[Need Advice] GSA Website Contact Setup Breakdown & Stealth Operations

Hi all,

I've been going through various threads on this subject and I'm already following a few legends of the game here on BHW.
As I'm ready to get my hands "dirty" with contact form marketing for affiliate offers, I need some advice in order to fully understand the mechanics that would make this a stress-free process in terms of dealing with spam complaints or getting domains blacklisted.
Kindly bear with me as I have divided the whole system into 3 categories: Tech Setup, Offer & Messaging, and Customer Journey.


Here's what I understand that I need so far staring with the Tech Setup:

1. A Windows VPS.
2. The GSA WC software as well as the Captcha Breaker.
3. IP4 proxies.
4. Xevil would be a great addition but I can get the job done without it (at least at the beginning).
5. A web server to host my landing pages/websites, along with the required domain names.

--> Questions regarding the Tech Setup:

- Am I missing something here?
- Is 6GB RAM/4 Core/60GB SSD good enough to begin with?
- Should I go for an anonymous off-shore web host?


Allow me to move on to Offer & Messaging:

The way I see it, this is something that depends on the available data (lists).
If I go for generic lists, then I need to promote stuff that any business owner or webmaster would find helpful.
I can get more specific with the products I promote if I have industry-specific lists to work with.
Also, for beginners such as myself, it's better to buy ready-to-go, verified lists from trusted sources.

As for the message itself, it is highly depended on the GSA WC software restrictions.
The body can only contain text and links, and common spam words should be avoided.
I can use my own email address or randomize it. However, the latter may hurt conversions, and there's a sweet spot between conversions and deliverability that I'd have to figure out myself via experimentation.

--> Questions regarding Offer & Messaging:

- Is it advised to include an unsubscribe link as well? If so, could you please suggest any relevant threads here on BHW that shed some light on the issue?
- Should I use a link-shortener such as bitly?
- Has anyone tried cloaked links? What works better in terms of conversions and deliverability?
- What kind of email do you use? Your own or random? If you're using your own email, do you go for warmed-up secondary domain names that redirect to your money website?


Finally we have the Customer Journey:

To put it in layman's terms, this is what happens after a prospect clicks on the link I included in the message body.
This is something that massively stresses me out, to be honest.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that this should immediately redirect the prospect to the money site.
There should be something in-between that helps to avoid the domains getting blacklisted.
Also, there's the thing with spam complaints, again, to consider handling here.

--> Questions regarding the Customer Journey:

- Do you use landing pages that act as intermediate steps after a prospect clicks the link and before they land on the money website? If so, do you use secondary domain names for these landing pages? Do you prefer to host them on anonymous off-shore servers?
- What is the optimal customer journey I should build to maintain anonymity and handle spam complaints stress-free?
- Specifically when it comes to promoting affiliate offers, do vendors tend to complain about "unusual" traffic? Is there a fear of being kicked out of any affiliate program or marketplace by using this method for promotions?


That was it!
I understand it's been a way too long post but I needed to get it out of my system.
My main goal is to set up a structure that won't produce too many complaints, and definitely avoid being sued. But at the same time it has to bring in some money.
Of course, there's a chance I don't know what I'm talking about, even though I've done some extensive research on this issue.

Your advice is crucial to me and it will be highly appreciated.

Thanks for bearing with me till the end...
That's all folks!

Hey,

Welcome to the journey of contact form marketing!

Tech setup:
- I would suggest to jump straight to Xevil and to skip GSA Captcha Breaker. The reason for this is that most of the established and new sites are using ReCaptcha/TextCaptcha/HCaptcha rather than old image captchas. By not using a captcha solver that is able to solve these captcha types, you skip a lot of sites - or are stuck to old websites where the message will never be read.
- The VPS specs you mention should be fine to start with. All GSA software is 32bit anyway, so the program can't use more than 4GB of memory. If I recall it correctly, GSA recommends not more than 150 threads to keep the program stable.

Site lists:
- There are plenty of sellers. Check their offerings on whether it is new sites or old sites sitting in the list for some years already. Double-check the URLs have actually been checked by GSA WC and are not just identified URLs which might work - or not.
- The same checks apply to general vs. specific commercial lists. General lists can work great with affiliate offers, too. Imagine sending a lunch promotion at 10 a.m.. The recipient of the message will understand its content and might propose the offer to the team. ROI in 2 hours! Specific lists can mean anything. Do not expect list sellers to run URLs against Majestic topics Specific lists are either scraped with specific niche keywords or identified afterwards by 3rd party tools / AI. None of this is 100% accurate.
- If you are looking for specific niche target URLs, consider to ask the list provider for such or scrape your own. To get started, you can use GSA WC but I'd recommend to use Scrapebox instead. Scrapebox is not only faster, offers so many features, but you can also use cheap IPv6 proxies for scraping the search engines. This is a big differentiator compared to IPv4 proxies!

Offer + Messaging:
- Keep your message brief and to the point. Shorter is better.
- Address the reader of the message, probably an office clerk without in-depth knowledge and understanding of health, legal, finance - whatever your niche is. Make sure this person understands and is able (and willing) to act on the message or forward your message to the right person.
- You can use a commercial URL shortener or your own with a YOURLS server. Easy to setup, domain names are cheap and you own the data!

I hope this answers some of your questions.

Cheers

Fiducia said:

Hey,

Welcome to the journey of contact form marketing!

Tech setup:
- I would suggest to jump straight to Xevil and to skip GSA Captcha Breaker. The reason for this is that most of the established and new sites are using ReCaptcha/TextCaptcha/HCaptcha rather than old image captchas. By not using a captcha solver that is able to solve these captcha types, you skip a lot of sites - or are stuck to old websites where the message will never be read.
- The VPS specs you mention should be fine to start with. All GSA software is 32bit anyway, so the program can't use more than 4GB of memory. If I recall it correctly, GSA recommends not more than 150 threads to keep the program stable.

Site lists:
- There are plenty of sellers. Check their offerings on whether it is new sites or old sites sitting in the list for some years already. Double-check the URLs have actually been checked by GSA WC and are not just identified URLs which might work - or not.
- The same checks apply to general vs. specific commercial lists. General lists can work great with affiliate offers, too. Imagine sending a lunch promotion at 10 a.m.. The recipient of the message will understand its content and might propose the offer to the team. ROI in 2 hours! Specific lists can mean anything. Do not expect list sellers to run URLs against Majestic topics Specific lists are either scraped with specific niche keywords or identified afterwards by 3rd party tools / AI. None of this is 100% accurate.
- If you are looking for specific niche target URLs, consider to ask the list provider for such or scrape your own. To get started, you can use GSA WC but I'd recommend to use Scrapebox instead. Scrapebox is not only faster, offers so many features, but you can also use cheap IPv6 proxies for scraping the search engines. This is a big differentiator compared to IPv4 proxies!

Offer + Messaging:
- Keep your message brief and to the point. Shorter is better.
- Address the reader of the message, probably an office clerk without in-depth knowledge and understanding of health, legal, finance - whatever your niche is. Make sure this person understands and is able (and willing) to act on the message or forward your message to the right person.
- You can use a commercial URL shortener or your own with a YOURLS server. Easy to setup, domain names are cheap and you own the data!

I hope this answers some of your questions.

Cheers

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I can't thank you enough for taking the time to answer all these questions and share your experience.
Fun fact, I started following you a few hours ago, as I ran into some of your content here on BHW.

phil stewart said:

there's some good advice here but only one thing I would not bother with is trying to solve recaptcha/hcaptchas if you're doing any kind of mass posting. They take at least a couple of minutes each to solve so it's just not feasible unless you're doing small volumes with targeted campaigns.

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Solid advice.
I highly appreciate it and I think I might be knocking on your door for some fresh lists quite soon.

Does mass messaging really work?

phil stewart said:

there's some good advice here but only one thing I would not bother with is trying to solve recaptcha/hcaptchas if you're doing any kind of mass posting. They take at least a couple of minutes each to solve so it's just not feasible unless you're doing small volumes with targeted campaigns.

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I agree on the time it takes to resolve Re-/HCaptchas compared to none/image captchas. On the other hand, I do not measure campaign success by the pure speed and number of messages sent.

Fiducia said:

I agree on the time it takes to resolve Re-/HCaptchas compared to none/image captchas. On the other hand, I do not measure campaign success by the pure speed and number of messages sent.

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You don't measure success by speed but without speed you can't hit enough sites to get a good result. Mass unsolicited advertising of any kind relies on volume and with contact forms if you're not blasting at least 2 million per day then you're dead in the water (UNLESS you're doing something niche targeted of course).

bottingisfine said:

Does mass messaging really work?

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yeah but you need to blast millions per day every day and even then results will depend ENTIRELY on what you're offering. Nobody cares about stuff like SEO or web development anymore, there's literally millions of people spamming contact forms with those. You need something MUCH MUCH more unique than that to succeed. Something that makes people do a double take and go "spam spam spam...wait what's that? "