Many SEOs are already doing this, but if you’re not one of them, you should seriously consider visiting SitePoint Marketplace a few times per week and having a detailed look at some of the sites for sale. The purpose of the visits is not to buy sites, although if there is a bargain then why not, but to research how successful niche sites are being designed, monetized, promoted, and find other useful stats about them too.

I started doing this last year and since then, SP Marketplace has given me some brilliant website ideas that have generated quite a bit of money. Initially, I tried to keep all the good ideas in my head, but that didn’t work for long! Then I came across ActionOutline, and what an amazing note-making tool it is! After using it for a while, it’s become absolutely indispensable! I recommend you try it for free.

Here’s just one example of using SP Marketplace: I recently bought a bingo-based domain from TDNAM with PR and backlinks for less than $15. I bought it because, other than being an absolute bargain, I remembered seeing a bingo site on SP for sale a while ago which included detailed traffic, keyword, and revenue statistics. So I checked my notes in ActionOutline, found the original bingo site and implemented some its ideas on my new bingo site.

I estimate my new bingo site will bring in over $3k per month from organic traffic once established, which is not bad considering I will spend less than $2k overall on content and promotion (getting backlinks), and probably less than 50 hours overall on site development.

If you don’t know what MFAs are, you shouldn’t be reading this blog

This is another idea I had and have used to degree a while ago – and still do. Other BHs use it too, of course.

If you’re worried about losing your Adsense account or having your blogs banned, instead of churning out 100’s of splogs, why not create a network of WH blogs? If you target the right niche, it still does pay!

So, the biggest problem is content right? Well, if you’re prepared to work at it or outsource (or both), it’s not so difficult. There are many millions of free articles from sites like articledashboard.com, articlecity.com, ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, etc. Obviously, you can’t use those articles as-is because they won’t rank due to those damn duplicate content filters! However, if you modify the articles so they are around 50% different they should bring in traffic, according to my experiments.

What do I mean by 50%? Well, I totally change the title, delete a five or more sentences, add five or more sentences and change two or more words in every existing sentence. On average, it takes about 5 minutes to customize each article so it’s unique. Overall, that’s about 12 per hour or about 60 for 5 hours work. But, it’s easy to outsource the customization of the articles as long as you are very specific with the requirements.

In a month, it would be easy to build 20 WH MFAs with about 100 articles each.

To get you going, here’s a feed containing 1000 mortgage related articles scraped from a popular article site.

I’ve mentioned this on several forums, but I’ll recap here because someone recently left me a comment about it.

Tens of thousands of domains expire everyday. But, for some unknown reason, a small percentage retain their PR and backlinks, and TDNAM is an ideal place to find and buy them cheaply. However, because of the sheer quantity that expire, trying to find the quality domains manually is exceptionally difficult. 

So, a while back I built a TDNAM URL scraper and PR checker tool, and have since bought many, many PR 3, 4 and some PR 5 domains for less than $15 each!

I won’t provide the tool I wrote, but it’s easy enough to build your own with VB/C#.

Download the DLL component and add a project reference to it (project->add reference). And, here’s some simple VB code that get Google’s PR and backlink count.

Imports PRChecker

…

Dim informer As GInformer = New PrInformer()
Dim backlink As GInformer = New BackLinksInformer()
Dim pagerank, backlinks As Integer

pagerank = informer.GetInfo(”http://google.com”)
backlinks = backlink.GetInfo(”http://google.com”)

A while back I was reading up on Web 2.0; I even bought an book that discussed the concepts, feature-sets, designs, programming languages, etc. In fact, it weren’t a bad book!

I then began looking at and comparing typical Web 2.0 sites – interesting stuff. And as I do, I jumped in to the future and tried to get a glimpse of Web X.0 sites… and WOW! A typical blog is seamlessly integrated with video, audio, and flash, AI-based search functions with novel features like ‘Ask a Question’, ‘Top Tips’, etc, integration with similar blogs (content sharing), and unparallel user experience compared to today.

Now back to reality. I remember watching one of John Reese’s videos fairly recently where he states something like, “the time to act is now, build top-notch authority sites… and easily out-compete most competitors because there’s so much crap on the internet”.

Never truer words spoken! There is a lot of crap on the Net.

So, I was thinking about creating my first Web 2.0 site and I came up with an online research and writing tool, with a typical Web 2.0 user-interface supported by AJAX, and obviously a database driven backend.

So what will this site/tool do? Simply put, it’s an article research and writing tool. Type a few keywords into an edit box and click one of a number of options, the tool then  finds related images, text (complete articles, paragraphs, or just sentences), audio, video and relevant links. All the retrieved info is stored in boxes that can be moved around like a Windows desktop. Such a tool could dramatically cut down the amount of time it takes to research and write articles. As for potential users… many millions without even considering other languages!

Perhaps the owner of http://www.uwrite.com/ is open to offers? (BTW, it’s not my domain.)

Beni has been busy lately, doing what he does best: identifying vulnerabilities, security flaws, XSS exploits, etc.

In the last few days he’s been playing with Wordpress and identified no less than 7 vulnerabilities and he even created a friendly worm to disclose certain flaws.

Wordpress Zero-Day Vulnerability

Wordpress XSS Worm

And can you believe Beni is only 18! Bright kid, bright future and I’m surprised no-one has snapped-up his talents yet!

I mentioned this method on Jon’s affiliate forum around a year ago and some of the responses I got were fairly colourful:

“I disagree with blackhat SEO myself, in that you’re doing a bait and switch…”

“…switching the content of a site to get inbound links so that people are linking to something they didn’t want to link to.”

“…but BH techniques such as this are reasons why the internet is becoming more and more of a cesspool.”

However, this approach is more effective now than ever before because of the rise in popularity of social bookmarking sites, so I’ll discuss it again.

Let’s say you want to enter the very competitive pills market to promote Viagra and related drugs. For traffic, you’ll rely on SEO. But, as you can guess, almost no one is going to link to your pills’ site. So it’s unlikely you’ll get much organic traffic!

But try this method…

Register an ambiguous domain name including the desired keyword – something like viagraaletinfo.com. Create a blog about the adverse effects of Viagra (and related drugs). Include studies about the side effects from using the drugs. (Visit PubMed and search for Sildenafil - aka Viagra.)

Create/include videos, relevant podcasts, cartoons and any content that will get backlinks. After creating and populating the blog, promote as much as possible. Write interesting and witty Viagra-related articles and submit to Digg and the usual places. Commission a cheap artist to create funny cartoons, eg.:

Because of the blog’s non-commercial nature and content, it should be fairly easy to get backlinks.

Now, after getting the desired amount of links, transition the blog into a site that promotes Viagra and related drugs: modify and delete articles, remove the cartoons and videos, etc. Add filler articles that target long-tail drug keywords. With the trust from all the backlinks, the filler articles should rank reasonably well to bring in decent amounts of targeted traffic.

The above is an example of using the BH Chameleon Method. A future post, Get and Abuse Google’s Trust, takes the idea to an entirely new level. Perhaps one day I’ll do a  case study on one of my chameleon sites.

What’s article marketing? Here’s Wiki’s definition:

In its simplest form, article marketing is a type of advertising through which a business writes short articles related to its respective industry. Once written, the business makes these articles freely available for distribution and publication in the marketplace.

Each article contains a ‘bio box’ and ‘by-line’ which include references and contact information for the author’s business. Well written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of gaining the author business credibility within his or her market, as well as new clients.

So, basically it’s about submitting articles to sites like ezinearticles.com, goarticles, etc, for extra backlinks and traffic.

I was thinking a few months ago about how dated those article marketing sites look (certainly Web 1.0) and wondering how they will evolve over the next few years (I’ve done this before)… then I came up with a novel twist: Blog for a Link

Here’s the idea. Instead of using dated article marketing scripts, use Wordpress. Create a network of blogs, one per niche, and allow webmasters to promote their sites by posting on the blogs which obviously includes backlinks to their sites – but only one link per unique post. So, effectively, I would have a network of user-generated content blogs.

I even built a prototype: it comprised several plug-ins and modification to the core code. So, alas, I can’t release it yet. However, I’ve since realised most of the code can be bundled into a single plug-in, which I’ll release sometime soon. Here’s some screenshots - submit-a-post & my-posts.

The business model behind this idea was build-to-sell. Build and promote the network, and after becoming established sell it to the highest bidder. However, I just don’t have the time so I’m sharing the idea with you guys just in case some-one is interested in pursuing it. Let me know if you do, I’ll feature your network on this blog.

Link bait definition: http://www.lunametrics.com/emarketing/search-engine-optimization/what-is-link-bait.php

Andy Hagan: http://tropicalseo.com/2007/andy-hagans-ultimate-guide-to-link-baiting-and-social-media-marketing/ 

Link bait vs Digg bait: http://www.toprankblog.com/2007/04/link-bait-vs-digg-bait/

Art of link baiting: http://performancing.com/promotion/links/the-art-of-linkbaiting

Best kind of link bait: http://www.toprankblog.com/2006/01/whats-the-best-kind-of-link-bait/

Buzz marketing: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_31/b3743001.htm

21 keys to link bait success: http://www.famousagents.com/link-bait-success

Buzz marketing: http://deanhunt.com/

Seth: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/09/what_makes_an_i.html

Viral web tricks: http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Branding/viral-marketing-tricks/

Wiki viral marketing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing

Link baiting for fun and profit: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/linkbaiting-for-fun-profit/2541/

Buzz marketing with blogs: http://www.buzzmarketingwithblogs.com/

Viral principles: http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles.htm

Why all the links about viral/buzz marketing and link bait? Imagine, you create a brand new blog and employ viral, buzz and link-bait techniques/tactics to get several thousand quality backlinks in a few months or so… now you can abuse the trust that comes with those links!

A while ago, I had an idea for a WP plug-in that allows specified people access to a private WP blog that contains details of stories to be dugg.

As I’m a member of numerous internet marketing forums, the idea was to network with a number of other forum members so we could digg our stories collectively. Because sometimes, an initial 20 or 30 votes may be just enough for an article to experience the snowball-effect and get on the front page if it’s creative, informative, and interesting.

It’s been noted many times that monetization of Digg traffic is extremely difficult. But, what’s important to me is the backlinks - the more the merrier. Front page stories can pick up a lot of links. And once you’ve got a site with a ton of links, you can easily abuse the trust that comes with those links – but that’s a future post!

So with this in mind I’m going to develop a WP plug-in/strategy that can be employed by webmasters to form Digg rings in order to get their stories dugg! You can share your thoughts about this idea by either commenting below or contacting me privately.

For most webmasters, the term ‘link cloaking’ means concealing affiliate links to prevent theft or loss of affiliate income. But this post has nothing to do with hiding affiliate links. In fact, it’s much more sinister: it’s about manipulating the SE spiders and channelling link juice to any site(s) at any time.

So, you’re looking at a PR 6 ‘do follow’ blog, and you see a comment from some one looking for help with a script for a mortgage/loan site.

You click the link and see this page… hmm seems like an innocent girlie blog, with useful articles, and no advertisements or anything like that. In fact most webmasters would have no problem linking to such a blog… but what you don’t realize is that the blog is the ‘virtual devil in disguise’! While humans see the blog, the SE spiders are redirected to the murky world of porn, pills or credit and the link-juice too… an example of stealth, BH link building!