Black Hat Experiments is a new section on the blog where I talk about ideas I (or someone else) had that seem like a good idea. I haven’t scaled them, tested them, or really done anything – I just think it’s a good idea. Here is the link to the category section where you can “see” them all. Black Hat Experiment Category. Side Note: Guest posts are welcome to BHD right now – either for this section, script contributions, or discussions. It’s a great way to get some exposure to your blog, service, etc… I don’t charge for guest posts, and I won’t take ones that just promote some service. Contact me if you are interested.
Black Hat Experiments – Volume 1 (forum auto generation)
A few weeks ago I purchased something (normally I never purchase anything unless I know I’m going to use it) that I knew I didn’t have time for. It was a “beta” price or a discount or something that made me snatch it up… because I’m GOING to abuse the crap out of this thing as soon as I get the time. I’m not suggesting you go out and get it — unless you have the time, inclination, and resources to make it work.
It’s basically a forum scraper. It takes a standard install of PHPBB3 (a open source forum platform) and scrapes based of keywords to fill the thing up. I’ve ran the first version (and wasn’t happy). It just scraped things that were to broad…. but they released an update that does keyword matching and it cleared that up pretty well.
let’s face it – when you are scraping you don’t always get what you want, so my expectations aren’t to high.
It’s called forum generator. The support as far as I can tell is pretty decent. It’s programmed with codeignitor or cakephp (i forget) platform so it’s pretty stable and you won’t have a lot of installation issues. It’s had one update, and apparently another one is on the way.
When I first saw it, I assumed folks would be using it just for spider food, or a way to get your CPA ads in front of some long tail keywords. I’ve thought about it a lot more and I’ve come up with a few additional ways to really get some ummpff out of a few dozen installs…. let’s talk about those right now.
In the light of full disclosure – I get nothing out of this. It’s not an affiliate product, I don’t know the owners, they aren’t my friends, we didn’t go skiing in the Alps last summer either.
Idea 1: TOTAL MARKET SATURATION
This will take a few dozen installs all on similar themes. I’m thinking breeds of dogs for the example. Each “breed” will have it’s own domain. Then we will break things down a little further with subdomains of it’s own install of a forum. You would end up with goldenretriever.com , breeders.goldenretrievers.com , grooming.goldenretrievers.com, etc…
Each subdomain will have it’s own install of phpbb3 and forum generator running on it. Then in the same subdomain we will also have a install of wordpress going on…. automated posting of course. You could make the blog the root of the subdomain or put the forum in front. I don’t think it matters. Just make sure your blog is pinging.
(warning – I would expect this to be pretty intensive and a vps or dedicated would probably be required for just 50 or 100 installs of this — since we are going a bit further spending the $ and time on a test this big is a big risk).
So you’ve got everything installed – you’ve got your forum generating posts, you’ve got your blogs installed. Guess what? You can set up phpbb3 to have feeds for recent posts, forum categories, etc… I don’t remember if it’s part of the default install or if you have to add a plug in in to do it – but you can. Take that feed and plug it into whatever you are using to auto post to your blog.
Each time your blog posts the feed items it will ping the update services – and of course bring traffic (spiders) to your blog and your forum.
Monetize however you will…. except for adsense. I almost think that you could do well just running interspercials from adbright 
.
Idea 2: Let’s really sink some money in.
Idea 2 is really the same as idea 1… but with a money sink built into it. You see if you have a forum with just scraped content you could have issues down the road with a manual review from google. You can actually pay people to post in your forums all day long…. and of course all their posts break up the scraping. have them start threads and answer them, etc…
Idea 3: Hacking PHPBB3
I haven’t done much with phpbb3 – but I used the hack the heck out of phpbb2 installs. It’s so easy to open up the .tpl (template) files and insert images, stuff cookies, put links and anchor text into the parts of it. Pull in rss feeds and display them at the bottom of every post…. whatever you want you can probably do with a little effort. One of my favorite things to do with phpbb2 was to fill them up with images. Lot’s and lot’s of images…. since a “USER” posted them you have a small amount of protection from places like getty images. Each of those images would link somewhere else, have anchor text, etc… and google (msn loves pictures too – hint) would eat them up.
It would be very easy to hack into your forum themes, add some rss feeds for your other sites, run forum generator for a bit, and then pay someone to make fake posts/moderate for you. Not to sound cheap but I’ve paid amoderator for one of our karate forums pennies for years now. When I approached him he said he wanted 50 bucks a month. He’s made thousands of posts/users etc… and he manages the real people that come in. I’ve given him a number of bonuses and give him about half the $ the forum makes — but he would probably do this for free for the power trip (hope your not reading this bud). The extra money isn’t his concern and wasn’t part of the deal — but I don’t want him going anywhere
Conclusion
I’m not going to post another idea until you guys/gals give me a couple comments here. I’m sure one of you has an awesome idea or two.
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