Skimlinks uses Javascript to automatically redirect appropriate links (redirection can be done via your own subdomain which makes it much more integrated to your site). You don’t need to be a member of any specific affiliate scheme, Skimlinks receives the commission, takes their slice and pays you directly. In theory they should be able earn a higher percentage from merchants thus absorbing their percentage however from my tests I’ve not seen this.

Reports show have many clicks and sales you are generating each day and also to which merchants. I find the merchant report really useful as it shows you affiliate programs You may previously of missed and should consider joining. It honours any affiliate links you already so won’t reduce existing affiliate revenue.

Pros
- Another revenue stream with minimal time investment
- Cloaks affiliate links 
- Reporting
- New merchants are continually being added (8,000+ so far)

Cons
- pages load another external JS file
- Lose a percentage of commission

I already do a fair amount of affiliate sales on CG so wasn’t expecting to find many programs that I’m not yet a member. However after 10 days of testing reports showed nearly 2,000 clicks from 138 different merchants, wow. Revenue was somewhat disappointing at £61, though for the amount of effort involved and just redoing existing links you can’t really grumble.

I’d certainly recommend giving Skimlinks a try, for both the revenue and reports which could highlight an attractive scheme that you’ve missed. If you implement it please let us know how you get on.

I’ve always been a huge fan of building lists and subscribers to my various sites, it removes some of the reliance on search engines and gives you a bit more stability. Using my site coolest gadgets as an example we currently have around ~69K RSS and 10K email subscribers. When speaking to people outside of the industry, only a small percentage know what RSS actually is never mind using it, however even my technophobic father has heard of Facebook, so around 9 months ago I started looking at building a list on Facebook.

Creating a FaceBook Page
Make sure you’re logged into Facebook, go here, click “Create Page” and follow then follow the simple wizard. You’ll need to create a logo, add links in to your site and write a simple description but nothing too challenging. Next up we need to populate your page, you can either make daily posts yourself, pay somebody to do it or if your site has an RSS feed you can automate.

I’m currently using RSS Graffitti (thank you Zath, Clarke and Keith for the recommendation). This will automatically post a thumbnail and excerpt on your pages wall whenever a new post is published on your site. This will then link to the relevent page on your site, like so

You now have a fully automated page and source of traffic on one of the most popular sites on the web, cool.

Promoting Your Fan Page
The first thing you need to do is get 25 fans so that you can claim your vanity URL, I’d suggest manually mailing friends to become a fan, explaining why and personalise your messages a bit. Once you have 25 fans head here and claim a more human friendly URL for your fan page.

I’ve tried a few different methods promoting Coolest Gadgets fan page, the following graph shows how it’s grown since inception

1 – Did a blog post saying we are now on Facebook
2 – LG kindly donated a LCD TV as a competition prize, to enter the contest readers had to become a fan or tweet about it (hence promoting the competition more).
3 – Did another blog post about the contest, this time keeping it really simple: Fan on Facebook? Then Stand A Chance to Win 42″ LG LCD TV
4 – We announced the winner
5 – The site was redesigned with much more prominence on becoming a facebook fan, including a banner advertising the page and a widget showing current fans (see right).

If you have the funds you can also promote the page using Facebook ads, as you can target based on peoples interests this can be highly effective.

My aim is to build the fan base up to 6,000+ by Christmas and promote various offers and discounts when available. If you’re not a fan (or friend) yet feel free to add me.

If you don’t have a fan page yet I’d suggest investing an hour of your time and creating yourself a new traffic source, let us know if you do and we’ll link them from here.

Last summer I secured a whole bunch of domains that were geo located around each other, some of which are listed on http://www.westofscotland.co.uk/about.html and include the likes of Ayr, Arran and Largs

So with a fairly decent set of towns the plan was and still is to create a physical local guide to Ayr which is the largest of the towns, time has dictated that it will be next year before I launch it however I have the cover designed and database worked on with 600 local businesses and around 100 accommodation entries, a licensed map, local places of interest info and calendar. So the physical guide will get worked on and completed late this year when everything else is quieter, it’s more work to put together than I thought it would be, the guide will be available from the local train station and bus station who agreed to display them as long as they are free, the plan is to sell the advertising space on it to fund it all and work closely with the website, I’ve seen it done to great effect elsewhere.

The sites on the town domains have been ageing a good bit since June ‘09 and around 11 of them are in the top 10 in Google.co.uk which puts them more in the limelight and some more still to be put up.

Enquiries have started coming in again, the only thing I really need to work on is pricing as it appears I charged one person £100 per year and then the next one £60 per year, I like £60 per year for an accommodation listing as it offers a decent bit of cash to me that builds up and shouldn’t be hard to recoup for a B&B etc on a top ranking site. Since I have started I have secured about £2000 worth of yearly listings, on top of that one of the sites I bought was already an established geo site with around £5k a year in advertising. That’s all been done through the winter which is a harder sell, the next 2-3 months I’d like to see a lot more enquiries coming in and I don’t plan on doing the chasing this time, should be a good year for the geo set and really turn them into a small business.

I have owned the various extensions of the domain so it’s never been an issue losing type in traffic, not getting worldwide traffic had caused the site to go from 30,000+ visitors per day down to around 10,000 visitors per day over the last few years. Thankfully I have taken on lot’s of other income sources to the point that I wouldn’t miss any income/adsense from the tattoo site so the time was right to actually move home. On February 1st I moved the site from the .co.uk domain to the .com, all internal url’s were staying the same so it was simply a case of doing a 301 permanent re-direct in the htaccess file. I also told Google about the move in Webmaster Tools – after that I updated quite a few of the links to the site and then waited.

From Feb 9th to Feb 17th the traffic dipped a lot but I am pleased to report that about 1 week after the initial dip the site was performing at around 95% of where it was before the move. I have read plenty of posts on what to do but hadn’t seen anyone actually move & say how it went, in time I’d like the site to feature in Google.com which was the reason for the move and will really need to start promoting it more so will watch will interest but will also try and get some work done on it, but it’s now on a better cleaner and more worldwide friendly domain name and most importantly of all…no damage done, phew!

Occasionally I managed to pick up something I felt under priced and occasionally I have had to pay more than I would have liked. When targeting towns & villages my preference so far has been to go for the .co.uk first, usually with no existing site in the case of Ayr & Arran. If that was a no go I have looked at the .org.uk which happened for Kilmarnock. If that was a no go then I google the town and looked at the top 10 to see if there was something suitable & established to buy which was the case for Kilwinning (.org) And in some cases so far I have not been able to get anything.

You can see a local map of my progress here, although there is another acquisition which isn’t shown there which is going through just now. Overall I like the way it’s turned out, some sites like Ullapool.co.uk rank no.1 and get a few hundred visitors per day (in the middle of a re-design), other brand new sites like Kilmarnock, Ayr & Stevenston are in the top 20 and starting to get a little bit of traffic, it gives me a nice mix of new & established sites which can help each other and offer value to advertisers. I have to say that there seems to be a LOT of established geo sites that rank and are sitting there forgotten about offering real opportunity for those of you with the vision to buy on the cheap and monetise.

I am going to have a main automated directory which is almost ready and will also have featured listings, the last week or so has been deciding my pricing & overall strategy. My buying domains is coming to an end, developing is well under way and the monetisation is fast approaching, all of this in the last two months from a standing start, it’s been fun fun fun and very refreshing as I have mentioned before.

I have not reached out at all to ask for advertising so far, I have some laterooms banners on the sites which have already had 7 bookings making commission which is nice but what is really nice is that I am starting to get asked by local B&B’s & Guesthouses for advertising. For new sites like Arran & Ayr I have a couple of advertisers wanting to go ahead, for established sites like Ullapool I have 3 advertisers waiting for me to finish the re-design and want to part with their cash, where else does that happen? within 2 months they are coming to me asking if they can give me money! It wouldn’t take that many enquiries once the sites are all established to increase overall income by £xxx’s every month. I still have no real idea what the potential out there is, I know small towns ranking well can make £5-£10k per year once established with no real effort, passively growing through enquiries. If my main sites averaged that it would make a pretty good set.

I get the feeling next spring (if everything is as I would like) these sites will really come on. My main targets are B&B’s/Guest houses. I’m not going to let it passively grow though, I shall be working through the winter to build up a base by contacting local businesses so that come spring they can really generate a good collective income with very little maintenance. From there any fallout should be replaced naturally with new enquiries.

There is a real geo land grab been going on this summer, whether it’s the prime generic co.uk or the established no.1 site I would say there is a real period of opportunity to strike and carve out a piece for yourself, I know some of you already have and it’s good to hear. I’ll be at ThinkVisibility so if your going I’ll see you there!

site: Lumens.co.uk

Category: Lighting

Current traffic: 100-250 visitors per day

Improvements made, after installing the software I had someone make the url’s more seo friendly and created my own categories using the search function along with some unique text/description at the top for some of the categories.

I also bought a template from templatemonster I think for a basic design to make the front of the site look better and less like an aff site.

Over the last month the site made the following sales;

All-up-and-on: 407 clicks, generating 7 sales, £644.65 in sales
Haysom lighting:  265 clicks, 2 sales,  £228.94 in sales
DIY Tools: 60 clicks, 2 sales, £276.47 in sales
Screwfix: 59 clicks, 3 sales, £225.51 in sales
Pricerighthome.com: 47 clicks, 3 sales, £34.57 in sales
Rapid electronics: 31 clicks, 1 sale, £6.28 in sales
Expert Verdict: 21 clicks, 1 sale, £1.50 in sales

So around 890 clicks through to a merchant from the site generating 19 sales of just over £1400. Not exactly massive or overly impressive but again it’s a zero maintenance site, I don’t think it’s worth pumping out sites like this though, not real value so could disappear overnight unless you really worked on it to build new content & information in the way of reviews or ran alongside a blog.

Initially I bought Arran, Ayr and Largs – I then remembered I own westofscotland.co.uk so decided to use that as the umbrella domain to link to them all from. I also picked up a few others all beside each other and all small but touristy kind of places on the coastline to make a little set of 7.

Minisites: I have seen a lot written and said about minisites which strikes me as sweeping statements, if you look at www.largs.co.uk that’s a minisite. Minisites are evolving, Largs cost me under £200 and for that I get a theme on Wordpress, research is done and around 7 to 10 articles are created without my input. It’s then all put together with work on descriptions, tags and keywords, after which I added some feeds for extra pages, but it pretty much ticks all the minisite boxes.

To say minisites are not worthwhile, useless or will not give you a return on your investment is like saying “websites” are not worthwhile. Websites like minisites come in a variety of flavours and if done well can be very worthwhile, but they can be crap and a waste of virtual space if done poorly.

I am negotiation for an established but tiny tourist location in Scotland with a population of 1500! the owner has had the domain/site for 12 years, it makes £3000 per year. He hasn’t updated it in years but wants it to go to a good home, I offered £2700 and was rejected no surprise, he wants £5500 which is a fair price, after showing him Ayr.co.uk & Arran.co.uk he has agreed to sell the site to me below his £5500 valuation as he wants it to go to a good home and likes what I am doing. So these new minisites have value that other’s can see.

Feeds: I know pulling in feeds doesn’t add traffic/real content but from a user experience it makes the site more appealing and complete, adding twitter, pictures, video, jobs, weather, property, events and games gives a better user experience from the off. I have tested this on people who work offline and have had good feedback. I am however looking down the line a bit to find a local estate agent to offer their feed exclusively for a fee.

Links: One thing I have noticed is asking for links for the generic place name .co.uk seems very easy with positive replies. I even emailed the local council and asked for a link on their .gov.uk which was up and live within 30 minutes. Emailing others sites who do info on the places often gets a quick “Hi Scott, that’s been done now” which is very different from dealing with product related sites, the exact match generic domain maybe helps or maybe geo sites are much nicer to work in when it comes to sharing links.

Some local hotels & resorts have link & info pages, I decided to make sure when asking for a link from them I email the PR & Marketing person, not the webmaster. Not only did I get a link from them I also got a typical reponse from the marketing person asking about the site, “is it new and how much for a homepage advert?”, much better than me asking them to advertise.

Twitter: I created a twitter account and followed quite a few people who mentioned the areas, in some cases people mention they are about to or have just been to the town. This seems a good opportunity to ask for user submitted content and I have a couple of people who have agreed to write reviews based on me contacting and posting on Twitter.

I have to say I am enjoying these sites, some are in development or live but under month old, they are starting to bring in around 50 visitors per day each. All in all a good excercise and a good set of info minisites that I feel have good potential to generate income. If someone can make £3k a year from a population of 1500 then the towns with 10k or 40k I also have should offer opportunity once established to earn their keep.

Been searching through hundreds of sites sending emails to site owners but getting very little response, I have agreed one site purchase but the owner seems wary and I get the feeling he feels I am scamming him trying to get his bank details to send him money to buy his site (he is in the US), been working on that deal for 2 weeks now and if it comes off it will take a few more weeks I reckon with really slow comms. I suck at waiting, if this one comes off I will post about it as I am buying it blind so will be interesting to see the stats/traffic and possible income so hopefully one I can revisit, I have a fair idea of what it should/could do from guesswork.

I raised some cash from my house equity (I bought my house 7 years ago before prices went way up and down again) so I have funds for buying sites but finding any quality one’s is giving me rsi, I am going to persevere though – I plan to physically look at around 50,000 sites over the next couple of months and target sites that look promising/neglected, really looking to try and find sites in the $5-$15k region. It seems harder than looking for good domain names, if a website owner has had a site for 10 years they can be even more attached to it even if it’s been neglected for years and ultimately many seem like they would only sell for funny money. Still I’m no quitter and I don’t mind putting in long hours to turn up gems, I’ve done it with domains so I really hope I can put in the hours and do it with a few good sites.

Talking of which had no offers or enquiries for quite a few months on anything I own from what I can remember and then all of a sudden a fist full on budget day with domain enquiries and leasing enquiries, as things stand I have 2 .net domains I bought for £2500 in Escrow to a buyer for £4000. I also agreed to sell a couple of uk domains. Each one just into 5 figures GBP with a contract agreed and signed, that will net a profit of around £15,000 which will also bolster the buying fund and has been quite exciting really, strangely for me it will mean money in the bank with nothing to spend it on. That’s just not my style .. back to work on Monday then looking for sites to buy.

Affiliate Window let’s you sign up with a lot of the major retailers like Dixons, Curry’s etc and then you can use their shop window software to display products in a store like fashion. Before I go any further remember that I am not a coder (or programmer) and have no design or coding skills, that’s probably more than obvious  but worth mentioning as it proves anyone can do it.

The thing I like about this script is that it doesn’t involve me downloading feeds or storing the data in a database which would mean I would have to update periodically to keep it fresh and current, instead I install their script which creates the pages on the fly using their data which means they update new products and my site gets updated automatically.

Installation is a breeze, just download, unzip and ftp the files to a directory, they even provide a couple of templates. You can edit the config file so it doesn’t show every product, so for me I could narrow that down to laptops which is the closest, you could just as easily create a shop on electronics, dvd’s etc.

What took me a few hours would take someone that knew what they were doing a few minutes but I really enjoyed it, I created 4 example netbooks on the homepage of the store to show the main features that would appeal, cheap, lightweight, battery life & screen resolution.

I also created my own navigation showing the main models, manufacturers and price mainly using the search function to create links.

The biggest problem was that it didn’t create any title/description tags so for the actual product pages after a bit of trial and error I managed to use the product name & description and get it into the head so that all the pages don’t appear too similar for the mighty G. Also added in the title when you search for example a Samsung NC10, apart from that I am pretty happy with it, not exactly groundbreaking or unique but I think it gives a half decent user experience.

Still work to be done on the layout & design and more unique content needs to be added but as far as a quick way of putting up a shop to take advantage of visitors your getting in a product based site I think it’s a great weapon to have in your armoury.

The Amazon store has sold 4 netbooks in the first week of this month so it will be interesting to see how the Affiliate Window Shop Window does in the coming weeks, I’ll report back later.

Next job has been to get them indexed and found so I added a link to them from a post on here, a sig link on a forum and my main pc site pcs.co.uk in the footer, also in a couple of the posts on PCs that relate to netbooks or notebooks as they are very relevant. I paid one of my writers to do a good explanation of what they are and what to consider when shopping for a netbook or notebook, this is even more relevant for netbooks being new to the market so they both have a homepage with some good information on them. Each article cost me $30 so apart from the initial capital on the two domains so far I have only spent $60.

I also added an amazon store so that if visitors did want to purchase they could buy from a company that converts traffic very well and has a good choice, while in some ways I bought at the right time in others I was a bit late to the party. Getting the domains in December meant I pretty much missed out on the Xmas sales however I did sell some, Netbooks.co.uk sold 16 items of which 6 were actual netbooks so a bit of commission due.

Buying at the right time means that I was lucky enought to get the deals done in time before the next guy came along and thought about buying them, therefore I received the offer to buy one for £5k and not the previous owner, phew! I also caught on to a surge in traffic as popularity and interest grew. While notebooks looks on the face of it to be the better domain netbooks gets the traffic. Both sitting around the same place ranking wise on page 2 in google.co.uk

Netbooks has achieved 1800 visitors and getting over 100 per day now while notebooks is doing 10-20 visitors per day.

I’m not worrying about rankings or traffic at present, I have only had them for a couple of weeks, stage 1 is to add value, buyers guide done!

Next will be to add a bit more content, looking for some comparison charts between the main models with advantages and disadvantages, again these are costing me $30 each and should add useful value to visitors and in turn help the site grow and become more valuable to readers and hopefully in turn more link worthy so that’s it for now, will come back to these as and when I work on them and document results.