miércoles, 16 de junio de 2010

Before entering a new market, try testing it first


Before your valuable time and money are spent building a website and infrastructure, here's one way to test the waters of a new possible online market with very little work.

You know information is valuable.
You know the Internet is a profitable venue for marketing information.
You think you may have a great idea or maybe even a product... Now what?

gambling affiliate marketing

If you've done your research, you already have the right tools to start your online business. Namely, you know how to make a website (or if you don't know how, you know that you can learn how to do it easily or that you can hire someone else to do it for you) and you understand the mechanics of selling your product online (like signing up with a payment processor and getting visitors to go to your site).

But maybe you're afraid to start.

There's nothing wrong with being wary; in fact it's good business sense to know what you're getting into. A common statistic thrown around is that 9 out of 10 new businesses will fail within the first year.


But knowing that doesn't mean it's time to quit before you even start. You have a product and therefore you have a target market; it's useful, even necessary, and most certainly comforting to your beginner's brain to do your own research and due diligence.

One method of practicing your business before actually going it alone is to become an affiliate. Using an affiliate program to enter a new market allows you test out your ideas and hone them with the ultimate goal of creating and promoting your own product. (In summary, for you beginners out there, affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission off of purchases made by visitors who arrived at that particular product's site by clicking on a link on your webpage).


An advantage of affiliate marketing is that your only concern is driving visitors to their site; the affiliate program will worry about having the perfect product, providing customer service, and delivering the product. Affiliate programs may even provide you with banners or free e-books and techniques showing you how to promote them. This will provide a good learning ground for you so that you can garner ideas for eventually promoting your own product.

Find some affiliate programs related to your particular idea or product.


The research you'll derive from joining an affiliate program will be the real benefit. By setting up a website or a few websites testing out your various ideas and promoting these ideas, you can then sit back and see what happens. Hopefully you'll start making money. Then you can see which products are really selling and what marketing techniques are working. As you work on improving your website for the products that are selling, you're laying the groundwork for selling your own product.

jueves, 3 de junio de 2010

Secondary Market for Adult Targeted Traffic - The Untold Industry

Every site developer I know is absolutely fixated in trying to find the latest and greatest new way to acquire targeted site traffic. In fact, cottage industries for Google optimizing alone have sprung up over the obsession for traffic-building. Yet what is the value of traffic?

affordable search engine optimization

Shouldn't we be more concerned with ROI? If sites which promise that they'll send you "1 million hits (which are often just row upon row of 1X1 pixel images) for the low cost of $50", can dupe nearly 5% of visitors into purchasing their utter garbage, it is a testament to just how desperate site owners are for visitors.


I have this theory that there's an element of self-consolation people have at looking at their stats soar over a 24 hour period with these types of guaranteed hits programs. Sure you don't convert any new visitors, but you can tell all your buds that your site got in the vicinity of 50,000 hits yesterday!

Impressive, yet totally useless. If money is to be made, you must think outside the box--do something which few others are aware of.
The online adult entertainment market is far and away untouchable in terms of profit generation, but it too can at times get stagnant. With such an over saturation in the industry, it gets harder and harder to compete. Sites die down, the big names get bigger, and the small names have an even tougher time competing. It is no wonder, therefore, that adult websites have such a high turnover rate. Webmasters like to move on to new things, try out different niches and the ilk. In the process, they abandon thriving websites, or simply forget to renew the domain names for some of their existing sites. It happens daily, and more often than you would think. And the really scary thing is, it's a gargantuan market--one which has been vastly untapped.


The market is that of secondary expired traffic -- possibly the most latent industry online for monetizing traffic. Concept The concept is simple: Find previously developed websites (read: domains) which have since expired due to webmaster neglect or abandonment, and make use of the link and search engine traffic that they are already receiving.
Expired domains are nothing new, and have been the rage on the net for the past few years.
The function of the expired domain market as it exists today for most individuals is to:
a) Find a suitable name for developing a new site
b) Try and grab up a hot sounding expired name in the face of cutthroat
Competition.

The fact remains that 99% of expired domain speculators are still fixated on the notion that they can snap up the next Business.com--assuming that the previous owner fails to renew it (here's hoping). Very rarely do you find an individual who ignores the undeveloped, great sounding, generic names and understands the value of those domains which have expired, but were previously developed. In the past, if an expired domain hunter had registered an expired domain with existing traffic, it was often by dumb luck.


That traffic attached to the domain was just thought to be an added bonus to the domain purchased. Now individuals are beginning to realize that there are fairly simple means to locate and estimate with accuracy those domains which have existing link and search engine traffic attached to them, and those that do not. However, few still have access to the right tools and information necessary to identify the gold in all the expiring, undeveloped rubble. Very few legitimate opportunities exist on the net which offer entrepreneurs start up costs of less than $10, minimal, passive involvement, and a growing recurring revenue stream--expired traffic just happens to be one of them. Once you've found an expired domain with a sizeable stream of adult traffic, the best thing to do with it is to squeeze every last drop of profit out of it by utilizing any one of a number of appropriate sponsors. Alternatively, you could redevelop the expired and previously active domain, in the hopes that the pre-established traffic it is already receiving may be revitalised through fresh, new content. If you go the way of redirecting to sponsors, the best sponsors for expired adult traffic have been Clickcash and Nastydollars for general adult traffic, and the Mr.Skin program, using Flashcash for any celebrity orientated material. These programs are highly established, have been paying on time for several years, and will provide you with free content and tools to promote them. Below we outline a real-life example of how this entire process works.


An Example What happens is that the expired domains traffic is redirected (either through domain-based re-direction or JavaScript re-direction) to one page. So say those 15 names, each were previously developed adult sites, but had since expired. They were each snagged for the mere cost of registration, about $9 a pop, and are then pointed to “yourname.com”. You continue to receive new streams of real traffic both originating from the search engines and from other sites of expired domains you start linking to yours.

Net cost: about $150 for the 15 domains (and hosting fees, which vary. However, you can usually set up a basic affiliate redirect for free.) If you then convert somewhere in the vicinity of 0.25% (1 in 400) of visitors which is the usual Clickcash conversion rate. Doing the math: From the traffic of the 15 expired adult websites, in 1 year.
Estimated to be -- 0.25% conversion from



* 1,000,000 visits/year *
$60/lead = $150,000.00 gross Less $150 for the domains purchase = $149,850.00 Sound unbelievable? It isn't. Although there is one small caveat--the sites must continue to bring in the same amount of traffic they are each currently sending. Over the course of the year, the traffic quality and quantity will surely degrade, but since sites expire on a daily basis, we can always replace older expired traffic with newer leads and newer sites. Conclusion So how do you get a piece of this market--a market where a select few individuals in the know have quietly gone on to make untold millions?
Through information, and the right tools. Understanding this nascent game, which I estimate fewer than 2-3 thousand or so individuals are actively participating in, is the key to prospering in it.

Very few legitimate opportunities exist on the net which offer entrepreneurs start up costs of less than $10, minimal, passive involvement, and a growing recurring revenue stream--expired traffic just happens to be one of them. While everyone continues to march to the drum of optimizing and developing existing sites to eek out small gains, I'll continue to find other people's abandoned property, and use it without fail to make a quick buck. But hey, you do what suits you best.