Purchasing an existing domain or website can be a great way to provide a spark to your online business. I am always on the lookout for some interesting new properties. This can take a lot of time because there are a number of places where people post their domains or sites for sale. Shoemoney recently created a page that aggregates many of these sites into one source. At his marketplace you can even get an RSS feed of all of the listings. The feed has been a great addition to my bloglines account and it has already helped me to quickly pick up a few properties.

The only feature missing would be some search functionality to quickly be able to search the feed. It is a huge timesaver, and I highly recommend adding it to you feedreader.

The nation of Cameroon owns that top level domain (TLD) of .CM and they are redirecting all unresolved traffic to a very lame and generic PPC landing page which syndicates AdWords results. You can see an example of it at google.cm. They must get significant traffic from all of the typos of users leaving out the o in .com domain names.

Setting aside the ethical issue with basically typo-squatting the entire .com domain space, this could be a great way for a poor African nation to raise some money. However, they could easily boost their revenue by building customized landing pages for the most frequently accessed domains. For example, amazon.cm should either redirect to the Amazon.com affiliate links or a page targeted towards ecommerce. I can’t even imagine how much money they are leaving on the table. The folks at NameView.com, who appear to be providing the landing pages, are doing them an a huge disservice here.

I started researching the .CM situation after  I came across a blog post about it on CircelID. I am now trying to determine how I can register a .CM domain name. I have come across a few sites that supposedly offer registration, but the information looks dated and the company in Cameroon which actually manages the registry recently took the page that contains registration instructions off of their site. I will continue to pursue this in the hopes of grabbing a few prime names.

In my post about about how to monetize unused domains, I mentioned that I was experimenting with redirecting a typo domain. The domain is blinkco.com which is a typo for the ringtone company blinko.

I have seen a drastic improvement by redirecting the traffic to the blinko affiliate program on azoogle. The previous owner was using Sedo to monetize the domain. This earned him approximately $0.13 per visitor. The affiliate program redirect has earned my over $0.40 per visitor over the first month and a half. This equates to $430 CPM. The traffic volume is not huge, but it is a nice additional revenue stream. I will keep my eyes open to apply this technique to more domain names.

Here are two posts on affiliate marketing that  caught my attention.

John Chow has some good ideas about the proper way to do affiliate marketing. His big empahsis is on pre-selling affiliate offers. In my mind, I view this as giving the offers context. In his example, he promoted affiilate programs as “hot deals.” This gave viewers on his technology site a reason to be more interested. On some of my sites geared towards less savy/younger internet users, I have had success positioning the offers in a free stuff or special offer section.

As a follow up to my Lazy Man’s Guide to Tracking PPC campaigns, this is a great post about using Google Analytics to track campaigns. I did not realize that you could pass information to analytics in the javascript to help it segment your traffic. This may not be helpful for tracking affiliate traffic to networks, but the idea has me thinking of some interesting applications.

Shawn Collins writes that the Attorney General of Florida is investigating deceptive practices of ringtone affiliate marketers. The part that stands out to me is when he mentions that they are concerned about people who marketed the offers as “free.” Although practices have changed recently, marketing the offers as free was a common practice. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Although I am relatively new to promoting affiliate offers via PPC, I thought that might be worthwhile to share my Lazy Man’s systems for tracking my PPC traffic.

While the pros use nice custom developed software to track their traffic, I use a relatively simple spreadsheet. One worksheet contains the all of the offers that I am running and assigns a unique offer ID to each offer. The set of worksheets contains a tab with all of the keywords that I am running. Each record of keyword data contains an offer id for the offer that it is associated with and a unique keyword ID.

When I send traffic to the affiliate programs, I pass the affiliate a subid variable which is usually in the format of:

traffic source|offer_id|keyword_id

The traffic source represents where the traffic came from. For example, I use “g” for Google and “y” for Yahoo. If I have lots of closely related keywords with very low levels of traffic each (ex: typos), I will assign them to a keyword group and then substitute the keyword group for the keyword_id.
Most of the programs that I work with allow me to quickly pull a report that shows that the performance of each subid. This helps me to quickly assess how each keyword is performing for each offer without having to download additional reports or transform the data.

If I need to do further analysis, I download the reports to spreadsheets and use pivot tables to look at things like the keyword performance across all of the search engines where I use the keyword.

Future Improvements

The system performs well for me today, but in the future I would like to load my spreadsheets to mysql and create a web based system to manage the keywords. The new system would address some of the shortcomings in my system today such as tracking all of the information that Google can append via the AdWords auto-tagging feature (keyword phrase, ad variation, etc.).

I also have just started looking at the RevTrends affiliate aggregation services. I run offers from a number of affiliate programs today, and their service attempts to provide an aggregate view of your performance. They do not support all of the companies that I work with, and I am not sure of the level of granularity in their data, but it seems worthwhile to explore.

I will keep you updated as I make progress building out a system to effectively track my PPC traffic.

The new Adsense terms of service prohibits term paper related sites from using Google Adsense. This creates an inherent conflict between the the Adsense and AdWords policy.

A few months ago, I found out the hard way that Google was going to ban term paper related websites. In the Adsense terms and conditions released in the beginning of January, Google made this stance official by adding “Sales or distribution of term papers or student essays ” to the “site may not include” policy.

On the January 30th episode of ShoeMoney’s Net Income, Brian Axe of Google explained the change by saying:

This is consistent with our AdWords policy and primarily Google just has a big responsibility in things that we help to monetize…We received quite a bit of feedback from educators, and we felt the right thing to do was to not help to fuel this industry…We do not want to fund them with Adsense ads.

Brian’s comment was very interesting to me on a few levels:

1. The Adwords Content Policy does not mention banning term paper related sites.
2. A Google search for “term papers” shows all sorts of AdWords ads for sites selling term papers and related services. These very sites would definitely not fit within the new Adsense guidelines.

So Google does not want to “help to fuel this industry” but AdWords provides a highly efficient vehicle for these companies to gain customers. Something does not make sense here, and I hope that Google can create a consistent policy between AdWords and Adsense to remove the confusion.

Here are some great monetization related posts that have bubbled up in my feedreader lately:

Vizu just launched a new service where they pay you to post polls on your site. You provide some basic demographic information for your site, and they will pay on a CPM basis for placing the poll on your site. This could be a great strategy for some of the quiz sites or even my friends who run a popular teen site, Kiwibox.com.

One of the blogs that I found off of the wickedfire forum has a good post about calculating confidence intervals for your PPC campaign performance. This is the best way to statistically prove if your initial campaign results are statistically meaningful, or if you need to continue testing your campaign. When I get around to building out the MonetizeTraffic tools section, I am thinking about a quick and easy interface to calculate confidence intervals. If you want to geek out on stats, you wikipedia has some good info.
I really liked this post on Earnersblog about combining blogger accounts with social bookmarking promotion to drive easy affiliate sales. The posts mentions using Bookmarking Demon to automate the bookmarking. The software looks very cool, but it is $97. To do it on the cheap, you might want to check out Delicioso which has less features but is free.