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So the Web marketing community is having it’s heyday with yet another product – the infamous Black Mask Project we reported on earlier here: Spilling the Juicy Black Hat Beans: Project Black Mask Launches Today

We’ll spare you the ruckus as many of you will probably be hammered with promo mails advising you to go for it – something we can only recommend ourselves.

What’s more interesting perhaps is the people who are making a point of proactively not promoting it (if there can be such a thing).

By way of a more inane example, here’s a quote from Nana Gilbert-Baffoe’s PPC Arbitrage Club:

if you are wondering why I haven’t
emailed you about Project Black
Mask, it’s because I have no idea
what’s it’s about.
I haven’t seen it or read it, so
that means it gets no promo.
However I am intrigued enough
to buy a copy of the ebook when
it’s launched.
If it’s good you’ll hear from me
with a full review tomorrow or later
in the week when the launch buzz has
died down considerably.

Some nerve - as if bloggers blogging about blogging weren’t bad enough, now we seem to be getting the Internet marketer marketing non-marketing.

From my pre-unsubscription response:

What are you telling me - that you’re NOT promoting
a product because you’ve NOT yet seen it? I mean,
how newsworthy is this?
Would you like me to reciprocate the pleasure by sending
you a list of Hollywood movies I have NOT seen in the last
ten years or so, perhaps?
So what’s next
- 99 Things I Never Did When I Had A Chance To?
- The Top Ten Products I Don’t Have a Clue About?
- How I Never Made a Million Bucks Over Night?
Or how about: Why I shouldn’t waste bandwidth and my subscribers’ time by posting uninteresting non-news and even boring them to tears about the fact?

[Update: Ok, to do him proper credit he did take it in good humor, explaining that people were pestering him (um, yes, my words!) about bonuses etc. And he even asked me for my list of of Hollywood movies, LOL.]

But it gets worse, if somewhat less funny.

Detlef Reimer is all against it in his Project Black Mask Review , which would be perfectly fine, were it not for him adopting the “reformed black hat” stance. Some gems:

First of all, the author doesn’t even try to hide the fact that he’s spamming the search engines. Although, the term “Black Hat” makes it sound nicer. But within the ebook itself, several forms of spamming are mentioned. Apart from the fact that you could easily lose your Adsense account if you’re caught spamming the search engines, there are several other risks involved in this kind of “business”.

[…]

Using Traffic Equalizer, by the way, was the main reason why I’ve lost my highly successful PR6 domain ↗ Internetmarketing-success.com …! By having links from my main index page to the new inner pages which were generated using Traffic Equalizer, I got pagerank for several hundreds of Internet marketing related terms easily and a lot of additional traffic. I should have stayed with my manual approach because one day that I looked at the Google Toolbar for my site, it was greyed out…

There you have it: Being “black hat” can also cost you the fruits of your labor from the past years (e.g. if you’re using existing “white hat” high PR sites to link to your bad “black hat” websites or pages…)! That was about 2 years ago.

Lesson learned… and one of the reasons why I’ve called my new beginning “Ethicalinternetmarketer.com”.

Ok, let’s get that straight: Here’s someone who got burned by using a “black hat” tool which he more than likely simply didn’t use properly, couldn’t cope with the fact and decided to go all squeaky clean aka “ethical”. Ho-hum.

Kind of reminds me of the King and the Duke in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn scamming the Mississippi shitstompers by claiming to be “reformed pirates” who had finally seen the light. And no, I’m not implying that Detlev is into scamming anyone – he’s probably a very decent guy who simply can’t muster the gumption to live the inveterate Black Hat’s merry churn and burn life.

I mean, you really can’t have it all, can you: Boosting traffic and profits mega quick with all kinds of sneaky techniques and expect to be rewarded by longlived stable web sites guaranteeing you a residual income for life. (Not that your old White Hat approach could do that for you, but of course that’s another story…)

But is he admitting to maybe just having deployed those (let’s face it: eminently harmless) BH tools in a clueless manner? No way. Instead, he resorts to the WH’s beloved FUD propaganda. To wit:

The search engines are constantly trying to delete these kind of sites. If their algorhythm’s can’t catch them, then their staff will be doing manual reviews of the top search engine results for the most searched for terms. And you can’t trick their staff. In 97% of the cases, they are doing a great job and delete these spam sites from their index.

Ho-ho-hoh – 97%, eh? So see me shiver and tremble. Well, not quite. Because for one, there’s probably not one Internet surfer around (including tons of Black Hats, by the way) who wouldn’t just love this to be true. Unfortunately, a single search at any of the major engines should rapidly drag you out of that particular daydream.

But heck, even if it actually were so (and it most definitely isn’t), why not do the maths instead of ranting about moralities: So let’s say it takes you a full two hours to churn out say 50 BH web sites (maybe the cheap .info variety you can get for under dollar all over the place) and upload them to pre-assigned dedicated IPs on separate C class blocks, with your automated scripts taking care of all that nifty Blog & Ping stuff, throwing some links at them via your auto gen network of sites, etc. etc.

Next, let’s assume that each of those sites will only make you about $50 (via AdSense, affiliate links, traffic sales, etc.) until they all get kicked in the you-know-where once and for all by Google, Yahoo! and Live/MSN (fat chance of this ever happening in one fell swoop across the board, but let’s not overly complicate matters here).

So what does this leave you with? $2,500 in gross revenues less registration fees (appr. $50), bandwidth and hosting costs (another $50 at the most), totaling $2,400 or $1,200 per hour. Now you go and tell me that this is some dumb business model, Detlev!

Ok, here’s my must-have earnings disclaimer: Will everyone make that kind of money merely by using Black Hat techniques? Hardly. Many if not most will rake in considerably less – with the really big boys laughing all the way to the bank when being confronted with such paltry, humble expectations. Because they may easily make ten times as much and more. (In any case, don’t even dream of attaining to such sums within an all-White Hat scenario if your targeted industries are only halfway competitive – and that’s precisely where the real difference comes in.)

After all, like everywhere else in life, you need to know what you’re doing no matter what it is. And if you don’t, there’s really nothing wrong with that per se: To live is to learn, after all. So go and do your homework first.

But while you’re still in learning mode, how about shutting your trap instead of waxing all judgmental about things you’ve obviously never understood in the first place?

And for those who are as yet unfamiliar with the Black Hat lifestyle but open enough to be wisened up, here’s arguably the very best piece you’ll find on the Web today, outlining it: Interview with a Black Hat Seo.

[Update: Ok, rather than having to respond to tons of e-mail inquiring about it, here’s the direct link to that ever-so-infamous Black Mask Project.]

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