Well after month or so being back from Affiliate Summit I am finally finished doing all the work with my new contacts. It is always a little hectic when I get back from Las Vegas so I end up staying there for a few days to digest it all in.
After Summit we drove to Los Angeles to see my favorite band The Dollyrots. They rocked as usual and I am so glad we added that part to the trip. (Hi Chris I know you are reading this)
So whats new is Loxly and I have our own little podcast going on. It is over on Geekcast.fm where we explain the ABC’s of affiliate marketing and making a quality website and how to drive traffic to it. There is also two podcast on using Twitter. I am finding it a lot of fun to talk about making a website, much better then typing it into a website. I can explain stuff in 15 minutes that would take me an hour to type and half that time I would lose focus on what I was trying to say in the first place.
The NASCAR site I built on the forum is doing better then expected. The traffic is just off the charts due to using Twitter I can’t rave enough about finding like minded people in the “Niche”. On some occasions people re-tweet whats happening on the site. Fans recommending fans to the site, got to love that. The forum has been a little hard to get going but like I said this isn’t a race its a long term deal. It is a passion of mine that just happens to make money.
I am now starting a new site and it is really just in the research stage. I developed a love for a certain medical type product which a lot of other people could use to make their lives easier. There is really no competition for it and I already found an affiliate program that converts well. Did my keyword research and I am able to get a great domain for it. I really don’t see why this site project doesn’t move forward rather quickly. You can bet though that the site will be pushed using Twitter, and probably Orkut too. I am not a big fan of Facebook and choose to use Orkut instead as I see it bringing my sites more international traffic.
Now go listen to the podcast on Geekcast.fm.
I received a lot of questions about my twitter “Tip of the Day” on using PLR articles. First let me explain about PLR articles, they are articles that you either get for free for joining a PLR membership site or worse from sites where you pay a monthly fee or an article based fee.
When I first started making websites I stumbled upon a site where I would get 500 articles just for joining. Not a big deal and with these articles I could get my site up and running faster. Once I started putting up these articles I found my site getting more traffic. After the first two months I upgraded to the fee based service where for $9.99 I could get 5000 articles a month.
The problem is they were the same articles that everyone else was getting for free and placing them on their sites. When Google got smart to this all my sites got dropped. I went from making a nice buck to almost zero. Costly lesson indeed, the only people that make money off PLR sites are the people that are getting newbies like me to pay for their service.
90% of the 5000 articles were not based in my niche so they were worthless, I still have these articles but I don’t use them as site content. I will use them if I get writers block just for subject ideas, or for email subjects. Putting any article on your site that you get from a free or fee based plr membership is totaly worthless and waste your time.
Thanks for all the people on Twitter who asked me about PLR articles. If you are not following me on Twitter you can add yourself and get my “tip of the day” when I remember to give one. http://www.twitter.com/nyfalcon
Someone asked me a few weeks ago what I look at when choosing an affiliate program. I have a little list that I go off of but by the time I get to the list I pretty much know what direction I am heading in. Lets take a quick look at some important factors when choosing to work with an affiliate program.
1) It has to fit one of my sites, It makes no sense to put window treatments up on a sports site, they will never sell even if they are Notre Dame window treatments. This is a usual newbie mistake, build it and they will come and shop doesn’t work and never will.
2) The merchants landing pages have to make me want to buy something. If I wouldn’t buy from the site neither will the people reading my website. I add something to the cart and see how many steps it takes to check out. If it is too much my shoppers won’t do it either.
3) Affiliate Tracking – If they are using an outdated rinky dink system for tracking I pass. It doesn’t matter if you have 100 sales there a day it still isn’t tracking right. I take a pass as it is hard enough to make money without it tracking.
4) Affiliate Management – This is a huge thing for me, I need to get them on the phone so we can discuss my percentage. There are many affiliate managers I wont work with regardless of the program they manage. If a program moves from an affiliate manager to another one I drop the program, especially if its an affiliate manager that likes to steal other affiliate managers programs. They are out there and I know who they are. If you can’t build up trust among other affiliate managers how in the world would I trust them. There are times when the program steps up to a better affiliate manager but thats rare. Google the merchants name with “affiliate program” and if you see they have had 2 or 3 affiliate managers recently you know the merchant isn’t paying the affiliate manager, what makes you think they are going to pay you.
5) Affiliate Network – I don’t use the so called big Affiliate Networks, with all the parasitic affiliates in these networks the only thing the big networks want is more money for the network by letting bad guys into these programs they are not looking out for me. I use Shareasale and Avantlink more then the average affiliate, it’s a trust thing.
That is my quick list I am sure I could go on all day but I think you are getting the message.
