Affiliate reporting – the problem

Moved to Affiliate reporting – The Problem at blindapeseo.com

How to multiply your adspace using lightbox

Description
Also known as “Project D” for the 47 day challenge, this is a small site about moleskines.

It is as good an example of a niche site as it gets.
The topic is the “moleskines” brand of notebooks, it is handcoded, took about 2 hours including content and is monetized via amazon.

One of the main reasons this works is the domain name.
All traffic is pure organic search results. I’ve done no more than link to it on some of my sites.
It brings in about 2 bucks a month and some more in Christmas season.
Last year it made about 50$ profit after subtracting hosting costs.

For those interested in ROI, it rings in at 400%.

Proven it’s worth, I want to give this little site some love and multiply its adspace.

Multiply your adspace times X using lightbox
Clicking on one of the dormant links in the wickedfire header will prompt a box to pop up, adding a dark layer on the site and shopwing a picture. Many people mistake this for a flash animation at first, but it is a small JavaScript called Lightbox.
The interesting part of lightbox is the description you can enter for the image. Turns out, you can enter HTML code to format your description.
This gives us the opportunity to enter the HTML needed for advertising.

Caution!
Javascript won’t work. So you’re out of luck with adsense, but any static HTML is fine.

For those interested in Javascript, flash, etc.. for something like lightbox, check out thickbox.

So what will I be doing?
Basically, collect a few nice moleskine pictures to display in my lightboxes. Add amazon to every lightbox. For 10 pictures, I can display 10 more ads.

Other Benefits
Lightbox has several benefits that should work well for advertising:

• It darkens the rest of the site, making the user focus on the image (and adspace)
• It does not interfere with the layout
• The user stays on the page while looking at the pretty picture
• The user is looking at something he’s interested in, you can display your ad right beside it

Setting it up
Download lightbox http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/
Read the Tutorials. (Really easy, it is just one page)
The script weighs in at about 5K, making it a lightweight addition to your site.

So I set this up for my product page here:
Collected an image of a lined moleskine, added a button “view details” which prompts the lightbox.
Set up the amazon link in the lightbox, using the small colorcoded moleskine icon.

How to enter the HTML code?
Well, saying “any html will work” is not quite right. You need to strip and/or escape some characters from your code to prevent it from breaking the Javascript surrounding it.

These are the less than sign < and quotation marks “

Just replace them with < and single quotes, respectively.
You could also just leave out the quotation marks, but I find readability is better using single quotes.

So your amazon code looking like this:

<a href=http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B0009WOZBE? ie=UTF8&tag=XXXYZ-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1638&creative=6742&creativeASIN=B0009WOZBE>Drei Amen für den Satan</a><img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.de/e/ir?t=XXXYZ-21&l=as2&o=3&a=B0009WOZBE&#8221; width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;”>

Becomes this:
<a href=”images/image-1.jpg” rel=”lightbox” title=”<a href=’http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B0009WOZBE? ie=UTF8&tag=XXXYZ-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1638&creative=6742&creativeASIN=B0009WOZBE’>Drei Amen für den Satan</a><img src=’http://www.assoc-amazon.de/e/ir?t=XXXYZ-21&l=as2&o=3&a=B0009WOZBE width=’1′ height=’1′ border=’0′ style=’border:none !important; margin:0px !important;’>“><img src=”images/thumb-1.jpg” width=”100″ height=”40″/>
</a>

Rinse and repeat.

Voila, you’ve got adspace times images now.

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powered by performancing firefox

CSE directories

Ok folks, this is just a crazy idea right now, but it might well be worth your time.

Since some time, you can use google to create your own specialty search engine under google.com/coop . All in all, this is similar to sevices like rollyo.com or squidoo. Google calls this “Custom Search Engines” or CSE from now on, as I am a lazy ape.

Google gives you quite the palette to customize the search results and pages that are crawled, including giving some weight to sepcific pages, etc.. RTFM for all that, I am not going to explain all this for you.

Money comes via adsense, what else?

So I have been thinking about a way to monetize this bitch for a while and I think I’ve come to a conclusion.

A directory! yay

Now, let me speak out before you turn away in disgust.

Here is the plan
– Look for an area that you know something about, for example: Aqarium fish.
– Make up a list of sub-topics, like this:

Sweet water fish
Salt water fish
Aquarium care
Water Plants…

Pour these into a directory-like structure on your new page: http://www.supreme-aquarium-information-for-you.com

For each topic, get a small article in place and create a google co-op search engine with about 5 pages to crawl.

You’ll also create a custom search engine with every page in all subtopics to put on your front page.

As I love user generated content, give the list of pages used for each CSE to your users.
A small paragraph with “these pages are crawled for this search engine: a, b, c” If you know another good page on the topic of salt water plants, please contact me under:XYZ” should be OK.

Be sure to market “in cooperation with GOOGLE” all over the place. Google actually insists on that, so we might take the seach giant’s good reputation for our gains as well.

Now you also have a nice list of pages that you can contact and promote your CSE directory. Webmasters will probably feel flattered enough to link to your page.

Et viola. Every search will get you some money.

Enjoy. And drop me some lines when you try this, or if you have additional ideas for this.

::emp::

Pink heart projects for wickedfire

Sooo much work..

.. often you see people balking at the work involved in this business.
I do have to admit, sometimes I do this too.

It is easy to get a bit tired when…

… you see a hill of 50 or 100 pages that need to be created/updated, domains that need to be registered / transfered or blog posts that need to be written, and I am not even diving into the configuration files that need to be changed, images that need to be edited, files to be uploaded, forum posts to be answered, contacts to be made, banners to be created, links to be exchanged, scripts to be coded, noooooooo I will not even tell you about the templates that need to be done, the deals that need to be struck, the asshats in need of banning, the news that have to be read, nonono, I’ll spare you all of that.

But is this really hard work? I beg to differ.
A lot of this is just mind numbingly boring, or tedious copy and paste.

Yes, you will be tired after a day of computing and I admit it can be strenuous.

However, I still think this beats nightshifts in a hotel, burger flipping, newspaper delivery, digging holes in other people’s garden, walking dogs, making macchiatos and above all working for idiot bosses!

But not to let this digress into an useless rant, I’ll add some advice on getting ahead as well.

Let’s call this the “pink hearts method”, in honor of wickedfire, the internet’s premier gay affiliate forum.

I found that when I balk, it is often not the actual work, but often projects that are all about money making and nothing else.

To counteract this, I recommend keeping a list of “pink heart projects” that you can come back to during those times.

here are some of those hearts to use for you:

(Courtesy of wickedfire – gay affiliate forum)

Those are the projects that might not make much money, but you love them nonetheless. It might be a blog, it might be a hobbyist site, it might be the next American novel. Hey, they might even bring some real content and service to the net.

This way, you’ll have a list of things to do the next time Copy and Paste seems just like too much hard work.

::emp::

PS: Yes, most of this was just to improve WF’s ranking. Fags!

Making money with digital photography

Well, this is not really an internet marketing post, but as we are all trying to make some cash online, you might think about selling some digital production assets.

Pictures, to be precise.

The company I’ll point you to is crestock.com (no affiliate link).

Why crestock?
I am choosing crestock because I was impressed with the quality of the images they offer and their review process.

Requirements?
A digital camera of 6MP+,  some good pictures.
crestock also accepts digital images other than photos, so if your pictures are 3D or vector based, go ahead and submit those as well.

The review of your pictures is actually intended to give you pointers to improvements.

How much do they pay?
Greedy bastards! I am so proud of you. <sniff>

crestock pays 20% of each photo sold by a normal customer, you’ll get 0.25$ if a subscriber chooses one of your photos.

Payout limit?
crestock pays once you reach 100$, payout is via paypal.

Conclusion:
All in all, the offer is not impressing, but solid. It should be easy to get a few dozen images into their database and once I get my new camera, I am planning to do just that. I might even give the old trusty lightwave another spin.

Enjoy.

::emp::