Make viral marketing work for you

February 6th, 2009

Ahhh the power of viral marketing. A successful viral marketing campaign can make you a millionaire overnight. I will not be talking about creating viral material however. Quite frankly if i was any good at that i doubt i would have been here writing this blog post right now. However, what i am good at is generating traffic from somebody else’s viral material.

You will need to be quick and you will need to be able to spot great material before it goes viral. Lets talk about viral videos for example. If a video posted on YouTube does extremely well and generates a lot of views you can assume that it will also do well on sites like Digg and Videosift. If another video appears on Google videos movers and shakers list we can assume it is a sign of a “shooting star” video that people are interested in it. Why would this video not do well on other sites?

What i have been doing for a number of projects i worked on, was taking that middle man position. I would take viral material from one person and show it to others via my own domain. The reason i decided to use videos as an example is because in most cases you don’t have to worry about copyrights, videos are easy to embed into your website and finally there is an existing market/infrastructure for entertaining videos.

You need an eye for such material. This will require quite a bit of practice and research. You will need to know what works and what does not. See what videos make it to the front page of videosift for example. See if you can notice any trends. Then try and spot such material on other sites such as YouTube and intercept it before someone else submits it to Digg.

Using this method i was able to hit front pages of huge websites day after day, generating huge streams of traffic. My domains would jump to PR6/7 like there is no tomorrow. And the best of all, this method will bring you huge long term benefits in the way any sort of linkbait would.

PS: I’m sorry if this post was slightly vague or lacked step by step instructions. Its just this method appeared in one of my Ebooks and me going any deeper into this subject would not be fair to those who have purchased that Ebook.
PPS: Oh and this Ebook is no longer for sale either.

Old money making trick that still works

February 6th, 2009

Affiliate marketing is not easy money as you probably know. You need to have the right flow of the right people to buy the right product. Even when all 3 are just right you can still struggle to sell because you can’t get your visitor to switch into the buying mood. When the person does not want to buy a product any attempt to sell will only drive them away. When the person is in buying mood however you can even sell them 3 products in the raw. It has been proven that one of the best times to sell someone a product is straight after their first purchase, while you customer is still in the buying mode, with his/her credit card out.

So what if you already had a customer looking to buy one product or another? All you had to do was to find that product for them. Seems to good to be true? Not at all! I introduce you to Yahoo answers. What you do is simply scan for the right question. For example: “What spyware cleaner should i buy?”. That person has a problem and needs a solution. In this case he wants to buy a spyware cleaner. What you do is jump into your clickbank quickly. Go to marketplace and find a nice spyware cleaner. Create your hoplink and answer the guy’s question: “Hey! Here is a very good spyware cleaner i use -link-. Never had a problem with it. bla bla bla”. Then go and find some more questions. You will usually be able to find a nice product for most questions.

Think quality rather than quantity. Take your time to write a natural looking answer that does not look like a sales pitch. It is a good idea to cloak your affiliate links too. You can create a quick blog on blogger and then use the following code in your template to redirect people to your affiliate link: < meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://ww w.youraffiliatelink.com">. Now you can use your blogger url as your referral url in Yahoo answers.

Every single backlink development method known to man

February 6th, 2009

I am tired of hearing about the same old link development methods over and over again. Go to any seo forum you like and start a 2.301.991-st topic called: “What are good ways to get backlinks?”. I bet you will get told to go and submit your website to directories, write articles and exchange links. Come on! We are in 2008! You need to stand out from the rest in order to succeed at seo!

I have decided to sort this out once and for all and cover every single link development method known to man. (Probably not but if i miss something out please do leave a comment) I will keep this nice and sweet. Us seo-ers don’t usually have all day to read a blog entry :) From now on I will simply point everyone asking about way to get backlinks to this post. Here we go…

Directories: Don’t bother with them unless you can get into DMOZ or Yahoo. I can assure you, your time will be wasted submitting to tens of thousands of directories. You are much better off doing other things I will cover bellow.

Link exchange: I stopped exchanging links years ago. One or two link swaps can still work well but when you end up creating another sidebar just to accommodate hundred links you have pointing to your link partners, you’ve gone too far.

Link development via templates: When you create free templates and give them away for free. For more info have a look at my previous blog post about link development with free templates

Link development with free scripts: Works as above. Create a great script and give it away for free. Take phpbb for example. We can however argue about it’s greatness.

Press releases: A way to get your news noticed by various companies and news agencies. For this to work you really need to have something news worthy. Here is a list of press release distribution websites and here is how you should write a press release

Articles: If your website is about tennis then you simply write a bunch of articles on tennis and submit these to various article directories. Each article should contain a link back to your website. Other websites about tennis would then go around searching for content, grab your article and publish it on their own site. I recently had a big argument about this method with a fellow seo-er. You may end up having various problems with duplicate content. I may well blog about this in more depth later on. If you can’t wait to start, you can find a bunch of free article directories here

Commenting on blogs and posting on forums: Some forums will let you have a link in your signature. Therefore you can get a backlink with every post. These backlinks are not too effective however. When it comes to blogs, you may even get rewarded for your comments and appear on top commentators list.

Referral spamming: Some websites make their statistics available to public. (Awstats for example). You can use a program such as PRstorm to ping a list of urls. Or fake referrers in our case. Not only you will end up with curious webmasters visiting your url, you will also end up with a backlink whenever these stats update. This method can get you into trouble if misused.

Social bookmarking: Increasingly popular link development method. See my earlier post on link development with social bookmarks

Exploits and injections: Anyone who knows PHP can easily write a quick script. It is much harder to write a secure script. This is why most scripts out there are vulnerable. You just need to find the holes. This is why sneaky defacing and link injection is possible. I won’t be posting any candy for script kiddies but if you know what you are doing already I suggest you start on milw0rm.

Link baits: Something people find interesting and feel a natural urge to link to or blog about. For example a great article or an amusing animation. Hopefully this blog post will be a nice link bait.

Paid backlinks: Very simple. You just go and buy a few backlinks. It can be a blog review containing a few backlinks. See my blog post on TNX and keep an eye on my future post about buying backlinks. It will hopefully help you avoid a bunch of penalties from search engines.

Playing top referrers: Some websites like to display their top referrers. (Sites that send them the most traffic. Search for “top referrers” + your keyword for real live examples. You can either send the traffic their way or cheat using various methods such as proxified hits or iframes.

Hijacking and redirecting: Under certain circumstances you will be able to hijack particular pages on abandoned websites and redirect them to your own domain using a search engine friendly 301 redirect. You can argue how well this method works.

Social news: Similar to social bookmarking. Involves submitting stories to sites like Digg.

RSS and syndication: Making it easy for others to grab your content and get a backlinks in return.

Social engineering: Exploiting human factor. At the end of the day every webmaster is human and if you say the right things at the right time you can end up with a backlink. For example sneaky link development I blogged about a while back.

Tag clouds, pixels, lists and other websites: There are a bunch of websites that let you create various link cluds and lists. Listible is a great example. See my previous post on link development for more information. It seems like Listible however has been down for a few days now.

Certifiers: When you get a hacker safe badge at scan alert for example you will be included into their hacker safe directory. There are a bunch of free alternatives. There is one for web 2.0 sites I can’t seem to find in my 2GB list of bookmarks. (2GB is an exaggeration :D )

Most searched/viewed/visited: There was a popular PR check website that used to display the last x domains checked on their front page. I was able to set up a little macro that would check my websites PR every hour or so and therefore keep my link on the front page at all times. I wish I had a list of such sites but I don’t. You will have to search for them yourself.

Sponsorship: Very similar to buying backlinks apart from the fact that the people you sponsor don’t always realise that the only reason you sponsor a certain event or project is to get a backlink. Would you like a backlink on Google? If you have $10.000/year you can end up on Google partner/sponsor page.

Classifieds: Posting classified ads will also bring you backlinks. For example Gumtree or Craigslist.

Answers + Questions websites: You can try asking or answering questions on Yahoo answers or Yedda. Have a look at my previous post on Yahoo answers marketing that should help.

Video links: Not quite videos that work as links but rather backlinks in video description. For example I used to use Google videos a few years ago and the urls I put into the little field for video description are still there and counted by Google.

Software: If you are good enough to create a great website builder for example make sure every website generated by your software contains a backlink in the footer. Other examples include bookmarking software. Every time someone bookmarks their page, they automatically bookmark yours as well.

Free resources: Squidoo pages, free blogs/journals/guestbooks and so on. You can go and create a bunch of free blogs on blogger and WordPress right now and include a few backlinks in your posts. You can spend the rest of your life doing this type of link development as there are so many free resources available to you.

Work: You can work or help out with various tasks for backlinks. Next time you see someone having problems installing a WordPress blog for example, simply offer them your help in exchange for a backlink on their blog.

Widgets: All them various bits on bobs some webmasters fall in love with to the extent they can’t help it but to keep on adding more and more. I’m talking about various widgets that display your link popularity, PR, Alexa rank, number of subscribers, server speed and so on.

Reviews an testimonials: Companies or individuals that sell certain products or provide services often collect reviews and testimonials. These are often published on the front page of the website along with your backlink in order to boost their sales. Next time you buy a product or pay for a service have a look at their review section. It might be worth your time to write one yourself.

Sexual favours: Find a sexually frustrated blogger, preferably a virgin, willing to help you out with link development in exchange for sexual favours.

Please do make a comment and suggest other link development methods I can add. Next time someone asks you about different link development methods, point them here

JavaScript fun

February 5th, 2009

The code bellow is often used to fake stats or earnings. Simply copy and paste the code into your address bar and click enter. Now you should be able to move around and change various elements on the page. Click on text and you should be able to change it to anything you like.
address bar
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Go to any page which contains images. You can even do this on my blog even though it might not work as well. Then enter the code bellow into your browser address bar and hit enter. Watch the graphics go crazy.

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName("img"); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position=’absolute’; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+”px”; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+”px”}R++}setInterval(’A()’,50); void(0);

If you liked the previous two you might want to try the code bellow as well before you get carried away.

javascript:function reverse() { var inp = " )-: moc.oesdesopxe.www//:ptth kramkoob dna ho !krow ot kcab ssa ruoy teG !ton kniht I ?avaJ htiw dnuora ssem ot uoy yap ynapmoc ruoy seoD"; var outp = ""; for (i = 0; i < = inp.length; i++) {outp = inp.charAt (i) + outp ; } alert(outp) ;}; reverse()

The code bellow works best with Google. Go there and use it.

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position=’absolute’; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval(’A()’,5); void(0);

Every now and then I would end up on the website with a horrible, red background and yellow text. Well, any horrible combination of colours will usually kill my eyes after a few minutes of reading. You can use the code bellow to change the background colour to anything you like. Copy and paste this code into your address bar and hit enter. A popup should appear asking you to pick a colour. You can then use a colour hash or tap in primary colour names eg white. Hit enter and voi·là!

javascript:void(document.body.style.background = prompt("Enter a background color", "#ffcc99"));

Go to Google and use the code bellow. Simply change the url to the url of any image you like and hit enter. You now have a custom Google logo.

javascript:void(document.images[0].src =”http://www.exposedseo.com/pictures/adtoll_referral.gif”);