I like to browse forums, read blogs, etc, after I’ve had a few beers and am relaxing (which I guess is like 70% of the time). This issue has been bothering me and I want to address here on my blog. I will keep this one short, I swear on my bad ass chair.

Every time something like Scrapebox is discussed or any link blasting utility (I use the word blast specifically because I will be reviewing the mother of all link blasting services very soon), this topic comes up. No matter how many times it is spelled out, the hesitant, pussy-footing SEO’s out there will just keep asking the same questions instead of doing some testing of their own. It’s almost like they thrive on getting contrasting feedback and marveling and the mysteries that they’ve created in their minds. It’s not that complicated. So, in response to the most common question I’ve been seeing…

Is it safe to build a shit ton of links to my money sites?

If you are hung up on the idea of blasting links directly to your money site instead of laundering that precious link juice through web 2.0 sites and the like, I’m cool with that. If you’re paranoid about it, just answer the following questions: Is your domain at least 12 months old (or so)? Do you have diverse backlinks already (that means different kinds of links, silly)? If so, the risk of receiving a “Google slap” (as you are so fond of saying) is minimized. And guess what? Worse case scenario, if your site is slapped into oblivion, it will come back in a couple months. And it is likely it will come back stronger than before. Sure, there are really sneaky ways to sabotage a competitor’s site, but building a ton of links to them isn’t really one of them.

As countless people have highlighted before me, if it were that easy to de-index and basically destroy a site by spamming inbound links, then everyone would be doing it to each other (at least in competitive niches). It simply doesn’t work like that. Aged sites (I use the term loosely) with a good amount of links pointing at them are not that easy to dethrone. And don’t you dare ask me exactly how many links a “good amount of links” is!

And you know why those new sites are de-indexed so quickly? Cause the vast majority of new sites suck balls and don’t last longer than a year before the webmaster fails to pay the hosting bill or ultimately doesn’t renew the shitty hyphenated .info domain.

Have Balls

Or ovaries, whatever you please. You’re never going to get anywhere in this business if you’re not willing to take risks here and there.

Stop Asking Questions

Seriously. I know I’m basically talking to myself here because the people that know what they’re doing and are destined for success are in total agreement with this post and don’t even need to read it while the rest of you are wondering why I’m such a raging, ranting alcoholic.

True, no one can give you a definitive answer to all your inquiries about the mysterious Google algorithm. But if you keep blatantly ignoring the advice from seasoned SEOs who deal with this stuff on a daily basis…double-u tee eff?

I’m sorry to get my rant on like this. But, shit, you know, I needed a new blogpost so they could move me up higher on Affbuzz!

After Eleah from AKMG threatened me with bodily harm, I decided to check out Meetup202 in Marina Del Rey on Saturday.

Highlights:

• • Riley Pool
• • Q+A with Smaxor from A4D and Nana Gilbert-Baffoe from Tracking202
• • Eleah’s dog, Chilli Bean
• • Beer

If I hadn’t been so distracted by the beer and Chilli Bean, I would have thought to take some notes and then plagiarize the helpful info from the speakers here on my blog.

Riley gave a detailed report on how to go about contacting high traffic websites for media buys and what pitfalls to avoid. One point he made that I thought was worth repeating is that you should NEVER take a webmasters word for their traffic stats. Use compete.com and similar sites to get your own info and request analytics reports (if available). Webmasters that run Google Analytics can go as far as adding another Google account with limited permissions so that you can go in and check it out for yourself. Reports can also be exported and emailed as PDFs. If you’re going to drop a bunch of cash on a media buy on some random site (or non-random site, for that matter), I don’t think its unreasonable to make such a request. I digress…

Jason (aka Smaxor) and Nana took questions from the crowd. As I was 3 beers deeper at this point, it gets sort of fuzzy. One good point that Smaxor made, was that his company was built on a foundation of blackhat SEO. Even though they have moved on to much bigger and better (i.e. less shady and more profitable) things, he pointed out that a lot of big online companies that started out with little capital used blackhat SEO to get the ball rolling. I get a lot of IMs and emails from people asking me how to make a buck with limited resources…and I think this is something that might be motivating for those people. Blackhat SEO is a “cat and mouse game”, according to Smaxor, and one that of course isn’t a very sustainable long-term business model. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do a little automated search engine manipulating to scrape a few bucks together at first.

Anyhoo, here are a few pictures:

Eleah’s beautiful dog, Chilli Bean and myself enjoying the refreshments.


Riley Pool (apparently immune to my sexual advances), Eleah Portillo, crazy-eyed Chilli Bean, and yours truly.


Some of the beers I put away.

All in all, I’d say it was a success.

This is pretty much as white hat as it gets. Or at least as white hat as I get, in any case. It is also incredibly effective. I’ve been implementing this technique for a few weeks now and the results have been phenomenal.

You can’t beat relevant, authority links. You just can’t. Especially if they’re do-follow/one-way links. Of course, reciprocal ones aren’t so bad either. So, what’s the best way to get them? Well, you could of course simply email the webmasters of sites that you’d like to have a link on and ask. In some cases, this will work. It usually helps to be polite, throw in some flattery about their site, and maybe offer a link back in exchange. But, depending on the niche, you’re going to have varying degrees of success. Despite your advanced charm, some emails will still be dismissed. I’m going to teach you a simple method to drastically improve the success of good old fashion link-panhandling.

What You Need
Aside from a computer, the Internet, and your incredible powers of persuasion, you will need to install this Firefox plugin.

What You Do
Step A: Find a juicy site or blog in your niche with high PR and tons of inbound links. Ideally something ranking for a keyword you’re trying to dominate (or maintain). Do they have a links page? Perhaps a blogroll? If yes, proceed to step B.

Step B: Navigate that mouse of yours to your Tools menu in Firefox and select “Check Page Links”. This will activate that new plugin you installed. You will see the progress at the bottom. If there are lots of links on the page, it may take a couple minutes. Go roll a cigarette or perhaps get briefly involved in political debate on Wickedfire. When you come back, you will notice all the links on the page have been highlighted. Proceed to step C.

Step C: Look for red and yellow highlighted links. These links are the problematic ones. Most webmasters don’t have time to check their blogroll often and are usually linking to a few dead sites. Every now and then the plugin will mistakenly mark a working site as a problem site, so in the name of being thorough, we’re going to manually check these. Open up a notepad document so you can catalog the URLs that are broken. Make a list. Proceed to Step D.

Step D: Find the email contact for the site. Create a new email. Proceed to Step E.

Step E: Now it’s time to sweet talk the pants off these bitches. Let them know that you are so-and-so from yourspammyasssite.com. Tell them you were browsing their links and happened to notice the following links are bad: badlink1.com, badlink2.com, badlink3.com, etc. Casually mention that Google tends to frown upon dead or broken links, and it can often hurt your search engine rankings when you are linking to resources that don’t exist. After all of this, mention that if they feel that your site is relevant, you would appreciate it if they would consider linking to you.

I Dunno Dude, This Sounds Like Too Much Work
How dare you. First of all, Rome wasn’t built out of hay, okay? When you shoot out a handful of these emails, you’ll see how well it works. Every single person that has responded thus far has agreed to give me a link. One-way links. One site even gave me a paid spot for free, out of gratitude (for six months). Of course, not everyone has responded. In all likelihood, some emails are probably never even read. That’s just the nature of the game. But it is still very effective and very much worth it.

And if that doesn’t convince you, I’ll have you know that within the past couple weeks I have moved onto the first page (not quite #1, but getting there) for a keyword I had been targeting for a long time. A highly competitive keyword that gets 90,500 searches/mo, according to Google (yes, exact match). I attribute this sudden success to the links I’ve acquired in this short period of time.

You want that SEO money? Hmmm? Do you!? Wanna sit around all day playing video games and drinking Mtn Dew while your sites keep making you money? Well you gotta do the leg work first. Stop reading my whack ass blog and go try this. You may send me gift baskets later if you’d like.

A Dark Twist
Sorry. Thought I was done blabbing. Not the case. It just occurred to me that you might be able to dirty up this method. I don’t really like advocating squeaky clean white-hat SEO methods because they make me feel like a square. So I’m just going to throw this out there.

Let’s say you have a site outranking you for a particular keyword. One of the first things I do in this situation is figure out who is linking to them. You can do this easily by using Yahoo! Site Explorer. Now, for the sake of this example, let’s say you determine that ABCsite.com is linking to your competitor, XYZsite.com, in their blogroll. This would work best with a site with a lot of links. You would use the method detailed above, everything the same way. Find the broken links on ABCsite.com, and contact the webmaster with a humble request to have your site included. Only difference is, in this case you would casually interject your competitor site, XYZsite.com, into your list of broken sites, after listing 3 or four legitimately broken/dead sites.

The idea is to trick the webmaster at ABCsite.com to not only add a link to your site, but remove the link to your competitor’s site, after you’ve convinced them that it’s a dead link. Perhaps after the webmaster sees that the first two or three links in your list are in fact dead, they will assume the rest of your list is accurate. How devious. What’s the worst that could happen? If the webmaster notices the link is in fact still good, he/she will most likely just assume it was a temporary outage or a simple error.

There. Now I feel off-white again.

First of all, if you haven’t already, you need to read this post, which was the inspiration and the foundation for this method I still currently use to build links. And I’m not the only one doing it.

Trouble was, after I read that article, I was left feeling sort of confused still. How do I take a womens shoes site (or something like that!) and turn it into a piece of useful software? Well, one answer is in the title of this post, now isn’t it!?

Screensavers are usually in either one of two formats: .exe or .src. If you don’t already have the software to compile screensavers, you might want to “buy” some. I’m currently using a program called “Screensaver Factory 5 Enterprise”. If you already have some images, you can literally build and compile a simple slideshow screensaver in about 30 seconds. In the womens shoe site scenario, I would probably put together a nice little slideshow featuring the most sought after womens shoes. By default, the program adds little fancy transitions and what not. Not that they really matter too much. If you really want to get maximum benefit, you might want to watermark your images with your URL (yes, people actually download these things).

Distribution
Now, you’ve got your screensaver. It is time to distribute it. Just about every software download site has a submission area. At this point, if you’ve never authored/distributed software before, you might be thinking about outsourcing this part. Well, that’s not entirely necessary, thanks to a little something called a PAD file.

What the Shit is a PAD File?
I’m glad you asked! PAD stands for “portable application description”. Basically, a PAD file is an xml file that exists on your server (or wherever) that contains all the necessary information about your software such as size, version, links to download and more. The idea is that instead of having to manually make updates all the time when things change with software (like updates), you simply update one PAD file and the sites offering the software usually poll their PAD files regularly for changes. Now, the beauty of using the PAD file is that most of these software sites that accept submissions will ONLY ask for a link to your PAD file because it already contains all the information they need. This means your time spent on each site is quite minimal.

I Can Haz PAD File?
Yes, you can. I use a simple utility called PadGen that you can download here to create my PAD files. Keep in mind that not all fields are necessary so don’t spend all afternoon on it. Just get the important ones covered. Some sites do have requirements about what information needs to be contained in a PAD file before it is accepted for inclusion or review.

Hopefully I don’t need to tell you that you need to include your URL to the site/page you’re promoting in your PAD file.

How ‘Bout Some Sites?
Of course. I live to please you. I’m going to give you some master list of software sites that will accept your useless ladies shoe screensavers, but I will give you a few. They really aren’t hard to find, and there are tons of them. And of course many of them just scrape data from the other ones so there are plenty of links to be had, here. There are also distribution services in the business of charging you for distributing your software, but I don’t think they’re necessary for this sort of task. Now, about them sites…

1. Softpedia.com
2. Windows7Download.com
3. FreeDownloadManager.org
4. DailySofts.com
5. PCWin.com
6. FileBoost.net
7. FreeWareTown.com
8. Files54.com
9. A ton more…get your Google on

Alrighty. Have fun. Please don’t take my method (which is obviously just an interpretation of Eli’s Method) and run it into the ground. Thank you.

Warning: Inspirational rant for newbies to follow.

Since the new year is upon us, and many of you have goals related to growing and expanding your business, I would like to take the time to go ahead and offer a few words of encouragement for those of you just getting into the game of building and profiting from your own websites.

Having been doing this for a couple of years full-time now, in my opinion I have discovered that the single most important element in a successful SEO strategy is simply time.

I started out more or less broke. In order to fund my new efforts, I turned to content writing. I don’t necessarily particularly enjoy writing, especially for other people, but it was a way to generate an income from home while learning and attempting to build my own business. It was also an invaluable way to gain insight on what successful webmasters were doing. Of course there are other ways to make a quick buck doing client work and learn the ropes, such as coding or designing, but writing just so happened to be the thing I was good enough at to make enough to get started.

Since then, many of my friends have become interested in what exactly it is I do on the computer that allows me to spend most of my time screwing around and blowing money on crap I don’t really need. Often times that interest has turned into questions that turned into them wanting to build their own online business. Out of all the friends and acquaintances I have that asked for my help to get into this affiliate marketing business, all of them gave up or lost interest relatively quickly.

It doesn’t happen overnight. I’m now in a comfortable position where I have several diverse sites generating passive income. If I were to take the month of January off, I would still have an income. However, that nice cushion wasn’t just handed to me. It took months of building and optimizing to get those sites to rank and start earning me $.

The short version of what I’m saying is simply don’t give up. You may not see results in the first month or even the first six months. Any webmaster worth his or her salt will tell you it generally takes 6 months to a year for a site to realize its true potential. I know it can be discouraging to work your ass off on something and still not feel like you’re making any progress a month or two later, but if you’re serious about it, you need to stick with it. The people that give up and fail and then post threads about how SEO is dead and all that nonsense are the people that don’t have the attention span or the drive to really make their business thrive.

In the real world of making money online, there is no magical Google Success Kit that will hold your hand and walk you through the steps necessary to build a successful internet based business. There is no get rich quick formula. Like everything else in life, you’re going to get out of it what you put into it. That said, there is still phenomenal potential on the internet and new opportunities pop up every single day.

We’re still living in the wild west of the internet era. With a little creativity and a generous dose of patience, you may very well find gold in them internetz after all.

I wish you all a prosperous new year. Take care of your families, work your ass off on your business, and please, keep an eye on your girlfriends.

<3

That’s right, I’m about to post something useful. Hold on to your off-white hat.

In our never ending quest to build links, posting comments on relevant (or even irrelevant) blogs with a link to your site is still a powerful tool. However, how many times have you stumbled upon a great post that is just BEGGING for your comment, only to discover that comments are strictly moderated? Or worse, they’re moderated AND the blog hasn’t been updated in forever, indicating that it may have been abandoned by the owner altogether?

Don’t give up. There is still hope.

When someone goes to leave a comment on a WordPress blog, they are presented with four fields:

• -Name (Required)
• -E-mail (Required, not visible to anyone other than site admin)
• -URL (Optional)
• -(Comment)

If the site owner has elected to hold comments in moderation (many do), your comment will not appear immediately after submitting it. It will be held in the moderation queue. Unless, of course, you have had a previously approved comment and you use the same email that you used the first time. Raise your hand if you see where I’m going with this.

The Strategy

…Is simple. Check out the existing comments on the article. Find one with a hyperlinked name. Follow that link to that person’s site, and look for a contact email. Once you’ve found it, return to the article and use the same info to leave another comment. You are now impersonating someone with a previously approved comment. The comment field should allow you to use html. Go ahead and leave your link with whatever dang anchor text you want in there.

As you might have guessed, this will not work 100% of the time. The main reason being you have no way of knowing what email was actually used to leave the comment. However, in all likelihood, the person that left that previously approved comment used the same email that they display on their website. This method also of course depends on the fact that the site owner has a publicly displayed email address.

And now the FAQ…

What if I Can’t Find Their Email?

Move on. Find another comment leaver. Depending on how much you want that link, you may or may not want to spend 20 minutes trying to find one that works.

Is This Unethical?

Sort of, but  it’s not that bad. Actually I think it perfectly reflects the theme and intent of this site.

Will it Work with Other CMS’s besides WordPress?

Do I look like an internet scientist to you?

Will this Post Upset the Natural Balance of the WordPress Universe and Destroy the Internet?

Yes.

Will this Shady Shit Work Even on This Site?

Probably, dick!

Edit: It has recently come to my attention that YouTube may no longer be counting autoplay views at all, rendering this entire technique useless. It has been quite some time since I’ve used it myself, so I can’t say for sure. Feel free to test it anyway. In any event, I will leave this post here for historic purposes (and because frankly, I don’t have much content on this blog!)

Recently someone on Wickedfire asked how they could get more views to a YouTube video. I figured I might as well put my response on this here bloggity blog as well.

This will help you get a significant amount of NON-HUMAN views if you do it correctly. Why would you want those? Well, basically the idea is to get so many views that your video starts appearing in the “most viewed” areas and what not, resulting in a ton of real views. A large amount of total plays also adds legitimacy to your video.

The Method

Upload your video to YouTube. Now go create a MySpace account. Proceed to hunt down popular MySpace Music profiles that have a ton of views/fans and that also ALLOW HTML in comments. These aren’t exactly easy to find but they are out there. I’m not going to give you a master list of them, but with a little research you should be able to find some. Just scroll down and check out the comments on any particular profile, and if you see a ton of retarded glittery images embedded then you’ll know you’ve found a winner.

Add all of these bands. Many of the more popular ones have their accounts set up to auto approve incoming friend requests (because it would take forever to do it manually).

Once you’ve got a friends list full of bands, you may now proceed to comment spam. In your comment, you will be embedding your video. However, the regular old embed code simply will not do. You need the AUTOPLAY embed code. Your typical YouTube embed code will look like this (forgive the screenshots, my code plugin thingy is being a jerk right now):

In order to make the video autoplay, you’ll want to add “autoplay=1″ to the end of both the URL’s in the code. The resulting code will now look like this:

And then you simply embed the crap out of it in MySpace comments. If you feel like being extra abusive, feel free to embed the video 2-3 times in a comment. Or even post multiple comments. Every time someone loads that MySpace page, you get a view (or more).

Okay, fine, to get you started I’ll give you one profile: McFly. Only because I don’t like them. If they stop allowing HTML in their comments in the near future, perhaps you’ll know why.

Have fun.

If you’re one of those newer affiliate marketers who is frustrated with losing money on PPC and need a bit of positive reinforcement to help motivate you and realize the potential in this here crazy business, then this post is for you.

To be honest, I’m getting pretty sick of Facebook. What a royal pain in the ass to have to constantly re-create and re-submit ads after they are disabled. I had a good run with them, but now I’m getting more involved in other things and I think our relationship is just about over.

To celebrate the burning of this bridge, I’m going to go ahead and outline in detail a very laser targeted dating campaign that will make you a few bucks. Of course, if enough people stumble upon this article and run it, it will probably become worthless rather quick. It definitely won’t make you rich (because of the limited size of the target audience), but it has always been profitable in my experience. I’ve been running this campaign and slight variations on it for over a year.

It’s also worth mentioning that this of course doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to Facebook. I’m sure with a little imagination you can find ways to run similar campaigns on other platforms.

Nerds Love Asian Chicks

Okay, to be fair, plenty of non-nerds have an inclination towards Asian women, but never mind that for now. From testing various keywords with different dating sub-niches, I determined that guys who are heavily into sci-fi, anime, RPGs, and martial arts are also heavily into asian girls. Not a huge surprise perhaps, but something you might not have considered.

You could always build an Asian-oriented (no pun intended) landing page, but I’ve always found landing pages to be unnecessary when promoting dating offers on FB. That is, as long as you find a decent offer/lander from the merchant.

The best converting offer I’ve used this with was Spicey or Sweet which I was running through Affiliate.com (who no longer has it). They had me at $3.50/lead. Copeac still has Spicey or Sweet with several landers, but I don’t see an Asian one currently. If you ask your AM nicely, they might be able to hook you up with one.  Ads4Dough also has Spicey or Sweet. You will probably have to cloak the offer to something a little less “suggestive” to get it approved by Facebook.

Check out the Finding Singles offer from Neverblue. They have some customization options you can utilize, such as changing the graphic on the LP (say, from a blond white girl to an asian girl in glasses). You can also change the title text on the LP. The Facebook nazis seem to be alright with Finding Singles. You might also want to try actually running it. It doesn’t convert as well as Spicey, in my experience, but it was still profitable (about $0.19 EPC).

If you know of any other Asian themed dating offers, feel free to test them out as well.

The Campaign Details

Since I promised full details, here are the exact interest keywords I targeted for one particular ad:

Anime, Anime Club, Anime/Manga, Animemanga, Bleach, Chobits, Dragonball Z, End of Evangelion, Final Fantasy, Full Metal Alchemist, gundam seed, Gundam Seed Destiny, Gundam Wing, Hellsing, Inuyasha, Love Hina, Naruto, Naruto Shippuuden, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Pokemon, Prince of Tennis, Robotech, Wolf’s Rain, Yu Yu Hakusho orrr yugioh

Feel free to add your own. I can’t remember exactly (that’s from a now-disabled ad) but I believe the target audience was around 100k. Single males, 18+, of course. Here, take the creative, too, you greedy bastard:

I ran that particular ad for several months, only in the evening hours and consistently on Thurs, Fri, and Saturday. I would throw in other days randomly as well.

If you have any experience with FB ads, you know that an ad’s effectiveness will dry up if you run it too often. At the peak of this one’s performance, it was getting a CTR of nearly 2%. The all-time CTR (after running it after it had cooled down significantly) was %0.30. I had to pay 11 cents per click to get decent volume, but I could run it at 3 cents without getting a “bid too low” warning from Facebook.

I ran this ad using a URL redirect which some of the time directed to Finding Singles with Neverblue and some of the time to Spicey or Sweet (Asian) with Affiliate.com. Here are the stats from Affiliate.com:

“Main” of course is the subid of the campaign detailed above. “you2b” is shitty YouTube traffic which obviously doesn’t do anything spectacular. “MA” as you can see has a slightly better conversion rate. “MA” stands for “martial arts”. It was an identical campaign except it was targeting males 18+ with martial arts related keywords on their profile. This target was somewhat bigger, but for whatever reason the CTR just wasn’t quite as good and I had to pay around I think something like $0.19-$0.25 per click.

Since I’m feeling generous, here is another creative that was effective with similar campaigns:

Not quite as effective as the first, but still pretty good. Hopefully those two creatives will give you an idea of what works and what you can realistically get approved.

In Conclusion

Like I said, this specific campaign isn’t going to make you rich, because of the low volume. But hopefully it will be that “ice breaker” for someone out there, or at the very least give you a little insight on a successful campaign to inspire you. I’m willing to bet some of you already have some ideas on how to take the fundamentals of this campaign and apply/scale elsewhere.

Best of luck.

EDIT:

I guess it wouldn’t be full disclosure if I didn’t give you the title/body of that ad.

I know there are a lot of anti-Twitterers out there crusading against the rapidly growing Twitter monster, but aside from the ethical debate over whether or not it is socially healthy to be hyper-connected to each other with play-by-play updates of our daily lives, there has also been much discussion on how to monetize this strange new obsession.

I do have a personal twitter account, but I try to keep it separate from business. However, I do have a few additional accounts that I use for marketing purposes.

None of my friends “IRL” are into internet marketing in any capacity whatsoever. The closest is probably a friend I’ve had since kindergarten that used to bank pretty nicely selling bootlegs on eBay back around the turn of the millennium. Just the other day a female friend of mine followed me on Twitter, so I went to check out her page and see who her followers were. Who did I see at the top? John Chow.

I suppose that is one approach. Just follow as many people as you possibly can since you know that some of them will invariably follow you back. Then just speet (spam tweet, I just made that up) all day and wait for the $ to roll in. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not the “hello friends! I want to teach you how to increase your passive income!” type. At least not when my real name and likeness is associated, in any case…

Where I have found success with Twitter is by cultivating a follower base with a sincere interest in whatever it is I’m doing. Many people have found success doing this with celebrity-based Twitter accounts. Unfortunately, some of you have gone as far as impersonating notable personalities. This will work in the short-term, but has no real longevity. On the other hand, acting as some sort of obsessed fan tweeting about the same person all day will also turn people off real quick. So what is the off-white hat solution?

Without revealing any of my awesome Twitter accounts (best one gets around 200-300 new followers per day, and I don’t do shit other than tweet maybe once a day), here are the steps I take when creating and priming a new Twitter account:

• The Name – Obviously very important. Using the exact name of a celebrity/band, etc might be a bit much. Try to incorporate something else into it that gives people the impression that you are the “official” Twitter for that personality, even if it that specific celebrity is not actually the one updating the account. You may or may not want to actually use the word “official”.
• Tweets – Obviously don’t spam crap, especially right off the bat. Just do a quick Google news search to find relevant info and make a tweet about it. Include a link. You can check the official website of your subject for updates as well.
• Be selective about who you follow – Any Twitter savvy user can tell you, your follower:following ratio determines how cool/important you are. Keep your list of people you are following to a minimum. Many Twitter-crazed youngsters will see your impressive ratio and follow you based on that principle alone.

Monetization

Okay, great, you have a ton of followers. Now how do you capitalize? Well, luckily famous people and bands are always selling something that their fans want. Whether it be an album, a DVD, concert tickets, memorabilia, whatever. All of these things can be monetized through the proper affiliate marketing channels. And boy, does Twitter make it easy.

Tiny URL

The fact that Twitter automatically appends just about every URL you post into a Tiny URL is a great blessing. Over the past few years people have become more aware of and more put off by affiliate links. This may have been the fate of Tiny URLs as well, if it weren’t for Twitter making them totally mainstream and acceptable. So you can go ahead and convert that obscenely long iTunes affiliate link through Linkshare into a Tiny URL link, tweet about Joe Blow’s new album release with your link, and the user will have no idea whatsoever that they just clicked through your affiliate link. On top of that, iTunes (or whoever) will have no idea where you are sending the traffic from (unless the referrer leaks…if you’re that paranoid just use a double redirect).

This concludes my Twitter marketing seminar. Sign up as an official consultant now for $50,000. That’s $150,000 off the usual rate. Refer your mother and your grandmother to become consultants and you’ll get your own island.

If you’re not already familiar with phpbay, I’ll give you a moment to slap yourself.

Go on. Right in the face.

Phpbay is an incredibly useful WordPress plugin (API is also available) that allows you to display relevant ebay listings on your websites to earn a commission. In order to use it, you’ll need to be signed up with the Ebay Partner Network. Some people have reported difficulty getting approved by EPN, but there are alternatives available. You can also join the Ebay affiliate program through the Pepperjam Network.

There’s a reason you’ve heard about Phpbay so much around various internet marketing portals: it’s awesome. But instead of just praising it like a lunatic in hopes that you will purchase it through one of my sneakily masked affiliate links, I will instead give you some other useful info that I myself use that will make your phpbay stores even more awesomer.

Ebay Search Results
Depending on the nature of your site, a lot of times users will land on your site and not realize that you’re simply serving them eBay results. As far as I’m concerned, this is a good thing. However, they may try to search for items that you don’t have listings for on your site. If you just have a regular old wordpress sidebar search bar, it’s not going to find what they are looking for unless you’ve included matching content on your site. Wouldn’t it be nice to display ebay results on your site that match their query?

All you have to do is go into search.php and replace some code. Starting with the line:

Delete everything up to:

(including that string) Replace with the following code:

Ta-da. That piece of code is brought to you by Wade himself, creator of PhpBay Pro.

In some cases, your particular theme may not have a search.php, but rather a searchform.php. I have not yet devised a way to make this work with this sort of rogue theme, but as soon as I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know.

Make the Entire Listing Clickable
By default, only the text of your phpbay listings are clickable. Poo on that. Why not make the whole thing clickable? Depending on whether or not you are displaying results in rows or columns, you will need to make the following adjustment to the respective file.

If you’re using row results, you’ll want to edit the file called template.ebay.results, which is located in the “templates” folder inside the phpbay plugin folder. The original file looks like this:

The new, edited file should look like this:

Now, for those of you using column results, you’ll want to be editing template.column.results, located in the same place as the other template file. The original file will look like this:

Go ahead and replace all that with the following code:

There you have it. Now your auction results are completely clickable. Mo’ clicks = mo’ money. But beware, mo’ money = mo’ problems.

Removing Icons
On some sites, I like to go the extra mile to minimize the ebayness of the results displayed. To do this, I simply remove those pesky icons that are so reminiscent of ebay. I almost always get rid of the “But it Now” icons, and I sometimes get rid of the paypal logo. To do so is really simple. You’ll need to edit the same files talked about above, except all you’ll need to do is delete the line of code that calls that particular icon.

In template.ebay.results, you’ll see a string of text that says:

Deleting that line entirely will remove the paypal logo from your listings and not adversely affect anything else. Similarly, deleting:

will effectively remove the bid/buy it now logo.

In template.column.results, you’d simply need to delete

to remove the paypal logo, and so on and so forth.

In a future post I’ll go into detail about how to construct your Phpbay sites in such a way to minimize your bounce rate and maximize your CTR. But for now, it is time to open another bottle of Martinelli’s award winning apple cider.