Internet Gangsters | Internet Gangsters

Author Archive

Take Advantage of Family With Affiliate Marketing

by Tom on Dec 30, 2010 • No Comments

It’s definitely not easy to get a successful site up and running when it comes to affiliate marketing so why not use family to help. Sure, you could find a niche that works extremely well right off the bat and not have to do much work, but for 90% of us that don’t get that lucky it can be kind of a downer when we don’t make any money, but why not turn the holidays into a profit center by using your family.

In general the winter holidays are a good time for affiliate marketers, but if you don’t have the visitors and still want to make a little extra cash you should give this method a try. I was completely hounded by my parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, girlfriend, etc… pretty much everyone, for gift ideas for Christmas (and my birthday since it’s in January) and of course I can never come up with anything. So this year what I did was scoured Amazon for any movies, video games, clothes, electronics, etc. that I wanted and sent an email out to all my family members, but in this case I made each link my affiliate link. Sure, it kind of ruins the surprise on Christmas morning when you have already checked your affiliate records and know what everyone has bought you, but considering I’m almost 30, Christmas just doesn’t have the appeal that it did when I was younger.

So while I got things that I truly asked for, I also made a few bucks from the affiliate side of things when my family bought them for me. I’m not going to get rich off of the few clicks and purchases they made, but the cookie lasts for a while and maybe they’ll go back on and pick up something else which will lead to more cash in my pocket. This month is actually my best month in 2 years with the Amazon affiliate program, although a lot of it is due to the fact that I restructured one of my sites to take advantage of it, but the family definitely helped out.

So if you’ve got a birthday, anniversary, whatever… coming up and people are asking what you want, shoot them an email with your affiliate link and see if you can make a few bucks on top of getting what you wanted.

Domains / General Information

Selling Websites Through Flippa.com

by Tom on Dec 2, 2010 • 1 Comment

About a month ago a buddy of mine introduced me to Flippa.com . I have been sitting on old blogs and website for a while with no intention of really doing anything with them so he suggested I try to sell them. He recently sold one of his websites for 5 figures so I figured it couldn’t hurt to at least give it a try. My only concern with “giving it a try” was that Flippa has some pretty hefty fees that come along with listing your site for sale. So I’ll warn you now, if you aren’t confident that someone would at least be interested in your site then I would suggest trying other methods of sale.

To list an item, whether it’s a full website or a domain, Flippa charges $20 + 5% success fee if the site sells, so right there you’re out $20 if you don’t sell the site, and that’s without any upgrades and believe me you’re going to want some upgrades. The upgrades range from things like bold around your listing or a different highlight to your listing, all the way up to being featured on the front page or an ad tweeted out by the Flippa twitter account. Some are as cheap as $5 and some as expensive as $40, but believe me when I tell you that the one upgrade I highly recommend is the “featured” upgrade which costs $40. The featured upgrade gets you listed in the featured section of the site and face time on the front page of Flippa.com… and this is where most people are going to find your site. The search on the site automatically defaults to the featured listings so if you don’t get featured it’s going to be hard for someone to find your listing.

The first site I sold I did a featured listing which at the time was $30 (it’s since gone up to $40) and I listed it for 10 days, which I found to be way too long. I received a handful of bids in the first couple days and that was it, the last 5 or so days just lingered while I waited for the auction to end. In the end the site sold for $600 and the transfer process went fairly smooth. I ran into a few issues with the buyer not wanting to use Escrow.com due to the fact that he needed to pay with Credit Card and was in a country that Escrow.com would not allow that… we ended up using paypal and I had to trust the guy not to rip me off, but it’s been a month or so with no issues, but I would highly recommend if it’s a large sum of money to use Escrow.com and NOT paypal.

The 2nd site I sold I started without doing the featured upgrade just to see if the site would still sell. The only upgrade I did was to highlight the line listing so that it stood out a bit from the others, $5. I also started the auction at the lowest price I would accept for the site and made the reserve the same amount. This way I could advertise that there was no reserve on the item and hopefully entice people to buy the site since if only 1 person bid and won, it would be theres. I’ve found this technique to be very useful on eBay so I figured it could work here…. and it did. Within the first day of listing the item I received a bid for the starting amount. It was at this time that I decided that since the item was going to sell for sure now, I would upgrade to a featured listing to hopefully incite a bidding war, which also happened towards the end of the auction. And the good thing about people bidding at the very end of the auction is that it extends the auction by 4 hours so that nobody can snipe the auctions like they can on eBay.

So I’ve successfully sold 2 out of 3 sites that I’ve listed on Flippa so far and I currently have another auction going right now. I haven’t made 5 figures off any site yet, but the sites I’m selling off right now are old blogs that were almost dead, basically I’m just cleaning house. Eventually I want to try to build up a site specifically with the intention of selling, but for now I gotta do some spring cleaning to make way for more sites.

Have you sold on Flippa yet? If so, what have your experiences been like? Have you ever been ripped off? I’m really curious to hear what other people have to say about the site.

Social Media

Twitter: To Follow or Not To Follow

by Tom on Apr 28, 2009 • No Comments

Twitter has become an essential part of social marketing these days and you are starting to find more and more businesses utilizing this new technology as a way to connect with their clients or demographic, but with this sudden influx of users comes a question…. Do you follow people that follow you?

When I first signed up for twitter early last year I obviously didn’t have many followers, but with the apps available on the iPhone, I was able to see and interact with people within a certain amount of miles of me, which helped a lot when we went on our baseball roadtrip last year and didn’t know good places to eat, etc. But I started noticing that whenever I would follow someone, they would immediately follow me back. It was nice, because then I knew people were actually getting my tweets, whether or not they were reading them is a different story. So I decided to give this idea a try and setup a few Twitter accounts for some of my web sites, then I used the search function and searched people’s profiles looking for related keywords or interests and then I would proceed to follow them in hopes that they would follow me back.

And yes it did work. I quickly had a couple hundred followers for some of my websites which I would then feed links to trying to get people to visit the site. After a while though I stopped using this method because it seemed to me that people who were just following me because I follow them are probably going to be less inclined to click my links than the people that actually made an effort to follow me, plus now I was following an obscene amount of people and couldn’t interact with all of them.

That was then…. it seems like things have started to change in the Twitter-verse. Not as many people are following people that are following them. It could just be the influx of celebrities joining Twitter and obviously they can’t follow everyone that follows them, but I know personally I don’t follow everyone that is following me. I just feel like if you want to know what’s going on with me, that’s great, I appreciate it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to know what’s going on with you. It’s not that I think I’m any more interesting than the next guy (cause I’m definitely not, just take a look at my tweets @treding) it’s just that I like being able to communicate with the people I follow and I truely do want to know what’s going on with them. So if I had thousands of tweets coming up everytime I opened Tweetie on my iPhone, I would probably miss 90% of my actual friends’ tweets. Yes there are apps for the computer that help with this problem by allowing you to create groups so you can keep people apart and I do use TweetDeck at home for this very reason, but I’m not always at home so people like Ashton Kutcher and P Diddy are constantly flooding my Tweetie screen making it very likely that I missed some stuff that my actual friends are saying that might interest me.

So with that I’m asking this question, Do you follow everyone that follows you (as long as they aren’t spammers of course)? Or are you like me where it’s great that people are following you and want to know what you’re up to, but you don’t really care what they are doing so there’s no reason to follow them?

I think Twitter is moving away from the follow me follow you idea from a year ago, but what do you guys think? And feel free to post your Twitter names below if you’re looking for random followers.

Social Media

Social Media In A B2B Environment

by Tom on Apr 22, 2009 • No Comments

I know it’s been a while since we’ve posted here and we genuinely feel bad about it, but nobody really reads it so I guess we can’t feel bad about it… But then again if we posted more maybe more people would read, it’s a vicious cycle, but we’re going to try to put a stop to that. We will be posting more starting now and hopefully you guys will enjoy what we have to say.

Does Social Media have a place in a Business to Business enviroment?

I was just in a meeting at my day job where we have been discussing some changes we are making to our website that will help our customers find what they are looking for. The software/logic that we have been using to run the website’s search hasn’t been the greatest mainly because we never tweaked the software used to drive that aspect of the site. So over the past couple weeks we have been working towards better logic to drive customers to find the products they are looking for. So in the meeting we had today about this situation social media was brought up. With Twitter making headline news pretty much everywhere these days I knew this topic was going to come up sooner or later (if I wasn’t the one to bring it up), but then it got me thinking, does this really apply to our business model? And would it really help anything?

I don’t like to get into too much personal information about where I work, but I work for a decent sized family owned company that acts as sort of a middleman for a specific industry. We buy from manufacturers and also produce our own goods and sell them to one industry that has multiple installations all over the world, not necessarily run by the same companies, just the same industry. These installations then offer a service to the public. That’s probably a terrible way to describe it, but hopefully you get the idea.

(more…)

General Information

Google Adsense For Domains

by Tom on Dec 18, 2008 • No Comments

Looks like Google has added a new method of making some money on your websites, but this time it’s websites that you have nothing on. They have introduced Google Adsense for Domains, which is basically just parking domains with adsense ads all over them. I just set it up on a few of my domains, some of which had content at one point and some of which that has never had any content on it. So we’ll see if this method makes any money at all. It can’t hurt since the domains were just sitting with GoDaddy parking them for me, so why should they get all the money.

General Information

ICANN Approves .tel Domain Names

by Tom on Nov 19, 2008 • No Comments

Who is going to be picking up some of these new .tel domain names? And yes, the article below is from 2006 when the .tel started making it’s move, but the sales are finally going to be happening. Check below for the dates.

An Internet regulator has approved the creation of the .tel domain, the company that proposed the domain announced on Monday.

Telnic, which proposed .tel to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 2000, said the domain will give individuals and businesses a naming and navigation structure for Internet communications.

The idea is for people to use .tel as a way of communicating directly with the person or company behind a particular Web site, using technologies such as voice over Internet Protocol, e-mail or Short Message Service (SMS). Telnic used the examples of AdamSmith.tel or Hertz.tel.

“The .tel domain offers the first genuinely different use of domains since .com was first created. It will provide seamless integration of existing methods of communication, with emerging technologies like voice over IP,” Telnic’s chief executive, Khashayar Mahdavi, said in a statement.

“The days of needing to remember several telephone numbers, numerous VoIP or instant message identities and other points of contact for our social and professional networks are over. By leveraging innovative DNS (Domain Name System) technology, the .tel domain will allow anyone to publish and control, in real time, how they can be reached,” Mahdavi said.

Telnic, whose mission includes developing a text-based naming and navigation system for Internet communications, hopes to start awarding .tel addresses in 2007.

A similar initiative, called ENUM, already exists. It uses an architecture based on the Domain Name System to resolve telephone numbers to domain name addresses.

Last week ICANN rejected the adult-oriented .xxx domain, a move that was welcomed by adult industry insiders but criticized by the European Commission, which accused ICANN of bowing to pressure from the U.S. government.

Sunrise Registration (Trademark Holders Only)

Pre-booking available Now to December 3, 2008
Sunrise Registrations open December 3, 2008 & continues until February 2, 2009

Landrush Registration (Open to Everyone at a Premium Price)

Pre-booking available Now to February 3, 2009
Landrush registration opens February 3, 2009 & continues until March 24, 2009

General Registration (Open to Everyone at a Standard Price)

Pre-booking available Now to March 24, 2009
General registration opens March 24, 2009

source: CNET

General Information

Online Advertising In Decline

by Tom on Nov 17, 2008 • No Comments

I just read an interesting article over at Tech Crunch about online ad growth grinding to a halt and at first it had me a little worried, but after I read what they were getting at, it didn’t bother me as much. The article is really short so head over there and read it really quickly, it’s more charts than words. First of all the article is only dealing with the 4 large companies, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL and we all know that you don’t rely on one type of ad on your websites to pull in the cash. Not to mention that the economy all of the world is in a steady decline right now and therefore not everyone can be pulling record profits like the oil companies. If you look at the graphs in the article, these companies are still growing, just not as much as they had the previous year. With everything that is going on right now in the world, I think any growth for a company is good.

Now I don’t rely on internet marketing and advertising as my sole source of income, if I did I would barely be able to afford the cost of cable internet every month, ha! While I do make a fair amount, I haven’t seen any decrease lately in sales due to anything outside of the time of year (my niche is a spring/fall type niche). Recently I’ve actually seen an increase in sales and income, but this could be due to the revamp of my site and the focus on SEO, but none the less, this proves that if you still work at it you will be able to pull money.

So don’t worry when you see articles like this one stating that internet advertising is in decline, focus on what you are doing and don’t stop working at it. Things will get better around the world and industries will thrive again, so why not get in on it now when other people are getting away from it.

source: Tech Crunch

Domains

My Experience With .info vs .com

by Tom on Nov 16, 2008 • No Comments

One of my biggest money making websites had been on a “.info” domain for over a year and was pulling a fair amount of money. I know that “.info” domains are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to quality and they are usually picked up by spammers for cheap. When I initially started the website I didn’t anticipate the amount of revenue I could generate with it and therefore didn’t want to spend the extra money on a “.com”. This was a big mistake!

A dot com domain costs anywhere from $6-10 per year, depending on what GoDaddy promo codes you can dig up, where a dot info domain runs you $1.99 per year. I was trying to save money but had I known that meager $4-8 for the year would have had me pulling in much more money I would have done it right the first time.

Earlier this month I decided it was time for this .info site to get a makeover and a new domain. It was starting to become cluttered with ads that didn’t need to be there, information that nobody clicked on and so forth, plus it was out of season and I wasn’t making a lot of money. First thing I did was secured a brand new .com domain for the website, making sure to use a good keyword. After that was secured, I got a different layout going and setup everything how I wanted. I did a few tests to make sure everything was going well and setup all the plugins and other stuff I needed. Everything was done, I switched the RSS subscribers over the new site, the twitter feed, all I needed to do was make a post on the old site letting people know that we’ve moved and then start updating the new site instead.

Keep in mind that I hadn’t been making much money on this site over the summer, it’s off season for this niche. As soon as I turned on the new site and started making posts there I was getting a ton more visitors than I normally had gotten. I was coming up way higher in SERPs and getting more click throughs which in turn was generating more revenue. I also had more people signing up as followers on twitter and subscribers to my RSS feed. I was certainly happy with the way things were looking.

It’s been about 13 days since I’ve launched the new look/domain and I’ve made more this month than I did all summer. I can’t put a finger on exactly what caused the massive change in visitors, but I’m pretty confident it has to do with the the SEO tactics I’ve implemented as well as the dot com domain. People seem to trust a .com more than a .info. The site is also not cluttered with ads anymore, although there are still a few minor issues I have to fix. Overall I’m amazed at the turnaround of the site over the past few weeks and it seems as though it’s not slowing down.

So my advice to you is if you’re going to start up a website and are debating between a .info and a .com due to the cheaper price, I would always go with the .com (.net if you absolutely have to). Just from my personal experience this month I can tell you that you will regret it if you go with the lesser of the two.

General Information

Website Magazine

by Tom on Nov 15, 2008 • No Comments

I recently signed up to receive a free subscription to Website Magazine which is dedicated to bringing you information on Website Success. I’m actually impressed with the first issue so far. This month it has a lot of good articles on how to manage your PPC campaigns as well as some alternatives to Adsense. If you’re just getting into this kind of internet marketing it’s a good place to start.

You can get your free subscription over at their websites http://www.websitemagazine.com unless you live outside of the US, then it’s $49/year, sorry guys. It’s definitely an interesting magazine and although you can find most of the information on other websites and forums, it’s nice to be able to have something physical that I can take into the bathroom to read instead of having to lug the laptop in there, which is kind of gross.

Website Magazine

SEO

WordPress and SEO

by Tom on Nov 14, 2008 • No Comments

WordPress is an amazing tool if you want to start up a content driven website without having the knowledge to code something on your own. Actually, even if you do know how to code it’s a simple, quick and easy way to manage a website.

WordPress can be used in two ways,

1. You can setup a free blog at WordPress.com which will give you a web address of http://yourblog.wordpress.com, which you can have any domain forwarded to. This will allow you to have free hosting for your blog if you don’t want to spend the money right away.

2. You can download the WordPress software from WordPress.org and install it on your own hosting server. This will give you full control over all aspects of your new site. This is the method that I would recommend.

Once you have the WordPress site setup and ready to go, before writing any content at all, figure out how you want to go about getting traffic to your site. At this point you should not be focused on making money, it will only discourage you when you don’t. You should already have some idea about what the site will focus on, since I’m assuming you either bought a domain or registered a free blog based on the topic you will be writing about. This article is obviously focused on bringing organic traffic to your new website using SEO and a few effective plugins for WordPress.

(more…)

General Information / PPC

TTZ Media After 10 Days

by Tom on Jun 30, 2008 • 1 Comment

So I’ve had TTZ Media ads showing on my sites now for about 10 days and I must say they are doing pretty well. You can tailor the ads that show up on your site based on keywords, so most of the ads are always relevant to what you are promoting on your site. Each click seems to be worth a little more than adsense pays, which is nice, and people seem to click them a little more than adsense. I don’t know if it’s because they look a little different or what, but it’s working out pretty well. I’m going to start pushing it a little more on a few sites in place of adsense and see what sort of numbers I can pull through this month, but so far I am very pleased with the results and am in the process of replacing everything that used “shoppingads” with TTZ Media ads.

P.S. Stay away from shoppingads.com, they were good before a larger company bought them out and now I don’t seem to make anything off of them.

Older

The trials and tribulations of making money on the internet.

Take Advantage of Family With Affiliate Marketing

Selling Websites Through Flippa.com

Google Adsense For Domains

ICANN Approves .tel Domain Names

Online Advertising In Decline

Website Magazine

TTZ Media After 10 Days

Recent Posts

Categories

Word on the streets…

Friends