I often get sidetracked with the multitude of projects I undertake and forget about the real earners that made me most of my money so im going to take a second to reflect on blackhat SEO.

Simplified, Blackhat is valid usable content generation, usually automated.

There are generally two methods you can go about doing blackhat seo, first is spamming other sites with links or generated content… And the second is to generate content, and tons of it. Autoblog’s, comment spam, email marketing, message boards, and social networks (myspace, facebook, youtube etc.)

However if you spam sites with your chosen keywords in order to rank higher in google, you will see a short term jump in rankings, but this will be gone in less than a month due to google’s algorithm picking up on those spammish links you’ve been dropping or automating… which leaves you back at square one. Your not gonna keep buying the bitch drinks if she aint going to put out. So the best method for doing this, which has been tried and tested, is to generate comedy/humor websites based off of feeds and databases that have several entries so that the output is relevant to the keywords for titles and meta tags. I setup a site similar to this and spent less than $50 and in about 2 month’s time I had earned almost $2000, blackhat at its finest.

Personally I don’t think people should sell SEO, but practice it on their own and learn. SEO is an ever developing realm, with the algorithms constantly being updated and changed.. The top blackhats stay ahead of the algorithm either by getting the code or by guessing which methods would go undetected. There are many outdated methods (keyword stuffing, invisible text, doorway pages etc.) that used to make a lot of money, and in order to stay ahead you have to constantly be on top of what works.

While blackhat SEO is unethical, if used properly in moderation (key word here) you can make a pretty penny, and at the same time not get penalized by the search engines as long as you stay within some very specific boundaries, and dont get greedy.

TNX.net is a marketplace for webmasters both looking for publishing tools as well as advertising. Webmasters are able to choose their advertisers themselves while placing links that are relevant to pages on their site.   The price of the links is very reasonable and you are given the ability to promote hundreds of keywords with just a few clicks.  TNX pays out on a monthly basis for their publishers network in a very convenient fashion through either paypal, check, wire or bank transfer.

They also have a variety of advertiser tools to make your paid links look natural for Google, with a link generator and a simple cloak script you can accomplish a very easy affiliate link.   They offer an affiliate program for which you can also make a pretty penny off of referrals to their network.

In terms of ease of use, the site is very easy to navigate and the admin panel makes it extremely easy for both advertisers and publishers. You can automatically place tons of non-recip links to your site as well all through their system.  As an advertiser you can get some of the lowest prices on links anywhere.  I think it was around $10 a month for about 10,000 static links to your website, which may or may not be accurate, but even still it is a good deal.

For SEO consultants and specialists, you can apply for their program and get discounts up to 50% off which goes well beyond any other text links marketplace out there.  There are minimum requirements for joining the TNX marketplace, however they arent that stringent and you should be able to meet the standards.

Overall TNX is a great system to assist website owners in attracting visitors and clients from search engines and relevant websites.  It helps to reduce the dependency on search engines, as well as improve quality of the search results for those websites that join the TNX system.

Another year is upon us and we are all looking to upgrade and update our blogs. So when it comes to wordpress, what plugins will make your blog stand out and which are best?After blogging for over 2 years, and writing a few plugins myself, here is my list of the best of the best wordpress plugins. 15 Top notchwordpress plugins, guaranteed to make your blog if anything, a little nicer than it was before.

Show Top Commenters - A great way to get your readers more enthusiastic and develop more discussions, by displaying their name & number of comments they have left recently to your sidebar.

Akismet - Intelligently blocks spam comments. Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.

Bad Behavior - prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator - creates a sitemap of all articles on your WordPress blog. Helps Google and other search engines index every article you write.

SEO Title Tag - Optimize your wordpress title tags for search engines. Enabling you to edit the title tags of posts, pages, category pages, tag pages etc.

Related Posts - Will show a list of posts related to keywords of your choosing in current posts. A nifty plugin to bring back older posts.

WP-Notable - displays a series of icons below each post allowing your readers to easily submit you to many different social bookmarking (Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Facebook, Youtube, etc.) and networking sites.

WordPress.com Stats - Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

AdSense-Deluxe - is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.

Global Translator - Translate your blog into multiple languages in a search engine friendly way.

Feedburner Feedsmith - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

InstantUpgrade - A plugin that will upgrade your version of Wordpress to the most recent version (or any other version) with a click of the mouse! If you hate upgrading Wordpress, this plugin is for you.

Gregarious- A social bookmarking plugin that integrates the Share This plugin, the Digg API, and a slick AJAX interface. Gregarious is so easy to setup, it requires no template edits!

404 Notifier - This plugin allows you to see how much of your traffic is getting 404′d and what page(s) they are trying to access. You can retrieve this data via an RSS feed or email.

Manage Multiple Blogs - Otherwise known as MMB, this plugin allows you to manage all your wordpress blogs from one session, eliminating the need for 500 tabs and logging in to each admin panel repetitively. A definite must for any blog owner who is trying to administer more than 5 blogs.

So I was bored in between websites and school work today and came across meez.com, a unique website that allows you, the user, to create a virtual 3d replication of yourself, for your own and others amusement. Viral media anyone? Not too sure yet, they launched back in March 07 and were in beta up until late October, so anything is possible really. Considering this is the first ive heard of it, it doesn’t look like it took off with a bang… however it must be starting to circulate.

Meez allows its users to create their own animated avatars, or “3D I.D.” graphics, for the Web. They partnered with photobucket which allows for easy hosting of your 3d ID graphic as well as smooth exports.

So after some fooling around, here is my end result:

Well its a new year, and that means that I should probably get off my ass and get down to business as usual. So for 2008 I figured I would give some insight as to the best ways in which to garner traffic to your website for the new year.

Social Networks

With the booming explosion of facebook and myspace, marketers should once again look to utilize these resources in order to drive substantial traffic to their websites. Numerous web developers have seen great success using facebook ads to publicize their sites or push conversions on their affiliate offers, and either way you will see improvements.

Blogs

Blogs are going to continue to be utilized in 2008, with networks like blogrush and mybloglog you can expect to drive traffic to your sites using the traffic and social systems of these sites. The best thing about blogrush is that it is totally free and the traffic you drive can be targetted for your specific niche. The best thing about blogs is the fact that if your writing unique content you can get other webmasters to help build your traffic flow simply by linking to your articles. Content will always be king.

Social Networking & Bookmarks

We will continue to use social networks such as Digg, Sphinn, Delicious, Stumbleupon, reddit and the long list of up and comers to drive traffic and build backlinks to our sites. While getting your stories dugg or stumbled isnt the easiest thing to do, as long as you keep submitting viral stories sooner or later you will start to see traffic flowing. While the majority of the users are going to be ad blind, it will still be one of the best ways to drive traffic and backlinks for your sites.

Google

Still the powerhouse of the internet, valued at $66.5 Billion US Dollars, and not something that looks to change anytime soon. Getting your websites and articles ranked high in the SERPS will ALWAYS drive you targetted traffic and tons of it depending on the relevance and search popularity of your terms. While backlinks and SEO are the most important things to consider when trying to rank for google, once you struggle with rankings for awhile and work on building high quality niche relevant links to your pages, you will start to see significant traffic from the search engine leader.

Article Writing

Well content is still king in 2008… Not much has changed there. The only thing that has changed is who is writing your content. With guest blog writers and some very inexpensive article writing services available on the various webmaster forums around the net, you can keep a steady stream of articles flowing for less than $50 a month if you know where to look. However if you have garnered a reputable name for yourself in the industry you can even find yourself writing articles for others and making a pretty penny.

Overall in 2008 you should look to continue to utilize the booming social media networks and social platforms to drive traffic that is targeted for your niches, these are the top performers right now in terms of my traffic generation and I suspect that these methods shall remain prevalent for the rest of the year.

The best parties? Internet ballers? Champagne?

Since these are all terms synonymous with the lifestyle im accustomed to living then I am definitely off to a good start! So who am I you may be asking? In case you cant read, or are mildly dyslexic, my name is Lorne Fade, and I’m just your regular run of the mill 23 year old college student with aspirations of the highest degree. In terms of affiliate marketing, I have been in the industry for awhile now, whipping up ingenious ways to earn a buck online, and doing pretty well considering I haven’t worked a real 9-5 job in 6+ years.

I might not always use the most “white-hat” methodologies to get my traffic and rankings, however I try to stay within the realm of “staying out of jail”, so lets call it greyhat. I have dabbled in the poker industry with a few sites, buying and flipping pokeraffiliated.com last year for a very modest ROI.

Currently I am looking into promoting an up and coming poker site pokerspace.com. While the poker affiliate industry is as lucrative as ever, I decided to part ways with it back when there was the gambling ban online in the US.

I think I would be the perfect choice for this trip for a multitude of reasons. First off I have extensive experience in the industry, and maybe you guys can convince me to come back to casino/poker affiliation. Secondly, I not only know my way around a party, but I AM the party. If you need the life of the party look no further, put some liquor in me and I’m good to go…

So strap on your boots Jeremy and Greg, and get ready to party like a rockstar! And on a totally unrelated note, I’ve never been overseas in my 23 young years and would really love the opportunity to not only see the sights, but to hang with some of the top dogs in the industry, it would be the chance of a lifetime. I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen… Thanks for considering my entry guys, and best of luck to everyone else.

But hey aren’t bots against facebook TOS?!
Simple answer. Who cares?

So the other day I felt like spending some money on some *nearly* useless products, and after having no luck with the free “facebook bot” I opted for the more user friendly version of the same thing, and after some digging, I found a nice little bot called Facebook Tools. After $70 deduction to my paypal account and about 4 emails to the supposed owner of the bot, I finally was given a download link that worked, and was able to activate the bot. (online activation, so cracking is gonna be tough, but not impossible :P)

So I went to work, made a bunch of accounts the old fashioned way (hot girl, a few scandalous pics, and a whole lot of way too friendly “about me” information) After pumping out a few accounts I thought I’d give facebook tools a run for its money.

I ran the friend adder successfully for about an hour on my verified account.. but wait m getting ahead of myself here. I had to “borrow” a cell phone just to get that account verified, so I could bypass the annoying captcha process facebook has instilled upon us. Which presents a totally different challenge in that I will need to find a method for bypassing the captcha OR a way in which to verify the accounts without dropping more money on unneeded cellular numbers.

A friend suggested that skype has a service where I can get numbers for $20, so we will have to do some research and see if that would be a worthwhile investment. Anyway back to the bot, I setup a neat little app on my (hot chick) facebook account entitled My Web Embed, which worked wonderfully in the implementation of my affiliate links, and I was up and running.

I put together a nice list of offers with the infamous “more profile pictures” and started up the bot. I ran the friend adder after scraping some FB id’s from a group dedicated to hot women (and shallow men, just the kind im going after :P) I’m going to leave it adding overnight and hopefully in the morning we will see some progress in the dollars department. (I didn’t want to run the adder without a 10 second delay between add’s to minimize bot-like suspicion…even though this probably doesn’t even matter)

After about half an hour of running the bot, I had sent out around 500 friend requests, and was already starting to see some clicks on my affiliate links, and actually made $18, which is a pretty good start.

The thing about facebook is that a lot of the users actually screen their friends, so its hard to filter out the more intelligible users. Your inbox may start to look this way:

This is probably not a problem, as long as these users don’t start to flag your accounts, and as long as you keep your friend requests to a decent number (probably 70 a day), you should be able to minimize suspicion and therefore increase your earnings. After some deeper digging I found that I only actually sent out about 80 of those requests successfully after which this message began to appear:

Okay, well folks, the cat is out of the bag, and if you haven’t already heard, the new Google Adwords is facebook ads. So how the hell are you supposed to use facebook to make money you ask? The answer is simple.

First and foremost you need to decide on something you wish to advertise. Think about the facebook demographics, who uses it the most.. and you should come up with both males and females ages 19-25, with the dominant group being the females. Now in order to cash in off of these pretty women, you need to think OUTSIDE THE BOX!

Ive been testing ad campaigns for several weeks, tweaking and testing and getting my cpr % up slowly and diligently, and with limited success I realized what was wrong… I was using the wrong image. I’ve come to find that the text you use has little to no effect whatsoever on whether or not the ad gets clicked, it simply comes down to the image, and the title to some degree, but not nearly as much as the image.

Heres an image I’ve been playing with and seeing some pretty decent results:

Now as you can see, there is pretty much NO text below the image, and I feel that makes it stand out more so than other ads. I’ve decided not to discuss numbers simply because I haven’t really invested big yet, but my ROI is well above 200% which is more than lucrative.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I was promoting a dating ad, but that is bottom of the barrel in terms of advertising… dating is becoming more and more saturated and im actually noticing my clicks dropping daily, despite the constant tweaking and testing I’ve been doing. So what ever will I do?!

Remember how I was talking about how the majority of users are women ages 19-25… What do women in that demographic want? I know your not Mel Gibson and you can’t read their mind, but if you can think logically and come up with some ideas (make-up, designer purses…?) as to what they MIGHT want, you will be well on your way to baking that cake as fast as you can!

And remember above all, hard work pays off… I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen!! Now get out there and make some dough!

Well it has been a long time coming, and most of the people I know got out of the game ages ago when the “Myspace Marketing” fad was growing near its saturation point. Today I received an email from Millnic Media which is basically putting the nail in the proverbial Myspace spam coffin. (Although I’m sure there are still other viable affiliate networks for Myspace Marketing)

Hello Lorne,

This is the second very serious email I have written in two weeks. It’s so not like us, but into every CPA Network a little hammer must fall.

All drollery aside, MillNic Media does not tolerate or condone Myspace traffic. Some of our affiliates have been running offers there, so we wanted to remind everyone of the Terms of Service. The Terms of Service is the list of rules and conditions you agree to when you sign up with the network. If you break these conditions, “you will forfeit your entire commission for all programs and your account will be terminated”. Although this warning is redundant, it’s still what happens when you run MillNic Offers on Myspace (for posterity: you don’t get paid, and your account gets shut down now and forever)Great. It’s all very clear now so there wont be any confusion. If you have questions as to the rules and regulations that govern the network please have a chat with your affiliate manager.

Sincerely,

MillNic Media
www.millnicmedia.com www.bestcpanetwork.com

http://millnicmedia.com

So if that doesn’t speak loud and clear, then maybe you deserve to get your affiliate account shut down and never receive any of your “free iphone” or “ringtone” money. Either way if you are still in the Myspace game for whatever reason, it may be time to start looking into new social networks for your marketing purposes. (Facebook Marketing anyone?)

Blogs are quickly becoming one of the best marketing tools that small businesses and even large corporations can use. Whether your business is online or offline you can use a blog to keep your customers up to date on the latest events and generally use a blog as a marketing and advertising tool for extra revenue.

Blogs enable direct interaction with customers and allow them to see what goes on behind the scenes as well as keep up to date with the latest news. Blogs are inexpensive to start and run, enabling you to use thousands of themes to change the look of your site at the click of a button.

Here are a 5 key reasons as to how blogging for your company can be a good thing:

• Direct communication between you and your clientel.
• Blogs are great for SEO, fresh content added daily will bring traffic.
• The more relevant the content the more opporunity for the niche to branch off into other areas which in turn creates more revenue..
• Comments allow direct feedback customers as well as potential clientel.
• Cost effective, low startup cost, high return.

Make sure to give your customers a reason to read your blog as well.  Have them directly interacting with you by using polls, questionnaires, giveaways and contests, and you will see a surge in the growth of your company as well as some added side revenue from your blog.