My Journey to the Dark Side

Alright, well I haven't done one of these yet. I've been doing SEO that's as white hat as the purest snow for about a year and a half. I came from a PPC background and managed to get hired for a corporation doing SEO for a bunch of major brands. The downside of this particular job, aside from crappy pay, was that everything we did was completely on-site and completely white. We did zero link building and the extent of our input to the sites was keyword recommendations for content, monitoring for appropriate meta data, and doing (but not implementing) site audits to look for HTTP errors.

Anyway, with that as my launching point, I managed to end up at an agency with a boss that takes the opinion of "if you're not reading you're not learning" and who showed me BHW(oooooh shiny....). While everything we do for clients is white.... or at least light gray, the more I read about your stories and your journeys, the more I want to come to the dark side of the internet. Maybe not permanently, but to see if I could pull it off. And to fall on my face and learn some sweet stuff along the way.

The stuff I need:
a niche (the moderately hard part)
a domain (cheap and easy to come by once I decide on niche)
a design (easy to do. More than likely end up with a free, slightly modified wordpress theme)
content (theoretically easy, assuming I pick an interesting niche)
a strategy(the actual hard part)

All of this is still in the planning stages so I haven't decided what tactics I'm going to use (artificial link building, purchase social media likes, etc) partly because I think certain tactics work better for certain niches.

As far as my financial goals...
30 day goal: break even
60 day goal: $100/month

Thoughts? Comments? Concerns?

PS, my friend pointed out yesterday that saying I wanted to do a website with black hat tactics just once, just to see what it's like, is like saying I'm going to do crack just once

Good luck with your journey and don't let the term "blackhat" have some kind of stigma around it. It's just for SEO and we don't do anything unethical. Just think of it as a better way to rank sites. Basically all link building is blackhat and these days you have to link build. It is possible to rank without it and get traffic but why would you want to do such a thing?

Also, you can build high quality links if it makes you feel more comfortable. It's not all about using xrumer and scrapebox pointing to your money site. You can build a high quality first tier of links and still be just as safe as not building any links at all.

wanted to got deeper into ppc since i saw some member earning big bucks with adsense, so i will definately follow this jounry.
good luck!

You will deff do $100 a month. It's nothing. More like $100/day.