Building an empire on the internet
Since I started the beta testing program, I’ve made 19 updates to date and things are moving along nicely. I plan on having another big update tomorrow with an eye to launching in a couple weeks with a version 1.0.
I’ve already completed the features for version 1.0 so I feel good about that. So I just need to polish it off, improve a few things here and there and unleash it upon the net 
So I have a couple stores setup with my new eBay store builder software and decided to drive a little traffic via AdWords. I was getting some good click through rates on a couple campaigns, but when I went into analytics the numbers were adding up. I wasn’t seeing any traffic via “google cpc”.
So I started looking around in the help, forums, etc. and it finally dawned on me about autotagging. That was all good and fine, but I never looked into how the auto tagging happened. Turns out it works via appending a query string onto the URL you provide, which honestly I should have guessed anyway. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but the framework I was using by default doesn’t allow query strings when you have the SEF URLs enabled. OOPS! In essence what was happening was every one of those clicks resulted in a 404 and a money down the drain. sigh
So I figured out how to get the query strings enabled and now it all works. Lesson learned: Test your AdWords!
Google is almost ready to roll out their AdSense for video advertising solution, starting with their 20 big partner sites and limited to the U.S.
Given that video is a really big thing on the net these days, this gives advertisers a more direct view form of advertising. They will use an overlay method for the ads as opposed to the preroll style, which is more like a traditional TV ad in addition to being more intrusive. If you have seen any videos on YouTube, then you have probably gotten a taste of what the overlay ads will look like.
The nice thing is that the ads will also be contextually targeted, just like their regular text and image ads are currently. I believe in a year or two this form of advertising will become really big for some markets that want to really get in front of potential customers. Something that AdSense ads can have a hard time doing.
I look forward to it.
The search giant appears to be expanding their revenue opportunities. Through Commission Junction you can sign up for Yahoo!’s new affiliate program. They are offering a variety of payouts as follows:
Yahoo! Toolbar: $1.00 per completed download
*Sorry, but Yahoo! can only compensate you for US Yahoo! Toolbar installs. US installs DO NOT include Canada, UK and Australia.Consumer Products:
Yahoo! Toolbar: $1.00 per completed download
Yahoo! Personals: $22+ per subscription
Yahoo! Autos: $4.50 per quote (up to 4 quotes per user)
Yahoo! Games: $5.00 per sale
Yahoo! HotJobs: $0.50 per applicationB2B Products:
Yahoo! Web Hosting: $60 per subscription
Yahoo! Merchant Solutions: $90 per subscription
Yahoo! HotJobs: 20% of sale
Yahoo! Search Marketing: $15.00 per account
Aaron Wall of SEO Bookfame has a rather scathing review of Commission Junction. To make it worse most of the commenters don’t have anything good to say either.
I personally have no bad things to say about their service, but I’m curious if you have any good or bad experiences?
Given the amount of blogging I’ve been doing regarding niche sites, I’ve decided to have a dedicated blog just for the subject. It is appropriately named NicheSiteBlogger.com and I will do most of my niche site stuff over there. This blog will go back to more general content with regards to making money online and building an internet empire.
We’ve got a good group of early testers willing to help out, so for the moment I’m going to close this beta testing round. I might do one more round with more people in a week or two depending on how things go.
Thanks for the interest and I’ll keep you posted on how everything goes!
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