Blackhat SEO gets thrown around a lot but it’s not often you hear about blackhat marketing techniques or how they are being used in the wild. Both of these subjects fascinate me, as a consumer it’s important to know how you are being manipulated and let’s be honest it’s fun to play devil’s advocate sometimes. This case study is for a personal project for the obvious black hat reasons, and I wanted to write about it because its hard to find case studies like this online.
The Goal
My goal for this particular project was to see how many email subscribers I could get to a website that was developed and launched only a few months prior.
The Parameters
“Be as blackhat as possible” Ethically and professionally this is a TERRIBLE idea but for the sake of learning, testing and growing as a digital marketer I could not help but see where it led me.
WARNING
Please as tempting as this is to try out don’t do it for your business. I will try to be vague in some aspects to keep people from replicating the same thing on a larger scale.
The Website
The website was designed by me and its purpose was to be a hub for new and interesting types of alcohol. The website was monetized by using Amazon Affiliates and Google Adsense. Within a few months the website had enough content in highly trafficked categories such as “Whiskey”, “Craft Beer” and “Tequila” .
With this particular project my demographics were pretty easy to layout.
Estimated Demographics
Gender
Male: 70%
Female: 30%
Age
18 – 24: 20%
24 – 34: 65%
45 – 44: 10%
45+: 5%
Income
$0-50k: 60%
$50 – 100k: 30%
$100 – 150k: 10%
( Keep in mind not a lot of work was put into these demographics, I mostly made some assumptions and checked up on competitors and some demographic data from the ARCR Alcohol Research)
The Idea
Thinking “Blackhat” has never been difficult for me, I pay attention to what a lot of digital marketers are doing and usually daydream about malicious ways to exploit these things.
Newsletter signups have been exploited almost to the point that they are invisible, we use to know that people wanted something in return for a signup. This use to be something trivial like “Latest updates about blah blah” but over the last 3 years its become bigger and bigger items such as e-books or exclusive memberships. Hubspot blog strategies have been worked to death so I knew coming into this I would have to get more creative and go beyond what has already been done.
What If I was able to give someone something better than an e-book or the latest updates, if I could what would it be? What would I want for signing up for a newsletter? Well the obvious answer is money, I think if given the chance anyone would take money for a newsletter signup, but no one would believe that they could get money in return for signing up for a newsletter right…?
One of my favorite books “Predictably Irrational” by Dr. Dan Ariely talks about how if presented something for free, such as money or an object our brains are trained to give less value compared to something that costs. This got me thinking that the incentive of money seems more plausible if users had to work for it. My target demographic cares about beer, whiskey and vodka how would I convince them to work?
This is when a slimey, malicious and unethical idea hit me. How many people would gladly hand over their email addresses for the opportunity to get paid to drink and write about their opinion of different types of alcohol. The proposition seemed too good to be true but with some good writing and a nice landing page it may be possible.
The Execution
Now that I had my idea I had to figure out how to write a job posting that had easy criteria to meet without sounding too good to be true. This job would likely appeal to people who, not to speak too harshly but are incredibly gullible and likely looking for easy money. The best place to reach people like this? Craigslist!
For the sake of making sure no one replicates this case study I will not include my craigslist posting.
The Craigslist post was submitted to 4 different west coast cities a total for 12 times. I did not want to do over do this so I decided to post in each city 3 different times throughout the week.
The craigslist applicants were directed to a page that talked about the benefits of the website and our mission along with an application which asked about things such as alcohol preference. The terms and conditions of the application included a section about adding these users to our mailing list so things stayed legal.
The Outcome
I started the campaign Monday and ended it Sunday night, within this time frame the site had 532 people apply and sign up for the newsletter. The best part of this is the demographic had an interest in the website vertical and using the application I determined what they were most interested in which theoretically could allow me to segment into specific lists.
What I Learned
- People are extremely gullible online
- Craigslist still holds a lot of power in terms of online marketing
- In a less black hat way, job postings can turn potential candidates to potential fans of the company.
This was ONLY a test, no applicants were emailed or marketed to!
