Blackhat SEO: Simply means techniques that might get you penalised or banned from a major search engine. Blackhat is a very generic term and the Blackhat Forums do often include email marketing techniques that most would consider spam. This is not an endorsement of such techniques.

Quadzilla opened up his SEO Blackhat forums on Christmas day for a limited time as a Christmas present so I spent half an hour looking round, I was pretty disappointed and I left feeling sorry for those members who spent their hard earned cash on membership.

Let me put some background to this post, Quadzilla Blackhat forums cost $100 a month membership fee, not to steep but enough to make most people think twice. For the $100 you are promised a forum that has some top notch experts and to be fair there are some pretty impressive guys in there. The issue I have is they are not talking.
So what if you are a;

• Newbies – If you’re a newbie then you are after questions being answered, so it was disappointing to see lots of unanswered questions, sure most of them were very newbie’ish but still this is not the place to find answers.
• Intermediate – You probably will want to go straight to the parasite hosting and large database section and will be disappointed, Syndk8 and Wickedfire have discussions all at a similar level.
• Advanced – You will want to go to the labs, to see the sophisticated cutting edge stuff and yep you guessed it nothing sophisticated or cutting edge mostly old posts.

The overall feeling was one of depressing lingering and slow death, which is a shame because it could have been so much more. Of course with 30 minutes I did not read every post and I’m sure there are a few gems but if I’m going to spend $100 a month I expect a forum that is organised, is moderated, has question answered or at least be told my question wasn’t appropriate. I would want to see stickies with the cutting edge latest ideas. I would not want to shift through posts looking in vein for a thread which might answer my question though to be fair this would not take to longer, in that respect it does keep one of its promises, their are not 100s of threads to crawl through.

Quadzilla forums are not the only places to find Blackhat/Greyhat SEO information as already indicated Wickedfire and Syndk8 are both excellent places to find information on various techniques, Wickedfire also offers a paid for area, which is either invitation only or by paying $55 a month which is significantly less.

There is one good thing to come out of the Christmas day present, it reminded me to resubscribe to SEO Egghead a fantastic blog, so not all bad.

I got sent a question via email…

Hi Tim I love the blog and have learnt a lot from you and others but my site while popular doesn’t get very many sales through affiliate links what am I doing wrong can you help?

A quick look at both the site (which sadly will remain anonymous as the original emailer has asked it be kept that way ) and its stats indicated it was indeed a pretty popular site with nearly a 1500 visitors a day, which for a news portal is pretty good going. One of the features I really liked was at the bottom of each article was a have your say section which had a simple poll.

Do you think Mclaren should have been fined over £50 million pounds for spying?
Yes|No

Each poll was a question and a yes no answer along with the results, most of the polls no one had entered however to help get this site out of the red they would make an excellent place to peddle our affiliate links.

Zip and Email submits

Many Affiliate companies have zip or email submit campaigns running these campaigns offer the chance for people to win free items like phones computers etc, in exchange for giving up some personal details. The person is then entered into the draw, the affiliate gets paid per lead, so every time some one enters the affiliate makes some money between $0.80 - $5 you are not going to get rich of these schemes but they can easily compete with adsense earnings if properly managed. Zip submits tend to pay out more then email submits and both tend to be very geographically targeted a quick look at the site revealed nearly 70% of the site came from the US while a further 21% was from the UK so we hunted down two suitable campaigns. In the end we found two geotargetted campaigns both through the Affiliate group Copeac one was a Win IPhone and $500 visa zip submit for the US the other a Win a Digital Camera for the UK. Both have appalling small print but hey they worked well for our needs, however before we could get started we needed to organise a few things.

Incentivised or Encouraged

With most Zip and email submits you will come across the phrase ‘This offer Can NOT be incentivized’ what this means is you cannot offer something to go with it. So for example you couldn’t click here to receive a free pen and a chance to win an IPhone for example. The line between encouraging and incentivised is simple you can not give away a physical or electronic product to lure a person into providing their information. While we did check that offering the chance to take part in the poll was not an incentive we also took some extra steps and included small print offering a link to the free iphone/camera offer as well.
Finally we added both an entry in the privacy statement about linking to a third party who may require information to conclude offers, a statement in the terms of service indicating that we are not responsible for offers on third party websites.
To give you an idea of what the poll looks like here is one of the early mocks

Geo-targetting

We knocked together 3 versions of the poll settings, USA, UK and international each with their own offer for the USA and UK they went to our affiliate site once voted via a timed redirect with a means to escape if they just wanted to vote. For international users we asked if they would be interested in doing an online survey to win $100 through yet another affiliate company. You can easily do the same thanks to posts by both Nick and Patrick from Blog Storm on the subject which we linked to just last week. Once this was done, we had checked out that all the links worked, via proxies we sent it live.

The results

The number of people taking the poll rose by 900% this initially sounds a staggering figure but remember we only had around 10 people a day taking the poll so in reality this means we increased the number of poll takers to around 90 a day.
Out of those 90, 50% were from the US, 41% UK and the other 9% international.
In terms of conversions

• 45% - From US resulted in lead payment well above average for this sort of submit
• 5% - From UK pretty much average
• 0% - Well technically not 0 1 person did take the survey but I think it might have been me via a proxy!

The result is that in the last 3 weeks the site has been earning about $24/day from its polls but these are already dying with the last week seeing a disappointing number of results, this is down to several reasons the very high US conversion rate is coming down, Lots of regulars have either stopped voting or more likey are not visiting the same offer. My job was done and I have left my new friend to find some more offers for his polls I have suggested that either run several offers and rotate between them or at least offer a new offer every couple of weeks seems to be a good balance.

Have you had success with Zip and Email submits? Do you think that using them this way is a good idea, perhaps you think its slightly manipulative let us know!

Today I will try to post a small tutorial on how to create a search engine using Clickbank’s marketplace. For that we will need some basic PhP knowledge, a clickbank account and CBcontextual, a script that has all the technical problems solved for us

The Basics

I am not sure what do you know for all these so let’s start with the basics :

What is Clickbank?

Clickbank is an affiliate network that deals with download products. Download products are anything someone can download, software, ebooks, content, etc. Clickbank is not selling products of their own but instead they work as a middleman between you and thousands of vendors.

The good thing about this company is that they have very high commissions that go up to 75% so it is an affiliate network that really worths to join.

What is CBcontextual?

CBcontextual is a php/mysql script that uses the Clickbank marketplace in order to deliver high targeted contextual advertisements to your web site. So suppose that with this script you can have adsense like ads to your site but those ads pay you commissions up to 75% of each sale you may deliver

Using the CBcontextual script to create our own Clickbank search engine

Creating our search engine using Clickbank products would be really difficult before some time, but thanks to CBcontextual’s API it can be done very easily and fast. So here is how the API works :

The CBcontextual script API

The API can work with 3 formats :

• XML
• text
• PhP

For this tutorial we will use the php method witch is the easiest to use. It simply returns a serialized array with the listings so there is no need for extra parsing.

Creating the seach engine

The first step is to create a form to submit our search criteria :

<form method="post" action="/example.php" >
<input type="text" name="q" value="" />
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>


Then we need some settings regarding our CBcontextual installation. What we need is our username and password (the one you use to check your statistics, and the url of your installation (eg. http://example.com/clickbank)

<?php
$uname = '';//Username in your CBcontextual installation
$pass = '';//Password in your CBcontextual installation
$instURL = 'http://www.example.com/clickbank';//The url path to your CBcontextual installation. No trail slash
$limit = 10;//How many results to display
?>

And now the core code. As you can see working with CBcontextual’s API is very cool because our search engine needs only 8 lines of code to coded


<?php
if ( !empty($_POST['q'])){
$results = unserialize(file_get_contents($instURL.'/api.php?
uname='.$uname.'&pass='.$pass.'
&nr='.$limit.'&type=php&keywords='.$_POST['q']));
if ( !$results )
echo 'No results. Please search again.';
else{
foreach ( $results as $res )
echo '<a href="'.$instURL.'/clk.php?i='.$res['id'].'">'.$res['title'].'</a><br />'.$res['description'].'<br />';
}
}
?>

And that’s all, we are finished If you want to download the full example please click here.

So you want to start your own ppc search engine? A ppc search engine may be a good additional income, and you can easilly add it to an established site, or maybe start a new one just for this.

What do I need to start my own ppc search engine?

Well to start you will need a third party network which will provide you the search results. The business scheme is very easy to understand. They give you an automatically way to fetch results based on the keywords that your visitors use to search your site and they pay you for every click that your users do in those results.

Selecting an advertising network for search results

In the past I have used many networks but the only one that was reliable for me was SearchFeed. So in this tutorial I will help you create a ppc search engine using SearchFeed.

Creating your own PPC search engine with SearchFeed

Before you start you will need an account with SearchFeed. If you don’t, use this link to register one, and then come back for the rest of this tutorial

The basics

Login to your account at SearchFeed, and go to Integration Tools > XML and Text Usage. From there you will see your track identification number (trackID) and your partner identification number (pID). Those are very important as they are used by SearchFeed to assign the clicks to your account.

The script. Time to create our php search engine

The above code is very basic. I suppose that you allready have some PhP knowledge in order to work this out. Of course if you have troubles using it you can allways post a question to a PhP forum

function searchFeedResults($q, $results, $tID, $pID)
{
$res = array();
$url = "http://www.searchfeed.com/rd/feed/TextFeed.jsp";
$url.= "?trackID=".$tID."&excID=&pID=".$pID."&cat=";
$url.= urlencode($_GET['q'])."&nl=";
$url.= $results."&page=1&ip=".$_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"];
$ret=file($url);
if ( count($ret) == 0 ) return $res;
for ( $i=0;$i {
$j = $i;
for ( $j=$i;$j<($i+4);$j++)
{
$a = explode('|',$ret[$j]);
$tmp[] = $a[2];
}
$res [] = $tmp;
unset($tmp);
}
return $res;
}

This function (searchFeedResults) gets the results and returns an array with them. The parameters are :

• $q => The query (search terms)
• $results => How many results to display
• $tID => Your SearchFeed track id
• $pID => Your SearchFeed partner id

How to use the script

Here is a common usage of the script. I suppose that the user is using $_GET[’q'] to send a query. So here is how we can parse it:

$results = searchFeedResults($_GET['q'], 20, $myTid, $myPid);
if ( $results ){
foreach ( $results as $rec ){
echo '
<p>
<a href="'.$rec[2].'" onmouseover="window.status=\'http://'.$rec[1].'\'; return true"
onmouseout="window.status=\' \'; return true">'.$rec[0].'</a><br />
'.$rec[3].'<br />
<small>'.$rec[1].'</small>
</p>';
}
}else{
echo 'No results for '.$_GET['q'].'<br /><br />';
}

Conclusions

Hope you like our script. By the way I have also added a full working script, which you can download here.