We were going to do a demo, but decided against it because the software is a subscription service. We only allow 100 people to use it at a time. When someone quits the spots usually fill up again within a few hours so that was our reasoning. Cloaking works though, well at least if it's done correctly.
Ah, I see. I'm sure you have your reasons as to why you only have 100 slots, so I won't give you 20 questions as to why but I am very curious as to how the software works. I really like the design, btw. Anyway, yeah-- I'm sure cloaking works. It's just.. what happens when the search engines find out??
Well cloaking is pretty 'black hat', so I'm assuming that the punishment could be pretty decent, at least regarding rankings.
You never cloak on a domain you can't afford to lose. Here's the key that most overlook. When cloaking you do it on 88 cent .info domains that are basically throw aways. You setup dozens or hundreds of domains and drive tons of traffic for your niche. The worst that happens is you lose a domain that cost you less than a buck and probably made you 100 or 1000 times that much during its lifetime. This is just for google. I have domains going on 7 months in google that haven't been banned. I have other domains going on two years in yahoo (yahoo couldn't detect a cloaked domain or a spam domain if its life depended on it).
We decided to limit it to 100 users to keep the competition down. Keep everyone under the radar. When you have thousands of people using the same software the search engines are going to catch on quickly. By keeping a tight 100 member community we are flying low under the radar and more likely to stay that way
I see. That makes sense. I still don't think this is something I'd base my livelihood on, since it's blackhat and could be shut down in a matter of days. But aside from that, it's a good side income it sounds like.
yeah, it is. I've been doing it for 3 or 4 years. I don't see it ending anytime soon either. Everyone always says search engines have caught on or are catching on, but honestly, theyaren't much smarter than they were 3 or 4 years ago.
See that's why I quit doing it as everyone said it didn't work anymore. Silly me for believing them! Christine
Of course cloaking still works, it really comes down to how you want to go about your online business though. I dabbed in it before and I can say it DOES work but it's not for me. I don't enjoy doing all the tedious crap that goes along with it. Yes there are plenty of tools to automate tasks but it just doesn't get me going. I Just don't feel as motivated as to for example setup a new site or try an affiliate marketing campaign. BH is all about mass production too. But by all means if that's your thing go for it, it does work if you know what you're doing. I have cloaked sites still indexed from over a year ago.
Well, if it gives you a significant increase in income per day with little risk, wouldn't you want to put the initial time into it? On a sidenote, this is what I love about this business- You can give yourself a raise any time you need one.
Sure...but again it just comes down to how you want to run your business. I would rather focus my energy on an affiliate marketing campaign which can bring a lot of money as well and at the same time enjoy doing it I am not knocking BH, there's lots of things you can do to make money, the trick is finding something that you actually enjoy doing. Sidenote on your sidenote, I love this part of it too
True, I do enjoy making money with ClickBank-- mostly because it's somewhat auto-pilot (I don't have to sit at my desk and watch it for it to work). I guess my point is more like-- why limit your income sources? Even if a few are a bitch to set up, once they are actually set up and working, you've just added to your daily profits by that much. A great example of this is actually setting up landing pages. I don't enjoy doing it; it's work! But I do enjoy watching my income double as a result of building one. It's a give-take thing.
Hey guys, Just wanted to say, just got my 1st sale. It was about $100 and I've only spent about $25 in Adwords so far (only $2 on that product which sold). I just hope it doesn't get refunded... Either way, thank you for all the help, its nice to see a long bar finally
I know what you guys mean as far as business models and such. The thing is, you don't have to build cloaked domains as your source of income. Build a nice affiliate site, then use some cloaking to drive additional free traffic to the site. This way you focus on the long terms SEO and feel good about your business, but at the same time you are getting that up front boost of traffic and income that gets things off the ground. I use throw away domains to promote all of my white hat sites. It works very well in fact.
It works. I think people get too stuck in the notion of doing black hat stuff or white hat stuff. The most profitable is a mixture of both. Use the cloaking to supplement traffic while you practice good regular seo for the domain. Search engines can't penalize a domain for incoming traffic or links (if they could I would have a field day setting up cloaked pages that point to all of my competition)
Congrats, dlm! That's outstanding. Sounds like you've found a winner. Keep up the good work and let us know how you're doing. Personally, I'm having a zero day.. which is driving me nuts, cause I can't figure out why. But I'll figure it out. Good luck.
But what if I set this up on pages with adsense? Am I not breaking the terms of service by putting in that virtual traffic cop?
1Eight can jump in here too, but I imagine that if you used this on a "non-throwaway" domain - i.e. one tied to an adsense publisher ID - you could risk facing a complete adsense ban if a real human got wind of it. Not to mention adsense causes pages to be crawled 10x as much in my experience. So I'd only cloak with throwaway domains. I'm banned from adsense for miswording a phrase (above the search box, I said "google where to go!" which was against the TOS), and I regret that every day. Despite how small and stupid the error was, no matter of arguing or begging has worked to get me back in. So I'd definitely try it on a domain/account you could lose