A white hat super affiliate?

I was thinking the same thing… I tried blackhat (doorways & splogs), and it worked, but the domains were banned and are useless now, ’cause no one will buy them. It takes the same amount of time to make $10K from blackhat OR whitehat sites. You just spend it on different things (one sets up automated scripts, buys domains, finds some new tricks, the other one finds popular topics, writes good articles and submits the sites to social bookmarks). In the long term, whitehat wins. But, yeah, it’s interesting to be “one against the world” :-).

Hey Chad, great post. Can’t wait to blog it and share your thoughts with my readers. You’ve summed up BH vs WH better than anything I’ve seen.

The other thing I would add about BH, and I’ve blogged about this a lot lately, is that BHatters make it harder for everyone to succeed. They make search engines, social sites and even the FTC clamp down harder PLUS they make consumers more distrusting, so even honest marketers suffer the consequences.

My hat is so white I’m sure some people find the 5 Star blog boring.
But that’s just fine by me too.

I agree Chad doesn’t matter which side both are tryng to make money. but just like you i don’t want worries when i lay my head or wonder if i am caught… now i do wonder about competition but if someone is smart enough to out do me in the long run more power to them.. but i sure will give a fight I have tried a few BH but i would say i am also a WH.

[…] What Color is YOUR Hat??? Some of my recent blogs have focused on the dark side of affiliate marketing, including black hat affiliate tactics and scammy web polluting advertising. I think some affiliates get the idea, based on some black hat affiliate blogs, that black hat is how you make the big super affiliate bucks. There are tons of honest white hat affiliates that make really good money too - using honest ethical marketing techniques. Today I read a GREAT blog over at CDF Networks, where super affiliate Chad Frederiksen, talks about why he chose to wear the white hat over the black hat. A white hat super affiliate? […]

Blackhat and Can-Spam have nothing in common. Also, it’s hard to compare the two as they’re almost completely different business models.
A blackhat doesn’t sweat a site get taken down. It’s an assumption that it will. The goal is to generate enough that a few dozen can roasted without you blinking. That and distribution of risk make it worth it.

I think people are attracted by BH techniques because it involves a lot less planning and thinking. People looking for a quick buck will never sit down in front of their desk and start keyword researching and studying conversions and so on… They would totally prefer using an exploit learned from a friend or spam a list of 1M people.

And talking about the success stories I’m sure there are many BH success stories, but you will never see a BH guru bragging about how good he is. Blackhaters that brag are newbies that made a couple of bucks using something learned on a forum/blog… and think they are already GURUS(BS)

black hat techniques are for the weak and unskilled.

Like with many things, you can take the easy road, make a lot of money for a bit…. couple months or years, then find that all your old tricks and schemes are worthless and your efforts quickly resolve to loses.

If you want security in this unstable business, succeed with white hat techniques and you’ll find yourself on a constant incline. WH is the way to go.

If u wanna make a quick buck go black hat.

I’m surprised this article was even written, everyone should already know this already. Its SEO 1.0

Very thoughtful post.

Glad you posted that - might give some of the new kids something to think about. That being said, at least a little knowledge of what is going on in BH can spur creative thoughts on the WH side… little knowledge can be dangerous because it can be tempting as well

I have to agree that black hatters that stay on top of their sites can make some serious cash. I have to add also that I’ve run into several that have chosen to scrape content and titles from my sites and cloak their pages to the search engines to get the job done. To them I say a big F.U.!

A word to black hatters-if someone busts you and asks you to stop because it’s damaging traffic to THEIR site-don’t be a dick. Do it. Find someone who doesn’t care and feed off their traffic instead.

After several snide emails from the black hatter basically telling me to screw myself, I made it my personal mission to get his ass kicked off of Google. Yeah, it wasted a hell of a lot of my time to get it done-copying source code, getting screen shots, urls, notifying google adsense, filling out their paperwork and faxing it back, tracking back his links and contacting his hosting company, his affiliate referral service, searching through archive records for other emails and sites he operated, etc. ….calling him on the phone directly at his job (my personal favorite)-
but it got done.

Was it worth all my wasted time? I have no idea-probably not. The people looking for my clients site would have bounced off his page when they hit it anyway, since it had nothing to do with what they were looking for.

Did I hurt his pocketbook? I doubt it. See shady’s post. But I’m a dick who hates to get screwed by some asshole making his buck off of my hard work. I know my guy’s name and where he works. And I’M the type of asshole that would fly someone just to beat their ass for stealing money from MY wallet.

maybe then they’d get the picture.

Nice post.

When you talk about Black-hat, are you referring to SEO or PPC? There are some people who like to brag about their secrets and there are some who just keep their mouth shut as long as their system keeps working. I know, you can tell me a big time black hat, but I use it for PPC and SEO, both, and I don’t reveal my secrets to anyone. I like to keep MUM! My sites look very white hat, but underlying technology is all black hat. And yes, I will not reveal my secrets. Don’t ask me why.

I would bet that there are some big black hat success stories out there, they’re just not going to be featured in the wall street journal, so you don’t really see them.

Just a couple of FYI’s from the blackhat side of things.

First off I think blackhat has a lot of things attached to it that shouldn’t be. Real blackhat stuff is serp spamming that’s it. Email spam is not blackhat. Social spamming is not blackhat. Hacking is not blackhat. etc etc.

A few things about your points.

1. Any big blackhat guy isn’t going to be posting any big success stories. Unless it doesn’t work anymore and they’re trying to sell you something. Or they found something that makes a couple bucks and don’t know how to exploit it properly.

2. The Blackhat mindset is just that of challenge and beating the system. Yeah google has all that money and so does Wells Fargo. But it sure does feel damn good to rank number 1 or 2 above Bank of America, Countrywide and Citigroup for the keyword refinance or home loan. It’s a fun challenge.

3. lastly a good blackhat doesn’t run a single system and do things a single way. They run 5,6,7 different systems at once. One dies off and the others are still pumping away. That one might be able to be fixed or it might not you just don’t know. But doesn’t matter as there’s 3 more under development.

In the end true Blackhats and Whitehats are different people. You’re really good blackhats are often people with coding and systems administration background that can automate all of the processes. Most non-coders of course go into whitehat as that doesn’t require those skills.

For me the end goal is blackhat sites that look comparable to your whitehat sites. but built by the 100’s of thousands. Think of this for a second. How good are you at making a domain that generates 1 quarter a day (this is a very low number for illustration purposes). pretty damn easy right? Now what if you could make 100k of those all with automated tools?

100k * .25 = 25k a day

That’s what drives the big blackhats. It’s all a numbers game but the better looking you can make your blackhat sites the longer they’re going to keep making that 25k a day. So are you sure your top competitor is a whitehat site even though it looks like it?

Great post Chad, I guess maybe I misunderstood BH though. I’m glad Smaxor educated me on that. I thought it included all the negative stuff you hear so much about. Although I’ve made very little in my short (2) month career, I would still only try something WH, or not at all.

I’ve just always had a problem with the guys that think the rules/laws don’t apply to them. That really intensified when my house was broken into last year. (Not comparing BH to something like that though or course).

[…] 27th 2008 6:13am [-] From: cdfnetworks.com […]