W-Shadow.com

A suspicious occurence – I got and e-mail today, with a (tracked & cloaked) link to a video tutorial about how to unzip files (note: the author keeps changing his permalink structure, so the link may stop working whenever). The weird thing was not the arrival of the e-mail – it’s was from a newsletter I’ve signed up for. The topic though was unusual and unexpected, even more so because I recently wrote a short article about free zip software myself.

So why, exactly, did this event seem worthy of mentioning (aside from the usual and oft-repressed desire to express my angst and paranoia)? The video was created by Rob Taylor, a big-name internet marketing pro. This instantly made me go “Hmm… Someone like that wouldn’t do something without a good reason.” But he’s not selling anything in the video. He shows where you can get some kind of free zipping/unzipping software (not one of the widely known tools) and how to use it. There’s a mention of a free report though…

Actually, this is a pretty obvious deal. I’ve done some research on the popularity of search terms related to .zip files and it looks promising from the SEO perspective. Someone with a bit of know-how could easily get near the first page of results on Google for some zip-related search phrases and get over 100 visitors/day for that. Couple that with a really useful video (or “great content” as the TDC folks say) and an unobtrusive link to an unrelated – yet enticing – free download, and, after magic happens, – profit! (Err, I obfuscated the cliche unintentionally, I swear!)

This form of traffic generation is actually a very good thing to do, as it both creates genuine value and, if used properly, has good business potential. Wish I could do that. Actually, maybe I can… (if I can find a topic that’s not extremely obscure and manage avoid being needlessly eloquent while lacking essential syntax skills)

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