Make sure you enter the contest to win a Nintendo Wii if you haven’t. I’m also seriously considering that membership course, so if you have any suggestions for me; you know where to go.

Today what I’m going to talk about is a slightly shady tactic to exploit your fellow bloggers for exposure. Note, this is not illegal, or unethical, but it is a little… shady, shall we say.

I bring you guys these kinds of ideas for your own knowledge; even if you never plan to use them, it’s always interesting to know about things that you didn’t before.

Anyways, a few weeks ago I was talking to a few buddies on instant messenger, and one of them pointed me to a Firefox extension that I had never heard of before (I’m still getting into all the technical side of things… ) – the extension is RefControl.

It may be an old, old, old extension for a lot of you, but here’s how you can use it for  your advantage.

Basically, what Ref Control allows you to do is to ‘fake’ a referrer – you set where you look like you come from. A big part of checking traffic statistics is to see where exactly your traffic comes from and those sources are known as referrers.

So, for example – I could set this blog as a referrer for every single website I visit.

Now – wherever I go, people will think I came from http://www.theuniversitykid.com

How do we use that to our advantage?

Two ways.

The first way, is by setting your referrer as your website and visiting blogs like you normally would.

Now, a lot of blogs do an end of month post thanking top commentators, talking about top sources of traffic etc. Here’s where you gain some exposure.

If you’re a top ten referrer for a blog, and they do such statistic posts monthly, you’ll get some exposure. Generally, you won’t need more than 50 visits to become one of the top ten referrers for most medium sized blogs.

I visit a lot of blogs, something like 30 – 50 blogs, 2-3 times daily for the ones I like a lot out of those. So I’d be sending around 60 – 150 visits monthly to my favourite blog – more than enough to get on their top ten referrer list.

However, if you’re lazy to visit blogs manually… here’s what you do.

The first thing you can do, is use the Entrecard Credit Generator created by The Germz. Simply open a new Firefox window, and click all of the batch buttons once a day for a full month. You’ll be visiting, and thus showing up as a referrer on around 200 – 300+ blogs, and thus will take you less than a minute daily depending on your computer.

The second thing you can do is manually set a few hundred (or even more) blogs under your Firefox Bookmarks as folders, and then open all folders once a day for thirty days. Over the course of a month, you’ll rack up around 30+ visits (you could do the above thing twice a day – 60 visits – thrice a day – 90 visits – you get the idea).

By doing this, you work your way into the top ten of all those bloggers, and even if just 10% of them blog about their top referrers, you get 30 odd blog posts linking to you. How’s that for free exposure?

Okay – now the problem with this is that although you’re faking referrers, you probably won’t see results until the end of the month; and even then those results are iffy (unless you target blogs that do such kinds of statistic analysis posts, you can no guarantee anyone will blog about you).

Here’s where we use RefControl for immediate gains.

Now, some bloggers use a widget called FeedJit… which shows where recent visitors to your blog came from.

An example, is a friend – Jay @ Dat Money. Below is a screenshot of what it looks like.

I visited the website directly, but you can see that it shows where people come from if they’ve clicked through from a specific website.

Now, a Google search for Feedjit reveals 9,470,000 results (note, may differ depending on where you are). That’s a lot of blogs talking about the widget.

What you do is find blogs with the widget, and set them under a bookmarks folder in Firefox. Every day, you open them once; every day, you’ll pop up in the sidebar (with your blog link). You can also do this for blogs with MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog etc. Think of this like Entrecard dropping with real exposure for your blog.

If you were really evil, you could setup a macro to do this automatically.

Again, I’m not recommending you do this; I’m not advising against it either though. Completely up to you.

Feel free to ask any questions if you have them, or put out any ideas. Remember, if you’re already visiting websites… why not set yourself as a referrer and see some traffic sent your way? At the very least, the blog owner will visit you.