When it comes to disruptive, innovative technologies, you can’t get more disruptive than with Bit Torrent. In one big swoop, website like Mininova or The Pirate Bay managed to piss off just about every recording label on this Earth.

But it’s not the the exotic legal aspects or the Bit Torrent revolution that interest us. What really caught my imagination is the potential of using this technology as a marketing tool. The numbers really speak for themselves. As of 28th May 2008, Mininova has reached a grand total of 5 billion total downloads. If a number like this doesn’t catch your imagination, I don’t know what will.

Alright so now we have a reason to upload our stuff on Bit Torrent and benefit from a considerable spike in traffic. How do we max out this traffic? Well, these sites act as giant specialized search engines and directories, so all that we have to do is game these search results and listings.

And gaming search results is easier than you might think. Here is how to do it, today for Mininova:

1. Get front page coverage - The easiest way to do this is to obtain a CD (content distribution) account at Mininova. Basically all that you need to get one such account is to have some content of your own you wish to distribute and basically ask for membership. Check this page to get started. Basically once you upload from such an account, you will have a few hundred guaranteed downloads from the front page presence.

2. Be on the first page of the category listing - A common way for people to search stuff on Mininova is to simply browse a specific category. What you want of course is to be on the first page when they decide to do so. This is quite easy to achieve because Mininova makes these listings in alphabetical order. All that you have to do is add something like “! # ” before the title and voila, the world can see you.

3. Use Large Volume Search Keywords - This might seem obvious, but with BitTorrent, things can get a little tricky. What keywords are the most used. Well, brands mostly. People are searching for names. What sort of names? Well… movie titles and famous uploaders. I woudl strongly recommend that you stick to the second. Movies tend to become unpopular fast. So what names should you put in the torrent’s title? Well, names like: axxo, fxg, nikon, sirius share, eztv… this sort of thing. One more trick worth to know here. You can use these words as part of some other words. For example names like Klaxxon and maxxon will show up in the search results if you search axxo. So be creative.

4. Don’t release it all at once - It makes more sense to split a big release into several smaller ones. This way you benefit from added front page coverage and you will be able to attract overall more downloads. Another technique used is to re-release old torrents. For example if you put a video, you can improve its quality or extend it with a few minutes and submit it again.

Final verdict: While some of the techniques described are definitely frowned upon by the Bit Torrent community, they will definitely not make you any serious problem, so don’t hesitate to use them. This is teh stuff that it is in the Zone… The Gray Hat Zone.