Building an empire on the internet
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!
If you happen to browse around the forums at Digital Point or other places, you will see lots of questions asking if you can make money from Commission Junction.
There are lots of people that make a pretty decent income, but how would you like to make $709,626.81? IN ONE MONTH?! There very well known Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemony.com did just that in March 2007.
Here is a screenshot of that, courtesy of S.eriously.com. If you need some inspiration, take a look through the rest of the that site, there are quite few big money earners utilizing different affiliate networks.
I recently wrote about eBay’s CEO leaving and how that might affect you. I opined that I didn’t think it would affect affiliates too much, and according to an article on TechCrunch, it looks like I was correct. The article takes a closer look at the fee structure change and it looks like an according to a quote from the AP,
selling a purse at auction for $25 would have cost the seller $1.91, including 60 cents for listing the item plus eBay’s commission of $1.31. Under the new structure, the seller would pay $2.74, including 55 cents to list the item plus a higher commission of $2.19.
So while eBay sellers may not be all that happy, it works out quite well for the rest of us. Looks like my timing for getting into the eBay niche store business is a good thing.
Meg Whitman has announced that she is leaving eBay after ten years of service. What does this mean if you are an eBay affiliate?
Initially not much. According to an interview that Meg Whitman and incoming CEO John Donahoe had on TechCrunch, it seems that they want to focus more on fixed-price items and expanding into other opportunities on the web, such as Facebook.
The recent change in fees has also been generating some interest lately. In 2007 eBay did a lot of experimenting with different fee structures in an attempt to get more people to sell online.
I don’t think this will have too much impact for the affiliates out there. While the entry fees will be lower, the smart eBay sellers will opt for the little extras that drive up the fee but also (hopefully) drive up the potential for a sell. Thus, the impact should be negligible in the long run, short of eBay lowering fees across the board.
Fairly simple. There are two approaches you can take. One, shoot for niches that have a high volume of sales. I know of one niche where an eBay store owner sells several thousand a day worth of items that cost less than $5. That is volume.
The second option is to go for niches that have good volume and tend to occur higher fees. Certain electronics come to mind.
A third option of course is to just keep building stores. The more the merrier right!
Last night I completed a big development milestone, moving me even closer to a beta release, perhaps closer than I had originally anticipated. I will be doing some more testing, on my own sites, either this weekend or early next week, but so far it is looking pretty good.
With this milestone met I have one other rather important feature to implement, then I will be focusing on building some templates. As I’ve mentioned before, I will probably start with a half dozen or so, but depending on how quickly that goes I might make some more before the beta testing proceeds.
OpenAds is a great ad serving software that powers many sites worldwide. While it is an open source software and thus free for anyone to install and use, they are now offering a hosted solution. For free.
This is perfect is you have a blog, niche site or whatever and don’t have the expertise to install the software or just don’t want the hassle.
I’ve been experimenting lately with the BANS software package. One of the first things that I did was create a dynamic sitemap.xml generator for the search engines. Being a nice guy, I’m letting anyone have it that would like it.
To install, download it from here. Extract the zip file and open the README file. It should be pretty simple. By default, it lists content pages with a change frequency of ‘weekly’ and store pages with a change frequency of ‘always’. You can change this by editing the PHP file.
You will need to edit the .htaccess file that is already included with BANS, but it is very easy to do and you just need to add a single line to it. It is all included in the instructions. NOTE: In the .htaccess file, the ordering of the RewriteRules IS important. The rule for the sitemap must come before the rules for the index page or else it won’t work.
If you have any suggestions or questions, please let me know!
Last week I read about Amazon’s Startup Challenge on Techcrunch and today I submitted my entry. At the moment I’m not going to divulge what exactly my solution is, but needless to say I’m pretty excited about it and I’ve been sitting on it for about a year or so and just didn’t have the motivation to move forward with it. Well, now I do.
Regardless of how far I get in the challenge I’m fully going to build this thing and give a go. I have a good portion of the code written for it so I just need to dust it off, polish it up a bit here and there and then somehow market the hell out of it. Who knows, maybe I’ll get a Techcrunch feature 
