburner. You are signed up on Feedburner, right? No? Go burn your feed right now! FFS.

Click on your feed name, click “Publicize” (yeah, that word seems wrong to me as well, but it is spelled correctly, I checked). Then on the services column click “email subscriptions” and the enable button at the bottom. That is it, you are done. Couldn’t be easier, yet easily neglected because the default is “off”. Now a link shows up if you click the rss button, that says something like “Get Glowleaf delivered by email“.

It’s free, its easy, and it’s dumb not to provide that option to your readers.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

Dec 08

You can’t get low bids on Facebook anymore

Fads, Mind over Pixels 11 Comments »

You can’t get low bids. You can’t have high clickthroughs, they stuffed more ads in the same page! Facebook clicks are so expensive! They don’t approve crush and IQ offers.

Yeah, right…

facebook-stats.jpg

EDIT: Ok, now you can hate me,

facebookctr.jpg

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags:

Dec 03

Be the leader of your tribe

Cybertowns, Doodling, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, Social abuse, Web 2.0 Cutesy Bullshit 1 Comment »

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I recently became involved in community building, and I must tell you, it is hard work. The time it takes to gather that group of people, to give them focus, to coordinate their efforts into a common goal, it is all hard and takes enormous amounts of time.

But the payoff is worth it. A post on Traffick discusses Seth Godin’s Tribes, but I am not talking about that specifically. Please note the part where it says:

Take Avinash Kaushik’s common-sense exhortation that “aggregate” is never the name of your website visitor. If you get bogged down in aggregate statistics, you might be overwhelmed with just how many loosely-engaged, “valueless” clickthroughs come to your website every week. Yes, but why not make an exercise out of ignoring the 80% of people who aren’t connecting with you and zero in on just the 20% of those who do? Study their characteristics. Build and grow with them. (And it’s easier than ever to study them. This week, using Google Analytics’ custom segment features, I hand-built a segment called “engaged quintile,” for the 20% of website visitors on a client’s site that stayed a long time and viewed many pages. By definition, guess what the “bounce rate” was for that segment? Yes, it was 0%! It’s heartening and inspiring when you look at life through that lens.)

When I analyzed this blog a while ago, I did the exact same thing. Note where I said, nevermind the “hit and run” visitors, look at the loyal 20-25%.

This table shows us something interesting. While 75% of the visitors barely skim the site (maybe its the big fat smileys on top that deter them, but who cares…) we have a loyal percentage of ~20% who are definately reading the posts, and when we factor in the repeat visits from the other tables, we see that they do so often.

Please note how I completely ignored the bouncers, and focused on my loyal readers right from the start. Someone might say, what, you cut out 80% of the visitors! Are you crazy?

Well, yes, I am, and apparently I am also right. Why? Because we don’t give a shit about the “hit and run’s”. I have an internet marketing blog, that does not care to appeal to everyone. Those that actually like it, stick around long time, because they recognize the real value in this. Those are the guys I want, not the visitors from random sources. A skim through the keywords that brought in traffic for me shows these irrelevant ones:

  • “what is the best seo tool”, I should redirect these guys to either a dickroll or a 7$ ebook…
  • sensational.com affiliate, no I am not. Nothing to see here, move along.
  • avatar james cameron torrent, WTF?
  • boobs that we can see, do boobs come out in the invisible version now?
  • wholesale glowsticks, just proves my point.

No, I don’t need those visitors. But the more visitors you have, the better, right?

Wrong. A visitor is a liability, unless he “converts”. At the time of conversion, he turns from a liability into an asset. Until that time, he only wastes bandwidth. A conversion in my eyes can be a lot of things, here are some:

The visitor converts when:

  1. He clicks an ad
  2. He buys a product
  3. He downloads an info product
  4. He registers and becomes an active member
  5. He posts a useful comment
  6. He becomes a loyal reader
  7. He subscribes to RSS or email updates
  8. He blogs about something I said
  9. He links to one of my pages
  10. He recommends my content to others through other media like word of mouth or msn link sharing or whatever
  11. He completes a poll/survey
  12. He builds brand awareness (this one is for big time guys, you just need to grasp it, not use it)

Note that not all of the above points can be directly tracked, but most can. We can track 1,2,3,4,5,7,11. Indirectly, we can track 6,8,9. Please note that I did not include “click the digg button” on purpose.

Do you see now why I wrote in my analysis, screw the others, the 20% is the one that matters? That 20% represents any and all of the above list. That is why I care more about time spent on site, repeat visits, frequency of visit, and RSS readers. And while, yes, chaos theory does prove that the visitor who came in looking for “boobs that we can see” could be a 16 year old computer geek, who will jerk off on boobsurfer, wipe himself, take note of the Wickedfire banner, click it, have a revelation the likes of “omg I can make monies on the interwebs”, spend 200+ hours reading and posting stupid questions and get dickrolled an average of 5 times (actual statistical data), and then rise up in 2 years  as the next internet marketing genius to become rich, powerful and famous, nevertheless, I HIGHLY DOUBT IT.

Another reason why social bookmarking traffic sucks big time is this.  Do a tracking experiment, and see how many visitors with social site referrers slide into any of the spots above. Very few usually. And while you may see RSS subscriber numbers going up, it will deflate as fast as it came. Most of the time, social traffic is a big waste of time and effort.

In summary, focus on your loyal readers, on the active members of your community, on those people that are real assets to you. It takes hard work and lots of time, but the rewards are huge. Focus on what matters, and create a little part of the world that is your own little tribe. It is the apotheosis of being an alpha male.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

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