Is this Shaun Stenning's internet marketing? Be a thief?

An intriguing document landed in ThePaepae.com mailbox for my review recently. It appears to be a guide to (supposedly) making money through the internet by adopting ‘blackhat’ techniques used by ‘YouTube Traffic Thieves‘.

From appearances, this MAY emanate from spruiker Dean Letfus’s new business partner itinerant salesman and self-proclaimed internet expert Shaun Stenning (or perhaps one of his henchmen colleagues?) judging by the ‘twa.lk 2.0’, ‘make big money on social media’ branding (not to mention the giveaway typos and poor grammar).

But I note there is NO author’s credit, publisher, copyright notice, nor contact details showing on the document as I received it, so it may be that Shaun Stenning et al has simply plastered his (latest) branding on someone else’s work. I really don’t know. (If you can shed light on this, and you care, please let me know. And feel free to send me more material.)

Whatever its origins, it is an ODIOUS little volume, let me tell you.

It’s interesting to note it carries this anonymous ‘disclaimer’, neatly demonstrating the term we recently touched on in another discussion, consciousness of guilt:

Hardly confidence-inspiring, is it? (Source: YouTube Traffic Thieves report)

The unnamed author shares dodgy methods he uses — and he says you can try at your own risk — to hijack people watching videos on YouTube and driving ‘traffic’ to your websites (ka-ching!) — with no value added, it seems to me. In fact, some of the techniques are downright dishonest, in my opinion. (Hence the disclaimer, I guess.)

Here are some extracts, to give you a sense of the ‘flavour’:

GAINING VIEWS TO YOUR VIDEO

TITLES
Make money online – very bad title
Make 100 000 $ online – it is better
How I made 100 000$ online – it is even better
How I made 101 437$ online in just 2 weeks – I would say this is the best [Comment: No, I don’t get why the $ symbol is at the end of the numbers either.]

Sexy girl – very bad title
Sexy girl stripping – better
Sexy girl stripping for you – even better
Sexy girl stripping in front of a policemen – I would say this is the best

This was followed by a few more invaluable tips. (Er, not really.)

WORST signer {sic} ever? Brilliant! Whoever wrote this doesn't seem to mind misleading people.
(Source: YouTube Traffic Thieves report)

.

“You can also use misleading titles… “

Oh boy! Why didn’t I think of that! These clever guys are really spilling the beans aren’t they?

Or there’s this, on misappropriating videos that other people have uploaded and ‘stealing’ their traffic by your cunning use of tags etc … (and look for the extra kick in the guts — highlighted).

Use the Youtube search feature and choose to rank the videos by the most recent uploaded. There you can see potential gem videos. Take them and reupload them and use proper tags description and titles to make them viral and surpass the original video.

You can use the same method but at another websites: [sic] see the most recent uploaded videos and reupload them at Youtube with proper tags.

What I do. I search Youtube for new sexy videos, when I see something good I download them and reupload them using extremely well defined tags, titles, and descriptions. After this, I go back and flag the original uploaded video from different accounts as being adult and breaking Youtube TOS. [Terms of Service] Youtube removes that video and there is plenty of space for me to gain the views. [Comment: Gee, he’s a real piece of work, isn’t he?]

Then there’s this wholesome strategy:

As noted in my post Lowlife con-artist uses internet to fleece Kiwis, Shaun Stenning describes Made for [Google] Adsense and Made for Amazon as “two of the key monetization methods”.

Hot on the heels of their NZ Property Guru’s [sic] hard-sell roadshow, Shaun Stenning and Ethical Investing Strategist Dean Letfus are travelling the country with a NEW! whizz-bang! Get-rich-really-fast sales pitch, apparently, offering a niche and keyword Made for Adsense/Amazon marketing ‘system’ to eager internet zillionaires-in-training. (‘Sni.pr‘ is just ‘twa.lk’ in drag, according to someone I know who follows such things.)
See if you can spot the key sentence (highlighted).

HOW TO MONETIZE THE TRAFFIC

… 2 Made for Adsense websites

A simple page with ads from adsense work [sic] perfectly in any niche. Make sure you send traffic, people are not finding [sic] what they want in your page, but they may find the answer in the ads, if you know what I mean. For instance, make a video saying if you want to make money online come here. Send them to a page, where there is an article about making money online, but not any real information, just some general shit.

They will be unsatisfied, and they will see those google ads with MAKE 1000000$ [sic] in 3 days. They will click them. Simple as that. Of course you can use this with pay per action or affiliate programs, and adsense as well, this way you will combine your source of traffic.

Wow. Am I missing something? “… not any real information, just some general sh*t”??

How are these misleading, dishonest tactics possibly a fit for ANYONE who uses the word ‘ethical’ in their tagline like Dean Letfus? (…or even in their self-image, for that matter, like Kieran Trass.)

Crikey! I personally wouldn’t have anything to do with someone who promoted or demonstrated this ‘blackhat’ marketing approach. How could you trust anything they said?

In case you think I’m making any of this up, here are screen shots of the YouTube Traffic Thieves document extracts quoted above: (1) (2) (3).

Facts are stated to the best of my knowledge and commentary is my honest opinion. Extracts reproduced under ‘fair dealing for the purposes of review, criticism and reporting’ provisions of the Copyright Act 1994. Corrections or clarifications are always welcome by email. Comments are open.
– Best wishes, Peter Aranyi © 2010 All rights reserved.