Glowleaf

Lately I have been spending my time creating minisites. Through a lot of trial and error, I have gathered some tools that I prefer and some setups that work for me.

Of course there might be tools and plugins out there that perform better. These are just what I use.

First of all, lets talk about the concept. An affiliate minisite must:

• Be deployed in a narrow niche.
• Be automated.
• Provide revenue.
• Rank well inside its niche.

I always use wordpress, so I got the ranking a step higher right from the start. A narrow niche needs some keyword research and some planning, but in the end all you can do is to try it and see what happens.

I suggest that you get a juicy main keyword in your domain, it will help a ton with ranking.

Wordpress not only ranks well, but it also comes with a nice bunch of plugins for automating the minisite.

What I like to use are the following ones:

• Feedwordpress
• Tweet this
• Realvms
• Digg-digg
• Next gen gallery
• WP super cache
• WP e-commerce
• WFReview
• And Thesis theme, not a plugin, but it has so many abilities that it honestly counts as one. Make sure to get Thesis Open hook plugin if you use the theme, it will make your life a lot easier.

Feedwordpress syndicates RSS feeds to add to your minisite. But it is not only useful as a splog maker. It can also keep a minisite fresh with content, without looking spammy. How? By having it pull RSS feeds from social bookmarking sites. I suggest you use Digg search results RSS for juicy snippety action! And the best thing is, that it is all current and popular.

Tweet this can automatically tweet the post you publish. The newest version also auto-tweets scheduled posts, which is awesome. I use this in a technique I call, “crier”. It is simple really, you make a twitter account dedicated to your minisite. You setup the account, pic, link, background and add a few friends to it. Then you put Tweet this to tweet your new posts. That way, the twitter account acts as a crier for your minisite. It is simple, easy, and works fine.

RealVMS is one of the powerhouses. What it does, is automatically scrape youtube and embed videos in posts. All along with their comments and tags. How awesome is that? Yes, pretty awesome. Did I mention it can automatically bookmark the video to Delicious? Just add a new category, “keyword + videos” or something like that, and have the plugin add new vids daily.

Digg Digg is one of my favourite social bookmarking plugins, because of the large buttons that pull the bookmark count from the mothersite. I love it. Don’t overdo it, most sites are useless. Stick to the big ones.

Next gen gallery is well known to everyone. I use it as a little cheat, I always gather some pictures of the niche, and add them in the minisite’s gallery. I social bookmark them, and it pulls a nice bit of traffic that way, plus some image hotlinks. The fine touch is that this plugin’s widgets look amazing, I always add random thumbnails to the sidebar.

WP super cache is great for lifting the load off your server. If it works right off the bat, you are lucky. If something conflicts with this plugin, you are pretty much screwed. Everything seems to hate it. Nonetheless, it is worth trying to load it because it works amazingly well.

WP e-commerce is free, and has a premium for addons. In its basic use, it can be used to create minisites/ministores. Yes, they work great. It also has a buggy import feature, which means you can import a product feed from any affiliate network. If you pull it off, it will work like a charm. Your ministore can then be added here, which if approved, will bring a trickle of valuable traffic.

WFReview was discussed in the previous post. It is a powerhouse in regards to making minisites, and it synergises so well with the previous plugins. Trust me, if you see a minisite, with thumbnails on the sidebar, posted videos with today’s date, news snippets to Digg, and a bunch of ratings and comments on the posts you will doubt whether this is autogenerated or not. It is a premium plugin, but it is well worth it.

I know that the tricks I use are rather well known, or seem trivial. The thing is that when used all together, they amount to a nice sum of traffic and ranking to my minisite. Coupled with the right offer, the minisite is profitable.

Now, how to make the minisite profitable? Well, you really should not ask that. The monetization methods of a minisite should be made beforehand, while in the early stage of planning. Generally, I like to use 2 monetization methods, one being affiliate links, and the second being ppc, Adbrite or Adsense. If and when the minisite matures, I like to add a third monetization method, selling text links. Selling links is perfect, because it eliminates the upkeep cost of the minisite and is very stable.

The build I do to each of my minisites is rather complicated, but I will try and break it down here. This is an analysis of the points above, so I can’t help but repeat myself:

• Base articles.
• Sidebar widgets.
• Crier and auto-bookmark.
• Fresh videos.
• Fresh social news.
• PPC monetization.
• Aff text link monetization.
• Set it and forget it banners.
• Mailing list creation.
• SEO, by hotlinks, social bookmarks and tags.

Base articles, are usually 10-15 that I write or order related to the niche. They are my base SEO, and I carefully select titles, I post them with proper tags etc, and social bookmark them for the initial SEO boost. Then I just forget about them.

Sidebar widgets are the Next gen gallery thumbnail random preview, which looks very nice. Also, the recent comments widget, to show the site is active. WP-ecommerce can also show “products”, which looks very professional.

The crier is the twitter account that announces the new posts from the minisite. I sometimes add twitterfeed to this, and blend in affiliate links from some network’s RSS feed. The auto-bookmark is done by RealVMS, to delicious.

The fresh videos are put in a category, like “keyword+videos” by RealVMS.

Fresh news are usually found at http://digg.com/rss_search?s=keyword or any other social bookmarking site’s custom RSS feed.

For PPC monetization I use Adsense, a single ad space in the most prominent place, above the fold. Don’t overdo it.

Aff text link monetization is done either with:

• Hand-made pages linking to offers.
• Auto replaced keyword by WFReview to aff links.
• Product feeds turned into posts with their aff links.

Set it and forget it banners Amazon Omakase, product or category banner. I also love Unibet for casino, betting and poker banners. Their dynamic banners are constantly optimized and updated, so you don’t have to. Just add the code and let them do the rest.

Mailing list creation is done quite easily and automatically by Aweber. The lists are small, so the cost is negligible. Aweber has a signup form that is perfect for this job, the box popup that you also see on this blog. The minisite will slowly harvest those emails, and once they reach a respectable number you can blast some offers to the niche. Remember, the lists might be small, but they are targeted.

SEO is integrated in all parts of the minisite. The base articles make the foundation, the domain chosen is always with a juicy keyword in it. Auto-bookmark helps. The image gallery invites some hotlinks. The videos are embedded with their tags in the posts, which makes wordpress rank great. The RSS scrapes are relevant and have lots of variations. For the minisites that make consistent cash, I usually throw up a TNX campaign so it can rank for my keyword. That last thing works very well, but it is costly, so it is only viable on high-profit minisites.

Design tip: You can use Greenbox logo maker to make a cool looking logo for your minisite in no time. It will help sell it better.

As you can see, each minisite created that way takes a lot of thought and work to create. But you must see it as a long term investment, because each of these sites will create a revenue stream that is stable and long lasting.

Popularity: 1% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: affiliate sites, minisites, niche sites, wordpress plugins

Yes, I know. Adsense sucks. Adsense is for newbies. Adsense makes pennies. You can’t be a baller with Adsense.

All that is true.

But, an advanced affiliate must use every single tool in his arsenal, and honestly, it is dumb to neglect Adsense. You should never rely on a single method of monetizing your sites, and you should definitely not rely on Adsense alone to make money.

You should be multidimensional when monetizing your sites. Find all the tools online that can make revenue, try them all, master them all, and apply them to the appropriate circumstances. Sometimes, a site works well with paid links, like Text-link-ads. Or maybe the classic banner space. Affiliate links for the products you review. Whatever.

This post is not to discuss alternate monetizing methods, but to use a proven set-it-and-forget-it method. Many people (even me) have turned away from Adsense due to their ridiculous terms, the bans, the crappy payouts. But it is still a monetizing tool that fits the vast majority of sites.

I am not telling you to slap Adsense on every site you own, quite the contrary. Use it only on your sites that don’t perform well with other methods (no-one buys your links, or never converting banners etc). Every affiliate has some “dead weight” sites in his arsenal, that get little traffic and they wield no revenue by other means.

Anyway, here is an example of how I used Adsense. The site is Greek but you don’t need to read anything, this is just a screenshot to show you the layout.

This is a Thesis theme, 2 column setting. The sidebar on the right is thin, just enough to fit in the useful stuff. Under the image rotator on the top right, I put up an Adsense ad, which is the only monetization method used on the site. Yes, a single ad, no more. It is placed near the picture, but under a “sponsor” text to be TOS compliant. It is clearly above the fold.

This example is not a money site, so I did not want to create the classic adsense minefield. But here is what I noticed:

Having a single ad in a good ctr place has benefits. This setup has very good click through rates, averaging 2% but with spikes of even 5%. Also, the average cost per click is maxed out. Since there is only adspace for one ad, only the top bidding advertiser gets shown. By truncating all the low-bidding ads I got a great performance from this set-up.

I am not saying that this method rocks, or that it will increase revenue. I am just sharing what I stumbled on, and I suggest you try it out. Or at least, take this post as an excuse to try out things out of the norm.

Popularity: 2% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: adsense, ctr

There are a ton of scripts and plugins to rewrite links, and hide affiliate links. Most “how to make money gurus” say that you absolutely need to hide the affiliate links in order to profit.

I say that is wrong.

There is a good reason for that. Lets see what happens:

1. You hide the affiliate link.
2. Your reader does not instantly realise that he got through your referral link.
3. If he signs up, you get credit.
4. You end up with more signups.

Now, lets see what happens when you don’t hide your affiliate links:

1. You show the technique, and link to the offer/service with your affiliate link in plain sight.
2. Your reader sees it is a referral, but voluntarily clicks on it.
3. He signs up at the service, uses it following your instructions, and sees that the technique works.
4. The reader is satisfied, and his trust in you is increased.
5. The next time you refer him to something, he will jump on the wagon with no hesitation.
6. You end up with more signups.

I prefer the second scenario. There are downsides of course. You will get a ton of emails saying “I signed up under you, now tell me this and that and the next”. Some will make legitimate questions, which you should answer. Others will paraphrase the demand “gimme your credit card info”, and thus you can ignore them.

The point here is simple:

If you don’t suggest shitty products, your readers will be more than happy to sign up under your link.

This is a fact, and I know it by experience. I have used every single one of the products or services that I have referred, and I have gained a degree of return from every one of them.

How do you like that for a make-money-blogging secret?

Popularity: 1% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: affiliate links, make money online blogging

Using social media is a one-way street in today’s internet. What used to be a passing fad 2 years ago is now a serious marketing platform.

It depends on your site/product/service of course, but social media can push serious traffic towards you.

Facebook.

By hitting the 300 million milestone, Facebook is now a huge platform. Have you ever dreamt as a marketer “what if I could reach out a whole country? That would be awesome.”

Well, now you can. Facebook has the biggest userbase in the world. What used to be a fad, is now a must. The smart thing that facebook did was the notifications. A friend of yours signs up on Facebook? You get notified, because it parsed his email list. Someone added you as a friend? You get emailed. Someone tagged you on a photograph? The same. Someone replied on that comment on a photograph? Spam, spam spam. And the funny thing is, that it is never treated as spam. Facebook just lets you know that other people are doing stuff on your account. And since those people are your friends, you never get offended if they keep spamming you with sheep and mafia guns. Facebook is just the messenger.

Twitter.

Twitter must be the biggest fad of them all. Many have fought it and then fell in love with it. Even I did. In fact, it is so great, that its traffic must be the most valuable of them all. Twitter traffic comments on your posts, subscribes on your RSS and email list, blogs about you, retweets your tweets etc. You might not be able to directly sell something on twitter, but you are bound to get some exposure. And if your promo is worth it, that exposure will convert indirectly.

I think that twitter nailed it with the 140 word limit. People get spammed all day, every day, around the world. Ads, radio, phone calls, SMS, emails, billboards, leaflets, a whole blizzard of little spammy messages are fighting each other for your attention. And researches show that the average attention span of a person has been reduced significantly the last few years. Twitter fits that lifestyle perfectly. The way I see it, it is even better than RSS feeds. I used to go through my subscribed RSS blogs every few days, and had to read to whole posts etc. Now, I just have a twitter account, follow those people who interest me, and receive manageable chunks of info from them every day. It is a mashup of little shouts, and they stay non-intrusive because I chose to receive them!

Myspace.

Don’t neglect Myspace. Yea, its old. Yea, it sucks. But there are a lot of people on it. And the best part is, a lot of stupid people. People to whom you can sell stuff.

Ok then, how can we leverage these 3 social sites easily and effectively?

There is a little piece of software that does all that. It is called tweetdeck, and it rocks. It started out as a more useful GUI for multiple twitter accounts, but the newest version bridges Myspace and Facebook as well. I believe it is a marketer’s wet dream.

Once you set it up, you can manage each of your site’s social exposure on 3 social networks from the same interface. Lets say you have your personal blog, so you make accounts for it at Myspace, Facebook and twitter. You pass everything into tweetdeck, and voila, you can post and manage them from one location. Want to promote your service? 3 more accounts, set them up in Tweetdeck, and you can go back and forth between them all day inside tweetdeck.

Of course, setting up the accounts is an important step. Different social sites need different approaches to succeed in getting lots of victi… cough, sorry, friends.

Honestly, for Myspace I have no idea what to do to make an account popular. Google it, someone will know.

For facebook, I found this useful article on Mashable amongst the enormous pile of crap on that domain.

For twitter, a lot has been said, but it is all bloated bullshit. What you need to know is this: link periodically to interesting stuff in your niche. That is all, honestly. Either do it manually or automate it. An easy way to do this is to fire up tweetdeck (I told you it rocks!) and open a search tab. As a keyword put something in your niche, for example #php or #wordpress or #lol. Spend exactly 40 seconds every day, check that tab on tweetdeck, and retweet something that looks even remotely interesting, you don’t even have to click the bit.ly

Of course it is not as easy as it sounds. Creating a following through social media takes time, and there is no secret recipe for it. What is certain is that it does help your site, and it does help get exposure.

Now, what should you promote? Not everything works when you promote to the social crowd. Think about building/promoting:

• Viral content
• Video
• Interaction/Flash promo
• Polls
• Contests
• Interesting articles

How can you twist the above into sales? Well, that is for you to find out! It is different for every product, but there is always an angle of approach you can take to twist linkbait/socialbait into buying.  Use your imagination, and keep an eye open for what other marketers are doing on the same platforms.

Signup on my mailing list if you want juicier stuff than this.

Popularity: 3% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: facebook, myspace, social media, tweetdeck, twitter

I loved this scene. Ari Gold spews out his bile as usual, but gives excellent advice for entrepreneurs. It is exactly like he says, no one is going to invest if you think you can make something work. You will have to prove it to them that it will work.

Popularity: 3% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: start-ups