Ideas for selling semi-legal marijuana alternative online?

I have a PPC client that was spending good money on Adwords, just today it looks like Google banned all 'herbal incense' products, now the only real source of traffic is gone.

I'd normally recommend going organic, but the problem with that is the stuff might not remain legal for a long time, so if we spend a bunch of money to get it ranked, then by the time it is ranking it could very well be off the market.

Anyone have any ideas for what might work for something like this? Maybe pop unders at porn sites in bulk, or some other way to monetize other people normally 'seedy' cheap traffic.

Well, The fact is you are guessing how long it will/wont be legal. Pop ups in porn sites wont guarantee anything besides horny dudes closing the ad.

Maybe an ad in high times or other 420 friendly sites. But if it were me I would go ahead and work on ranking the site ASAP just in case it is no longer legal and in the event it stays legal you have a long term benefit for the customer.

I am not sure what he was spending in adwords but if he commits that amount of money to your SEM then he can rank.

Try BidTraffic,I'm sure they allow it.Go for the rankings,this herbal products won't get banned in the next years,only the substances that will be replaced by new ones each time.This is how the game works.

In 2007 Carlos and Lupe Garcia put out an info product about something like this.

One niche I remember was illegal cable boxes. They made a killing and were shut down.

Then they sold questionable diet pills and made a killing until they were shut down by the FDA.

Then they moved onto something else equally shady. The course was about pay per click but they also had multiple 1st page ranking for their keywords which g00gle caught.