SEO Shadow

Turbo charged affiliate success the Black Hat way

Alright, guys. I’m gonna run you through a technique that I’ve used for the mass production of Black Hat affiliate websites. The beauty of this trick is that it’s actually quite lateral in its scope for use. You can take it as far over to the dark side as you want, but it’s equally rewarding to modify it for your White Hat projects.

I’m going to cover the White Hat side in the next post. For now, we’re going to veer in to some deep end Black Hat SEO.

The Black Hat essentials

We’re going to need a content generating script or some kind of mechanism to rewrite chunks of text. Now, as you’re probably aware, quality rewriting softwares are few and far between on the web. Thankfully, we don’t need something that’s going to read like a white paper. We just need to slot our pages in Google’s index and let them grab some keyword traffic.

We also need a little PHP experience, or a touch of knowledge when it comes to dealing with referrers and search strings. I don’t have the time to dedicate an entire blog to PHP - or indeed, any other language - but I’m going to trust that you’ll be able to find a script for what we need. It’s foundation stuff.

The root of the problem

What is the number one problem that we’re faced with when trying to sell an affiliate product? Assuming that the product is legit and presented tidily, it’s not about the volume of traffic. It’s about directing the right people to the right offer.

Affiliate websites are generally prone to pitching too many products at too many audiences. The number of web hosting affiliate sites I’ve seen trying to cross-sell bargain shared hosting, alongside private virtual servers and premium packages is enough to make my eyes bleed.

It’s a mistake that new kids on the block make all the time. We dip our feet in the riches of the affiliate pool and try to sell every last offer, every last bargain and every last scheme. The more the better, surely? The greater the chances of success?! Well, no. 

The result is a mish-mash website lacking focus. Mr. Megabucks lands on your pages wanting to buy a dedicated server but catches sight of your shared hosting bargain range. He immediately gets confused and travels elsewhere to splash his cash. If you’d just had a way of knowing that he wanted a dedicated server, you could have drawn his focus to only those offers that were going to make him part with his credit card.

Well, we’re not going to focus on information architecture until the next post, so let’s cut to the chase and address this problem the Black Hat way.

Give your customers what they want (now that’s not very Black Hat!)

Every time somebody lands on your website via Google, the search term they used is logged and accessible in the search string. We can get to this string dynamically and capture the search terms that are bringing traffic to our site.

Great, you already knew that. You’ve had Analytics for the last six months so I should stop patronizing you.

But have you thought about what this information means? You can SEE what the user came for! 

Let’s propose that a user gets to my language product site with the search term cheap discount Italian courses. If the user lands on a page that is promoting premium top-of-the-range Italian courses, it’s likely that his stay will be a short one. You might think about skirting this issue by making a page for cheap Italian courses, a page for premium courses, and a page for just about every other keyword variation.

Feel free, I’ll see you in a few weeks.

What we need is a way to grab that search string and dynamically output the exact offer that our visitor is looking for. We’re so much more likely of capturing their attention and making a sale if we immediately present them with their exact requirements. And here’s how.

Do your market research

We need to set aside an hour and draw up a list of all the keyword variations that correlate to the products we’re going to be promoting. I would suggest you find a niche market which offers a variety of budget offers and premium solutions. Now what are the customers going to be searching for? Using our example of Italian courses, here are some secondary terms to consider.

Cheap, bargain, discount, quality, excellent, best, top, number one, in USA, in the UK

All of these phrases are interchangeable. For example we could have somebody searching for Italian courses in the UK, and another after quality Italian courses.

Now we do some more research. Scout out your market and draw up a list of products that you can promote. Analyze the product and decide for yourself what category it falls in to. Is it a bargain course? Is it an advanced premium package? Is it restricted by location?

Note down the URL of each product and plug it in to a database or a simple holding script.

We want to start drawing direct connections from our keyword terms to affiliate offers.

So I might have a list that looks like this:

cheap italian course  —  http://www.cheapcourses.com/italian-product.php?aff=myaff
italian courses in the uk  —  http://www.ukstudy.com/our-italian-course.php?aff=myaff
quality italian courses  —  http://www.bestcoursesonly.com/premium-italian.php?aff=myaff

Naturally, if you’re using a database, things are going to be looking a little different at this point and you’ll be relying on tables and IDs.

The execution

We’re going Black Hat so the last thing we want to do is pull together a website with endless pages of hand written copy. We just want to grab some content that ranks, spin it a few times, and output it with the same keywords in tact.

Get your hands on a functional content rewriter. It won’t pass you any English Lit exams (and if it does, I’ll be the first in line to pay for it), but as long as it scrambles the copy enough to be untraceable by Google - we’re sitting pretty.

Now the last thing we want to happen is to click Start on our rewriter and watch it go through and replace our keywords with utter nonsense. If I’m rewriting an article to target cheap Italian courses for sale, I don’t want my robot friend replacing the term with, oh I don’t know…easy Italians in corsets for hire. That’s not the kind of search traffic that I’m looking for.

So do be careful when spinning your content and make sure that your key phrases remain in tact. We couldn’t care less how it reads - we just want it to get chomped up by Google’s spiders and thrown in to somebody’s search results.

Now, the clever bit.

Using our PHP script, we place an include on every page and grab the search string as soon as the file is requested. Your visitor isn’t even going to see the content. We simply match up the key phrases that they’ve searched for to get to our site. We scan down our list and match up the most relevant affiliate offer based on those keywords. Now all we have to do is redirect the user to the closest matching offer and send them on their merry way - towards something that we KNOW they’re going to be interested in.

The only way anybody is ever going to find that you’ve been rewriting content is to access the site directly (and who’s going to if we only ever link to it from non-related sites?!). 

Alternatively, if somebody gets to the site using a search term that isn’t in our catch list, we can still send them somewhere generic. Just add a simple else if to the PHP script and sit down in unusual delight that absolutely nobody is visiting your site!

As for Google…well, Google doesn’t get to your site using any search strings. It will simply spider the rewritten mumbo-jumbo content and process it for ranking.

Turbo charged success…with limits.

This is an effective way of busting out websites for quick profit. Don’t expect them to pay your pension many moons from now. It’s incredibly likely that somebody will nark you out somewhere down the road. Of course, the swaying factor of success is that we can produce websites like these in mass volume and send fantastically targeted traffic towards our affiliate offers. It’s fast. It’s effective. It’s downright easy.

In the next post, I’ll be showing you how to convert this method for White Hat websites. I’m sure you’ve already worked out where we’re heading with this one… 

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Black Hat SEO, rewriting content, scraping content, turnkey websites   Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Content Scraping