Sep 27

Anarchy Online

Can of SPAM, Cardinal Sin, Doodling, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, Moniez, Social abuse, Virtual War 6 Comments »

anarchy online

I have been coaching a friend who wants to get into affiliate marketing for a few months. Apart from the expected “how do I…” questions, another one pops up every once in a while.

“Am I allowed to do this?”

And my answer is always: “Yes, of course you can“.

The internet has grown so powerful so soon, that the international law systems cannot possibly keep up, often forcing them to extreme measures like convicting spammers the same as rapists. 

Can you imagine yourself, a skinny, sun-deprived computer geek inside a jail full of murderers and rapists with tatoos?

Scary guy: “Hey, you, fish! What did you do to end up here?”

You: “Oh, I spammed Myspace…”

The inneficiency of the legal systems to keep up with the internet pace is so apparent, that we even had a course on that subject in the university. The laws regarding the internet are mostly rubbish, idiotic, over-reactive, and anticonstitutional.

I mean, come on, Youtube censorship for Turkey? Because some folks uploaded videos that the dictator did not like? I understand why a private company would comply to a country’s requests, but they shouldn’t. Laws protect everyone, and there should be international laws against censorship by anyone, even by a country of 60 million. Youtube should be allowed to say “Fuck off, we can show whatever we like” and lift the ban backed up by international laws.

The world wide web is a place of anarchy, and that is what makes all the power-holders in the world afraid of. Since they cannot control it, they try to change that. But:

As long as it does not lead you to jail, you can do whatever you want

Terms of service are not laws. They are house rules. You are not forced by anyone to follow them.

  • Adsense does not allow you to pair them with other contextual ads, but I have seen many sites with both adsense and adbrite. Their defense is: oh, adbrite is not contextual. Bullshit. Adbrite simply has a better model, allowing you to put your own keywords instead of letting a dumb bot pick up totally unrelated keywords from your page.
  • You cannot put adsense on porn/poker sites, unless you are big enough. You cannot put adsense on no content sites, unless you are a parking company with a 100.000 domain portfolio.
  • Digital point forums allow you to have only one account. They ban you if you post “Pm sent”.
  • Sphinn bans your domain due to a misunderstanding, and their email reply is “Oh, we know, but the script we use does not let us unban you. Sorry.” Really? I know 12 year olds who can remove the entry from the database…
  • Ebay bans you for cookie stuffing, while they charge 30$ listing fees even if your item does not sell. Who is the thief here? They bully their own rules simply because they became big, screwing the same people that made them what they are. (and no, cookie stuffing is not bad. If you believe that it is, go tatoo the word “sucker” on your forehead)
  • Merchants ban affiliates for cookie stuffing, where at the same time there are other methods of tracking without cookies, but noone uses them!
  • You cannot bid on competitor keywords in ppc. Since when? Do you know what competition means? Go tell a TV advertiser that he cannot outbid a competitor on prime time tv ad spot, he will laugh in your face.
  • Competitors nag you for registering their misstypes, threatening with “legal action“. Oh deer friedns, i kan mistype all I watn. If u dotn liek it, go regitser them domaisn urselves.
  • You cannot say “free” and charge people 8 euro per month for ringtones. But, supermarkets can have products paired with “free” gifts, included in the price. Credit cards can say 0% interest and charge 24%.
And the biggest crazy thing of them all:
  • You let a computer decide what site is better for a human.

Am I the only one that sees how irrational all that is?

You can do whatever the fuck you want, as long as it’s not illegal. And you need to understand the distinction between “against a company’s stupid TOS”, and “LAW”.

  • Want to buy links? Buy them. So what if Google says that it is bad?
  • Want to spam fora? Spam them. They should get better spam protection anyway.
  • Want to 302 hijack a page? Hijack it. If your competition does not like it, tell them to email a complaint to the guys who created internet protocols.
  • Want to create your own little corner of the internet, full of interlinked sites and a barrage of splogs? Do it. Ignore all those who say that its bad. They are idiots anyway.

There are no “SEO best practices”. It is just a fancy way of saying “comply with their rules”. I am going to make a shoking statement here:

You don’t really need Google to succeed online.

There, I said it. This blog gets 300 uniques/day, and only 4% is search engine traffic. And, risking to appear as showing off, but in reality I am not, I didn’t even try that hard to promote this blog. Sure, its nothing compared to what traffic big sites get, but its still better than the other 90% blogs in the niche.

Good guys get a kiss on the cheek, badass guys go home and fuck the prom queen. Why do you think its any different online?

Abuse whatever system you can find. Lie to make that sale. Undermine your competition. Be successful.

Lets close this post by making a sick and twisted version of a boyscout’s motto:

Break a rule every day.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , ,

Aug 08

Little trick to sabotage your competition

Cardinal Sin, Techniques, Virtual War, mAdsense No Comments »

When this idea came to me, I thought it was too stupid to work. I gave it a shot, and it actually worked.

Here it is. As usual, if a competitor is stupid enough to have adsense on his site, go to your adwords account and make a new image ad site placed to his url.

Put up a blank image, yes, a blank image, and bid high to ensure the top spot. The color of the image should be the same as his background, so if its pink, put pink…

You will have to submit the image ad several times until a bored google employee approves it, but if you did any facebook ads, you are already used to the drill.

What this does is simply negating his adsense income for as long as he does not notice it, since noone clicks the ad. Almost noone, I had 2 clicks and 23k impressions.

Easy? Yes

Stupid? Completely

Does it work? Yup

After ccnp and mcp, a lot of mcdst professionals who are not interested in a comptia certification, instead settle down for ccda.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

Jul 04

Nasty idea: sell people things they own

Cardinal Sin, Virtual War 2 Comments »

Today I made some phone calls, selling banner space to my site, to other businesses in the same niche.

And I made a realization: I am selling them, what was already theirs for a good solid 10 years now. 10 years in the internet life is like a millenia. These businesses owned the top 10 results for years, and I showed up out of nowhere, grabbed the top spot, and now I am selling them an overpriced banner slot. Its so shitty I love it.

Now, I am thinking of doing the same in other business niches. I am gonna forget about affiliate offers, the regular high volume niches etc for a while. These businesses cannot sell from affiliate networks, but they are paying big cash to show up on buyers monitors.

The key here, is experience. Weigh the niche, build it proper, spam the shit out of it. Link build it, make sure it gets to the top spot when google lifts the filters, and simply own the first place before google even indexes you.

A little tip is: Try to market to the businesses who already buy banners and adwords, but who don’t know shit about seo.

Quoting Sun Tzu, The Art of War:

A battle is won before the swords unsheath.  

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

Jun 24

Case study: Outranking the competition

Cardinal Sin, Heavy construction, Inorganic agriculture, Virtual War No Comments »

A year ago, after a lot of research, I decided to go for a very competitive niche.

(I will not say what that niche is, but smart people will find out anyway)

The niche is a standard business avenue, unlike the classic affiliate marketing world.

The keyphrases I went for were 2, a main and a secondary one.

The main keyphrase had 80.000 results in Google, hardly a competetive number for other niches like poker or credit.

The secondary keyphrase had 220.000 results in Google, a better match.

Obviously, the secondary had more searches than the primary, so why did I choose it the other way around?

Well, the answer was that while the secondary had more searches (and competition), it was a wider interpretation of the business, whereas the primary is spot on the theme. Also, in the primary, the other sites where actually my competitors, where in the secondary, it was them and lots of relevant businesses, but not actually the competition. I hope that made sense.

Then, I researched many of the competitive sites, and I laughed a lot while doing so. The 90% of them was horrible, and the remaining 10% was too basic, and most of that 10% had seo from 1995.

Examining the top 20, and their backlinks, I saw something ugly. These guys had stuffed keywords in metatags, backlinks from every relevant directory out there, DMOZ links, Yahoo directory links, PR6 links from irrelevant sites that had not been updated since 1996 (yes, I am serious). The top 15 where on-site seo’d to shit, with almost every page indexed, in both yahoo and msn.

And the cherry on top was the domain age. Every domain was from 1997-2001 tops, and every site has been in the index with closely the same content ever since its registration.

Not a good landscape to dive into. Actually, for the past 3 months, the only thing keeping me from outranking them is domain age, and their backlinks age.

Right now, I am close to Google spot 26, and the site keeps on ranking as Google lifts the filters from my links. How did I do that? Simple:

  • Pure content. Many of the competitive sites where the classic brochure sites, saying a bit about the company, some pics, prices, and a few more pages. I found that they lacked in content, so I beat the shit out of my content part, and stuffed everything in. They have 200-2.000 pages, I put up 50.000.
  • Links. All their links where reciprocal (which worked in the old days, but now it nullifies the “vote” from one page to another). I put on one way links. Also, I put the directory on a different domain, so any reciprocals became 3-way-links.
  • Spam links. All their seo was white hat, and borderline gray hat. Don the black hat my friends, and your opposition is in deep trouble.
  • Dullness. Their sites, except a few, are dull, dull, DULL. Put some web 2.0 thingies up there, and your are good to go.
  • Sex. Or lack thereof. Let me say this softly: YOU CANNOT SELL ANYTHING WITHOUT SEX. I put on pictures of babes. They are going the family route. I win, they lose.
  • Static sites VS pinging blogs. You know who wins.
  • Adsense. Come on! Adsense on a business site? He has got a nice: “This site a scam? Find out here” ad that steals a third of his traffic. Amateurs…
  • Communication. If you dont communicate with your customers, you lose. Put in blogs, skype, email addresses everywhere, phone numbers, contact forms, forum, comment, etc.
  • Imagination. They lack imagination. I dont. Create anything you can think of that can give you a competitive advantage. Find what they dont have, and put it up first.

EDIT: I got asked what I mean by keyphrase.

When you say keyphrase instead of keywords, you mean like a long english sentence that has the keyword in it? can you give some examples?

A keyphrase is a phrase that contains a few keywords you want to rank for. Something like the longtail, but not exactly. An example : “Glowleaf affiliate marketing blog, out of the box thinking for making money online”

You spoke in the last post about beating the competition with, among others, pure content.
They put 2000 pages, you put up 50,000. How did you put those up? I mean it must be generated, but then the content quality isn’t there so much? Or did I miss something?

About content, you can autogenerate pages, interlink them, and put up links. Check this out:
http://www.cashquests.com/google-pag…eat-the-system

Also, eli at blue hat seo says that internal linking to the upper pages push up rankings as well. I could not find the article on a quick glance. You should read his whole blog anyway!

So, I just combined the two ideas.

Once you put up those pages, all you have to do is try and index them. Then your ranks will go up. Also, always monetize the autogenerated pages with ppc (not adsense, try adbrite, or better yet, peakclick).

What I have been wondering about is how to facilitate the most time consuming part of the work: content.

Could you tell me more about generating those pages. I mean generated pages that are, i guess, good enough in terms of english to get people to go on them and click on ads.

I heard of some generators using dictionaries, but it’s most for bots, not so much for humans.

I like rssevolution. You have to buy it, but you can use a demo for a few days to see what it does. A free alternative is yacg.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

Apr 06

Ingenious link bait for software directories

Can of SPAM, Cardinal Sin, Doodling, Fire and Forget, Heavy construction, Inorganic agriculture, Mind over Pixels, Moniez, Techniques, Virtual War No Comments »

 wtd298.jpg

While I was trying eli’s technique, on submitting to software directories, I got this email:

We have checked your program for viruses, Trojans, adware and spyware. The report is available here:

http://mysite. mysite.org/antivirusreport.html

Today, every second program is infected with some sort of cash-making malware. Your product is free of unwanted extras, but your users don’t have an idea whether or not they will experience some unwanted activities after installing your program. You can easily increase your trust rank by referring your customers to the trusted anti-virus report. The link code is here:

http://mysite. mysite.qarchive.org/antivirusreport.html

We are constantly checking all products listed at www.qarchive.org to find programs containing malicious modules. All software vendors receive messages similar to this one when we perform a scan.

This is a clever way of asking for a backlink to your directory. You can make an autoresponder say “We have scanned your site, and it was found free of parasites. Link to the report.” Of course, the report is nowhere to be found.

Pure genius.

EDIT:

These guys are amazing. Look at this:

Dear developer,

Your software ‘Bad Wolf Yacht Charter in Greece’ has been selected and listed by cleansofts.com team.

You can view the software at: http://www.cleansofts.com/get/569/75513/mysite.html

Your software has been awarded 5 Stars based on cleansofts.com Rating Guidelines at http://www.cleansofts.com/awards.html

Please display this great award image on your website using one of next 2 methods:

1). insert the below code on your website: (the code will display the award image)

<!– ——Start Cut Here—– –>
<a href=”http://www.cleansofts.com/get/569/75513/Bad_Wolf_Yacht_Charter_in_Greece.html”>
<img border=”0″ src=”http://www.cleansofts.com/images/5starsaward.gif” alt=” 1 : 5 Stars Award at cleansofts.com !” width=”151″ height=”70″></a>
<!– ——End Cut Here—– –>

–OR–
2). Download a copy of your award image at http://www.cleansofts.com/images/5starsaward.gif and display it on your website to let your users know about this award.
Link the award image from your website directly to your software listing page URL provided above to increase your ranking and traffic on search engines and on cleansofts.com website

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , , , ,

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