Feed your new domain

Construct a websiteI previously pointed out one good resource when searching for an older domain to start a new website. Assuming you find a nice domain with some traffic and negotiate it for a good price your going to want to put a website up there.

Now if you can code like Al then that opens all sorts of options, however if your unskilled like myself then you may have to find a way to get a website up on your new domain on a budget and easily. If we are staying on a product based domain like furniture the easiest way to do this would be to use product feeds from affiliate companies.

Affiliate sites such as Share A Sale, Affiliate Window  and Commission Junction let you browse merchants that offer feeds which you can use to populate a website very quickly and thus giving you a certain amount of control over how your website looks & works.

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To display these feeds on your new website we are going to need a pre made script, a favourite one that I use is Price Tapestry. At £79 (roughly $150) you get unlimited installations, lifetime technical support and it includes Magic Parser. This script can then be used for a variety of projects.

With Price Tapestry you can have thousands of pages up in minutes, using one feed for a specific store or more than one feed to offer a price comparison website. Putting this script with a few feeds on an old domain would likely get you a well indexed website after a week or two with the chance of affiliate sales, you can add in your adsense code for extra earning potential.

Some important points to note about running feeds & affiliate sites

It doesn’t take long and you’ll feel like your registered with almost every affiliate network going and remembering who/what/why is always tricky, Affmeter  lets you gather all your revenue data from all affiliates in one place and can save a lot of time.

Shopping comparison sites have been done to death by bigger and better funded websites than yours so as always look for an angle,  instead of taking a broad topic/product range like furniture you should consider concentrating on a specific area like bedroom furniture.

Niche niche niche & with lots of content, if you have the budget invest in some unique articles to enhance your site, unique content can be bought very cheaply however you do get what you pay for, articles can range in price from $2 to $15 depending on the research needed to write them and be sourced at most webmaster forums such a DP

You can invest in PPC with your new affiliate website, at the very least there are often free starter vouchers for Adwords that can let you test out your PPC skills and generate a little targeted traffic to measure your success with it.

What’s hot at the moment? ~ most products & niche’s still have fashions that come and go, if you have the domains and feeds then you need to keep on top of what’s hot, read related blogs, newspapers, look at adverts from the big name brands as that can often offer great inspiration for your next niche.

Once your up and running that new site is going to need some deep links to help it get fully indexed, if you are using an older domain do a check using archive.org and see what pages were used in the past, make sure you are redirecting that traffic and not giving out 404 errors to pages that may be linked to and have residual traffic.

If your using this method on an old domain that relates closely to the subject in hand you stand a great chance of some good rankings and profits for very little outlay but be warned that comparison sites may get the dreaded chop from google, it wasn’t that long ago we saw some pretty heavy penalties for clones and affiliate sites that used to make lots of money for their owners and rank well.

Since then price comparison sites have taken over that mantle as they have been deemed to be doing good, giving visitors valuable information to make informed choices based on price and value, this has resulted in the mass bandwagon and some search results for products now shown unnaturally heavy amounts of comparison type sites in the top 20.

This is a bad omen and in my opinion its only a matter of time before we see a purge of clone comparison sites by Google, just like they did with dmoz & simple affiliate sites. This shouldn’t necessarily stop you building an affiliate/comparison based website, you would however be advised to work extra hard on making it niche and unique and if google do their job you may well see a lot of the competition disappear later on this year.

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. When you use feeds like that do you not run into problems with duplicate content?

  2. If you use an older domain that’s relative to the subject it helps and go niche rather than taking the whole feed supplied just use part, that make the site unique.ie bathroom furniture, then you can rank very well and avoid dup’s & supplementals with great success!

  3. Not sure if this helps any of your readers but we’ve launched a site over at http://www.pricetapestrytemplates.com that sells templates specifically for Price Tapestry.

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