Black Hat Marketing
The following is an unhinged rant about why you should avoid shady business practices on the internet.
There’s no doubt that you can get ahead temporarily by resorting to black hat marketing techniques, but few understand the potential long-term consequences of those quick paydays.
I intended to create a compelling argument, but it’s Sunday afternoon and it’s the first hot day of the year in the UK, so I’m possibly delirious.
The majority of black hat marketing gurus are posers and temporary hustlers.
The small minority of them that actually succeed tend to do one of two things;
- Learn from the experience and move into something more permanent
- Learn how to hustle other beginners out of their hard-earned pocket money
Either way, there’s one fact; black hat marketing is at best a very temporary solution to a problem you’re probably going to have to deal with all your life. (Cash flow, or the accruing of coins.)
Black Hat SEO & Black Hat Social Marketing
Black hat SEO is the once, now and future “goldmine” of online hustling.
Things you might be interested in:
- Buying hundreds of backlinks
- “Gaming” search engines with various signals
- Buying into private networks of blog links
These are the sorts of things you’re confronted with when you go to somewhere like Black Hat World in all sorts of weird packages and guises.
Sometimes, in the short term, these methods work. Over the long term… not a chance. Here’s the thing with Black Hat SEO: It’s exactly what the great big monoliths don’t want.
Here’s another big idea in terms of the Black Hat world – paid social advertising – and more importantly – burning through accounts and cloaking your landing pages.
In its most common form, this is where you’ll set up an ad on Facebook and send the quality assurance team to one landing page; a nice clean one. “Our supplements will make you feel better and live a happier life.”
You send your visitors to another page entirely – one that’s not at all kosher as far as Facebook’s rules are concerned; “THIS SUPPLEMENT IS LIKE STEROIDS ON CRACK. IT’LL GIVE YOU 100LB’s LEAN MASS IN THREE MINUTES AND (PROBABLY) MAKE YOUR PENIS REALLY, REALLY HUGE.”
Now, this method works and works well. Reports come in of people making thousands in a day.
Until they inevitably get banned.
There are whole architectures and economies built around this. You can buy fake accounts and re-run cloaking stuff over and over, burning through credit cards and otherwise wreaking havoc amongst the innocent social media surfers.
The problem with this model is the problem with all of these ideas.
Eventually, (maybe not so eventually) you’re putting in more effort for less return.
The Problem With Black Hat Marketing
Imagine walking into a bar full of people with money to throw at you. These are the big business tycoons and other movers and shakers.
They’re all sipping martinis and they’re talking about how the money flows with ease.
There’s just one problem: They all hate your guts.
The way they see it, you’ve been dipping your hands in the bar’s tip jar, and that’s pretty much tantamount to stealing from them, in their eyes.
That’s kind of fair, because hell, you know the risks when you break the rules.
What’s probably not fair is that, like pirates, they’re going to give you the Black Spot.
With places like Google, Facebook and Amazon, once you’re a sinner – you’re done. Dead. These companies aren’t like utility companies; they don’t have to provide you a service, and they certainly don’t need to help you make money at their expense.
Sometimes, they’ll ban you without actually telling you why.
Now, there are virtually unlimited amounts of money to be made on these platforms. You can spend hundreds of dollars a day on Google Adwords or Facebook Ads, and they’ll take your money, send you traffic and nobody will bat an eyelid.
So far as is visible, these giants aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Like the old media and publishing empires, these guys are in control for the time being, arbiters of financial flow for anyone who works on the internet.
Do you really want to play with that fire?
If you think so, then take stock of reality here. Do you think the above companies are going to get more or less important over the next few years?
Temporary Gains, Long-Term Pains
My argument against “being dodgy” is essentially the same as it was back in this article.
If you get banned on Twitter for saying, “[Some group] deserve to be raped and murdered” then you’re incurring a hell of a penalty in the long term for that rush of dopamine.
Let’s say you give up 500 visitors a day to your website through getting a Twitter ban.
That’s 500 visitors that are going to your competitors. You’re losing twice; your own lost revenue and the market share your competitors get.
This is without taking into the social stigma.
Anyway… off topic slightly, but the same is true of cold, hard cash and the black hat marketing world.
I saw a guy in the Kindle boom write a thread boasting about how he made $100 a day by copy-pasting absolute junk into his kindle books. We’re talking “rgiondfbdkgdfgndflgfdngldnfgd” type stuff. He’d make hundreds of ebooks like this, and then borrow the things and get his friends to do the same.
Now, I don’t know what happened to that guy, but it’s obviously not going to be good. He probably got slapped with a permanent ban. From Amazon. Amazon are also the tech giant most likely to sue the hell out of you – as they showed by targeting fake review providers.
The Future and Untold Riches
Imagine the untold riches that guy is leaving on the table by getting the ban-slap from Amazon. It’s not just about books. Amazon is entering these markets:
- Merch by Amazon, FBA (The future of manufacturing)
- Drone delivery (The future of logistics)
… It’s not all physical, although that’s the future of manufacturing physical products right there. We’ve also got:
- Publishing (books, videos, software)
- AWS (Amazon Web Services… the future of the internet’s architecture)
And more that I can’t think of.
Now, that guy probably felt pretty clever when he gamed the system, but imagine being locked out of all of those things.
Now bear in mind you can also get banned from the other tech giants. (Try out Facebook Ads and their targeting system… that’s the future of marketing. Hyper-targeting. Crazy.) Google are literally trying to turn us into transhuman AI machines.
You have to wonder whether $100 a day in profit is worth being cut out of the above future markets?
Final Thoughts
Business is, without a doubt, a case of trying to get ahead of the competition.
You have to be smart about doing so though. There was one guy who defrauded millions out of third world governments by telling them a golf-ball detector was a mine-detector, for instance.
He’s in jail now.
When it comes to the more realistic example of “Should I go on a dodgy site and buy a thousand backlinks to my website?” you might think, “There’s no way I’m going to get caught doing that.” Or, “I don’t care if my little website fails.”
That’s a risk you have to weigh up.
But the big dogs – the tech giants – are getting better at chasing down this sort of thing all the time, and like I mentioned above; they ban you for life, with no jury of your peers or anything. Oh, and they probably hold the keys to the future.
The real risk you’re weighing up is two-pointed:
- Should I aim to be a pirate, slipping in and out and making a load of short-term gains before evading the Navy?
- Should I just do it the right way and use the Navy to build a merchant fleet that makes me more money than I need?
Sloppy, last-minute pirate analogy aside, the choice is pretty clear.