Changing Affiliate World – Part 2

Let’s have some fun – and try to do it with no (little)money!

The “changing affiliate world” is a series I’m doing in parts to give those going through the 30 day guide some ideas to get something off the ground.  You can see all the posts on the “Changing Affiliate World by looking at the “Changing Affiliate World” Category.

O.K. most of the posts in this segment will of course require you to have some money.  Not always for tools (some of them will), but most will require hosting and domain names at the minimum.  I’ll be the first to “NOT” be excited about this idea, but that’s mainly because of my slight paranoia about building anything on anyone elses websites   I also have my hosts, domains, and play money so I wouldn’t actually ever do this any longer  just this way.  Instead I would use the sites we are talking about to drive traffic to MY real money sites.

Basically all that is covered in the 30 day guide to a kick ass network.

Still this idea has a lot of merit and there is no reason you couldn’t view some of your “users” as your own money pages.

So let’s get straight to it.  Head on over to your favorite affiliate network.  Sorry kids, I’m not talking about neverblue, azoogle, pepperjam, etc..  I’m talking about the big boys.  That means Link Share or Commission Junction.

Pick one – doesn’t matter.

Once your in there – pick a “REAL” store. Like walmart, office max, etc…

Pick a product theme.  Curtains, couches, books, something.  For our example I’m going to pick kids toys.  Walmart (in linkshare) has a ton of toys – and of course if we can get the grandma’s and mom’s to walmart who knows what else they will buy.  For the ‘social’ aspect of this to work I can’t help but think we need to be bringing women in.  Men don’t participate as much in stuff like this.  Sure you could make it work – but you will probably see the benefit of targetting women as we go along.  Better yet target what most women think are more important than they are —- their kids.

Here is what you will need:

• Hosting. I recommend a VPS for this – but you can put 5 to 15 instances of this concept on the same server. HINT – Liquid Web (link in the sidebar) has great VPS servers for a first timer.  You can get away with this with a shared host – but don’t try multiple domains running MU there.
• WordPress Mu. This is your secret weapon. It’s going to let you burst into new markets fast and easy. Go get it here: WordPress MU.
• Make sure you set up WordPress MU to create subdomains for every user.  That’s where the wildcard subdomains come in that I talk about below.
• Buddypress – BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact.  This is the most important part…. creating your community.
• Squidoo Account, Blogger Account, and Bookmarking Demon. (this is optional but really really helps. If you don’t use it, get a copy of onlywire or something).
• An Account at the Promotion Center through Niche Site Special 2 (black hat membership). (this is optional but really helps)

In regards to the hosting, you can use a shared host but you must ensure they are willing to set up wildcard subdomains first. I’ve always found this to be a hassle and it’s just easier to get a VPS. If you get a good support staff it will take them a few minutes to do, or you can take this opportunity to learn how to do it yourself. There are tons of tutorials out there.  Just google “set up wildcard subdomains”.  Hostgator has set this up for me by the way

Since in my example we are going to be targetting moms to talk about their experiences with “TOYS”…. we need an appropriate domain name.  Let’s go with something like “momrecommendsthesetoys.com”

GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR WORDPRESS MU and Buddypress SETUP:

1. I make a newsletter series. Usually just 5 or so messages. I take companies I find in linkshare, commission junction, etc… that are related to toys and I just e-mail out a promo for each of them. I load them up in order, them load them again, then load them again. Basically I’m just hitting them up with something like this:

Walmart.com has a great deal on xyz toy.  Here are all the details – and here is a great review from a “MOM” like you!  (blah,blah,blah).  Ohh by the way you should be talking about your experiences with toys at momrecommendsthesetoys.com.  If you haven’t already created your own page please go log in here and do so.

Adding the newsletter isn’t a requirement – but it is worth it usually even if it does add on an hour or so to this set up. Make sure you add your newsletter boxes to all the themes your users can chose from.  I recommend Aweber (but I don’t have the ‘new’ style accounts. I’m an old fart and was grandfathered in to the old system where I just pay per 10k subscibers).

3.) I’m not worried about adsense income with these – I want them to purchase something from MY affiliate links not someone elses. I’ll make some pennies off the other steps we take. Plus since I’m not using my adsense account(s) I can be a little risky with some of the promotional methods I chose to do.  Normally I would focus on getting folks into the newsletter – but since I’ve got to fill out things anyway I’ll explain another way to make some moola.

5.) Time to start being “mom” – actually a lot of moms.  If you don’t take the time to sign up 50 or so fake mom’s it’s going to take forever.  The good news is that you can of course stuff some of those moms up with affiliate links.  Be smart with some of those names — you want to make sure some are “real” — but not lose out on the good paying keywords.

You end up with urls like this:

lego.momrecommendsthesetoys.com

sheilalikes.momrecommendsthesetoys.com

tyco.momrecommendsthesetoys.com

tycomom.momrecommendsthesetoys.com

Make a few posts for each user account and create a real profile…. also your post titles are going to matter (make sure model numbers and features are in the posts, titles, etc… ). Write em down – your going to need the urls of each of your links.  For the rest of my example I’m going to pretend that I’ve made a post on a the “starwars flip toy”.  Your urls are going to end up like this:

starwars.momrecommendsthesetoys.com/starwars-flip-toy

Next I’m going to open up three browser windows.  Squidoo, Blogger, and WordPress (the ones they host for you).  I’m going to make a quick post about “starwars toys” using keywords I think (or have researched) people will be using to find these things.  Somewhere in all of these I am going to link back to my star wars flip toy page (starwars.momrecommendsthesetoys.com/starwars-flip-toy).  For squidoo I’m going to activate at least 5 moduals… link back, etc…

It’s also not a bad idea to find some way to get people to go sign up over at your MU site at this point as well. If the page has a reader — use it.

End result:  I now have:

My WordPress MU page, a squidoo page, a blogger blog, and a wordpress blog.  I’ve interlinked all of them but the focus is my MU page because I OWN that one.   I’ll use the others for traffic and ranking help, but I sure as heck don’t want to depend on any of the things hosted elsewhere to stay there forever.

I’ll take my keywords, and each of those urls and head on over to Bookmarking Demon and get the initial links to get me spidered and to increase my “squidoo rank” and submit all those sites to the “Promotion Center” at Niche Site Special 2.  If you don’t have those things – step up your game and start making more web 2.0 sites to link from.  It really does come down to links.

If after a few days I start seeing some good traffic at squiddo or to my MU site, I’ll go ahead and start making comments on related blogs.  I’ll use Comment Hut for this.  Basically Comment Hut goes out and finds related blogs, lens’s, hub pages, etc..  Spits em out in a text file and I can go comment on them.  I have a few choices there – and it really depends on how I want to do things.

I can:

Manually make a comment to each one.

Use a script to make fake comments on each one.

Trackback Spam them.

Referrer Spam them.

Or just start linking to those posts in future blog posts so I get the trackbacks the acceptable way.  This is something that isn’t talked about much because it’s just “work”.  But why not be white hat about this?  You’ve put a lot work so far – so let’s not ruin it.

There are also a few more things I can do.  Usually there is someone somewhere in some forum selling submissions.  For like 20 bucks I can get my MU site put in a couple hundred directories, but I normally don’t have to go that far.  There is always myspace, hubpages, and a few hundred other social networks out there just waiting for me to drop links in.  That’s what they are there for right?

That’s just a drop in the bucket, there are still hundreds of other ways to build links… and even generate content for these sites.  There’s rss feeds, viral stuff, link injection, and more.

Moral of the story and your game plan:

1.) Set up MU and Buddy Press

2.) Make a user to promote individual products along with fake users.

3.) Find 3 (or more) ways to build other web 2.0 sites and pages pointing to your fake users.

4.) That will help you get indexed – but don’t overlook any other tools you may have.

5.) Figure out how you are going to keep building links steady over the long term.  Hopefully you can have your “real” moms do some of this for you if you can attract them – but never plan on that.  The owner of a site has to work hard just to get them there.

Have questions?  Ask away.

Edit: I realized that I didn’t really cover product promotion much up there.  Before I get flooded with questions, I suggest that you actually hyperlink and promote single products…. and focus on getting your self in the search engines for them.  In the case of toys I would actually name the toy.

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Tags: buddypress, Commission Junction, Wordpress, wordpress mu

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Changing Affiliate World, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.