White Label Aff Programs

What exactly are they and how do they work?

[ska_demon]

I have been an affiliate for quite a few years now with varying degrees of success. The thing is, I have just gone along with what I know and sort of avoided and ignored everything else.

Would someone care to explain exactly what a White Label program is, how it works and how you would go about jumping on this particular bandwagon.

Things are ticking along nicely at the moment but I need to do something different, learn something new, but don't really have any idea where to start.

Thanks

Ska

[laertes]

White Label program usually refers to the merchant giving you a turnkey website that clones their site or the sales part of it, which you can rebrand with your own label "mylabel.com". Sometimes the purchase links will go to a shopping cart within your site, but most often they are affiliate links to the merchant site.

Some of them will have dynamically updating datafeeds, some are static sites. One good program I can recommend who'll set you up with a white label site is eVitamins. Also many ringtone programs offer white label sites.

[Localizer]

White labels are very usefull to create your own look & feel, it's even possible to create your own brand with this technique.

I'm in the travelbusiness and using an affiliate booking-engine which is completely modified into my own style.

I'm able to say "ABCDE (my site)has cheap fares available now!"

Customer is thinking that he/she is buying from my company, but it isn't.

In my opinion a great way of doing business with minimised risks.

[ska_demon]

Thanks for the responses. I am getting a bit bored with building sites from scratch so this sounds like the way forward. I assume you can SEO the sites and basically do whatever you like with them.

Can anyone sticky me with any merchants that provide this service without having to have proof of existing traffic. I would prefer to find a good market and then go for the domain and hosting.

It doesn't matter what the market is. I have looked about but I can only find travel and ringtone type merchants.

Are there others.

Thanks again

Ska

[radix]

Would you mind sharing the info what are the travel white label programs you have found?

[brickwall]

I signed up for a couple of white label sites a few months back (one hosting, one personals) and had been very disappointed with the degree that you can "optimize" these sites to suit my "taste." Iam normally very good at generating traffic, and the premise of these white label sites I guess is to offload the development part from the affiliate so that he can concentrate on the marketing, but easily lost interest because I couldn't easily implement any of the design and structural changes I wanted to make on the basic site provided.

Iam sure there are a lot of better white labels out there. I too am tired of developing from scratch everytime I want to work on a new project. But if you are very meticulous on how you want your site to run, I guess it will be hard to find just the right white label to spend your marketing effort on.

[ska_demon]

Ok, I found a white label program and actually PAID to join it. Why? Because I have full control over every aspect of the design of the site. The only thing I dont have control over is the served content. I put the site up last week and with a few tweaks I am getting a little bit of SE traffic, even tho all the SE's are only listing the homepage. I will try and post more regarding what I am doing and how things are going so we can have a bit of a case study going with regard to the 'possible' successes or failures of going the white label route.

I won't mention the widget that I'm punting or its accessories ;oP

The Story So Far.

Bought the site and domain name.
Fiddled with the images and layout to give it a bit of appeal.
Changed the <title><keywords><description> tags to avoid getting busted on dupe content on the code.
Uploaded the site on 23/10/05.
Submitted to about 50 directories.(I'm not scared of the sandbox ;oP besides, i think i shall be relying on traffic from links rather than SE's for the time being.)
29/10/05 Homepage is listed in all major SE's and scored 2 direct hits each from G, Y and MSN searches. The search terms were broad-ish but hey the homepage ranks in the top 10 for those 3 word terms.

So far the site has been live for 7 days and has had 36 unique visitors, 6 from se's and the rest from the directory submissions.

Earnings to date: £1.54

I'll keep you posted

Ska

[brickwall]

Yes, ska keep us posted. =)

This might just revive my interest in white labels again.

And would you mind stickying me the details of this aff prog if possible. Thanks.

[ska_demon]

Thought I would just post a little update to the white label thread as I have been discussing it a little here. [webmasterworld.com...]

Google is now listing over 100 pages following the recent/continuing update. The site still has pr0 (I missed the update by a few days). I am getting 10-15 visitors per day from google and making an average of 3 sales every 2 days. OK it's nothing special at the moment but the site has paid for itself and is now in profit. MSN currently lists 45 pages and sends me 3-6 visitors per day. Yahoo lists the homepage only and sends no more than 3 per week. I have done nothing to the site since I uploaded it. It has now been submitted to about 50 directories and the backlinks now show up in the SE's.

Earnings to date £84.82

I will leave the site well alone for a couple of months as I don't want to work on it and then find it bombs for dupe content or something.

I will post again when something significant happens.

Ska