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Those of you that are experienced, please post what you'd do if you had $5000 to use for Affiliate Marketing. What are the steps you'd take, etc.
You don't need to post a specific market that you'd work with since most people like to keep that private.
Anything goes here folks :) Lets give them newbies some ideas :)
I'll post what I'd do after I get off work :)
As for site development, I would try to pick a profitable niche market and build a large content site. I would spend several hundred on unique articles, a lot on link building (including buying links) to help my organic search results... the rest on developing the site, newsletters and maybe free email if it "fits" the site theme. Build a community website and you can't go wrong.
Pete.
You can either go the PPC or the SEO route.
For PPC you will learn a lot quickly
For SEO I would use the money mostly to buy articles.
C.K.
2) Buy yourself some $10 pages of content.
3) Throw 1 and 2 up on a $100/year host.
4) Spend at least $1k - $2k testing out keyword conversions.
5) Buy yourself a hand full of $100 links
And definitely set some of it aside for the next conference so you can buy a round. ;)
A thought I had a while ago was to spend like $1000 on articles (should be able to get about 100 articles for that amount) on a pharmaceutical portal. Spend another $1000 on links, and then a bunch more to drive traffic to the site. Using adsense you should probably be able to drive a small profit, and then once the site gets indexed and starts ranking well (6 months down the road?), then you sell some text ad space to all those pharma sites out there that are fighting for the sales. You wouldn't technically be selling ad space, you'd be boosting their search engine power since you'd establish yourself as an authority and strictly limit the number of outbound links :)
Buying an already established site is a great way to break into the AM market in a big way right off the bat without the unknowns of launching a new site.
And yes, there are many "decent" sites out there for less than 5K if you look hard enough...and you CAN improve these sites in order to make more money.
Dave.
About 4 months ago I sold one for $100. I was ranked top 10 in Yahoo and MSN for ALL of my keywords, and Google for only one keyword... it was making a small profit but I got bored and didn't have time to play with it since I recently moved...
Next time you have 5 minutes free, take a quick look on ebay... search for "established website" and you'll get a ton of results to go through.
PS: If you're willing to put in the hours to build a good website, you could grab a good domain name at afternic, they have a section called the "bazaar" (I think that's how it's spelled)... everything from $5-200.
I'm already turning a decent profit after being in the game for a few minutes...But the advice in this thread could take me to another level...Yall rock!
[edited by: jcoronella at 5:56 am (utc) on Mar. 27, 2005]
My main business is mail order. I don't know anything about affiliate marketing and selling ad space. Therefore this is the route I have taken and I have now got over 60 sites.
It looks like Ebay is a bad place to buy websites, or am I wrong?
Most of the sites listed only state "potential" earnings if you sell "X" products per day. Leave those alone! There are no guaranteed earnings with those sites and they are usually just cookie cutter which will require a LOT of work from you.
I almost bought a site on Ebay that could have netted me nearly $1000/month with little effort because it was already established, receiving traffic from all 3 major search engines and everything was set up already. All I would have had to do was update the site a few times per week. Unfortunately, someone outbid me at the last moment. The person who one though, will have that site paid off in just 5 months if current traffic persists... Why do these people sell these sites for good prices? In my case, the site owner was sick and couldn't work on the site anymore and wanted to unload it. Other reasons may include: They don't have enough time anymore, they are tired of running it....etc. There's gold to be found when looking for established sites! Just be patient until a good one comes up, figure out how much you're willing to pay for it and then bid away :)
Dave.
I have quickly glanced there a few times too.
What I usually do is just skim down the page and look for the websites with like 10+ bids. Usually other people can see the spam and don't bid on that stuff heavily. By looking at the # of bids, you can generally stop and see that the site is actually established or something.
C.K.
The other thing that helps is setting the minimum bid to $100 or $200. This weeds out quite a bit of the junk. There's enough people looking through the sites that you can be sure you aren't eliminating the good sites.
Checking ebay twice a week with these 2 methods will take very little time, and if you have cash ready, can be a great way to get a site.
I do as Conroy does as well. I set minimum price from $1000 to $100000. That way most of the "chaff" gets filtered. You still get dreamers posting domains for sale for one million as well though....
Dave.
1. I bought a lyrics site for $6000, it was making $750 a month and then the earning tanked after the Allegra update by Google this February. It had only made $2800 and it will take years to recoup the rest.
2. I bought a gigantic forum that uses 250GB in bandwidth a month. I found that I had to provide a dedicated server for it which was more than it was drawing in in terms of income.
3. Finally this is truely a horrific experience and should serve as a warning
I bought a site and I asked the previous owner to install it for it. I gave him root access and he went on to delete all the files on the server maliciously. This matter had since been reported to the FBI.
When I refused to pay a monthly admin fee, him promptly shut off the site. Apparently he had install a backdoor in vBulletin. Not only that, he managed to steal the domain back. I am still not completely sure what happened. Registerfly allows the creation of subaccounts and I think I was fooled.
To cap it all, this site was owned by another company before and this person did the same to them. It looks that the sale to us was not valid in the first place.
I feel that buying sites is definitely not recommended for newbies. If you are a newbie, you should get some advice from more experienced webmasters before you buy. I would recommend that you start off with a budget of less than $1000 and then increase it as you get more experience.
I am not sure whether you can use the no. of bids to judge a site on eBay. For many sites, most bids come in within 5 minutes of the close of auction. I would look at sites with a PR of at least 4, and those that have a good amount of free search engine traffic. After my experience lyrics site, I am going to restrict my budget to less than $2500 per site.
No wonder you are wonder you are weary Derek... Sounds like you have been through the ringer.
C.K.
Dave.
Good learning experiences for him and us, but his conclusion:
After my experience lyrics site, I am going to restrict my budget to less than $2500 per site.
wow. This is what happens when you jump into something not really knowing what you are doing, you end up reaching conclusions like this.
I've seen some other experienced members say they never buy anything over $1000. The problem with this is, at this range, all you get is a site maybe past the sandbox. It still requires serious work to make it work for most of us.
If you start paying good amounts for sites, 10k+ or so, you get into sites that are established in the search engines and generally aren't going to drop off the face of the earth in the SEs next week.
If you buy 4, $2500 sites, they are going to be extremely volatile. Out of 4, you'll probably lose 1 or 2, have 1 not really be that profitable, and 1 do OK and make its money back.
Instead, you could buy one high quality site, expand it and make it into something worthwhile. It will be more established and much less volatile (it should be if you purchase correctly, and then know what to do with the site once you get it).
This mindset of quantity over quality is overwhelming on this forum (100 sites @ $5/day, 1000 sites with 10000 pages each etc. etc.) and IMO the quality needs to be emphasized much more. Does a million little sites work, yes for the people who really can automate and churn them out. I think the vast majority of people would be much better off going for just a few high quality sites.
What it boils down to is if you think long term or short term. This 100 sites @ $5/day is a short term mentality - churn and burn. What you are saying to the world is "I don't expect this to last for very long" and as a result, it doesn't. Not to say this method won't work for some time to come. The problem is that most people make 10-20 sites at $5/day each and don't go any further because they can't/don't know how to automate. From what I've seen, there are a lot more people making big money from a few sites than from thousands.
Apparently he did the same things to the previous owner, who happend to be a large online games company with offices in 3 countries. I have been in contact with them and they confirmed that they were scammed.
Therefore even with their huge expertise, they were fooled. There are just some very unscrupulous people out there and you have to be careful.
The lyrics site was just plainly unexpected. It went from 4000 visitors to 250 a day. Even now, there is no change in the PR, no. of backlinks or the no. of pages indexed. I think it was hit by duplicate content filters so that it is getting interference from lower-ranking sites with the same lyrics. Anyway, I will get my money back eventually......
The $2500 is my personal limit based on my own expertise and experience, but I will go over that for sites with PR6 or 7. Being in Hong Kong, there are real difficulties in getting redress through legal means should large purchases go wrong. If I were in the US, perhaps I would be more aggressive in buying larger sites.
I tend to stay away from sites that depend heavily on PPC for traffic since it would be extremely easy for the previous owner to put up similar sites. Forums do get a lot of recurrent traffic but their CTR is very low. I do not know any programming and therefore I tend to shy away from sites that are constructed with lots of custom programming.
Since I do not have time, I have subcontracted out the running of the sites I bought for a percentage cut in revenue.
