Cloaking: General Strategy and the Big Picture

I talk to a lot of people new to the cloaking industry and constantly I see that people are missing the big picture. I guess it is understandable that it is easy to get caught up in all the details of cloaking and lose focus of the big picture and general strategy. This post will hopefully help everyone refocus their efforts and remind people of the basics that can sometimes easily be overlooked.

Goal
The goal of cloaking is very simple…create a cloaked website that, when in test mode, a human would not be able to tell that the website was auto generated. This means using a template that has an attractive design as well as creating content that is unique, human readable, and grammatically correct. If your cloaked websites follow the rules above then you are 90% on your way to being successful. Remember that SEC and EWI are just tools and that it is still required that you use your brain and some creativity to put it all together.

Competitive Advantage
As cloakers, our competitive advantage over other website owners is very simple: mass production and automation. While a cloaker can create a 2,000 page website in a few hours, it takes the same blogger a few years to create a comparable size website. For this reason, cloakers need to leverage mass production and automation as much as possible. The more cloaked websites you can produce and the more pages you have indexed in the search engines, then the more money you will make.

Utilizing Your Strengths - Knowing Your Weaknesses
There are a lot of steps to creating a successful cloaked website: SEO, designing a template, keyword research, content creation/manipulation, backlinks, and promotion. It is very rare to have a cloaker who is an expert in each step of creating a cloaked website. This is why it is very important to know your strengths and weaknesses. Personally, my strengths include all the steps from start to finish to creating a cloaked website, but I suck at promoting it and getting backlinks, which is a crucial step in the process. So rather than struggle at getting backlinks or not doing it at all, I outsource it to someone who knows what they are doing. Usually this is someone who, like me, has realized their strengths and weaknesses and their strength is in automation and sometimes blackhat techniques to easily build massive amounts of backlinks. I guess the main point here is that you should either outsource or team up with someone who has complementary skills as you to cover all the facets of the cloaking process.

Networking
Elaborating on the topic above, it is also very important to network. Reach out to experts in the field and try to figure out what they are doing. Then take what you learn and apply it to your business. A lot of my best ideas come from conversations with other cloakers that get my creative juices flowing. Networking is not easy though. Before you contact an “expert” make sure you have something to bring to the table or else they are not going to want to talk to you. If you are good at programming maybe make a little application that could help this “expert” and contact them asking them what they think about it. Don’t just go to an “expert” and say “Can you help me?” and expect them to open up and tell you everything they know which has taken them years of trial and error to learn.

Think Like the Search Engines
When ever you do something think to yourself “What would the search engines think if they saw my cloaked website?”. So may times I get questions that are irrational and usually my response to these questions begin with “Well if you look at it from the perspective of the search engines…”. One example of this is the question I get very frequently of “Will my money site (on a separate domain) get banned if my cloaked website (also on a different domain) gets banned?”. Now if you think about this question from the search engines point of view they can’t possibly ban a website because a cloaked website was redirecting to it. If they did then us cloakers could wipe out all our competition by creating spammy cloaked websites that redirect to our legitimate competitors.

Enjoy!