One of the most clear cut methods in marketing a website or blog is the so-called “bum marketing” that often centers on creating unique articles for better search results.

The theory behind this goes that by submitting a ton of individual articles to several websites, you will over time increase all of your search engine term rankings. As we all know, higher search engine ranking positions (SERPs) lead to increased traffic to your website… which is always a good thing.

Thinking about “bum marketing” for promotion got me thinking whether or not it would be possible to do the same thing for revenue. Granted, writing up articles can be a good amount of overhead work; however, marketing your content can be one of the best free no-risk methods to driving insane traffic to your website. Making money by writing articles is really as simple as cashing in on high-traffic niche through Google, and collecting on the clicks that come in organically. Let’s get to work in turning ordinary “bum marketing” into a profit machine!

The Method to Make Hundreds Marketing
Before I get into the specifics, allow me to first talk about the method we are going to use to turn article writing into a steady cash flow in a simplified version. Essentially, we are going to be doing exactly what would commonly be used in bum marketing with either a referral link or monetized website on the other end of things. Since article submission services like eZineArticles allow you to attach a link in the “resource box” section that appears at the end of your posts, we can slip in a resource that is going to make us money. I’ve devised a five-step process that covers everything from researching a niche area where we can place high in Google, to finding a great product to market, to actually getting your affiliate information visited!

The Five Steps to Success: Discover/Research a Niche Area Come Up with Killer Keywords for SERPs Finding A Hot Product that You Can Market Create a Path to Profit in the Resource Box Write Unique Articles & Get Published!

The most important step in any process is usually the first one. With no exception, coming up with a niche area that offers high volume with competition that you can beat out is essential. If you are trying to penetrate a giant industry with your hastily written articles… you have another thing coming! What we need is to find an industry where you can be a big fish in a small pond to steal all of the traffic in Google search results.

Start researching a target market now.

There’s really no two bits about it, whether or not you feel you can write articles for the area you research is highly irrelevant. You simply need a market of people that are willing to spend on a product here or there… something that you can exploit for capital gains. The process is as easy as identifying a market, finding a product for the market, researching the profitability of that product and finding more markets! You will want to do this until you have about five separate targeted markets that compose one collective niche.

Example: Let’s get you through the niche process in a sample. Say I started with “sports” as a general idea. Too popular would be an understatement here… so let’s narrow the field a bit and go to “sports betting.” Still, this is a bit too heavily invested for my blood… there’s no way we’ll be hitting page 1 with this. So let’s narrow it further to “football betting.” Now that’s the kind of niche that we can penetrate with some clever keywords!

2. Come Up with Killer Keywords for High-Ranking Results
Now that we have our niche in place, we need to find a collection of keywords that are going to give us a high amount of traffic with a low amount of advertiser competition. This sounds simple, but it’s a bit trickier than it sounds… so you may want to spend a good amount of time getting acquainted. There are a lot of tools to lighten the load, so let’s talk about a few of the best while we hunt for 15-20 keyword phrases to exploit.

My two favorite tools to come up with creative keywords that you can use to get those all-important top rankings are the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I would say that Google is now your best option, as they have all of the rankings built in for your display. Best of all, you can export all of your results to a spreadsheet for your convenience!

The most efficient way to research keywords is to simply open up a blank document in notepad, excel or your favorite data entry program so you can jot down your best ideas. Remember, we want to shoot for 15-20 terms total… so you should write down more than 30 great ones before you narrow down the field to the top tier results. It’s much easier for me to give you an example, so let’s go through our term “football betting” in a keyword adventure.

Example: Okay, so we have our text editor open and we are ready to explore some opportunities. I like to start with Google and work through a few other tools to really get the best results from my efforts. Google more than likely has the best numbers (for obvious reasons), so I’ll use them first. After entering “football betting,” I am getting 68 immediate results. I like terms that have low competition with over 2,000 in daily hits… so keywords like “football betting system,” “bet college football” and “betting predictions” would be good options. Remember, we can discover more words by searching the terms we come across in the results page. This might take awhile, but it’s worth it for getting those front page clicks.

3. Finding a Hot Product that You Can Market
There’s going to be a product for every market out there… and you really only need one to make a lot of money. We are basically going to be finding a product that offers an affiliate referral program where we can refer leads and make money. This can either be a lead-based or sales-based program, but I prefer making actual sales because of the higher commission on each success.

Once again, we turn to our favorite affiliate networks to find offers that convert well (high ratio of sales-to-views) and pay well (high ratio of cash-to-pocket). Let’s open up Market Leverage, ClickBank, NeverBlueAds and/or any other network you might be using. I would try something generic like “sports” as a search term for our “football betting” niche. Most networks have some great statistics pages so that you can see just how well these programs are paying affiliates. You’ll want to structure your landing pages differently based on which offers you choose, but right off the bat I see “Vegas Baby” and “Pure Play” betting services that offer around $2/lead a piece. We’re going to be aiming for the fast cash if we use a lead based system… so plan accordingly!

4. Create a Path to Profit in the Resource Box
The “resource box” is the area underneath every article that you publish that is going to bring in the bacon. In it, you need a way to get loads of traffic coming toward your website or affiliate link so that people who read your top-ranked article are getting you paid off. There are a few ways to sneak in your link under cover, so let’s talk about how we do this most effectively.

Unfortunately, websites like eZineArticles (the most popular) won’t let you put in an affiliate link or even a cloaked redirect link into your resource box area. So what can you do? Register your own domain name! I’d recommend the cheapest possible (as it doesn’t really matter) such as a .info name… and you have your problem solved.

Once you have your domain, you have two options:

1. Create a forward: In this method, all you need to do is have your domain name operate as a forward to your affiliate link. As long as you write your domain name in the resource box, the article service will be none the wiser.

2. Create a landing page: In this method, we are going to create an attractive landing page that hooks readers into giving us a referral commission. This is what I use especially for lead-based referring, as you can’t just dump a reader into a survey… you need to give them a set-up opinion poll or something catchy to get them interested in doing the work for you.

Link your newly created domain name with a short description around it that entices readers to click on your link to find out more, and you have yourself a high-paying stream of income!

5. Write Up Unique Articles & Get Them Published
The stage is set, so all we need to do now is put it all together in a bunch of articles and get them published on a few article resource websites. You should aim to pump out as many unique articles as possible, as they only need to be just over 400 words apiece to be effective. Remember, do not use duplicate content as Google will never let you survive. You can use old blog posts of yours if you wish, but you should be piecing together articles from no more than 2 paragraphs a post, and you need to change around some words with synonyms. Doing either this, or just jotting down some generalized information with keywords inside, will get you traffic if done correctly.

Submit Your Articles to These Websites: eZineArticles.com (REQUIRED!) GoArticles.com USFreeAds.com ISnare.com SearchWarp.com

You could try additional services, but it’s a waste of your time if it doesn’t get a top spot. eZineArticles is the one you need to be in, but the others could potentially get you some great rankings as well.

The most important part of submitting articles is having the keywords you researched in the title of the article! Remember, your list of 15-20 killer keywords are going to be in the titles, and this is how we get our serach traffic because the article title carries the most weight. Below are a few examples of titles that are keyword-effective:

• Five [KEYWORD HERE] to being a successful…
• Three keys to [KEYWORD HERE] like…
• [KEYWORD HERE]… in one week or less!

The best part of article writing is that it doesn’t even have to be good… it just needs to get ranked. A lot of the stuff you are writing is going to sound outright “street” if you are doing it quickly. That’s perfectly alright. Remember, this isn’t 5th grade English…. we just need to get hits and get out, so being effective in your writing is essential.

Bottom Line: By writing articles rich in high-grossing keywords for a niche you can be competitive in, it is very possible to start earning $100s every single day. The power of researching a product that will sell in a niche that has a high amount of volume is astonishing. After the initial struggle to put up articles on the five service I have outlined, you’ll start seeing money flowing in from your affiliate link hits day after day!

-Jimvesting

I’ve had tons of people come to me and ask simply “how can I make money online?” A simple question at first, there are literally hundreds of answers. Most typically, I will first suggest to them that using a get paid to (GPT) website might be the best option.

First things first, anyone telling you that GPTs are a waste of time is on a high horse and doesn’t understand that not everyone has a network of friends to leverage, the know-how to start an ad campaign or the time to create their own blog. Using an incentivized GPT website allows you to have a reliable secondary income stream. You can make money when you want, and be paid for the time you put into it. I’m here today to show you the best way to maximize your gains and minimize the time that you spend working!

What is a Get-Paid-To (GPT) Program?
Much like a lot of internet marketers go out and start up ad campaigns, some websites compile systems where you can simply complete the ads yourself and get paid! The basic idea here is as follows: advertisers pay for leads and trial product members; the money goes to the GPT website gets divided up and kicked back to the member who completed the offer. Understandably, “good” GPTs pay out most of the money that advertisers give them… bad ones horde all the cash for themselves. At any rate, you are getting paid and making money with your spare time.

But Why Not Just Do It Yourself?
Let’s not get carried away here, completing offers yourself using your own affiliate network program is fraud. Don’t do it! GPT websites run off the basis that some advertisers allow “incentivized” offers. In other words, they allow you to pay other people to complete them. A lot of advertisers really only want people to get leads or to sign up for trial offers, and will pay based on that alone.

What’s great about having a GPT website is that you get all the customer support you can handle, and you get your own member area where you can track how much you’ve earned, what offers are completed, what offers are still pending, your bonus earnings and more! They make it very easy, and typically offer creative bonuses along with the offers they pay you for. Many utilize a credit-based system, so that the more offers you complete, the more points you have to cash in for free prizes and the like. Best of all… you don’t need to mess around with any affiliate networks, they provide all the latest offers and incentives for you!

Jimvesting’s Top Five GPT Websites That PAY!
Truth be told, there are a good number of scams out there. Meaning GPT websites that won’t pay you, GPT websites that pay half their members or simply websites that take 90% of the profits. You can check out my Approved GPT list for those websites that won’t rip you off… and here are my top five in order:

1. Swat Cash
2. Cash Crate
3. Treasure Trooper
4. Fusion Cash
5. This Site Is For Real

You shouldn’t be using a website that isn’t approved here first, it simply isn’t worth wasting your time as I am already aware of nearly all legitimate GPT programs. I recommend sticking with the top three because of their extensive bonus programs which are actually a lot of fun!

How Much Money Can You Actually Make?
Many people scoff at get-paid-to services, claiming that the money isn’t worth the time. I beg to differ. If you are doing things correctly, the cash flow can be outstanding! Just a quick example, my next check from SWATcash is going to come in just under $1,900 for the month… yes one month, and I’ll have the check to prove it. This isn’t typical; however, it is more than possible to achieve earnings in excess of $10/hour on a consistent basis (will be more at first)… which is a nice secondary salary to compliment your overall household income.

Three Steps to Maximize Your GPT Efforts
There are certain ways to go about the offer completing profit that can really boost your earnings and cut down on dead time. The following are some neat tricks and tips that you should follow when you sign up to your go-to GPT websites before you start.

1. Register Multiple Email Addresses
Lots of offers that you will be completing work off of the basis of emails to store data on who has and hasn’t completed an offer. Therefore, you can use multiple email addresses both to protect yourself from spam advertisements and to ensure that more offers that you complete give you the credit you deserve!

2. Buy a PrePaid Debit Card
There’s no secret about it, you can literally be making upwards of $20/hour with relative ease if you are completing offers with credit cards required. Typically, these are trial offers… so you just need to cancel your subscription before the trial period expires and you will make a bundle. Buy a prepaid Visa from Simon.com or another provider, and you will limit your downside and eliminate the potential credit rating hit. Basically, these trial offers operate on the presumption that most people forget to cancel their membership, and they charge you an excessive amount if this happens to you. So make sure that you cancel after the offer credits to your account, and you’ll be making 2-3 times more than your would be if you did only free offers.

3. Don’t Overkill It!
Lots of people that are new to the GPT industry log into their accounts and start completing the 100% free $0.50 or $1.00 offers like clockwork. This will work for the first few days, but will eventually get your IP address and mailing information blacklisted from servers.. which means you’ll have a harder time getting offers to credit. Instead, you should complete just 2-3 offers per research company per day.

If you have done a few offers, you’ll soon notice that a lot of them are run through the same company (like “myrewards.com” or “offercentral.com”). These guys aren’t fools, and they’ll pick up on your attempts if you are completing 10 offers at a time through their website. So play nice, and hop around from network to network to keep your offers approving.

Bottom Line: By applying for and completing offers on a GPT website, you really can make money online. This is really becoming the “everyday man’s” technique at making an extra buck on the internet. While it’s definitely not the most profitable, it’s something that everyone can do with confidence to make a nice additional income. So if you are looking to purchase some extra web hosting, a shiny new watch or even pay off some debt, a  well paying get-paid-to program might just be what you are looking for!

-Jimvesting

Sometimes making money on the internet requires nothing more than asking for it. With all of the constant banter about expensive pay-per-click campaigns, affiliate marketing and advertising revenue, wouldn’t it be nice if you could simple launch a site that asked for donations?

Crowdfunding website Go Get Funding lets you do just that. You can raise money for the personal crisis that you may have found yourself in or other events or causes that you really need money for.

What is interesting, is that begging for money, in many cases, has worked out to thousands of dollars in profits. As it so happens, a lot of people have loose change in their PayPal accounts and respond quite well to a friendly cry for help. While there are probably a few more scams out there than legitimate needs for extra funding, if you understand what works… begging can make you rich with little effort and almost zero downside.

The Examples
Before I explore just what I am going to attempt, I think that it is important to look toward some more noteworthy examples of people making money by begging on the internet. Perhaps the most popular example is the Million Dollar Homepage. Essentially, a motivated (and very clever) student decided to sell 1,000,000 blocks of ads at $1 apiece on the front page of his website to raise money for college and other activities. By making it simple, fast, and profitable (cheap advertising?)… the founder Alex Tew has made his mark on the industry by selling out every last spot in record time. There have been tons of clones of this project, some have worked, most have failed… but the idea is ingenious nonetheless.

One of these “beg for money” websites that I more recently heard about is the Save Karyn project, where a women who was massively in debt ($20,000) decided to openly seek help on the internet in the form of donations. Despite the poor quality of the actual website, she managed a whopping $13,323.08 in outside donations though the internet. Not bad, eh?

Forming An Idea That Works
You’ve seen what’s been done before, but how exactly can you make your own website that is successful like those that have been tried? Your first step needs to be an idea. The most important thing to consider is that your need should be something commonplace and real. Make it something reasonable, because nobody is going to donate to Joe Schmo so you can have some more beer money… or because you want to buy yourself a new yacht. People respond to need, so if you show them that you need money to go to college, or you are in debt and need financial assistance, you are much more likely to get some love right off the bat.

Setting Up a Personal Goal
Once you have your idea, you need to solidify in your mind exactly how much money that you will need. Nobody is going to donate to a website that is just asking for money, you need to have a set amount (like $1,000) that you are shooting for. Why? It creates an emotional desire to help.

I think that the most important aspect of any website that sells itself out for donations is the progress bar. People want to be updated on how much has been donated so far, and how much is still needed. A nice graphic on the top of the page would be the most preferable measure to take here, as visitors and potential donators will want to see that they are making a difference.

Don’t Integrate It, Separate It
One thing that has failed time and time again is the donation integration. What do I mean by this? If you have a website, don’t try to include on top of it all a donation/begging page… it’s much better to keep these things separate. I recommend setting up a new website, which you can then link to and advertise from your main blog or website as you wish. What will NEVER work is simply adding a sidebar widget that offers $1 donations through PayPal. You simply aren’t going to get a lot of attention, as people aren’t coming to your website thinking about your money troubles. If you can’t separate your other websites from your begging website, the emotional pull towards giving cash will never exist… and you won’t be successful.

One recent example of the integration attempt that I have seen was from Chetan on The WWW Blog. He started out with a fantastic goal. A new iPhone? That’s practical, current (topical) and not too much to ask for. While this donation frenzy started off on the right foot, I feel that things started to lose momentum from the get-go, as he tried to simply integrate it with his blog. This isn’t what you want to do, and I feel that separating the call-for-cash and the blog would have made a big difference.

My Idea for a Donation Website
Since I’m a college student, it’s going to be very easy for me to exploit the emotional pull of a donation page, I’m not even going to pretend that I am being clever here. Of course, this won’t go live for at least a week due to other projects, but I intend on launching a website geared on buying a refurbished LCD TV for my upcoming semester at college. I feel like this is a reasonable request, and since a lot of my visitors have been in college at some point, I wouldn’t be too surprised if this idea works.

So essentially, this is going to be a paid experiment, where I am going to attempt to collect something like $400 in order to buy a standard rate LCD TV. My basic logic follows that I will create my own website and offer free links and advertising to anyone that donates. I think the best route is to offer to write a blurb about each website that donates, with more words going to heavier donations. Offering something is very important, and ad space is the most obvious ploy. By spending $10 on a domain name and a quick website to track the progress of my donations, I hope to reach my target within a month.

Bottom Line: Websites that openly seek donations have been some of the most profitable ventures on the internet. The major upside is that there is really no downside risk, as you aren’t paying for much more than a domain name and hosting. The downside can be that things can be slow moving, and you might drive yourself crazy before reaching a goal. There have been literally hundreds of failed attempts to turn a quick profit, but I remain optimistic in the potential behind “begging” websites.

-Jimvesting

Looking for a way to make $1,000′s in the blink of an eye? You may think I’m exaggerating, but getting sales with some well-converting affiliate programs can be as easy as riding a bike, and anyone can do it.

This is a method that has been a best-kept secret by the internet marketing community for quite some time. I know full well that they are going to have my head for letting you guys in on one of the fastest ways to make thousands of dollars on the internet… but this is just too good to pass up. By exploiting the power of the best affiliate program on the internet, you can actually make over 1,150% more than your referral pays. This translates to some insane profits on your end. So let’s get started!

The Basic Idea
You all know about the affiliate programs that exist on the internet. The basic idea is that you sign up as a referral under a company, and for every sale you refer you get X% of that sale. But what if you could find such an affiliate program that paid you a flat rate that was actually MORE than the sale itself? You could make a fair amount of money, couldn’t you?

As it just so happens, the program with HostGator offers payouts that offer over 1,150% more than what your referral actually needs to pay for the successful conversion. By getting people to sign up to just a few months of hosting, you can grab up to $125 flat-rate on each purchase. This method is fool-proof and the pros have been exploiting it for awhile. It’s time to let you in on the big secret.

The HostGator Referral Program
The affiliate program over at HostGator, one of the web’s largest web hosting companies, is the best I’ve seen. The system works in four phases, and credits you a variable flat-rate each time you make a sale. Keep in mind that there is a 60-day hold period where your earnings will be on standby in order to cut down on fraud. This is no big deal, as we just need people to sign up for 2 months of hosting. You are going to be making anywhere from $50 to $125 dollars on every sale you refer, depending on how many people you get to sign up each month. So register here if you want to be paid using the HostGator pay scale.

If you are anything like me, wouldn’t you rather skip the system and get a whopping $100 every sale from the get-go? This loophole of sorts was shown to me by Reid from MooneyQuest.com, so thank him for it. Essentially, if you sign up with Commision Junction, they will pay you $100 every time you refer a use to HostGator through your CJ account. This is by far the better way to go, unless of course you are planning on referring over 20 people every month… at which point you’d break even.

The downside? If you use CJ.com, you can only get paid in check or direct deposit. But you have your options: either you sign up directly through HostGator, or you just go for the big bucks from the start with Commission Junction’s HostGator affiliate program.

Offer Your Referrals a Discount
Before you focus on how exactly you are going to get people to sign up for two months of hosting using your referral, let’s make things affordable for them! People like a good deal, and it just so happens that they can grab the first month of hosting for just 1 cent using the coupon code “HGC25“, the second month on the mid-sized hosting package is just $9.95. This means that you can get people to buy hosting under you that will earn you as much as $125 for under $10 (or $9.96 for you math guys).

How to Get People to Sign Up
Obviously, now that we have the premise in mind, we need a game plan to pick up our sales. I think that you will find it is very easy to get people to sign up to hosting underneath you, especially if you have something to offer. If you are a blogger, you essentially have things made as you can simply leverage your reputation as a means to get people to buy hosting under your account. But even if you are just a run of the mill entrepreneur, there are plenty of methods to have people signing up!

1. Offer a Discounted Good
   Chances are, you may already have your own eBook, membership or other digital product on the market. Getting people to sign up can be as simple as offering a special discounted $10 copy of your good to people. What’s more, you can even say that with every purchase, they’ll get two free months of web hosting from HostGator. Who’s going to turn that kind of deal down?
2. Provide a Service
   Offering a service is very easy to do, and you don’t necessarily need to be talented in any specific area in order to get business. By making a thread on DigitalPoint webmaster forums or WarriorForum you can get people interested in graphic design, article writing, advertising you name it that would be more than willing to get you $10 and get free hosting along with it. Heck, maybe you could even sell them the hosting straight up!
3. Leverage Your Influence
   If you own a blog, feel free to use that to your advantage. Offer your readers something extra and give them hosting on top of it. It’s quite easy when you already have the subscriber base, so feel free to go ahead and reach out to the community you’ve already built for support.

I’ve seen people get $3,000+ every month by offering to do various things for people on the internet. Lots of these schemes have involved offering to set blogs up, giving tutorial lessons on the internet or providing a consulting service. Since you are going to be making at least 900% more than you are asking for, this is one of the easiest paths to riches around.

The HostGator Path to Riches Recap
Okay, it’s recap time. This post outlined a method of making money online using the affiliate referral program offered through HostGator. The first step is to sign up with either HostGator (pay scale) or CJ.com (flat rate). Once you have an affiliate link to sign people up with, simply sell two months of hosting with a coupon for a total order under $10.00 to people by offering discounted goods and services with a “bonus” hosting plan. It’s fast, it’s simple, and their is no potential downside.

Bottom Line: Jimvesting’s HostGator referral method promises HUGE upside with absolutely zero downside rise… making it worthwhile for anyone. Other than this, there is additionally no risk of the method ever being saturated or over used, as the affiliate program is giving you a rate that won’t go away simply because more people are doing it. I’m hoping that you guys make a lot of money doing this. Go ahead and refer your friends over to this article if you like the idea.

-Jimvesting

This post is meant for educational purposes only. I have not ever used black hat methods to drive revenue/traffic and do not openly endorse the actions described in this article. Furthermore, I propose black hat strictly in the short-term.

A lot of people ask about black hat SEO as a means toward outsized short-term gains. Many consider black hat to be unethical, but I feel that it is important to understand the inner-workings of websites. The reason people want to hear about “black hat” methods (as opposed to “white hat,” or more ethical) is precisely this… it seems illegal. I want to assure you that most black hat methods are completely legal, just unethical and frowned upon by major networks.

What Is Black Hat SEO?
We need to start with a basic question, what exactly do I mean by black hat SEO? Essentially, this is a phrase that describes using “unfair” techniques to drive results in search engine listings among other things. Most typically, the traffic or artificial clicks that you gain from using black hat methods are extremely temporary… used for short term gains. There is always the risk of being banned from networks like YouTube, Google or StumbleUpon, so caution and patience are always recommended.

Many successful bloggers have used black hat methods at some time in their careers. It seems that you are almost foolish if you shun the techniques altogether, so I encourage you to keep an open mind. I believe that we all need to be willing to step down from our pedestal sometimes, as there are cases that white hat is just too impractical to cut it. With an open mind, let’s have a look at some black hat SEO techniques for making money online!

Popular Black Hat Methods
There are literally hundreds of variations in black hat techniques, as the phrase is applied to anything in business that appears unfair or shady in nature. I want to have a look at some of the more traditional methods, though I might explore particular methods in-depth in separate articles on theNetFool.com.

Keyword Stuffing
Stuffing keywords is a bit like spamming a search engine. To keyword stuff is to take a targeted term phrase, let’s use “make money” as an example, and repeat it excessively throughout your page in an attempt to maximize your search engine ranking positions (SERP). You can have the targeted term reflected in your page, meta tags, alt, titles, links and more. Though it may be considered slightly “old school” as there are many filters nowadays to defeat this practice… it is very possible to achieve a degree of keyword stuffing that won’t get you banned and will help your search engine rankings.

Doorway or Gateway Pages
Some webmasters have been able to manufacture so-called “doorway” or “gateway” pages that are little more than invisible pages that are only seen by search engine spiders and are used to increase SEO ranks. By heavily optimizing a website page for a search engine, it is very possible to artificially boost your SERPs while redirecting real visitors safely to your website before they know any better.

Google has been known to support the growth of these artificial gateway pages by redesigning their algorithm to favor overall trust over actual content… letting black hat professionals exploit previously established websites for high placements. There are even services like The Content Solution that automatically generate loads of keyword-rich content, supposedly desirable by search engines.

Cookie Stuffing
The practice of cookie stuffing is one of the more easily mastered black hat SEO techniques on the web that involves secretly embedding a cookie into a visitor’s web browser without them ever knowing about it or even having to click a link. In other words, you can use a fake image in a forum signature and have every view of the image count just as if someone had clicked it. Devious, eh?

People (like myself) like to keep the actual method of cookie stuffing on the down low. I am not going to tell you the method, nor will I respond to any email requests. I will however, summarize the general idea.

Cookie stuffing happens everywhere, a lot more than you would expect. By using it, you can effectively get thousands of false and undeserved affiliate impressions to a banner you have visible on a website. This is one of those methods that can be illegal if worked to an extreme degree. The average web surfer won’t have a cookie notifier enabled, so it is generally pretty easy to score some free clicks from embedding your own (especially if done through flash software).

What is essentially being done behind the scenes, is some clever work with an .htaccess file on a remote server that redirects all views of an image to an affiliate link. This referral link is in fact exposed, which makes it risky. However, you can effectively go about stealing sales money away from deserving advertisers if you are using cookie stuffing to re-route things in your favor.

Invisible Text
Not as advanced as stuffing keywords, using invisible text is one of the more simple techniques thought of as black hat. Essentially, “invisible” text refers to writing up lists of keywords on particular websites in the color white, or the background color, so that they cannot be seen on the page (without highlighting, of course). By using invisible text, it is possible to feed through lots of rich content to search engines and users. However, this technique is becoming more easily detected every day.

Black Hat Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Management
We think of PPC campaigns as having rules. Some rules help you run more effective advertising campaigns; others will actually set up competitive barriers. Black hat PPC management is the art of doing away with the rules set up by networks to gain competitive advantages.

There are several ways to exploit PPC campaigns to gain an edge. The first is to remove the requirement of direct url’s for your ads. To do this, we need to set up a layer between us and our affiliate network so that it is possible to make changes to the target link without losing revenue. You can also do things like use a non-budget-function strategy to optimize your earnings or cloak PPC editors to covertly apply pop-up ads to your campaigns. Try this article to explore PPC black hat further.

Comment Spam
If you run a blog or have ever commented around the blogosphere, you know exactly what I mean when I refer to comment spam. We all see the irrelevant messages with complex “names” that look like they were written by a two-year old. These comments are being automatically generated for the purpose of collecting backlinks to other websites being promoted. By dropping massive amounts of comments, it is possible to boost SERP rankings and traffic by making Google think you own an established and rooted website.

There are many scripts that people use to seek out blogs that have comments easily available (no word-verification, dofollow, etc.). Here’s one. Whoops . But seriously, these comment spam generators have their days numbered with the flurry of spam-defeating blockers like Akismet that store logs on anyone found to be spamming. Use at your own detriment.

Why Is Black Hat So Unfair?
A lot of the times, black hat doesn’t actually void terms of service. However, more often than not it is considered an unethical practice that will get you banned nonetheless. A lot of these methods do not follow the rules and regulations of major search engines… as they attempt to artificially sugar-coat hastily made websites. User experience is key, and if you want to maximize your user base in the long run… white hat is the only way to fly as you will eventually get noticed.

Tools You Can Use At Your Own Risk
The guys at Digerati Marketing have composed a zipped file that contains a dozen or so known black hat tools that can help anyone interested get a foothold in the industry. This package is publicly available on their website. And while I don’t want you using the tools inside, it might not be a bad idea to see what other people are doing by having a look.

Bottom Line: Hopefully you now understand the advantages and pitfalls of black hat SEO techniques that are being used all around the internet. If you are trying to establish and maintain a successful and user-friendly website… you would be a fool to invest in black hat methods. However, many have found great success by employing a few of these techniques to win over some short term success.

-Jimvesting