A beautiful introduction
Well, this is down-right dirty, nasty stuff. I had an idea a while back how to skim some money from affiliates and I was surprised that nobody had thought of it before. After a bit of Googling, I of course found – it actually has been done before (: However, there’s not overly much written about it so I’m going to do a little bit of blogging on the subject.

Before you read this, if you’re one of those whiter than white, whitehats who thinks people shouldn’t even blog about blackhat stuff and you’re already desperately trying to open whatever linux based, environmentally friendly, open-source mail client it is you use to flame me, you should probably know that all you’ll achieve is you’ll make my laugh and I’ll probably post it for the world to see. (: Besides, my “ethics” behind this is if we make enough noise about blackhat techniques and lots of people use them, they will have to be fixed and the Internets will be a better place for all. It just so happens you can make filthy money in the process.

Here’s the coolest thing about this technique: It requires almost no technical knowledge and you can set it up in minutes.

Here’s the not-so-cool thing about this technique: If you have any morals or anything like that, you’re going to have to put them in a box for now. Throw the box in the river, then throw the river into space.

What’s the plan?
Dead simple: Earn affiliate commission that we’re not really meant to by giving people our cookie.

I can do this in 2 steps?
Yes, it’s dead easy:

Step 1: Sign up to every affiliate programme going. You can try the big ones like Amazon and Ebay, but generally you’ll have more luck going through an affiliate scheme that’s running though an affiliate network. The reasoning here is that Amazon, Ebay and all the big players run their own affiliate schemes directly. If you’re caught nicking pennies off them, you’ll probably get banned pretty quick (although I ran some pretty large tests doing this and never heard a so much as a peep from either of them).

Going through an affiliate network is a lot easier. Basically, if you’re stuffing all these cookies onto visitors computers, you’re making the affiliate network a bunch of cash. Guess what, they’re in business to make cash and they really aren’t going to bust your balls unless they have a merchant complain. If you read through most of the affiliate networks TOS, you normally find a clause like “If we ever actually get around to bothering to see why a particular affiliate is earnings thousands of pounds a week while we aren’t tracking any clicks, we’ll probably give you some type of slap on the wrist via e-mail. This is assuming we can move the cash out of the way of our gold-plated keyboards.”

Step 2: All we have to do now is take all of our referral URLs and stick them in a 1pixel (invisible) iframe on every webpage we have control over. The higher the traffic the better! Don’t have any high traffic websites? Ahh, c’mon! Generating traffic isn’t hard – make some linkbait and stick it the code on that page! Get 50,000 visitors from Digg, you think maybe Digg users shop online? Damn straight they do! Or have you considered hub sites that allow you to put your own HTML in?….

The possibilities are endless, anywhere you can stick an iframe, you can drop your 30-day cookie onto a machine. Did I mention it’s almost Christmas? I hear more people buy stuff online around now.

I’ll let you be creative with how you use this. Don’t shoot the messenger. ^_^

Go on - Tweet This Post! 

Had a busy few days with traveling, SMX and trying to squeeze in some work between talks and sleeping, but it was worth it. I learnt a fair bit and met some really great people. As predicted, arriving on my own meant a lot of standing about sampling as much free food as possible and eavesdropping on conversations trying to navigate my way around the room by what I heard, i.e. trying to find some blackhats to hang out with (:

I’m still thinking about to write up some of the seminars I went to, the type of information on offer is quite different to that I normally blog about. Normally, I’ll focus on “ground level” stuff, meaning – we’re trying to achieve goal X, you can do this by doing Y and end product is Z. SMX was insightful in a different way, there was a lot more focus on the industry as a whole, looking more at the reasoning behind why we’re doing what we’re doing.

It reminded me of a conversation I have with a relative a few weeks ago. He was explaining how a particularly large, fast-reacting organisation he is involved with is run. Sometimes people at “ground level” doing what needs to be done can be so engrossed in what they’re doing, it is possible to miss the bigger picture. For this reason, the organisation as 3 tiers of management with the next tier up looking at why X is happening and at the repercussions of doing Y. The top-level will look at connections, trying to find out what is affecting X and make predictions and models of what will happen in the future, so it all gets a bit more “think tank” the nearer the top of the tree you get, but it works pretty well.

However, I find this is the main-stay of most SEO blogs, talking about the industry as a whole, trends, analytics and what’s new and shiny. The Digerati “niche” as I see it, is more technical guts and “real(?) world” examples of SEO. I don’t want to lose that side of the blog and turn more into a “reporting” blog about what’s hot on SearchEngineLand. They do it well, so no need for me to be an echo.

My favorite sessions were Leveraging Social Media Networks and Local Search Tactics, partially because they are relevant to projects I am working on at the moment and I think they definitely provided some of the best insights. Local Search Tactics particularly gave me a new line of thinking with some naughty things that can be done, so I’m doing a few tests at the moment and I’ll report back on what I’ve found.

From the talks as a whole, Andrew Girdwood stood out for me. He presented some solid talks (with apparently very little preparation) with humour and I think a lot more veiled knowledge that he didn’t have time to get across.

I also got the pleasure of meeting Lyndon Antcliff from Cornwall SEO, who seems to make light work of pwning most social network sites. Kelvin Newman from Site Visibility, who gave me some relief showing me the only LOLcat I’d seen all day in his presentation on levering social media. Also big points to Stephen Pavlovich from Bony Toad who wins for diving in at the LondonSEO meetup to buy me a drink and generally being a top chap!

I spied Jane from SEOmoz a couple of times. The first time she was swamped with people and the second she was tucking into a massive portion of chips & peas, so I decided not to disturb. Although I did get a nod – it’s funny what happens when you stare ^_^

Here’s a photo from the LondonSEO after party, that I stole from Andrew:

Go on - Tweet This Post! 

This Thursday & Friday I’ll be jetting off (okay, driving) to SMX London. I usually try and avoid conferences because I normally find myself in one of a few situations. Either, the company delivering the talk is more concerned with selling themselves rather than delivering good content, which I think annoys me more than anything. Equally frustrating is attending so-called “advanced” seminars on subjects, where I reach the end with a blank notebook because the speaker has talked about “why x is so great” and recycling the same basic principles, rather than ripping the subject open and giving decent insights.

SMX seems to be the place to be and I really hope it changes my opinion on conferences and the highlight isn’t just the networking. I’ve had a look through the agenda and I plan to attend seminars on:

• SEO For Multimedia
• Leveraging Social Media Networks
• Local Search Tactics
• Search Marketing for Financial Services
• Search Marketing for B2B Companies
• Search Marketing For Retail
• Search Marketing for Travel

I’ll have my laptop with me and the plan is to do a brief write-up of each seminar for those of you who can’t make it or aren’t lucky enough to have a kind SEO agency to sponsor you to go (:

The way things have panned out, I’ll be going solo to SMX. I see I’ve got a whole bunch of London readers, so if you do see me nursing a pint by myself, do come over and say hi (:

Go on - Tweet This Post! 

I’ve been meaning to post an update for a while on the SEO Tools that I launched on the first of this month. Yes, probably the least shouted about launch in history, but there was reasoning behind the apparent madness.

After all of the ideas, tricks and special SEO treats were put into the thought melting pot, developing most of the tools was a fairly straight forward (but time consuming process). I’m being very cautious with the roll out of subscriptions for several reasons:

The tools will constantly be updated, added to; and if needed, scrapped if they become obsolete. For this reason, managing usage is top of the agenda at the moment. The tools are scalable, but this demands increases on the size of the networks, both internal (server) and external (other sites) that they depend upon. I am still trying to find the optimum balance of usage vs. resources.

As I see it:
Effectiveness of tools = (Resources / Number of users)

and of course:
Value of tools = Effectiveness of tools

So, from perhaps a selfish viewpoint (which actually is mutually beneficial to you guys), the subscription roll out will be incremental as I fine tune these variables as I try to maintain the effectiveness of the tools.

The other reason I have decided to do this incremental launch is because the dependency of the tools on various networks of thousands of pages of content that has been created. Having a full ship launch will of course result in all new users hammering their sites with the tools, damaging the overall effectiveness and perhaps compromising the integrity and stability of the networks.

That being said, I currently have just under 50 people subscribed and using the tools; mostly people I know who requested personal invites (sorry if I missed you, it’s nothing personal, it was more in alphabetical e-mail order!). I’ve had a couple of network issues, mainly due to the fact I had run some of the networks on shared servers. All of the components that make up the tools are being moved onto dedicated servers to ensure they can always deal with the load. To date, we have generated and indexed over 90,000 pages in Google and this number is growing everyday, increasing the strength of the network for subscribers to use.

Once this transfer to dedicated servers is complete, which I’m looking at a timescale of 2-3 weeks, I will begin incremental subscriptions again, once all users are totally happy with performance.

If you would like to reserve a place e-mail me at: tools [at] digeratimarketing.co.uk

You will then be placed in a first come, first served queue and e-mailed individually as subscription places are opened up. Don’t ask questions at this address, they won’t be answered, I am simply using it as a tally system to contact you guys in a fair manner.

A few bonuses in the box
We are also packaging a site creator program, which will be free to download for all subscribers. This allows you to generate full, SEO friendly designed websites, with unique content, all linked into Adsense and affiliate feeds, in under 5 minutes. This tool really allows you to hammer long-tail searches by generating sites quickly and efficiently to corner markets. It is more than possible to generate dozens of these sites per day – and they look damn good. Here’s one I made earlier in under a minute:

All of the menu structure and layout is generated from mashing up various feeds and using search data for key phrases.

I hope that is enough to wet your appetite! Lastly, I’ve come across a fairly reliable way to get competitors’ pages de-ranked in Google. The process can be automated and it was something I considered adding as a tool, however I’m pretty certain it won’t make the final cut now. The process uses up resources which could be better spend improving your own rankings, rather than trying to harm another site.


Would you prefer to raise your sites ranking, or try to damage your competitors at a greater cost of time? I’ll leave the final decision with you guys.

Go on - Tweet This Post!