I want to get in on this. Right now I feel like I've been throwing shit at a wall and watching it slide down all the while praying something will stick. So far, nothing is really sticking. I've also been trying to think of a way to contribute to this forum when I don't know what the fuck I'm doing so perhaps I can learn and help someone else at the same time.
This is what I've got so far and my plan. In all fairness I started about 2 months ago but I am in the red so in my eyes I have to make up the loss ( ~$800 ) just to catch up with everyone who started yesterday at $0. Also, this is a really long post so sorry.
The Plan:
1 - I'm running email and zip submits (non-incentivised) from
Copeac for 4 days now. Current strategy with this is voting pages. Two of these are direct from ad to offer via an instant redirect. The other three are ad -> my vote page -> offer. I have everything running from a CMS/App framework so I can put these up very quickly which is nice. I have my affiliate links cloaked... I think. The link posts to my site which does a redirect to the offer with my aff id... I figure more people will click if they don't realize they are about to leave the site and it may help a bit with SEO.
This is currently a looser overall. It's been running PPC from 7search.
Stats - 408 clicks @ $43.44 (0.11/AvgCPC), CTR - 162 (Vote -> Offer), Conv - 6 @ $8 (Entered email or zip), Net loss -$35.34
I tried running these with AW and the fuckers wouldn't start running the ads for 2 days and then they would jump in CPC drastically w/i a few hours. I did my best to optimize the pages (meta-tags, relevant content, privacy & contact pages, friendly urls with keywords in them and keywords in title)
With this I'm going to let it ride for a while as I'm guessing I haven't had enough traffic to really know if it will do well. Extremely open to suggestions on how not to suck.
2 - I implemented the Black Hole SEO idea from Eli's blog. I started with RudeDoggs software which worked great but I wanted something I could run from my server instead of my home PC with windows. I also wanted some diff features so I rolled my own with MySQL/Perl/Crontabs.
For this month it's made 2.5GB of rss files and consumed ~ 20GB bandwidth and generated ~ 2.5 million fake posts. I'm targeting 5 backlinks, 2 -> index pages, 3 -> deeplinks.
The two sites it's trying to get backlinks for are affiliate based sites (CJ offers)... content heavy to the niche. It's been running for about 1.5 months and I show 60 backlinks that I can attribute to fake posts in Yahoo and 0 in Google. The sites are ranking in the top 100 results on Google for several of my keywords though which is good.
I don't pay for any advertising for these sites and threw adwords up. Adwords has made like $3 though. I get about 40 uniques a day on each one. I also paid Kamesh to directory submissions for me for 1000 deeplinks and 1000 regular links. About 15 of those show up in Yahoo and 0 in Google after about 2 months.
Overall I'm about $300 in the red from buying the software from RudeDogg initially and paying for dir submissions. My plan here is to give the backlinks time to get indexed and drive traffic organically. If I can get traffic I will focus on getting the aff offers to convert. Hopefully adsense will continue to throw a few dollars in every once in a while. This is a longer term investment.
3 - I read the SEO Empire post from ELI. I auto-generated two db sites and can do them in about 4-5 hours now. The first one has ~ 23K pages the other has ~6K. I used Eli's QUIT tool on them and now have about 40 pages indexed by Google between the two sites. I put them up like 2 weeks ago. I have adsense on every page but neither of them have made any money yet.
Plan is to build more of these... I have 4 or 5 more content databases and have got my autogen script to where I can modify it pretty quickly for this type of site. I'm going to add links to each of these pages to the sites I spoke of in #2 above to help with SERPs.
That's all. Sorry for writing a fucking novel. If anybody has any questions about what I've done I'd be happy to answer them. If anything stands out as a classic newb mistake I'd appreciate the input... I've tried some other techniques as well but they failed too so I've decided to focus on the ones listed here.