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 was already using this on on few pet sites and it generated the odd sale here and there but putting it on the contact page on USA Gardener appears to be bringing in a sale or two a day just now, nothing massive but convenient and functional.

Ideal if you run an information site and could offer an extra income source as well as take care of particular visitor questions without getting your hands dirty, I’m making sales of around $10-$16 and from that get $1-$3 per sale.

Competitive markets like insurances and debt management look like they will thrive in 2009 while the mortgage market suffers, approaching a top 10 ranking website for debt management will NOT provide you with a cheap gem to buy but that doesn’t mean traditionally difficult markets are to be avoided. Thinking outside the box can offer cheaper inroads to high paying niches and the example I will give can be applied as always to many ideas and markets, for this one let’s presume you want to tap into the high paying debt management market.

Liken your task to that of a profiler who works for the police, if there had been a complicated murder and the police call in a profiler to get a profile of the murderer they expect to be given an overall picture with accurate behavioural detail. The profiler won’t tell the police to wait until there is another murder and then you’ll find them, instead behavioural patterns are given to try and find the offender and narrow them down through everything else apart from the murder, so work, social life, habits and hobbies.

Take this back to your debt management leads, worth say £50 a pop, people who are heavily in debt have a profile, finding them at the top 10 ranking sites for debt management would be expensive, as it would for finding them through Adwords. You can however find these people at other cheaper places through profiling, cheaper websites and cheaper advertising places that have a direct correlation to your desired lead can give you great profit with albeit a poorer conversion rate. People get up to all sorts online and a great many of them fit patterns and profiles.

Simply one idea is to hand register domain names and sell them for a couple of hundred, try not to presume anything, don’t presume all product names are registered, don’t presume nobody wants to buy and don’t presume it’s a waste of time. With a budget of less than £50 and your time you could research, register and sell domains to very happy people.

As usual when I tried this to test it I stuck to UK domains, more opportunity in CCTLD’s
I would suggest finding a source of ecommerce websites, again for me this would be UK based sites, you could probably use DMOZ as a source. Pick a subject like ‘mobility’. Then find the product pages of the sites and check the names of their products again the whois – with a bit of luck you will very quickly find products available as I did, mobilityvans.co.uk & mobilitywalkers.co.uk, the latter is now part of a £50 per month lease. For example on this page you can see they sell a car caddie and that domain is available. If you chose instead home improvements the first site’s description says “Online store for supplies of timber, sheet materials, specially treated woods and ancillary products” A quick check and you’ll see treatedwoods.co.uk and sheetmaterials.co.uk are available or the 8th company on this list sell temporary window blinds which I remember seeing on Dragons Den, surely temporarywindowblinds.co.uk isn’t available that has to be worth £100 and as I write it is available. Don’t get bogged down with search volumes or other unrelated data – your selling the domain only, the name of a product that companies sell.

It’s important to be courteous and reasonable, point out that you own it and are selling it for a fixed price of £100 or £150 or whatever your number is, a fixed price lets them know your not out to rip anyone off and gives them a very clear decision to make, I don’t think it would take long to get a bite, you really don’t have much to lose apart from your time.

By keeping the price low and fixed you increase your chances of making quick sales, now is not the time to put your head in the sky – deals can be done even at £50 your well in profit, I did this with solarcover.co.uk today to a swimming pool company, sending 5 emails and one came back and paid £200 within the hour and asked if I had any others product names he would be interested, also had one other person reply looking to buy it but they were too slow so I could have sold it twice. It’s simple and it works, yes there are going to be some you can’t sell off or find a buyer for initially but build some stock and try those again in a few months time targeting offline businesses. Anyway I’m feeling skint just now so I may just go do it myself next week unless you get in there before me

Edit: Got bored so did it again, starting in Dmoz at A = Alternative within 5 minutes  discovered spiritualcrystals.co.uk which was available, quite a nice one, sent 8 emails and just had a reply saying someone will buy it for £75 all within 30 minutes, resisted the urge to register hedgewitchery.co.uk

Specifically contracts and the negotiations of a sale of your assets.

We need to look out at other industries and learn from the way deals are done, I have already talked about leasing which I believe has a big future, perhaps dictated by added value such as rankings, a shop would have added value through it’s location and passing trade, a domain with a small site that ranked would mirror that location and passing trade adding real value and making it an asset that would be attractive to businesses.

In the UK some of the larger deals we see reported in the press are for sportsmen, specifically footballers who can earn huge transfer fees and wages through their contracts with clubs. It is from this model that I see future potential.

Large football clubs don’t need to sell their best players, therefore if Real Madrid want to buy a player from Manchester United we are talking tens of millions, a motivated buyer and an unmotivated seller make for some really large numbers. Larger clubs can also give the experience needed to improve players and offer international matches which adds value.

If Manchester United wanted to buy a player from Luton Town (a few divisions down) Luton will never get the best price for their best player, they need to turn over player more and are much more motivated to sell, lower value amounts of money also make a much bigger difference to their business. Furthermore with their lack of experience their players will never have champions league games under their belts to add value HOWEVER they have found a way around this problem that we can learn from.

Let’s take this adage straight across to websites and domains.

When Rick sold ireport for $750,000 most of us agreed we would have sold it for a lot less, how many of us wouldn’t have taken $50,000 for it? So in this instance him being an unmotivated seller meant he got the best price, we would have taken a lot less but there must be a way to combat this.

If someone approaches you for your best asset we usually go one of two ways

1/ We over compensate in the hope of riches and ridiculously value our asset which kills the deal dead
2/ We get more realistic, come up with a figure that would be half decent value and make a difference to our lives but fear we may live in regret for evermore, like footballers domains are unique and really difficult to value and once it’s gone difficult to replace.

There is a 3rd method and one the smaller league football teams use frequently

3/ Sell for a half decent amount of money than can make a real difference BUT write into the contract a share from a future sale, there have been countless stories of small clubs having huge windfalls when a player moves on , does well and gets sold on again but for a much larger price. If your asset was sold and then improved, given the experience on a national stage that you can’t give it and then sold I am sure you can see the value in being more realistic with your asking price in return for say 5% of any future sale. In some circumstances that can amount to more than your initial sale amount.

Naturally with any new method comes hurdles like contracts, this would be a much easier arrangement to achieve if your in the same country as the buyer and much more enforceable, so if someone will not pay your price in method 1 above, consider method 3.

Presently the unit will only show to your US traffic and even then it’s described as behavioural so will only show to “some” of your US visitors. From our tests and observations it looks like one of the key factors to whether the ads are shown is based on the referrer, primarily is the visitor from a search engine, if so show the ad and base the ad content on the keywords used to find the page. This leads to highly targeted ads which should result in a higher than normal CTR and eCPM.

I’ve only been testing these for a couple of weeks but performance so far has been an improvement. I’d recommend at least giving them a test (especially if you have a none product based site that performed badly in the past) and make sure you specify a default ad (instructions here) to monetise the rest of your traffic.

One of Anybody can apply to Chitika and if you’re already with them, the new ads in the Get Code section.

It goes like this, you run a free classifieds website letting buyers and sellers list their ‘for sale’ and ‘wanted’ adverts in a niche, be it fish, dogs, birds, cars, music or whatever! It’s a free service and you want to keep it clean and user friendly but you also want to monetise the traffic without plastering Adsense everywhere!

The solution
You protect the privacy of your advertisers, aww bless
When people place adverts for unwanted goods or pets they have bred they may be wary about giving out their phone number, fear not, your classifieds site operates privacy protection so that their phone number is not actually displayed on the site, instead an 07096 number is displayed (in the UK), this number forwards calls on to the advertisers real phone number and costs £0.50 per minute generating shared revenue for the website owner.

The result
The website is clean, user friendly and free to use, more than that as detailed in the privacy policy all private numbers are hidden and a forwarding number is used to protect the users from spammers and canvassers obtaining their number. The website owner is on a revenue share, as long as the cost element of the phone call is NOT EXTORTIONATE and clearly stated, I think it’s a great way to monetise a service you can offer, generating income from premium phone numbers is not new and older than the internet but it seems to me a nice way of bringing them both together, indeed if you could find a well established high traffic classifieds website you could remove existing advertising and implement this and give a better user experience and make a good income from it buying it cheap on a multiple of it’s present income. Win win.

• Scrape content
• Pay a content writer
• Pay someone who really knows what they are talking about

I have never bothered with scraping content and republishing it, purely because I have always felt the short term gains are just that, I prefer something that has a better chance of lasting longer, so that leaves two other options, both of which I have done.

Pay a content writer
This is the cheaper option, you can find them in various forums and through recommendations and it certainly is the case that they vary in skill and ability, I took this option for home and office furniture. I made a list of 30 articles that were based on the main keywords for it’s genre using overture and paid around $200 for the articles as a bulk deal, put the articles up and added some adsense and a couple of small links and left it be. That was January 2006.

Since then the site has earned it’s money back generating under 10 page impressions per day. Last month in December 2007 it earned a paltry $5.27

Links: Naturally this site being of low value content has done next to nothing, Yahoo site explorer reports 20 inbound links. I have other plans for the domain now and the poor quality articles just have not worked for me, I would have to spend serious amounts of time on rankings & backlinks to get anything decent out of this site.

Pay someone who knows what they are talking about
I chose this option for another information based site on tattoos. For the site www.tattooinfo.net I sourced a tattooist from asking around on a few forums and paid not much more, about $10 per article to make 30 informative articles on again a variety of keywords/questions using overture for inspiration. Added a couple of links and left it completely alone, that was January 2005.

Since then the site has grown traffic wise to around 1400 page impressions per day, last month in December it earned around $100 in a low paying niche.

Links: Naturally this site being of high informative value content wise has done much better, Yahoo site explorer reports 176 inbound links, these links apart from a half dozen of my own have been gained naturally with no backlink campaign or work done.

Conclusion
Although these two sites are in totally different niches with one always being more linkworthy than the other it should still serve as a reminder that the old sayings like content is king are very much applicable more so today than ever they were, if you have the choice between a quick and easy solution to pay article writers for content or spending a few hours on forums sourcing someone more qualified to write for you as a one off then I suggest taking the time out to get valuable content.

Today the furniture site is stagnant with less than 50 visitors last month and I have other plans for that domain now, the tattoo info site had over 14,000 visitors last month and is an asset – the main difference between the two for myself was spending an extra 2-3 hours at the start to find someone qualified to create content that would inform and educate others.

I’m still having a crazy Christmas season here, I have another week of long days and will then be taking my daughter and a couple of close friends to Lapland for a Winter break (I can’t wait). One of the affiliates I’ve been pushing big time this season is Amazon and they are now (normally) my forth highest daily earner (after Adsense, Chitika and Commission Junction). What impresses me most about Amazon is their conversion rate which for me currently stands at over 9% and looking at their site I can see why, I reckon many on-line retailers could learn a lot from from Amazon.

One of the things Amazon has done for a long time is offer you a special price when you buy a related item that they suggest at the same time, which I’m sure has brought them millions in extra sales. One thing I noticed today is they now don’t always display the price but display:

Buy Together Today: Our price is too low to display. Add both items to your shopping cart to see the price. No purchase required.

I think this is a great idea, now the customer has to add it to the basket before knowing the price genius.

Other things they do us display:

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

This is another great way of cross selling and it will take them no additional work as they are just basing this on stored data.

User reviews are another great feature, it’s useful for buyers and is free unique content, what website wouldn’t benefit from that in the search engines.

Towards the bottom of the page you have adverts (more money for them), the way of thinking here is if you get that far down the page you aren’t likely to buy so lets make some money out of you a different way. And the adverts don’t stop there, once you receive an order you’ll often find the box contains leaflets from other companies flogging you more stuff.

Another useful feature the site has is your recent history, so you can quickly go back to products that you were previously looking at.

There’s a lot webmasters like you and I can learn from Amazon, what other revenue maximising features can you see that Amazon do right (and wrong)?

This next tip is really really simple, so simple in fact that it’s easily overlooked (well it was by me anyway). At the moment people are in buying mode so make it easy and obvious for them, one thing I did was add the following button to some of my affiliate pages:

It’s a hack of one of the buttons found on Amazon (which even my limited graphical skills could do). So far the results look really good with conversions on the pages involved 50 – 100% up (how much of that can be put down to it being a day closer to Christmas I’m not sure).

So it’s a short post today, but if it’s suitable for your site could prove to be a very profitable one.