E-Commerce and the Rise of the Bots
For anyone with a product that’s easy to distribute then the internet obviously offers an incredible opportunity. One of the easiest products in this category is the ‘digital product’ – something that only exists in electronic format and can literally be dispatched anywhere in the world for virtually zero costs.
Think about it, a product which costs you nothing to supply, nothing to deliver and with a potential market that stretches across the globe. These are simple statements, but ultimately they lie behind a concept that’s making an awful lot of new millionaires every week. The products vary but things like e-books, computer software, videos, audio and online services are some of the products that fuel this market.
Several years ago, I remember a product being released by a very famous internet marketer called Frank Kern. It was called Mass Control and followed another product called Stompernet which were both informational courses designed to help people make money online. These products were always hyped to the stars and then released into an almost hysterical market and I should add they were never cheap.
IT costs thousands to buy many of these products which always came with extra bonuses (to buy), subscriptions, fast track options and loads of other junk options designed to skim more money from customers. The sad thing was that they worked, which was not a testament to the quality of the product but more to the masterful release process where people would end up buying anything. These still happen usually on a slightly smaller scale but still the value of these releases is incredible – Stompernet was rumoured to have grossed over $20 million. Most of it was rubbish, some useful tips on things like marketing and SEO wrapped up in over the top hype and an inflated price tag. However it showed that when you have a product that can be sold for this much and distributed for virtually nothing how much money was possible.
Now most of these releases were at best overpriced rubbish but probably nearer the ‘complete con’. Indeed many involved in these major releases were prosecuted by the FTC which is why we probably don’t see the massive hyped launches any more. Yet distributing digital products like this is still a massive market and there are still customers. If you pick the right niches, things like weight loss, making money, picking up women and market it right there will always be a huge number of customers all over thee world.
So if marketers have moved away from the mass release template what other options are available? Well the most obvious is to reach a global market is to use directories and social media to reach your audience. If you take a platform like Craigslist, Instagram or eBay then it’s relatively easy to reach a massive audience all over the world for a small cost. Get the right product, the right market and you can makes sales all over the world, dispatched by a simple email or web link.
Unfortunately, directories like Craigslist don’t like people doing this because they consider it a misuse of their platform. They promote themselves as a local directory and want advertisers to put ads up only in their local area. Now if you’ve got a $20 report on how to lose weight, you don’t want to just sell it online in your local area! You wont to push it far and wide to desperate dieters all across the planet, after all it costs nothing to send out extra copies and there’s no delivery costs.
So How Do the Craigslist Marketers Work ?
The answer is simple, they let computer software do the work for them, There are lots of automated Craigslist posting software you can buy like Crayzilla, CL Auto poster and many more. They’re simple pieces of software in general which allow you to create a simple advert which then can be posted to regional Craigslist sites all across the world.
The attraction is obvious, promoting your product to millions of people by just the click of a button. Obviously they take a while to configure and setup but when it’s completed you have a push button marketing plan at your disposal. However as mentioned the directory companies like Craigslist do not like this behaviour at all and spend a lot of resources trying to stop people placing multiple adverts.
So the software providers spend much of their time trying to hide under the radar, usually by offering many configuration options to simulate human behavior. There are some aspects though that are difficult to hide and one of them is physical location. When you try and post an advert on Craigslist they will first check your location, cross referencing your IP address with the location it was registered to. This will be used to stop people posting ads to regions outside their location. There’s not much the computer software can do directly but they do normally allow the use of things like dedicated rotating proxies.
These are essential in using any sort of automated posting software like this and usually represent the difference between success and failure. There are even specialised servers configured and designed for different platforms – e.g. Craigslist proxies and Facebook proxies and so on. The idea is that these are proxies with IP addresses that work fine on these platforms and are also distributed geographically – e.g. in different US or UK cities for example. Craigslist is particularly difficult as it you need to tie in the classified section with an IP address in the specific range.
Although there is something of a constant war between these platforms and the marketers/software providers the potential gains easily justify this effort. There used to be a lot of multi use bots which could post to lots of different platform, however now it’s more common to use a specialised bot for each one. The only large mainstream multi-platform Bot is probably Jarvee which works for most of the major social platforms and a couple of the big directories. However it’s important to try these out with the platform you prefer, below you’ll find a link for a free trial of Jarvee.
If you can find a free trial it’s quite a simple decision to make. Simply set up your advertisements, or tasks then run the program. Unfortunately Jarvee doesn’t cover Craigslist any more as they now specialise in the major social networks. The key with any of these programs though is to use decent proxies, having a clean IP address in the right location is essential to success. In previous years you could get away with using a simple VPN like the sort people use to download videos from the BBC but these seldom work anymore. It’s because the VPN usually shares IP addresses across lots of people and most of these platforms will start blacklisting addresses with lots of concurrent connections.
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