BlackHat SEO News & Reviews

Introduction

Hello fellow BHWers. I’ve got a nice white hat method to share
with you. I’ve used it for three years now to create and get in some
really killer white hat niches, both for getting outgoing links, and for
making killer conversions right on page. This method is a long term
method and it takes a bit of work and dedication to start rolling, but
after a certain time it yields really powerful results. I’m not
promising to make you a millionaire overnight, but I am sharing my
method that has brought me really reliable earning and

What’s A Wiki and Why?
A wiki is a kind of web site where anyone can edit the pages and update
them. The idea is to ‘crowd-source’ the content writing and creating
part and have random people write content on it for free, it gets a
ridiculous amount of traffic. According to Alexa, it’s the 6th most popular website. According to Business Insider, Wikipedia, a nonprofit organization, is worth $7 Billion dollars.
Of course, I am by no means saying you will become as big as wikipedia,
but even a tiny fraction of the traffic, editors etc can give you very
reliable earning potential.

Pros and Cons of Wikis for making money

Pros

1. “Wiki” as a brand has amazingly positive reputation, unlike some random blog where you allow others to post
2. People love wikis and trust them and the information in them
3. Other people will eventually write content for you
4. Unlike blogs or other websites, advertising wikis is really easy. No
   one looks down on it, you can post it in forum threads, blogs, anywhere
   and because it’s got such a positive rep
5. You can excuse ads by saying you need to support the wiki
6. You, as an Admin, can make it look like there’s a consensus to outsiders
7. Product placement, as long as you do it right, has very high conversions
8. Very SEO friendly for engines
9. Lots of targeted direct traffic if you do things right
10. It’s 99.9% Whitehat!
11. Making wikis in a non computer savvy field is a ridiculously easy and has sick conversions
12. PEOPLE TRUST WIKIS

Cons

1. Wikis take work to seed the initial content
2. You can’t monetize right away
3. You need to have a long term plan to attract users and people to make content
4. You need to research the market well
5. It’s a long term project
6. You’ve got to be really white hat and good in your copy writing to
   make it ‘innocent’, because the people you host the wiki with have to
   never question you or receive too many complaints
7. Others can mess up your work if they’re really malicious
8. Technically you don’t own the content with the default terms

The Method

Market and Keyword research
I can’t stress how important it is to have really good niches and
markets. You can’t go in a niche where other successful wikis exist. You
can’t go somewhere where there is no traffic! (Duh!). You can’t go in
somewhere where you won’t have a long term strategy for making money out
of it. You must take careful time and research setting up a wiki niche
for yourself, because you’re going to have to do work in the long term
to get the site going. Remember, traffic is key, but so is the kind of traffic you’re getting.

I also must point out that you’ve got to concentrate on niches that are not related
to internet marketing or to tech savvy people or anything like that.
First, imagine you had a wiki niche about IM. Other IMs would quickly
figure out to put their links in it, they’d figure out you were
monetizing stuff, etc. The less tech savvy the audience, the
better. They’re way more trustworthy and they don’t question some
potential ads or your ownership of the wiki. The niche for things not
related to computers is way less likely to have a good wiki in it too!
Remember these tips! Remember to research your competition ahead of
time, you can’t just sit down in five minutes and dive in a niche! It
also helps to have some knowledge about the topic yourself.

Powerful thing to do while researching!
Let’s say you’re pretty figured out on what you want your niche to be.
You’ve done some research, and you’ve got a good idea of the market, of
the monetization long term strategies, of how in demand the content is,
if there’s a lot of good will people in the community that will help you
out in the long term, etc. Okay, you must do this one IMPORTANT STEP. This
has helped me so much in the long term I can’t overhype it. Even before
you set up your wiki but after you’re pretty sure on the niche, start
making GOOD and CONSTRUCTIVE posts using the same identity on popular
forums, discussion sites, blogs, facebook pages, and other awesome
community hubs for your niche and very related niches. You want to build
up a bit of time for your identity to ‘exist’ out there and for people
to accept you. This will come to be useful a bit later, you will see.
Trust me on this!

Setting up the Wiki
Research what kind of wiki hosting you want to go with. Do you want to use one of the many available free hosting wiki services?
Do you want to redirect it to your own site or do you want to host it
on theirs? Do you want to download a wiki package and host it on your
own site without involving the wiki hosting places? I personally mostly
use Wikia, because it looks exactly like wikipedia and people feel
really familiar with it and how to use it., and most importantly they’re
a lot more likely to trust it!

I’m not going to explain the process of making an account and all that,
because it’s fairly simple to set up, no matter what hosting you’ve
chosen. Make sure you do your keyword research and organize the
subdomain or domain to be an effective on for on site SEO for searches. This will matter in the long term! Now comes the hard part!

Content in the Wiki
In the long term, your users are going to be generating content and
you’re going to be thinking about ways of monetizing it. Hopefully
you’ve thought very well about the niche and it’s a fairly big one
without too much competition as far as wikis and other stuff goes.
Hopefully your niche caters towards people that aren’t tech experts and
likely have a number of free time to write about their expertise and
experiences with whatever niche you’re thinking about.

To start, wikipedia and other wiki’s content is copyrighted in such a way that other wiki pages can use it freely as long as as you include a link to them. But let’s use our SEO
hats for a minute and think! We can’t just copy wiki content, because
we’re going to get hit with a duplicate content penalty, but we can
easily use it as a base to work out on making content yourself. So for
example if you decided you wanted a wiki on strength training. Sure,
there is a competing wiki in that 550k search volume keyword, but what
we’d do is go to wikipedia for strength training (here)
and look at the content people wrote. Then we’d take it and rewrite it
ourselves to expand on it on our own wiki. This takes time and patience
and hard work, like any kind of SEO
and website building. But after a couple of hours or days or weeks of
work, you will have some pretty good content in wiki form. Remember how I
told you to start participating in the communities? Because you were
posting and talking to people on the niche subject, you will have a lot
of ideas about what content to write, but this is not even the big
part. It’s time to market it!

Marketing and Advertising the wiki
Okay, so you remember to take time to set up a trustworthy identity for
yourself. Awesome. People have made connections with you, the blog
authors kind of know and trust you, your forum account is not one day
long, etc. Now you can LEGITIMATELY go and advertise your wiki and ask
people to help you and to link to you. This is the beauty of this,
because wikis as a brand have such a powerful ‘brand’ image and people
feel so altruistic about them, as long as you don’t start stuffing ads
right away you will get people to help you. You will get people to write
content for you for free. This takes some time, but as long as you did
your market research well and you found a good niche and you’ve built up
a decent chunk of starting content and you’ve got a pretty legit online
identity for people to trust you, they will FLOCK to you to give their
expertise and advice on your wiki. They will link to you because wikis
are so positive and altruistic and good. You will have a ton of organic
traffic in the long term, too.

Grow time
Like any good project, wikis will take some time to grow
and go up in rankings and get the content going. Keep at it, remember,
your goal is not to have it bringing money right away, because this is
not what this method does. Your goal is long term. Keep at it! Keep
making improvements and getting the community interested.

Monetizing
Okay, it’s a year in and you’ve got a good community of people
occasionally writing content. Now it’s time to make some money. If you
chose your niche well, you can either go for an ads displayed way or you
can go for stuffing occasional affiliate product links in the content.
It’s up to you how you do it, but be both subtle and positive about
this. You don’t want to advertise shitty products that the people that
write for your wiki don’t approve of. You don’t want a backlash. Keep
your ads on topic, they will have better conversions. You can also make
wiki pages on the product you’re advertising and write up a really
positive wiki page on it detailing all the features and benefits and
savings it does. In case you get flak you can always make up a story
about how we need ads for server hosting, or w.e. in private to the
people that complain.

Also, after a year or so your wiki pages might have pretty good pagerank. Use them to push your other project’s SEO up and to get people to related places that you own that can be used to monetize the traffic.

Ending tips:
I wanted to share a few tips I learned in my working with this method for you guys.
First, if you took time to find the right niche, chances are its
oriented toward less computer savvy people and maybe even old people. To
make it easy for them, increase the default font size on your wiki.
Older people and most people in general have a lot of trouble reading
small sized text, so they will really appreciate your bigger text!
Don’t start monetizing too early. It can hurt the initial amount of
content and make people less likely to help you contribute. You want to
give it time to build up in size.
Slow and steady wins the race, but don’t be too slow!
If your content is really good you get an incredible amount of organic
links. So work really hard on making sure you’re providing real content.
You can’t spin random crap articles this way, you’ve got to go legit.

Ranking your site is all about building quality along with quantity
backlinks to your site. If you can control your link building techniques
and know what exactly you are doing, you will make lots of money from
your site.

I have seen many newbies diverting themselves from basics of link
building and moving more towards spamming. Spamming does work but only
if your base of links you have built is strong and to build a strong
base of links your basic link building should be strong enough. I am
sure these points must have been discussed here before so many time,
still I am putting them all together in this thread to make it
convenient for people who hate hitting search button.

1.) Article Marketing :- Most common way to get back links, though many seo
experts are debating on new google algorithmic changes and google not
giving much value to links been build through article marketing. But
still posting high quality articles to multiple high PR
sites will give worth to your efforts by giving link back to your site.
You can use this as pre-selling to your potential customers before
bringing them to your site.

2.) Directory Submissions :- There are many free directories
available on net where you can submit a link to your web site. Though
these directories will take some time before they approve your
submission but every link is important and good for our site specially
when its coming free. Here is a list of approx 3k free web directories:-

Free Web Directories

3.) Social Bookmarking :- Social bookmarking sites are mostly
used to index your links quickly. But they are also very effective when
it comes to drag targeted and high traffic to your site. Its highly
recommended to bookmark the urls of your site which contain quality and
unique content to high PR
bookmarking sites as this will attract traffic on to your site. If you
looking to bookmark urls in bulk, as it will be tiring and boring to do
them manually, you can always take help of bookmarking tools available.

4.) Forum Profiles :- Forum profiles plays vital role in site’s
ranking if done correctly. Most people just creates a profile and leave
the link in it which reduces the links efficiency. Rather we should
create account on forums related to our site, leave the account for
weeks time and then post the content in the forum with link to our money
site in the content. This link will give more link juice to your site
as it is made with relevant content and will look less spamy.

You can do this work manually however there is a software called sick
submitter which can do this job as you can add your own custom list in
that tool. So you can add your own list everytime according to your site
niche.

5.) RSS Submissions :- RSS submission to RSS directories is
another good technique to get backlinks and traffic to your site. If you
have an HTML page, still you can create RSS feed by using free RSS feed
creation service like links2rss.com. Once RSS feed is created you can
submit them to RSS directores using many free or paid services available
on net. You can find the list here:-

Free RSS Directories

You can also use tools senuke x and sick submitter to do this for you.

6.) Content Syndication :- We always tend to over see the
simplest things that can get us good number of “FREE” links and traffic
to our money site. Submit your blog’s RSS feed to ping.fm which will
then send your updates to other high PR pinging sites returning you links and traffic to your site.

7.) PDF Distribution :- Very uncommon method of getting laser
traffic is writing 5-10 pages ebook or you can even convert your article
into pdf format with your links in it and distribute them to ebook
directories. Very easy and effective way of getting traffic to your
site. You can add your ebooks for free to these directories :-

Free Ebook Directories.

8.) Web 2.0 Properties :- As far as back linking is concern web
2.0 sites plays very important role. Add unique content to these sites
with an anchor text containing link to your money site. The most
important point of these sites is that you can spam them heavily with
xrumer or scrapebox with out fearing of getting your money site
penalized. For instance you have added unique content to these sites
pointing to your money site, then you can do xrumer and scrapebox blast
on these buffer sites and eventually link juice will flow to your money
site as well.

9.) Blog commenting :- Manual blog commenting is very important
for your rankings in search engine. You need to search blogs related to
your niche in google and post a comment relevant to the topic on that
blog and leave your link in it with your Anchor text. Posting a relevant
comment will increase your chances to get approved. You can even use
scrapebox to scrape blogs related to your niche.

10.) Press Releases :- The idea behind the press release is to
sound professional and formal. Writing style of press release is
different from article writing and is more of public announcement types.
There are many free Press release submission sites available on net,
just search on google and you should be good to go. How ever if you
looking for paid service then PRweb is a nice option to be considered.
Paid Press release would definitely gt you more exposure as compared to
free one.

11.) Guest Post :- again most commonly practiced method of back
linking. Beneficial for both blog owners and people who promoting their
web sites. Blog owner gets unique and quality content and you get one
way backlink to your site.

12.) Yahoo answers :- Answer sites like yahoo answers, ehow etc
are always helpful in attracting traffic to your site. Post in the
section related to your site leaving link back to your site will act as
referral for people reading your answers.

13.) Google Images :- Google images are important source of
traffic to your site, so when ever you add image to your post on your
web site, always mention alt tag and add link of your site to the image.
Once your image is indexed by google, it will send you decent amount of
traffic.

14.) Youtube :- Have you ever noticed that when we search of any
product or service and if we see any video ranked on top positions we
tend to watch that video. This is the main idea behind this, next time
you think of creating video and uploading them to youtube, watermark
that video with your site url and add link to your site in description
as well. Though google won’t index your link but it will help you get
traffic to your site once your video get ranked.

15.) Automated blog comments/Xrumer Blast :- As I mentioned in
the starting, spamming is effective if done in right way. If you have
got these tools and you know how to operate them, then never spam your
money site directly if you really love your site. Rather take all the
buffer sites like web 2.0, profile links etc and spam them with
xrumer/scrapebox. In this way you will get the link juice of these links
created but you won’t be penalized by google for spamming. Most of
these links will get deleted or won’t be indexed so we always we create
these link in thousands.

ok, so that’s all for now. These are basic but very effective ways if
done correctly to build back links to your money site. I would request
my other Pro fellow members to add more points/techniques or
correct/elaborate any of the above points, if I missed out of any.

Suggestions, feedbacks and comments are always welcomed.

Regards