Day 2
On day 2 I had a chance to see Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney), and Lee Dod’s presentation on Monetizing Communities. This talk was basically about how to develop viral sites (forum/membership sites in particular) that slowly overtime build up a solid membership base all from free search engine traffic.
These sites are monetized with well chosen and well placed contextual advertising.
It was a fascinating talk. In fact, I been talking to Tom (my business partner) about purchasing sites like these. A well monetized site that has a large active membership base can be a solid residual source of revenue for years to come.
After the talk, I had a chance to take a picture with Shoemoney…
Shoemoney is really a very nice guy, always willing to help people.
The next blockbuster talk was by Kris Jones, CEO of Pepperjam, on the “Confluence of Search and Affiliate Marketing.” What an AWESOME talk! He talked about the power of search arbitrage, and gave an excellent outline on how a newbie affiliate can get started in the world of search arbitrage.
As you know search arbitrage, or ppc affiliate marketing, is my specialty! So I was very excited to hear the CEO of Pepperjam talking highly of this method of affiliate marketing.
LESSONS LEARNED
At dinner that night I had a chance to speak with some other very successful super affiliates. I talked to one guy who was running 500 affiliate offers at one time, making $20-$50/day from each one. WOW!
Not only this, Kris Jones had mentioned during his talk that he became a super affiliate by promoting 2000 affiliate programs, generating $50/month profit for each! Amazing.
This approach to affiliate marketing is definitely contrary to everything I’ve been teaching. That is, you should focus on a few big affiliate offers and build several authority sites and work towards generating a $100k+/month per affiliate offer.
That’s what’s cool about affiliate marketing, there’s so many creative ways to make it work!
Nevertheless, I will continue to advocate building a handful of affiliate sites instead of 1000s. Here why:
- Long Term Profits - once you build an established large affiliate site, it more likely to make long term profits than a small campaign making $50/day profit
- Google’s landing page “quality” score - Since paid search and natural search are converging, small mini sites won’t last long term-especially on Google
- Competitive advantage – having just a few big affiliate sites gives you the ability to continually improve your sites, split test your landing pages to improve conversions, revamp the site design every six months, etc, etc. With 1000s of sites this could be a near impossible task, certainly impossible for most affiliates. With rising ppc costs, continually improving site conversions is a necessity!
- Low maintenance – Once you have a large site optimized, maintaining it is easy, especially compared to monitoring the performance of 1000s of smaller affiliate sites
Would you rather try to keep 1000 plates spinning or just a couple?
affilaite summit kris jones monetizing websites pepperjam shoemoney
Hi Amit,
Definiely a variety of different approaches out there.
To add on to your point about authority sites, you can build up the brand value of rich content sites and have the ability to flip a big, established content site, in the same way Lee flips forums too.
I think there’s nothing quite like building up a PlentyOfFish.com or a eHarmony.com and selling it for a nice stack of cash…
Amit,
Thanks for attending my presentation and for sharing with me some of your perspectives on affiliate marketing.
From my experience over the last eight years I’ve found that those individuals that are able to build large authority websites are programmers / web developers or businesses with skilled programmers /web developers on staff.
Think about it – some of the names you mentioned like Marcus from plentyoffish and Jeremy Schoemaker from Shoemoney Media…these guys are skilled programmers and / or have skilled programmers on their staff. Moreover, like yourself, these programmers also have impressive marketing insight – that’s key.
Kudos to you guys!
However, the typical entrepreneur does not have programming and web development skills – that’s a fact, which are essential to building the kind of websites you mentioned in your talk at Affiliate Summit and on your blog.
The truth is you can make a ton of money by building out authority websites and monetizing them with affiliate offers – there’s no doubt about that!
However, I’ve yet to meet someone who has done this successfully and isn’t an experienced, skilled programmer / web developer – these skills are learnable, but not easily learned.
From my experience speaking at conferences, I typically advocate that affiliate marketing search arbitragers find something that works on a small scale, replicate it, and then scale it.
What I advocate is about approach and discipline, not technical skills.
For instance, if the affiliate can figure out a way to generate $100 per month profit from 1,000 merchants that’s $100K per month profit, $1.2 million profit per year.
During my presentation at Affiliate Summit I offered a very simple strategy to do this, but it will require discipline. The tip was to develop an affiliate strategy around trademark typos. Develop your campaigns around misspelled trademarks, not the actual trademark itself, and either direct link using the affiliate tracking URL or build out landing pages and send the traffic through there.
I provide insight on how to build those landing pages that should pass Google’s Quality Score algorithm at http://www.affiliatesummit.com/2007eastpreso/5a-The-Confluence-of-Search-and-Affiliate-Marketing.pdf
The typo analogy is only meant as an example of how an average entrepreneur, with or without technical skill, can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing search arbitrage by doing something simple and scaling it.
My guess is that over time your presentation will appeal mostly to people who have the technical skills to build out the kind of authority websites you speak of – I will be there to listen because that approach is very exciting and over time potentially extremely lucrative.
Either way, there is a ton of money to be made by entrepreneurs willing to understand and apply proven affiliate marketing search arbitrage skills.
It was my pleasure meeting you in Miami!
Hi Kris,
Again you’re absolutely right. When I first got started and didn’t have a team of people and expert programmers, I was doing direct linking to the merchant and focusing on a handful high converting keywords.
I recommend direct linking to newbie affiliates as a great way to learn adwords. I actually launched 16 or so campaigns when I got started, although most of them failed I learned a ton about adwords and affiliate marketing.
In fact I quit my day job with around 10 simple one page affiliate sites all in one niche but targeting different sub-niches.
Only after that did I start building a team and focus on building larger sites.
The longer I’m in this business the more my affiliate marketing strategy has evolved. That’s what makes this business exciting for me, every year I’m always doing something different!
Look forward to speaking to you at future conferences.
Very interesting post and comments. Amit, I like your approach of creating a few high-authority sites and have begun adopting it with a new market I’m getting into. I have the advantage of being a web programmer, so having the ablility to code my own sites, making it very attractive as Kris suggested. But, I’m also wary of putting all my eggs in one basket(or 2 or 3), so I’m not going to completely quit sending clicks straight to the merchant either. I guess that is my way of diversifying. My weakness is the lack of marketing insight. I’ve actually thought about taking ‘Marketing 101′ at a local college. Any suggestions for someone in my position how has little marketing knowledge?
Hey Brent,
You probably won’t learn much in a college Marketing class. I took “Marketing 300″ last year as a required course, but hoping that I would be able to apply some of it to my online marketing. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Maybe “major level” marketing classes would teach some good concepts, but a lot of intro and intermediate college courses are, in my opinion, a waste of time.
I think you would be much better off going to Barnes & Nobles or Amazon.com and picking up a few books on “direct marketing”. That is probably the area that is most applicable to affiliate marketing.
Hi Brent,
I totally agree with Derek, don’t waste your time with college marketing courses. I recommend Perry Marshall’s Ultimate Guide to Adwords. It discusses both Adwords and essential direct marketing principles.
As for diversification, I would not worry too much about it. If you build your campaign properly, and choose a solid market and promotion (that won’t expire next week) you’ll be in good shape.
My company’s strategy is to go into a new market every 3-6 months or so, and revamp an existing campaign (optimize and improve conversions) every 6 months or so. This is includes once a month or twice a month campaign “maintenance.” I’ll discuss this in a future blog post in more detail.
Hi Amit,
Another fantastic post. You are a generous and great man! The whole one-page site vs. content-heavy site with offers seems to be a very fundamental question. It seems to me that as more people get into the affiliate game and start throwing up landing pages and bidding on the same keywords, the integrity of Google’s search results will begin to decline. I have heard multiple people complain about how spammy Google’s SERPS have already gotten and that could really hurt Google’s business model over time as well as all honest affiliates who want to fundamentally add value to the web and not just make a quick buck.
The problem with the content sites is of course maintaining them and adding fresh content which you have addressed very well in many of your posts. But how much can you say about ringtones? Or Blockbuster offers? After awhile, you may hit a wall.
Have you ever built a large content site only to find out there wasn’t any kind of market for what you were offering? Pretty frustrating especially if you’re paying others to do all your coding and writing.
Love those posts, man! School is in session.
Peace,
Tim
Hi Tim,
Thanks for the kind words.
Yes maintaining a content site is a lot of work if you don’t have a team in place. When I build a large site I usually do it strictly for PPC at first. Adding 15-20 articles, privacy policy, about us, to make Google happy. And anywhere from 1-30 targeted ppc landing pages.
Once the campaign is making strong profits from PPC, I have my team add a few hundred articles to the site every month and start building a real content site.
I’ll be honest, unless you’re an SEO wizard don’t expect many sales from free traffic compared to what you’ll get with PPC traffic. I make 95% of my sales from PPC traffic, and hope to make a larger % of sales from free traffic a few years down the road as my site matures and has substantial content.
Good post and great comments.
Sorry for cross commenting here, but I’d like to comment on Kris’ comment.
Kris, you say that in order to build a large authority website you need to be a skilled programmer or hire a programmer.
I fully agree, but I would think that driving PPC traffic to 1000 or so affiliate offers would require a sophisticated backend, which would also require significant programming skills.
I just can’t imagine that you could keep that many campaigns alive – let alone monitor them – without an automated process.
So dare I say that you need to be a skilled programmer or employ a programmer/webmaster either way you?
Steve
Hi,
Content sites take time to get indexed, but if you include blogging and other social media into the mix, you can get them indexed within 48 hours.
As for generating quality content sites, you can do it pretty easily, if you outsource the content generation.
I have my own inhouse content creation team, but if I were looking at generating an authority site, I could outsource the work at about $5 a page from places like elance.com or need-an-article.com.
A 100-page site would only cost $500, and I’d be able to recover that in 1-2 months in a “worst case scenario”.
[There are some insider strategies to maintaining the quality control and knowing how and whom to outsource to. A newbie content creator might get burned a couple of times at the outset.]
My content sites typically generate about $1,000 – $2,000 per month, so it’s typically about a 1-2 week ROI for me.
Then it’s merely a matter of rinse and repeat.