[Update, August 2: sales of Niche Devil are now closed.]
The latest site building product to hit the internet is Niche Devil. Like all product roll-outs of this type, this software has been accompanied by considerable hype. Never one to mince words, let me try to separate the fact from fiction and wild rumor for you.
I got into internet marketing too late to take part in the Build a Niche Store (BANS) party, but I hear it was quite a party while it lasted. BANS is one of several software packages for building affiliate commission sites. A lot of people made a lot of money running BANS on cheap .info domains that sold eBay products through the eBay Partner Network affiliate program.
Then came the BANS slap on Google. Two IMers whose blogs I follow say that the BANS script has a unique code pattern that’s easily detected by Google. These guys both write code, so I trust what they say. The problem was that thousands of BANS sites hit the internet in a short time frame. The product builds sites so fast that people who bought it were pumping out hundreds and even thousands of EPN sites with no content, just eBay listings. Totally against Google’s terms of service, so everybody’s sites got deindexed literally overnight.
Niche Devil is designed to do what BANS did, only faster, and without the obvious code pattern, or “footprint.” I’m still on the fence about the product, but I’ve read literally every site on the internet that mentions it, including some that are very critical of it. Here’s what I’ve gathered so far:
- monetization: supports EPN, Amazon Affiliate, and Chitika. Do not use it with AdSense, as it’s totally against Google’s terms of service
- speed: Niche Devil is freaky fast at building affiliate sites. It’s faster than BANS or Storestacker, and way faster than PHPbay.
- footprint: Unlike BANS, the developers have made some effort to cover Niche Devil’s tracks. Some reviewers have opined that no code can be made Google-proof, and I agree, so ultimately, how well it will hold up depends a lot on how many people buy it. These tools are made for massive auto site generation (which is why Google hates them), so there’s some risk involved. But that’s also the nature of internet marketing. If you tried to use 2005 methods today, you’d fail. (Hell, you’d probably fail using 2008 methods.) At $97 for Niche Devil plus $79 for a pack of 100 .info domains from GoDaddy, it won’t take long to make your money back.
- site quality: I found a link to an actual site built with Niche Devil. Basically it’s a mash-up of EPN links, twitter tweets, Yahoo Images, and scraped news feeds. Nothing out of the ordinary for a thin affiliate site. The attractive thing about this content from an SEO standpoint is that it refreshes each time the page loads, so it’s constantly pumping out new material automatically after the site is built. It has a built-in ping feature so it pings every time you get a visitor and and a new piece of content loads. This is no substitute for backlinks, especially on a .info domain, but the approach works–I’ve used it on one of my own sites with PHPbay Lite and kept a post ranked on page 1 for weeks with no penalty from Google.
Vic Franqui is marketing Niche Devil in cooperation with IQbizz, an Irish software development company. Like most of this business, personalities seem to carry more weight than the merits of the product, and a lot of people are ready to either buy or reject the product because it’s Vic’s.
It’s impossible to read the real motives of online marketers (although you’re welcome to guess at mine if you like), but I do want to point out one thing: the 14-day marketing window before the product closes is designed to keep too many people from buying it and beating it to death so Google smacks it. Many people have opined that this is just the usual cheesy “buy now or lose your chance forever” trick, and no doubt it does help sell the product. But this isn’t your typical affiliate campaign roll-out. It has all the trappings–the ugly sales letter on the website, the glowing testimonials–except the most important one.
What’s missing? The armies of affiliates. I signed up to promote the product on the first day of its release, and guess what my number is? I’ll give you a hint: it’s less than 500. Way less than 500. Now who the hell rolls out an IM product with fewer than 500 affiliates on Day 1? I tracked the number of websites promoting it, and it barely covers 4 pages in the SERPs. My sense is that the owners are not really pushing Niche Devil that hard, at least not with this initial release. I have no doubt we’ll see it sold again sometime after the 14-day window is up, but probably for a much higher price as part of a larger package.
What would I use it for? I’m not in EPN yet, and if I’m going to build backlinks to a site, even a thin affiliate site, I’d rather do it on a less risky platform, like PHPbay, which according to Justin at SEO Zombie, can be customized to leave no footprint. But for testing niches and building a huge network of backlinks, I think this software would rock. If it makes a little bit of money in the process, so much the better.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Online Income // Jul 31, 2009 at 12:35 am
You make a point I hadn’t realised up until the last day or 2 – Vic really polarizes people even in our little corner of the Internet. I await with interest to see what happens – but I know something for a fact if I don’t build sites with Niche Devil then I will never make any money with it – stands to reason really!
2 Lorecee // Jul 31, 2009 at 12:46 am
Good to see you over here, Lissie. Yeah, having a big personality has its risks. My impression of Vic is that he’s a sweetheart unless you mess with him or his peeps. IMO the roll-out for this was pretty damn quiet compared to a John Chow or Gary Conn bonanza, and I wouldn’t put it past Vic to give up some income in the near term so his friends can use it and make commissions on it before it wears out its welcome. If not, well, I’ve been wrong before in this business and the sky didn’t fall.
3 Thea // Jul 31, 2009 at 1:38 am
I ended up buying it last night and installed it on a few sites and while I may play with it a bit more over the weekend, I’m pretty sure I’m going to wind up requesting a refund.
My biggest complaint is it loads very slow. I’m on hostgator and it takes ages to load. Also, maybe it is great with Ebay listings, but there is no way I am risking my EPN account. So I’m using Amazon and nearly all of the listings it pulls from Amazon are crap — items out of stock, items irrelevant to the keywords. Did I mention the pages load slow? No one is going to stay long enough to click an Amazon link in the first place. LOL It is slower than phpbay which is making database calls.
I know it is supposed to be just a toss things up and see what sticks kind of software, but if I’m going to take some time to do keyword research I want some granularity. I want to be able to tweak the settings enough to actual pull highly relevant related content.
Also, it is just way spammier than I was expecting. This is beyond just a thin affiliate site. The sites are garbage. In my opinion, Google may not like thin affiliate sites, but they are perfectly useful to a visitor who is looking to buy something specific. These sites though aren’t useful at all.
You really can only make money with it by putting up tons of sites and if you are using Amazon I doubt very much that you could actually earn a dollar per day per site. And I just don’t want to put 100 garbage websites out there and I don’t want to spend 80 bucks on Info domains that I know will be de-indexed in a few months.
Oh, and I would think the footprint is very obvious. I have no idea how they can say it doesn’t have one. The layout appears to be exactly the same for every site. How is that now a footprint?
4 Lorecee // Jul 31, 2009 at 1:49 am
Thanks, Thea. The sample site I saw was really spammy looking, but I wondered if the software has options for narrowing the type of product it calls for display so you don’t get all kinds of weird, unrelated crap that no one wants. And you do have the option of writing your own articles instead of scraping them and/or spinning them.
But 1,500 pages in one sitting seems like overkill to me, Googlebait or not.
5 Thea // Jul 31, 2009 at 2:39 am
You can narrow the Amazon listings to certain categories, but the number of categories they’ve built into it is very limited. None suited the niches I already have domains for.
As for content, I actually loaded up my own content. But whatever you upload is just turned into nonsense stuffed with keywords. There’s some kind of Markov script that’s taking whatever articles you add and spinning them then spitting out random bits of it. If you load a few articles, it actually jumbles them all together then stuffs it with the keywords for whatever page it is on. Basically, it’s just for search engines, i.e. completely useless for actual visitors.
6 Lorecee // Jul 31, 2009 at 8:43 am
Yeah, I know why it’s jumbling and stuffing your content–the idea is to give the searchbots fresh content every time the page is loaded. The stuff I saw on the site I looked at reminded me of the crap that I have to clean out of my Akismet every morning. It’s buried down at the bottom where it hopes your customers don’t go to look–they just click on your affiliate buttons.
So it’s built to take advantage of Google’s fresh content bonus over and over again, as a substitute for backlinking. Not a bad idea, actually, while it lasts.
7 Amy // Apr 23, 2010 at 3:36 am
I ended up buying it last night and installed it on a few sites and while I may play with it a bit more over the weekend, I’m pretty sure I’m going to wind up requesting a refund.
My biggest complaint is it loads very slow. I’m on hostgator and it takes ages to load. Also, maybe it is great with Ebay listings, but there is no way I am risking my EPN account. So I’m using Amazon and nearly all of the listings it pulls from Amazon are crap — items out of stock, items irrelevant to the keywords. Did I mention the pages load slow? No one is going to stay long enough to click an Amazon link in the first place. LOL It is slower than phpbay which is making database calls.
I know it is supposed to be just a toss things up and see what sticks kind of software, but if I’m going to take some time to do keyword research I want some granularity. I want to be able to tweak the settings enough to actual pull highly relevant related content.
Also, it is just way spammier than I was expecting. This is beyond just a thin affiliate site. The sites are garbage. In my opinion, Google may not like thin affiliate sites, but they are perfectly useful to a visitor who is looking to buy something specific. These sites though aren’t useful at all.
You really can only make money with it by putting up tons of sites and if you are using Amazon I doubt very much that you could actually earn a dollar per day per site. And I just don’t want to put 100 garbage websites out there and I don’t want to spend 80 bucks on Info domains that I know will be de-indexed in a few months.
Oh, and I would think the footprint is very obvious. I have no idea how they can say it doesn’t have one. The layout appears to be exactly the same for every site. How is that now a footprint?
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