Trick #6 the ghost box.
I'm not a lawyer and I haven't read all the federal laws pertaining to the postal service but #6 and #7 are definitely in the grey area of the law.
At this point I am obsessed with winning my local keywords. I even open a local business in two metro areas thousands of miles away from home. I had such confidence that I could win my keywords and I put together a complete business serving 10 million people in two large metros. I didn't just want to win the main cities I wanted to win the "A" balloon for my keyword in every city over 50k in the area. So now I need a verified business address in 20+ cities thousands of miles from my home turf. I didn't have a license or a Realtor key to retrieve mail from inside business in these cities so I invented the Ghost box, well I am probably not the first guy to ever conjure up an address out of thin air so I can't really say that I invented it. In the end this business failed and all this time was lost :-(
Back to trawling my target area, bit this time I was on a road trip living cheap and trying to work fast. Now I am looking a little different opportunity. I am looking for a
space not so much as a vacancy.
Example #1 - in an older light industrial area many times you will see a string of mailboxes located together. Most of the time they are not all matching and grouped together near the entrance. I would just add my box to the group and mark it up with a clear address that was congruent with the others.
Example #2 - older strip mall or re-claimed old main street store front area. Most older strip malls are made up of all sorts of businesses. Restaurants, small and medium retail stores, service business like dry cleaners etc... The addresses are also mix and match because it just kind of happened over all the years. I would actually attach a new box right between two legitimate businesses or next to a cluster of boxes. I would head to Lowes and buy a box that matched the others I usually popped the extra for a nice locking box. Return at night and place my ghost box.

Here is a great example of squeezing a box between two existing business
I mentioned "older" because anything new had combined locking postboxes. You know the tan ones with multiple doors on the front and the mailman loads from the rear. I contemplated buying a few of these and placing them myself but they about a grand each and you need to register them with the local post office. Also I would end up with 20 address in the same spot - not really what I was looking for.
As a side business - this would be great for someone who wanted to offer virtual office space. You could actually rent a small piece of sidewalk from a forward thinking landlord. Buy and place the multi box and register it with the post office and rent the boxes on a monthly basis. Collect and forward the mail, etc... Over active imagination...
This ended up being an upgrade to the vacant home and business plan because the mail man was a lot more likely to deliver to my new box because it just appeared one day and I'm sure that he thought to himself "wow there must be a new business in the neighborhood"
The downside...
This is even more work that all the other methods
I had to pay for the box - $20 to $80 bucks each
I had to hire someone to check the boxes because I was working in a distant city
Sometimes the building owner or someone else would remove my box (how dare they...)
I felt a little bad about drilling holes in someone else s building to attach my box.
At some point it will become clear who screwed that box to the building because I will be promoting that address a lot. I have never been called out but that is certainly a possibility.
The upside...
Once the box was there and the mail man was delivering to it I get to keep that address as long as it remains
I even think that once mail service is established it is a federal crime to mess with my box. How crazy is that - my ghost box has rights..HAHAHA evil.
CC