Black Hat SEO Digest

Pneumonia – in the clear!

Figured this was the fastest way to get the word out there since I’ve talked to a few readers through e-mail, comments, etc… and I just don’t have time to respond to anything other than customer questions at the moment.

On the 26th I took my little girl to the ER. figuring she had the flu.  Went from getting sick, to shaking and being non-responsive in a matter of hours.  Turns out she has Pneumonia and it all happened in about 12 hours.  I was really shocked because I always thought that you had to be really sick to get pneumonia in the first place — shocker for me.

There are a few other kids in the ER with the same problems so it’s something that’s going around I suppose.  She’s going to be fine – fever has broke, she is giggling and happy, etc…  Really tuckered out, but unless something changes I think they will release her tomorrow or the next day.  She is starting to get bored – so those of you know that a bored kid attached to things pumping liquid into her is a bad thing.  We’ve got so much tape around the iv port that I think we will have to cut it off with a blow torch

I’ve answered all the e-mail business related in my in box – and I’ll answer any personal ones tomorrow at some time.

Cash in on your Competitors’ Work – SpyFu Ad History

Popularity: 1% [?]

How to make your own Twitter Poster in PHP with Curl

Twitter offers a handy dandy API for posting to itself.  It’s not hard to work with (you just have to organize your data the right way).

You need to have a few variables set up prior to running this.

$message  (what you are posting to twitter — a day or so ago I provided the code to make tinyurls)

$twitter_user =  Your twitter Username
$twitter_password =  Your twitter password

If you have those three variables set you can call the code below and post to twitter with their api url and a wee bit of curl.  Here is the code to do it:

$twitter_api_url = “http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml?status=”.urlencode(stripslashes(urldecode($message)));
$twitter_data = $message;
$ch = curl_init($twitter_api_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $twitter_data);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, “{$twitter_user}:{$twitter_password}”);
$twitter_data = curl_exec($ch);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($ch);
//Let’s print out where we posted and what!

echo ‘Posting Message: ‘.$message.’<br> to <br> http://www.twitter.com/’.$twitname.”;
// Let’s print out an error message if things didn’t go well.
if ($httpcode != 200) {
echo “<strong>Don’t Panic!</strong> Something went wrong, and the tweet wasn’t posted.  You Failed.”;
}

That’s really it.  It will post your message to twitter.  You can store your variables in an array, or a database, or a text file.  Along with all your messages and have it go do it’s thing.

Cash in on your Competitors’ Work – SpyFu Ad History

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tags: post to twitter php

Why I market with Twitter now — answered!

I’ve gotten about a dozen e-mails about “WHY” I’m marketing with twitter.  The answer is “REAL TIME SEARCH”.  Google is changing the game (again) and showing recent results for keyword and phrase searches.  Guess where one of the favorite places is?  You guessed it – twitter!

Twitter Promotion Script is what I’ve been using to get hundreds of visitors a day to product pages that probably wouldn’t have gotten a click that day.  When you are dealing with large datafeed driven sites many of the pages will NEVER get indexed — but your twits will.  People scrape twitter by keyword as well.

Basically while there isn’t much “SEO” value in a twit with a tiny url, it does result in more spiders visiting your site, other sites scraping you, and you also can end up in real time search results.
It’s a no brainer really, but you don’t want to try to do it manually.  That’s why I set up the script to deal with the genders of your twitter accounts, and have it mix in little non promotional blurbs.

Cash in on your Competitors’ Work – SpyFu Ad History

Popularity: 2% [?]