photo credit: Inkyhack

Not everyone’s honest, wanting to make their money the old fashioned way online (providing good content).  There are people out there who only want to start a splog (spam blog), make a quick buck and get out.  Well, today I’m going to give you a few tips to starting your own splog.

I already covered beginning blog mistakes.  Well starting a splog is a lot like starting out a beginning blog, except you want to make a few of those mistakes on purpose.  If you’re going to be sleazy and try to earn a quick buck, you may as well do it right.

The ads are king: I’m going to start off with the most obvious thing.  If you want to make money you’re going to have to have ads.  You can use referal ads, Adsense or any other paying per click ad system on the planet.  CPM isn’t going to work well as you’re not really drawing big enough crowds on a splog.  If you’re going to be slimy you might as well go for those opt in services where you get paid for each e-mail address you harvest.  The ads should be tricky and placed so that people feel they MUST click on them.  Place your ads right in the middle of your “content,” place them where people might click them accidentally and place as many as you can.

Remember, you’re not trying to help your visitors:  I learned this years ago when I was running a splog and making some good spending cash.  People found my site mainly by googling looking for information.  I didn’t want to give them that information.  I wanted them to almost get the information from me but feel the need to keep clicking onward (to my ads).  An example of this would be to have a post on installing an oil filter into your car.  You can talk about how it can be tricky, the fact that you’ll need some tools and you might have to jack up your car.  You can even mention “1999 Honda Civic Oil Change” in the post somewhere to draw people looking for really specific information.  They won’t find it, but your ads will probably say “Learn How to Change Your Own Oil” and on they click.

Content is ONLY there to draw traffic:  This is an extension of the above.  Feel free to title your posts whatever you want if you think it’ll draw traffic.  Have a bunch of keywords in your content and you don’t even have to make sense.  This is all about search engines.  Your spammy blog isn’t going to get mentioned on Digg, so you’re probably going to need lots of search engine traffic.

Lie, cheat and steal to get that traffic:  I once ran a semi-spammy blog.  It really had no important content.  I learned that this one site would send over 10,000 daily visitors to my site if I got a link on their homepage.  They were a news site.  But I figured out quickly they didn’t read the stories I submitted, only the titles.  So I’d title my stories whatever I thought would grab their attention (in this case edgy stuff with lots of drug references) and the story would be about whatever.  I got a great link every couple weeks from this guy all because he was too lazy to read the stories he posted up for his readers.

Write your own content: This part sucks.  99% of splogs are automated and steal content from other websites.  Google hates this as do all the other search engines.  They want original content on your blogs.  So when they see this people get penalized.  You simply MUST write your own content to run a decent splog or you’ll have to run a million automated splogs to make the same cash.  Also you can integrate things like affiliate links and be as tricky as you want with the search engines.

A flashy design fools a lot of people: A good looking template will fool lots of people.   Almost every splog I see uses one of the default Wordpress or Blogger templates.  Take the extra 30 seconds to find a good template and people will trust your website a lot more.