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.

What I found in testing is that while the 300 x 250 banner above the fold on the upper right side of the screen did “ok”, the 728 x 90 ad boxes at the top of the page between the menu header and the content have been drawing more clicks than any other ad I’ve put on the sites. Most of the 728 banners have been image only ads (not text) because text in that area of the site just looks funny to me. Either way it seems to be working for the time being. I’ve gone from getting 1-2 clicks a day on these sites to getting between 12-20 a day. In the case of these sites, this is a huge increase in clicks which equates to a fairly big jump in revenue. Obviously it’s still not a lot of clicks, but it’s definitely an improvement over what they were doing in the past so I’m not going to complain.

1. Look at portfolios

For the love of god do not hire someone who’s work you have not seen. I don’t care if someones best friend used this person and you are supposed to just trust them on a whim, dont do it.  That best friend might have been building an alligator taming website and you are building a site about free popsicles.  They are different, will have different requirements, and might not need to look the same.  Most developers have a “style.”  Make sure you see it before you offer up your cash.

2. Read the reviews

People have used this developer/person before right?  If not, find someone else.  Do not use someone without reviews.  Look at both the good reviews and the bad reviews, I often find myself caring more about shitty reviews than people’s good reviews. Don’t ignore what people said but don’t take it as gods word, sometimes they are dumber than you and your preparedness would have avoided the reason they were pissed.  Read the reviews and use them.

3. Understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

If you think you do, you don’t.  You must be SURE of what you are doing. Do not wager that you will get exactly what you need from your minions because you will not unless you know exactly what to tell them.  Do not think you are smarter than you are.

4. Look for a jack of all trades

Someone who also understand how the different parts of a site fit together knows more than someone who is just a designer.  Often you can find a designer, coder, optimizer, javascript genius and more all in one elancer.  Sometimes these people can be more expensive than individuals but their knowledge is worth your extra coin.

5. Don’t be a cheap-ass

This is where people who have no idea what they are doing get into crazy messes, spend boatloads of money and end up with half a project that doesn’t do shit.  Unless you understand what you are gaining from “cheaping out” and using a workforce like this it is a bad idea.  It is not about saving tens of dollars, its about saving thousands of dollars, its the same reason someone will buy a prebuilt computer or build their own.  You can generally get a lot more bang for your buck handling it on your own, but if you dont know what you are doing,and fuck it up, than what are you gunna do? You’d much rather send it back to someone and say “FIX MY SHIT.”  Same is true here.

These lovely little tips should help you navigate the world and harness the power of these deployable work forces.

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.

The test itself costs $50 to take and inorder to even be eligible to take the test you have to build and maintain a minimum of $900 dollars spent over 90 days.  Assuming you have built this up, the test should be too hard as you are already maintaining a decent amount of money in before you can even take the test.

Ill most likely do some research for a few days to make sure im “up to snuff,” no reason in wasting the $50 fee because i didnt feel like being prepared.  Look for my results soon.

Another tip for this upside-down economy.  If you cant control yourself with your credit cards, why not ask the issuing company to lower your credit limit?  I had a $17,000 limit for no reason on my Mastercard.  I never spent over 1k/month, so i called them and had them drop it to 8500.  I know its still not close to the 1k i spend a month(average) but it allows for half of thew wiggle room and potential trouble from the larger credit line.

Overall, just make sure to spend only the money you have.  Just becasue things are cheaper now, does not mean they need to be bought.  Its great to make a lot of money, but even if you do, be sure to save wisely, not just spend wisely.

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.

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. 

In this meeting today Twitter and Facebook were brought up and questioned as to whether or not we should branch out and use these tools to help market our website/company. Another guy then chimed in and started talking about Social Networking as a tool, like Digg, Reddit, delicious, etc (he didn’t know those sites, but we knew what he was talking about). And finally the idea of a blog was brought up, which, as a matter of fact, I had brought up about 2 years ago. I did a long write up on the benefits a blog could have to our company in general as well as a good boost to SEO for the website (which currently doesn’t do anything in the way of SEO). 

Now I definitely see the potential of using things like Twitter and Facebook for B2C (Business to consumer) businesses in the fact that there are a lot more potential “clients” to push your business to. You can use it to answer questions about products, offer sales and promotions, or just talk to people in general thus giving them at least a little more reason to visit your store instead of somewhere else. In a B2B world, at least in our case, I don’t see these as being very helpful. Sure you could have your clients follow you on Twitter, but most of our clients have a specific set of products that they can purchase for their location, or they know exactly what they want and how to find it. Our industry isn’t that exciting so I doubt they would want to hear about things every day that are going on with our company, at least these things aren’t going to make them buy any more or any less, in my opinion. I think it also goes back to the people that are doing the purchasing of these products from us for their locations, they aren’t really the most tech savvy people and don’t seem to embrace technology like this. I think our e-mail campaigns are the extent of what our customers would be interested in looking at, they give them all the sale information, promo codes, and all the stuff that they care about directly to their inbox, a familiar place for them. 

As for Facebook, whether it’s a “Fan Page” or paid advertising, this isn’t really our market and the only people that are going to become a “Fan” of our company are probably going to be the employees. Now maybe I’m just not giving our customers enough credit and they would love to read about us on Facebook, but having been at the company and in this industry for 10 years now, I really don’t think this is a place to find new clients. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in paid ads on places like Google and Yahoo, but that’s where people are looking for a company like us, not Facebook. 

Social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and Delicious also don’t seem to apply to use since our website is 99% products. Why would anyone Digg a Towel or a Bed Sheet? I can’t really see a purpose for this on the product pages, however I do believe that we should have a blog that related to our industry and that would be a great place for these type of links, but at the moment we don’t have anything like that, so I feel it’s pointless. 

The last one I want to touch on is YouTube, which actually did not come up in the meeting today, but I do feel that this one could potentially help our company and website in general. I’m currently sitting next to a room full of 1000′s of old VHS tapes of videos that we’ve done in the past. Everything from training videos (which obviously wouldn’t be put online) to informative product videos and instructional videos, which could definitely be put online. Even a little monthly video from someone in the company about the interesting things going on in the industry and what we have coming up would be a good way to promote the company and would also allow us to easily put videos on our own website. 

So while some aspects of Social Media don’t seem to apply to our business model, there are some good things that we can do to help promote our brand and company. Before I started writing this article I didn’t really think that there was a huge market for Social Media in the B2B world, but after going through some things in my head there does seem to be some good things that you can do with it. And while a lot of them don’t apply to this company in general that’s not to say that other companies can’t benefit from it. 

Which leads to me to a question I guess. If you currently work for a B2B company, how are you using social media to build your brand? Do you find Twitter a useful way to interact with clients? Is a Facebook Page really making a difference? Now I’m really curious as to how other companies are leveraging this up and coming marketing method to further their brand and get their name out there so please let me know.