Can’t Get Rich

If you’ve never read the blog ‘Mixed Market Arts’, you’re missing out. I was browsing around today, looking for some ways to promote a new site of mine when I stumbled across his Link Building Cookbook.  Specifically, I found parts one and fourteen.

Those stupid shout boxes

I’m sure you’ve seen them before.  Shout boxes like CBox and Oggix are all over the place, although they seem to be most common on message boards and angsty ‘life-is-pain’ livejournals.  It never occurred to me that they could be used for good (or evil, depending on which side you’re on).  For example, did you know that CBox has zero spam control?  Or that Oggix only has a simple three digit captcha?  Did you know that, depending on how they’re implemented, comments you leave in those chat boxes can count as backlinks?  Did you know that it’s relatively simple to find thousands of sites that use those two widgets using Google?  Are the gears turning yet?

So, yeah.  After reading through those two entries, I decided to give it a try.  Fourty-five pages of Google results and a few hundred sites later, I realized that I was a spammer.  Oddly enough, it didn’t bother me. That may be because the two-day old site I was promoting has had seven conversions since I started my little campaign.  It also helped that a good percentage of the sites that I left comments on were Harry Potter fanfiction message boards.  Those people scare me.

Oh yeah, message boards.  Those were an added bonus.  Some of them had hundreds of active members (again, you’d be surprised at the number of Pokemon/Harry Potter crossover groups there are), and judging by the impression statistics I’m seeing, a lot of them clicked through to my site.  I even came across a few PR6 sites while rummaging around.  Hooray for high PR backlinks (for free!).

Shady?  Yes.  Mean?  Absolutely.  Effective?  Hell yes.  Do yourself a favor and go read Colin’s cookbook.

Completely unrelated note

Do any of you know anything about capoeira?  I found a club that meets twice a week where I live and I’m thinking of giving it a try.

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