I’ve been running a couple of pretty basic wordpress installs with a script that reads a data feed from Share A Sale. Basically, the script takes an assortment of products that haven’t been published yet, and then randomly inserts new pages into a wordpress site over the next week. I run about 100 products per week, so with a larger dataset (say, 5000 products), this site will have continually new information each day for a year.
They work ok; more or less pay for the time spent building them. Seems like cheating, though. But an interesting thing (to me anyway) is seeing the long tail searches that hit those sites. People are pretty much searching for the exact thing (example: blue glass napkin ring ) that is in the page.
I can’t really say that I recommend this site technique. These sites are fairly thin as far as content goes, and not very helpful for an end user. But if you’ve got a domain just sitting there, you might give it a try. I can’t suggest putting adwords on them, though — google doesn’t like empty sites like this.
Written by russ on October 18th, 2010 with no comments.
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I love Superhero movies. Even bad ones. Ok, except Spiderman 3. Superhero or comicbook movies are one of my passions. So when I heard about The Goon Movie by Eric Powell, I jumped up and bought a domain. I put some basic info on it and set up some affiliate links to Things From Another World.
It doesn’t get a whole lot of traffic- about 1000 visitors a month, but it’s made about 55 bucks. I figured that the new Superman movie (shooting starts next year, the movie should be released in 2012) would be more popular than The Goon. And then I heard that General Zod was rumored to be the villain. I was shocked to see that generalzod.com was available. So I jumped on that $10 grenade and a night later had a basic website up.
Well, I woke up yesterday morning and learned that Snyder (the confirmed director) is saying that Zod is just a rumor, and the whole Internet is pooh-poohing the idea that Zod is the villain.
Sometimes the ten dollar gamble pays off (50/10) and sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe general Zod will still pay off.
Written by russ on October 15th, 2010 with no comments.
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Thought someone out there might need something like this. I don’t have a particular use for these exact pieces, so I’m going to share.
First, I found some semi-interesting hunks of data over at http://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/ — there’s a link on that page (it updates slowly so it’s probably still there) to this site for Australia: http://data.australia.gov.au/ . I chose one at random, well semi-random (I was looking for something smallish) and found http://data.australia.gov.au/570 this dataset of frog sightings. Download the file, unzip the file, and it’s in XLS format. Oowriter can read that and save it to a csv; so I did. Then I wrote a little php script that’d be able to read the file and maybe import into a database (this step is superfluous because you could just do a mysql “import data from file” query and you’d be done. But here’s what the start of the script looks like:
$input=file( "frogs.csv" );
foreach( $input as $line ) {
list( $fauna, $species, $common, $nsxcode, $lat, $long, $amgzon, $easting, $northing, $sighting, $date, $reliable, $method ) = explode(',', $line );
print "$common: $lat, $long\n";
}
Ok, what could you do with a database of frogs and their location? You could pull some information from Wikipedia with this format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ . str_replace(‘ ‘, ‘_’, ucwords(strtolower( $common ) ) ). You could follow the wiki link to http://frogsaustralia.net.au/frogs/display.cfm?frog_id=72 and get some more information, including their call.
Or, you could use some geolocation service or just ask the user where they are, and give them a list of the 10 different frogs in the area (“I just saw something brown! what could it have been?”). Or, you could mash these up with the database of public toilets to find out what frog’s making that infernal racket in the potty, and is it venomous? (hint: you’re in Australia, it’s venomous).
Ok, so the frogs are a pretty silly example. But thank you Australia for the six thousand little data points in that database.
Written by russ on April 19th, 2010 with no comments.
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I got a nastygram from eBay. I’ve probably been running on borrowed time for several months; but now they’ve cut me completely off. So my scrapbook page website (scrapbookitforme.com), my project car website (projectcarcatalog.com) and my naruto trading cards websites are all sitting dead in the water.
Sigh, back to the drawing board I suppose; I’ll have to find another $100/month to replace those. I guess I was getting complacent anyway.
Written by russ on November 9th, 2009 with no comments.
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So, here’s the skinny on another way to be on the shit end of 1and1′s stick.
First, sign up at 1and1 for a package. Any package. The URL is 1and1.com; you can find their hosting packages, I’m sure. Oh this one looks good… The Beginner Package: $2/month for six months, then it doubles to $4. Right on, you say, and you sign right up. Great. You’re happily going along when you decide you need another domain. So you order another domain through 1and1′s not great prices, but hey, it’s all together.
Fast forward another ten months. You’ve got a pack of domains running, but you’ve outgrown your 1and1 service. You look at the offerings and decide to go with a HostGator package instead. Since you have multiple domains, check out their “baby” level service. Unlimited domain hosting. Great.
You gently move your sites from 1and1 to HostGator. Everything goes smoothly, and you go ahead and flip the switch, changing the nameservers from the 1and1 ones to the hostgator ones. Now everything’s beautific, you’ve got great service, you’ve got fantastic uptime, hostgator is really coming through for you. You’re ready to stop paying for the hosting at 1and1; you don’t need it, and frankly it wasn’t all that great anyway. You call up their “cancel.1and1.com” instructions, enter your username and password, and … shazam! …
You can’t cancel your package without cancelling the domains!
So now you need to transfer the domains to (hostgator? I prefer namecheap) before you can cancel your account with 1and1. And you’ll probably be billed for another round at 1and1. As an added bonus, your domains will be locked in “updating status” for an indeterminite length of time) if you’ve recently changed something about them. For instance, their nameservers.
Thanks, 1and1. Again.
Written by russ on March 23rd, 2009 with no comments.
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Taking time out for a mild rant. I think they’re wrong, but it’s their game and if I want to play with them, I have to follow their rules.
There’s a Commission Junction advertiser advertising a job search guide, the “last job search guide you’ll ever need.” The advertiser is collegerecruiter.com. When you click through the link, it takes you to “trialpay.com” to purchase the book. “Trial Pay” is obviously a payment site (like paypal, right?).
So when I advertised the collegerecruiter.com deal through adwords, I put down the collegerecruiter.com site as the destination page. It’s the honest place where the money would go. However, Google Adwords wants trialpay.com as the destination domain. Which I would be down with, if it were trialpay.com selling the book.
Anyway. I thought it was stupid.
Written by russ on March 5th, 2009 with no comments.
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I’m working over a site; currently it’s running a bunch of McJiffy sites and getting diddly bupkiss for traffic. The fact that Google Hates It doesn’t help but there’s other sources out there. One of the subdomains is “Rachel Ray.”
Now, I don’t remember why I threw Rachel Ray up there; I suspect I was just tossing it out there because she was a hot search item about a year ago. As I do these subdomains, making them over from McJiffy to “something else,” I’m also evaluating whether or not I should keep the site alive. I mean, I removed britney-spears.portallane.com, didn’t I? And Kim Kardashian?
But looking over my stats, I saw a huge jump for Rachel Ray yesterday. Why? Because she “doesn’t regret those racy photos” and my site popped up on yahoo search for Rachel Ray.
“I think I was 35 at the time [the pictures were taken],” she says. “And I thought about it for a while, and I said, ‘You know what? This magazine has as young as 17-, 18-year-olds in hottie bikinis, and these are all actresses, models, pin-up girls. I don’t belong to any even remote club of theirs.’
“And I thought, ‘If I’m gutsy enough to do this, this is a good thing for everybody. This is the everywoman, here she is.’ And I did it, and it was the most scared I’ve ever been, and I wouldn’t change a thing. I’d do it again tomorrow.”
Yup, those FHM photos came back, and they’re still lovely. Since I’m moving the sites over anyway, I threw together a different page, just showing some of those photos and a couple of popular CPA ads. Heck, free traffic; I don’t suspect these visitors would buy eBay stuff but maybe they’ll click on these banners. And yeah, 200 free views in a day aren’t too shabby, in my mind.
So don’t be too hasty to remove old subdomains. If they’re just sitting there, maybe you should leave them alone. What’s the worst that could happen?
Written by russ on March 3rd, 2009 with no comments.
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This post was inspired by a conversation I had with a non-native english speaker over on IRC.
The basic problem for affiliate marketers is “impressions.” You need to get as many impressions as possible. Once you have a lot of impressions, your percentages for click-through-rates are more reliable, which leads to your conversion rate percentages being more reliable. The first thing you need to worry about is impressions.
People succeed at PPC because they’re paying for impressions. If you don’t want to pay for impressions, (and this is the important part), you’ll need to get them some other way.
Since he was looking for “free money,” my suggestion to him was that he get a blogspot.com blog; note that in this case I’m not encouraging wordpress.com. WordPress (hosted) blogs don’t allow you to add advertising. With a blogspot blog, you can “edit the template” and insert a html or javascript snippet. This is where you can add advertising.
So, get a blogspot blog, add some advertising, and then figure out how to divert traffic to it.
What I suggested to him was that he write some fabulous, kick ass content, or post boobs, and submit it to digg and reddit and fark. There are two main problems with this approach. First, I suspect his content will get lost in the flood; he was a non-native speaker, and it may have been difficult to connect with his audience (unless he posts his boobs). The second problem with this is that fark, digg and reddit traffic doesn’t convert well. However, this is still true. Compelling content to get your users to your site, getting the eyeballs actually on the page, and then watching the impressions->click ratio and the click->purchase ratio.
Written by russ on February 22nd, 2009 with no comments.
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Need Content Generation? Tired of outsourcing blog entries and want to get-er-done? Need a way to track the backlinks of your sites?
Check out Datapresser!
Using cutting edge technology and scripting from the deep minds that brought you the seocracy databases, Datapresser allows you to track large networks of sites, from a one-off blog where you’re ranking for “kangaroo steaks” to a huge “offshore poker” splog site. You can track the position of your site for selected keywords and you can watch the backlinks roll in.
Or if you’re confident in the success of your own sites, you can track your opponents; watch your meteoric rise in the rankings against their waterfall slide down down, down.
The tracking tools are great but where datapresser shines (and where it gets its name), is when you’re creating fresh content. What you’re doing is creating a wordpress-backup of posts in the future. You can automatically generate thousands of unique articles for any niche; for any blogs.
However good it is, it’ll be worthless to you if you don’t sign up. It’s fairly resource intensive (for the creation of literally hundreds of thousands of posts daily ), so availability is limited. sign up now for this service. You won’t regret it, but you will regret waiting until your opponents learn about it.
Written by russ on January 16th, 2009 with 6 comments.
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Got a great email this morning about “micro niches.” But I took it a little differently than I think they intended it. You may have gotten the same email, if this “micro niche” rings a bell.
What is a microniche? Imagine, if you will, a niche for “credit cards with low apr” (those words in that sequence, not low apr credit). According to google, there are 70 pages in the whole world that come up for that page. Getting to the top of that page would be, to coin a phrase, easy. According to the google external keyword tool, there’s about 36 searches per month. About 500 a year.
Most affiliate marketers would avoid such a small niche. What if you didn’t? What if, instead, you built a page with excellent SEO and excellent information on these credit cards with low apr ?
Honestly, what if you took wordpress, whacked together a few pages, and put in some advertising for, you got it, low apr credit cards. You put it on your site and forgot about it.
Suppose your domain purchase is $8. And you put it on your current hosting plan as a parked domain. It won’t get enough traffic to warrant its own hosting plan. It might not get enough traffic to warrant its own domain. But if you’re aimed at selling credit card signups and the click – to – action rate is 1 percent, and the action pays $10, if you sell one credit card every two months, you’ll be making 52 bucks a year (((12/2) * 10) – 8). Ten of those sites would be 520. A hundred, well you see where I’m headed.
True, true, that’s not a lot.
What I’m saying, though, is that if your shotgun approach of finding something with 250,000 sites and 3 million searches per month isn’t working, maybe you should work on something smaller.
I should take my own advice. I’ve been complaining about Easy Spyware Removals not getting much traffic. However, it’s not very seo-optimized, and it’s not very sales oriented. It’s just a dumb bunny site. That specific keyword gets about 140 searches per month. There’s about 3000 sites that pop up in google for that search, and honestly, most of them suck. Of course, the niche is pretty competitive.
Written by russ on January 5th, 2009 with no comments.
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