SEO Shadow

So it’s been a while since I last posted. Work commitments have kept me pretty busy but I’ve also been working on a number of side projects which I’ll be using as the catalyst for the next few posts.

Having been in touch with Rob over at Seocracy, I’ve been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to test out Datapresser, his popular solution for content creation and mass blog management.

To fill in the background, Datapresser is an online suite offering integrated tools for managing your Internet marketing campaigns. Hold your horses though. This isn’t just some Google Analytics overview of your traffic with a few colourful graphs. The reason I personally took an interest in Datapresser was for the madlib content generating possibilities.

Now anybody who knows anything about link building on a grand scale (that is, a scale that makes money), will be aware of the riches that come from having a strong link profile to utilize. If you’ve ever wondered why your SEO perfecto White Hat site is getting whooped in the rankings at the hands of a seemingly basic turnkey site, it’s probably because the foundations to that number one ranked site are better thought out, better executed and better received by Google. Even if you don’t notice as much at first glance.

Madlib scripts are excellent for churning out pages and pages of relevant content to start building your own link profile. These are pages of essentially the same content, but dressed in synonyms with words swapped out for close match replacements. Imagine writing one great article, and flicking a switch to process it so that you can output another 99 near identical articles. We’re not so concerned about people visiting those 99 articles, in fact, we’d rather they didn’t. The real power comes from having Google index all of relevant niche content and linking it to your White Hat moneymaking project. Suddenly your money site seems a whole lot more trustworthy in the eyes of Google.

Datapresser takes care of both the link building and the content generation by introducing a madlib script builder that opens up a mind boggling number of marketing strategies.

Starting at just $25.00, you can gain access to one of the most impressive collection of tools that an affiliate marketeer can have at his disposal. I’ll admit that I’ve passed over similar tools in the past, but the stubborn streak inside me has always insisted that I’d be better at building my own custom scripts - especially when it comes to madlib site construction which is about as hands on as it gets.

Datapresser, however, makes a good impression from the start. The interface is nice and clean with several anecdotes littering an otherwise minimal design suite. You’ll find options divided in to two main groups, the content generation and the tracking statistics.

When you reach the main control screen, you’ll see a list of public madlibs that have been added by other Datapresser users. It’s a nice thought and makes for some good testing material, but let’s face it, if you stumble upon the magic money spilling formula - you don’t reveal it to fellow subscribers!

To go with each madlib collection, we have wildcard sets, keyword sets and link sets. All of which are vital to your madlib planning. Datapresser keeps it nice and simple to use (great for those who suffer from serial impatience, like me), and you can navigate between each in a breeze.

So what do they do?

Okay, let’s get down to the basics. Say we have an article that includes this carefully crafted gem:

Are you looking for Dating in New York City? Check out our brilliant dating profiles now and meet somebody tonight.

Let’s say we’re looking to branch out and appeal to more than the singletons of Manhattan. We can use the Datapresser wildcards to create a neat list of every city in the United States. Put the reference to that list in place of your city and your generator will take care of the rest.

Next, we mix up our phrasing so as to avoid the Google duplicate content red flag. Datapresser includes a synonym wizard for English drop-outs like myself who can’t be bothered to have the thesaurus handy. Drag and drop in to your custom madlib script. In just over the time that it’d take you to put together one quality article, you suddenly find yourself looking at the building blocks which Datapresser can turn in to as many unique articles as you so desire.

So when I tell Datapresser to get content spawning, it’s only seconds before I’m greeted with my generated pages. Had I gone through with the masterpiece above, I could have produced the following snippets instantly:

Can’t get enough love action in Chicago? Visit the juicy anchor link dating site tonight and find the lover of your dreams.

Seeking love in Miami? Come to our free dating network and start meeting new singles now.

Okay, so that’s two. Imagine I have every city in the United States included in my custom wildcards, and a shit load of calls to action to keep things unique. By using Datapresser, I don’t have to worry about the background coding that goes in to generating madlib content. I copy, paste, generate and publish. All in time for dinner.

And the best thing of all? I can save those wildcards to my Datapresser account for recycled use when I want to spread my wings and target a new niche.

Datapresser supplies the content in plain text file format, but you can also output madlib scripts to produce Wordpress posts that are ready to be imported in to your blog farm. It’s nothing that can’t be done with some skilled custom PHP coding - but Datapresser takes the pain out of the ass and lets you focus on the marketing strategies that don’t involve breaking a back on donkey work.

Setting up your blog farm is cool, but watching the newborn link power thrust your money site up the rankings is better. Datapresser lets you do just that by tracking each of your blogs over time.

Need to know how you’re performing compared to your rivals? Want an exact overview of your position in the rankings? Just add your site to the Datapresser tracking pool and forget about it. I particularly appreciate the “newest backlinks” feature which is a God’s send for other marketeers who are sick of trawling through 10,000 backlinks just to sniff out the newest entries. You can also see which methods of promotion are serving you best and track the number of backlinks that each site is sending you.

As you can probably tell, I’m pretty stoked about the hours that Datapresser has shaved off my previously tedious manual tasking. If you’re beginning to realize the scope of madlib scripts, you’ll surely want a suitable testing arena to focus your time and effort on the jobs that are making you money.

This is a great tool for any Internet Marketing wannabe. So head on over to the Datapresser website now and check it out for yourself. My thanks go to Rob for allowing me the chance to review it here!

Check back later this week for more on madlib content and how to make it bring home the cash…

If you’ve played the affiliation game long enough, you’ve probably tried your luck with a product review site of some sort. It’s the definitive choice for affiliate beginners, yet it still offers untold riches for those who’ve seen everything in the business and know how to capitalize accordingly.

Product review sites are popular because they’re viable for even the laziest of web entrepreneurs, and they don’t take an Indian summer to setup. They also cut out a lot of the middle researching groundwork. If you’re going to build a site dedicated to one product, you better know that product inside out with a comprehensive understanding of your market. Anything less is like walking in to the abyss of chance affiliate marketing. You might get lucky and crack a few sales, but you’re more likely to walk away with a sore head and no return on your investment. Pounds for pennies, if you will.

Hell, you’ll probably stumble back to Digital Point pleading for tips on your first sale and posting a big fat screen grab when you finally cash in on your hours of hard work. I wouldn’t dare knock it. We’ve all started somewhere and just like many - it took me a fair amount of experimentation and late nights glued to the blue to stumble upon a formula that worked.

When I speak to people looking to make a sustained second income on the Internet, I usually advise them to get started on a product review site.

These are absolutely perfect for learning the ropes and understanding the basic principles of what sells and what draws traffic to a site. Better yet, you can set up your site on Wordpress or Blogger and be up and running in minutes.

I’ve explored many avenues for presenting my affiliate offers. From the bespoke website with 100% unique structure and content, to hosted Wordpress blogs and Squidoo hub pages. The truth is, it really doesn’t matter. I use Wordpress to publish my content. It’s quick, it’s optimized for the search engines and it’s easily manageable.

If you’re looking to break in to the product review segment of affiliate marketing, you might take interest in this tip. If you’re already successful, well, it might get you thinking about how you can implement the technique elsewhere.

My advice is to go viral.

Viral is such a buzz word in 2008. I fucking hate it but it’s true. People don’t trust the traditional review site anymore, and why should they?

Some of these product review sites out there are about as discrete with their intentions as Arrington is with his Twitter. If I were a consumer, and I stumbled across a review site showering praise on a heap of products that I hadn’t heard of before, telling me to buy them with special discounts, I’d immediately suspect the legitimacy.

Of course, when you’re in the affiliate marketing business, you grow terribly skeptical of all reviews - both from trusted sources and whatever dot com. It’s important to separate the consumer mindset from the salesman mindset.

Recently, I’ve adopted a tactic which has served me so much better than the biased review approach, I’ve been teasing the urge to bin my old projects in disgust. It’s simple and it’s subtle.

You write without trying to sell, and let your “customer reviews” do the talking.

What do I mean by customer reviews? No, not those god awful testimonials that you read for shits and giggles. I mean busting open the commenting functionality on Wordpress and spamming the hell out of your own blog (no, it’s not practiced here!).

Web 2.0 has reached the melting point where consumers are increasingly relying on the reviews of fellow customers and word of mouth. Established review columns are no longer as appealing. Why take one opinion when you can take fifty?

When you post your product review, stick to the facts. Get rid of the sales talk and promotional garbage about how the consumer simply has to have the greatest invention of the twenty first century. It won’t wash with the savvier audience of 2008. You should STOP reviewing the product and START describing it.

Keep all bias out of the equation and reel off a list of facts about what’s included with the purchase. We’re talking company information, a list of the features, the history of the product, when it was released and what the manufacturer is hoping to achieve with it. Forget those stupid product rating icons. 10/10 and 5 stars are lovely if your brand is worth a sniff of a shit.

The key is to remain completely neutral and come across as an independent party with no affiliate connection. We’ll still hype the product to the moon, but we’ll do it in our comments section.

It’s easy to spam your own blog. That’s a fact, folks.

Those of you with split personalities are gonna love this because you’ve now got the chance to create some make-belief blog commenters and explore as many different shoes as you can feel comfortable in. Take ten minutes to jot down the key selling points of the product. What would the consumer be concerned about?

Got it? Now start commenting on your review under the guise of different names and aliases. Don’t go overboard with the positive praise. A lot of the time, the consumer is simply looking for assurance that the product is legit and not a scam. Especially with the sales pages that they can expect to find on Clickbank (”take my money, just take it”).

Mix up the comments with a few neutral reviews, and maybe the odd pissed off rant which will surely be overlooked if you sugar coat it in enough positive viral buzz.

Now what you have is one informative and non-biased review, and a whole host of positive feedback snippets from your “customer readers”. Just think Amazon, with a hidden agenda! After all, what would you rather trust? A review that praises a product you’ve never heard of to the moon? Or an overview of features and glowing praise from satisfied customers? Better yet, we can use our blog comments to further optimize for keywords (it’s great for the long-tail) without having to ruin the tone of the original article.

Product review sites will always be a popular entry point for affiliate newcomers. But it doesn’t matter how much experience you have. Some simple consumer logic will go a long way to making your site pay.

Fresh from our look at Black Hat affiliate bombing, I thought I’d take things back to basics and focus on some squeaky clean White Hat traffic optimization techniques.

Now when I say White Hat, I cringe a little bit inside. The truth is, these ideas shouldn’t even be classified one way or the other. They should be seen as good business sense.

The more you know about your target market, the better equipped you are to sell to it.

Lets drill that thought in to our heads before we go any further. Making a sale doesn’t have to be rocket science, but you’ll find your chances of converting become infinitely greater when you know just who in the hell you’re targeting.

The problem with selling on the web is that it’s a faceless, all-too-typically linear experience. If I want to sell a dieting package, for example, I have to design with all segments of the market in mind. Not to get too complicated, but there are many differences in the way that I’d promote a dieting product for women (looking good, medical concerns, staying healthy…) and the approach that I’d take when selling to men (chicks love it, optimal performance, good for sports…).

Selling is about appealing to the needs of the customer. We have to cut out the crap and get to the root of what they want. And if they NEED it, well, that makes selling a dream.

So looking at the web, what tools do we have at our disposal?

1. Referring URL

Every time you click on a link, the referring URL gets passed on. This doesn’t mean a whole lot on its own. But when you consider that it’s possible to capture the exact search term somebody used to reach your page, the possibilities are endless. What if we could dynamically adjust our content to match the user’s needs as given away in the search string?

Take this referring URL for example:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cheap+dieting+products+for+men

What can we say for sure about our customer with this piece of information?

• It’s a man.
• He wants to diet.
• He doesn’t want to spend a lot of money.

Using some basic logic and PHP knowledge, we serve up the three cheapest dieting products in our database. We then call on the men keyword and dynamically alter our image references to display only pictures of male six packs and world famous athletes. And if it’s a woman searching? Land your pitch with photos of successful businesswomen, slim adored housewives and health conscious imagery.

We can go as far as serving different snippets of copy that are written specifically for one audience over another.

Split testing is fundamental to any successful affiliate campaign. But it doesn’t always reveal the true facts of your marketing success (or failure) – why? It’s because we’re altering the entire shape of a website when we split test. Either this works or that works, but we never think about who it works for. We could potentially be missing out on dozens of sales. The real success lies in handling the variables that matter to each segment of our target market.

2. Geographical IP mapping

Welcome to the next big thing in Internet marketing. I say that, but porn websites have been making a dime on this information for years. It’s only recently that more orthodox websites have started to catch on.

Every time you visit a website, your IP is logged. If you’ve spent any time meddling with analytics software, you’ll be well aware that geographical data for our visitors is stored. This makes it possible to see not just where our traffic is being referred from, but where in the world that user actually is.

If you’ve visited any dating or adult sites recently (hey, it ain’t a crime to look), you’ve probably bared witness to one of the most effective marketing strategies of the last two years. And you probably didn’t even notice it.

Sign up now to chat to Jessica, 18 years old from YOUR TOWN HERE!

When you visit the page, your IP address is mapped to the nearest city and displayed as Jessica’s hometown. Caught between star gazing at the fine young woman and wondering whether she lives just down the street, it’s easy to see how some non-tech savvy users could be persuaded in to signing up under the pretences of getting some action tonight.

Now, this is only one example of how IP mapping can be used to focus a product or service on the consumer’s needs. I can see this technique becoming extremely popular in mainstream Internet marketing although it’s still very much in the primitive stages as far as your average affiliate website is concerned. Conjures some creative possibilities, don’t you think?

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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…