Search Engine Marketing Spot

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One of the biggest problems for any forum moderator is having to deal with spam posts made by either users or a piece of automated software. These posts are normally short and have links inserted in them to a variety of different websites depending on what the person is trying to advertise for. Forums get these types of messages everyday, so the moderators are always having to delete them. So lets say you have 100 people spamming your forum on a daily basis with there links. That means the moderators will only have to delete 100 posts a day. What if the moderators had to watch there PM (private message) system on the forum now as well? The use of instant message marketing (can call it spam I guess) has been around for over 10 years. In the mid 90’s there were programs created that would harvest screen names of AOL users from chat rooms and eventually profiles once that was implemented. It would take those screen names and send them all an instant message with a link or asking for a reply back. Take that same concept and apply it to today’s marketing world. Forums are visited by millions of people everyday for almost any type of market. Well sad to say I have come across a piece of software that will spam your forum automatically. Luckily however the program is poorly designed and the creator has been making a bad name for him/herself already over at BlackHatWorld.

This program creates an account, spiders the forum and collects all the usernames it can find and tries to send each person a PM. In theory this sounds great for the person running the program, and bad for the forum moderators. However there are a few things wrong that makes this program useless. Most forums have a time limit on the amount of PM’s you can send through it, when trying to send more then the allowed limit you either get a warning message or an account ban. Luckily forums also have an outbox that can get full, so after sending so many PM’s the user has to go in and delete these as well. The program is suppose to do this for you, but that does not work either. So people who bought the software are left in the dark now with no updates, no support and no responses to there questions or problems.

 

People ask all the time about black hat marketing, well the theory behind this program is a perfect example of black hat marketing technique. It could work if done the right way; however I do not condone spamming any forum. The moderators spend a lot of time keeping there forums spam free and most do not get paid either. This blog though is meant to teach people on techniques weather white or black hat.

 

How this could work:

• Have the program create multiple user accounts on the same forum

• Have it be able to store a list of email addresses in it to use when signing up so it rotates through them for different user names.

• Have it check the email accounts and look for verification links to go to.

• Have the program use proxies so your IP will not get banned by any forum.

• When sending out messages, have the program use multiple threads (connections) and log into various forums so it can get around the 1 minute timer allowed to send each PM. If you have accounts made on 500 forums you could just have it rotate through them all making sure not to hit the same forum in under a minute.

• Have it actually delete the sent message in the forum outbox.

Black hat style marketing is all around you, most just over look it and never think of the “What If’s”. A lot of places do not talk about these types of marketing strategies because they would not be used for any real client. They do exist however and I will try and show you some other examples in the future.