Internet Gangsters

So I signed up for a new ad service last week, TTZ Media. From what I understand it was started by John Chow of johnchow.com and actually pays quite well. It uses a pay per click business model similar to adsense, so anytime anyone clicks on the ads you make money. In some niches you can make quite a bit for each click and obviously in some you don’t make as much, but so far I feel like it’s working out much better than adsense has.

I have added it to a few of my sites so far and replaced a lot of my shoppingads.com banners with TTZ banners. So far I am pleased to say that it is working out well and I am going to add these banners to a lot more of my sites in the near future. So if you feel your site can generate some cash from banners that promote products, then check out TTZ Media.

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.

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.