Hello, i have been buying and selling domains and websites for the past 3 years and i have yet to venture into affiliate based websites, i have stuck to adsense etc. I have recently purchased a domain SweetestDeals.com and im thinking of building a site based on affiliate based revenue. I am a complete novice to this area of website building, marketing and receiving revenue. If anyone is able to post some tips, hints and secrets that i could use to successfully set-up a site that brings in decent revenue it would be greatly appreciated. Please note i have a budget of $1500 to set-up and get this site running. Thanks
Right! It should not take $1500 to do it. It is a completely different concept from your usual adsense marketing concept, that is for sure. I am not sure where to start... I have a pdf file with the basic concept laid out from start to finish if you are interested. There is quite a bit to set up but after that it practically is a cash cow.
How should i go about setting up a site for affiliate based website? I am wanting to have the site list the sweetest deals of the week etc and refer the visitors to an affiliate program in which they purchase the product/s. What affiliate networks are the best? Thanks
Ideally... You want to create a list of subscribers. By that I mean... people who come to your site once... they like what they see, and they signup for your mailing list. Now everything you are posting a new sale, you simply send them a quick email and BOOOM... you get instant customers to your site. A common affiliate network is clickbank. Perhaps a little over rated but it is a good one nonetheless. Another good one is paydotcom.com. Are you looking at developing a mall type site or a plain out "one product at a time" kind of site?
I am going to have a mall type site although that will be secondary income im going to mainly focus on weekly deals for sales etc but having other items on the site to keep users coming back and to get occasional sales of other items. Is there a good script that i can use that will fulfill my needs?
1. Stay away from products that have low commish: Clothes, electronics, food. Go with high commish. 2. Go through all the stores in the merchants: ClickBank, Performics, ShareaSale, CommissionJunction, LinkShare.... LinkShare and CommissionJunction seem to be the best to deal with. Write down all the high commish stores, and one by one start signing up with them. Keep a detailed record of all the ones you signed up for: Their commish rate, when they pay out, their e-mail address, their occassional deals on coupons, and whatnot.... I mentioned this tip in anothjer thread on a different subject, but it goes for this one also: Ads in Playboy that are consistently running month after month are on shoe lifts, lingerie and sex pheromones. You know these products sell because Playboy's rates are through the roof. See if you can find such products to be an affiliate with. Another good one is generic products, like Viagra. Do a search for it. Also do a search for such terms like, "prescription medicine forums." Networks that have high commish rates advertise there for affiliates. 3. Read one of the top forums for affiliates, AbestWeb.com. There is also where you will find the top merchants to sign up with. 4. Although this site could be better, study FlamingoWorld.com. She has been at it for a number of years now. 5. Forget newsletters! According to the site, but on average less than 10% sign up. You want to show EVERYONE your deals, news, and other info in your home and sub pages. In addition, of the ones who sign up, many do not read past the second e-mail sent to them. Having a kick-ass site and getting them to remember it is what brings them back. Besides, you will get your mailing list from your customers. You have got their e-mail address, so there is no need for a newsletter anyway. 6. Write articles, and either put your affiliate links in them or have your URL at the end, along with your full name. It could be a dating article for men. You can use the shoe lifts or sex pheromnes' links in such articles. 7. Once you have your site(s) set up, get others to critique them. Would the stay at such a site? 8. Once your site is ready to go, start doing click ads. Get others to critique your ads. Would they click on them? ADS Sign up for pay per click services, in additon to the search engines: TextLinkAds, TrafficSwarm, Casalemedia.com, FastClick, Burstmedia, FC, TribalFusion, CJ, Azoogle, CPA Empire, GlobalInteractive, AdBrite, Adengage, RealMedia, Kontera and Avnads. Search engines you can advertise on: Google MSN Yahoo Ask (AskJeeves) AltaVista MetaSpider Vivisimo PlanetSearch SurfWax qbSearch ProFusion Proteus Go2Net MegaGo.com WebFile MyGO MegaCrawler Jayde Burf Search-O-Rama Cipinet InfoTiger G7K TowerSearch RealTech Miva Chitika VCM LookSmart NnSeek iWon.com Exactseek Jayde ScrubTheWeb Search.com MetaCrawler Dogpile Mamma C4 Canada.com Ixquick Infogrid Query Server WebInfoSearch 800go Debriefing Highway 61 SearchAve Aesop GoTo Mixcat Abacho Igwanna SearchEngine Find Once Search-The-World Beamed SearchPixie GoClick Abcsearch Pageseeker Lycos Insite SearchFeed 411Web GenieKnows Searchfeed Search123 Overture A9com FreeEmail123 Amfibi 37.com OneSeek WebSquash Start buying ads with the most popular, high-commish products first. Do $100 first. If you do it right, you can get that money back, with a small profit. Take that entire amount, your initial $100 along with your profit, and buy more ads. Repeat, repeat, repeat. If you have ads that are consistently working, dip into your savings for more ads in other sites. There's much more to all of this, but you now know the gest of affiliate marketing.
Wow great post Perry Rose Rep added! Ive been reading quite a bit about affiliate based websites today and i have a much better understanding, although i feel the best way to learn is to get the site up and get experience hands on. Ive got ideas for the site, i will be researching products etc over the coming weeks but im sort of stuck as to how to develop the site. As i do not code or design am unaware to head either to hire someone to code the site and design it or is there a script that can be used in which i have someone edit it to my liking? Whats the best way to get a site up. With the best features and functionality for the lowest cost? Thanks everyone for your input so far.
Create one site for each high-commish product. For the design of the site, to make it easier on you, make it real simple. Example: Say you are pushing 1-800-get-lens. Create a 3-page tour of the product. Look at http://www.eharmony.com/singles/servlet/about/tour. Work it sort of like that. On each page put in a nice big picture, with great sales copy to the left, benefits to the potential buyers, along with coupons, and other sales info. Off to the side or, better yet, in the footer, have links to your other sites, products. Also look at other sites for ideas. Shopping.com is a good one to study. That is a monster of a site. It's a start. And again, don't do newsletters and sign ups. You want everyone to see what you are offering. Common sense, right? You will see that shopping.com, and the woman who runs FlamingoWorld doesn't make it a priority. They know better. Good luck with it.
This is great information as I am in the process of getting a webiste done with blogs attached and want to get into affilate marketing. The webmaster is taking csre of the seo at a great price so I will put this in mind for the subscription bit as I have to send hiom a list today. So thanks again you are not only helping the thread starter person but me also with this advice.
Research, research and research. Find a niche that is in high demand but not overcrowded. You also have to make sure your niche is product-focused, which means that there are a wide selection of products you could sell. Here are some ways to get ideas; - Sign up for Commission Junction and browse the advertisers - Check out eBay pulse to see what is selling well - Check out the Amazon bestsellers list (pick a category, sort by 'best selling') Once you have a broad idea of what you want to base your niche on, you want to narrow it down and find keywords which have high searches and low competition... To get an idea of how crowded a niche is you can do a few things, I will just list a couple here... - First check how many searches per year the keyword gets on KeywordDisvoery - If you find one with a decent amount of searches, then it's time to check out the competition! You can do this lots of ways, I will be doing a more detailed article about it soon but the easiest ways are; 1. For a general idea of the size of the niche, search for the keyword in quotes ("") in google and look at the number of results that come back... 2. For a more targeted look at the competition you can check this; for example if you wanted to check competition for LED screens you would type this into google: allintitle:LED screens what this will tell you is how many sites listed on google have that keyword in the title of the page, which is very useful for seeing how many sites are actually about the niche you are targeting rather than just how many sites happen to mention it... Hope this helps KieranG
Thanks for the tips Rimki. I feel as if people here recommend creating individual sites for each niche instead of using one large site and target many different niches. I was hoping to create a shopping site but have the sweetest deals for the day as well. But it seems i am better off creating individual sites for individual items? Would it be wise to use subdomains such as viagra.sweetestdeals.com ? Would this hold up well in search engines? Or would it be better to use an independant domain? Thanks
I have some experience with affiliate based websites...actually I have only made money online via ebay and my affiliate sites thus far... The FIRST thing I would recommend is to find a unique niche, that you know somewhat about, and then find out and create ways to get the appropriate visitors to your site within that niche category... So, you should offer some type of information on your website...creating the illusion of VALUE and then from the visitors your niche site receives, you then will have the challenge of Converting them into sales and/or redirecting them to your affiliates.
Would using subdomains reduce my SE rankings? Or would it be alright to have all sites used with subdomains such as viagra.sweetestdeals.com ? Thanks
No. Nor will it increase it. It will, however, increase your odds in getting on page one, or, two, even, because the more key-enriched pages you have in your site, the better your odds. Think of it as the domain as the father selling something, and the subdomains are his children helping him out. The more children he has, the better his odds in success.
I was thinking of having the main site sweetestdeals.com to mainly attract visitors to sign-up to a mailing list so when i bring out new pages for example acne.sweetestdeals.com i can send a mailing list. Would this be a suitable idea? Thanks
I would join Commission Junction and Linkshare and build a killer coupon site. Check out Couponcraze.com. I know this webmaster personally and he does very well ranking wise with his site...
Yeah, you could do a mailing list, but not that many sign up for them, and of the ones who do, many of them don't read past the second e-mail, so keep that in mind. You can get repeat visitors with your home and subpages by displaying coupons, news on recalls, interesting reviews from Consumer Reports, articles, quick tips, consumers' favorite buys, the best products of 2007.... And then while at the same time get them to put you in their "Favorites," and other means to remember you. Like experienceadvertising said...put in a coupon page. And tell your first-time visitors to remember you because it will be updated everyday. Remember FlamingoWorld.com? She has a shit load of repeat visitors due to this one thing. She doesn't need a newsletter. She shows EVERYBODY her deals, and whatnot. With advertising so expensive, and it can be hard at times to bring in visitors, regardless, you really should consider making sure you have signed up for most if not practically all of the products worth pushing and all your pages up and running before opening the doors for business. It won't take that long. Then later on, once you are settled, start signing up for the lower commisson products, like flowers, clothes, electronics, food.... If you did your job right, many of your past visitors will come back to see the new stuff you have up. I talk too fucking much. Have a good night.
Thanks everyone for the great tips! Ive been reading up quite a lot about this area of web mastering and ive got some good ideas. Now for the site creation. Are there any good recommended scripts out there that can allow me to fulfil my needs? Or will i have to get the site custom made? Thanks