fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

When it comes to gaming the social networks black hat style, there’s really no “secret sauce” involved in gaming the social networks, so no need to cough up money for expensive e-books trying to sell it to you.

Simply follow the rules outlined below and adjust them as required, employing your #1 resource as an SEO - your head!

1. Give before you take - vote for people’s articles (lots of them), then sign them up as friends (again: lots).
2. Continue voting, then, gradually, send them one of yours to vote for.
3. Monitor closely: Some are anchors and will hardly return the favor (too busy, etc.) - keep them as friends anyway.
4. If someone never votes for yours, chuck them from your friends’ list - no point in wasting time on them.
5. Before you send your message to friends for voting, vote for their most recent articles - as long as they don’t have too many votes yet, yours will stand out and typically they won’t be swamped with reciprocation requests yet.
6. Be prepared to give more votes to power posters than you’ll receive in return. Chances are, they’re too busy to keep track most of the time. But they can be very influential, so for my part, I’ll go for a 3:1 to appr. 5:1 ratio max, after which: see #4
7. If you want to be sneaky, set up multiple accounts (different names, mail addresses, preferably IPs), but don’t overdo it because linking patterns (i.e. voting networks) are fairly easy to spot. Make sure you don’t vote for your own stuff all the time - keep it natural and as “organic” as you can. This little bit of extra trouble can actually make or break every manipulative campaign.
8. Beware votebots: Plenty of those around now - no good for you because most of them are too dumb to spread votes across anything but their masters’ articles. (Generally, their blatantly incestuous behavior makes them highly vulnerable to detection, of course. So don’t fall for that same trap yourself!)
9. If your competitors should start hitting your articles with sinkbots, retaliate in kind and be sure to take no prisoners. If you can discern who’s vote-related to whom, respond to every sink with 5-10 of your own. Then, send them an anonymous mail proposing a truce. If you’re relentless enough and they see no reason to doubt your determination, chances are they’ll want to cut their losses and may even be willing to cooperate with your own voting network further down the road. (Think of mobsters staking their claims and cutting out their respective territories - if they’ll let you work the Cialis racket, you can leave the Viagra promo to them, you get the drift. And be sure to stand united against any new contenders cropping up out of the blue who’ll try to screw both of you.)

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