Rogue Domainer

Those are my favorite 2 words in the world, Be Prepared and a philosophy we should all live by. But many of us overlook the fact that the Search Engines are not the only source of converting traffic available. Instead of really being internet marketers, most of what we do, even with our white hat sites is dependent on the algorithms of the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo, & MSN) and their menstrual cycle. This keeps us in the mentality of Seo’s, but it forces us to rely on a single traffic source, that could in the end ultimately bring our sites down at their discretion and bite us in the ass.

This is why so many SEO’s turn to Blackhat, because in all honesty and reality it is a lot quicker, safer, and steadier way to generate traffic. We do not have to compromise our money sites with aggressive SEO tactics that might be considered Gray by Google. Because let’s face it Google considerer’s pretty much any SEO that will get you ranking a gray area. Changing business tactics to become more of an independent traffic generating entity should be a requirement of all internet marketers, because one day that day will come when you wake up, check your stats and see no sales, then check your ranking, and see you’ve dropped off the page.

Deciding to allocate resources to build a non reliant network to generate traffic so that you do not need to rely upon the Search Engines and their mood swings for traffic, should be a top priority for any serious web 2.0 business. Here is 10 Methods, that could hold you over, if Google ever decided to drop you.

1. Build a list. Email marketing is a great way to upsell and cross sell products to customers. If your a merchant you already have the customers email anyway, why not put it to use in a small email marketing campaign. Conversions are often a large percentage better than general site visitors, if a customer has previously bought something from you. Since you know the customer is willing to buy your “type” of products, this makes it twice as easy to sell to them.

2. Exploit Social Networking. You mind as well, besides the fact that there are still a few social networks out there that don’t use “nofollow” these social networks often have a large userbase. And give you the ability to target customers in your niche, that might not have ever knew about your product, but would be willing to purchase it.

3. Have an active blog. By blogging weekly, you can personalize your site and give reassurance of your legitimacy to your customers. Not only is this a great way to generate inbound links, and rank for longtail keywords, but it also can spread the word about your business, and website through your comments on other blogs. Using blogsearch on google, you can find bloggers interested in your particular niche, and invite them to do a post about your product. Also readers of other blogs can find your products through your blog comments.

4. Social Bookmarking A good story can generate a lot of traffic for your site, unfortunately regarding conversions and sales, social bookmarking is generally shit. But it still puts a product, name, or site in the back of the mind of a potential customer, which could be more inclined to purchase from you in the future.

5. Forum Promotion This is a very valuable source of conversions. Niche forums can bring in loads of traffic and sales, whether you own them, or just post in them.

6. Posting to Classifieds can generally bring in some traffic depending on the niche. If it is the right niche, it will bring in an enormous amount of traffic, if not, it should still bring in some.

7. Yahoo answers, answers.com, & answerbag Answering questions on “question answer sites, can bring in loads of traffic. Even creating and answering your own questions can bring in traffic.

8. Wiki’s: Secretly inserting a link into a wiki, can bring boatloads of targetted traffic to your site. But make sure to make a relavant edit to the wiki before adding your site, or your link won’t last long.

9. Get a presence on Video Sharing sites. Even if your company has no videos, you can still make relative comments to videos. If you have videos, that is even better as people will watch your videos, and hopefully be inspired to purchase your product.

10. GoViral: Create something funny or interesting related to your product. Going viral can employ all the previously mentioned methods, or just some of them. But can generate more traffic than any of the previously mentioned methods combined.

For a while, I have had people exploiting yahoo answers for me to generate sales and click throughs, in the beginning I had been doing it myself, but It soon became a time eater so I had it outsourced. The traffic is just as targeted as craigslist, and great for affiliate sales, it converts twice as good as regular SERP traffic, about at the same rates as targeted Craigslist ads.

I make a lot more with affiliates (PPA (Pay Per Action) and PPS (Pay Per Sale)), then I ever will with monetizing the Y answers traffic with adsense. However I do use adsense to monetize informational sites that I link to in my reply’s to questions. I make a fairly decent amount of pocket change weekly with this, by just having a guy reply to questions in a given format then linking back to sites built specifically for yahoo answers, that is either redirected to affiliates, or has a simple table comparing affiliate products on them.

OK, so here is the basics of how it works, and how you can make money off of it.

1. First search yahoo answers, and see what others are doing. What kind of commercial products are being sold or asked about. And yes, about 10% of all answers for commercial products are all spam. We’ll get on how to deal with our competitors in a second.
2. Pick 5-10 good niches that have affiliates for them. Could be a niche for legal highs or prosthetic legs, it really doesn’t matter as long as there are at least 25 minimum open questions about it at any given time. Use your common sense people. If someone is asking about something like an airplane there not gonna use a suggestion from yahoo answers to by it. Be realistic about which affiliate offers you choose.
3. Set up your landing pages for your chosen niches. Try to use different domains, people usually set them up different pages on the same domain which in my humble opinion is a mistake. The goal is to make the site look as real as possible, without setting off any flags to the users who go to your site. This may take anywhere from a couple hours to a few days, it all depends on you. Make sure they look pretty, and sound intelligent to the ignorant and real to the knowing.
4. Create your accounts in Yahoo Answers. Don’t worry about your IP, as it seems to be a non issue in banning with them. I’d say you should have at least 50, but if your lazy I wouldn’t do less than 20. The goal is to not have all of your answers (replies) on one profile have links to the same domain. I would vary each profile to suggest each link over time. For example not to have 1 profile answering questions about niche1 all linking to myniche1site.com. Better to have each profile answering questions and linking to myniche1.com, myniche2.com, myniche3.com, etc. This way another user looking at your profile won’t be able to report you for spam just by looking at the first page of all your answers. Don’t be stupid also, make all your affiliate sites in a different format & theme.
5. Now create your “copy” if you will. It should be in the following format:
   • Dear **********(person name who asked the question)Hmm…….great question. Wasn’t too sure of the answer myself when I saw it. But looking around I found a site on *****(your niche) that has what you need in detail, and some other info on it. Hope this question helps, as I know you asking it helped me. I got one as soon as I found the site above, hope it helps you. If it doesn’t send me a message and I’ll try to help you out with it some more.Best Regards,
     ************

   Make sure to write a couple of these different types of copy and vary them around a bit. Also try to be as polite as possible and don’t worry about overdoing it.

6. Now you have everything ready. And are ready to start answering questions in your niche on Y Answers, and ready to get paid.

From an SEO Perspective Yahoo seems to love the links and eat them up, while google seems to not care at all for them. Be wary of how spammy your messages are, it is a lot easier to get a profile ban on Y answers than Craigslist, and when you get a ban all your responses are deleted. It is better to generate new profiles every month, since these previous reply answers you have given drive recurring traffic from Y answers that turn into recurring sales.

I had this question awhile back, and nobody I asked seemed to know the answer to it. So I decided to do a small experiment on it awhile back.

The question was, “Does Google count html links on Javascript redirect Pages?”

Here are the findings of that “study”

1.The answer is Yes, and the results that lead to that conclusion are below. The first experiment was if googlebot would follow a html link on a javascript redirect page, and the obvious answer was yes it would follow the html link.

2.The 2nd experiment was if you could get a new page indexed in Google by just using html links on js redirect pages. Working from a brand new page on a free host and after creating some text links on some of my wh sites to the redirect page on the freehost, and pinging the redirect page for a week I got the page indexed. So that tells me that Google not only follows the html links on js redirect pages, but that they obviously count for something.
3.The 3rd experiment was to see if I could get a completely separate “money page” on the free host indexed and ranking in google for a low competition term (competing sites, had around 50-60 backlinks for the whole domain) with just links on js redirect pages. So I created 1 html link on 100 js redirect pages (for a total of 100 links) from 7 different domains with a domain root of pr 3 or higher. The redirect pages were brand new and not indexed, so I preceded to ping each 1 from separate ip’s 4 times a day. Within 1-2 weeks (i didn’t check the page for 2 weeks, but it was somewhere in there) The “money page” was ranking not in the top spot, but on the first page for the desired keyword.

This tells us that html links on js redirect pages, do count towards some linkjuice. The amount that it counts for would require far more time intensive testing, that would more than likely be a waste of time. There was a reason behind this experiment, and if you can guess it than there are maybe a couple hundred sites you can hit up for free links 24/7, without them looking like blatant spam and being a different type of link.

And of course yahoo does too:

Javascript redirect Page: www3.sympatico.ca/jasonfurlong/professional.htm

Destinaton of js redirect: http://www.jasonfurlong.com

And yahoo backlinks of js redirect page: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com…

I’m switching to the roguedomainer.com domain, as little of what I do is “blackhat” anymore and merely just competitive marketing. So hello to the new domain, and I’ll be updating it weekly.