Greyhat Method Journal (8 months in) RESULTS

Hello. I have been ghosting this forum for over a year now and have finally decided to contribute. Out of everything on this great forum, the personal journal threads really catch my attention and I think are the most useful so I will present my own method here, what I did, and the results so far.

first I decided to post the results of this expirement rather than start from the begininning to save time.

8 months into 2010 I am happy with my results on a Greyhat blog I have been working on since January.

So for the past three months I have been holding around 1.2k visitors a day. I have come along way since January which has been only about 10 hits a day. about 3 months ago I recieved a major bump in SERPS and it boosted my traffic a great deal.

This is a greyhat method I have developed because most of it is white hat but in the earlier steps some black hat traffic methods are use to kick start some traffic.

feel free to ask any questions and follow along.


Step 1: pick a niche from a LARGE market. You do NOT need to worry about microniches thats not what this is about nor how it works. So before you make that weblog about "budget spring landscaping" just shorten it to "landscaping".

Step 2 (one that takes time): Generate a LARGE keyword list related to your niche and I cannot stress LARGE enough. This is a big key to the success and growth of your site/blog. The one I used for my blog was about 47K words compiled.

Step 3: Create an account for every major social network site. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Orkut, Friendster, etc.

Step 4 (Another long one but again one of the most important): Your going to cross check each keywords through Google Trends and put each one in one of two categories: Keywords/phrases that have gained popularity in the last year and keywords/phrases that have lost popularity in the last year.

Step 5: once you have the keywords grouped disregard the group of keywords that have lost popularity. Were focussing on the "growers".

Step 6: Time to put something online. This part I wont go into to much detail but I would go with a blog (wordpress works). Write up a few good articles/posts about your niche and make sure you insert at least 100 keywords into the articles/posts. these keywords are growers that you will use. the ones with trend growth.

Step 7 (the blackhat part): Were going to do a little keyword spamming on your social network accounts. Rip videos watermark them and reupload them on youtube with titles tags and descriptions ripped from your keyword list, use flashtweet to gain a lot of followers on twitter and post short keyword messages related to your blog. Make sure your URL is posted on every social network account you have. Once you have a small following on your SNA's yoru going to link them all together and start sending messages/posting on each page (example: post one of your youtube vids on your facebook page). How blackhat you want to go is up to you (example: dozen of posts, videos, spambots, comment spammers, etc.) Remember this is just to quick "now" traffic to help index you quickly in the search engines and let them all know your site exists.

Step 8: Everymonth you are going to add 100 new keywords from your hot list and eventually you should see SERPS start turning in your favor. I would shoot for a few posts a week. Remember though the more the better.

I'm going to leave off for now as I am still conducting this experiment but this is something to get you started.

Q+A

Questions Ill probably get asked so lets save some time.....


How much are you making and when did you actually start making money?

4 months ago I slapped adsense on this blog and and been pulling about $1400 a month average. Is this good for 30K+ targeted SE traffic a month? For me it is. I'm a traffic guy not really a marketer. I could have probably started making money sooner but I was focussed on the traffic first.

What did you use to build a keyword list?

google adwords keyword tool and my brain.

what do you use for a site platform?

Wordpress. Nice and easy to use as I am not a web developer by any means.

Whats next in your expirement?

I started Grad school this month so I am going to keep it simple and just focus on this blog. I plan on starting more blogs at the end of the year.

How much work is involved?

Building the keyword list took the longest (over a month) since then 5-10 hours a week. Sometimes I'll spend a whole saturday or sunday and be done for the week.

well this is all Ill post for now. Ill be back with results for the remainder of the year as well as to answer any questions.

Thanks and goodluck

This method is genius. I'll for sure bookmark this thread, lol

Thanks alot for sharing!

Pretty good results you got there! I totally agree that best way to get traffic is from good keywords!

good stuff. congrats.

social media is the future to success. I was wondering when would a thread like this pop up. Great Contribution KeyzDT!

wow thats great.. thanks for the share..

Do you write your own articles/posts or do you outsource them? what do you do to generate backlinks?
Thanks for sharing!

undermyhat said:

Do you write your own articles/posts or do you outsource them?

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I write all my own posts. Currently about 3-5 a week not really that many so I can spare a few hours a week and just do it myself.

undermyhat said:

what do you do to generate backlinks?

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for me, backlinks come from social networking sites. Commenting using tools like scrapebox is also useful. I really just use them early on in this method for the sake of getting indexed and dont rely on backlinks for any more than that.

Interesting technique and share! but how is it technically possible to increase your serps by only using social networking websites as backlinks? Twitter, Facebook and co are all no follow to start with. This makes me a bit curious.

devtom55 said:

Interesting technique and share! but how is it technically possible to increase your serps by only using social networking websites as backlinks? Twitter, Facebook and co are all no follow to start with. This makes me a bit curious.

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devtom, social networking sites are merely a way to get you some quick, consitent traffic to help get you indexed into serps.

You see what a lot of people dont realize is that why their sites take so long to get indexed is that you need traffic in order for search engines to pick you up fast. So, you obviosly cant rely on SE traffic in the beggining right? Therefore you have to use social network sites to "push" some traffic thus giving off the impression that you have an active site and not a dud.

I don't focus on backlinks as a means to improve serps. I focus on keywords that gain popularity over time and my blog containing more of those keywords than the next guys. This alone will start bumping you up the ranks. Infact, I think backlinks are losing credibility online because of all the spamming associated with them. Backlinks alone wont help serps. Traffic yes but serps no.

I used some blackhat social networking techniques from January until March and then just stopped once I saw my site start appearing in serps for keywords and phrases. At that point I just pushed the keywords and created more posts. The ultimate goal here is for when "joe internet user" pulls up Google and types in something related to your blog, he will eventually run into your blog. He wont need a backlink leading to your blog, he will find your site right on the first page of Google.

Then once you have started gaining popularity and get consistent traffic to your site guess what you will start to see? backlinks that other people have setup for you on their sites if they like yours.

In short, the main focus of this method is the keywords. Dont worry about backlinks

KeyzDT said:

In short, the main focus of this method is the keywords. Dont worry about backlinks

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Give me a break

DustinX said:

Give me a break

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sorry you dont believe it. backlinks can get you traffic and help with PR but ....this is about keywords NOT backlinks. If your worried about creating your own backlinks then xrumer and scrapebox is the way to go. If you want to focus on keywords then then you dont have to worry about building backlinks. my blog now has about 47 backlinks. I think 10 of them are from myself during my social networking days the rest are on forums and other blogs that I have never visited. they came naturally. 47 is nothing compared to people who add 5k a month through BH methods. this is the source of their traffic not mine.

people who are all about backlinks just end up going the spam route blasting away with xrumer and all that. hey if it works then great. Im interested in being found in serps not off of other peoples sites.

I did not use your method though, but I have a site that is constantly gaining links from forums where people found me in the serps and then discuss the content of an article. I also added Social Bookmarking icons and links to each post (it's a WP site) and people bookmark it for me. So, what KeyzDT describes works ... after you have the initial rankings build up.

Very interesting method and technique! Social Media its great thing!

social networking sites are now great for boost up the traffic

thanks for sharing. it's nice to see someone being successful in building an authority site instead of having thousands of micro niches. easier to maintain. better for the long term.

so only SN? no other promotion done? and in how many months did you see good results?

in this days, backlink is second part in seo, if you have large area in social media like facbook, twitter ect, it will be great for your blog in serp too.

by the way, how you monetize that site?

redmint32 said:

so only SN? no other promotion done? and in how many months did you see good results?

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In the first few months only SN. The main traffic source ends up being from SE because of the keywords that I took a month to filter. SN is just to start off some traffic to get the SERPS going. Dont fall into the social network game. traffic is easy to generate from social networks but its not worth much and google hates it. Use it just to start you off but dont depend on it.

It wasnt about early June that when me and the big G became friends and I started ranking for several keywords that gave me a major boost in traffic.

The ultimate goal here is to have natural traffic growth. Traffic from search engines is the best kind so this is what you want.

mariosocieto said:

by the way, how you monetize that site?

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right now just adsense. later in the year I might do some research to see how I can maximize my earning potential but for now Im just focusing on growing this blog