Project Black Mask Review, Part 1: How to Build Hundreds of Made for AdSense Sites
As promised, I’m starting my review of Project Black Mask. I’m going to do it in parts so that I can properly cover everything that’s included in the package, including the upsell. There are actually two main parts to Project Black Mask: one is focused on AdSense, the other focuses on affiliate marketing. Today we’re looking at the AdSense side of things.
What’s Included in Project Black Mask
So the launch price for Project Black Mask was $77, although the price is going up sometime today apparently. This gives you a 99-page ebook and two videos. For a further $67 (I assume that’s going up as well) you get access to a set of “advanced videos”.
Because Project Black Mask was being promoted by Chris McNeeney of Affiliate “Project X” fame, I assumed the material was written by him. But it’s not. It’s actually written by Alex Goad, which I must admit was a disappointment to me. Part of what I like about Chris’ books is that they’re very entertaining. Anyhow, that’s just me. On with the review.
Copy Those Videos!
This is a bit of aside, but whenever I purchase an infoproduct that includes videos, I always download the videos to my local computer instead of watching them directly from the product site. That way if the site goes down or gets too slow I can still watch the videos. The problem is that most of these sites don’t make it easy for you to download the videos. Here’s what you do.
Most videos are provided in Flash format embedded right into a web page. The video itself is actually stored as a “.swf” file on the web server and the web page has instructions telling the browser to load and display the video. So the trick is to find and download the actual “.swf” file to your hard drive.
Click the link that brings up the video. If it starts running right away, pause it. Use the “Page Source” or “View Source” menu item on your browser to look at the HTML for the page. Look for a line similar to this one:
fo.addVariable( "csConfigFile", "IntroVid2_config.xml" );
This line tells the Flash player to load its configuration from “IntroVid2_config.xml”, which is an XML file (looks a lot like HTML) sitting on the server in the same directory as the HTML file you’re looking at. Go to your browser’s address bar and change the URL to load the XML file. For example, if this was your URL:
http://www.somesillysite.com/videos/2/IntroVid2.html
Then you’d change it to:
http://www.somesillysite.com/videos/2/IntroVid2_config.xml
The XML file may or may not display nicely. It doesn’t matter, just use the “Page Source”/”View Source” menu item to see the raw XML file. Look for a filename ending in “.swf”, something like this:
<uri>IntroVid2.swf</uri>
That’s the file the player’s going to load. Change your browser’s URL to refer to it. You should see the video load and run in your browser window, minus the player controls. Now you just do a “Save Page As…” (or “Save As…”) to store the .swf file to your local drive.
Repeat this process for all the videos.
It’s About Traffic
The introductory videos make it explicitly clear that Project Black Hat is really all about traffic generation, not AdSense or affiliate marketing per se. The idea is that you use the techniques described by the project to send traffic to your sites, which you then monetize any way you want. But AdSense is so easy to use that it’s the place he recommends you start.
The traffic generation methods all revolve around getting pages you control to rank in the top ten results for relevant keywords. There is no pay-per-click involved here — no AdWords, in other words. This is strictly organic traffic generation.
There’s no denying that getting one of the top ten spots on Google is a great way to get traffic. I have direct experience with this phenomemon. My site promoting Invisible Fence gets a lot of traffic because it ranks consistently at #3 or #4 for the term “invisible fence”. There’s nothing wrong with working to getting your pages to rank highly in the search engines — that’s what “search engine optimization” is all about. What I don’t like is how Project Black Mask tells you to do it (and, yes, it’s step-by-step).
The “AdSense is King” Technique
Here’s the basic outline of the technique:
- Create a long list of long tail keywords related to your niche. Specifically, find keywords with less than 10,000 competing results in Google.
- Feed the list to some page generation software to generate at least ten different sites. Make sure the pages that get generated are ugly as hell and prominently display as many AdSense ads as possible above the fold.
- Upload all the pages to a keyword-based .info domains you purchased.
- Use a blog, or ideally a blog farm, to get your content indexed. Detailed instructions on how to create a blog farm are provided.
- Bookmark various blog entries and content pages.
- Submit articles to the article directories. The articles should link back to your blog farm.
- Create Squidoo lenses for each blog in your farm.
- Move on to another niche.
That’s pretty much it. If you follow these steps, the author claims many of your pages will rank well in Google. The cumulative effect of all those pages on all those sites will generate a lot of AdSense income, even if it’s only for a month or two. Create networks like these on a regular basis to ensure that your income stream stays steady even as the older networks get dropped by the search engines.
The Dangers of “AdSense is King”
There’s no discussion in the book about the downsides of the “AdSense is King” technique, the most obvious being the loss of your AdSense account because of violations of the AdSense program policies. Remember that the program policies forbid you from placing ads on “made for AdSense” (MFA) sites. Now what exactly constitutes an MFA site is debatable, but the page generation software used in the book generates nonsense content that clearly violates that policy.
If that wasn’t bad enough, though, remember that Google recently started requiring AdSense publishers to follow its landing page quality guidelines. Again, the sites generated using this technique clearly fall short here.
It’s surprising, then, that there was no discussion on creating secondary AdSense accounts by setting up shell corporations or LLCs. It seems like a bit of an oversight to me, because surely if you’re doing all this black hat stuff you want to take every step possible to protect your income stream by splitting it across multiple accounts.
Does It Work?
Yes, I’m sure it does. Over the years I’ve seen posts on various forums describing techniques almost identical to the one presented here for getting lots of natural traffic — the concept of a blog farm is nothing new. You can’t just sit back and watch the money roll in, however, you have to keep working to stay a step ahead of the search engines, who really don’t want their result pages polluted with the crappy sites you build.
I don’t really see legitimate content producers using these techniques, however, and it’s not something I recommend you do. But I’ll save further commentary for the end of the review, once we’ve gone over everything.
Sponsored Link: For a complete set of AdSense best practices, read Uncommon AdSense — for serious AdSense publishers only!
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
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AdSense, Black Mask AdSense, blog farm, Google, made for AdSense, program policies, Project Black Mask, site generation
Comments
8 Responses to “Project Black Mask Review, Part 1: How to Build Hundreds of Made for AdSense Sites”
Eric, thanks for letting the cat out of the bag on this. I’ve been inundated with copycat sales pitch emails from various self-styled AdSense/AdWords/affiliate “gurus” on Project Black Mask. What’s been more interesting for me is watching the differences in how they all sell it! By the time you’ve spent all the money necessary to make a system like Black Mask work, you had better make some real dough back! This is only for people who have money to make money. The refreshing thing about ethical methods is that they often don’t anything but time and effort. Personally, I hate MFA sites and the automated techniques that spew out hordes of them. They are a blight on the internet.
Hi Eric,
I enjoyed your review, well done.
The videos will be made downloadable over the weekend and you’re correct about the multiple Adsense accounts. I will consider adding it to the package.
While you’re at it why don’t you just take your MFA scumbag sites down too! It’s crap like what you put out that gives IM a bad name. What a system…throw up 100’s or 1000’s of scrapped, good for nothing content sites and hope to make a quick buck before Google has to clean up your dirty mess after you. What a great user experience you provide. And then hope you don’t get your adsense acct shut down while you’re at it. On second thought though everyone who uses these kind of scumbag methods ought to get their accounts shut down! You’ll deserve it.
[...] Make Easy Money with Google Adsense says: I don’t really see legitimate content producers using these techniques, however, and it’s not something I recommend you do. But I’ll save further commentary for the end of the review, once we’ve gone over everything. [...]
[...] Guigere has posted part 1 of a review on Project Black Mask, which will supposedly make you rich: Project Black Mask Review, Part 1: How to Build Hundreds of Made for AdSense Sites. I’ve been reading Eric’s blog for a little while, now, and I generally like his take [...]
[...] readers may have noticed that I haven’t finished my review of Project Black Mask. I don’t honestly know if I will — I have many things on my plate and once I realized [...]
Yikes! I’m so glad I didn’t buy this ebook. I get irritated when I come across MFA blogs or websites with nothing but junk and jibberish. I certainly wouldn’t want to pay money for someone to teach me how to do that! Thanks, Eric, for this great review
[...] do that very often, though, because I don’t like to promote crap. And ever since the Project Black Mask disappointment I decided to not whole-heartedly promote any product without having seen it first. [...]