Give me a keyword or phrase and tell me to rank it – I’m good to go.

Tell me to build a network – I’m good to go.

Have me investigate what needs to be done to get sites to rank – I’m good to go.

Ask me to meet with someone in person – I’m NOT good to go.

If I was to be honest with myself I would have to say that I dread meeting with clients, talking over the phone, etc…  On most days my “big” adventure is going to walmart, the store, or taking my kids to whatever activity.  It’s a whole different ballpark when I’ve got to shave, get dressed in something nice, and actually go “sell” something.

The selling part isn’t what I find hard.  I don’t do hard sells – it’s not in my personality.  I was however a plumber for about 10 years.  During that time I got comfortable telling folks that something was shot and it was going to cost thousands of dollars.  In some cases (imagine the cost for digging up your entire back yard, putting in pumps, a drain field, etc..) the cost was in the 30k range and we were going to tear up your pretty landscaping too.

It’s really not difficult.  You just act like it’s a no different than selling them a soda for $1.65.  How you perceive the value of the service your offering is what is going to carry over.  If your like me and don’t have the ability to try and turn shit into shinola – it’s even easier.  If I tried to over inflate my off line services I wouldn’t be able to carry it off.

The best part is that my prices are way more than fair – but equate to a tremendous dollar per hour value.  Why?  I run a small shop, with little overhead on the seo side of things.  I meet with a client and tell them it’s going to be 5k to design their site, fill it up with the content THEY provide, do a little seo on it, and then work on rankings for one month.  I’m still cheaper than every single website development firm they have talked to locally.

I’m confident my prices are fair, that carries across to confidence in my abilities (which I have), which usually results in a sale.  Usually for everything I ask for – why? I’m the expert not them.

There is another way to project that expert status – and it’s expensive but ohh so worth it.  I’ve got business cards, folders, plans, outlines, etc..  all packaged up and I just hand them to the clients.  They cost about 9 dollars for everything in one, and I only give it to you after we’ve talked about prices, vetted you, and are on our way to finishing things up.

It’s got your contract inside it.

It’s got my cards inside it (20 of them with the clients name already printed on the back…. I do free work in return for referrals.)

It’s got question and answer sheets.

It’s got a form to fill out with all the parts their site will need.

It’s got an example workflow for a fictional client so they can understand how long things are going to take and the fact that input is required from them at certain stages (they hold it up — it’s their fault not mine).

Staples, vistaprint, and kinkos are all my best buds.  Vistaprint is great pricing to try new cards out – that’s about all I use them for.  Kinkos and staples literally have folks there to help you design and layout everything. (kinkos is better if you have one -but more expensive).

It’s going to cost some money to get things made – and your going to keep making changes.  Before you go that route do some work with off line clients and make sure your comfortable working with off line clients.  A great way to get started is to do some work at cost for some influential people in your area.

Or just do some of the things in the black hat experimental section here and walk in with proof your an expert.

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Polls and Hot Trends – Using Auto Blogs to Clean Up!

FIrst what’s up with hot trends?

I’m sure by now you are aware of Google Trends.  If you aren’t – or don’t quite get it,  google trends provides you with the top search terms for the recent couple of hours.   If you are autoblogging using these terms you show up in googles blog search and get traffic.  You also get links back from *(via trackbacks) from other sites on the same hot topic bringing you in more traffic.

Why mess with a poll?

Many marketers use polls as a way of “tricking” folks into signing up for a CPA ad.  I’m sure you’ve seen those lovely ads that say things like:  “Is Madonna Really Sleeping with the Lakers?” Click here to vote and win an ipod.

It then takes them to a fake poll, and then they fill out the cpa offer for a free ipod.

The marketer gets a couple bucks and life goes on.

How to bring it all together and have it make sense.

So most people using hot trends to auto blog use polls but they only use one per site.  With a little coding you can easily have your poll ads match what’s going on.  Let’s see what’s “hot” right now:

So let’s say you use a plugin to allow PHP in your posts (phpexec I believe), and a plugin to put something at the top of every post (can’t remember which one – generic header I think).

You’ll have to be posting with just the “keyword” as your title – and nothing else.  So let’s pop in a little php code to the top of every post:

Do you think everyone else is searching for <?php the_title(); ?> right now?  Click Here to Vote for a Chance to win a FREE Ipod!

Let’s be honest and admit that you will have some “Duds”.  There are hundreds of variations you can do — such as:

Our last  <?php echo rand(15, 50 ); ?>visitors have also been curious about <?php the_title(); ?>.  Do you think you have something in common with them?  Fill out our “Profile” form for a chance to win a free mustang convertible.

Then take them to a page where they fill in a form about their age, weight, hobies, etc…  after they submit it send em on over to the CPA offer for the mustangs.  Make sure you grab their e-mail as well and dump em into a newsletter.

(note:  you could just hack into singlepost.php and do the same thing with out all the plugins – easier that way)

Basic little hacks to wordpress with some very basic PHP coding and you have a little more content on each page, a “new” User experience…. and a way to monetize crap traffic to a auto blog

This can’t last forever

Auto blogs that scrap for google trends get burned pretty quickly.  Here is how you protect yourself a bit.

1.) Install a plugin that “hides” categories from the front page.  This will help you pass any human reviews.

2.) Have “real” posts that do show up on the front page.

3.) After running it as an autoblog for a few weeks/few months turn it off – and make it real.  BURY that category so it doesn’t show up in the sidebar at all.

4.) You can always use something like power up wordpress to manage your real posts for all your autoblogs.  Bury that spam in a flurry of “legit” posts

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Now I’m not suggesting that you sell folks things from there – and spamming is wrong. Cough Cough.  Ebay doesn’t like it, but you could probably find a few bucks this way (or the safe way – I’ll get there in a minute).

BUT let’s say you have a free afternoon, and all these affiliate programs you belong to.  Between C.J. and Linkshare you can probably find lot’s of things that people are looking for.   Throw up a blog real fast, and start listing what you see people looking for.  Direct those ebay searchers to the page where you put the product.

I’ve used this feature only as a research tool in the past.  Let’s say I’m thinking about something to create a “ebay site” on.  I like to find little niches that don’t have much competition outside of strange people searching for them – and then direct them to ebay to make the purchase.  I’ll build a site that’s only going to make 200 a year if it only takes me 30 minutes.  400 dollars an hour is usually worth it in anyones book right?

Here is the ebay “want it now” page:

http://pages.ebay.com/wantitnow/index.html

If you’ve got ideas, or have used this feature on ebay a little further – speak up.

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Abusing Slideshare and Scribd

I’m not sure if you are familiar with slideshare or not.  Basically you create a powerpoint presentation and upload it to share with others. It’s searchable and all that fun stuff.  You get a profile and “about” area just like on youtube.

Here is one of the cooler parts – you can add audio to your presentations and really do some ‘wow’.  The catch of course is to embed links to your things – affiliate things if you are counting on people watching your slideshow – links to pages if think you will be scraped.

Scraped – why would you be scraped?  Well slideshare has an api and anyone can display things on their sites..  learn up on the API both for content for your site, and for ways of getting your stuff out there.

You are going to need ‘good stuff’ on slideshare to really get anywhere.

Scribd is another place that lets you upload PDF’s.   PDF’s are treated by good differently than html pages – but they still get crawled and spidered.  In my experience a link in a pdf is worth dozens of links in worpdress comments, etc…  Now the way that scribd shows your stuff the spiders might not read the links in your pdf’s.  So rely on linking to the original in your description or linking to it from your own sites.  JUST get some PDF’s up – and also put them on scribd and see where they rank.  I think you’ll thank me.

Ohh – open office is free and open source.  When you make a document just click the handy dandy pdf button and that’s what it will spit out.  I’ve found that people REALLY enjoy mind maps of processes and step by steps -  and there are a number of mind mapping software programs out there.  It’s also really easy to embed your links in them.

IE at this stage you need to buy a power drill.   Walmart sells them for $.35 cents.  Here is a link:  xyz affiliate link

You have to know how to do something.   Even if it’s just tying your shoes.  No drills needed, but probably a good place to dump links for your on-line affiliate shoe store.

Disclaimer:  I use pdf’s all the time to create “resources” for my white hat sites. Of course they have links in them back to the white hat site.  Yes they do get spidered and ranked.  I have very few things on scribd, and nothing on slideshare – hence the experiment section.

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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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Right now, if I move into a new concept I’m wasting my time, and a handful of outsourced help or the couple of employees I have working on other projects time.

Imagine if that waste of time also involved a programmer, designer, writer, and a couple techies.

So in the same vein as we did with Changing Affiliate World – I’ll just be throwing out ideas here.  Most I haven’t done – or haven’t scaled enough to know how “great”, “bad”, or just “stupid” they are.

I’ll keep them all in this section.

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