The Online Marketing Blanket

We Cover Everything Broski

The first step within this is obviously setup a landing page, site where people can order, hub page, money site, whatever you want to call it. This is where the majority of your cash will be coming from. This should definitely be handled manually to make sure that it’s done correctly. Monetization, content, etc.

Step two is simple – use LFE to create a smaller site network where you can begin to drop links to your mini-nets and site hubs. This is a way to smother your smaller links with broader ones which will reinforce in numbers and upward carry the juice to the top. If you haven’t purchased LFE yet, make me some money and order via this link -> LFE. Now once you have the site network for LFE built (probably over a week or two) and you have it, either buy XRUMER or just a blast and evenly distribute links to your LFE hubs. If you have a friend with xrumer it shouldn’t be too hard to actually give that a shot. Now you have xrumer links going to LFE links that are going to mini-hub/site/microsite links, which are going to your money site. Nice eh? Keep on building out this network while factoring in direct links via trackbacks, comments, etc and you’ll be sittin’ pretty.

Step three – Make sure that you have ALL of the sites setup with an opt-in form so you can mail them with an autoresponder (I recommend Aweber to start). Example, “Free 10 day e-Course on how to lose 20 lbs!” with 10 days of 2 paragraphs + 1 affiliate link. Schwing! Passive income from linking networks is an utter win, especially since most people say you shouldn’t monetize them so they look legit. Let me ask you a question, when was the last time you saw a website that was only 5 pages in the weight loss niche without any form of monetization on it? Monetize the bitch with -something- that won’t necessarily link that site to your others. AdSense is alright, but don’t use it on all of them. The last thing you want someone to do is see “47 other sites with this AdSense ID” *click* and find your entire network.

Step four – Your network should auto scale itself. If you need help with automating the expansion, consult your local uBot guru and if you haven’t gotten it already and you’re not a programmer – get it. This is the only program out there that will allow you to do what I do without knowing how to program to a decently higher level of programming knowledge. In other words, use uBot to automate things such as LFE, wordpress.com, ArticlesBase, etc. YOU CAN DO IT! YAY!

Step five – You remember those autoresponders on the linking sites and opt-in forms? Make sure your affiliate links are using redirect scripts and/or prosper202 links. If the offer goes down or you find a better payout, redirect somewhere else instead of logging back into your email place (Aweber) and changing it.

Step six – If you’re feeling daring, try out some PPV. I’m just getting started in this myself but it’s decent for leadgen. Right now I’m using MediaTraffic (Ask for JIMMY – he’s straight to the point, call, tell him, he says ok, hang up, get it done) because I don’t feel comfortable enough in PPV yet to throw down a G for TV yet. Currently I’m just messing around with an opt-in page for Aweber on PPV, currently paying about 40-60 cents per double opt in. Not too shabby, that’s like 250% ROI on an email submit broski. It’s worth a shot, and if it doesn’t work out – it’s only 20 bucks for Aweber and like $200 for the initial deposit for MediaTraffic.

Step seven – Grab your copy of uBot and find some sites where you can just do the same iterations over and over to get your result. If that’s links, sales, whatever – find a site that is templated so you can write one bot for all of the sites. This will get you a lot more exposure and grow your opt-in list as well. Opt-in is key when it comes to things such as this, because it can turn one short-term click into a long-term revenue stream.

Step eight – PPC. Well, I’m not going to lie – if you want to know more about PPC go read this. Specifically point 6.

That’s all I can really think of right now but that should get you all thinking straight in regards to how to blanket a niche. Think of all of the different points and places where a person will go to read up on, check out, buy from etc a specific product or niche. Find those, and find a way to put yourself on there or in the way. Bank hard. Laugh. Grey Goose. Ryan Eagle. Bofu Their Wolfe. Stop. Bankin’time. Have a good one. And in all seriousness I really will try to post more often. Go buy something from one of my affiliate links so I can make monies online.

uBot

Pros:

• Ease in Use
• Newbies can learn how to use it quickly
• Can write powerful automated tools, many that actually even rival mine in terms of what it can do.
• Can be exported and given to friends to use (hint: outsourcing…)
• Can even outsource captcha’s using the built-in technology (extra charge but extremely cheap for the captchas themselves, not a charge by uBot)
• Ease in Use
• Unlimited Possibilities, even into having it log into your bank accts and check your balances for you.
• Could even make it find you a date on a friday night from CraigsList! (additional fee’s may apply)
• Ease in Use
• When combined with LinkFarmEvolution (FUCK YAH!) you can create automated linkfarms that get auto-created … Hint hint. Post coming soon.
• The possibilities are literally endless.

Cons:

• uBot won’t do my homework, or yours.
• uBot doesn’t come stock with a ‘make money’ button, but it does however allow you to make one.

All in all I must say I’m completely impressed with uBot. uBot is probably the best way to take the powerful programs and scripts that I have made over the years, and allow someone with no programming knowledge to pick it up and do almost the exact same thing. The power behind this is truly amazing and I must admit, I’m planning on making uBot a consistent component in my daily tasks for my staff (you know, when I find someone I can’t just replace with a script/program). But the bottom line is this is a blackhat seo and/or automation specialized blog, so I felt as if I had to do a review of uBot. It’s completely worth the cash, the staff are knowledgeable and know what they’re talking about. Seth is an amazing programmer and I won’t deny that, this suite is nothing short of flawless. Definitely give it a shot.

Oh, and you know me guys. I got you all a discount. Original price is $245 I got it down to $199 for you all.

Order Link: Cheaaaa UBOT!
Coupon: bofizzle

Next is the review of LinkFarmEvolution, which will come tomorrow. Check out the sales page as well though, because uBot + LinkFarmEvolution = utter complete win.

The most little change can make the biggest impact on your results. What if you were able to automate the creation of wordpress blogs on your host? What if you could just type in the domain name, and a password and it’ll go set it up and change the admin password for you. Now let’s assume you can make a wordpress blog that makes you $50/month. How far of a stretch would it be to automate setting these up, so you can setup 50 of these a day? After a month, assuming they all will make $50 a month (yeah right, but still lets assume) – that’s (@ $10 per domain) a $15,000/month investment to make $75,000/month. Run it for 6 months, then sell the network off at 8 month value to someone else. Rinse, repeat. There’s your million dollar business. All from typing a damn word into a box, and laughing your way to the bank. Just to keep you from doing the math (and because I’m on so much Redbull it’s got me typing like it’s a contest) it would be 8 months * 75,000 == $600,000 (that’s 8 month value) plus the fact that it would have made you 6 month’s value which comes out to be $450,000. That’s $1,050,000 in 8 months. Will someone buy it? Uh, yeah. If not, sell it off in lots. But that’s just to keep you thinking. Not bad for typing a few words, huh? Now do you see where the mindset affects you like crack? Crack kills though, this just help you make life easier – whether that’s money or time, or both. Bonus: Think of making even more recurring income forcing them to host with you

Automation can also do other little things like save your ass. Ask yourself this question – especially if you have a dedicated server. Do you have a script checking the server load every minute, and if it’s over … lets say 5ish … it text’s your cell phone and your server management company to investigate? Have you ever considered what 1 hour of downtime really can do to your business? What about your tracking links if you’re an affiliate marketer? Ever think of doing an MD5 sum of the landing page where the traffic ends up, and whenever it changes – text you? Or what if it doesn’t even get to the lander, text you? What if your money site or one of your microsites that is throwing links to you gets deindex’d? Text you? Take all of these into consideration. Lack of notice is probably one of the most important reasons companies lose money. That and corporate stupidity.

For the SEO’s out there, have you ever had a tool that does nothing but watch your competition? What new sites are in the top 50? What new sites hit the front page? What was their link velocity and numbers for the past 6 months? 6 weeks? 6 days? Where are their links coming from? How are they building them and how fast? From where? What if you had a script to snag those links too (trust me, it works very well har har)? Think about a way to get almost everything that you check daily yourself automated in some way, shape or form. Think about this. Would you consider it a good investment to pay someone like me $25,000 to automate everything for you that you do on a daily basis and send you 3 updates a day, one at 9 AM, one at noon, and one at 4:30 PM? How much easier would it make your life? Consider that.

Alright so enough theory and all of that jazz. Let’s give you an actual example. Give me a second here to prepare you with the following line: “yes I’m going to second tier whore this next site”. The reason is it’s almost impossible to actually not make money with them. So here’s the deal. They have datafeeds, and “instant shopping sites” etc. Here’s the part that makes it worth it.

• You’re the brand. The users order through your site, and never leave your site. Think dropshipping.
• It’s in a good niche (Pet Medication)
• The sites are modifiable and easy to promote, including a 1000+ product store within an hour.
• The staff -actually knows what they’re talking about-, which is rare as hell.
• Residuals!!!
• They handle the upsells, and on a 3 month order call the end user after 2.5 months asking if they need a refill. Bonus, eh?
• Set price markups for your stores.
• The rest you’ll see for yourself.

I’m even willing to help people out with 1-5K backlink packages for promotion. The 2nd tier is -that good-. Click –> Here’s the link for the company <– Click, for the ‘How did you hear about us’ put the URL to this post. I’m going to work on talking with them regarding expedited approval for you all. Now let’s get into the actual automated aspect of them. They’re an affiliate program that you can mark up the prices on the products, they do the store, act like a dropshipping company, pull stock when it’s not available, and handle support completely under YOUR brand that earns you residuals. Automation + this program = utter win. Not to mention one of the coders there has … how can I say this, experience in a fast paced automation-based industry that is not really mainstream anymore *cough*. He knows his shit. Anyway, I have a new post coming up about automating the entire system of putting up site networks. If these energy patches and redbull keep doing the trick it may be up today.

Let’s take a few common knowledge concepts in the SEO world and really think about it and how they work:

Links From Related Sites Are More Powerful
I don’t think anyone out there will really argue this one. A related PR4 link will “carry” more weight than a random PR4 link. That’s what we’ve all been taught and told from the almighty SEO guru’s, right? Well let’s assume for a moment that this is really 100% true and why it works. The real questions you should have asked yourself the first time someone said this to you, is how does google tell if the sites are related? It’s not just keyword density, or incoming anchor text’s to that page – what if it’s a lot more? Google has consistently said that incoming links can never, ever hurt your website because it would make it easy for Blackhat’s to ‘kill’ your rankings – right? If you actually go back and listen to their technicians speak on camera about it (answering questions from the general public) you’ll notice they always say conflicting answers while they dance around this subject. I recall one day seeing one technician say that incoming links can’t hurt you, then looking at the next video in the list and the technician said “if for some reason you think another site was to blame for this, submit a reinclusion request”. I quote that because I think that’s what he/she said, but I can’t remember completely.

So the real question is, can this happen? Yes, it can. I’ve done it a few times. Just figure out the triggers and give it a whirl, it’s a lot easier than you’d ever think. But let’s not get off topic, shall we? Let’s get back to classification algorithms. So let’s look at how Google will classify your site. Everyone says that meta tags are pretty much useless when it comes to ranking. But what if it was actually helpful in determining how much link juice is passed to you from another site, via related content? What if your site and their site both had a meta tag saying your niche was ‘weight loss’, do you think your link would be unrelated or related? Ever think that maybe meta tags are there to help you classify the actual subjects of your site, therefore affecting the incoming link juice from other sites? Give it a whirl, you’d be amazed at the actual results. Personally I won’t say that the rankings were specifically from this change, but I’ve had a site jump from the high 150’s to low 40’s in the span of 3 days with no link building by just adding some meta tags. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Just food for thought.

Too Many Links Too Fast Will Result in Sandboxing
There are a lot more factors in play with this one that make it appear that way, yeah. You first need to clarify exactly what sandboxing is. To some people sandboxing is this little place where your site goes before it can prove that it’s normal. It reminds me a lot about the kid in preschool that stays in the corner looking at the paint dry, personally. For a lot of people sandboxing is a 3rd stage to sites. There’s sandboxed, normal, and authority. To other people (me included) I believe there’s literally 2 types, which is normal and authority. To me sandbox’d is nuked to all fucking hell, not ranking for damn near anything including it’s own name. The only time you’ll see this site is if you do domain.com or site:domain.com. What if it wasn’t necessarily that too many links too fast results in sandboxing, but merely too many links without resulting traffic to a site results in sandboxing? If you don’t think that Google actually shares information between analytics and the SERP engines that you’re not really looking too deep into things.

I emplore you to try a little test. Try link building fast where people will actually click through to your site. Article sites, directories with traffic that people will actually click through, etc. Throw all of them at your site overnight and see what happens. Try it on a fresh domain even. The biggest determining factor here is domain age. If the domain is aged, it will go quite well and you’ll magically rank higher across most of your terms. If not, you’ll most likely drop out of the SERPs for a few days (not a deindex, though) and then bounce back with higher rankings. There’s a lot more to Google’s madness than people will give them credit for. Their algorithm is one of the most complex algorithms I’ve seen in a long ass time, but it’s not impossible to figure out how it works. It’s no different than any other algorithm at this time, which means it was written by humans and it can be figured out by humans. You just need to get into their mindset. Chug a redbull or two, pop a NODOZ and buckle down in a very poorly lit room with techno blaring and just think about every-little-stinkin-detail and you’ll start seeing a little bit about it that’s different (Disclaimer: I do not recommend anyone doing what I just said, I merely over-exaggerated for effect). Never overlook anything.

What I Don’t Have in Quality, I Make Up In Quantity
A lot of the people that I talk to about link building usually say the same thing. I don’t need stinkin PR8 links when I can throw 200 PR5’s at it. And to a certain point, that’s true. But let’s consider the last algorithm update. Most won’t argue that Social Bookmarking links are fairly well nuked now (stay classy, autopligg). The update really started making me think. What if Google decided to change the algorithm so that your potential ranking power was changed from (individual link power * links) to (total link power / links)? Instead of, for example, 500 PR4 links outweighing 5000 PR3’s. Would your sites still rank? Would they still carry so much authority that the new post you just wrote gets top 5 for the title? Keep that in mind. The goal of a good search engine marketer is to be able to not just adapt to algorith changes, but anticipate future algorithm changes and plan ahead for them. Make it work all the time, not just when you scramble to fix it.

One of the experiments I had lately was a 4-5 year old .com domain with only 5 links, but all 5 links were from Yahoo Directory. It ranked top 50 for it’s term (and the term, btw, had 900,000 on allintitle) with nothing but a blank front page with the term in the h1 and title. Pretty cool, eh? I threw 50 or 100ish PR2-5 at it and I got kicked to 200+ for the same term. What the hell, right? It looks at least to me like it’s definitely possible for the changes to be in testing with certain things. The goal of Google is to provide the best user experience (credit to Steve when I forgot all about that one) so wouldn’t they try to discourage or possibly even attempt to derail certain ways to manipulate the SERPs? Yes my friends, SEO is a way of modify and manipulate the SERPs. Just keep that in mind when you start your tests and try different techniques and methods.

Google Only Listens To What You Tell Them
Now this, is going to be a fun one. If you set the text in a title tag to “hey this is my site”, the title for your site will always be “hey this is my site” right? Nope. Not always. One of my clients actually is a prime example. They own the domain <term>inc.com. Without my knowledge they changed their site completely, and the title was reset to index. I went to check on their rankings, and for the term <term> their title was not index, but actually <term>. I click through and see index. Confused as hell, I click back and check the google cache date. It’s current, today in fact. I query <term> inc, and their title was <term> inc. Same pages, same caches, different terms, different titles. Interesting, eh? Do you need more proof about backend classification?

Here’s another interesting one for you to sleep on. A member over at WickedFire actually followed up with me about one of the previous posts where I mentioned graphics being read via OCR and that contributing to your ranking. He PM’d me to actually let me know that one of the google bots (or whatever) actually took the tag line in his logo, and used it for the meta description in the SERPs. It’s no where else on the pages, not in alt tags or comment tags even – just in the image. After reading his message again I definitely laughed on the inside, and then stood up with a very loud “WHAT THE FUCK?” Chea son. Dis shit happened. About 15 minutes later I started to blur the backgrounds behind the tag lines on all of my logos to a solid color. Right now in your head you should be saying “shit just got real”. Yeah.

The bottom line that you should take from this is not what the intention of your site is. It’s what Google takes as your intention. Sometimes you need to spell shit out. Sometimes you need to make sure they can’t mistake the point behind one of your sites or pages. You need to make sure that Google understands exactly what it’s about.

Anyway, it’s almost 2 AM here but this was my random little session for the night. I’ll still be up for another hour or two if you want to poke me on Skype (Contempt.me is the username). Also if anyone wants to have a drunken idea session at Affiliate Summit, I’ll be there. Leave a comment with some ideas Peace!

Contempt

Often when I talk to people about what I do I can’t really sum it up with the term Blackhat SEO, or anything of the like. Usually it ends up being Automation and Scalability. First, I do want to say this though: automation is not simply a field or a thing to do, it certainly is a mindset. Once you start thinking in the right way with automation your mind hardly ever stops as you try to break down every little thing behind a certain task and make it all powered by scripts and programs. One of the concepts I’ve thought about lately when thinking about new scripts and programs was for niche research – but why stop there? Originally it was very simple.

• Check root keyword search volume (organic).
• Check average CPC on adwords.
• Report to me.

The whole goal of automation is to take as much human interaction out of it as possible, and the goal of scaling is to be able to replicate this many times over and over. So let’s take this one step further and look at automating almost the entire process.

• Check root keyword search volume (organic).
• Check average CPC on adwords (if over a certain number, continue)
• Check exact match domain names.
• Find exact match that’s open on any TLD worth using.
• Register using the eNom API or writing a cURL script through NameCheap.
• Point DNS to my servers using API.
• Create cPanel account via WHM on server to allow resolving and showing of said domain.
• Use FTP to upload YACG and do the initial installation of it, posting adsense on pages for initial monetization.
• Install in-text script for secondary monetization on terms in content itself, Kontera comes to mind.
• Ping out said website, submit to a few aggregators.
• Drop 100-200 backlinks (including deeplinks) to website.
• Social bookmark a few of the pages for initial indexing (autopligg come to mind?)
• Report to me.

See the huge difference when you go with the automation mindset and see how much is really possible? Total we’re talking about $2 cost per 500 keywords researched (Going under the 1000 captcha’s for $2 from Decaptcher). This could most likely end up being a $100 a day after domain costs, but the sheer numbers alone would probably start making it back via monetization within a week or two. Now, will this always work? No. Will it work for now? Probably yes.

Back to the original idea behind this post though, Automation is a Mindset. Once you really get on a roll you’ll start thinking about how to automate damn near everything. One way you could comparably think about what I’m talking about is a dish washer. Someone figured out how to make a device that washes dishes. That’s amazing! Helps everyone on a daily basis, but it would be in my mind to try to figure out how to create some way to get all of the dishes in the house into the dish washer so I can literally leave them anywhere and have them picked up. Robotics FTW. The bottom line is that anything can be automated even more and to a better extent, the question is how and how much.

Let’s go with another example, though. I drew up a diagram for a WickedFire thread that was posted in the Traffic & Content section over there about a SEO Network. Here’s the diagram, and then I’ll explain somewhat on how I automated it:

Now comes the somewhat impressive part. I have this entire system automated but the social bookmarking. Sadly I still have to type about 5 keys and click 2-3 times before the social bookmarking works how I want it to. The WPMU’s are all autogenned and uses the WordPress backup file to load about 150,000 markov’d posts delay posted over 3-6 months (think DataPresser but a little less clean on the output). The micro URL’s are added via the blogroll so they expand out with all of the new posts, and then a few of the posts are all bookmarked for fast indexing and incremental indexing with the growth. The micro’s themselves are basically article re-writes, only about 5-10 pages per site. These are somewhat of a way to “link launder” your links to your main site, so you can some-what clean them from completely spammy and automated to clean and respectable. After time if done right, the micro’s will end up around PR4ish with a gooooood number of backlinks, including deeplinks.

The whole point behind that example is that everything under “Money Site” is automated, and can be scaled out almost infinitely. That’s actually all that I have right now on this subject – but please for the love of God let me know what else you all want me to write about. I’ve been considering posting some scraping classes that I have and the like but I’m still not sure whether I should post them in Ruby or PHP, etc.

As always, hit me up on Contempt.me (Skype username) with some feedback.

So let’s think about how spider’s work in general. Spiders go to your website, and for the most part they see flat HTML. Do they execute JavaScript? Do they execute Java? What about jQuery? If you say no to all of the previously mentioned statements, you are a dumbass. I’ve actually seen a Google Crawler join an IRC channel via a Java app. It was on a website it was crawling, which shows that it does actually read Java. And no, I wasn’t imagining things or lying, the actual hostmask was the crawl googlebot hostmask with a Google owned and operated IP.

Is it safe to say that they actually take whatever data about the scripts they’re running that they can? Maybe they won’t be able to interpret all of the data coming from it like when I said “Hey Googlebot!” but it could certainly look at the description, the data in it including the IRC URL, etc. Also, along the same lines is it out of reach to consider that Google Crawlers may actually use OCR to see the text in banners? Is it really that far out of reach? Personally, from what I’ve seen that can happen with OCR and CAPTCHA’s, I don’t doubt it for one second. For you doubters, 150-200 links/minute anyone? All CAPTCHA “protected”?

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. What can Google Crawlers read and not read. By this point I’m sure there’s at least a handful of people going “why hasn’t he mentioned Flash yet?”. I’ll address that right now. One of my “research friends” wrote up this article about Indexing and Flash over at SERPable. If you give it a full read he actually goes into a lot of detail regarding what he found out with indexing flash.

When you start to think more along the lines of how spiders are configured and made to ‘think’ (algorithms, etc) you can start to find exactly what they’re looking at and seeing. Now think outside the box at how the data they collect is manipulated and categorized. Here’s an example: if you have a 500 word unique article that you can “spin” into being unique again, would you stop at just 5 spins? What about re-ordering all the sentences and doing it again? What about running it through a synonym function to find higher words synonyms or even taking a word, getting an antonym and saying “not <word>”?

An example of this would be: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” => “The not so slow brown fox leaps over the lethargic dog”. Do you really think the spider would be able to tell the difference? It knows a few things … unique or not unique, keyword density, and related words. If you have a list of synonyms and antonyms, so do they. Keep that in mind.

As for other data and cloaking I won’t even really touch on that right now. I used to experiment with cloaking and it’s very hard to get around especially without an IP list of Google spiders. If you think UserAgent is the best way, I’d try something else after kicking yourself in the ass. Remember that Google’s entire job is to ensure that the best quality sites make it to the top. My job is to figure out how to get it up there, so that it stays.

Anyway I hope this helped you all think a little bit outside the box, and if you’re not members of WickedFire I hope you signup and take a peek at my post here that has some PHP code I posted about making unique content. Have a good one

PS – Bored? Skype me @ Contempt.me (that’s the username). If you don’t catch me in the middle of coding we can have a little chat …

Twitter’s system is extremely easy to use. Let’s also take a look at it from an SEO standpoint. If you google bofu2u site:twitter.com you’ll see something in the realm of:
Results 1 – 10 of about 783 from twitter.com for bofu2u. (0.21 seconds)

That’s 783 links on twitter to my twitter profile. That’s the same as 780ish backlinks to a single site, except it’s also internal dofollow linking. Let’s talk about nice power behind that. Now you take that concept and think about internal and upward linking. 783 backlinks to my profile (give or take a few), and my profile links to Contempt. So there’s an example, and of course we’ll ignore the fact that Twitter’s nofollow because everyone has their own darn opinion on that one.

Let’s do another example – and this’ll show not only why Digg is powerful as far as viral goes, but linking as well (not sure with the latest URL struct change, so I’m going off of like 2+ weeks ago). You submit an article, and digg it. Let’s say you favorite it. Now your profile has a link from every article you’ve dugg, and people that friend you link to you, and shouts. So if you have 200 mutual friends, and you’ve dugg 800 links, that’s theoretically 1000 internal links to your profile. Higher on the page == higher value of link juice passed, right?

So now let’s assume you submit an article, digg it, shout it, and favorite it. You’ve got it favorited so link juice from your profile goes to it, lets say 700 of those 1000’s power wise. You shout it out, that gets 10 other people to digg it. Let’s say they’re also in the same exact position as you. That’s 700 * 10 = 7000 internal juice going to your digg submission. Remember this is all theoretical and I’m trying to stress the concept, not the numbers. Once you understand the numbers you’ll probably be sitting there going *facepalm* “dumbshit this works with <insert site here>!”.

Anyway, I got a few bigger posts on the way yet but it’s just not time yet. So I hope this holds a few of you over. Also, if you want to mess with some social, OnlyWire.com

Contempt

1. It’s not about how not to get caught, it’s how to prolong getting caught.
This is one thing that I definitely had burned into my head after introducing myself as “I do a little blackhat”. The bottom line is that you’re going to get caught doing blackhat unless you are really, really good at “automating whitehat” (grayhat) which is a completely different thing. Automating whitehat would be like … automating directory submissions, trackback requests on a moderately slower level like 5-10 per article and making sure it’s all related content. This would be like posting about blue widgets, and then sending out 5-10 trackback requests about blue widgets. If for some odd reason you can’t see where I’m going with this, check out Splog Ping Crawl …

2. Is Your Out Worth Your In?
Something that Sugarrae mentioned in her talk (and I also think mentioned to me the night before) is “is your time spent on something worth what you’re getting for it?”. This seems like common knowledge, but really think about it. Assume your time is worth 10 dollars an hour, and you work 40 hours a week ($400/week). Is the tool, or site, or method you’re working on going to return that within 6 months? 1 year? 2 years? It’s all about priorities. One thing that rae mentioned was that she doesn’t usually count on something to be really profitable until after a year. Me on the other hand, I’d like to have it profitable by the 2nd or 3rd month. Different priorities, different methods, different guidelines for your projects.

3. Brandable and Long Term, or Short-Term Churn and Burn?
Different projects warrant different techniques and methods, as well as require entirely different guidelines and goals. If you’re going to go longterm on a good whitehat niche, spending $2000-$5000 on a site startup may be warranted if the return would be there. I know I just started trying a few grayhat/whitehat domains and running them with the intent of no return until 6-8 months out. Until then I don’t mind running a few splog networks for testing.

Don’t get me wrong, I do use BlackHat SEO almost on a daily basis. Here’s the rub, most of the time I use BHSEO for testing theories and methods with mass generation. Just wanted to clarify that so you don’t think that Contempt is a whitehat!

4. Stop Thinking, Start Doing
This wasn’t exactly an unknown saying to me. We often throw it around on WickedFire and I’ve found myself mentioning it to someone, pulling back and going “wait, wtf am I doing”. Even I need to reality check myself every now and again. At IMSB I was reality checked by 3 people really. It’s not necessarily what they said, but how and why. First was Steve Plunkett – sitting down with him for nearly 3 minutes yielded the yells of “WHATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT IS THAT IN YOUR CODE” which made me slap myself endlessly. I also need to mention, the caps are there for a reason – security told him to quiet down right after.

The second person was Rae (who I mentioned above). I’m not quite sure why it hit differently when she said it, but the mention of figures from her put other things into perspective for me about success and non. Thirdly of course, was and always will be, XMCP (SlightlyShadySEO). There’s normally a bunch of passing back and forth between Shady and I but for some odd reason, I listened closer this time (not saying I didn’t listen before bud ). I’ve put a few things into play and and trying a lot more techniques on different projects. Longshot? Doubt it. Will it work? It will if I’m trying hard enough.

5. GO – TO – MORE – MEETUPS
The people, the information, the drinking (oh and trust me, I set records… ask anyone at IMSB about the cherry bomb har har har), and the atmosphere in general. “Shit just got real” is a line I say in my head consistently as I listen to people I talk to. Hardcore affiliate or beginning SEO, the perspective on it is worth it alone.

Thanks again for everyone I met, the people I got drunk with the Cherry Bomb (you know who you are), the ButterMyRoll Crew (again, you know who you are), and of course above and all Search & Social for putting on another amazing event. If you’ll be at AdTech, drop me a comment we’ll have to meetup.

Before I start telling you how to use it, here’s what you need – and what you may want to have.

What you NEED:

• PHP 5
• WordPress
• Desire to Learn and Think Abstractly

What you may want (and will help …)

• phpBay
• WFReview
• (these will be at the end of the post as well so you can decide AFTER you see why)

Here’s a few things to think about with the code …

• This uses XMLRPC so will work with Splog Ping Crawl
• Can be integrated with Google Blog Search for avoiding duplicate content penalties *hint hint*
• Can be used full steam, throttled back, etc.

Now I’m going to admit this right now. It’s 3:15 in the morning right now and I’m tired as hell – but I did want to get this out because I promised a few of you I would get it done. So please forgive me if the code itself isn’t so clean, but my goal is purely to prove it can be done – and it’s not too hard to do either. My goal here on Contempt is to help you re-think about Automation in general and help you create ways to make your online endeavours much easier. For some Automation in general is considered blackhat, and to those people I’d like to remind them to wake up. Everything in life is getting automated whether you like it or not. Personally in my opinion blackhat seo is nothing other than a label for “holy shit that’s automatic”. Usually this is by people that don’t know how to do it, or have a problem looking at their newfound power and ability and can’t control it enough to not go overboard. This usually results in “i can spam links, go buy viagra go!”. It’s true – the same methods that I use sometimes could be used as an attempt to rank for buy viagra – and you know what, I’m sure with some time I could – but why? I want long term residual income off my endeavours, and right now I’m doing enough research to plan the methods down to successful ones so I don’t make stupid mistakes over and over on sites I’ve invested money into.

Anyway – like I said – It’s 3:30 so I’m ranting. Let’s move on. Here’s my overall goal with this post. In the following code I’m going to show you very simple code to extract information from a CSV, and how to format it into a good post for a review or shopping site. Here’s how you do that using PHP5 ..

Code block

<?php
$row = 1;
$handle = fopen("datafeed.csv", "r");
while (($data = fgetcsv($handle, 5000, ",")) !== FALSE) {
$num = count($data);
echo "<p> $num fields in line $row: <br /></p>\n";
$row++;
for ($c=0; $c < $num; $c++) {
echo "$c -- ".$data[$c] . "<br />\n";
}
if($row > 5)
die();
}
fclose($handle);
?>

I wrote this up quick to view the first 5 rows in a datafeed file. This’ll allow me to look at (with most feeds) the names of the fields, and then the first 4 lines to see sample data. This is an easy way to sort out “oh #5 is the URL” and “#10 is the image”. Next we’ll work on a template file so that when we post it to wordpress it’ll at least look decent. I’m not going to say my HTML is stellar, but I’m doing this as I write this so it’s purely an example. Here’s an example with a quick table, 2 sections – image and purchase URL on the left, description on the right … and of course, phpbay under it haha – Contempt style!

Code block

<?php
$row = 1;
$handle = fopen("datafeed.csv", "r");
while (($data = fgetcsv($handle, 5000, ",")) !== FALSE) {
$num = count($data);
echo "<p> $num fields in line $row: <br /></p>\n";
$row++;
$purchase_url = $data[8];
$image = $data[25];
$desc = $data[12];
$title = $data[16];
$var = "<center><table width=\"50%\"><tr><td>
<a href=\"$purchase_url\"><img src=\"$image\">
</a></td><td>$desc</td></tr></table><br><br>
Used Items:<br><br>[phpbay]$title, 10[/phpbay]";
echo $var."<BR><BR><BR><BR>";
if($row > 5)
die();
}
fclose($handle);
?>

And just so you all have this, here’s the function that I use to post to WordPress blogs with XMLRPC. The external libs I’ll throw into a RAR (click here). Here’s the function:

Code block

<?php
function post_to_blog($url, $pass, $title, $posttext, $nick = null)
{
$xmlrpcurl = $url;
$client = new xmlrpc_client($xmlrpcurl);
$params[] = new xmlrpcval("n/a");
$params[] = new xmlrpcval("n/a");
if(isset($nick))
$params[] = new xmlrpcval("$nick");            //your wordpress login
else
$params[] = new xmlrpcval("Admin");            //your wordpress login
$params[] = new xmlrpcval("$pass");        //your wordpress password
$params[] = new xmlrpcval(
"<title>$title</title>".            //the title of your post
"<category>1</category>".    //the category
$posttext);                                 //the body
$params[] = new xmlrpcval("true");          //publish now = true
$msg    = new xmlrpcmsg("blogger.newPost",$params);
$response = $client->send($msg);
}
?>

So yeah, when we put them together we have this…

Code block

<?php
$row = 1;
$handle = fopen("datafeed.csv", "r");
while (($data = fgetcsv($handle, 5000, ",")) !== FALSE) {
$num = count($data);
echo "<p> $num fields in line $row: <br /></p>\n";
$row++;
$purchase_url = $data[8];
$image = $data[25];
$desc = $data[12];
$title = $data[16];
$var = "<center><table width=\"50%\"><tr><td>
<a href=\"$purchase_url\"><img src=\"$image\">
</a></td><td>$desc</td></tr></table><br><br>
Used Items:<br><br>[phpbay]$title, 10[/phpbay]";
post_to_blog("http://myblog.com/xmlrpc.php", "password", $title, $var);
if($row > 5)
die();
}
fclose($handle);
function post_to_blog($url, $pass, $title, $posttext, $nick = null)
{
$xmlrpcurl = $url;
$client = new xmlrpc_client($xmlrpcurl);
$params[] = new xmlrpcval("n/a");
$params[] = new xmlrpcval("n/a");
if(isset($nick))
$params[] = new xmlrpcval("$nick");            //your wordpress login
else
$params[] = new xmlrpcval("Admin");            //your wordpress login
$params[] = new xmlrpcval("$pass");        //your wordpress password
$params[] = new xmlrpcval(
"<title>$title</title>".            //the title of your post
"<category>1</category>".    //the category
$posttext);                                 //the body
$params[] = new xmlrpcval("true");          //publish now = true
$msg    = new xmlrpcmsg("blogger.newPost",$params);
$response = $client->send($msg);
}
?>

So there you have it. Loading a CSV file into wordpress with a template, to start up your own affiliate-based eStore. Once again I thank you for joining me on this Code-Enriched version of Contempt Can’t Sleep. I figured keeping this short and sweet would be more beneficial than posting with fluff and other dumb crap to try to impress you.

The reason I recommended phpBay is because of the fact that it’ll allow you to post direct links from PJN (PepperjamNetwork) or EPN (eBay Partner Network) with the new items. New & Used. The WFReview will actually allow people to rate the items, comment on them with star ratings, and post random generated ratings on them to make the site look like a good well traffic’d site. A must have for larger scale op’s and just fun in general! This also is an easier way to automate the CSV to Wordpress operation. So once again, those links are in this paragraph if you wanted to try those out.

I hope you enjoyed the read as well as the Contempt experience, and I hope it’s worthy enough to have you pull the trigger on subscribing to the feed!

Referral Spam is the art of getting a link from a site that lists the most recent referrers. This could be from sites that just put them on the sidebar, or even AWStat / Webalizer stat pages. Here’s a few little fun ones for you all to look at … here’s a few .edu links for you all (you have to sort them obviously – 226 at the time of this post) .edu links – and here’s a few .gov (once again, manually look at each one – 11 at the time of this post …) .gov links. I highly suggest you think about these footprints before actually using them. I am giving you these for research only (obviously), and I won’t be held responsible for your actions if you do use them. Referral spam for these types of links is simply just hit the URL over and over and over again with your URL as the referrer. Most of them will give you a link back if you’re in the top ~10. Not to shabby, huh? This method usually does -not- require multiple proxies to work.

Comment Spam is the next method and is obviously a little more known. It’s leaving comments on blogs, guestbooks, etc with your anchor and url in there somewhere creating a link. Usually this is great on wordpress blogs that DO NOT have Akismet (props to you guys – wish I met you in Vegas! ). This is all of those beautiful comments talking about cialias and online dating in the same comment, conveniently linking. Also a lot of comment spammers now a days use a method called seeding (much like email seeding) in which they post with specific keywords and strings and then scrape the Goog results for which sites index’d them – and then blast those all at once because it’s almost a guarantee’d link drop. This is great for the 10,000 links in a hour type blast. The two factors that people need to think about with link blasts are not only IP addresses, but destination URL’s as well. Most people don’t think that it’s throttled by URL, but sometimes it is. Keep an eye out.

Trackback Spam is my personal favorite. TB spam usually gets through a lot more, and I’ve never seen a trackback request be captcha’d. The one thing I’ve seen to stop it is the “is the site actually linking to us” plugin, which is easily circumvented via a closed hidden div with every URL of every link drop. After drops are in, remove URL’s – easy circumvention and won’t affect the user’s experience. This is also a nice little thing to do with Splog Ping Crawl if you’re up for the modification, modify it so it’s in a drop down so to the user it’s hidden but in Google’s eyes it’s not blackhat because it’s not cloaked, and it’s not taking up your users experience. Great way to help keep it whitehat but still get blackhat results. Zing!

Creation Spam is one of my up and coming techniques that actually works a lot better with trackback spam filtered in, but it’s basically a way to fast-track Eli’s Keyword Real Estate. My definition of creation spam is signing up for a blog, free hosting, whatever – and posting a full site with content and links to another one of your sites. The goal is to make this look at whitehat as possible. We’re talking about a YACG type site with just Wikipedia scrape, copied content, and links to your sites. The reason behind this is when you combind this with Trackback Spam – you have a great way to filter and cycle your link farms. Throw 1000 links at once of these bad boys, and then have your site linked off from it with 2-3 keyword-optimized links and you’ll be passing juice “legitly” in no time. The best example of this is to have a whitehat ecommerce site, we’re talking about 600K product pages on a 2-3 year old aged domain. Use creation spam for around 100 sites, drop 1000 links to each (total 100,000 link juice to site – theoretically, obviously) and then maybe throw in a 100 social bookmarking and 2000 directory submission on the main domain as well for some cover. This results in a good flow of juice to the site, easily covered by other sites, and should keep you afloat for a while. For me, I usually use these 4-5 levels deep (1000 creation spam sites to 100 to 10 to 1) etc.

Now comes the real fun part. Let’s talk about scaling out. Usually personal link spam programs do one site at a time, maybe a list of a few hundred sites. My personal arsenal has the rate of around 3000-4000 sites/minute if the list is pre-determined. This means – best case scenario – 4000 links per minute. This doesn’t mean 4000 to one site, but I can split them however I want. The way I have this coded is I optimized the web classes, threw in multi-threading, and database caching with fast RPM drives. I try to keep it as fast as possible. Then I went ahead and made it work with multiple boxes. I can do 10 dedicated servers, each doing 4000 a minute – that’s 40,000 sites/minute combined. Talk about some nice links huh?

Another scale that most people don’t consider much anymore is forums. This is obviously due to the XRumer spam (which I must admit, I like ) and a lot of speculation that forum backlinks are de-valued as a result of it. Don’t count them out completely though – they can still be used to cover up link spam in the backlink overview tools like linkdomain on Yahoo. This should keep prying eyes away from your actual links that help you do some damage. Just because they’re penalized doesn’t mean they won’t help. Keep that in mind. After all – a link is a link.

Now most people will tell you that I go overboard with my operation – but as most of you already know, I like to be very effusive. My current setup allows me to scale almost infinitely. Currently I run a network of spider boxes and hub boxes, that just keep looking for new links day in and day out. As I said above the 3000-4000 a minute is a true number – but what I didn’t mention is that’s per box. Just to give you an idea of what can be achieved, yes – I do have a network like this running and mainly I use it for research and of course because I find it fun. Don’t think that all blackhats are limited by out of box applications. This is completely coded from scratch across a programming language, a scripting language and of course I use MySQL for the database portion.

I just wanted to throw that in there to help put in perspective what’s actually possible. I hope you all enjoyed the read, and I know a lot of you were on my ass about a new post – I hope you think this was worth the wait! Feel free to use the Request Post link to request any upcoming posts and/or give me ideas for future posts, maybe I’ll get a few more out soon.