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 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.

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.

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.

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:

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.