Now for the explanation. If you’re anything like me, some days you’re at your house chugging away at campaigns and you just get bored. Maybe most of your friends on IM are working and can’t talk, you don’t want to wait for people to reply to your forum posts, and you just want to take a break. That’s why I set up a small chat room attached to UberAffiliate. I plan on just popping it up in a new window and letting it chill in the corner of one of my monitors. I used to hang around the Cakes chat room, but the past few times I’ve gone in there hasn’t really been anybody on.

This is also a way I think I’ll be able to connect with you guys (the readers) better. A lot of you send me IMs during the day and I’m either not paying attention to Adium, or by the time I get back to the computer to respond you’re already gone.

So if you just want a place to hang out and chat/shoot the breeze with other marketers, just head to the chat room.

Nothing big, maybe I’ll see you there maybe not! Oh if you have your own IRC program that you’re more used to, the channel is #affchat.

Twitter on Quantcast

I took a quick look over at Quantcast on Twitter to see what the demographics looked like.

The site caters to a more educated audience.The typical visitor subscribes to New Yorker and reads realclearpolitics.com.

Ok so we have more educated people on Twitter, and it looks like the audience is a little older than the 13 year old Myspace crowd. So this kind of makes ringtones or something like that not the best choice.

So what do older people want? I don’t know, the really old chaps like wine, cigars, etc. Mid range people maybe want Starbucks coupons, New York Times subscriptions, maybe a better mortgage. All of these things have affiliate offers. It looks like 30% of the users have a child in their household…maybe you coupon guys can find a Toys ‘R Us coupon for them, haha.

Do I have any idea that this will work? No…it just came to mind as I was on Twitter earlier. I’m in the whole webmaster crowd on Twitter, but I’m sure there’s normal people out there that don’t know what affiliate marketing is. It’s just a potentially large traffic source that looks untapped; perhaps people are doing it already and I just haven’t gotten any spam.

Good luck and don’t blame me for any of this.

DISCLAIMER : These are my ideas only, and I am not recommending you take action on anything I say. If you piss Twitter off and they sue you or something crazy, don’t point the finger at me. I’m only thinking out loud here, if it sparks any ideas in your mind then so be it.

Yahoo stock dropped from around $28 to $23 per share, and I’m no stock expert so I couldn’t tell you how much more it will drop. I think it was around $19 when MSN made the offer, and then spiked up close to $30 (again just going off what I heard). Kris predicted that Google would make a bid on Yahoo once the stock drops off more, and then Microsoft would battle it out with Google. Once again I’m no stock expert, but it seems like a smart thing to do would be buy a boatload of YHOO stock when it’s at a low, and once Google/Microsoft start a bidding war stock should spike back up and you could make a nice coin. I might throw some money into it myself after a little more research.

What if Google ended up winning Yahoo? How would that change our strategies as affiliate marketers? We all know Yahoo Search Marketing has been poorly trying to replicate the Adwords system for some time now. The new addition of minimum bids made it even more retarded and pathetic. I have sites that have Great QS in Google with $0.02 minimum bids, but they have like $0.67 minimum bids in Yahoo. Even taking that into consideration, would I want the two to become one? Probably not right now, Yahoo still does a lot of things stupid that you can take advantage of.

I’d just feel bad for poor MSN if this all happened, haha.

This post wasn’t actually in my agenda, but I’m squeezing it in as I just kind of stumbled over it and found it interesting. I was browsing YouTube, and found a site that is possibly cashing in on hundreds of thousands of free impressions. I was on vacation yesterday and missed American Idol which I like to watch (I love music and play the drums), so I was watching some of the performers on last night’s episode when I stumbled upon the user RealIdolFans. It was pretty obvious what caught my eye, here’s a screenshot of the very beginning (and end) of the video :
 

 
Basically it’s an ad telling users that they can get their American Idol ringtones at IdolRings.com. If you go to Idol Rings you can see it’s just a rip of a basic ringtone landing page, they just altered the graphics a little bit to make it look like it’s IdolRings’ custom website.

When the video of the show actually starts, they have a little Idol looking watermark thing in the bottom corner of the video. Their ad is showing during the entire video, and almost looks like it’s a part of the show.
 

 

They also have a link to the landing page in the first line of the video description.
 

 

I looked in a little further and checked out the profile of RealIdolFans and saw the following information :
 

 

RealIdolFans joined just 1 day ago, but in that day has watched almost 1,100 videos. Now either this person is a REAL YouTube addict, or they had some automated script go through and watch 1,000 movies to make their profile look credible.

After one day, this person already has over 50 video subscribers, and around 10,000 views per video (most have over 10k, one of them has over 50k views in less than 24 hours). With every new week, subscribers for RealIdolFans should jump up as well as video views. This person has found a way to get thousands of ringtone clicks at no cost (aside from taking time to upload all the videos). Do I have any idea if they’re even making money with it? No, but I’m sure they’ve done at least a few leads.

Moral of this story…once again think outside the box when it comes to affiliate marketing! There are plenty of other ways to make money on affiliate programs aside from just PPC landing pages. This person is exploiting the millions of YouTube views every day by building a follow-ship and then using it to sell ringtones to the perfect target audience.

Build A Small Proxy Network

These are the easiest things in the world to do. I spent like 2 hours total on the project and it made me $10-15/day in Adsense for a few months. Here are the steps :

1) Buy 10 .info proxy related domains. Like www.ProxyJock.info or something.

2) Find a free proxy template and throw it up on every proxy. Need help? Click

3) Install PHProxy

3) Go to DP and pay for someone to submit it to 100 topsites or so.

4) Go to proxy.org and asked to be submitted to the list.

5) Add all the topsite codes and your Adsense code to the page.

6) Let it run and make some money.

7) If server costs get too expensive, just flip the network for a couple hundred bucks.

Build a Directory Network

These take a little more time but are really easy to to, and it’s how I made my first big sale. My directory was the first thing I owned. All I did was buy some powerful directory links, submitted to a crap load of free directories, and then made some money with it. My best directory was a PR5, I probably made $2,000-3,000 total off it, then sold it for $3,000. Since it was my first venture online, I was very pleased with the income. I actually solid it to fund some PPC stuff as I as running out of cash. A lot of people question the demand and authority of general directories anymore, so I don’t know how well it would work. I’m just sharing my experiences from early this year and how I made some money. For the step-by-step :

1) Buy 5 or so directory domains. www.SeekTheWeb.com or something like that.

2) Buy phpLD and install it.

3) Find five different directory templates to install. Need help? Click.

4) Pay somebody to submit your directory to a few hundred PR3+ directories.

5) Buy some powerful links from Alive and Aviva.

6) Make a promotion at DP saying free regular links for 24 hours and special $3 featured links for 24 hours or something like that.

7) Let the network sit for a few months and make a few bucks here and there. PR update comes and you get PR2-3.

8) Sell some cheap sitewide links, try and make around $100 per directory. Sell them for a whole year or something.

9) Flip the network for a few hundred and enjoy the 1 day you put into it to start.

Like I said, I’m not sure how out-dated that information is, but it may be an alternate idea for those struggling to make money online. Like I said it was around April when I sold all my directories. My biggest directory sold for $3,000, and then I had a network of 4 directories that I did the EXACT same thing as above and it went on SitePoint for $1,200. I also had another directory that I bought for $200 and flipped for $800. Now there’s bidding directories and all that other crap so I’m not sure how it’ll all work. But the directory forum at DP still seems bustling with activity, so if you’re in a bind it could mean some money.

Alright not a directly related affiliate marketing post, but it’s about making money so are you going to complain?