This morning I’ve been playing with WeatherBill and it seems like a pretty neat idea.
For £77.06 I can bet that the temperature near London will get to 33 degrees next July. For every day that this happens I get £100.
If its cold I lose £77.06, if its hot I could make £3100.
When Tesco launched a property website allowing people to advertise their houses online for a fee of just £200 everybody thought it was a great idea, apart from the estate agents.
Over the past 10 years property prices in the UK have skyrocketed and estate agents, who charge a typical 2%, have had a massive increase in revenue. Most will simply take some pictures of your house, upload it to Right Move and pocket £4000 for a days work.
Tesco was the first big name to launch an alternative style of property website and pretty much guaranteed its success by uploading hundreds of thousands of properties, employing property experts and giving the site a big advertising budget.
Last week Tesco was forced to shut the site down after The Office of Fair Trading decided that TescoTropertyMarket.com is actually an estate agent and therefore must comply with the same laws as all the other estate agents. The decision was somewhat ludicrously based on the 28 year old 1979 Estate Agency Act.
The problem is that under the act Tesco would be liable for any inaccurate information its users write on their website, so if I lie and state my house has a swimming pool Tesco would be liable. Imagine if a buyer travels from abroad to see my amazing house only to find it’s a run down shell, Tesco would have to pay their travel costs and maybe additional compensation. Normally estate agents check the information before publishing.
Today we hear that Tesco might be entering the estate agency market with a revised service:
Whilst being an on-line estate agent was never our immediate intention we are so encouraged by the positive reaction from customers to Tesco’s entry into this market that we are now reviewing our business with a view to launching a new and exciting on-line estate agency service.
This would enable us to offer our customers personal advice on the sale of their home and give them access to the leading property portal websites which accept listings from estate agents but not from private sellers.
As a result customers would get their property in front of hundreds of thousands of potential buyers.
If they can get properties listed on Right Move for less than the estate agents charge the service will be a winner.
This website has been around for years it seems but I’d not heard of it until Radio 1 mentioned it today.
afterlifetelegrams.com, a website that looks to have a Google penalty for linking to spam sites, offers a telegram service to the dead.
For $5 your telegram is given to a terminally ill person and passed to your dead relative or friend once the messenger dies.
For a donation of $5.00 per word (5 word minimum), we can have telegrams delivered to people who have passed away. This is done with the help of terminally Ill volunteers who memorize the telegrams before passing away, and then deliver the telegrams after they have passed away. We call this an “afterlife telegram”. The $5.00 per word fee, depending on the wishes of the messenger, it is either given to a relative, donated to a charity or used to pay for medical bills. The company does not keep any of the fees from the sale of the telegrams.
Have you ever heard of a more unbelievable business model?
A new affiliate site called Last Minute Auction shows eBay auctions that are about to end and have a price of less than $1. The idea is good but the implementation leaves something to be desired.
My tips for this site as as follows:
What do you think? Could this site be a winner?
Even before Squidoo was hit with a Google penalty for being full of
spam it was pretty clear that the business model was doomed to fail
sooner or later.
The problem with any site that allows users to create their own pages
is that the users will push the boundaries in terms of promotion. Many
brands who don’t want to be associated with link spamming will create
a page on another site and drop 50,000 links to it at no risk
whatsoever. If Google gets upset they won’t penalise the owner of the
page, it’s the site that gets hit with a penalty.
The thousands of Squidoo pages about p0rn, pills and gambling are
being promoted using all sorts of black hat techniques that most
people would never use on their own sites.
A new service called the Million Dollar Wiki is similar to Wikipedia but allows you
to create a page about anything you want for $100. The problem is that
the site has very little link equity to start with (just like any new site) and judging by the
links its attracting already will really struggle in the future. Lets
face it, if Google doesn’t trust the site then there will be no
traffic and the links are worthless.
About 12 months ago I was about to launch pretty much exactly the same
type of site. A version of Squidoo where users could pay to create a
page about anything they wanted. I kept putting the idea off as the
timing didn’t seem right and even had the entire thing coded and ready
for launch last October.
In the end I kept looking at the links people were throwing at Squidoo
and decided that there was no way for my site to attract enough trust
and natural links to overcome the thousands of spam links that people
would throw at it from day 1.
In order for this sort of site to be really effective you would need
to have a trusted site and start selling pages in a sub directory. The
problem is that you run the risk of losing trust to the main site
based on the content of the paid pages. I’m not sure this business
model can ever really work.
Living in the UK is expensive. We pay lots for insurance, houses, electronic gadgets, phone contracts and pretty much everything you can think of.
While this might be upsetting for most UK residents I just look upon it as a great opportunity to make more commission from affiliate marketing.
This post was inspired by a comment I made at Self Made Minds today. Last year I bought a site based on the money it was making outside the UK and transferred it to UK hosting and added UK specific affiliate offers. The site cost £250 and made £600 ($1200) in the first month.
So if your site is a .com hosted outside the UK and capable of running some affiliate links you could move it to UK hosting and make a load more money.
If you don’t want the hassle give me a call and I’ll buy it.
Starting a new website from scratch is the most difficult aspect of internet marketing. If the site is the online home of a bricks and mortar company you can normally leverage the reputation and contacts of the business as well as a large marketing budget to kick start the process. These luxuries are not usually available when we launch an affiliate site.
The golden rule is to choose something that you are passionate about or, at the very least, knowledgeable about. Ideally you should already read some of the blogs in the niche and know the names of the editors. If you try to start from scratch in an industry you know nothing about you will find it hard to build any traction.
Make sure you have browsed the marketplace at sites like Commission Junction and Trade Doubler to see what programs are available and what sort of CPA they pay.
Unless you are good with php you probably want to start your affiliate site using WordPress. For the first few months you really don’t want to be worrying too much about monetizing the site – all you are going to be doing is link building. Make sure you have things like unique titles and meta descriptions on your pages and you really can’t go too far wrong with WordPress.
After a few months you might find you need something more flexible so you might be able to move away from WordPress or to have a mixture of normal php pages and WordPress pages on the site.
I would recommend removing date stamps from url’s as they might make visitors think your offers have expired.
To make your affiliate site appear trustworthy you need to have an eye catching logo as well as an appealing design.
If you’re using WordPress then it’s best not to worry about the design for the first few months. Download one of these themes and the site will look stunning right from the outset.
Most of the ideas you might have for your affiliate site have probably been done before. Unless something is truly revolutionary it is very unlikely that you will achieve any press coverage. A new website for your local shop might be able to get a mention and a link from some local websites but this won’t happen for your affiliate site so you need to think slightly differently.
Try ideas such as offering awards to various businesses or reviews of products and services. Many companies have press sections on their websites where they link to sites that mention them. You will need to appear very authoritative to pull this off.
Assuming you have added some useful tools and a blog to your site and chose your niche wisely it should be quite straightforward to launch a linkbaiting campaign. Adding some cool content and tools to the website and promoting them everywhere you can in the first few months will dramatically reduce the time it takes for your site to rank and you will reap the benefits of having a solid, natural link profile.
Initially you will need to gain some PageRank to make sure your new site is indexed. The best way to do this is submit to directories such as Yahoo, Business.com and a few others.
If you have chosen a niche full of interesting products you need to use images of the products in your pages and blog posts. The use of images makes your site appear legitimate and encourages buyers. Images also allow you to get lots of traffic and links using Google Images.
It’s much harder to use images to your advantage in niches such as insurance or mortgages so you might need to consider this when deciding.
Until you add some affiliate links your site probably just looks like a normal WordPress blog. The key thing to remember is that until you start getting traffic from the search engines you won’t make much money from affiliate marketing so you may as well not include the links.
People who find your site via social networks and RSS feed readers are far less likely to want a new mortgage than the user who typed in “new mortgage” into Google.
The key with affiliate marketing is to pass your links through redirects to make them look like normal links. This results in more clicks from your human visitors as well as making sure Google doesn’t see that your site is full of affiliate links. Luckily there is a good WordPress plugin for adding and tracking your affiliate links.
If you fill your pages with affiliate links the visitor will probably not click on any of them. I recommend using a couple of links per page along with some “Buy Now” buttons. Keep testing the layouts, click rates and bounce rates to see what works well for your site. My favourite trick is to add an affiliate link such as “Top Sellers” in your navigation bar.
If the affiliate program you are promoting only sells products to US residents you are not going to earn any commission from people in the UK. The solution is to install something like the Maxmind IP to Country database for $50. This allows you to send US visitors to your standard affiliate program and foreign visitors to another.
If you can’t find an appropriate place to send the visitors simply use the Auction Ads Url Converter to send the traffic via Auction Ads to eBay.
If you want to sell gadgets, for example, it really helps your conversion rates if your site looks like a gadget shop. Visit the leading retailers in your niche and make sure your site is laid out like theirs. Most users are still new to blog layouts and prefer to be faced with a standard online shop. You need to strike a balance between appearing too commercial and struggling to attract links and losing conversions because your site looks like a blog.
Not sure why this isn’t common knowledge but you can set the maximum and minimum prices of the items that show up in your Auction Ads.
For instance I sell a fair few phones and use Auction Ads to monetize a very small amount of spare traffic that isn’t suitable for my normal affiliate programs. In the past a keyword search for phone brought up loads of cheap phone chargers and phone covers but if you set the minimum bid to $50 it gets rid of these items and increases your commission.
The way eBay works is that the bids increase near the end of the auction so if you can send somebody to an auction that’s about to end you will get impulse purchases.
Here is the code:
auctionads_ad_kw = "keyword minprice:50";
Replace minprice with maxprice to set the maximum price.
Did everybody else know this already?
In my website reviews I keep recommending Auction Ads so before people start thinking I work for them I will explain why.
Finding an affiliate program isn’t too hard. You can visit Commission Junction, Trade Doubler or Amazon and get signed up in a few minutes. However not all will accept your site straight away and it can be hard to get started. Even finding your way around the CJ website is hard enough.
Auction Ads is easy to set up and offers a great way to get started in affiliate marketing. You simply enter your keywords such as “digital camera” and you start selling them pretty much straight away.
While your Auction Ads earnings are building up you can then spend a week figuring out all the other affiliate programs and finding the ones that work best for you.
Once you have found a few and been accepted you can test them along side Auction Ads and see what works best. I guarantee Auction Ads won’t work well for everybody but its a perfect way to get started.
Most web publishers use a CPC network such as Adsense or a CPM network
that shows banner adverts and pays a tiny amount such as $1 per
thousand impressions. I prefer to use affiliate programs that pay me a
commission for every product I sell.
Having been banned from Adsense 3 times in the past for no reason at
all I’ve had to learn how to make money without relying on Google to
send me a cheque. The reason for my first ban was that I signed up
with a site and never got round to adding the Adsense code. Then one
day I added the code to the revenue sharing program in the Digital
Point forums, quickly earned $60 and then got banned. Google didn’t
even offer an explanation. The next two bans were for starting accounts when I was already banned. 
The best thing about affiliate schemes is you can’t get banned easily
and you have email & phone access to loads of people who want to help
you make as much money as possible.
Making money using affiliate marketing is way too large a subject for
me to cover it in one blog post so I will be doing a series of
probably a few posts per week explaining exactly how I make over
$10,000 per month from affiliate marketing on various blogs.
If you have any specific questions please post them in the comments. Otherwise wait until tomorrow for the first post which is about link baiting – the first
thing you need to do when launching a new affiliate site.
The key
aspect of link baiting for affiliate sites is to make sure you don’t
have any affiliate links in your posts. This might sound strange but
bloggers won’t link to sites with affiliate links. You need to wait
until your posts are about a week or two old before you start adding
affiliate links.
Remember that any visitors from feed readers or social bookmarking
sites are very unlikely to want to buy anything. Visitors who find
your posts by searching on Google are very likely to want to buy
something.
A link baiting campaign for a new affiliate site can help the site get
good rankings very quickly and avoid the dreaded Google Sandbox.
Affiliate sites are very hard to build links for so starting your
sites life as a blog allows you to build links for free and then flip
the blog to an affiliate site after a few months.
Read the rest of the link baiting article tomorrow.
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