Automation - How To Build A Bot Army
"They didn't know that it was impossible, thus they did it." - Mark Twain Quora, Yahoo Answers, Facebook, Twitter - all these places have user generated content, that can be manipulated, extracted or mashed up. Imagine finding a Yahoo Answers question and posting it on a Facebook page to get a response, then later on dropping an affiliate link of a product that you think is a great fit. I'm going to open pandora's box on one such empire being ran under the radar.
Some tag team buddies of mine have grown to over 50,000 twitter accounts each with 1000+ followers. Currently they're averaging a 12% CTR and 8% conversion. What does that mean? That's about 6,000 people clicking through to every CPA they sends out and 8%, or 480 going on to buy the product. If you are in a niche that gets $15 a conversion, that $7,200 per campaign (they does them in 2-3 day intervals). I've seen their backend and his revenue numbers, it's ALOT more than that. These guys are doing serious numbers daily, this is just a small glimpse into the potential of blackhat automation. It's about seeing an opportunity and playing the numbers game.
First find a twitter account reseller, there are a dime a dozen. The twitter accounts is the easy part. Using your bots you are going to naturally grow these bot's followers by interacting with people, and even auto-following people in your niche. This is about mass exposure. Once you get 100 twitter accounts to about 300 follows, you've got an audience of 30,000 in your niche which you are mimicking interaction with all the time. You can take it a step further and attempt to create real dialog, and I suggest using WordAi's APIs for this, but that might not even be necessary, and that's Final Boss level shit you aren't ready for...
You see these bots out here automatically adding you. The more sophisticated bots don't start conversations but enter them and drop links, comments, and create interaction. I've got another guy doing this EXACT same method but with Pinterest . He rents out his bots though, so whenever I need to blast something to the women niche, he's the first person I hit up, always a positive return on investment for me. All this guy does is create bots that interact, re-pin images, follow users, and re-post Niche news, it's honestly one of the most beautiful things I've seen.
But that's Pinterest and Twitter, what about the other niche specific forums, social media platforms like LinkedIn, which are all business oriented? There are so many ways to extract traffic from platforms, and automation is the key. If you don't know a language get someone who does, even basics. I used Perl for most of my bot programming. I use CasperJS/PhantomJS for my bots since they are headless browsers and can interact with javascript - oh wait, anti-spammers don't want to hear that
The first lesson of CasperJS is learning to scrape Google, yeah that's right, Google -> Quickstart - CasperJS 1.1.0-DEV documentation
If you're too lazy to program, at least be the brains of the operation and partner with a programmer that's on top of their game. Here are some quick rudimentary bots that I've seen in action and a beginner programmer can whip up rather quickly:
Friendster Bot: Searches For recent Questions, Mentions, Tweets - Niche Respond with random questions, comments, or thanking the person Check back in 24 hours if they responded, if so - Add them as a friend. Check if they added you as a friend. The Goal: The goal is to reply to recent questions, mentions, or tweets. You can push CPA offers to these people like "hey, you might be interested in XYZ product - bit.ly/link"
Random Comment Bot: Find people that have commented on your niche. categorize them by the amount of Followers. If low followers - follow them. (Hopefully they'll follow you back) If high followers simply note them. Send out random comments about the niche and include the @followers_username. 'Have you heard of XYZ PRODUCT for the NICHE? @MercenaryCarter' 'Found a great article on NICHE, www.bit.ly/link @MercenaryCarter' The Goal: Get some reply back from them and therefore get their user base to see the messages as well.
News Bot: Setup Google Alerts for your niche to bot@mybotserver.com. Have a the bot check for that inbox, pop3 might be the easiest way. Whenever a piece of news comes into play get the title and link and output a twitter message with it and #Niche. The Goal: to create hashtag news bots that re-distribute news. People start naturally following these hashtag bots. The goal should be more for exposure so no one bot should have more than 1000 followers. If so, automatically remove the bot them from future messaging. Why? So you don't have all your eggs in one basket. Have tens of thousands of these twitter bots, each with 1000 visitors and when you need a social army to push a new CPA or a discount, bam, you've got a huge social army. If you're clever enough you can even get these bots to trends topics on twitter.
WordAi.com Bot: Scrape for recent tweets in your niche. Use WordAi.com's plugin re-construct the tweets. Re-tweet those tweets from other individuals and use hashtags to get them into the Niche's conversation. The Goal: generate unique content that will allow you to stay relevant in the social conversation without sacrificing quality. WordAi uses Artificial Intelligence to create it's content, not a bullshit copy and paste spinner.
Coupon Bot: Create a database of coupons that you are an affiliate for. Whenever someone in your niche talks about your keywords, send a tweet or even A DM (Direct Message), and let them know you've found a great coupon they might be interested in. Bank. The Goal: Send out coupons to people who are potentially looking from buying from a company you are an affiliate of or who can possibly pass the coupon on to friends of theirs.
Enemy Bot: Get a database together of all your competitors. Have a rebuttal promoting your brand over their brands as messages. Whenever someone in your niche talks about the competition, send a tweet or even A DM (Direct Message), with your message of being the better product/service, and to give you a try. Make sure not to message the same person over and over. The Goal: Competition counter social campaign. Whenever someone mentions any of your competitors, your bots jumps into the conversation, messages them, and tweets to people asking them to do a comparison.
Databases Should do the following: Login all twitter accounts and their proxy information. Log All tweets and know the last time and frequency they post at. (Need this for analysis) Know the individual niches you are targeting with keywords to look for. Monitor EVERYTHING!
There are literally dozens of ways to attack this. You can start out with 100 twitter accounts, and give each bot access to a portion to the twitter accounts, then creates these bots scripts, use a cheap VPS (CloudAtCost.com for example), buy 100 proxies (may need more as your network grows), and start experimenting with ways to socially interact. Your biggest concern will be getting flagged, so you'll have to randomize and vary a lot of this activity. I'd also assign certain twitter accounts to specific proxies, so Twitter can't eliminate your whole network out of existence. But seriously, don't go create a twitter bot army, that's already been done, there are hundreds of thousand of other websites out there with traffic that might be more targeted which you can use these ideas/blueprints on. Also, those other websites I guarantee have less spam filters and botting protection in place than the bigger aged properties.
The goal here is to create an army that you control with different bots that do different things - all with an end goal of either making you money, sending traffic to your site, or expanding your reach (being followed), in your niche. As this bot army grows and you integrate different platforms/websites/portals or data sources(Hint: local government archives), you'll be able to send out affiliate/CPA campaigns that generate you good residual money and traffic to your money sites (or even your tier sites), and whenever you need to tap that bot ass for nice pay days, you smack that shit, and no one will be the wiser.
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There are programmers the specialize in botting, so look to them first if you need to outsource this type of project. It's definitely a longer term project, so don't get 50,000 twitter accounts and spam twitter in one week, and fuck up all your proxies. Think long term. Also the key is to take advantage of cross channelling - for example if you can have a "Pinterest to Twitter" Bot, that takes popular photos in Pinterest, downloads them onto your website, then send out a link in a tweet to your audience. Same thing for Tumblr - "Tumblr to Twitter" Bot, or "Imgur To Twitter" Bot - Or "Pinterest To Imgur" Bot. Subreddit to your community through email? anyone? What about Yahoo Answers -> Twitter (other platform) -> Your own Q&A site -> Money site? Just think about all the places something can go viral, and come up with ways to push that viral content on another channel while you profit - with automated blackhat bots of course... Don't forget to monitor, watch, and analyze the feedback from the bots.
