Yesterday, I found myself excited as I saw my EPN clicks shoot past 50, then past 100, then less excited after 200, and absolutely livid after 400. I was getting scraped and they were following all of my EPN links driving my once very respectable EPC right through the floor. I made a hearty $4.00US yesterday because some stupid idiot wanted to scrape my scraped content. Here is the solution I came up with if you use Auction2Post: Javascript. We’re going to use a sneaky little piece of script to keep bots from finding our EPN links.

Step 1: Log into your Wordpress Admin, and go to your Auction2Post settings and hit “Templates”

Step 2: Make a copy of your A2PDefaultTemplate to edit.

Step 3: Go to your EPN panel and go to the link generator and make a link for a specific Item in your specific campaign. I like to break everything up into campaigns so I know when one of my sites is tanking.

You’ll end up with a link that looks like

Step 4: Now, back in your template you’re going to want to use the template tag to get the Item number. Throw in a little javascript magic and you have:

<script type="text/javascript">
var item = "[itemID]";
var first = "http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-xxxxx-xxxxx-0/1?icep_ff3=2&pub=xxxxxxxxxx&toolid=10001&campid=xxxxxxxxxxx&customid=&icep_item=";
var last = "&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=xxxxxxxx&kwid=xxxxxxx&mtid=824&kw=lg";
var url = first+item+last;
document.write("<a href=\"",decodeURI(url),"\">Click HERE TO BUY</a>");
</script>

Add this to your template where you’d otherwise have regular links.

So what kind of protection does this afford us? Let’s see.

• The url is never in complete form, so we don’t have to worry about regex matches.
• The URL doesn’t live in the <A> tag, so we don’t have to worry about scraping there.
• The url isn’t put together until the user clicks. Bonus.

Hopefully this will help against the most common bots running around ruining our days.

Joshua Ziering is owner of FullSpeedSEO and loves to talk about all kinds of nerdy stuff. You can see his personal blog @ myauntishot.com

If you are unfamiliar with how white labels work, basically you set up a site that instead of directing to affiliate offers actually facilitates the sale of a product or service. It can help increase conversions dramatically since you aren’t bouncing your visitors all over the dang internet.

Dating Gold makes this process painless. If you’re not familiar with their network, they are the ones behind Amateur Match. Using their white label system, all you have to do is register a domain, point the nameservers to the ones Dating Gold provides you with, enter Title/Description/Keyword info, upload a logo, and boom, the site is live.

Once you’ve got it up and running, you will be paid based on a 50% rev share system. Every time someone new signs up, you get 50% (currently about $15). Even better, you get 50% for the lifetime of that new member. So each month that person renews their membership, you get another $15. Of course, some cancel in the first month, but then some stick around for a year or more.

Currently, there are two types of white labels available. The first is the standard geo-targeted local dating site, and the second is a cam site. There are a few theme options available and you can also customize the color scheme. Here is an example of one:

Getting Traffic
Originally, my plan with my sites were to do a bunch of off-line promotion and see how it does. The domains I used are somewhat “local” themselves. However, after being up for just a few months, they started getting traffic. The downside is, there is currently no way to track traffic stats. I can only assume the traffic is from organic search since I haven’t promoted the site anywhere and only dropped a handful of links to them. For whatever reason, some search engines seem to like these geo-targeted white label sites.

Obviously, the title and keywords you use will have a great impact on whether or not your white label sites pull any organic traffic. I’m not going to divulge what keywords I used, but they were somewhat broad dating terms that have a reasonable (but not super high) amount of competition.

Off-Line Promotion
Considering I haven’t even conducted this test yet, I can’t really encourage you to try it, but it’s something I’m definitely planning on getting around to. Flyer drops at sex shops/strip clubs, ads in the back of shady magazines, etc. Hopefully I’ll actually get to this in Jan/Feb when dating is hot and have some interesting data to share with all of you.

Goddammit, I was supposed to keep this brief!!!

To be perfectly honest, I’m a little bit buzzed right now, but I will try to stay on topic.

If you’re not already familiar, Auction 2 Post is a very handy Wordpress plugin that feeds ebay auctions into your wordpress blogs as posts to provide you with all sorts of fresh content. However, once those auctions end, you don’t really want a bunch of posts linking to dead auctions. Ebay doesn’t want you doing that, either. Luckily, A2P has the ability to automatically delete posts for you once those items expire.

But what about the pages on your site that are indexed by Google and other search engines that get automatically deleted by A2P? Unless you do something about it, those precious visitors trying to access those pages will arrive on your site’s default 404 page. How you handle these 404 visitors is up to you. One plugin you might want to check out to handle your 404’s is called Smart 404. That’s one idea. But in my opinion, this is a better one…

If you’re a member of EPN and you are using Auction 2 Post, chances are you also own PhpBay. If not, well, you should probably take care of that. Click here to buy it so I can get my $19 or whatever and we can move on.

The Method
First of all, I just want to say that I suck complete ass at php and pretty much anything that takes any real coding know-how. Fortunately, Joshua Ziering aka Enigmabomb was kind enough to help me put this code together (based on some code I stole and his own magic) to get this thing to work. Please buy (or give) him a lap dance at ASW to show your appreciation.

The idea of this trick is to take the keyword your visitor used to find your site to begin with and show relevant ebay auctions based on their search query in the place of a useless 404 page. It will work with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and any search engine that uses “q=” to pass the variable.

You’re going to need to edit your theme’s 404.php file to do this. Since it is apparently impossible for a mortal man to get certain code to display properly as code in this post with the theme I am using on this blog, I am going to have to give you text files.

Here is your basic Wordpress 404.php file (will likely be slightly different depending on your theme)

And here is the 404.php I use with all the magic code added to it. Obviously it will not work if you don’t have PhpBay installed on your site.

Of course you might want to tweak that a little bit in order to suit your theme, every case is different. But that should at least get you headed in the right direction.

Booyah. Big ups to Enigmabomb. Peace.

Anyhoo, today I’m going to talk about .CM domains. You may remember a famous domainer by the name of Kevin Ham who traveled to the distant land of Cameroon to basically swoon the Cameroonian government and monopolize the .CM TLD. Well, as of just recently, .CM domains are now up for grabs for everyone.

In case you haven’t already figured out the appeal of this TLD, it gets a ton of typo traffic due to hasty web surfers that miss the “o” key when typing in .COM addresses. It’s safe to say that Google.cm, Yahoo.cm, Facebook.cm, etc, get a hefty amount of erroneous hits per day. There are also non-trademarked typo domains you could snag if you put your brainstorming cap on and do a little research.

The Catch
These exotic domains don’t come cheap. I just registered a .CM domain (that I’m quite happy about) with Namecheap, and it cost me $104/year. I’ve already started to accumulate a text file filled with other .CM prospects that I may or may not register. This could get dangerous.

Namecheap offers free privacy with .CM registrations, so that’s nice. Especially for those of you planning to snag some trademark domains.

Before You Register a .CM Domain with Namecheap!
Check out this important info I got from a Namecheap representative:

If you register new .CM domains during open enrollment (starting Wed, August 26, 2009 at 5:00:01 PM PT) be sure to pre-configure the domain to use custom nameservers at the time you register the domain. You cannot change DNS after it is registered. Please see the CM FAQ page for more details. The Registry will eventually allow DNS changes in future (estimated to be early in 2010), although the Registry will charge for DNS updates. The use of eNom nameservers is a free service for our direct clients. You can make any changes to your host records, such as URL or email forwarding, by going into the domain control panel (Domains > My domains).

As far as other registrars, I have no idea what the policy is. I remain loyal to Namecheap.

Last night on the Wickedfire Ventrilo server, myself, Eli, Enigmabomb, and a couple others (who do not have blogs to the best of my knowledge) did some intense .CM gold-panning. We found some pretty interesting available domains.

Eli found and snagged the best one. That jerk.

Have fun.

In any event, EPN recently introduced four new programs: Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany.

Why is Germany in bold!? Well, because Germany is Ebay’s second largest market after of course the United States. This means that all sorts of untapped niches and microniches can potentially be exploited over in good old Deutschland.

Pic (sorta) related:

It also opens up some domaining opportunities if you’re thinking about registering .de domains. Although there is definitely competition in the .de domaining game, it’s nowhere near that of the .com industry. However, keep in mind that .de is the second most popular TLD in the world with an estimated six million .de domains already registered.

If you’re interested in searching for a good .de domain in any particular niche, here is what I recommend you do:

1. Determine the main keyword related to your niche
2. Use Google Language Tools to translate that word into German
3. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to check out how many searches that keyword and related keywords are pulling in [use exact match]
4. Snag a .de domain

Unfortunately, my most favorite registrar, Namecheap, does not offer .de registration at this time. Here are some alternatives (prices/currency conversions obviously reflect the time of this writing, don’t expect me to update this shit all the time!):

1. GoDaddy* - $17.99/yr (PayPal accepted)
2. iWantMyName.com* - $29.00/yr
3. EuroDNS* - apprx. $26.23/year (€16/yr plus €2 setup fee)
4. iDotz**- $19.95/yr
5. DomainDiscount24.com - $10.39 (€7.14)/yr
6. Joker.com - $9.16/yr
7. Europe Registry - $13.11 (€9)/yr

But I Heard You Have to Live in Germany to Register a .DE domain!?

Not the case, not the case. That myth is derived from the fact that the administrative contact on each .de domain registered must be located in Germany. Some registrars offer to act as the administrative contact on your behalf, thus circumventing this little bump in the road. However, some registrars will charge an additional fee for this (and some may not offer this service at all).

The registrars with the * listed above are the ones that include an administrative contact in Germany with your registration.

**Idotz.net will provide a German administrative contact for an additional fee.

The others either don’t offer this service or charge an additional fee (you’ll have to do your own research you bastard). Or you could just use your long lost cousin that lives in Germany as your administrative contact.

Only one I’ve used myself is GoDaddy (I know, I know). They might not be my favorite registrar but when it comes to international domains, I’d rather deal with their spammy site/terrible support and hopefully not have any further problems. Coincidentally, they’re also the only registrar listed above that I have an active affiliate relationship with. Weird.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that if you plan on building and optimizing sites for German traffic, it’s imperative that you have the site(s) HOSTED over there. Having your international sites hosted on IPs in the countries they are targeting helps a ton for ranking on search engines specific to that country. As far as which host to use, do your dang homework. As of now I use a UK host called Nativespace for all my European e-pillaging. That’s pretty close to Germany, right!?

Recently Matt released a nifty program called Guide Site Builder and was kind enough to give me a copy for review. If you’re anything like me (and if not, you should aspire to be), you’re probably wondering “what the fuck does it do?”…

Basically Guide Site Builder (herein referred to simply as GSB) is a very convenient way to churn out simple sites for the purposes of list building. Once you’ve got the thing installed (which is pretty painless), you upload one of the templates and bam, your mini site is live.

The two-page template allows your visitors to learn about whatever it is you’re offering them, and then lets them sign up (by providing their email) and then download whatever the hell it is you’re giving them. Most people I would imagine would use this for ebooks, but you can use your imagination.

Now, once you drive some traffic to the GSB powered site and collect a slew of targeted emails, GSB allows you to download all of that data in a nicely compiled little .CSV file. Pop that thing into Excel (or another program if you’re a weirdo), and then admire all of that marketable data you have collected.

Hopefully I don’t need to explain to you why collecting emails from your targeted visitors is important.

If this sounds like something that will help you grow your business more efficiently, you can pick up a copy of GSB here for only $60.

Have fun.

If you aren’t up to speed with the new changes to the EPN program, some adjustments have been made that further restrict the types of promotion allowed. One major change is that it is no longer acceptable to drop your EPN links on ANY site that you do not own and have complete control over. This includes social networking sites like Twitter as well as free blogging platforms such as Blogger and Wordpress.com. The only exception is if you obtain permission in writing from Ebay Partner Network prior to using these promotional methods.

As a precaution I’ve spent some time the past couple days disabling old links (the ones that I can) that were dropped on sites like those listed above. It’s a bit unnerving to think that although maybe only a handful of clicks are coming from these now illegitimate sites, it is still technically enough for EPN to show me the door. However…

The Bright Side

I’m not sure how exactly this works out, or if it just mere coincidence, but Google traffic on my PhpBay sites is way up. Like 110% up. Of course this is just the past week, so I’m not exactly counting on this being consistent. But I’ve talked to other phpbay site admins and I’m not the only one experiencing this phenomenon.

I’m only speculating, of course, but could it be that the high (and getting higher) barrier for entry to the EPN program as well as the harsh promotion restrictions has caused Google to attribute a little more credibility to phpbay/BANS type sites? It would make sense, since autoblogs and black hat type sites monetized via EPN are now few and far between.

After all, Steve Hartman and the folks at EPN have made it very clear that they are shifting their business model away from quantity and now trying to focus on quality. Wouldn’t it make sense that Google would make a slight algorithm tweak in response to these recent changes?

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking. But…maybe not.

Wisdom Nugget

Also, I’ve gotten some questions from folks asking about how I set up my phpbay sites in order to get a favorable Google ranking. That is a whole different post in itself, but I will say that I’ve seen a ton of them making the same mistake: A ton of phpbay results on the homepage.

When I first started building them, I wanted to of course get as many EPN clicks as possible, so it made sense that I should put clickable auction results on the home page to minimize the time visistors spent on my site and get them clicking through to Ebay as soon as possible.

I learned pretty quickly that that is a very short-sighted mentality, and in the long run you will do much better to have unique content on a pleasant looking site with user-friendly navigation. There is a lot you can do with phpbay to narrow down categories and provide a lot of value to your visitors. I know it sounds corny, but my EPN dashboard makes me feel a lot better about it.

So, keep the results off the front page. Yes, that is a protip.

Recently someone on Wickedfire asked how they could get more views to a YouTube video. I figured I might as well put my response on this here bloggity blog as well.

This will help you get a significant amount of NON-HUMAN views if you do it correctly. Why would you want those? Well, basically the idea is to get so many views that your video starts appearing in the “most viewed” areas and what not, resulting in a ton of real views. A large amount of total plays also adds legitimacy to your video.

The Method

Upload your video to YouTube. Now go create a MySpace account. Proceed to hunt down popular MySpace Music profiles that have a ton of views/fans and that also ALLOW HTML in comments. These aren’t exactly easy to find but they are out there. I’m not going to give you a master list of them, but with a little research you should be able to find some. Just scroll down and check out the comments on any particular profile, and if you see a ton of retarded glittery images embedded then you’ll know you’ve found a winner.

Add all of these bands. Many of the more popular ones have their accounts set up to auto approve incoming friend requests (because it would take forever to do it manually).

Once you’ve got a friends list full of bands, you may now proceed to comment spam. In your comment, you will be embedding your video. However, the regular old embed code simply will not do. You need the AUTOPLAY embed code. Your typical YouTube embed code will look like this (forgive the screenshots, my code plugin thingy is being a jerk right now):

In order to make the video autoplay, you’ll want to add “autoplay=1″ to the end of both the URL’s in the code. The resulting code will now look like this:

And then you simply embed the crap out of it in MySpace comments. If you feel like being extra abusive, feel free to embed the video 2-3 times in a comment. Or even post multiple comments. Every time someone loads that MySpace page, you get a view (or more).

Okay, fine, to get you started I’ll give you one profile: McFly. Only because I don’t like them. If they stop allowing HTML in their comments in the near future, perhaps you’ll know why.

Have fun.

Here is an example of an account i set up like a week ago with Twitterfeed: GoogleNewsTweet

That’s a very broad and general example of what you can do with a Twitter account + related RSS Feed + Twitterfeed. I just followed a few random people, set up the Twitterfeed and let it go. At the time there are only over 200 followers or so, but that’s not bad for 10 minutes of work.

Now go make a thousand accounts.

If you would like to know how I did it, please PayPal $97 to offwhitehat (at) gmail. Good luck bros.