Gaming Twitter for Thousands Of Backlinks

Posted on March 31st, 2008 in Link Building

Nickycakes started using twitter like a week ago, and already, the potential for using it to automatically build links to a site has become pretty obvious.

A few things to note when trying to game twitter:

• Twitter has millions of indexed user feeds.  A simple search for site:twitter.com on google shows over 3 million.
• Writing applications to  automatically post to twitter is super-easy.  They even suggest doing it with their twitter api, which is easily done up in curl.
• Twitter no-follows links posted on your feed.  If they are over a certain length, they are shortened to tinyurls.  Even though they no-follow, there are websites that scrape and post all the twitter feeds that may or may not be do-follow.
• There are tons of applications that allow you to easily post to twitter, and when you use them to post, a do-follow link is shown to that application:

  

So how can we game this functionality for tons of do-follow links?  Slightly involved process, but really not that hard.

In order to have your application name and link posted when your app is used for posting, you have to first create an app, and then submit the webpage for approval with the twitter staff.  Any old app will do.  Just make some crappy php code that can be embedded on peoples webpages that lets them post to their twitter or something, throw it up on a webpage to let people download it, and then submit it to twitter for approval.

After it’s approved, it’s pretty easy to write up a program in curl to create accounts, follow random people, post whatever.  Make a few hundred/thousand accounts, and automatically post some random messages on them.

When you feel comfortable with the number of messages posted, use a 301 redirect on the page that you originally submitted as your application’s url, which will now be indexed on thousands of pages, to the page of your choosing, and watch the link juice bombard your site to the top of ze serps.

There are dozens of other ways to game twitter, and this is probably one of the more complicated of them.  So get to work before it’s too late!

Keep it real.

In Soviet Russia, Content Scrapes YOU

Posted on March 29th, 2008 in Content Generation

Nickycakes was doing some Technorati “promotion” the other day and had a glance at the blog reactions for nickycakes.com. For those who don’t know about blog reactions, it’s technorati’s way of displaying inbound links from other blogs to yours. Showing up in the reactions were some links from some Russian speaking blogs with the same content as some of Nickycakes old posts, only translated into Russian. Here are a few of them:
http://www.seomarket.biz/casinos-the-worlds-greatest-landing-page
http://homelessinizhevsk.blogspot.com/2008/03/casinos-worlds-greatest-landing-page.html

Without being able to speak russian, it’s hard to say if these are just autoblogs that automatically translate the Cakes’ content, or if they were actually manually re-written, but considering they do have some comments, it looks like it may be beneficial on some level to have content available in other languages. Not necessarily for nickycakes.com specifically, but for any blog networks you may be running, having them automatically translated to 10 different languages gives you 10 times the unique content.

Yes, there are services out there that will translate a webpage for you and display it in your browser, if you request it, however, these translated pages are not indexed and won’t bring you more traffic. And traffic is the name of the game.

Google hasn’t officially released their translate API to the public, although with a little digging you can figure out how to use it.  For a simple solution you can just scrape and post to http://www.google.com/translate_t to translate your stuff.  If you’re translating a bunch of stuff, you should use proxies, because they will ban you after 500 or so translations in a short period of time from the same ip.

Keep it real.

AffSpy: Epic Failboat

Posted on March 27th, 2008 in Retards

Affspy launched it’s private beta last month at Affiliate Summit. The service was hyped by uberaffiliate in january, back when people still thought he posted useful information, so it had a little buzz going. But in the end, just like most overhyped services like izea ranks, blogrush, ttz media, agloco, etc, it’s just that, overhyped crap, and here’s why:

First, what is Affspy? The idea is kinda cool, aggregate payouts from all the affiliate networks so affiliates can see if they could get a better offer elsewhere. Well, the idea WAS cool back when Offer Vault already made the exact same service. But, after investigating, only the idea is cool, the service (both offer vault and affspy) is pretty much worthless.

So what’s the big deal? Why does a website that pulls all the payout data from all the networks and displays it to help affiliates get a higher payout suck so bad? Let Nickycakes count the ways.

1. The street payouts for an offer on ANY network are NEVER EVER the highest amount they can give you for that offer…EVER. In fact, as a new affiliate to a network, you can nearly always get a higher payout than what is advertised simply by asking your AM “hey, can i get a higher payout on offer X?” So right off the bat, the service is completely inaccurate. Using AffSpy to check the payouts will never NEVER give you an accurate picture of what the highest payout is.
2. They make the networks do the work for them. It would literally take an evening or two to make a scraper to grab the payout data, creatives, etc, from all the networks automatically every day, but they actually make the affiliate networks sign up and do work, and then end up charging the networks for the referrals they send.
3. They literally have a “team” of people for something that would literally require one person a couple hours a day to run. At Affiliate Summit West, Nickycakes was surprised to see that a service this stupid and simple actually had a booth with several people running it.

   

   There was at least one semi-hot girl there who probably had the excuse of being hired by affspy to attract people to the booth, but other than that….over 5 people to run what’s basically a scraper site…?

4. AffSpy is designed to screw affiliates. Affspy makes its money by referring affiliates to networks. They get a cut of anywhere from 2-5% for the lifetime commissions made by those affiliates, in general. The network referral programs are designed to let affiliates recommend good networks to their friends and contacts, and the commission is supposed to be payment for bringing your friends to do business with the company. Affspy is no better than someone cybersquatting neverblueads.cm and redirecting it to a neverblue referral link to catch typo traffic and leech referral revenue. Just remember, every referral they get from you could have easily gone to one of your friends in the industry, or someone who’s given you some help getting started in the business and has actually helped you make money. These people deserve a chunk of your profit, not some retarded non-service like affspy.
5. AffSpy is unoriginal. As was mentioned earlier, this ENTIRE WEBSITE was already created by the idiots at affiliate radar, and is called OfferVault.com. It’s also not in some d-bag “exclusive” private beta designed to make people think they need to join the cool guy club and join it. Keep in mind that both services are equally crappy, but offervault.com gets points for not needing 20 people to run it and not being associated with mediocre john chow knockoffs.

But not all is bad with affspy! The “exclusive affiliate summit beta invite” cards they were handing out make decent coasters and the t-shirt they gave Nickycakes proved awesome for cleaning up spills in the kitchen!

Twitter: How to Steal an Idea and Make it Better

Posted on March 26th, 2008 in General

Ok, a couple weeks ago, Nickycakes signed up and started using Twitter.  He was hesitant at first due to a few factors.

• Turnoff #1: shoemoney posted about it, which generally means it’s a crap service he’s been paid to promote
• Turnoff #2: nobody can really explain what twitter does, they just say to try it…no thanks
• Turnoff #3: it’s got a bunch of stupid web 2.0 graphics, which Nickycakes hates.  it’s got a bunch of bubbly clouds and screams “IM AN IPOD LOVING D-BAG”.
• Turnoff #4: it’s called TWITTER…seriously…twitter….sounds like some 13 year old girl dress up myspace game.  imagine the ridicule of using this service and then recommending it to family/friends.

So after much harassment to join by people, nickycakes signed up.  He’s not too sure why people have trouble describing exactly what this service does.  Here’s exactly what it is:

It’s facebook’s status updates.

There ya go.  They took facebooks status updates and made a whole website and api around it.  You post a short blurb about what you’re doing at the moment, and everyone who you’re friends with sees it on their feed.  They added a few small things like the ability to reply to people or send private messages, which can be forwarded to your cellphone or google chat, but that’s the basics.

But for a completely ripped off idea, it is pretty addictive.  There’s a firefox addon for it, which shows you popups in the lower right when new items show up on the feed, thunderbird style.  It’s super easy to use it from your cell if you’re bored on the subway or whatever.  ANDDDDD it’s syndicated on indexed blogs which lets you get a few backlinks for whatever links you’re posting.

And thank goodness, you can change the background of the page for your account so you dont have to look at those retarded clouds, otherwise the Cakes would have been out like a trout, for real.

So if you’re already signed up, or want to, go sign up and follow Nickycakes to see when he’s hittin up the gym or avoiding cooking for his girlfriend.  You never know when he’ll be dropping that tip on how to make billions of dollars a minute online with no work!!111~

So What’s This Guy Really Promoting?

Posted on March 24th, 2008 in General

It happens time and time again.  Joe D-Bag decides he’s going to make an Internet Marketing blog, pretend to be some sort of guru, write a bunch of nonsense linkbait, and watch the sheep roll in and unwittingly subscribe for more nonsense.  But are they really “gurus” of anything?

Or let’s say you’re getting pissed because some asshat keeps outbidding you on your highest converting search term, costing you hundreds or thousands a day in profit.  Want to find out what his other sites are?

Well luckily, you know about myIPneighbors.  Just put in the ip address or hostname of their site/landing page/whatever, and you can see the other sites hosted on that IP.  If they’re smart like Nickycakes, and using shared hosting, you’ll end up with the hostnames for a bunch of other unrelated crap, which will probably be useless.  But remember, just ’cause these super dooper affiliates claim to be making buckets of cash per day online, doesn’t mean they’re smart enough to use a separate IP for their public blog.  Hell, many of them barely know how to use a computer from the looks of things.

Warning: Tangent

Nickycakes has been absolutely floored recently with the number of people making money in this business who have no experience with programming, marketing, computers, english…let alone any..language, etc.  It just goes to show how easy it is to make money online.  If you have half a brain in this industry, along with some php coding skills, you have an automatic head-up on the competition.

Also, it’s bad form to out the personal sites of other affiliate marketers on any public forum, so don’t do it, cause you don’t want it done to you.  Keeping this information for your own personal use is more profitable anyhow ;]  Anyway, enjoy the website spying tool, and keep it real.