If you haven’t heard of Drip Feed Blasts (DFB), well then thank your lucky stars that you read my dang blawg. This is one of those tools that a handful of SEO’s are using the dickens out of, but most are hoping to keep quiet so that it doesn’t get adopted by the bumbling retards of the SEO world and subsequently become worthless. Since we all know only the elite read my blog, and the folks from places like Warrior Forum think this place is immoral and far too realistic, it is of course safe for me to promote DFB here.

Those of you who hang out at Wickedfire (the true WF) know about Guerilla. When he’s not schooling people in political/economic debates, he drops golden nuggets of wisdom. He is one of the people behind this awesome new service. If you are growing impatient, you may check out the DFB sales thread on WF…but only if you promise to come back here and read the rest of my post.

What it Does

Ever heard of Xrumer? Of course you have. You already know that it is a somewhat pricey link spamming utility, famous for leaving buttloads of pharmacy type links (not exclusively, of course) on forums all over the internet. Some traditional white-hat SEOs (read: bitch niggaz) frown on this software because they believe it is a one-way ticket to Google purgatory. You already know how I feel about link blasting.

The trouble with Xrumer is that the learning curve is a bit high. Another problem is that, well, you have to use it yourself. F-that, right? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a service where you could just enter your URLs with varying anchor text and schedule it to run daily? Dang…that sure would be nice. But where the shit are you supposed to find such a utopianistic service?

Tha’ts right, DFB. What a smarty pants you are. The DFB interface is about as easy to use as it possibly could be, and it allows you to blast 500, 1000, or 2000 links per day (depending on your subscription level). Pricing is $49/mo, $67/mo, and $99/mo, respectively. Anyone who has ever paid for a single Xrumer blast already knows what a ridiculous value that is. You can create different blasts to run on different days, and you can combine blasts to run together. You can mix and match URLs and anchor text to your heart’s content. I haven’t seen a truly valuable link building service like this available in a very long time. Get it.

Support
Phenomenal. There is a forum where the creators of DFB not only respond to questions, but also contribute valuable SEO tips and strategies.

Pinging
DFB does currently include their own in-house pinging service, but it is still being worked on and isn’t yet 100% functional. In the future I hear there are plans to release a custom pinging solution within DFB from the creator of MegaPinger.

What is this MegaPinger You Speak of?
It is exactly what it sounds like. If you need to ping a ton of URLs, you need MegaPinger. It has proxy support, unlimited URL support, and can support up to 500 threads at once. That’s a lot of support.

Wait Why do I Need to Ping my URLs?
Whether you are building lots of backlinks with DFB, manually, or with some other automated system, it is a very good practice to ping the URLs that contain your backlinks in order to get them indexed efficiently. MegaPinger is by far the best and most cost effective way to do this. Currently you can get a lifetime license for only $27.

Don’t act like you don’t want to know what I’ve been up to. I know you do.

Friday (weekend starts on Friday, rite??) I took a little trip up the 405 fwy to Santa Monica to have lunch with Nicole and Leah from W4. In case you didn’t know, W4 is a newer affiliate network comprised of a bunch of awesome folks, many of which came from Hydra. Truth be told, I never cared much for Hydra. Actually I found them to be downright rude, at times. But it seems like the good people at Hydra went elsewhere (such as W4) and the evil ones stayed behind. That’s the only conclusion I can draw.

I had the tri-tip sandwich and some Belgian beer called Allagash. It was pretty delicious. We spoke of all things Internet. Afterward, I got a chance to meet with W4 co-founder, Jason Durant. He then gave me a large briefcase full of cash and instructed me to create this blog post. Okay not really but I did get some pens and even some sweet W4 sunglasses. I meant to take more pictures but somehow this was all I got:

Anyhoo, they’re really good people and you should probably do business with them. Here is my affiliate link again in case you missed it.

Later that night I went to a friend’s house in Long Beach and don’t remember much of what happened there.

Saturday, I got my Scrapebox on. If you haven’t heard of this phenomenal tool, thank your lucky stars you read my blog. Some folks don’t like the fact that people like me are blabbing about this tool because of the fact that it is very awesome and could easily become much less effective if too many newbs started abusing the hell out of it. It’s basically a comment spamming utility…but it is so much more. I’m not going to get into the specifics of it. Just trust me, it rocks. If you have no idea what you’re doing, I don’t recommend you use it because you could very well end up harming your sites by using it incorrectly. But for the more seasoned SEO, this tool is a Godsend.

Saturday night I went and saw my old guitar teacher play at some seedy bar downtown. Loved it.

Sunday was a bit of a lazy day. Some of it was spent at the coffee house, some was spent with good company skipping rocks and smoking weed admiring the Pacific Ocean. Here is a camera phone pic I took:

Then I came home and started making a blogpost to schedule for this morning, pretending as if I actually wrote it now and not Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what I did last night, because I do not know. Not yet, anyway. Does that make sense?

Speaking of Monday…Monday gets a bad rap. 9-5ers can’t really fully appreciate Mondays. Trust me, they can be pretty sweet. I could go on and on about what I like about Mondays, but a little punk band by the name of NOFX already did that for me. Indulge me, if you will, and check out the following song entitled, “Thank God it’s Monday”.

Happy Monday!

So, basically, I went to the A4D meetup in San Diego on Saturday, left for Vegas the next day, spent four days and three nights in a drunken stupor, and now here I am trying to remember what happened on Saturday so I could squeeze a blog post out of it.

First of all, if you wanted to go, you should have went. The lineup alone should have indicated that it would be a very valuable experience. That said, I didn’t even stay for the whole thing, and I took the liberty of a 30 min lunch break right in the middle of the thing (look, if I was any sort of professional, I’d have a real job).

Luckily, I managed to take some notes. I’m not sure if I was taking notes because I thought I was going to forget the info I was receiving, or if I just felt compelled to because people around me were. Using these notes and my hazy memory (I was actually drinking during the meetup as well…this blog is really more or less a cry for help), I will now attempt to go over what I saw.

First Speaker: DK from Purposeinc

Seemed like a nice enough guy, but was visibly intimidated by the room. Maybe he wasn’t expecting so many aff marketing pros to show up. He referenced info he had “got from Shoe” a couple times, which was enough to make half the room take him less seriously. He also went into detail about testing creatives for Facebook ads, showing case studies with different creatives and what sort of CTR each one got. Trouble is, only like $7 was spent on each test. With people in the room spending five figures a day on FB alone (if not more), this seemed a little silly to me.

To make matters worse, towards the end of his presentation he casually mentions that he has NDAs in place with Facebook. This was in response to Jason inquiring about shadier methods of getting ads approved. Although he wasn’t willing to suggest any new tricks or system manipulations, he seemed open to the discussion. “Anything said at this conference will not leave this conference by me”, DK reassured us. But, still, c’mon.

Although I wasn’t impressed with his Facebook know-how (or conflicts of interest), I must say that DK knew his shit when it came to local campaigns. It was evident that local was his strong suit. Probably why he saved it for last.

Hagan – Talkin’ ‘Bout Leadgen

I liked this guy. At first it seemed like no one was paying attention but eventually they realized he knew what he was talking about and settled down. The gist of Hagan’s presentation was about how continuity offers are no longer sustainable, and how leadgen is the foreseeable future of AM.

He had a nice little breakdown of how to presell offers based on payout that I think might be helpful for a lot of folks, especially the nooblings. Here is that breakdown in a nutshell:

- Low Paying Offers (Email/Zip Submits, etc) – Direct Link
- Medium Payouts (Insurance, Edu, etc) – Short forms/bridge pages with a short pitch, big call to action.
- High Payouts (Mortgage, that kind of jazz) – Long pitch, very few calls to action.

He also offered a list of books that he thinks affiliate marketers should be familiar with:

1. Ca$hvertising
2. Simple and Direct
3. Blink
4. Extraordinary Popular Delusions

MikeTPowell on PPV

After I stumbled back in to the Legends conference room, having just enjoyed a tuna melt at MaryJane’s Cafe in the Hard Rock Hotel, Mike was already well into his presentation on running PPV campaigns. My notes started getting short and vague at this point. One point that Mike stressed repeatedly is that you absolutely must use a landing page when running PPV, regardless of the offer. If you think about the nature of PPV traffic, this makes a lot of sense.

The Lawyer

There was a surprise appearance by Rob Berkowitz, a senior associate attorney at Coast Law Group, a firm that A4D works closely with. Rob went into detail about how we are all 100% guilty for stealing images and ignoring trademark laws, and how we will all pay dearly for it one day. He seemed like a pretty nice guy, though. For a lawyer.

The Rest

I swore on a bible that Nickycakes was carrying in his back pocket that I wouldn’t disclose any of teh bigg secretz. Same goes for Smax and Dr Ngo.

Guess you better come to the next fucking meetup!

<3

Warning: I will now use my blog for trivial and counterproductive revenge purposes.

Some time ago, ZenSix (a fine and respectable hosting company) sold all of their cPanel based shared hosting accounts to a company called VPSoutlet. This meant that the shared hosting account I currently had with Zensix became the property of VPSoutlet. What did this mean for me? Well, at the time, it appeared it didn’t mean anything except the annual invoice would have a different company name on it. Boy, was I wrong.

I use this account for a couple PhpBay sites and also for some software and a bunch of redirects. It is not by any means a hub for my primary web raping activity, but it is important to me, nonetheless.

I’ve had a support ticket pending with VPSoutlet since January. Priority: High. I have also attempted to email their support and have received zero response. Not even an automated response.

Naturally, there is no phone number listed. There is, however, a live chat button that always indicates live chat support available. Trouble is, the link doesn’t work.

Basically, you guys suck. Sorry to break it to you. You will get no link from me in this post, either. If you’re looking for a new, affordable shared hosting solution, look elsewhere. These guys are teh suck. I know it’s dirt cheap and I shouldn’t expect world class service, but there ARE cheap shared hosts in the same price range that actually know how to respond to a support ticket. Believe it or not.

Peace.

No, this is not a paid review. Yes, I will be dropping affiliate links. To quote NickyCakes (via Twitter), “I always chuckle when I get accused of using affiliate links on an affiliate marketing blog.” Nonetheless, this is my honest review. Like it or not.

I opened a VPS hosting account with Jaguar PC about six months ago. Although their dirt cheap prices had me skeptical about the quality of service, I decided to give it a shot anyway (yes I realize that sounds like a scammy review site review comment). I needed a home for some new phpbay sites.

I was referred to Jaguar by a friend who told me they were the best host I would find at such a cheap price, even though his account had been terminated for some shady shenanigans. Because of this, if you’re looking for a new host to facilitate your unethical ebony hat business practices, I regret to inform you that Jaguar PC may not be your best option.

Not for Noobs

Although the sign up/payment/setup process was relatively easy, they don’t hold your hand and walk you through it. No colorful advertisements, no hard upsells, no laymen step by step tutorials, no GoDaddy.

I purchased the cheapest Linux VPS package with Fantastico ($2/mo) plus 5 additional IPs which runs me about 28 bucks a month. Right now, if you sign up for the same fully managed package using coupon code VPS10YEARS, it includes the following:

• Root Access
• Unlimited Domains
• 320mb Guaranteed Ram
• 25gb Disk Space
• Choice of cPanel, Interworx, DirectAdmin, Plesk
• Some other crap I can’t remember

Extra IPs are $1 a piece (billed annually) and come in blocks of five. There are plenty of other add-ons available as well.

Support

I was expecting support to suck ass because of the affordability of this host. They do not offer phone support, but they are pretty freakin’ quick when it comes to responding to tickets, and they seem to know what they’re doing. Most issues are resolved in 1-2 tickets (in my experience).

Customer Service

Fine and dandy. When an attorney from a rather large company contacted my host about one of my infringing sites, Jaguar PC was kind enough to contact me and let me know about the situation FIRST, before going and deleting my shit. I’ve had experiences with other hosts where they will not only fold like little bitches and delete my entire site and its associated databases, but they will also delete every single other site on the account. Since Jaguar PC was courteous about it and disclosed everything to me without revealing any of my personal info to the attorney in question, I went ahead and moved the site to a different host (overseas) to alleviate them of any further headaches. This extension of courtesy is one of the main reasons I decided to write this review in the first place.

Why You Need a VPS

If you’re still using shared hosting, consider that a problem. If you don’t want to spend the money on a dedicated server, VPS is the way to go.

The problem with shared hosting is that you are sharing an IP address with a bunch of random sites. If there are a ton of shitty spammy sites on the same IP as yours (which is very likely since you’re on a shared host), it is my belief as well as that of several other SEOs (first and last time I ever refer to myself as one) that Google penalizes all the sites on the IP it knows is notorious for bullshit. I’ve had legitimate sites that just couldn’t rank no matter what I did on shared hosting accounts that leaped to the front of the SERPs after moving them to a dedicated IP (or at least an IP I controlled with few sites on it).

Now that I think about it, this site (offwhitehat) is on an old shitty GoDaddy shared hosting account. There are probably tons of worthless sites on this IP. I just don’t really care all that much about it to bother moving it. Maybe one day.

Well, there you have it. That’s my review. I’m outta this nerd fest.


EDIT: I should also mention that in the six months I’ve been with Jaguar PC, I haven’t experienced any downtime whatsoever. Granted I don’t check my sites every 10 seconds, but there have been no major outages that I know of (or minor, for that matter).

Well, finally some good news from the Ebay Partner Network. I don’t want to even talk about the upcoming shift to “Quality Click Pricing” because it’s just going to upset me. Perhaps I’ll have a future post all about optimizing your phpBay sites for the new system, but first I’m going to have to figure that out for myself!

In any event, EPN recently introduced four new programs: Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany.

Why is Germany in bold!? Well, because Germany is Ebay’s second largest market after of course the United States. This means that all sorts of untapped niches and microniches can potentially be exploited over in good old Deutschland.

Pic (sorta) related:

It also opens up some domaining opportunities if you’re thinking about registering .de domains. Although there is definitely competition in the .de domaining game, it’s nowhere near that of the .com industry. However, keep in mind that .de is the second most popular TLD in the world with an estimated six million .de domains already registered.

If you’re interested in searching for a good .de domain in any particular niche, here is what I recommend you do:

1. Determine the main keyword related to your niche
2. Use Google Language Tools to translate that word into German
3. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to check out how many searches that keyword and related keywords are pulling in [use exact match]
4. Snag a .de domain

Unfortunately, my most favorite registrar, Namecheap, does not offer .de registration at this time. Here are some alternatives (prices/currency conversions obviously reflect the time of this writing, don’t expect me to update this shit all the time!):

1. GoDaddy* – $17.99/yr (PayPal accepted)
2. iWantMyName.com* – $29.00/yr
3. EuroDNS* - apprx. $26.23/year (€16/yr plus €2 setup fee)
4. iDotz**- $19.95/yr
5. DomainDiscount24.com – $10.39 (€7.14)/yr
6. Joker.com – $9.16/yr
7. Europe Registry – $13.11 (€9)/yr

But I Heard You Have to Live in Germany to Register a .DE domain!?

Not the case, not the case. That myth is derived from the fact that the administrative contact on each .de domain registered must be located in Germany. Some registrars offer to act as the administrative contact on your behalf, thus circumventing this little bump in the road. However, some registrars will charge an additional fee for this (and some may not offer this service at all).

The registrars with the * listed above are the ones that include an administrative contact in Germany with your registration.

**Idotz.net will provide a German administrative contact for an additional fee.

The others either don’t offer this service or charge an additional fee (you’ll have to do your own research you bastard). Or you could just use your long lost cousin that lives in Germany as your administrative contact.

Only one I’ve used myself is GoDaddy (I know, I know). They might not be my favorite registrar but when it comes to international domains, I’d rather deal with their spammy site/terrible support and hopefully not have any further problems. Coincidentally, they’re also the only registrar listed above that I have an active affiliate relationship with. Weird.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that if you plan on building and optimizing sites for German traffic, it’s imperative that you have the site(s) HOSTED over there. Having your international sites hosted on IPs in the countries they are targeting helps a ton for ranking on search engines specific to that country. As far as which host to use, do your dang homework. As of now I use a UK host called Nativespace for all my European e-pillaging. That’s pretty close to Germany, right!?

I want to start this off by saying that if it wasn’t for Matt Gibson, most of my shit would fall apart. I have never purported to be tech savvy. In fact, I think I know just about enough to get by. You should see the caveman process I use to create new sites. But alas, I digress…

Recently Matt released a nifty program called Guide Site Builder and was kind enough to give me a copy for review. If you’re anything like me (and if not, you should aspire to be), you’re probably wondering “what the fuck does it do?”…

Basically Guide Site Builder (herein referred to simply as GSB) is a very convenient way to churn out simple sites for the purposes of list building. Once you’ve got the thing installed (which is pretty painless), you upload one of the templates and bam, your mini site is live.

The two-page template allows your visitors to learn about whatever it is you’re offering them, and then lets them sign up (by providing their email) and then download whatever the hell it is you’re giving them. Most people I would imagine would use this for ebooks, but you can use your imagination.

Now, once you drive some traffic to the GSB powered site and collect a slew of targeted emails, GSB allows you to download all of that data in a nicely compiled little .CSV file. Pop that thing into Excel (or another program if you’re a weirdo), and then admire all of that marketable data you have collected.

Hopefully I don’t need to explain to you why collecting emails from your targeted visitors is important.

If this sounds like something that will help you grow your business more efficiently, you can pick up a copy of GSB here for only $60.

Have fun.

As the internet marketing world evolves, so do the different tools and services we have at our disposal. While the vast majority are steaming piles of poo, there are a few that actually come in handy and can help you increase your bottom line (that’s your monies, noob).

All good things supposedly come in threes, so here are three that I recommend. Please note that these are NOT paid reviews, and I am not using any sort of affiliate links here. These are all products that I have used myself.

KBlinker – Link Management Utility

KBlinker is a great tool to better control and organize your links. It has an awesome geo-ip redirection feature built in that was a Godsend for myself. You see, I have my stink plastered all over the internet in the form of static links I have dropped over time. Many of these links still consistently bring in leads/sales. Problem is, a lot of them are on sites that get international traffic. If I have one link redirecting to an offer that only accepts say US and Canadian traffic, then those Australian clicks are going to waste. Most likely they are redirected to some completely irrelevant or lame offer (Webfetti, anyone?).

So instead, I have these links point to my domain that has KBlinker installed, where I have everything setup to re-route specific countries to the appropriate offers. Of course, it takes time to find relevant international offers and maintain the thing (since offers get dropped all the time), but at the end of the day, I’m making money off of international traffic that would have otherwise gone to waste.

Check out KBlinker.com to learn more about its capabilities. You can currently get a single domain license (which is all you really need) for $50.

Article Drip

One problem a lot of affiliates face when building sites and trying to get them to rank is of course link building. We know that Google likes to see your site gaining backlinks steadily and consistently, but it can be difficult to arrange it so that links appear (get indexed) gradually when you’re buying directory submissions or social bookmarking packages. If too many links appear pointing to your site in too short a period of time, Google may frown upon this.

Another issue we face is with article marketing. We know that having articles relevant to our niche posted on several sites with backlinks is a good thing. Trouble is, it can be very time consuming or expensive to come up with UNIQUE articles for the various article sites so as to get the most value out of those links.

Andrew Scherer was nice enough to provide me with a free review of his new Dripped and Spun Article Marketing Service. This service is a great solution to the problems detailed above.

All you need to do is submit your URL, title, keywords, etc, and you will have a unique article written for you and then slowly submitted to 100 directories over the course of a month. In order to make them unique, the article is manually spun using interchangeable keywords to make each article original. Since the article spinning is done manually, the spun articles actually come out nice and readable (unlike most of the auto-spun articles I’ve seen).

This service is currently going for $44.97 and you can order it here.

Twitter Snipe

Twitter marketing has really taken off in the past couple months. I even saw #Acai Berry as a trending topic the other day. Before Twitter gets ridiculously saturated with spam, there is still money to be made.

My approach to twitter marketing is a bit different than what seems to be popular, and this tool isn’t really conducive to it, but I’m sure there are a lot of you out there that can think of several ways to utilize it.

Twitter Snipe basically makes it a breeze to follow people that are likely to be interested in whatever it is you’re promoting. For instance, if you’re pushing a weight loss offer, you can enter the keyword “diet” and have Twitter Snipe automatically follow anyone and everyone who is tweeting that keyword. The fact that it is nearly in real-time is what I think makes this tool so powerful. Right when some young lady tweets about how she wants to try a new diet, like magic, there you are following with your interesting profile relevant to her current interests (and interesting links).

What sets Twitter Snipe apart from the other Twitter tools out there is that it has a very handy “unfollow” feature built in. I talked before about how it just isn’t appealing to have 10x less followers than users you are following. In order to weed out those who ignored your follow and are highly unlikely to follow back in the future, you can remove them all with a simple click of the mouse.

In order to use Twitter Snipe, you’ll need to install it on your own server running PHP 5.0 or above. Installation is pretty painless. A copy of Twitter Snipe currently costs $77. Get it here.

Alright, I believe that’s enough plugging for today!