Happy New Year!

We’d just like to wish everyone of our readers and customers a very happy 2009! We hope that you’ve enjoyed our offerings over the last 8 months and continue to come back and support what we’re doing here. We have much more in store for 2009.

As a special thank you for all of your support in 2008, we’d like to offer a 2009 coupon for our newest Meta-Marketing offering. If you enter the coupon NYE when you are ordering, you’ll receive $150.00 the original price and be able to purchase for only $200!

Please contact us if you have any questions!

More Meta-Marketing: Volume 2 Reviews!

Good reviews continue to pour in about our newest product, Meta-Marketing: Volume 2!

From Scubaslick:

Another absolute winner Oldenstylehats. Bravo.

This is the same kind of “screw the box, I’m thinking outside the rhombus” method that you always deliver. Let the market be your guide, find the hype that others have spent sooooo much time and money building, then ride the wave of cash.

From Genjutsu:

13 pages, remove the title page and the disclaimer and your left with 11 pages of content. I printed it out and sat through and read it a few times over. Not because I didnt understand it on the first read, but because I wanted to see how much more information I could extract from the 11 pages. It seemed all too simple. There was alot of information for such a small ebook. It was written clearly and provides you with just enough to get started and earning in any niche. There is no programming or scripts included. This is just an old fashion method that requires some manual labor. You can outsource all of this if you wish (i think unlimited mentioned that). Also, it should be noted that this method comes with its own traffic. You dont have to worry about getting that yourself. I believe that is the true beauty of this method. Anyone can start earning money almost immediately.

From graphicnut:

I was lucky enough to get hold of this and even before i bought it i knew oldenstylehats would not let me down!
I will say it short and sweet, WELL worth the price tag, great support and a little discussion in the forum where you can pick up alot more ideas for the method. My mind is running wild with what you can do with it.

Thanks again Olden, another great method!!

From gts6:

this is a great method for anyone to use to make money. you really dont need any technical skills at all to pull this off.

it can also be done in a white hat manner as well for those that are not wanting to do blackhat things. And many people after reading this method will think of many other ideas to use with the basic ideas presented here.

the only way to screw this up, is to wait too long to jump on this offer

From MontyzPython:

Hey, this is very nice OSH. This is a great example of ‘thinking outside the box’. I can see this being quite lucrative for those who decide to purchase.

Meta-Marketing: Vol. 2 Reviews and Update!

Sales have started to roll in both privately and on BHW. We’d like to thank everyone purchasing and especially people who’ve taken the time out of their busy, holiday schedules to review our newest product.

From sinewave:

Great product. No surprise there. It’s at once simple and brilliant. With the excellent support forum, it’s an easy decision.

Gracias!

From trophaeum:

olden does it every time with his products, this sure beats any ’super affiliate’ launch for actual usefulness

From unlimitedpostings:

This product is very informational and the method is actually pretty brilliant. I think that I’ll outsource a few of the menial tasks and let this one make a couple grand or more in January. This is a product that I would recommend buying.

From Dan08:

great product yet again. i can see that this will definitely work lol. thinking outside the box a lil will help boost sales to i reckon.

but olden has come up with something brilliant here. if you haven’t got this yet. then do it before they all sell out.

well done olden. another great product!!!

We’re also pleased to announce that we’ve decided to extend the Christmas promotion until Sunday evening at midnight. Use the coupon code xmas to receive the discount. We know we said we’d have two products out by Christmas, but we wanted to focus on each, so we won’t be releasing our next product until either next week or the following week. More updates soon!

Meta-Marketing: Volume 2 Coupon!

We’ve just released our newest offering and the next installment in the Meta-Marketing series, Meta-Marketing: Volume 2.

Because we’re all feeling very festive, we’re offering a $150.00 off coupon until 11:59PM EST (-5:00 GMT) on December 25th, 2008.

To receive this Xmas discount, use the coupon code at checkout: XMas

We’ll be posting public reviews in the near future.

We Need A Web Designer!

The title says it all; blackhatzen is looking for a talented web designer for a variety of in-house and contract jobs.

blackhatzen:

• Fast-growing, internationally-known Internet marketing company
• Global client-base across a wide variety of industries
• Working on the bleeding edge of search engine analysis/optimization, information retrieval, and content generation

You:

• Intelligent web designer with a portfolio
• Strong work-ethic
• Work well with others and alone
• Understand XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, PHP, and other tools of the trade
• Know your way around Photoshop and Illustrator
• Able to create cross-browser compliant sites that follows standards
• Understand basics of SEO
• CMS Integration experience (WordPress, etc)
• UI and application design experience
• Ruby/Ruby on Rails experience a big plus

We’re not looking to train, we’re looking to get someone integrated into our team and moving as quickly as possible. Terms and level of compensation is negotiable, but commensurate with experience and abilities. Profit share for the right candidate. We will accept and consider international candidates as long as speaking and working entirely in American-ized English is not problematic.

This position could very well turn full-time in the near future. If you think you might like to work with a company like ours, please enter all of your information into the contact form below. Be sure to include a URL to your online portfolio, email address, and phone number. All qualified candidates should expect to hear from us before Christmas.

Two New Products Before Christmas!

We’d like to update everyone and let you know that we’ll be releasing two new products before Christmas of 2008. One of them, the next installment of the Meta-Marketing series, has helped us pull in a considerable amount of money over the last few months from a handful of different CPA companies on a few different offers. No cookie stuffing, torrents, or pay-per-install is involved. This method also generates real leads that keep both CPA companies and advertisers happy.

This is just one example of a campaign from COPEAC:

Click this image to view a larger image.

We haven’t had any issues with account bans, only minimal interaction with our AMs, and have been paid as usual. We’ve figured out a few different ways to run these campaigns to coincide with different levels of risk, involvement, and profit. We’ll go over a sample campaign from a few different angles within a single niche to give everyone a solid understanding of the method. This time we’re also going to provide you with the information we used to pick the group of offers we’ve profited from. This method is extremely scalable. The method itself isn’t something that can be saturated and can provide smart, savvy marketers with a different way to generate real leads that convert into real profit. We’ve really focused on developing this method because we believe that it create win-win situations for everyone involved.

The second product we’ll be selling is an unencrypted, PHP/MySQL web application we believe will help our customers succeed safely and securely in any number of different affiliate markets across all niches. We’ve developed it over the last 5 months. It started out as a hacked together application we used on a few campaigns and has turned into something much, much more. We’ve integrated a lot of the feedback our customers, friends, and business associates have provided us. We’ve made it as simple to install as possible and will be providing installation videos and step-by-step text instructions to help everyone get started.

After a great deal of demand during our last offering, we’re also instituting a new support feature to this and all of our future web applications. Our staff will be integrating modifications, hacks, and other features requested in our product forums. These hacks, along with installation instructions, will be freely available to everyone who purchases. We will be making an active effort to respond to all reasonable feature requests so that you know you’re being heard. We’ll be allotting our programmers time every week for the first month the product is available. The best feature requests we utilize will be integrated into the code with a reference to the individual who came up with the idea.

While our business and campaigns haven’t been directly effected by the recent economic fluctuations, we’ve decided to integrate a new pricing structure to help those who have been effected or who have turned to the internet because they lost their job. Our goal here it to help everyone with many different levels of experience to succeed and learn. We believe our support mechanism can be an integral aspect of that success. As such, we’ll always provide customers private, one-on-one support as well as group support through our private product forums. However, for a significant discount we’ll be providing all of our customers with the option to receive group support solely from our private product forums. We believe that offering these two different levels of support will allow us to keep our prices low and the quality and speed of our support high while giving our customers yet another option.

Due to anticipating a large number of new and returning customers seeking support on two separate products, we’ve brought on another customer support specialist to help assist our customers. We believe that we are now fully prepared to take on a large number of new clients and still maintain the quality of service that many of you have come to expect and know. We will most likely never post about jobs publicly and generally hire from our pool of customers or people that have been recommended to us by those we respect. We hire staff, regardless of their function, based on intelligence, integrity, experience, work ethic, as well as taking into consideration how well they handle themselves under stress.

We hope that everyone is having a good, profitable December and we can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on for the past few months with you. We’d also like to take this time to thank all of you, our families, and friends for making 2008 a great year for everyone here at blackhatzen.

Take the time to tell at least one person every day that you love them. While we all enjoy making money, the love and companionship of our staff, friends, family, and all of you is worth more than any check that we could ever possibly receive. We’re all in this together.

Happy (and Profitable!) Holidays,
the blackhatzen family

Natural Patterns in Cookie Stuffing, Pt. 3

Recently someone bumped a 6 month old thread I wrote on the BlackHatWorld forums discussing a framework we were developing to avoid detection while cookie stuffing. The same article was also posted on our blog. We created a quick implementation of this framework, but not anything worth releasing. It also became apparent that while it is true that controlling click-through rates is an important aspect of successful cookie stuffing, conversions rates and other metrics are probably equally important. People have brought up some good points in the thread that I think we can validate and work from.

Of the importance of conversion rates, Genjutsu writes:

The one unatural thing no one has been able to account for is the conversion rate. This is what they will ultimately look at when deciding to ban your account. You can make your traffic and stuffing look organic as possible, but when they look at the data they recieve and you only convert .01% of the clicks you sent, they will find something fishy.

This is why ebay stuffing works, your stuffing users ON ebay. Your conversion rate will look closer to a whitehat affiliate, even better than 90% of all whitehats. Why do you think so many got dismissed from the EPN network for not having involved traffic.

Well, work on targetting and we wont have to worry about traffic patterns. Real traffic (read clicks) blended with stuffs will always yield the best results and be the hardest to find a pattern.

We agree that this is true and that padding statistics with real traffic absolutely is the best case scenario. The more real human traffic we can mix in with our stuffed traffic, the better the campaign will fair. Perhaps one solution is to develop one or two natural sources of real human traffic and then fork their legitimate clicks to multiple, different EPN accounts. The probability of human click redirection could be modified by the number of stuffs each campaign has sent in the past week or 24 hours.

So, for example, if you’ve stuffed 200 users with Campaign A and 300 users with Campaign B, you’d set t If you weren’t stuffing a lot of people, you wouldn’t need that many natural clicks, so long as they were relatively evenly distributed by need. This might be a little advanced for new marketers, but I think that the theory holds that taking care of referrers and padding are the best forms of protection.

Natural randomness is introduced with great abundance by human interaction with any automated system. While this may seem intuitive, many people without a technical background forget that random calls in programs aren’t that random. Almost every statistical system we can design that could be rendered useful in this kind of solution will have a well-defined footprint. Surprisingly enough, this is at least partially dependent upon the language the script is written in, compounded with the operating system the server runs on.

We developed a little proof-of-concept to show what we’re talking about. Visualization can be a great tool to use when doing research. Our eyes and brain pick up on patterns that might not come to us intuitively and as such may act as an extension of our own logical systems. To show how random isn’t always necessarily random, we can use the GD library and PHP to create images that show how random isn’t always random. In an ideal situation, the image created would appear to look like static and have no well defined pattern or path. However, because PHP’s rand() function is merely a wrapper and calls the system level random function, this isn’t always the case.

As you can plainly see, this isn’t exactly random. In fact, there is an easily discernible pattern. This is not PHP’s fault, but rather a problem with Windows, which has never handled random numbers properly. Luckily, most black hatters are hosted on server’s running *NIX based operating systems where randomness is handled much more cleanly.

Much better. As you can see, the static-like pattern that we’d expect to see is apparent. To up the ante even more, we can introduce the Mersenne prime method of randomness.

While this image may look a lot like the first CentOS random image, it is, in essence, more random. (blackhatzen apologies to mathematics professors and researchers everywhere for using those two words in sequence.)

This is an example of the PHP code used to generate these images. The GD library must be installed on the host computer, or this code will fail when it attempts to make the imagecreatetruecolor() call.

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< ?php
	// HTTP Header for PNG
	header("Content-type: image/png");
 
	// Creates a new 512x512 image with GD
	// For more information on GD: http://www.libgd.org/
	$newImage = @imagecreatetruecolor(512, 512)
	    or die("Install the GD Library!");
 
	$colorWhite = imagecolorallocate($newImage, 255, 255, 255);
 
	// This is where the "magic" happens.
	// One could replace the rand() call, with this:
	// if (mt_rand(0,1) === 1) { 
	// The Mersenne twister random call (mt_rand) is "more random."
	// For more information on Mersenne twister: 
        // http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/ewhat-is-mt.html
	for ($yAxis=0; $yAxis&lt;512; $yAxis++) {
	    for ($xAxis=0; $xAxis&lt;512; $xAxis++) {
	        if (rand(0,1) === 1) { 
	            imagesetpixel($newImage, $xAxis, $yAxis, $colorWhite);
	        }
	    }
	    $xAxis=0;
	}
	// Displays the image we created.		
	imagepng($newImage);
 
	// Destroys the image we created.
	imagedestroy($newImage);
?>

If you have trouble copying and pasting, you can download an archive of this PHP code here.

Aside from cookie stuffing, another purpose of developing these frameworks is to ascertain what pattern recognition algorithms affiliates are utilizing so that we may more effectively avoid detection on all kinds of campaigns. The purpose of showing that random isn’t necessarily random is to try and help people to think about what they’re doing and hopefully begin to question their assumptions with regards to how simple certain kinds of pattern recognition can be in larger systems.

We’ll try and release some code on the blog in the next few weeks to show users how to develop the click-forking method we described earlier in this post.

Author’s Note:

Buckets of respect go out to Thomas Boutell and all those who contribute to the GD library as well as to Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimura for developing the Mersenne primes randomness algorithm.

Finding Top Commentator Blogs with Google

There has been a method floating around for a while that leverages blogs that utilize plug-ins that list their top commentators to create good inbound links. While this method is of questionable value as more and more blogs use the “rel=nofollow” parameter in their anchor tags to reduce the link’s value to spammers, it is still interesting and requires more thought. In a recent thread on the subject started by Dave King, a BHW user asked:

Thx, nice idea. But how do you find Blogs with ‘Top Commentors’ on front-page?

Here are a few different Google query URL’s that one could scrape sites from.

WordPress blogs with a top commentators list that have been updated in the past week:
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=allintext%3A+%22Top+Commentators%22+%22Powered+by+WordPress+%22&as_qdr=w&btnG=Search

WordPress blogs with a top commentators list that have been updated in the past month:
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=allintext%3A+%22Top+Commentators%22+%22Powered+by+WordPress+%22&as_qdr=m&btnG=Search

Blogspot blogs with a top commentators list that have been updated in the past week:
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=allintext%3A++%22Top+Commentators+%22+site%3A*.blogspot.com&as_qdr=w&btnG=Search

Blogspot blogs with a top commentators list that have been updated in the past month:
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=allintext%3A++%22Top+Commentators+%22+site%3A*.blogspot.com&as_qdr=m&btnG=Search

It’s important to ensure that the sites you comment on aren’t using “rel=nofollow” on all outbound links, so be sure to check!

If you’re attempting to advertise to a specific region, you can add any of the following path arguments and receive region-specific results. These are just a few examples, there are many more.

United States:
&gl=US

United Kingdom:
&gl=UK

China:
&gl=CN

For a complete list of country codes, check out Google’s reference site.

Who has ideas for other queries?

Server Upgrade

We migrated to some new, much faster servers over the last 24 hours. There may be some hiccups over the next few days, but after initial testing, everything seems to be running smoothly. If anyone has any issues reaching any pages on the site or the forum or if your load times have increased noticably, please contact us ASAP.

These server upgrades will hopefully take care of some of the issues we’ve experienced when our site is under heavy load during sales. We’re also integrating new services that will require a bit more juice than our previous hosting solution provided.

BlackHatIt.com - Black Hat SEO Subreddit

We just wanted to let everyone know that we’ve connected a domain to the Black Hat SEO Subreddit; BlackHatIt. We’d love for everyone to join us by adding content to it so that we can begin making it a useful tool for other SEOs and marketers.