Nov 20
Partially because I got tired of talking to myself, and mostly because I have many projects chewing up my time, I am opening this Q&A.Â
You can ask me whatever you want to know about affiliate marketing, and if I have something useful to reply, I will. If I don’t have the required experience, I will try to help you the best I can.
Nooby questions are ok, but don’t ask me how to register a domain for example… Also, no programming questions. Take them to a developer forum, or to wordpress.org
Other people pay me for answering their questions and finding solutions, you get it for free!
Fire away, the comment box is right below.
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Popularity: 12% [?]
written by Glowleaf
\\ tags: affiliate questions, seo questions
November 20th, 2008 at 11:35 am
how much wood, would a wood chuck chuck, if a wood chuck could chuck wood?
(i’ll think of a serious one later :p)
November 20th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Which affiliate networks hands you the fattest stacks each month?
November 20th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Commission Junction, hands down… But since I have no referral link for that, I will shamelessly insert the second moneymaker, TNX.
EDIT: Just remembered I do not actually get any money stacks. It’s all wire transfers, paypal and e-banking.
Also, CJ is still a great moneymaker even after splitting up with Ebay, keep that in mind.
November 20th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
I’ve never built an autoblog/splog before but I’m starting to look into it a lot now and will likely be building a load soon. I want to make it as whitehat as possible without reducing the effectiveness too much.
So, any tips for doing this?
Like, for scraping, how to reduce the chances of being asked to remove content, avoid getting sued, etc?
Basically, I want to build autoblogs that have a good chance of surviving for a long time and not getting into trouble, instead of constantly building new ones.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Nice question Adam. Basically you want a splog that will fly under the radar for as long as possible.
You don’t get sued, you are simply asked to remove the offending content. I have a lot of splogs, and I have been asked to remove content only twice. No big deal, you just delete the posts, and change the feed so that it does not scrape the same source again.
A surefire way to get noticed by the original author, is by leaving the permalinks pointing to the original page, so you just change the setting in feedwordpress e.g. and point the permalinks to your page instead.
A quick and dirty way to avoid some issues, is to post up an article on a page, and set up the splog to display that page as a frontpage. Most people will not dig any further.
The best way to avoid any issues is to cloak the content. I have no firsthand experience, but a lot of people are praising http://simplifiedses.com/
It is expensive, and blackhat, so it may be out of your league yet. Keep it in mind though. We all started out as newbies
A splog is not a big deal, it is simply a wordpress installation with feedwordpress for example. Put up a theme, cleaned from any footprints. Set a feed, set the time, and you are basically done.
The only way to be 100% trouble free, is to create your own feeds, and scrape from those. It basically defeats the original purpose of splogs, but there aren’t any rules here. I suggest that you use the feed from a small social bookmarking site, the digg clones have feeds for every category. That will give you titles that are popular, and they might catch a rank or two.
In reality, scraping content is not as bothersome as you may think. On the contrary, it is quick and dirty.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
How are you selecting the niches in CJ. Is it by personal interest, or search volume, etc? Do you prefer the lead gen types or the percentage of sale offers? There’s so g*ddamn many of them. Do you pick offers that have just been released, or do you like to see a little historical data first? If you had $1000 ad spend and 60 days deadline, which offers would you be pursuing right now? Would you put it all towards just one offer, or split it evenly amongst a few?
November 20th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
I’m sure I could find loads of questions to ask, but my brain is fried from working too hard. Let’s see…
How do people get into classified ads stuff, I’m thinking Craiglist only I won’t be using Craiglist as that’s what everyone does. Is it just a case of put out some posts, track the results, rinse and repeat or is it more complicated than that?
November 20th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
@Dave
I have never used Craigslist, and never plan to, so I cannot give you specific information on that. Classified ads in general work like that, yes. You buy adspace, you send people to landing page, and see what converts.
If for example you want to promote car loans, which have hefty leads, I suggest that you go to Yahoo answers and start answering to people. That way, you can learn the usual questions, see what kind of dumb problems people have regarding car loans, and also get some actual leads if you do it right. Then once you get the hang of it, you can buy classifieds with killer sales copy and targeted to buyers.
As for the actual work, I suggest that you use subdomains in your landing page, if it’s type-in traffic, or tracking software to track every single visitor and sale. Also, use your brain, experiment, and find something that works.
November 20th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
@ew. Ewwww!
CJ was the very first network I came in contact with. I have tried so many things, so many niches… I still have minisites promoting a single product from CJ, some working, some with broken links…
I have gone through Macbooks to NY flight tickets, through Ebay to EA Games, to toolbars, to real estate leads, to inflatable kayaks. What I am trying to say here is, pick a product that interests you, because that way you can better understand the buyer.
There is a pile of products to choose from, there is no way of not finding one that suits your niche.
I never pick offers that have just been released, because getting listed in CJ means some serious cash, and most advertisers cannot take the heat and die in a week. I will not even bother spending time researching a new advertiser, except if its like the new Australian branch of Expedia or the online store of Electronic Arts games.
Especially in CJ, you don’t care about the percentage or the lead amount. What you are going for is the brand name. It is one thing promoting “Glowleaf” laptops on your techie forum, and another to throw up a banner on “The new Macbook pro for 999$!”
There is no comparison. I have seen insane, and I mean INSANE conversion rates on some products when you hit the right visitors. When 67 out of 80 clicks buy a laptop or a gadget, who gives a shit if my cut is 7.5% or 7.7%? The only thing I care at that point is how to get more of that traffic.
In affiliate marketing, the things that matter are ecpm and conversion rate. Nothing else. The BIG brand names push that conversion rate up, always.
As for the budget question, it is a big issue. You cannot put them all in one offer, cause you dont have anything that is already converting. And we all know that ppc campaigns need some time and money to settle down. I advise against doing ppc to CJ. It is one of the hardest, unless you get real lucky. I have burned a lot of cash into these campaigns, with no luck. Stick to SEO for CJ, see what works, have an actual conversion rate on a certain demographic, and then give it a try at ppc. If you are trying to find something to promote with ppc, stay away from CJ for now, find a CPA deal, there are thousands.
November 20th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
If you don’t mind I’ll jump in here as well (your praise gave me a bighead:p) One thing that is vital when creating splogs the no. 1 rule is make sure it doesn’t look like one!
1) get a nice theme …
2) make sure it doesn’t ‘bleed’ throw in a few SEO plugins and some social media plugins!
3) Don’t get caught
4) Don’t tell anyone that it is a splog…
5) if its a bad splog rotate rotate rotate
November 20th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Yes, those are some good points from Donace. Although, the strength in blackhat generally is in numbers. Splogs are cannon fodder, dump them in the heat of battle, and don’t shed a tear if one dies.
November 20th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Cheers for the info Glowleaf and Donace, great help
The model I’m thinking of using is this:
1.) Automatically scrape sites like youtube, article directories, basically sites that probably won’t mind me doing it
2.) Build tons of pages over time and internal authority
3.) Build links to the site using “hands off” methods like Eli’s trackback plugin, mass article subs (with services), etc
4.) Create legit pages on the site targetting keywords to rank for and use the scraped pages to push juice to them
Am I on the right track with this?
November 20th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Sounds good. And push all that link juice up to your money sites, which have the sales pitch and affiliate links.
And add social bookmarking to your linkbuilding scheme.
Just start doing it, you will discover a lot of things in the process.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:51 am
Is that all? Keep em coming!
November 21st, 2008 at 12:36 pm
what’s the quickest and fastest way to hit social media sites to build links and traffic….preferably automated or near enough.
November 21st, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I’ll have another jab then…
I’ve just started promoting CPA offers through Ads4Dough. I used to make around $200/day off ClickBank through warez sites and I’ve had experience in some other product affiliate networks, but this is my first experience with CPA.
I’ve been making parasite hosts and link spamming them and also spamming authority pages where I have a backlink. I’ve banked just over $220 in my first week which is pretty damn good for the minimal work I’ve put in (I have a full time job).
What do you think the next step is? I was thinking of entering PPC but I don’t know if it would be better in the long run to start building a large network of splogs, parasite hosts, information sites and beautifully crafted whitehat sites?
I already have hosting where I can set up new domains on different c-class IP’s, I can also get more c-classes whenever I need to upgrade my network so I think this may be the way to go, what do you think?
November 21st, 2008 at 2:58 pm
@xentech
You need to understand that PPC and SEO are a different world. Although they may overlap in some areas, as SeoBook wrote: PPC means living on rent, SEO means owning the house.
If your goal is to get long term gains, and that is a good goal indeed, you need to keep on expanding your network. You will quickly see that owning your own SEO foundation makes it ridiculously easy to launch a new project.
Since you have already found a way to make cash, just keep replicating that same concept. PPC might be easier for some cases, but it is definitely not steady or longterm, and you will need a lot of tweaking to get it right.
I also suggest that you slowly start moving away from depending on other authority sites, because you are at their mercy. By all means, use them, but start building your own “authority pages”, so that you can sleep at night.
Find tricks that work, and try to apply the 80/20 rule on all aspects, meaning automate as much as you can, and make them run with minimal maintenance. It all depends on the niche, but it is not uncommon for affiliates to own a network of 150+ sites, filled with splogs, fora, blogs, content sites, turnkey sites, article directories and link directories.
So yes, I suggest you work on your existing network. Make it huge, as big as you can handle.
@Donace
Not all social sites bring in traffic. Real traffic, that is. From the big ones, I found only Digg, stumble and reddit to make any real difference. There is no actual way to automate this, unless you write the scripts yourself. Semi automation can be achieved with a method Eli posted on the Motherfucking SEO Q & A thread by SlightlyShady.
http://www.wickedfire.com/traffic-content/37649-mother-fuckin-seo-question-answer-thread-3.html#post357824
The thread is amazing in total, but I want to point out Eli’s method at that particular post. He gives a list of all the submit urls for many social sites, and explains the way to semi-automate the process.
On automation, Eli says:
“If you really want to go the script route you can view the documentation for each api and they will usually give example code for php. With some minor edits since they all pretty much use the same variables you can simply grab all the example codes and mash them all together one right after another and probably end up with a few results.”
It is a big deal, that requires a lot of coding trial and error, and if you make something like that, you can easily sell it
November 23rd, 2008 at 8:16 am
Glowleaf,
Little late here but I got another question if you don’t mind dude
Is it possible to set up autoblogs on free hosted sites (blogger, wordpress.com), all info I’ve found on autoblogs is for using your own domain and although that’s a better idea, I still want to make some free hosted ones.
Cheers
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:07 am
I thought that it wasn’t possible, but Bofu mentioned a method of remote posting with xmlrpc. Drop him a comment or an email on http://contempt.me, maybe he will write a methodology on how to do just that.
From what I figure, he means to do “remote posting” from a splog located on your own server, but the end result is the same, i.e. automated content.
November 23rd, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Glowleaf,
How do you organize doorway pages(or splogs)? Do your doorway pages have links pointing to your money sites/aff link, do they have links to landing pages that have your aff link, do you just redirect with JS or meta refresh or are there more whitehat sites in between your doorways and your aff link?
I’ll contribute an answer to Adam:
I believe both Blogger and Wordpress let you post through email- not as easy to automate, but there are plenty of RSS to email services out there.
November 23rd, 2008 at 4:21 pm
@ Ilya
You mean the whole structure? Oh, this covers a whole post in itself, but it is a rather simple concept. The basic idea is:
Layer 1: Spam, parasites, illegible keyword stuffed content and more spam + some linkspam. And spam. Add autogenerated content, and spam of course.
Linking to:
Layer 2: Intermediate buffer sites. Not that clean, not that dirty, definitely grayhat. These rank quite good, and twist the linkjuice to the anchor text I want. These are turnkey sites, directories, video blogs, funny pics sites, abandoned blogs, dropped projects that rank good, whatever.
I sell links on this layer because it has lots of PR and indexed pages.
Linking to:
Layer 3: Whitehat, squeaky clean SEO’d to shit money sites.
The different layers should be on different IP’s.
January 25th, 2009 at 3:23 am
This is way late, but after seeing your facebook ad stats, I have to ask the question: what kind of ad produced those CTRs?