Ethical Internet Marketer – Make More Money Online… Ethically!

Chris McNeeney, author of “Affiliate Project X” and “Day Job Killer” – both great products – has come up with a new potential bestseller called “Project Black Mask”. But I wasn’t impressed at all – I could even say that I was quite disappointed. I know, I could have made a lot of commissions by promoting this one, too. But it wouldn’t be the right thing to do. Read on to get to know why…

Before I get to that, I think, I’ll have to retract the statement about Chris McNeeney which I made yesterday by saying that:

“… And I think even without having read his ebook, I bet it’s a killer product again.”

– Not this time, sorry. I made that assumption based on the quality of his other products and without having read a single line of his actual “Project Black Mask” ebook. Now that I have finished reading it, I can’t keep this statement alive.

Let’s go into the meat of his ebook:

First of all, the author doesn’t even try to hide the fact that he’s spamming the search engines. Although, the term “Black Hat” makes it sound nicer. But within the ebook itself, several forms of spamming are mentioned. Apart from the fact that you could easily lose your Adsense account if you’re caught spamming the search engines, there are several other risks involved in this kind of “business”.

Okay, here’s what it’s all about:

Content Generators or Portal Builder software

I must confess, I have used them in the past as well. In the beginning, when they were new, I made several thousands of dollars with them, too. But soon after the search engines reacted to this and I lost the Pagerank of most of my domains and got penalized by Google, I realized that this is a fight that the normal user cannot win and I abandoned these tactics altogether.

Sidenote:

Using Traffic Equalizer, by the way, was the main reason why I’ve lost my highly successful PR6 domain Internetmarketing-success.com! By having links from my main index page to the new inner pages which were generated using Traffic Equalizer, I got pagerank for several hundreds of Internet marketing related terms easily and a lot of additional traffic. I should have stayed with my manual approach because one day that I looked at the Google Toolbar for my site, it was greyed out…

There you have it: Being “black hat” can also cost you the fruits of your labor from the past years (e.g. if you’re using existing “white hat” high PR sites to link to your bad “black hat” websites or pages…)! That was about 2 years ago.

Lesson learned… and one of the reasons why I’ve called my new beginning “Ethicalinternetmarketer.com“.

Whether they were called “Traffic Equalizer” which was the first one as far as I know or “Niche Portal Builder” , they have one fact in common: The search engines are constantly trying to delete these kind of sites. If their algorhythm’s can’t catch them, then their staff will be doing manual reviews of the top search engine results for the most searched for terms. And you can’t trick their staff. In 97% of the cases, they are doing a great job and delete these spam sites from their index.

Here’s are some more details about the content (taken from the table of contents + my comments):

1.) SEO: White hat, grey hat, black hat

What is it about: Explains the differences between these 3 SEO techniques.

2.) Black hat money

What is it about: How to make money from using unethical SEO.

3.) Site creation

What is it about: How to find niches to exploit, how to find good keywords, how to create these black hat sites, the tools used and what kind of hosting and domains you should use for it.

4.) Linking and promotion

What is it about: Blog spam, Blog and Ping, Comment- Forum- Guestbook- Spam and several more spamming methods e.g. how to abuse Web 2.0 resources…

==> And if I’m reading something like “Web 2.0 is the spammer’s best friend” – it actually makes me want to vomit…!

Moreover, even if everything were ethical: In order to put into use what he tells you to do – if you want to copy exactly what he does – , you need to buy at least 2-3 different keyword tools, you need several different reseller hosting accounts, even better VPS (Virtual Private Servers) servers and of course hundreds of domains and different IP addresses… This means expenses of several hundreds of dollars before you even get started. Some of the tools needed (e.g. for building blog farms) cost more than $250. The main Portal Builder Software called RSSGM is free, though.

I love automating website building tasks, too. Yes… But then please let the output be real content sites that visitors can actually enjoy and not total crap.

Apart from some tools for finding niches, his thoughts and explanations on doing keyword research and the valid points he mentioned about using long tail keywords (which is old hat already, anyway… ), I didn’t find the ebook very useful. If you’re into building real businesses like I am, you’ll find that the techniques used in his works are just unethical and do not contribute any value to the info already available on the Internet.

Quite on the contrary: It artificially inflates the number of pages in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) by adding irrelevant stuff and lots of link collections directly taken from search engine results + RSS feeds. Then you could better become a member of my Niche Content Websites membership site and get real article websites within hot niches but without the risk of getting whole IP blocks banned by the search engines – because that is what sooner or later will happen with that kind of sites!

My conclusion is: NOT RECOMMENDED!

What are your thoughts on this? Comments are welcome…!

How are you doing? I hope, you’re fine and looking forward to do some barbecues or go out swimming. Here in Germany it’s quite hot with temperatures around 26° C but I’m located in the south and that can make quite a difference…

I’m preparing for my holiday which will be a mixture between holiday and work. A subscriber of this list has invited me to come over to his home country which happens to be the island of Mauritius. I’ll be there for 4 weeks and do some personal coaching sessions with him so he can learn how to make money on the net. I’ll also be doing some video recordings and camtasia videos so I think, I’ve got a lot to show you when I’m back…

The flight will take something like 13 hours or so. In case you’re wondering where Mauritius actually is located: It’s to the south east of Madagascar (several hundreds of kilometres to the south east of Africa).

He sent some pictures over so I can see how it’s like there and I really love it. There are only about 5 days before I’m leaving. I will have an Internet connection over there, though.

What I haven’t mentioned so far is that my buddy Dirk Wagner will be there, too. We’ll be flying together from Munich. Meaning, he’ll come over from Moenchengladbach to Munich – I’m going to meet him at the railway station and then we’ll take the Underground to get to the airport and the plane will hopefully take off in time.

Here are some pictures of Mauritius:

Isn’t that the kind of lifestyle that people are meaning when they’re talking about Internet marketing? I can go there because I don’t have to ask anyone if I can take 4 weeks off. I just do it. I love this freedom of choice and my biggest wish is that you might experience it as well.

That’s what I am here for. I want to help you succeed!

Detlev

Viral Marketing sounds like something bad but it is actually something very good. It also is a powerful way to generate free traffic to your website.

Think about how a virus spreads from on person to another. One person gets sick and just by sneezing they can give the virus to many more people… those people get sick and share their germs with everyone they know and the next thing anybody knows is that there is an epidemic. That is the very concept of viral marketing. The idea is to get everyone to spread your marketing message around because they want to.

Now let’s look at using an ebook to start your viral marketing campaign. First you create an ebook… a really good one that has links to your website, to your sales page and affiliate links to products and services that you recommend… and you give it to three people. In the book you encourage those three people to give it to their friends and family.

Before you know it the ebook spreads across the Internet like wild fire. Digital information duplicates easily and quickly so before you know it, thousands of people could be reading your free ebook.

Make certain that you let people know that they have permission to forward the ebook around the Internet. When you create the ebook, you have the right to give people certain rights. One of those rights could be that you allow them to give the book to other people. Make it clear that this book is free to give away.

You can write the ebook yourself, use private label content or you can hire a ghostwriter to prepare the content. There are a lot of ways to create an ebook. Once you have your ebook written, use software to create your E-book.

For more information on how viral marketing can be put into practice, I recommend looking at a new ebook release called “Viral Marketing Blackbook” (just launched at: 12 PM EST). Even before its’ official launch, it comes highly acclaimed and if you take a good look at the salesletter, you’ll discover my testimonial there…

I am answering a new question here which I got from one of my subscribers. This answer is with regards to a promotion which I sent out for my Niche Content Websites membership site:

Hi,

I’ve had VRE for awhile now and was getting ready to put some sites up when Google came around with their last slap with the Adwords arbritrage thing. Many folks lost their Adwords account and many of them were pointing to their VRE sites.

With Google penalizing Adsense sites, like VRE, where there are just a few articles posted and tons of Adsense ads, how can anyone really use vre anymore? I know that Google isn’t the only fish in the sea, but unless you use Adwords to get traffic, you are basically stuck with just writing articles, manual linking etc. Does not seem like a very good use of your time.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

Thanks,
Peter T.

—————————————–

My answer:

Hi Peter,

The abbreviation VRE in itself does not imply that these sites will get punished. Google did not punish real content sites with genuine articles and enough other links or ads to click on. What they did punish were sites which had NOTHING ELSE there but a bunch of links and no content whatsoever and two Adsense blocks at the top so this was the only thing people could see when they arrived on such a site. Most of them were sites built with so called portal builder softwares. I have more than 60 of these real article VRE sites online and I still have an active Adsense account.

And I don’t agree that Adwords or Google Arbitrage is the only way of getting traffic. Things like Web 2.0 (Digg, Technorati, Squidoo, YouTube, Google Video, MySpace etc.) can have a HUGE impact on the number of visitors. Personally, I’m getting more visitors from using these techniques than from the search engines themselves. This is true especially for non-unique sites and content. The problem with it is that people are just too lazy to drive traffic to the sites.

They want to upload them as they are without changing anything and just put a link out there so the spiders come over and they can make money on autopilot. Sorry to be so blunt but it simply doesn’t work that way. There IS work involved in making money from these kind of websites or all members of so called VRE websites would be making enough money to quit their jobs. The ones who are getting active in driving traffic to their sites are really enjoying a healthy income.

So I’m sorry to destroy a dream bubble that you can have some kind of push-button solution. Yes, you still need to get links, you still need to submit articles, you still need to make posts on related forums etc. etc. or these sites are collecting “digital dust” and no one will visit them!

Best regards,

Detlev Reimer

Yesterday, I received an email from one of my subscribers and he has a certain problem with his web site(s) – they were attacked by a hacker and the passwords to his FTP server and Cpanel had been changed… :

Hi again Detlev,

I have a small problem I am hoping you can help with.

2 of My sites are hosted with a particular company and their servers got hacked by a terr0rist supporter (unfortunately).

The problem is they destroyed data which allowed access to my sites via ftp and Cpanel, so I cannot access them.

Part 2 of the problem is that I have had several misfortunes with computers and I dont have a full back-up copy of these websites.

I have downloaded 4 different software applications to spider my sites, but they only pick up the index page and wont go any further. I do have many more pages on each site, but the software refuses to find these links.

Is there any way I might be able to spider my own sites so that I can find page names & links to all pages on my sites?

Can you help??

Sincerely,

Jason

———————————

Here’s my answer, (I’m by no way a professional computer expert who has studied these things or some kind of certified programmer but this is what I would do based on my over 8 years of experience with web servers and web based applications as a user) :

Hi Jason,

I’m afraid that there isn’t much you can do. But I know how you can access your Cpanel and your FTP server again: You need to change the DNS to a different hosting company. If you’re like me then you probably have several different reseller accounts so adding the site to a different server should be no problem.

Now on to the problem with your content. If you have no backups, it can be kind of hard to put up the same pages on your new server.

“I have downloaded 4 different software applications to spider my sites, but they only pick up the index page and wont go any further. I do have many more pages on each site, but the software refuses to find these links. “

– The spiders need to find links on your index page. If there are no links, they cannot spider the site. OR if there are links then probably the pages have been removed or changed by the hacker. In this case, the spiders cannot find pages and don’t show them as results.

The only way I can think of to get the original pages back would be to go to: www.archive.org/ , enter your URL (s) into the “Waybackmachine” field, click “Take me back” and then hope that your pages were indexed by their spiders. You will then be able to view each individual page by clicking the links and then you can save the HTML pages to your harddisk again.

Possible problem: This usually will work only for older sites. If the sites were brandnew, you might have bad luck with it. In this case, there’s no way around to creating the site(s) from scratch again… ;-(

In order to avoid a hacker attack like this in the future, try to make your password as complicated as it can be. Save it into my PromoBuddy and just copy and paste it from there if it’s too difficult to remember. And then try to change it on a regular basis like once a week or so.

That’s what I am doing with my passwords as well (although sometimes I tend to forget it). I have been hacked several times, too. But since implementing these long passwords and regular changes, it hasn’t happened anymore (this is NOT an invitation to hackers who are reading this right now…!).

I hope, this helps.

Detlev