I’m back! I haven’t posted in awhile because I’ve been researching a few new ideas and trying to decide what to do next. I started peddling ringtones a little while ago, something that most people don’t want to get into because it’s ultra competitive and there’s literally no way to rank for it unless you have a million dollar budget, which makes all your SEO knowledge useless and leaves you to just PPC and social networks. But at the same time, a lot of advertisers don’t like social network traffic (read: “Myspace”) so that leaves you with just PPC. And with millions of other people PPC’ing the same ringtone offers as you, it doesn’t seem very appealing. So I knew I didn’t want to drop six figures into a PPC campaign for something I had no experience with, but I wanted to try it anyway and see how I’d fair.

I picked a couple offers from different networks and started running basic ads, including a few different artist and song names and targeting those keywords rather than just “ringtones” or “hiphop ringtones” in general, which would have been way too expensive. That’s about it really, I redirected them through a domain I had sitting around, didn’t even buy a new one or create a landing page or anything. And while I’m not gonna be able to buy a new Benz after doing this, it’s surprisingly easy to pull in an extra $50-100 a day for literally ten minutes of work. I’d say that’s definitely worth it.

But ringtones aren’t the only thing I’ve been doing. I was checking out DN Scoop a couple weeks ago and saw a Myspace layout site going for $600,000. Yeah, you read that right. If I had been drinking milk it would have shot out of my nose, so I decided to do a little research and see exactly how the fuck this site was worth the price of a new house. Apparently the guy who owns it is an 18 year old CS addict making $30k a month because of the sheer volume of traffic he receives and the huge number of ads slapped up in the most blatantly ridiculous places. So I thought, “Hey, I’m the motherfucking king of Myspace marketing, maybe I should look into starting a Myspace layout site … LOL!” I started talking to a few people who ran layout sites and learned a lot about how to start one and how they generate traffic, and THAT’S when I decided I wanted to do it. Why? Because the huge majority of these guys have no idea what SEO is. They barely understand link building. And shit, I know my SEO, I know my social network marketing, I should be able to rape these fuckers and rank in no time.

Most of these sites buy a script that basically generates the site for them and all they have to do is upload layouts into a folder on their server and it displays them on the site (like uploading themes to Wordpress). My first idea was to scrap that idea and customize a Wordpress theme to look like a layout site, since we all know Wordpress is the king of SEO’ing itself (grammar? lol). I could also have an RSS feed where people can subscribe to be notified of new layouts. It would also be pretty easy to buy some bullshit links on DP as well as network with other Myspace layout sites, since there are just SO MANY of them. Most of them don’t understand the concept of anchor text and they just link to each other using whatever the fuck they feel like, such as “Joe Blow’s Site!” And yeah that helps if you have a shitload of links but if he had just added the word “layout” in there it would have taken an extra half a second to type and generated a lot more traffic. It actually seems pretty easy, and the costs are extremely low (I could set up the entire thing and have thousands of layouts on there for less than $1000), so I’m pretty sure I’m gonna go ahead and do it. If anyone has any ideas (or sites somewhat related to Myspace / layouts and you want to trade links), let me know!

Let’s say you run a blog and you post an affiliate link to some random product. Someone clicks the link and looks at the product, decides they don’t want it, and closes the window. Later, they decide they do want it, so they go back to the site, buy it, and you still get paid your commission. But how did they know you were the one who referred them?

When someone clicks your affiliate link, a cookie is added to their computer with your referral link and typically that cookie will stay there for a long time (it can vary from one day up to a year depending on the product manufacturer’s settings as well as the user’s browser settings). Now, here’s where “cooking stuffing” comes into play. Cookie stuffing is basically “stuffing” a large number of cookies onto a user’s computer without them clicking on anything, so if they decide to buy whatever product in the future, your cookie is still on their computer and you’ll get the commission even though you didn’t refer them to that product. Typically you’d stuff cookies for big sites like Amazon and Ebay, because there’s an extremely high chance that people will visit those sites and buy things. Affiliate networks hate cookie stuffing and most will ban you if they catch you doing it, because you’re getting commission even though you didn’t refer people to the product, so if you do decide to do it, make sure it’s not obvious (stuffing hundreds of cookies a day is obvious).

I actually just thought of another really devious thing you could do while I was writing this post: If you run a blog, you can recommend a product, and link to it with a normal (non-affiliate) link. Conversions are always much higher because people see it as a legitimate review, not a review written just so you could use your affiliate link and make money. Do you see where this is going? All you’d have to do would be to embed a cookie stuffing script for that particular site into your post, and you’ve essentially “tricked” people into buying a product that they think you genuinely recommended, but that you really only recommended so you could profit from affiliate commissions. (note: I don’t do any cookie stuffing on this blog, you can check your cookies if you don’t believe me )

Cookie stuffing can also be used for “legitimate” purposes Continue Reading »

PR is Google’s algorithm for determining how popular a site is and in turn how high it should appear in their search results. Your site’s PR increases based on how many incoming links you have and the “weight” of those links (for example a link from a high PR site is worth more than a link from a low PR site). It follows that if you want to generate more search engine traffic, you need to build links to increase your PR. This is referred to as link building and excessive link building for the purpose of increase your PR (as opposed to generating referral traffic) is frowned on by Google, and they won’t hesitate to penalize you if they catch you doing it. But let’s say you do want to do it - what would be the best ways to boost your PR as fast as possible?

• Link exchange: Email other blog or site owners and ask if they’d like to trade links with you (you display their link on your site, they display your link on their site). If you ask enough people, you’ll get at least some that will agree. Make sure you use your top keyword as the anchor text (for example if your site is a travel insurance site called Traveling for Dummies, you would ask them to link to you using the text “travel insurance,” NOT “Traveling for Dummies”).
• Buying links: If another site has a PR much higher than yours, they probably won’t do a link exchange, because there’s nothing in it for them. In this case, you’ll have to buy a link on their site. These typically appear in “Featured Sites” or “Featured Links” lists in sidebars. Some people will try to trick you and put your link in individual posts or on pages other than the homepage, so if they do this you’ll need to check the PR of those individual pages because PR does vary from page to page within a site.
• Comment trolling: “Trolling” basically means subscribing to blog feeds and commenting on all their posts. The benefit of this is it usually generates a large amount of referral traffic, but in terms of link building, it can help because if an individual post is popular enough, it will have a high PR and commenting on it will count as a link to your site. Lots of blogs also feature “Top Commentators” lists where whoever comments the most on their blog gets featured in their sidebar. You DO need to view their source and check if these links have a “dofollow” or “nofollow” tag, because “nofollow” means it won’t count as a link and is essentially useless for the purpose of link building.
• Article directories: There are lots of directories that allow you to submit articles, and if your article is popular enough they’ll feature it on their homepage. These directories usually have high PR’s so if they decide to feature you it will help you a lot.

The best ways of finding sites to exchange links with or buy links from is Continue Reading »