I haven’t done much in the realm of affiliate marketing so far, the bulk of online revenue thus far has been through PPC (pay per click) and direct sales. But that changed today with my first affiliate sale! It was through the eBay Partner Network. Previously I had setup two sites, discountroombas.com and joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com, that utilized the mcjiffy script and the eBay Partner Network search feeds.
My first instinct was that somebody had won an auction via joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com since I have two PPC campaigns, via Yahoo and Microsoft. However it was actually from discountroombas.com, the site has had less than 25 total visitors, most wandering in from digitalpoint so I’m pretty surprised somebody made a purchase, but I won’t complain. This actually validates my assumption, to a purely circumstantial extent at least so far, expensive items will tend to do better on eBay affiliate sites due to the gap between the aftermarket price and the retail price. I had been putting time and money into the Josh Hamilton site on more of lark and interest in him after his home run derby performance.
So feel free to share any stories about your first affiliate conversion, which network was it, how hard was it to get that conversion, was it worth it, etc…
For everybody that doen’t follow the OpenX blog (you should by the way), Tim Cadogan, the OpenX CEO, posted a video discussing the API functionality introduced in the 2.6 beta. I’m a little pressed for time today so you’ll just have to watch it yourself. Enjoy
The OpenX team has been staying on top of their game with a security update to the 2.4 branch. The fix includes bug fixes and improvements to various features including, of particular interest to me, geotargeting. If you haven’t moved to 2.5/2.6 then you should definitely update your 2.4 branch.
Which brings me to 2.6, which I mentioned previously. I installed it tonight for nichebuilder.net to finally start running in house campaigns for 2goware.com and solostream. While the API functionality is the most important feature in 2.6 as far as I’m concerned, the polished UI is very nice, the previous 2.x interfaces were the very definition of Spartan and while the engine under the hood is what determines the success of any ad server if you or your users spend any significant amount of time trafficking ads or setting up campaigns a nice UI makes things a little more pleasant.
The OpenX team is on a roll with new functionality, just over a week ago user improved user management functioanlity was released. Now they have gone even further with their release of an API. The API (application programming interface for you non code wonks out there) will allow administrative functionality such as adding clients, banners, zones, etc… this will greatly reduce the time and human intervention needed to get new advertisers set up in OpenX. I immediately went to the OpenX beta page to try and download the new functionality as it is only available in 2.6 but download page has version links to 2.5.7 I’ll keep an eye out for the updated download and install it as soon as I can, for a programmer like me this feature is like cat nip.
This morning the new .ME top level domain (TLD) became available via Godaddy for registration. Apparently Godaddy was ill prepared for the rush of domain name speculators. I tried to register fla.me at about 10:15 this morning, the first try timed out but I was able to register it successfully about 40 minutes later. I was a little surprised the name was available but figured I just got lucky.
Then the bad news started showing up in forums, Twitter, and various blogs. Multiple people were allowed to register the same domain names, over on Mashable Adam Ostrow reports that the aweso.me domains is proving to be especially popular.
Considering that .COM domains can sell anywhere from hundreds to literally millions of dollars there are bound to be lawsuits flying when the dust settles and a single owner per domain is crowned, there’s no cutting these babies in half.
Personally I’m not big on domaining, I have a small collection of domains and have a hard time parting with any of them so I wasn’t going to do much speculation with the .me TLD. But it will be interesting to watch the feathers fly from the sidelines
A lawyer, surprise surprise, is attempting to bring a class action lawsuit for deceptive advertising and “unjust enrichment” against Google over their AdWords product. Hal Levitte filed a federal suit in California, claiming that by placing AdWords on parked domains.
After starting an AdWords campaign to increase business Mr. Levitte discovered that 16.3 percent of his AdWord spend was going towards parked domains and “error” sites, none of this traffic resulted in conversions that would have normallay been generated had the ads appeared on a higher quality content site.
As of March, 2008 Google offered a way to exclude ad placement on parked domains and error sites. Mr Levitte is seeing class action status for everybody that has held an AdWords in the last 4 years and served at least one impression.
If, and it’s a big if, Mr. Levitte can attain class action status the lawsuit could be huge. AdWords contributes the lion’s share to Google’s 16+ billion dollar revenue stream so the suit, if designated class action, could be on par with those lodged against major auto manufacturers warranting large scale recalls (think Ford Explorers and Firestone tires.)
Of all the search engine optimization techniques out there none is more fundamental than rewriting URLs to be more human and search engine spider friendly. URL rewriting is useful for removing ambiguous querystring parameters that have no meaning to your visitors but are required to drive the content presentation of your data driven website. For example if I were searching for Kung Fu movies and saw the following URLs, http://www.dvdstore.com/categoryid=7 and http://www.dvdstore.com/kungfu-movies.html I would be more likely to follow the second link as I know exactly where I am going, not so with the first ambiguous, albeit functionally identical, URL.
Today wrapped up my acquisition of 2goware.com that I mentioned in a previous post. There were some issues with the hosting that had to get sorted out relating to the security script PHPAudit and dreamhost.com (af). I was lucky the seller was so professional and worked through the issues for me, if he had just left me to sort through the issue with ionCube and dreamhost.com (af) myself my lack of php knowledge would have made getting the site transitioned successfully very painful.
2goware.com sells an arcade script for hosting flash games. Flash games sites are very popular niche sites right now because of the large amount of games available and the booming casual gaming market. I have a long list of things I would like to change including improving the landing page of the site itself and the template that comes with the arcade script.
As I mentioned in the previous post relating to this purchase I will now have another possible revenue stream outside of display advertising (CPM), text advertising (PPC/CPC), and affiliate marketing (CPA). Diversification is always a good thing, having multiple revenue streams shields you from sudden down turns in one particular market as we are currently seeing in display advertising.
OpenX the, open source ad serving solution, anounced that expanded user permission levels will meet the needs of advertisers looking for deeper integration with their publishers and agencies that require trafficking privledges for users not normally entitled to such functionality under previous versions of OpenX.
Introduced in version 2.5, currently in beta, the following functionality has been added.
Each user will be given their own account rather than having mulitple users piggyback on a single account.
Control visibility and updatability via individual permissions set the user level rather than the publisher or advertiser level.
Audit history of individual account permissions to see who can do what and when they were able to do it.
Allow users to switch between multiple accounts so they are presented with different functionality upon log in.
I’ve used OpenX previously for another site but will be setting up a new instance to support nichebuilder.net so I’ll be digging into these new features soon.
There is a difference between having an idea for a single site that you want to truly breakout from the pack and those that you see as low maintenance, low risk, yet still dependable revenue generators. If you are looking to build a breakout site the choice of development language is pretty much up to you and your team, .NET, PHP, RoR, they all have their pros and cons and you can make a case for any of them. But if you are looking to establish many small streams of revenue spread out over different markets and monetization schemes YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE PHP. Believe me I hated coming to this realization, I’ve spent the last 6 years as a .NET developer, I love the scalability, that it’s strongly typed, and the development environment is world class, but when you are trying to scale a niche operation the sheer breadth of open source scripts that you can leverage that are all built in PHP dwarf every other development language. Wordpress for blogs, mcjiffy for ePN or domaining, OpenX for ad serving, and the list goes on, 95% of all code you need to build any type of niche site is available via an Open Source PHP script.
The sooner you learn PHP and to a lesser extent MySQL/Apache the less reliant you will be on other support entities to get your next endeavour going. I just purchased an arcade script ditribution site, 2goware.com, and I am at the mercy of the current owner’s support staff to transfer the code and get it all working on my dreamhost.com (af) account since I am not nearly as strong with PHP as I am in .NET. If you aren’t prepared to learn at least a modicrum of PHP so you can either do things yourself or outsource in an itelligent manner what you can’t this IS NOT the business for you.
I’ll keep an eye out for the updated download and install it as soon as I can, for a programmer like me this feature is like cat nip.
