Everything has a Dark Side. SEO, PPC & Domaining are just a handful of things that can be used “the wrong way” to make money, or is it the right way? Now, when I say the Dark Side I don’t mean things that are illegal. Most of the time you’re merely bending the rules or manipulating something that a rule doesn’t exist for yet (Arbitrage anyone?).

The aim of this series of posts is to delve into some of the lesser known or dubious techniques that Affiliates use to make money. To kick things off I’m going to talk about 2nd Tier recruiting & some sneaky ways to do it.

What is Second Tier Recruiting

Think of it as Multi Level Marketing, whenever you’re a member of an Affiliate Program there’s usually extra incentive to recruit members underneath you. Rewards range from a percentage cut of Profits to one time payments.

There’s a few types of 1 time payments, those that pay instantly (stupid imo) & those that also pay when the person you refer makes their first sale/conversion.

Everyday Implementation

Most webmasters will put minimal effort into promoting Second Tier programs. Perhaps a few banners here & there, or a few affiliate guides that encourage the user to sign up. The main problem with this is, 99/100 of these people that you refer will ever make any money with the program. Therefore you get Zero.

Taking it to the Next Level

There’s quite a few different ways to you can really start to think outside the box when it comes to recruiting Second Tier members. I find that it’s worth concentrating on one network at a time, build up a solid Second Level then move on. This will take sweat & tears, are you prepared to work for it?

Domains

Domains can be one of the easiest ways to take advantage of Second Tier referrals. Especially with typos. However you need to be careful to see if the company has a registered Trademark on the name. In America you can check your trademarks here. Creating a dedicated funnel page to direct affiliates through to the end program can be a great way to entice people & also get them to sign up to your newsletter. However I would strongly advise against using typos for competitive reasons. For example creating a typo of Coke & redirecting it to Pepsi.

Trademark Bidding

Some Affiliate Programs let you get away with it others don’t. There’s also ways around the ones that don’t, which I’ll touch upon in the Blackhat PPC section. A perfect example of someone using this technique is with Widgetbucks (this one is quite lucrative since you get $25 per signup).

This technique also works well if a domain has incurred any Google Penalties & doesn’t rank for its own name anymore. The above technique is extremely powerful at bringing in 2nd tier affiliates, so use it wisely.

Mentoring

Some affiliate programs (especially the ones that have Forums) are great for mentoring new starts & helping them make money. Have a look at More Niche (heaps of cash to be made from these guys). Now look at the leaderboard.

The Affiliate DoINeedOne? makes a large chunk of his Affiliate Commission each month by actively mentoring his Affiliates & teaching them how to make money. Since More Niche has products that pay $175 commission at a time & they also pay you for affiliates that your affiliates refer, he can net 5% on the second tier ($8.75) then 3% on the third tier ($5.25) & then 2% on the fourth tier ($3.5) per sale.

It pays to look for an Affiliate Program that allows you to effectively communicate with your Second Tier Affiliates for this technique to really work. It also takes a lot of time & effort. But once you’re up & running you can sit back & reap the rewards of all that hard work.

Imitation

This technique is down right underhanded but works like you wouldn’t believe. Set up a gmail account & simply “pretend” to be one of the Affiliate Managers from the Program with an offer for bloggers within the niche to “trial” the program. Most networks don’t condone Spam so be careful.

Make sure to:

• Highlight the Benefits
• Explain why they should use the program
• Highlight how much extra money they could be making

I get about 4-5 of these types of email a week, so it’s easy to see what everyone else is doing & add your own little twist on it. You also don’t need to pretend to be one of the Affiliate Managers, you can simply recommend the program to other bloggers in the same way.

You can also tie this in with my previous mentoring method by offering mentoring sessions to help the Webmasters make money from that particular program. The possibilities are endless!

To make this technique work even better, register a domain that is similar to the website that you’re promoting. For example say you were promoting Earners Blog, then register http://www.earnersblogaffiliates.com/ & set that to redirect through your affiliate ID. This is what a lot of the big boys do & it works much better than showing an Affiliate or even Cloaked Affiliate ID.

Learning Courses

Building upon the Mentoring technique, you can completely automate the whole process with something like Aweber. Simply create a website dedicated to a particular program then offer a 7 day course on making money.

Write 7 emails that slowly unravel how it’s all done (you don’t need my help on this, it’s not that hard) & set Aweber to distribute them over the next 7-14 days. Slowly tease them with information, I’d recommend signing up to a few lists to see how some of the bigger players do this, I subscribe to EVERYTHING I can, I always want to see what the opposition are doing. The beauty of a technique like this is that not only will you reap the rewards if they start making sales, but you can also presell them heaps of other products like:

• Web Hosting (Hostican offers $70 per sale)
• List Management (Aweber offers 20% recurring Commissions)
• Keyword Research (Wordze offers 30% recurring Commissions)

You get the idea. So not only could you be making serious bank on the 2nd Tier commissions, but you could also be netting monthly recurring commissions for all the other products that your Affiliates are using to help them succeed. A win win situation really.

You also have the advantage of being able to communicate with your list. This means that if you branch into other networks you can leverage off them.

There’s literally hundreds more ways to do this, you can snipe affiliates with the first few techniques, or you can really try to provide value & build a rapport with them. One will net you short term rewards, the other will give you long term rewards. It’s your call, use the information wisely

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Ebay has without a doubt been one of my most consistent earners over the years & now it just got even easier to make a kick ass site that’s earning you money in no time.

The Theory

The theory is simple, the Ebay affiliate program pays out as follows:

An ARCU, is an “Active Confirmed Registered User.” This is someone that you refer via your site to Ebay. They’re confirmed as active when they:

• Signup
• Confirm their Account via Email
• Either Places a bid or Buys via BIN within 30 days

ARCU’s are easy money, there are also plenty of niches out there that you can really leverage this form of Ebay income rather than the Revenue Share.

The Revenue Share is the amount of money that you earn when someone buys an item. You earn a percentage of the total revenue Ebay makes (not the sale price of the item). So naturally higher priced items will earn you more. I’m also pretty sure that Cars etc earn a flat fee, so don’t think there’s huge money in them.

So if you refer a new customer to Ebay & they purchase something then you get the ARCU & the Revenue generated.

Ebay’s cookies lasts for 7 days so you’ll also get revenue from any other items that the customer buys within that time period (Amazon only has a 24 hour cookie time, so this is a much better deal for Affiliates). I find that people quite often buy more than 1 item.

So the theory is simple, we’re going to create a site that drives people to Ebay via the various products we’re promoting.

My Results

It makes more sense for me to show you the site I used to generate the income, before going into the technique. It’ll allow me to come back & reference different aspects of the architecture.

My Niche: Electronic Music Equipment
Date Launched: 3rd October 2007

As some of you know when I’m not working or engrossed in Affiliate Marketing I’m a very avid producer of Electronic Music. I also like to keep up to date with all the latest Gear & Equipment. So I decided to create a site that would allow people to compare the prices of various types of Hardware/Software & DJ Gear from Ebay. I decided to brand the site instead of going for a keyword rich domain name (whichever you prefer). The domain used to be a blog, hence the pagerank so I had a bit of a head start as far as inbound links etc. I’m 100% certain that the domain is still sandboxed for certain keywords though.

This isn’t by far anywhere near the best niche I’ve come across, if anything it’s my poorest performer so far (there’s a lot of competition from big merchants in this space). However, one thing to note. This site doesn’t initially appear to be an affiliate site at all, instead it’s perceived as a comparison tool.

Remember, there’s always going to be one particular niche that you know 10x better than anyone else. It could be Pianos, Golf Equipment or Trading Cards for a particular game. Use your knowledge in that realm to build a site so you can get a feel for the whole process.

You can see my results for last month with this site, almost no new ARCU’s which is a little disappointing. But then again there’s certain niches that perform better for signups (think impulse purchases, music equipment really isn’t an impulse purchase).

What you need for this technique

• Web Hosting – I recommend Hostican ($6.95 / month for 200GB & 2,500GB Bandwidth)
• A Domain Name – Quick Tip: Aged Domains kick ass with this technique. Clickmojo offer a 3 day free trial of their expired domain names service. Hostess do the cheapest .com.au domains for $25AU.
• WordPress
• PhpBay Pro ($39)
• Endless supplies of Niches

It’s not vital that you have all of the above, but that’s exactly what I’m using. There are other free creative ways to come up with niches if you read some of my earlier posts. An expired domain isn’t necessary, however you will get quicker results. If you’re a bit on the lazier side & don’t want to worry about the whole WordPress setup that i’m showing you then you can check out BANS (Build a Niche Store), it does something similar, quicker. But it’s less customisable (and costs $97).

What advantage does my technique have over BANS? well for a start each product has it’s own unique page, whereas bans works more on categories. We’re also forking out $58 less (which you can use for hosting).

Getting Started

Firstly you’ll need to install WordPress on the domain name you’ve picked. If you’ve chosen Hostican they’ll give you your first domain free, they also have Fantistico which allows for an easy 1 click install of WordPress. If not, you’re on your own with the installation I’m afraid.

Plugins you’ll need (these are all uploaded to the wp-content/plugins/ folder):

PhpBay Pro (commercial): This plugin is the brains of the whole site, it pulls products from the Ebay Category RSS feed & parses them onto your page within WordPress. It’s updated constantly so the page content is always fresh. You can choose products by name, category & you can also set negative keywords to filter out.

SEO Title Tag (free): This plugin allows us to set unique page titles for each post that we make.

Top Level Categories (free): This awesome plugin removes the annoying /category/ part from the WordPress permalinks.

Sort Categories by Title (free): WordPress normally sorts things in categories by Date, this allows you to sort everything alphabetically which works much better for a shop type layout.

Different Posts per Page (free): You can set the number of posts to display per page with this plugin, I normally set it at around 25-50 on the homepage & set it at unlimited for categories (that way your products are never further than 2 levels from the homepage).

Recent Posts (free): This plugin allows you to list your most recently added products.

Choosing your Niche

Analysing what’s selling well on Ebay is a great way to find a niche. Check out the best selling artists & the pulse for awesome ideas.

Don’t be afraid to go after big niches, you can really surprise yourself.

The Beauty of this technique is that you’re all not going out & making the same website. Sure you could copy mine, but that’ll get you nowhere unless you know Electronic Music & want to try to compete with me. Instead, you’ll get the absolute BEST results if you try to find something unique that no-one else is doing. I have absolutely no tolerance for people that copy in this game, uniqueness is everything & will make you the biggest bucks. So put a bit of thought into it.

Researching your Niche

Once you’ve decided which niche you want to target you need to decide which categories to choose, you can see the way I’ve split up the categories on the left hand menu in the image to the right.

Don’t forget you can list items in more than one category, so say for example you were doing a website about DVD’s. The Movie Transformers may appear in the Action category, the 2007 Movies category & the Megan Fox category. Try to use this feature to your advantage, it puts more weight behind that product if you have it listed in different categories (which will help rankings).

Try to come up with a list of about 20-30 categories, I always research the categories that have the highest search volume. This will come in handy later when we’re setting the page titles (for SEO).

Setting up WordPress

Once you’ve decided on a niche you need to set up wordpress.

Template: You can choose any template you want. You can make it look anyway you want. The script parses into any template exactly the same so it doesn’t matter which you use, as long as you’re happy with how things look. I plan to release the template I use for my sites eventually. Check here for wordpress templates.

Permalinks: /%category%/%postname%.php

.htaccess: This is pretty important, I’ve coded my htaccess file so that it forces a trailing slash on all URL’s (removes duplicate content problems), so that it stops virtual access to directories & also so that it redirects non-www requests to the www. Please replace the yourdomainname.com with your domain name

Options -Indexes

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# force trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^\.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ /$1/ [R=301,L]
# redirect nonwww
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomainname.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomainname.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Categories: Create your categories under the manage tab. What I normally do is create a few master categories. So for example on the music equipment site, I have the equipment as one category then everything else as a child of it. Then I have the manufacturers as a main category & everything else as a child under it.

I list all my categories on the sidebar, I also never have a product less than 2-3 levels away from the homepage. This really helps rankings.

To list a child category in the sidebar I use the following piece of code:

Manufacturers

Category Titles: Most people don’t know how to set titles for categories in WordPress but it’s fairly easy with a few conditional statements. Here’s ho I do it:

Setting up PhpBayPro: To do this thing you need to grab your PID from Commission Junction (you’ll get this once you sign up for the Ebay Affiliate Program). Set the country you want to target, set whether you want your items to appear highest priced, ending first etc (I normally choose ending first).

Now you’re ready to add your first product. Simply create a new post. Let say for example we’re going to add the Transformers Movie.

Title: Transformers DVD
Categories: DVD’s, Action, Megan Fox, Michael Bay
SEO Title Tag: Discount Tranformers DVD | Transformers Movie
Content: To call use the Phpbay string is pretty easy, first we need to find out which category Transformers DVD’s are in:

Ignore the Z’s & other letters. We can see that it’s in category 617.

Ok so now we put in the code to pull up the listings:

[phpbay]transformers, 20, 617, poster[/phpbay]

This will show 20 items labeled as transformers from category 617 & will ignore all the items with the word poster in it. Pretty easy eh? If that’s worked you should see the page generate something like this:

Now you just need to start adding products. I normally add about 100 to start off with, then start promoting the website. See my previous post about TNX if you want some free links to kick start your site.

Results

You can start to see results within a few days depending on how you promote the site. If you’re doing this full time you can probably pump out about 3-4 good sites per week. I estimate that this site took me about 15 hours in total to complete.

Expenditure

Phpbay Pro: $39
Hosting: $6.95
Time: 15 Hours x Hourly Rate
Income: $155

If this site generates the same income for the next 12 months, that’s $1,860 for 15 hours work & $45.95. If you build more sites then you can offset the cost of the software & factor it into that project. The guys that are earning less than $500 a month, you only need 4 sites like this to break that barrier. You’ll also find that you have more expenditure to spend on other areas like PPC, Promotion etc.

Quick Promotion Tip: Spend the extra money & send out a really good quality Press Release when you’re launching your site. I’ve seen really really good results from this.

Conclusion

This is a very very solid way to not only kickstart your earnings but to all lay a solid foundation. This is something that I preach. The limits are endless with these types of sites, some of the weirder & wackier ones I’ve made have been the most successful so don’t be afraid to try out things like kids toys, hair products, playing cards, fps games & whatever else comes into your head. The most annoying part about this technique is Google’s Aging Filter (otherwise known as the Sandbox), it can sometimes be disheartening when you’re only getting < 30 visitors a day. But don’t despair, keep promoting & building more sites, don’t sit & worry about the non-performers. Because once you come out of the Aging Filter you’ll really start to see sales. Did I mention that these sites convert REALLY well? So even if you are only getting 30 visitors per day, you’ll still see sales

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Two of my previous posts stand out:

1. Affiliate taking advantage of VA Tech Shootings
2. Apple Iphone Marketing

Number 1, whilst it isn’t someone “predicting” a future trend it’s a clear indication of how a lot of affiliate marketers think. If I personally see or think something will take off I’ll almost certainly try to register a domain name for it.

A perfect example of something like this is American Idol. As soon as you get a whiff of all the contestants names you should instantly see dollar signs. As it currently stands most of the domains are already registered. You’ll find that if you’re not really quick with things like this the opportunity will pass quickly.

There’s lots of opportunities throughout the year for registering domains worth value:

1. Big Brother
2. American Idol
3. The Biggest Loser
4. So you think you can dance
5. Dancing with the stars
6. The Amazing Race

You can use Google Trends to get an idea of popularity & search volume for each show. As you can see from the graph below American Idol really leads the way in reality shows.

Taking it a step further you can also get on the bandwagon quick with TV shows. No-one ever expected heroes to take off as big as it did right? If you’d got in early then you’d definately be cashing in right now. Which TV Shows have taken off within the past 5 years:

1. CSI
2. Lost
3. Greys Anatomy
4. House
5. Heroes
6. My Name is Earl

Once again using Google trends you can see the trendline for search activity. Lost leads the way.

The same can also be said for technological & software announcements:

1. Ubuntu (which does very well on Digg)
2. Iphone

So where am I going with this? Well the point I’m making is that it can be difficult to predict future trends. Quite often affiliate marketers can’t predict trends, rather they jump on board as SOON as they find out. Many leave it too late, those that don’t normally milk it, then move on to the next trend.

So what are good ways to find out about new trends? How can you ensure that you have your head & shoulders high above the rest?

Google Zeitgeist: This is a gem in any affiliate marketers book. It’s a small Google project that shows you the most popular searches for the previous week. You can also look internationally, for example I like looking at the trends in searches here in Australia.

Ebay Pulse: I prefer using this for PPC, it allows you to see what’s hot on Ebay in a variety of categories. So for example these wierd fluffy toys called webkinz are super hot on there right now. I wouldn’t have had a clue what they were or whether they were hot if I’d not been keeping an eye on Ebay Pulse.

Amazon Bestsellers: Another awesome outlet for anyone doing agressive PPC campaigns. Get the lowdown on EVERYTHING that is selling well on Amazon. Narrow it down by category & get ideas you’d not thought of before.

Adcenter Keyword Forecast: This tool can help you learn about future predictions in search volume for particular terms, I quite like the fact that you can get raw numbers from this tool rather than just a graph like Google Trends.

Netvibes: This is probably my feed reader of choice right now. I can literally have a different tab for each niche I want to learn about & fill it with information. Very very powerful.

Here’s my top 5 tips for making money from trends:

1. Be quick, very quick with registering domain names. If you can get a good content site up first you can become an authority in the space very quickly.
2. Don’t get caught on the back foot by not anticipating growth, have a solid monetisation strategy that you can track & tweak.
3. Don’t just rely on old faithful affiliate programs (adsense etc), think outside the box & sign up to some specific programs that directly fit your niche.
4. If you’re making a site that’s likely to get high traffic make sure to monetize with CPM banners. Doubleclick, CPX or Rightmedia.
5. Create linkable content, just because you got the domain name first or came up with the idea first doesn’t mean people will link to you if your content is pure crap.

Until next time.

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A few years ago, back when the net wasn’t quite as savvy as it is now & I was in uni; I did a few marketing exercises that almost proved to be more profitable from one days work than one website might be in one year. Call it an experiment, I was curious to see what was beyond internet marketing.

Poker, Bingo & Roulette was quite a common occurance where I used to live. They’d throw a tournament every Saturday night. Mostly older people but you’d find the occasional high roller now & then. I noticed that Casinoblasters had a real nice downloadable package that would allow you to burn all their Casino Software onto a CD with your affiliate ID included.

This is back when I was getting on average $200 CPA (Per Player Signup). I was eventually moved to a Rev Share system which incidentally made me more money.

Anyway, I made about 150 CD’s & got them all printed with details of the “free signup bonus” which was around $400. I also made a tactics guide for the various Casino Games. Roulette, Blackjack etc in which I positioned as a training guide.

“Want to become a better player? Then you can play online with a free signup bonus & hone your skills”

Once I’d handed out all 150 (which took more than 1 weekend unfortunately) I waited with baited breath & checked my stats. I thought that the conversions might be low due to the number of older people that played, but I had 27 signups that each made an initial deposit! which qualified me for the CPA of $200. An easy $5400 dollars.

I didn’t stop there, this gave me more ideas about how I could integrate the real world into the internet space. Aswell as integrate the internet space into the real world. You really need to think of ways that you can cater to someone’s needs that will result in them performing an action via one of your affiliates. The more targeted you can be, the higher your conversions will be (as with any form of marketing).

This idea eventually let towards my $200 dollars a day idea.

Have you ever printed 100 stickers, written on your web address then stuck them everywhere you think they’ll be seen? You’d be interested to know the results?

I would love to hear stories from people that have embraced this bridge in the Online & Offline industry with success & remember if you enjoyed this post you can do a Review of my Site (Honest or Dishonest I don’t care)

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Well today marked the official unveiling of the Apple Iphone.

You can see the beautiful picture in all its glory.

Now you’re probably wondering why I’m talking about the Iphone. Maybe it’s to get traffic? No, but I will show you something fascinating that I saw earlier today.

Check out the Apple Iphone Concept Blog, these guys have been talking about the Iphone for a number of months (around 3). Now they rank a tidy Number 1 in Google for all sorts of strings:

1. Iphone
2. Apple Iphone

Now lets have a look at what’s happened to their traffic over the past 2 days since the Iphone was announced:

Traffic to the site increased 17x in the space of 24 hours. This could mainly be due to Digg giving Apple over 32,000 diggs in the last 24 hours:

However none of these stories actually go directly to the Apple Ipod Concept Site. The Hype alone has created a HUGE amount of interest.

You can make an absolute killing by making simple sites revolving around upcoming technologies, this is perfect example of it done properly. Adsense integration is good, layout is good. I’m sure this guy got a nice shock when he checked his Adsense yesterday morning

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Mass Affiliate Link Redirection

This particular method allows you to keep all your affiliate URL’s in one php file. You can assign each URL a name, then call it whenever you want.

Create a .php file & call it redirect.php

Open up the file & insert the following code:

$links = array(
“earnersblog” =>; “http://www.earnersblog.com”,
);
header(“Location:”.$links[$_GET['site']]);
exit;
?>

You can replace Earners Blog & the URL with whatever you want. You can also add as many other URL’s below this one as you want.

To call one of the links you need to call it using the name you’ve described it as. To call the link above we’d use the string:

http://www.yoursite.com/redirect.php?site=earnersblog

And there you have a very simple Mass Affiliate Link redirect script that can hold an unlimited number of URL’s.

Single Affiliate Link Redirection

I use this method to redirect single affiliate links. The advantages of using this method is that if you point enough link juice on the affiliate link you can sometimes get it to rank in MSN. This can mean free commissions from organic clicks. The url structure also looks much cleaner which will attract more clickthroughs.

Say I want to create a file to redirect to Earners Blog. Simply create a file called earnersblog.php

Inside the file place the following code:

header( ‘Location: http://www.earnersblog.com’ ) ;
?>

Now when you want to call the link just use http://www.yoursite.com/earnersblog.php

As you can see, using this method makes the link look much more like a static page. Therefore your reader is more likely to click & possibly buy. If you’re consistent & use this linking method throughout your site for external affiliate links you may find some of them ranking in MSN. This is generally dependant on the Anchor text you decide to use for the link.

Until next time

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That aside I often get asked a few questions, from both sides of the divide.

The first one is from the white-hat:

“Why isn’t my site getting indexed & why are my pages going supplemental?”

This is fairly easy to answer, you can’t expect to throw up a site & not work on getting backlinks. Zero backlinks equals zero trust, which equals shit rankings or supplemental pages.

Then from the black-hat:

“I’m spitting out sites like no tomorrow, they’re up for a week then banned….why?”

Again this is easy to answer but it shows a different side. Blackhat’s are willing to promote anywhere, get their sites indexed & ranked using any method possible. Problem is (and it’s a big problem), that most of the sites are low quality, have a huge page count (possibly cloaked). So even though the sites rank, they get reported or trip the filters & get dumped.

This whole theory is quite interesting for me as I’ve always been somewhere in the divide. I can’t see the value in making 100 disposable sites only to see them get banned a month later. But on the other hand I can’t make a good site & sit around asking for links or writing link bait to get links all day.

In today’s day & age I think all webmasters should be looking outside the box to get links, to promote their sites & to rank where they want to rank. The internet is not going to do you any favours, nor are other webmasters who want to rank for the same keywords as you do.

So here’s a few methods of promotion for your sites:

Blog Comments: Leave comments on other blogs, drop some html in with the comment & try to be polite or civil. Sometimes you can find some realy good links. I mentioned Comment Hut in my last post, this will find blogs for you to do this. You could always use a comment spam script although I prefer the manual method as I mentioned I don’t build sites in mass.

Blogger Blogs: Creating a network of blogger blogs to blog & ping with is a great way to get links. They call this the blogger slam. There’s software out there that’ll do this like Blogger Generator.

Forums: Registering on Vbulletin forums will allow you to place a link to your website in your profile. Do this 500 times & you have 500 easy backlinks. A program like Xrumer will do this. Some forums also allow you to have a signature, like Digitalpoint make good use of your signature space.

Social Networking: Submitting you sites to social networking sites that don’t have the nofollow attribute is a good method of promotion. I’ll post a list of the best social networking sites to submit to tomorrow

Guestbooks: Do you have any idea how many old forgotten Guestbooks are lying around? Loads! Just go into Google, see who’s ranking on Viagra spam then see where they’re getting their links from using the linkdomain: command in Yahoo.

Directories: Submit to directories. Not really that complex. If it’s a decent site you’ll have no problem with this one. You can get a directory list at Vilesilencer

Blog Networks: You can use software like Blogsolution or Rss2blog to create your own army of blogs, post to them automatically everyday, gather up Page Rank, then use these to help your main sites rank.

Authority Sites: Getting links on authority sites like Wikipedia or Squidoo is fairly easy.

There’s a few more methods but I’ll keep those under wraps for now. But you get the idea. You don’t have to go out there spamming the shit out of the place. Use these ideas for your sites & put them to good use, don’t abuse them. Ease the links in gently to make it look natural. 1000 links popping up overnight will look suspicious

And for goodness sake make sure you use decent Anchor Text. Don’t post links like this:

http://www.earnersblog.com

Post them like this:

Earn Money Online

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Myspace

This still works, in fact I haven’t tried it in a while. Reason being is that Google’s results only show up to 1000 for a particular query so I had completely saturated all the results :p

Anyway it’s quite simple really. This is an easy way for you to get expired Myspace Accounts that have a decent Page Rank then re-register them & put whatever links you want on the page I’ve managed to get anything up to a PR6 doing this, although mostly PR4′s.

Firstly I’ll run you through the idea. It’s always good to see exactly what goes through someones mind when they come up with an idea like this.

I was browsing through Google one afternoon & came across a Myspace Profile, I clicked on the URL & I got this interesting message:

This user has either cancelled their membership, or their account has been deleted.

However, looking at my handy Firefox Pagerank plugin I was amazed to see that the page had a Page Rank of 4! Nice.

So, being naturally curious I decided to try & re-register the username that was in the url (http://www.myspace.com/username/). These are the only types of URL’s this works with. If the URL contains strings or just numbers it won’t work.

Just register using your normal details, then when it asks you to choose a username use the username in the URL.

I now had myself a shiny Page Rank 4 Myspace account. However, I decided to take it to another level & do it…….on a mass scale.

To do that I simply just used the following operator in google:

Click Here

This shows you the entire list of all expired Myspace accounts up to 1000 (since google’s results don’t go past that). So according to Google there’s around 21,000 expired accounts up for grabs.

I now copied the url’s in mass from every page into excel & got rid of all the crap ones. So I’m looking for urls that look like:

http://www.myspace.com/someidiotsnamehere/

Once I’ve finished that I’ll probably have a list of about 600-700 or so. Now comes the fun part. Checking the pagerank of each URL. To do that I use a tool called Parameter, that’ll check the Page Rank of URL’s in bulk. Once that’s done I’ll have a list of all the URL’s that are PR4+.

Now you just need to go & register them.

Bear in mind that I registered them all about 2 months ago, so I would like to think the serps have updated a bit since then.

Happy hunting

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You could read countless ebooks telling you that Adsense is the way to go, however I find that most new webmasters get blinded so much by the pennies they’re making on Adsense to really look at the bigger picture. There are literally millions of different ways, combinations & methods to earn money online. You just need to be creative.

People moan that Black Hat SEO’s are unethical, which to a certain extent could be true (For some). I like to think of them as Creative SEO’s, alway willing to try new things & put new methods to the test. There’s more creativity because there’s less conformity to how things “should” be done. This can be a great mindset to have when brainstorming about earning money online.

So without further ado I’m going to show you step by step how I used to make $200 / day, sometimes more. It’s got nothing to do with Google or Adsense but I hope that it will give you the urge to look at other avenues & get your creative juices flowing. Once you see how potentially easy this is you may never want to waste time on low paying clicks ever again

This particular method can work with a number of products or services, I however used it to make money from Online Casinos. It’s probably a good idea to check out whether the law in your country permits you to promote Online Casinos before trying this one out, I was living in the UK whilst I was promoting this so it was perfectly legal for me

Step 1

First of all you need to become an affiliate of a good Online Casino. I worked with about 5 or 6 to finally settle with one I liked.

My favorite is Casinoblasters, they’re the affiliate program for the Golden Palace perhaps the largest online casino in the world. They pay on time via Wire Transfer every month & I’ve never had any problems. You can view your reporting in real time so you can check to see how much cash you’ve made

There’s two types of program with them:

Revenue Share: You get paid 50% of the Revenue the Casino Makes off any signups for life. So for example if you sign up a few High Rollers you can make serious cash from this option.

CPA: If you’d rather play things safe then you can opt to be paid up to $300 PER SIGNUP. Needless to say I chose this option.

So first of all let’s get a Casinoblasters Account. You can sign up by clicking on Casinoblasters.

Step 2

This is the research phase. To promote my Casinoblasters Affiliate ID (which linked to the CPA at Golden Palace) I had to explore a number of different avenues. I realized that the online Marketplace for Casino Websites is fairly saturated & I would have to put in way more work than I’d want to in that area.

I decided to do offline promotion, i.e. not on a website.

So I went about writing 10 small ebooks, each based around a particular roulette strategy. I researched the most profitable strategies (is there such a thing? ) & also the ones that seemed most actionable. This is important, if a potential buyer doesn’t believe a strategy will work they won’t try it in the first place. Just like if you think this strategy I’m telling you about isn’t achievable you won’t try it, right?

Once I’d written the ebooks, I made sure I had calls within them to my Affiliate Link for the Golden Palace. I’m not going to go into details about what the ebooks contained, that’s up to you to test out. But they more or less walked the person through the strategy, explained how much they could potentially make then asked them to sign up & try it out.

Step 3

This part is the main execution of the plan. How was I actually going to circulate the Ebooks? I did this in 3 ways. Each slightly more ingenious than the last:

1. I made a folder containing the ebooks & shared them on file sharing networks. Perhaps clocking up 15-20 downloads per day.
2. Sign up to Ebay. Simply sell the ebooks on ebay for $0.01 each. I was selling 50 some days which was raking in some serious cash. If you write a larger ebook, give it reseller rights & let others resell it for you.
3. This is perhaps the most ingenious way of distributing the ebooks. Sign up to Ebay, buy one of those ’1000+ Resellable Ebooks’ pack for like $2 then unzip them all. Zip one of your ebooks in with every ebook as a ‘bonus ebook’ then resell the pack on ebay for $0.25 or whatever. Then every time someone resells an individual ebook they’re also distributing your ebook for you, talk about viral

Conculsion

It’s a simple method with some big ideas. You can see for yourself the potential of this working easily & bringing you in some easy cash. I still get hundreds of clicks & some conversions everyday just from people reselling my ebook on, which is a tidy couple of thousand dollars a month. This way I can still make cash & let everyone else do my legwork for me. This is what you should be aiming for, the less work you have to do the more time you can spend on other projects or brainstorming sessions.

If you try this method, drop me a comment to let me know how you get on. I hope this article has been useful for you

Signups: Casinoblasters, Sign Up to Ebay

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Your referrer header is what will appear in a webmasters logs whenever you visit their site. So if only you could manipulate this value somehow….

It’s simple, simply fake your referrer header so that any site you visit will see the referrer as your website. I’m sure you’re thinking what is this good for? Well a number of reasons:

• Freaking People Out (i.e. setting your referrer as kinkybumsex.com :p)
• Making people think you’ve linked to them (but you really haven’t )
• Getting people to visit your site because they see it in your logs

Now, being a typical webmaster I’m not going to throw up the opportunity to miss out on free web traffic. However, setting my referrer as this blog would probably give the game away since this post is at the #1 spot.So how’s it done?

Download Privoxy, this is a local proxy that you can use to run your web browsers through. It’ll also do cool stuff like block ads, cookies & popups.

Here’s a photo of the settings you should have (Taken from Bjornblog):

Make sure your settings look like they do above, however change the add-header line to whatever your website is. Voilà !

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