My friend and fellow blogger Andrew Wee has a great post based on an awesome thread of comments on my last Affiliate Summit post.

Andrew has some really great insight on how to crank out content sites that generate $1k/month-$2k/month. Andrew answers a burning question a lot of people have: How do you find good writers (especially overseas) that will write quality (ie sticky) content.

Here’s what Andrew has to say:

“The reality is that you will get what you pay for. Proven quality costs.

A workaround is to find new guys on sites like elance, workaholics or rent a coder, who’ve yet to establish themselves and might be willing to do quality work on the cheap in order to build some positive feedback.

If you’re going along this approach, you might like to farm out a batch of 3 articles, and solicit 10-20 freelancers to work on your project. You could then do a ’survivor’ style elimination and work with your favorite 2-3 writers.

The important thing to note is that you need to spend time scanning and headhunting quality. You might be really lucky and have a talented freelancer fall into your lap, but it’s not likely to happen.”

And that’s great advice!

Finding good people, whether it’s a content writer, programmer, graphics designer, is a matter of going through the numbers. I’m personally willing to pay more for quality content, however, they’re lots of excellent writers out there that will crank out great content for you for $5 an article. You just need the patience and perseverance to find them.

However, there’s one really powerful shortcut, it’s called crowdsourcing. You can do this on sitepoint.com.

What sitepoint.com allows you to do is setup a contest for anything web design/graphic design related. You set a cash prize for the contest, and let talented web designers from around the world submit their entries.

You pick the best entry and only pay that person!

The superaffiliatemindset.com logo was done through sitepointe.com, it only cost me $200. And my company found a very talented logo designer!

They REALLY should have crowdsourcing for writers.

Let’s look at the following example:

Johnny Affiliate has a site selling “widgets” and has setup his campaigns with tightly structured adgroups and keywords using the word “widget” in both his text ad and display URL to improve overall relevancy.

Adgroup: “Blue Widgets”

Keywords: “blue widgets, buy blue widgets, cheap blue widgets, etc…”

Landing Page: Johnny sends his visitors to a landing page selling “blue widgets”.

This is a common example of how a lot of affiliates structure their campaigns but in the never-ending quest to lower bid prices and stand above the competition, we need to go further.

So how could we improve on Johnny’s campaign/landing pages and become even more relevant?

Domain aliases for display URL’s and landing pages.

Purchasing multiple domains and setting up domain aliases is a quick way to become more relevant in the eyes of Google AND your potential customer. For example, Johnny could purchase “Blue-Widget-World.com, Red-Widget-World.com, etc.” and use these domain names for each seperate adgroup. The benefits to this is that his display URL is  targeted to the customer looking for “blue widgets” and his keywords are in the display URL as well, helping his overall Google relevancy.

So what is a “domain alias” and how do I set it up?

Domain aliasing allows additional domain names to lead to the exact same location of your original website. For example, if Johnny is hosting his domain name “widget-world.com” and added a domain alias for “blue-widget-world.com” on his web server, then “blue-widget-world.com” and “widget-world.com” would take the visitor to the exact same landing page as his original site “widget-world.com”. The difference being the domain name in the visitors browser window would reflect whatever domain name was used to send the visitor to his site.

We can make the same site become seperate “niche” sites, all with one code base. Most hosting companies provide a web panel for your hosting account which will allow you to add multiple domain aliases, and then re-direct them to your main site. The next trick is to display the matching domain name on your webpage. This can be done by setting a simple variable name.

For example, if your web host is running PHP, you could add the following code snippet at the top of your “index.php” landing page:

Now if the domain name Johnny used in his destination URL to send visitors to was “http://wwww.blue-widget-world.com”, the above code would recoginize the word “blue”in the domain name and set the “$DomainName” variable to match that domain -same thing with “http://wwww.red-widget-world.com” etc. If it doesn’t find the word “blue” or “red” in the URL, it will just default to Johnny’s main domain name, “widget-world.com”.

He can display the domain anywhere on his web pages simply by adding the code below:

<? echo $DomainName; ?>

The code: ‘”Welcome to <? echo $DomainName; ?>! We have thousands of widgets at 70% off!” would display to the vistor as: “Welcome to Blue-Widget-World.com! We have thousands of widgets at 70% off!” or “Welcome to Red-Widget-World.com! We have thousands of widgets at 70% off!”

Johnny can now send his “blue widget” customers to “blue-widget-world.com”, his “red widget” customers to “red-widget-world.com” etc. without having multiple websites. He has turned one website into multiple “niche” sites that target his customers directly.

I’m meeting up with, Jeff, a good friend, business partner, and very successful affiliate in his own right. We’re actually scoping out some real estate properties to invest in the downtown Austin area.

We hope to purchase 2-4 hot properties through our limited partnership. Although you’ll never get the type of return with real estate as you can with affiliate marketing, it’s a great conservative long term investment.

This will also be a great opportunity for me to take a much needed vacation from the world of internet marketing! I’m having two of my business partners, Tom & Melanie, step in as guest writers until next Wednesday, where I’ll resume the daily post.

Tom is an SEO & social media expert, he’s also a world class web designer who has worked with the Who’s Who out of Silicon Valley. Melanie, owns a highly successfully writing company, she’s an absolute pro at writing copy and an SEO expert. She worked with several big name internet marketers and is privy to their techniques and secrets.

Tom and Melanie are really the secret to my success, I want you to read every post that they write the next couple days, I promise that you’ll be blown away by their insight and expertise. I have learned a TON from them, and I know you will too.