Internet Gangsters

So if you haven’t heard of BANS or Build a Niche Store, it is basically a software/script that creates a storefront completely based on eBay links. It uses Commission Junctions affiliate program with eBay to give you commissions per sale. So basically you find a niche, purchase and setup BANS, tell the software what category to use on eBay to populate the store and that’s it. The software will automatically pull the sub-categories from eBay and populate the website with all the auctions that can be found under it. The idea here is to find a good niche, as always, once you’ve found that, the software basically does the rest. It has many good tools for SEO and to help your site gain some popularity. Some niches will produce sales as soon as you set them up and others will take some work. I purchased the software last week and have since setup 2 BANS sites. 1 of the site is based off of another site I have and gets most of it’s traffic (for right now) from that site. They are both in the same niche but cater to different parts of the niche. The other site I set up doesn’t seem to be doing as well, but I’m not going to give up yet, so we’ll see. In less than a week of setting up the 1st site, it has yet to make a sale, but I have a feeling that will change soon. So I will keep everyone updated on how this experiment is working out.

I just wanted to make a post about my best day so far, which was yesterday. Most of the money was made on one site, which was started at the end of December. I think I found a pretty good, unsaturated niche with a lot of potential for making money. It has only been averaging around 500-1000 hits a day, but I’m offering something that people will come back for daily, which is what you want to do. If you can gain loyal visitors that will continue to come back and use your site, then you’ll have that steady income for awhile. Now yesterday was in no way a ground breaking number, but being the best single day I’ve had so far.

For all of my sites I only spent about $8 on advertising through adwords and msn adcenter yesterday and profited ~$140. In one day for only about an hours worth of work updating all the sites in the morning isn’t bad. Hopefully this number will continue to grow and I can monetize this new site a little better to maybe pull a little more cash out of it, but I’ll keep everyone updated.

According to a study done by Starcom USA, 6% of people account for 50% of ad-clicks and banner clicks on the internet. They claim that it’s mostly users between the ages of 25-44 who live in a household with an income of $40,000 or less. These people are apparently more likely to click on ads about gambling, auctions and career services… It’s an interesting read and not too long so I figured you guys might want to check it out. Now if you create a site that doesn’t rely on banner ads to bring in revenue this wouldn’t apply to you, since if a person doesn’t know they are clicking an affiliate link/ad it’s not really the same.

source: Starcom MediaVest Group

If you’re just getting into this internet money making game you probably have an idea of what Google Adsense is. It’s those ads you see on millions of pages throughout the world wide web. They base what ads they show on the content of your site. So if you’re writing about flying fish or other sea life, you are going to end up with ads about sea life on your site. This gives the readers a reason to click. It would make no sense to show ads about midget wrestling on a site about fish would it? well I guess it depends on what the midgets are doing with fish, but usually that’s not the case.

So what is Adbrite? Adbrite is also a company that does the same kinds of ads that Google Adsense does plus a lot more. They will display text ads based on the content of your website as well as try to sell banner space via their marketplace for you. So it’s similar to text-link-ads which I wrote about the other day, only with banners. But that isn’t all they offer. Unlike adsense you can also do inline advertising with Adbrite. Inline ads are ads that appear as links within your content, but usually they appear with a double underline and when rolled over a small advertisement comes up and when someone clicks that, you get paid. Again this is all done automatically by Adbrite by placing a small piece of code on your site.

Another cool feature that I use a lot on my sites is InVideo and BritePics. What these do is take a video or picture that you have designated and allows you to put an ad right in the video or image. It doesn’t really interfere with the object you attach it to, it displays the ad in a drop down at the top that disappears after about 3 seconds. So it’s non-intrusive and doesn’t get in the way of the actual video/picture. Here is an example of a working ad using BritePic. It’s a picture of two midgets playing golf with the advertisements setup for the keywords, midget and golf.

So as you can see the ad appears just above the image for a few seconds then disappears. It can be brought back if you roll over the little menu at the top. I’ve also embedded the optional menu bar from adbrite at the bottom which allows your readers to embed the same image on their site. You can also set images up to be clickable in order to resize, it’s all very simple.

So if you don’t want to use Adsense for whatever reason, maybe Adsense denied you because of the content of your site, or something like that. Or you just want to try some of these other cool ways of advertising while still using Adsense, then give Adbrite a try.

So, here we are. You have your site all set up and you are ready to take over the internet, but you cant do that without content. Content is king. How do you write engaging content you ask? Well, you could rip off from other sites, which is generally a bad idea and frowned upon by your fellow interneters, so instead maybe let those other sites serve as an inspiration for your writing. Ultimately this is the sort of stuff that will make or break your site, since once visitors come, you need to provide them with a reason to stay. Depending on what your website is about, there is usually some static information about that topic that you can use as reliable subject matter.

For the sake of this article lets assume, you have a site about Scuba diving. There are several different static content pages you could add to your site. Something like common scuba locations would be good, since all new scuba-ers are going to be looking for good places to dive. You could also have a page on how to get certified, because that sort of information does not change too frequently; also good for SEO due to the general keywords in a How-To article.  Also maybe something like general saftey procedures for scuba.  As you can see, this is all good general information related to the topic.  It is static and will provide you a good starting ground for your posts on whatever.  If at first you are not seeing the type of traffic you are looking for don’t give up.  Generating traffic is not an easy thing to do for a beginner, especially if you have a difficult niche.  Remember not to get discouraged because this is one of those areas where persistence pays off.

If you’ve ever been on Google or Yahoo you have no doubt seen the “Sponsored Ads” on the top and right side of every single search results screen. I’m sure you’ve wondered how you can get your website there, well the beauty of it is anyone can, if you’re willing to pay. The sponsored ads on these search engines are what we call PPC or Pay Per Click ads and obviously you must pay for them, but how much you pay is determined by how much other people are paying. The main ones that I use are Google Adwords and MSN Adcenter, although I would also recommend Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) service although I have no direct experience with them a lot of people do.

This is by far the easiest way to get traffic to a new site while you’re adding content. Now remember your ad placement on the side/top is determined by how much you are willing to spend vs. how much your keyword competitors are willing to spend. Say for example you have a site dedicated to bologna, you love bologna and everything about it and you want people to know. So you decide you’re going to pay for some ads on google using adwords. So you go in and setup your campaign using the keyword “bologna”. Now just from going to google and searching for “bologna” I can tell you that you’re price per click is not going to be very expensive, nor does it have to be since you’re only competing with 3 other people that are paying for ads. So in this case you could probably only spend .01 cent per click and have your ad at the bottom of the 3 ads on the first page. First page is key, even if you’re not the first ad to appear on the right, at least make sure you’re on the first page or it’s really not worth it.

Now if you had a site dedicated to “cell phones” and you want to get noticed for the search term “cell phones” on Google, it’s going to cost you a lot more since there are a lot of companies out there buying for the top spot/first page on the sponsored ads for cell phones. This could cost you a lot more than .01 cents a click, probably upwards of .50-1.00 per click depending on where you want to be in the results (these numbers are just my estimates based on sites I’ve setup campaigns for using similar keywords). And at .50 cents a click those could ad up quite fast if you’re not careful.

This is the same basic idea with all the big PPC publishers. The idea is that you set a specific price you want to spend per click, then you set a maximum price you’re willing to spend per day/week/month and then you sit back and let the search terms do the work for you. This is a great way to bring in visitors if you know that you’ll be able to get clicks on your ads or be able to generate sales with your affiliate programs. At first you probably won’t see too many conversions until you get more content (if it’s a new site) but you should see a definite improvement.

As I said before I don’t have any experience with Yahoo Publisher so I cannot comment on how well it works, but I have read that it is very good and I am going to look into getting into it. Currently I am using Google Adwords along with MSN Adcenter for my PPC campaigns. I have found that Google Adwords generates more clicks but it seems like MSN Adcenter brings in more conversions. People must use MSN when they are looking to buy something specifically, where as everyone uses Google so people could be searching for anything at anytime. The key is to turn paid clicks into conversions. There’s no sense in paying for ads if you’re not going to get anything in return.

A little update on my text-link-ads.com experiment. I guess I should have read the emails they were sending me a little more carefully before I started to write them off as not being able to sell ads for my site, but I received an email today saying that the site I setup was approved at that ads should start appearing on my site soon. They have set the price at $15/mo for the site I sent them, which is totally fine by me. Everyone always wants more, but you have to start somewhere. Now if I would have done this a few months ago when the site was really hot I’m sure I would have made more money, but oh well you live and learn. So this is good news, I’ll keep everyone updated on whether or not anyone decides to buy an ad on the site.

On a side note, I tried to get my forum approved by the site and they denied me right out of the box. They didn’t even say “yes, until further approval” it was just flat out “nope” and they review sites every Monday and would look at it again… riiight, we’ll see about that. The forum gets more hits than the site that got approved and I would place the links as the 2nd post of every thread page so I don’t understand the problem, but we’ll see, maybe they will approve it at a later date.

So at this point I’m going to have to recommend text-link-ads , but we’ll see how the actual sales go.

So in my random forum searching today I came across a few people asking about a site called PopShops. I had never heard of it before, which doesn’t mean a whole lot since I just recently got into the affiliate programs, but it sounded interesting. It’s a site that links up to your Commission Junction, LinkShare.com and a few other affiliate websites and it allows you to create “stores” using the products that you can promote through the affiliate programs.

So recently I started a site using a method that pulls auctions from eBay and displays them on a page and when people click the eBay auctions you will get a commission based on the final eBay costs of a winning bid. I will write a more in depth post about this method and what software/scripts I’ve been using soon, but I just wanted to give you an idea of what the site currently does. So this site that I decided to experiment with PopShops on has recently been getting a lot more hits than last month but not many conversions with eBay. So I felt like it needed a little change so that it didn’t just look like I was pushing eBay ads since obviously people weren’t buying this product from eBay.

So that is the basic background of the site and what I’ve started adding to it to make it seem more like an actual store rather than a blog with eBay auctions. Pop Shops offers 3 different packages that give you different options. First there is a free option, which allows you to setup 10 “stores” and gives you javascript as a way to implement the code on your page, which isn’t very SEO friendly, but if you have good content outside of the products it could work for you and not cost anything up front. The 2nd option is $5/mo which is the one I opted for. This one gives you an unlimited amount of stores you can setup and gives you more options for the code, like PHP, HTML, and ASP. These methods will help with SEO since the actual text from the product descriptions will be visible to the search engine crawlers. This option also removes the “Powered by PopShops” link that will appear at the bottom of your “store” module on your page. This and the SEO friendly code were the 2 big reasons I opted to pay for the software rather than use the free one. If people know the products are strictly affiliate links they are less likely to click them, so let them find out after they have already clicked the link. There is also the Autofeed option which allows you to create a ton of pages automatically based on similar products you’ve already chosen. I haven’t really played around with this aspect of it yet, but I’m sure I will soon. The third option gives you XML feeds as well as another SEO tool that you can read about on the site and it costs $30/mo.

I don’t have too much to report yet as far as how click throughs have done since implementing the new software, but I will keep everyone updated on what happens with this. I’m really impressed with the whole setup they have going on and would highly recommend you at least try out the free version if you want to run some sort of affiliate store.

So, you found your way to IG somehow, you started reading some of our articles and now you are saying to yourself…how do I get started? Well the first thing you have to do is pick a niche. Now, this sounds signifigantly easier than it actually is. What you are gunning for here is an under-saturated area that you are confident you know enough about to actually drive traffic to a worthwhile site. Unless you are just reposting 100% Ebay links, which in theory works too, but is not what we are talking about for the sake of this article.. Anyways, pick something. Anything. For the sake of this article we are going to pick used guitars. So, say I want to hawk some used guitars via Ebay, generate some coin on adsense and try and create a foothold for myself on the internet. Now, you need a domain. A .com works best for obvious reasons, but if you cant find anything that ends it .com it is alright to use .net, .org and .info. I’d stay away from .biz because people are going to assume its a business. After that, you are going to want to install Wordpress, or any other blogging/CMS software you want. Next you are going to want to sign up for Google’s Adsense, which will give you a few cents everytime someone clicks on one of their links. Shopping Ads is also a nice and easy place to get some Ebay auctions on your website without too much work. If you are interested in a more indepth program, you can sign up for Commision Junction, which is, for the most part, the status quo for this type of stuff. After you get all of this stuff set up, you are almost ready to go! All you need now is some content. Part 2 of Getting Started will be all about writing valuable and engaging content and keeping people coming back to your site. Check back soon for the second part of the article, where we will talk all about your website on guitars.

One of the keys to getting your website higher on the search engine results is to have a lot of other sites linking back to you, but how are you supposed to get links without paying a lot of money? Submit your site to free directories, that’s how. Directories are sites that basically just have a ton of categories full of links, just like the yellow pages in a phone book. Yahoo has one of the best directories, but it’s not free to get your site entered and they usually won’t accept sites that are straight up affiliate sites. If you have some cash, there are a bunch of good paying directory sites that you can find out there, but this post is about the FREE directories out there that will accept your site no matter what. Yes these directories probably will not get you too many hits from people actually clicking your link in them, but what they will do is give you one-way links that the search engines will see, and this is key.

Search engine ranking is determined by a lot of different factors; keywords, links in, popularity, etc. So once you’ve made sure your site is up to par with it’s keywords and all the SEO you can do on your own, it’s time to move on to building links that point to your site and the easiest way to do this is free directories. Link Rain has an incredible list of over 500 free directories that you can submit your site to. Link Rain itself is a directory that you must pay to get into and is for legitimate sites. So you can always go that route as well and pay them to get your site listed, or you can go down this list and start adding your site to a few directories everyday.

By doing this the search engines will see more and more links in to your site and it will help you move up higher on the results pages for whatever keywords you are trying to get higher with. Also, make sure when you submit to these directories, your titles and descriptions contain the keyword you are working towards. For example, if you have a site that sells purple dildos and you want to rank higher when someone searches for “purple dildos” or “adult fun toys” then you want to make sure that you put those words in your description that you submit to the directories. And if you can put it in the link and title as well. Anywhere you put those keywords is going to help. But don’t write a description that talks about “leather and lace” if you’re not trying to help your search results for those terms, it’s pretty common sense.

For you lazy people out there, there is another option. You can pay someone else to submit your site to hundreds of free directories for fairly cheap. Check out places like Digital Point to find someone who will do this for you. But the one thing is, don’t expect to see instant results. You won’t start seeing an influx of traffic until the search engines have had time to crawl all those directories, so expect to wait a few months before you start seeing more search engine traffic generated from these new inbound links. Remember, nobody got rich overnight (other than winning the lottery) so making money on the internet will take some time and effort, don’t expect instant riches. But just think, every link you build back to your page could bring 5 more people, so in the time it takes to build 10 links you could have brought 50 more people to your site over time.