nop90.net

I am making this entry in reply to this thread on this message board. The young lady was asking about how she can promote her site using social media.

I always end up in trouble, even when I am trying to be good
Excellent post by benjarriola Social Media Optimization Should Not Work Like A Link Farm, I wish i had a way with words like he does Problem is people think that numbers (as in higher traffic) = more $$$$
This is not really true. I have had like 10K+ unique IP on a website in a day and only make like $10. (me and a friend gamed a social book marking side so we where on front page for like 32 hours).

On the other side of the coin I have had only 250 unique IP, these have converted at like 1:20 and lets just say i make a lot of $$$.

I forgot about yahoo answers and other Q&A services. Thanx for reminding me.

Also remember that spam is spam when the person you are giving it to is not intrested in what you are offering. Whether you submit the entries by hand or using automated methods, it still holds true.

A couple of months back I had the pleasure of working with a guy promoting male enhancement products. (automatically you think spam).

For starters he wrote amazing copy, not using fancy english etc. The best person i can compare his writing to is “Mark Twain”, he was formally a newspaper journalist, so he is very discriptive/captivating with his words, while never using fancy words.

The he make sure that he only promotes his site in places where there are people who may be intrested in such products. So he did not social bookmark on a site that deals with womans issues :). Using the yahoo Q&A example he would  only promote in places where there might be men with such problem :).

Amazingly enuff he was having conversions of 1:20.

I am not sure if i mentioned this before on this board, but 25%+ of your time should be spent on research. As in randomly choosing a niche seeing what they are up to, how are they promoting etc.

In USA there was a famous bank robber, called willie sutton. He had robbed over 75+ banks, escaped from jail countless times etc. When he was old a newspaper journalist interviewed him and asked “Why did you rob bank ?”. Willie looked at the journalist, kinda perplexed, what type of stupid question is this, then replied “That is where the money is”. And so on the net follow where the money is.

And so when you do your research follow where the money is. On the net the money is in 4 major areas

• adult oriented sites
• pharmacy / medical sites
• gambling / casino (less so since new laws in USA about online gambling)
• finance areas, check out payday loans etc

Of primary intrest is adult sites and pharmacy. In both of these markets the competition is cut throat. There is no such thing is whitehat/blackhat, the only rule there is you get traffic legally and make it convert into sales. Also adult is ussually 5 years ahead of anyone else in the net game. The adult industry was doing what is called web 2.0, social media presentation, marketing with blogs etc, 3-5 years ago. They where doing web 2.0 before it even had a name.

Ironically 3+ years ago while the adult industry was pioneering the concept of adult blogs as a marketing tool, the so called experts where saying that blogs from a marketing perspective where useless. That there was no way to monetize blogs etc.

In all of the above industries, competition is brutal, if you buy PPC words in these area, you are looking at $2-3 per click. So you do not have the luxary of wasting users.

Right now adult is pioneering flash animated ads, little games which you can play. Also they are working on flash chat boxes, flash video ads etc. I am guessing that 3 years from now the rest of the net may clue in.

The key is not doing the same crap what others are doing today, but to think of new origional ideas. (Or sometimes taking old ideas, and putting a new spin on them).

I have touched upon how state of mind is very important to be successful in your ventures. A lot fo what I will talk about I stole from Richard Bandler who stole these ideas from someone else. Many people view Mr. Bandler as a bit of a charlatin etc. To a certain degree these allegations are true. But regardless you can get valuable information where ever you go.

One of the things he often talks about is placebo effect and the power of the mind. Placebos are amazing things, every new medicine before it goes to market has to be tested against a placebo. One of the reasons Freud came up with modern phsyciatry is because his study of placebos. These things are amazing, in some cases even with terminal diseases such as cancer etc, they can cure these disease with rates as high as 30%. This is absolutely amazing, a sugar pill which does absolutely nothing can cure a deadly disease, and often better then real medicine. You would think that modern medicine would look into this :).

One of my favorite stories is about a man who had no money. All he had was just $10. His life was horrible, he had no job, absolutely no future. Where ever he looked all he saw was doom and gloom, and the world seemed to be out to get him. Anyway he was wandering around the market place, wondering what should he do. This merchant jumped out in front of him, holding in his hand is an old scruffy black tophat (kinda like the one abe lincold wore).

“Sir would you like to to buy this blackhat ?” the merchant cried.

“What that worn out old thing, you think I am a fool, all it is fit for is the rubbish heap”

“No sir, It is a magical blackhat”

Intriguged the man hesitated for a moment, and looked at the hat, but it did not look like anything special just old, worn out and black.

“When you put this magical blackhat on sir, every where you look you will see opportunity to make money. For you my friend only $25.”, the merchant continued.

“Ahh but I only have $10″

“No problem good sir, you give me $10 now, and then next month when the blackhat starts working for you you give me the other $15″

The man is desperate. He thinks what do I have to lose. All I have is $10, and that will not last me long. If the magical blackhat does not work then I will kill myself, and end this suffering.

They do thier exchange, and the man puts on the blackhat. Nothing really happens. Thinking he has been scammed he regardless wears the blackhat and goes to find a place to sleep. The next day he wakes up, he sees the blackhat sitting next to him, mocking him, ohhh how could i have been so foolish he cries to himself. I could have used that $10 to buy a bottle of booze and atleast I would have some comfort if only for a short time. Well what the fuck, I paid my $10, I will wear the stupid hat anyway.

He puts on the hat, and nothing happens again. He starts to wander arround the market place. I am going to prove that this stupid hat does not work. Stupid fucker ripping me off, I will prove him wrong and show him hat does not work. See I am going to wander arround the market place and I will see no money. Why look at that rubbish heap, all there is in it is old tin cans and other garbage. What can I do with the tin cans ? Well besides selling them to the metal dealer that is.

With in a short time he becomes one of the largest scrap metal / recycling dealers in the area. Soon he is able to buy a large house and many other things. Many times he went arround trying to find the merchant who sold him the blackhat to pay him the $15 he owed him, but the merchant had disappeared.

Many times he has been interviewed by newspaper reporters. One question they always ask is why does he always wear that scruffy old blackhat. They are alway perplexed when he replies back. “I owe all my fortune and success to this hat”.

How many times do you have a new idea, but instead of acting on it you ask your friends, so called experts etc. They ussually tell you, that it is a foolish idea. Or they point out the reasons why it will not work etc.

That why i hate so called experts, they always point out why things will not work, instead of looking for solution.

Or in life instead of looking at what you have, you waste your energies on looking at what you do not have. You always are saying stuff to yourself, like if only I had _______ then I would be able to do _______ . Or this will not work out because of ______. Well instead of looking at why things do not work, look at how you can get things to work. Take a self examination, make a list. Put on the list all of your assets, talents etc. If need be the list start very basic, like for me i did.

• laptop fairly good make
• pretty good internet connection
• ability to code in many languages
• ability to reverse engineer things
• good at playing strategy games like railroad tycoon, civilization, starcraft etc
• …… and so on, list everything you are good at, regardless how stupid it may seem.

Then start to make another list. This list will be of things you can do, with the assets you have listed above. Not the assets you wish you have. This list should be a on going thing. You will be surprised with what you can come up with. Remember list should only contain things that you can do with assets you have. If your idea involve coding, but you are not a good coder, do not put on list. (You can later make a list of goals, as in maybe learn how to be a coder ).

Or the simpler way is just to buy a magical blackhat

A long time ago I was talking to a right wing christian. He was explaining to me about his religion etc. He told me I should read the bible etc. I told him I had read the bible many times. Some where in the conversation he found out I was a programmer. He then made the statement. “You would not understand about faith/miracles, computers are logical”.

I then tried to explain that computers are anything but logical, in order to be a good programmer you have to have a lot of faith. The simplest computer is nothing more then a toggle switch, it contains 2 states, off/on , 0/1 etc. If you attach a clock to that switch you have a computer. A very simple computer. You line up 32 of those switches you can store your telephone number. But when you have millions of these switches it becomes extremely complex.

With something like a Fibonacci series it is not possible for me to calculate the next number in the series unless I know the previous number. So unless I know the previous 99 states I can not determine the 100th state. The same principles can be used to create pseudo random generators etc.

Your PC probably has components from over 1000 manufactures. Its operating system has millions of lines of code, that has been written by 100s of people. The applications well …. . And somehow all of this functions and works together 99.9% of the time. As a programmer you will use API constantly to communicate to the OS, other apps etc. It is like a black box. I give it stuff and magically it will give me what I want back. I do not know the inner workings of this black box, just this is what happens. And the right wing christian accused me of not having any faith, or believing in miracles. It is a miracle computers even operate

There are very few books on actually how to program. Most of the books are just abbreviation of some programming languages specification manual, ussualy full of poorly written code examples. And then some drivel about how to use function XXXXX, often with incorrect information. Again here we can draw lessons from the bible :). In the story of jesus and the centurion, because the centurion is important man initially he sends one of his servants to go talk to jesus. But then the centurion knows that these servants will probably fuck it up. So he decides he better go talk to jesus himself, find out what the true story is :). And so the same in coding, even the API sometimes lies, always if in doubt look at the source code if possible. The source never lies

As king solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun. And so the same hold true today. All ideas are just old ideas recast with new wrappers. People used to ask me at parties what I do for a living. Being the prankster that I am I would reply I am a magician. And then I would tell them (i stole this from some book i read a long time ago, and forget which one).

I create objects at will, I make them appear and disappear :).

I have been accused of never leaving concrete examples, and so I shall

A good example is the internet.

On the simplest levels it is nothing besides a bunch of electrical pulses going allong a wire (0/1).

But on a hardware level for sake of organization these pulses are put into “packets”.

But these packets do not really exist, they are just something router/hardway guys invented.

But for the programmer these packets are a pain in the ass, and hard to work with, it is much better for them to view the packets as a “stream”. As in the internet is like a water pipe, and when i turn on the tap (socket) data flows out, and when i turn if off the data stops.

And so you may ask, which way is the best to envision the internet. Should it be views as a stream or packets. (Like the arguements is light a wave or a particle ).

And light, the answer depends on what you are doing.

If you are designing an application that does not do real time, (example an irc type chat proggie, email etc) then the stream answer is the correct one.

But lets say you are doing a real time app. (example VOIP) when fractions of a second make a difference, and you have to deal with the latency of the packet. Then you need to use the packet analogy.

When i had to do voip work, i would picture then internet in my head as a road, along the road where vehicals, like cars, trucks, buses etc. And all of these vehicals where going to all sorts of different places. Sometimes there where accidents (net work collisions) bus runs into a car :). At the intersection of these roads are like policemen (routers), these policemen send the cars to the proper place. But sometimes the policemen are taking nappy time :).

When i had to make like none real time apps i picture the net as an oil refinery with like thousands of pipes. Big pipes, little pipes. And connecting the pipes are all sorts of valves etc. Or sometimes a rivers (depending how I feel).

Each application you make you make different type of picture in your head, depending on what you need to do.

Well i guess looking at it, my concrete example was not so concrete after all :).

Blackhat seo is contrary to popular beliefs is very hard work. First you have to study the serps, you have to read all sorts of blogs etc. Probably 25% of your time should be spent doing research. Research on what the search engines are doing, research on new tools and programming languages.

Then you have to find a way to monetize your traffic. When you are starting out adsense is ok, but to make the big bucks you have to find good affiliates. To get your traffic to convert you must match it as closely as possible to the right affiliate.

Example if user is searching for “black teen cheerleaders”, sending them to a teen site may get a few conversions, but if you send them to an affiliate that fills the niche exactly you will get a lot higher conversions. Common sense, but go look on the net on how many search engine spammer waste thier traffic sending gay traffic to straight sites or vice versa.

Not counting that you have to be constantly making new tools, or fixing your present arsenal of tools.

So lets say you have no coding ability, have no idea how google works, and are down right lazy. You would think a fellow like that would have very little career option in the SEO industry. Well that is where you are absolutely wrong. You can become a search engine guru. How on earth can you do that you cry ?

Well all you have to do is hang around forums like syndk8 or wicked fire etc. Just read all of the stuff posted there. Then just regurgitate this stuff. When you go for job interview try and look like an expert. Always give very vague answers, but the answers which people want. Mention words like duplicate content, google bomb, pagerank, trustrank, lsi. If you do not know what those words mean, do not worry the guys interviewing you will have no idea either. Also when you make statements never state absolutes, if you have any problems understanding how to do this read religous books, the bible is a good place to start.

After being a search engine guru a few of the crowd might clue in that you have no clue what you are doing. No worries, just contradict yourself. Or sometimes a good offense is the best defense. Accuse you accuser of being a fraud. Of course google short tail traffic does not convert very will. I thought I told you that. What you need is yahoo long tail traffic, why I have some of that and it converts like crazy. Most people are clueless and will not catch on. Don’t believe me, well religous leaders and politicians have been doing this for thousands of years.

Only problem is all this money starts rolling in, and since you are doing nothing you ussually become and alcholic or develop a nasty drug addiction. Ohhh well.

I always get a kick out of reading google’s recomended guidelines. They make stupid moronic statements like, would you be ashamed to explain to a competitor what sort of SEO tactics you are using. Me personally no, only reason why i would not like to explain to competitor my tactic because maybe he steal them and then use them for himself. I personally find this who blackhat / whitehat seo crap rather comical. But I guess i must be a blackhat , I never stuck the label on myself, others have.

Often I think that I must live in a hole, totally isolated away from the rest of the world. Recently one of my wife’s relatives came back from the USA to visit PH. While he was visiting it came up that both of us where into e-commerce (I am not sure what proper term is when u sell stuff on net as affiliate). Anyway we started to have a little chat. He then told me he was buying traffic using PPC. Perplexed I asked him why don’t you just rank your site ? He replied that takes time, not really I told him, you can probably do it in a week. He looked at me kinda funny. I then proceeded to explain to him what I would do. He then grins and tells me “That’s blackhat”. Irronically it never dawned onto me, until that point.

Anyway people always ask me what does it take to be a good blackhat. They seem to think that being a good blackhat just involves know a bunch of tricks / secrets . Or they seem to think that blackhats are extemely good coders. There also is this idea going arround that to be a blackhat you have to be extremely intelligent.

All of those things help, I will not deny that. Yes I have learned a few tricks about search engines, but all the information that is required on how to rank is publicly available. Anyone can find countless papers on Trustrank Pagerank etc. Probably because of my experience I am a better coder then most programmers, but then again I know better blackhats then me, who are not as good of coders :). As for the intelligence part, well lets just say I have a below average IQ :).

So what makes does it take to make a blackhat ?

Blackhat is a state of mind.

You know that yes google,yahoo and msn have the smartest, brightest PHDs working for them. And these eggheads have all virtually unlimited resource, and despite that you know you can beat them at thier own game, on thier playing field. Despite all the odds against you, you manage to succeed.

When you look at something on the net, immediately in your head, a little light flashes on, and you think how can i use that to rank higher in google.

Where other people tell you it is impossible, you do not get upset. You just look at them and wonder what in the world do they mean. For in the blackhat’s vocabulary, that word does not exist.

Other people may think that some canned tool they buy of the net makes them a blackhat. Or maybe hanging arround syndk8 makes them a blackhat, but no.

When I first started doing blackhat I made my own content generation system, very similar to rssgm . I was doing the standard spin X ammount of sites a day, get them all indexed, traffic comes, and then inevitably they would get banned. I would repeat this cycle over and over again. To monentize the sites I would either use adsense, or some adult sponsor, depending on the type of site I generated.

I was one day listening to a CD on marketing. It stated something allong the lines that the most expensive accusition a buisness makes is getting the customer throught the door. If the product they sell costs like $1 they often will spend $5 to get the customer in the store. The examples he used where the soft drink industry etc.

As ussually it takes a while for me to clue in. In this case like 6 months. Initially with my adult traffic I was either sending the user right to the signup page, or to a page full of banners. I would convert at maybe 1:1200.

But then I decided to make attractive looking adult blogs. Initially when I opened them, I was getting traffic, but no conversions. WTF, I should be converting at higher rate no ? All this effort gone to waste. For 2 weeks traffic but no conversion. Then all of a sudden bam 4 signups in 1 day :). When i looked at the signups, they came from bookmark. I notice most of my signups come from bookmarks now. What is happening is that the users see blogs. Because they are quality blogs they keep coming back, eventually they will buy.

So when you make MFA(made for adsense) sites, initially you are making profit on short term, but on longterm you are throwing away your money.

When I origionally started doing SEO i thought that increasing traffic would increase revenue. This is a mistake that everyone seems to make. There is the myth that increased traffic increases revenues.

Lets say you site sells XXXX.

Conventional wisdom saids that you should rank in top 10 for XXXX and you will get most sales.

But reality is you are better off to target for keywords like :

buy XXXX online

purchase XXXX online

You will get far less traffic per day when you target like that.

But on the other hand the guys who come to your site are ready to buy. If you have a good product with good landing pages you can get 1:10 conversion ratio. The key is targeting your traffic, the closer the traffic is to what your page offers, the easier it is to make a sale.

UnitedCrown of synk8 told me he was using Wordpress to develop his static sites. Initially I thought that was the stupidist fuking idea I ever heard of. I am planning to move into WhiteHat(WH) sites, when users have more then a landing page, things like quality content, a visually pleasing site are important.

As a result I have hired a writer to create a site for me. I then planed to hire a web designer to layout the site for me. But fuking webdesigner do too many drugs, and are flaky and unreliable. Instead I plan to get my write to write directly into wordpress.

Wordpress very flexible and has tons for free themes and plugins :).

Anyway I am very intrested to see how this will turn out.