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Blue Hat Technique #15 - MFA: It’s All About The Homepage

Posted By Eli On December 10, 2006 @ 1:46 pm In Blue Hat Techniques | 99 Comments

As many of you might not know I am also a computer tech. I get to help a lot of people with their computer problems and frankly its a lot of fun. It’s also very educational in the Internet marketing aspect. As experienced Internet users we sometimes loose sight of how the average Internet user behaves. We get so caught up in our own habits of long tailed search phrases and properly quoting terms that we often forget that a worthless searches like the term “computers” gets over 200,000 searches/day. I learn more and more every year from the benefits of casually watching friends and family members use the computer. Watching how they browse the Internet, why they click on ads, and how they respond to things like error messages has huge benefits in designing money making campaigns online.

This entire technique focuses on just three common user habits that I’ve noticed over the years with my own clients.

1) Double Clicking- Ever watch your parents or grandparents use the computer? You’ll probably notice one thing immediately. They double click everything. They double click icons, they double click Internet links, they even double click buttons. Double clicking is the first skill taught when learning how to use the computer, and more often than not, teaching when double clicking is not required is often skipped. Simply because it typically brings no harm.

2) The Homepage- Homepage changes aren’t a big deal to the average Internet user. As long as the home page has a search and maybe a bit of useful items like news they simply typically don’t care about the switch or even bother changing it. Its us experienced Internet users that tend to be hardcore about our homepage. Internet providers realize first hand the power of this trate. Installing a new ISP will change the users homepage to their homepage 90% of the time. I can’t tell you how many times a client has commented about how much they “like this new Internet” when they switch providers and see the new homepage for the first time.

3) Decisions- Dialog boxes and error messages = decisions. Our familiarity to dealing with dialog boxes often makes us forget the power they hold on the typical Internet user. Try this, next time you’re on the computer with a common user watching and a dialog box comes up and of course you click out of it quickly without needing to read it. Watch the expression they make. It’s usually something like “WTF? You didn’t even read that! What if it was important?” It’s funny because its true.

The habits definitely don’t stop with these three. The more you look the more you’ll find. I just wanted to list some examples of the types of behaviors to look for because the next step is obviously, monetization. So how exactly are we going to use the power of these three habits for our own profit without of course harming the user. The trick is simply; Turn something useless to them into something useful. How about starting with some made for Adsense sites? Then we’ll take this one step further and turn one user click into reoccurring traffic & Adsense income. The following steps will dive even one step further down the rabbit hole and attempt to increase your click through rates on your MFA(Made for Adsense) sites.

The Proccess
1) Prepare your MFA sites. MFA sites are great for this technique because they draw the common Internet user and very rarely trick the experienced user. So since your MFA network is already up and drawing a gripload of inexperienced surfers lets begin there.

2) Create a nice startpage. Give it some nice domain like mysmartstartpage.com. Make it pretty and easy to use. Include your Google search box code(through your Adsense account setup) prominently. Then include a bit of news links and possibly a local search. Don’t forget to put a few inconspicuous ads on the site. Make it look like a really nice start page that you would use yourself if you weren’t so obsessed with that giant Google logo. :) Check out [1] Charters homepage as a great example. It never hurts to learn from one of the best.

3) Insert some homepage change javascript code on your MFA sites.

document.setHomePage(’http://www.mywebsite.com’);

I recommend you put it as an onload() in the body tag(see comments). That way it will automatically popup when the page loads.

4) Reposition your ads. The window.position.set properties are held in the registry and are typically never changed on a Windows XP computer. Through practice try to reposition your ad so they are directly underneath where the javascript dialog box will show on a typical 1024×768 or 800×600 resolution computer. Double check your results on several computers for accuracy.

What Will This Do?
The user will go to one of your MFA pages and get faced with a small dialog box asking them if they want to change their homepage to your new startpage you built. The experienced user will quickly click cancel and be on their way. No big deal. The rest will click to get rid of the dialog box. A percentage will click OK. This percentage will become your reoccuring income for a long time. Everytime they open their browser they will get your start page. It will be nice so they usually won’t care. You will get money from the searches they make on your Google adsense search box. You will also get income from the ads placed on the start page. Over a long enough period of time your start page will start to build in its loyal userbase. The more it builds the more reoccuring money it makes.

What About The Percentage That Click Cancel?
Remember the first trate of the common Internet user that was mentioned? They click once: it gets rid of the dialog box. They make the second click for the complete double click: you get a click on your Adsense ad. Your CTR on your MFA page just went up! *Insert evil grin*

You never really loose.

Don’t Forget To Brand Your New Start Page
Another smart tactic to use would be to brand your new start page. Make it prominent but not in the users’ way. This is important because as the user gets more familiar with the Internet and starts to really learn the ins and outs they will start to become loyal to what they are used to. Since they are in the process of getting used to your start page when it gets changed in the future when they are smart they will remember it and will be more apt to change it back to yours. This creates a long term win for you.


99 Comments To "Blue Hat Technique #15 - MFA: It’s All About The Homepage"

#1 Comment By Richard On December 10, 2006 @ 2:04 pm

Haha! I usually never leave comments on blogs but this is so goddamn brilliant that I simply have to.

Been reading this blog for quite a while now and I must say that you surely are creative. Keep it up :)

#2 Comment By Caydel On December 10, 2006 @ 2:35 pm

That is an interesting proposition… I think I may finally give this a try.

#3 Comment By Dave On December 10, 2006 @ 2:41 pm

One of the best ideas I’ve seen in a long time. If you have any large-market site, like one on fitness, diet, and weightloss like [2] Lose Fat Get Fit you could have portal sections on losing fat, exercise routines, clothing, fitness equipment, etc. — all with your affiliate ads and your adsense. Great!

#4 Comment By John On December 10, 2006 @ 4:49 pm

I totally like this idea. I will give it a thought

#5 Comment By John On December 10, 2006 @ 5:05 pm

How does Charter.net keep up with all that content?

#6 Comment By Chad On December 10, 2006 @ 6:10 pm

Haha, great post Eli. I laughed my ass off. Those things you said are so true. I’m constantly coaching my dad whenever I see him use the internet. “Wow dad, you don’t have to double-click everything.”

Great idea as well with the homepage change. At the Chicago SES conference, Shoemoney talked a bit about a similar concept that BearShare was using.

BearShare would force the user to set their homepage to google.bearshare.com in order to install the software. Click cancel, and the installation halts. So, if you wanted BearShare you also got a new start page.

It was/is a search portal serving up nothing but Adsense for search. I think they’ve since moved to Ask, which still serves up Google ads anyway.

#7 Comment By Jon On December 10, 2006 @ 9:06 pm

Great post, Eli.

Back when I used to work cleaning computers of spyware, I should have been resetting their homepage to one of my sites.

#8 Comment By Jon Waraas On December 11, 2006 @ 12:05 am

Another great tweak to get some more revenue! Thanks man for this info!

#9 Comment By curlykarl On December 11, 2006 @ 6:25 am

Great post, I will try these tactics on my MFA’s. :)

#10 Comment By Richard On December 11, 2006 @ 1:23 pm

It seems that using setHomePage in body onLoad isn’t possible in IE 6.0. Do you have a workaround for this? Using onClick on the body element works though, so that’ll have to do for now.

#11 Comment By Eli On December 11, 2006 @ 1:31 pm

thanks guys,
service pack 2 really brought this technique down, but there are still workarounds to it. here’s close
[3] http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffdav/archive/2004/04/13/112632.aspx

#12 Comment By kansieo On December 12, 2006 @ 9:56 am

eli, are the workarounds you mentioned considered classified information? ;)

I’ve explored dhtml which will still require a click (but I can disable all other window controls til I get that click…may be detrimental to CTR on pages?). I’ve also looked into using flas, but need to dig a bit further.

#13 Comment By Eli On December 12, 2006 @ 10:12 am

there are a few work arounds but, no very good ones or ones that are super simple. The other side of this is just to include it anyways on the MFA sites and target win98,me,2000 computers. Which still works great.

#14 Comment By kansieo On December 12, 2006 @ 11:00 am

out of curiousity, what do your visitor demographics look like? is there a large percentage still using outdated windows?

#15 Comment By xref On December 12, 2006 @ 2:17 pm

Surely this would be good to use on bought traffic?

#16 Comment By Jon Waraas On December 14, 2006 @ 1:42 pm

Is there any other workarounds? None work for me..

#17 Comment By Eli On December 15, 2006 @ 1:50 pm

Here’s my suggestion. Just put it up and leave it. Like the technnique mentions theres no loosing its only gains with using it. You’ll still get plenty of ppl from the win98,me,2000 computers. everyone else won’t notice a thing.

#18 Comment By Jon Waraas On December 16, 2006 @ 5:42 pm

Is there a way to make a website a users homepage without clicking any buttons. Like a hack or something?

Also when i tryed

document.setHomePage(’http://www.mywebsite.com’);

I got an error in IE7? Did anyone else? Thanks Eli

#19 Comment By Eli On December 16, 2006 @ 6:16 pm

i was wondering if its possible to get by it in flash. Anyone try this? Also on the microsoft documentation for service pack 2 it says don’t put anything inside a popup. because everything inside that popup will be considered a user action. Which means it’ll block popups but it won’t block popups inside of popups.

#20 Comment By Rob On December 18, 2006 @ 9:47 am

It’s kinda sneaky but you could have an iframe on the page that links directly to a download of a Windows Registry file .reg

then when the page loads they get an OPEN SAVE or VIEW type response - if they click open you could have the registry change the homepage.

Following Registry Keys
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Default_Page_URL
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Default_Search_URL

Then you could set the homepage to whatever page you wanted.

You may also lookinto .vbs (Visual Basic Scripting) you could do a similar thing thru that and have it change the registry directly from that (which would elimate the popup of “Do you wish to import into registry?” etc.

#21 Comment By Ron On December 24, 2006 @ 7:50 pm

I made one really quickly, not sure if the set homepage thing works:

[4] link

#22 Comment By Atomm On January 8, 2007 @ 9:56 pm

I love this idea. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to monetize my own search site and this is great!

Not quite as long term, but I recently moved across country. During the trip, we stayed at 4 different hotels. Each hotel had a public computer you could use . One even had the bearshare.google.com page as the start. hehe

I reset the homepage to my own page and it worked great for about a month. I guess someone caught on.

#23 Comment By TheOperative On February 5, 2007 @ 3:37 am

LOL, dude, I have been cracking up reading this. It is brilliant and evil I love it. :)

#24 Comment By markj On February 28, 2007 @ 8:04 pm

Anyone know a good resource for the content?
Somewhere you can get the weather, news etc all in one script?

#25 Comment By Thien On March 18, 2007 @ 11:39 am

I made a homepage of my own running on Joomla. Joomla has some great modules for weather, email, etc. that I slapped on the homepage.

#26 Comment By markj On March 18, 2007 @ 1:55 pm

Thanks, Thien.
I’ll look into that option. My sites have cpanel.

#27 Comment By Pay Per Install On April 2, 2007 @ 1:03 pm

Dont you have some example how this page should look like? Obviously you cant put there any page… you want the user to think that he could keep this as homepage forever.

#28 Comment By needsomehelp On June 25, 2007 @ 5:33 am

Hi this idea is awesome. I have implemented a search box on 1 of my sites to try out this theory but today I have had the following results

Queries Clicks CTR eCPM [?] Earnings
30 2 6.67% $0.68 $0.02

basically 2 clicks got me $0.02

does that seem like something is wrong, or is it because the searches were crap ?

thanks alot

#29 Comment By Joe loan On September 21, 2007 @ 2:36 am

I have heard about black hat and white hat and now i had gone through your blue hat techniques. It was really a good suggestion for grand parents to how to use the computer and was a good comment on the ‘decision’ where people seeing the dialogbox will not see the message inside it and simply click it. I agree with your comment. Thank you for your post.

#30 Comment By FunWithSEO On October 4, 2007 @ 6:58 pm

Man, you’re a freaking genius!

#31 Comment By mike On December 5, 2007 @ 4:49 pm

This is a lot of great information on MFA site. Thanks for the great information especially the home page recommendation.

#32 Comment By Soutien Scolaire On December 19, 2007 @ 6:59 pm

Thanks a lot for your SEO tutorials. Your website helped me a lot for making my first mfa sites

#33 Comment By neil strauss On January 31, 2008 @ 7:04 am

Very creative and its so much better than the typical advice given in these make money on adsense eBooks.

#34 Comment By Prosperity Writer On March 24, 2008 @ 1:54 am

i will try this idea, i’ve been using the adsense search box for a long time but the surfers aren’t really using them.

#35 Comment By Apple Money On April 5, 2008 @ 9:10 am

Great idea. I have made a really simple one with links to facebook, hotmail, youtube and other popular sites.

I was just wondering would there be a sneaky way so that surfers homepage automatically changes without them knowing at all.

Thanks

Sarwar

#36 Comment By SEO On October 10, 2008 @ 4:25 pm

“Your CTR on your MFA page just went up! *Insert evil grin*” Hehehe, I love it, damn where do all your great ideas come from Eli? You have the mind of a genius! :)

#37 Comment By rufman On March 26, 2009 @ 5:57 pm

I agree, your homepage is everything on the net.

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Mfa’s doesn’t work anymore.

#39 Comment By Payday Uk On October 9, 2009 @ 3:23 am

I forgot it, but your mail reminded me again to read your blog. Thanks

#40 Comment By xp-error On January 22, 2010 @ 7:50 pm

I was just wondering would there be a sneaky way so that surfers homepage automatically changes without them knowing at all.

#41 Comment By Resell Rights Ebook Store On May 5, 2010 @ 8:08 pm

This post is quite old but the method of having a pop up with the cancel button directly over an adsense ad works to increase click through rates.

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Thanks a lot for your SEO tutorials.
I made a homepage of my own running on Joomla. Joomla has some great modules for weather, email, etc.
Another great tweak to get some more revenue!!

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#45 Comment By Forum Roleplay On September 14, 2010 @ 9:01 am

Great article. The very first point you brought up, the double clicking, is amusing. True, of course, and hilarious because it is so true.

The Homepage is another true point, and I think you explained it very well. It’s number 3 that makes me laugh even more, and I have to stress that I laugh only because it’s SO true. I have had this experience many times myself.

As for the techniques you detailed in this article: Brilliant.

#46 Comment By PLR On September 15, 2010 @ 5:38 am

This process is or was widely used and helps figure out visitor click hot spots also visitor heat map tools can help with this.

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I made a homepage of my own running on Joomla. Joomla has some great modules for weather, email, etc. that I slapped on the homepage.

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Here’s my suggestion. Just put it up and leave it. Like the technnique mentions theres no loosing its only gains with using it.

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AdSense still accept these tricks?

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“Mfa’s doesn’t work anymore.”

You can try it with other alternatives.
But, I think most of them has similar policies like AdSense.

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URL to article: http://www.BlueHatSEO.com/blue-hat-technique-15-mfa-its-all-about-the-homepage/

URLs in this post:
[1] Charters: http://www.charter.net
[2] Lose Fat Get Fit: http://www.losefatgetfit.com
[3] http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffdav/archive/2004/04/13/112632.aspx: http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffdav/archive/2004/04/13/112632.aspx
[4] link: http://humorlaugh.info/
[5] http://www.sellnikeairmax.com/: http://www.sellnikeairmax.com/
[6] Gyproc: http://www.hanssen-pleisterwerken.be/gyproc-plaatsen-gyprocwerken/

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