Some of the details of the .cm domain name monetization scheme have been revealed since my last post on .cm domain names.  Business 2.0 ran a great article about what is going on with the .cm domain space. In my initial post, I detailed how nearly all .cm domain names were being redirected to a landing page on agoga.com that features ppc links from yahoo. The redirects and landing pages are managed by uber-domainer Kevin Ham. He has worked out an agreement with the government of Cameroon to share the revenues derived from the landing pages.

The .cm landing pages receive roughly 8 million uniqe visitors per month. In my initial post, I mentioned that whoever was behind the .cm domain redirect was leaving money on the table by not customizing the landing pages based on the domain entered. According to the article, all of the domains point to the same landing page in order to provide some defense against accusations of typo-squatting. By Mr. Ham’s logic, the service is not typo-squatting, but simply a redirection where all domains are treated equally. The article is a great peak into the world of domaining, and I highly recommend checking it out.

In the comments of my last post, someone mentioned Rightway Gate, a company that claims to be able to register .cm domain names.  I gave them a call last week.  They claimed that if you could provide proof of a trademark or other intellectual property, they would work with the Carmeron domain registry to get you the domain. I am not sure if the service is legitimate, but it is something to explore if you are desperate.

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.

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.

Here are two good posts related to website monetization.

Making Money In the Mashup Economy - An interesting post over at GigaOm about how some companies are monetizing all of the mashups that you see springing up all over the place. One key take away is that many of the people selling tools and services related to mashups are the ones making money. However, there is a great example of hypemachine which allows users to sample music. They monetize the site via links to the apple itunes affiliate program and advertising sales. I could also see them selling feature spots on the homepage to push certain artists. This might be a bit shady, but it could be a nice way to make some money and the payment could be disclosed.

Ringtones Experiment - BlueBobbo got tired of reading in all of the forums that the ringtone market is saturated, so he decided to run a test PPC advertising campaign. The results were surprisingly positive. I love test like this which dispel common myths. It just goes to emphasize that you would always be testing.

As someone who has been building websites since 1996, I have a small collection of domain names that I am not making use of. Over the years, I have tried a variety of methods to monetize these domains.

1.) Domain Parking Services. These services allow you to point your domain to their name servers and they show semi-targeted pay-per-click ads on the domain. The level of input you can have related to targeting varies for each service, but most let you provide some keyword suggestions.

Advantages

• It’s Easy. You can pretty much set it and forget it. Most of the parking services have landing pages with high click through rates, so you will not have to spend any time optimizing the site.
• Works with any domain.

Disadvantages

• Unless you have a huge domain portfolio, the parking services will take a sizable chunk of the revenue.
• For some domains, you may not be able to come up with relevant keywords that will pay well.

I have had some good luck with both DomainSponsor and Sedo. There is also a post over at WickedFire recommending a few other domain parking services and DNForum has some great posts on reviewing parking services.

2.) Redirect to Affiliate Programs. Recently, I have been experimenting with redirecting some of my unused domain names to relevant affiliate programs. For example, on CollegePower.com, I wrote up a quick little PHP script to redirect visitors to one of five scholarship programs on Azoogle and HydraMedia. I have also tried this with a few typo domains that are very well targeted to affiliate programs. I am currently redirecting Blinkco.com to the ringtone offers on Blinko.com. I am not yet ready to discuss my results with this technique, but I certainly see some potential here.

Advantages

• With well-targeted affiliate programs, this can be more profitable than parking services.
• With a simple redirect script, you can test multiple affiliate programs/offers on one domain.

Disadvantages

• Not all domains will have an affiliate program that is a good fit for it.
• You must remember to change up the site if the offer that you are running expires.

3.) Domain Resale. One of the best techniques I have used to monetize my unused domains is to resell some of my holdings. After I sit on a domain for a year or two, I usually consider reselling it if I will not start using it within the next six months. When selling my domains, I have had success using DNForum, Webhostingtalk, and Sitepoint forums. If you find the right buyer, you can get a good price for your domain. For example, I have sold techcoupons.com and webhostinglab.com for a few hundred dollars each. This was a huge return on my initial investment.

Advantages

• Lump sum of cash upfront
• Reduces your overall domain portfolio which can be good if your unused domains distract you from focusing upon your mains sources of revenue.

Disadvantages

• May require some time investment to find interested buyers.
• Obviously, you can no longer use the domain after you sell it.

4.) Build an Automated Aggregator Site. I do not have much experience with this, but I have seen unused domains monetized by setting up blogs that republish (scrape) RSS feeds from other sites. The scrapper blog is then loaded with Adsense and affiliate programs. I am toying with the idea of doing this on TheKnicks.com.

Advantages

• Ability to build audience and repeat visitors
• Potential for multiple revenue streams (ex: Adsense and affiliate)

Disadvantages

• Limited traffic from search engines because you will be penalized for duplicate content.
• Will take some time to set up site.

A domain name portfolio can be a great asset to an Internet marketer. I encourage you to build up that portfolio and continue to not be afraid experimenting with different monetization techniques on your domains. Even if your unused domains earn just enough to cover your annual renewal fee, you will be ahead of the game.

In Part of Getting Started in PPC Advertising, I mentioned that it is always a good idea to sign up with promo codes so that you can test out a system without losing any money. Paul Allen (not the famous microsoft guy), has a good post up where he lists a new discount codes from Ask and looksmart.

I had not heard much about a looksmart PPC program, and I was excited about the $300 in free credits until I read a review of the program over at AU Interactive’s blog. I would proceed with caution on looksmart. The Ask program looks interesting. I have read some posts on digitalpoint questioning the quality of their traffic, but with a .05 minimum bid, I am willing to give it a try.