There are more shades of internet marketing than there are shades of grey in a certain high profile novel.

But which should you use?

And what are all these different hat colours anyway?

White Hat Internet Marketing

This is as pure as it gets – you tread very, very carefully to make sure that you don’t offend the search engines and (hopefully) get your site indexed.

Most internet marketers may lip service to white hat methods and some follow them to the exclusion of all other techniques.

But it’s a fine line and if you err too much on the side of caution then there’s a good chance that you won’t be making money from your internet marketing any time soon, if ever.

That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t employ white hat methods – you definitely should.

They include:

• Making sure that your website pages are well laid out with all the correct tags behind the scenese. This makes sense as the more compliant your web pages are, the more likely search engines are to understand what they are about
• Making sure that your links are natural. Natural as a word has a very wide scope in this context. In theory, it means only links that other webmasters and internet users have voluntarily put on their pages. The link from your YouTube video is probably actually a grey one in this context as it’s self promotional. But it’s rare to meet anyone who’d treat that as such.
• Posting helpful content on forums, blog comments, etc. Again, white quickly looks off-white when you examine this – did you post that item entirely altruistically or was there an ulterior motive? A hope that people would click through to your site or buy your services?

All in all, most so-called white hat methods are probably at least a bit grey hat. I’ll come on to that later and let you make up your own mind.

Black Hat Internet Marketing

At its purest, this is subversive:

• Stuffing cookies on your computer so that the black hatter gets a commission even if they didn’t send you to a site but only pretended to your browser that you’d been there.
• Filling your inbox with spam email messages and phishing attempts to get you to disclose your financial details or access to them,
• Using computer programs to automate tasks that are against the terms of service of the websites they’re using. This includes things like YouTube video views, upvoting on sites like Reddit. posting spun articles to forums and Wiki sites and all sorts of other tasks.
• Using computer programs to automatically spam blog and other comments in the hope of getting a link. It may not be against the terms of service of the sites that are being battered but that’s only because the people running those sites haven’t actually got that document posted.
• Hijacking your computer without your knowledge to use it to send emails, clicks or whatever else.
• Cloaking your web pages – showing one version of your site to the search engine crawlers and a different one to regular visitors. The search engines are getting better at detecting this but you’ll occasionally find this kind of page in the search results.

Essentially if you couldn’t explain what you’re doing to someone else and still keep eye contact with them, there’s a good chance the method is black hat. Even if you’re trying to justify it because you just bought a licence for an auto-posting piece of software and are hoping against hope that it will pay for itself before the method disappears into oblivion.

And I’ve got some bad news for you on that front – if the software you’ve just bought cost less than a thousand or so dollars, there’s a very high chance that the method is already obsolete and doesn’t work. Once a system for “beating Google” becomes so common that it can be performed by a cheap (sub $100) piece of software, there’s an excellent chance that the search engine algorithm had already been adjusted to remove any advantage or – if that’s not happened yet – that it will very soon.

Above about $1000 the market for the software is a lot smaller and the people using it will know a lot more about how to minimise any footprints – the cheapo software will have come with instructions to reduce any footprint but most people will ignore that and just use it out of the box.

So save yourself the cash and don’t fall for this kind of instant results software.

Grey Hat Internet Marketing

This covers anything else.

Including a lot of things that are tolerated by the search engine algorithms but don’t really fit with the webmaster suggestions.

The shade of grey depends on what you’re doing and how much you’re doing it. For instance, helpful posts on a forum with a promotional link in your signature are very close to white hat. Me too posts on the same forum that basically just say “Nice post” or some other equally useless answer are a lot greyer and if the forum is policed to any extent run the risk of being banned by them so that their reputation isn’t tarnished,

• Artificial link building – that’s any link that hasn’t been voluntarily put on the web by someone unconnected with you. Which is probably most of the links you’re getting – most guest posts, quite probably the links from your YouTube videos, that kind of thing.
• Artificial reviews – the ones where you get to the review site and instantly know that it’s just been created with the intention of getting an affiliate commission. Which is why you can’t easily find unbiased reviews on things like web hosting, autoresponder services, keyword research methods, etc.
• Purchasing old “aged” domains and repurposing them.
• Using or setting up a private blog network.
• Buying or renting links – anything from a link wheel on Fiverr through to renting links on wwebsites.
• Buying followers – quite a dark grey shade as it’s almost certainly against the terms of service of the website. And the algorithms on sites like Facebook are quickly learning to check whether or not your followers interact with you which is unlikely to be the case for any followers you’ve purchased.
• Lots of other things – if you feel uncomfortable with a method, there’s a good chance it’s grey hat.

Grey hat can work.

If it’s a light shade of grey – a bit like telling a white lie – then there’s a good chance it will keep working as too many people are doing it to make it worth a search engine actively programming against it.

If it’s a darker shade, there’s a good chance it will get trapped in a future algorithm update. Maybe next month, maybe next year, Who knows?

You then have to decide whether that’s a risk you’re prepared to take or whether you’d prefer not to.

And of course there’s also the variable that we never really know what will happen in the future with our internet marketing or anything else we do on the web.

Above all, take care

it’s your business.

Treat it like a business, not a hobby and you’re much more likely to get decent results from it, even if they are painfully slow to arrive at times,