At the beginning of this month, my friend Derek Semmler made a post about a contest to win $106.34 by referring the most amount of people to his site by February 25th. The winner would be chosen by the most number of referrals shown in his Google Analytics account. As I was reading his post, I came across one line:

You??re free to use any means available to refer traffic to my site – as long as Google Analytics counts the visit I will consider it valid.

As I read this, the light bulb over my head went on. This was just asking for some sort of evil method of winning the contest. My plan was to use a 1 pixel by 1 pixel IFRAME on the footer of all the pages on my blog. For those that don’t know what an IFRAME is, it’s basically a website within a website. You can specify the size of an IFRAME, and then load another webpage into it…usually it’s another page on your own site. I decided to load Derek’s site.

I wasn’t sure if this would register as a referral on Google Analytics though, so I created a test page loading in my own site. I checked to see if it came in as a referral…it did. Score! So I added the below code to every page on this site:

<iframe src=”http://www.dereksemmler.com” height=”1″ width=”1″></iframe>

If you can see this little black dot below, this is what the iframe would look like that would load Derek’s site inside of it and generate a referral visitor.

After a couple of days running the code, I got an IM from Derek letting me know I was evil lol. He agreed that it was ok based on his terms, so I left the code on my site for a few weeks to ensure my win. I felt bad, so I made sure that I’d post about the contest, and I also made this little ad which you may have seen running on the sidebar:

Yesterday Derek made a post announcing that I was the winner, and then PayPal’d me $106.34. Definitely goes up there as one of the easiest $106.34 I’ve ever made

Thanks for being a good sport Derek! If you don’t already read his blog, make sure to give it a chance. It’s good enough to make it onto my RSS reader, and I’ve been a subscriber and a commenter for quite some time now.