It’s very rare for me to do a follow-up post on any subject, let alone in such a short timeframe, but my recent post on Viral Nova caused quite a fuss. Pageviews wise, it was the most popular I’ve published this year but more surprising was how many emails and comments the topic received.

Many of them were to let me know about the Facebook click fraud video that’s gone viral and the articles from both Business Insider and Bloomberg on Upworthy losing Facebook traffic . I hope to dispel their claims and more in this follow-up post.

It’s so easy to think that all of the best ideas have already been thought of, but then each year something else comes along that makes you go “why didn’t I think of that?” Whether it’s Pinterest, Snapchat or even Flappy Bird, it’s amazing that new ways to communicate and play are still being “invented”. One such example that I want to share with you today is simply about giving crack to Facebook users and becoming rich because of it.

Not actual crack, of course, but crack in the form of content that they just have to share with their friends on the world’s most popular social network. What’s more amazing is that your website can look terrible, you don’t have to get any of your own images or write any of your own content, and you can be up and running with traffic in the next 12 hours. Don’t believe me? I have more than one example. Let’s go…

Perceptual vigilance is a term used to describe what happens when you keep noticing the same things over and over again. For example, you may have just purchased a new car and you start to see that car all over the place. It’s almost like the entire city purchased it.

Recently, the thing that I seem to be noticing more and more is people discussing which SEO tactics are Whitehat, which are Blackhat and even those which are Greyhat. Because many of the discussions tend to be around tactics like networks – which I covered recently – I wanted to share my thoughts on the topic.

Back in August I published a blog post about my PPC case study where I made $1,000 profit in my first week. Paying for traffic wasn’t really something I had done too much of so I was pretty excited to add a new angle to my marketing efforts and fortunately, it really paid off.

Without a doubt, the reason I had such fast success was because I devoured a ton of information before I got started. Most notably, the threads on the Stack That Money forum. A lot of people recommended it to me and when some of them are personal friends who do six-figures per month, I decided to check it out.

In 1865, Fredik Idestam built a pulp mill on the banks of the Tammerkoski River in southwestern Finland. He soon added a papermaking machine. As with any papermaking company at the time, much of what the company produced was used for stationery, newsprint, and books – the primary means of communication before the age of television, radio, and telephone. So in a way, it was in the communications business.

By 1900, it was already one of the biggest paper producers in Finland and was looking for growth opportunities. Electricity was a rapidly growing source of energy at the time. So in 1902 it decided to build its own electric generators and sell the current to local businesses. By the end of the 1920s, however, the company was struggling financially so it decided to join forces with Finnish Rubber Works.

Last month we mentioned that the Triple X Niche Case Study was now live on ViperChill. If you missed the launch then a quick summary is that three people will be tackling the same industry with three different approaches. I (Glen) am only allowed to focus on social media. Diggy (my SEO business partner) is only allowed to focus on SEO and Mr.V (a beginner to making money online) is allowed to do anything he wants.

When we originally planned the case study we each had a $1,000 budget in mind. After a lot of feedback however this was lowered to $500 for the first two months of the project; November and December. Many of you have been following the case study closely on the forums and I’m proud to announce the threads have been viewed over 40,000 times with over 30 case studies being shared there.

Penguin 2.1 has caused quite a shakeup in the SEO world these last few weeks. Launched not long after Google’s Hummingbird update, there seems to be fewer people talking about this then there was for the introduction of Penguin or even its version predecessor, Penguin 2.0.

Though I previously shared that I had a lot of success on the back of helping people get over Penguin 2.0 – especially since I own Penguin2.com – I’ve yet to write anything about Penguin 2.1 until now. The reason is simple: I wanted to be absolutely sure I was giving the right advice on what to do after this update. After looking at hundreds of sites in my own network (yes, hundreds) I certainly am now.

We’re well underway with our Triple X Niche case study (introduction post here) and we now have over 20 ongoing case studies on the forums. They’ve racked up close to 15,000 views so far and there are hundreds of posts to read. Suffice to say I’m really excited about what we have going on here and I hope that you’re going to be sticking with us for the journey.

One thing I promised to do when introducing Mr.V into the case study was to answer his questions and queries in public. Without Mr.V I could only guess the kind of things that people would struggle with on their own niche site journey, but his questions give me true insights into how I can help more people. My aim is to personally help him become one of the top marketers online, almost superhuman if you like, and give you the knowledge to do the same.