How to go straight to hell, or how to profit from dead celebrities

[BlackhatSEO]

How to go straight to hell, or how to profit from dead celebrities

This isn't something that I'm proud of, but I was thinking about it given Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter)'s death. It was a little tempting to set something up, more as a challenge to see how I could do, then as a way to make a profit.

Back in the days of making low X,XXX a month (only last year), I was always looking for schemes that might increase my profit a bit.

The spike in traffic when something happens to a celebrity is enormous. I think this was pretty obvious, but I'd seen the possible traffic for myself. I have a very small developed site (most of my 'sites' are basically just to make a little from Adsense/aff programs like Amazon - usually hand designed) for a C-list celebrity. When it was only announced that she was getting a divorce, traffic jumped from 10-20 uniques a day, to about 4000 uniques a day for about 5 days (as the news is reported). This is the kind of traffic that I like, because I consider it to be targetted. Adsense clicks were decent, albeit not paying terribly well because she is, after all, only a C-list celebrity. Aff sales at Amazon were a bit better since the fans were reminded about how they needed her dvds.

Let me put in a plug for celebritydeathbeeper.com. It is a free mailing list that will send you an email when someone dies. It's automated for the most part, I think so occasionally (okay, often), you'll be getting an email about some 'celebrity' that you've never heard of. CDB is not my site, I'm just one of many subscribers.


So when Johnny Carson died in January '05, within hours, I headed into Adwords and purchased an ad with an Amazon aff link selling his most expensive dvd set costing about $110. The clicks were costing me about 20 cents each, and I would then make about $8 per sale (if it was a direct link and then they purchased). Of course, you have to remember that most people are going to buy other stuff while still at Amazon. I've also found that people who spend $110 on a dvd set usually have more money to blow. So I made a small profit (maybe 200) for about a day before the click cost went up a lot and I just dropped out.

What I really didn't like was that I really had no idea what visitors were looking at. Also, direct aff links pay like 7-8%, whereas everything else that they add to their shopping cart only gets you 4%. So I looked around for a good Amazon script.

I found Associate-O-Matic (associate-o-matic.com) which I really liked because it is easy to setup and customize. Only downside is that the code is encrypted so you can't make any script modifications. Here's an example of an AOM store http://store.sciam.com/
The license allows you to setup stores on as many sites as you want, so I took advantage of this and quickly got the $99 that the script cost back.

AOM keeps the user on your own site until they are ready to check out. So everything that they purchase from you is considered a direct link by Amazon.

So when Richard Pryor died, I didn't go to Adwords immediately. Instead, I registered a nice domain name regarding Richard Pryor, and setup an AOM store. Put in some keyword-rich paragraphs that would appear on all of the pages, and THEN I went to Adwords and bought an ad. I was also paying about 20-25 cents a click in the beginning. The difference was that people were doing purchases and I was getting a better %.

The cost per click on Pryor went up pretty fast so I only made about $100 before I decided to stop with Adwords. I then bought cheap pr3-pr4 links from people, so within three days, my site was in Google and ranking for some specific Pryor dvds.

9 months later, I'm stilling getting sales every other day for some of his dvds. AOM can be setup so that it will email you everytime a visitor checks out. This doesn't mean they've paid for the items, and they might not, but usually they do.

And that is how I'd profit from celebrities. On a very, very small scale. I think if you really went after a celebrity aggressively, especially a really big name in the industry who everybody is going to be talking about for a long time.. there would be a lot more money to be made. There are probably better things that can be done with the celebrity fan traffic, but I never really took the time to do it. And for the record, I don't have any intentions of profiting from another celebrity's death.


RIP Steve Irwin. RIP Johnny Carson. RIP Richard Pryor.