I’ve already discussed crowdsourcing creative work such as logo design, but I also needed more development oriented work. For programming type items I decided to turn to oDesk for a contractor/company. Why oDesk and not 99Designs? 99Designs is good for design related work, it kind of says so in the name no? I have several projects in mind that will all require some outsourcing of JavaScript and/or PHP so I wanted to transition to an outsourcing site that catered more towards developer needs as opposed to designer needs.
The first project I posted on oDesk is really just to dip a toe in and see what kind of results I get. I need a new menu system for a pending redesign of gamersmark.com. If the initial project goes well I can see offloading a lot of work to developers on this site. As a programmer myself, my first instinct is to do the work myself, but that requires a large time investment, especially since my strengths aren’t in PHP. Learning when you should hire somebody as opposed to sinking your own time into something is important.
Cookies are of paramount importance in the internet advetising space, in fact, I would go so far as to say advertising on the internet could not exist without them. Why? Glad you asked! Cookies are little files of data that get set when you visit a site and are accessible when you return to the site that set them, maybe they do something as innoculous as automatically log you in upon return or maybe they store other information, such as what link you clicked to get there. Regardless, they are there to store bits of data about your browsing history. Alarmed? Probably not if you are reading this blog bug but if you are, as Sun’s Scott McNealy said way back in 1999, “get over it“.
While cookies can help sites track things such as visitation frequency and demographic data they are even more important in the context of affiliate marketing. The cookie indicates which affiliate the visitor arrived through and consequently, who get’s paid if/when the visitor converts. Since visitors may not necessarily convert (buy, sign up, whatever) on the initial visit the affiliate marketer needs window of time with which they can be credited for the action. Typical affiliate ranges could be anywhere from 7 to 90 days or more.
I was browsing the digitalpoint forums and found a user asking about the duration of the eBay Partner Network cookie. I couldn’t find this in their documentation so I did a little experiment. I cleared my browser cookies and went to discountroombas.com, the niche eBay site I plan on experimenting with. I had already implement the RSS widget that populates a list of sales meeting certain keword requirements, in my case roombas.
Anyway the intial niche site set cookies under two domains, with dates ranging from end of session (when I leave the site) all the way through 6/24/2010. It wasn’t until I clicked on an auction link that a cookie corresponding to my affiliate status was set (highlighted in the picture above). In this case the eBay Partner Network cookies was set to expire after 30 days. That meant that if the user that clicked arrived to eBay through my site and either signed up for a new account or placed the winning bid on auction link they clicked on would end up netting me X dollars. Had this visitor joined or won an auction after 31 days I would not get get anything.
Bottom line, if you are working with an affiliate program, check the terms of service. The longer the cookie duration for conversion tracking the better.
So I was looking into godaddy’s domain parking service and I had a domain transfer I needed to complete. I tried logging into my account twice in Firefox 3 and both times it crashed on login. I finally resorted to logging in through Internet Explorer and completed the account transfer.
I don’t know if it was an SSL issue or what but this is kind of a bummer, it’s not like godaddy is a small site or anything. Having to revert back to IE = lame.
In my previous article I added “(af)” after some of the links. If you are wondering what that means, it means that those links utilize my affiliate code for whatever affiliate program I happen to be referring to. My intention with this blog is to be transparent when it seems appropriate, if I have an interest in somebody taking action off a link or recommendation I make it should be disclosed. Some people don’t like signing up under other’s affiliate codes despite their interest, I for one feel it’s a validation of the entire business model I and my readers are trying to leverage. If somebody doesn’t like affiliates, then fine, I can’t control it anyway so I may as well make it easy for them to see so they see me as an honest authority on a subject rather than as some kind of huckster looking to sign people up to various programs.
WordPress is a near ubiquitous blogging and content management systems out there. Not only do some of the biggest blogs out there like techcrunch utilize it but so do small niche sites that end up with a few pages before whithering into the ether, and everything in between, including NicheBuilder.net. But while ubiquitey makes WordPress platform a reliable proven choice it also means there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of sites that look just like yours. If you want to spend the money or you have the time and expertise you can contract out or develop a custom one off theme yourself. Since my expertise isn’t in PHP/CSS but rather .NET I decided I would purchase a theme. Why didn’t hire a developer to create a custom theme for me so the site would really stand out? Three reasons. One, I could still get a very clean, professional looking theme without spending a few thousand dollars. Two, if I want to start other niche WordPress sites, I would need a theme that I could use over and over as a starting point. Three, the theme developer I settled on offered an affiliate program (af).
Why was an affiliate program a factor in where I purchase my theme from? Simple, were I to ignore a potential revenue stream through the referral of new customers to the theme developer would be contrary to the whole point of this blog. Affilates programs are what are referred to as PPA/CPA programs, Pay Per Action or Cost Per Action depending on whether you are the publisher (affilate) or the advertiser (seller). I’ll be discussing affiliate programs and CPAs in great depth in future articles.
I settled on a theme from solostream (af), specifically, the Solostream 3-Column theme. Solostream utilizes e-junkie.com for their affiliate program. The sign up was easy but they don’t offer creatives for their various sellers which puts additional work on the affilate if they want to use more than text links, it’s not a huge issue but it would be nice and it highlights the differences between e-junkie and some of the big boys like Commission Junction. Regardless of where you get your theme from, search google therearenumerous sources, take the time to get a good theme as the base for your site, you won’t regret it.
One of the most common affiliate programs out there is eBay’s Partner Network, formerly administered via Commission Junction, if you go to SitePoint or Digital point their sites for sale forums are riddled with these types of sites. The most basic of these, of which 95% are, are implementations of eBay’s Widget Editor Kit. Affiliates earn money through referring new users that create eBay user accounts or a user winning an auction they found via your website. eBay’s affiliate program is enticing due to it’s massive scale, everybody is familiar with eBay and a significant percentage have transacted business, either as a buyer or seller, through eBay. Recently however eBay has been dealing with a seller revolt due to changes in the changes to how they handle seller ratings, long story short sellers cannot respond to negative buyer ratings and search results favor highly rated sellers over established sellers. It may seem like a small distinction, but if you’ve been around long enough as a seller you are bound to have at least some negative feedback, and new sellers with no history what so ever are ending up at the top of the search results which is threatening to put established sellers out of business. Naturally, people find a way to game system, in this scenario established buyers register new accounts to end up at the top of the search results until feed back forces them to abandon the account (lather, rinse, repeat). Here is a video a seller, at eBay Live, going off in response to the new feedback guidelines.
What remains to be seen is how this impacts affiliates, if you look in the video the place is pretty empty, in the past it had been extremely crowded. As markets tend to resemble ecosystems, collections of buyers and sellers that coexist, the long term impact on the eBay Partner Network could be dire. One of the sites I have on deck intended to implement the eBay Partner Network, I won’t have historical data to reference but we will at least be able to see whether the eBay Partner Network can be leveraged to create a reliable revenue stream.
Finding a logo for your site, blog, or whatever has always been somewhat of a crap shoot, articulating exactly what you are envisioning can be difficult. Once you start working with an artist or design firm you were usually committed to following the process through and paying regardless of the results. To minimize risk you would usually be given X number of initial concepts from which to have the artist develop further. Crowd sourcing has emerged as viable alternative, you increase your odds of achieving success for a given problem by spreading the possible source of a solution amongst a large pool. Addressing the graphic design space in this way is a site called 99designs.com, which helps connect you with graphic and website designers. The process is very simple, register a competition, it costs $39 to do so, give a title, summary, and list of “wants” and “don’t wants”, and set the prize amount. Then the competition is live for a predetermined number of days. Artists will submit their take on what you are looking for, you can then rate each submission and provide feedback for further tweaking if desired. Once the competition ends you determine the winning entry, arrange payment, and you get your new logo. You can check out the
competition I arranged for a new logo here.
My only reservation is that the one size fits all price of $39 per competition may limit the sites usefulness for getting quality work for your niche sites. And it would be prohibitively expensive if you wanted to outsource creation of more frequently needed lower dollar items such as banner ads. It would be nice if there was a sliding scale, the bigger the price the more the competition posting fee.
Hi there everybody and welcome to (yet another) blog on the business of the Internet. In particular this blog will focus on, in no particlular order, the online advertising industry, generating income through niche websites, SEO, and general entrepreneurial matters.
I’ll try and make sure that my posts contain actual value, not asinine generalities that come from a lot of the other blogs that are nothing more than common sense. I’d like to address topics like Landing Page Optimization, utilizing Ad Servers to best utilize your advertising inventory, evaluations of various advertising networks, and being that I am a programmer by trade I’ll throw in some actual programming samples to for anybody that really wants to get down and dirty.
