🪄 Underground SEO Hustle (buying backlinks to Reddit posts)

Hey,

The Spells Master is back!

Welcome to the 12th issue.

Today's topics:

1. Underground SEO Hustle (buying backlinks to Reddit posts)

2. A tool to generate 1000s of AI models for your brands

3. One recommended video on Deep Insights on Building a Recognizable TikTok Brand

Underground SEO Hustle (buying backlinks to Reddit posts)

While I was searching for SEO hacks on YouTube, I stumbled upon an interesting YouTube short that piqued my interest.

And the hack is so brilliantly done that I had to write about it so I don't forget it.

This is purely a blackhat tactic.

So there are these group of individuals who have 100s of different Reddit accounts that they use to game Reddit.

But here's the catch, they game Google at the same time.

What they do is they create these posts on Reddit for their desired keywords, putting the keywords in the title and first sentence of the post. This is SEO 101 bdw.

The posts are innocent. They don't put anything promotional in there. Just valuable info that people would like.

Then they buy upvotes to that post so it performs well and they can rank on the frontpage of the subreddit.

It doesn't take much upvotes and comments to start ranking #1 and you can buy 1 upvote for 1 cent so it only costs $1 to buy 100 upvotes.

Most of the times they use their other accounts to talk to themselves by asking questions so they can do a little back and forth to get the comment thread going.

5+ comments are enough for it to not seem dead and it starts ranking quickly as Redditors follow herd mentality.

They don't go too aggressive on the upvotes so as to not get caught. If you get caught, your account gets banned from that subreddit and most likely, your other accounts that interact with it do become more suspicious.

You can also get the site you are promoting banned from that particular subreddit because Redditors are notorious about post history.

That's why it is important to not overly promote on Reddit and have everything spaced out because some Redditors do like to report such accounts to mods.

So after they get to the front page of that subreddit, these individuals edit the posts to include a link to the product they are selling or promoting.

Sometimes they use URL shorteners or buy a secondary domain so it acts as a middleman. So if their main domain is example.com, they buy example.xyz so the main domain doesn't get banned on Reddit.

For context, some domains like gumroad.com, t.ly, bit.ly, dub.sh are banned in Reddit DMs.

This goes against Reddit's rules, but they are rarely caught since they edited the posts after the fact.

Now instead of buying links directly to their own websites, which is very risky and against Google's rules, they buy backlinks to the Reddit posts.

The backlinks use the desired keywords as the anchor text, which helps the Reddit posts rank highly on search engines. Again, this is a SEO tip.

The good thing about buying backlinks to Reddit is that Reddit isn't going to get penalized by Google as its already a highly authoritative site.

These individuals don't need to build authority for their own sites.

Buying the backlinks is the only liability they have, as it only costs them a few hundred dollars using PBNs, and they don't risk their own websites being penalized.

This allows them to leverage Reddit's authority and avoid the risks associated with traditional blackhat SEO tactics.

The buying backlinks part was definitely an out-of-the-box thinking.

You can use it for your agency or product to get them to rank really quickly.

Imagine if you are selling an SEO product, you can give away all your SEO secrets in 1 mega-post of 10 badass SEO tips on /r/SEO.

Once you cross ~100 upvotes, you edit the Reddit post and link to your product.

Then you buy some more upvotes so you rank #1 on top of week, month, or even all time.

You keep doing this through multiple accounts and use multiple domains to get the sales train going.

I bet the SEO juice from Reddit will make Google trust you even more.

Hat tip to Edward Sturm for covering this tip in his podcast episode and his 40-second YouTube short which is where I first found it.

I got my first video shout-out as well from Edward himself.

A tool to generate 1000s of AI models for your brands

Funny how AI democratized 1000s of photo creations for $39 per month using Photo AI.

Dating apps work on the principle that your profile pic is unique.

AI makes it easy to get away with it by creating 1000s of pics of the same person in different outfits. So you can create 1000s of accounts of one person.

This is great for dropshipping brands (and d2c brands) as well.

You don't have to hire models anymore.

You can just use an AI model.

They are available 24 x 7 and you can tune them how you like it with lots of variety in gender, race, age.

One recommended video on Deep Insights on Building a Recognizable TikTok Brand

This advice is not only for TikTok Brands. It is general advice on Brand Building on any platform.

People want expertise on 1 topic.

This video explains it much better.

All the algorithms (TikTok, YouTube, Twitter) are trained to put you into buckets of niches.

You will confuse the algorithm if you start talking about too many things at once.

Stick to 1-3 topics.

It is often better to stick to just 1 topic until you have enough influence to get away with it.

If you are wondering why you aren't growing on Socials, this is one of the main reasons.

I've done this mistake for years when I used to talk about too many unrelated things.

Your audience slowly tunes out if you do it too many times.

Tweet of the day

This is an SEO masterclass by Edward Sturm!

His newsletter ranks on #2 in Google so he knows what he is doing.

He is launching a course on SEO that's titled:

"Compact Keywords: SEO That Requires Less but Makes More"

I think it'll be a really good one as he breaks down everything down to the fewest actionable items.

Go sign-up for his newsletter and watch his videos on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram where he gives a lot of value on Growth Hacking.

Rabbit Holes

1. Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence with Anna Lembke - This 16-mins video will change your life. Anna Lembke's book Dopamine Nation tells you why we seek relentless pleasure through eating food we don't need, watching videos, scrolling TikTok, or watching Netflix. Once you understand how Dopamine works, you'll be able to stop consuming so many things and start creating. Not enough people know this.

2. Getting Over Plateaus is the Most Important Thing an Entrepreneur Can Do - When times are hard, push through. Two things I like about Shaan Puri: (1) He tells wonderful stories through writing and video but the most important one is (2) He introduced me to Wim Hof Breathing Technique that cools down my brain like no other. I started when it had 49 million views, now its on 82 million views. Go do it now, thank me later.

3. The Inside Story of How Tony Delivers Manufactured Virality With No Marketing Budget - When you have no marketing budget, you have to come up with out of the box ideas.

Until next time,

Your Spells Master!

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. How to raise money without giving away equity (LINK)

2. You don't need to target different personas. Nail down your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) (LINK)

3. Make $10,000 per month with Midjourney (The Easiest Side-Hustle?) (LINK)

Disclosure: Everything said in this post is for educational purposes only. Please follow the law. By reading this post, you accept full responsibility for your actions.