value of building an affiliate website

It has been reported on a number of sites that a UK affiliate site, Empire Online potentially being sold for £700 million pounds.

The business of Empire Online is described as follows in the Guardian Unlimited:

“Empire operates as a "skin", or white-label, poker and casino site and is the most successful of this new breed of online gambling companies.

In effect it is a marketing business that recruits online gamblers and then directs them to third-party websites, such as Party Poker and 888.com, where the poker and casino games are played.

Empire makes its money by claiming commission from the host operators - in some cases, this commission is thought to be over half the revenue generated by individual players. Payments from PartyGaming represent two-thirds of its revenue.”

This is good news for affiliates developing websites rather than doing ppc, contextual, or email marketing as it means the affiliate is building long term value from the site in addition to the revenue they make on a monthly basis.

Interesting though, all the sites mention EmpireOnline.com or EmpireOnline.co.uk as the acquisition. Having looked at both of these sites, they are both redirecting to the same content based movie and music review site owned by the eMap group. So I’m wondering whether there is truth in the rumour that an affiliate site got sold for such a large sum of cash, and if so, what the url of the affiliate site is? Any one know?

 

comment spam update

Well, sure enough, a few minutes after I posted the last comment on the trafficsynergy blog about comment spam, there was another posting which was a comment spam. Now, I can’t believe that someone would read the posting about comment spam, and then comment spam the posting! So I looked at the composition of the comment spam posting.

 

It read as follows:

 

“Your blog is thorough If you have a weight issue, I'm sure you'd be interested in xenical diet purchasing xenical diet”

 

It suddenly hit me that the comment spam was computer generated. I’ve looked at blog software before for generating blog postings, and it is useful in very specific cases, as you don’t want to create blogs with meaningless information. But this is different – this is software that creates comment spam on new blog postings. So I’m assuming what it does is it finds a list of blogs with new entries, and then adds a preformatted message like the one above (I took out the hyperlink from the comment spam above, as I don’t want it to gain any page rank).

 

Anyway, I’m now testing a new feature on the blogger software called “word verification” which means that you have to type in a sequence of letters and numbers before you can post your comment – this will prevent automatic scripts like the one which I believe is being used for the above posting from “littering” the traffic synergy blog with meaningless comment spam. So any comment spam which now appears on the traffic synergy blog will actually have been entered by a real live human being!

 

 

comment spam

I’m amazed. I posted 2 comments on the trafficsynergy blog in the last few hours, and already there is comment spam on the last 2 postings. If this trend continues, then I’ll have to suspend comments, and if visitors want to comment on the postings, then they’ll rather have to email me the comments, and I’ll post them on the traffic synergy blog.

 

For those who are not aware what comment or blog spam is, it’s simply the method of adding a comment to a blog with the only objective of getting your site mentioned and your url hyperlinked. This results in an incoming link to your site, and if done from the right site, it is good for getting extra traffic from the search engines, as the incoming links results in good search engine optimization practice, which results in your site being listed higher in the search engine rankings.

 

I’m honoured that people believe the trafficsynergy blog is good enough to comment spam on (I guess it does have a rather attractive page rank) but unfortunately comment spam does nothing to add value to the many visitors who read the traffic synergy blog on a daily basis.

 

Therefore, I’ll have to watch over the next few days, and see whether there is any further blog spam – if there is, then I’ll have to consider stopping comments from being posted on the traffic synergy blog (which is a pity as it was meant to be an interactive blog), but I’m thinking that perhaps it’s also a good idea to have a forum for people to discuss issues related to the traffic synergy affiliate network and internet marketing in general.

 

 

baidu being accused

An interesting story has been reported on a number of affiliate marketing message boards and forums, that Baidu, which is the large Chinese search engine, one of the owners being google (I recall that they own about 2% of the company), has been attacking the servers of a chinese e-commerce site, 8848. Baidu recently ipo’d for a huge sum of money, and it will be interesting to see how they respond to this accusation.

number-one-affiliate-network

After I wrote the article on how to promote an online offer using an offline marketing stategy, I thought I’d see who is using the domain Number-One-Affiliate-network.com (note that I used dashes between the words – whether you should use the words with dashes is a conversation that I’ll write about at a later date – but I have to tell you that I’ve spent many hours over a cold beer with other internet marketers debating whether urls with or without dashes are better – and we still don’t have a definitive conclusion).

 

It’s interesting to see that no-one appears to be using the number-one-affiliate-network.com (with dashes). Don’t all rush out to register it at once! J

offline marketing an online offer

There are so many different ways to promote an offer. Everyone has different ways, so I thought I’d lay out some of the most common methods, so you can see how others are doing it as well. In the future, we’ll try delve a little deeper into the different forms of promoting the merchants offers. I’ll start with offline marketing.

 

Offline Marketing is making smart marketers a lot of money.

 

Believe it or not, some affiliates are doing well using offline methods, such as advertising on radio, tv or the press, or doing offline PR. The first question people always ask is how you use offline marketing to promote online offers as you have to give a long url fulled with your affiliate ID so that your visitors get tracked.

 

Here’s a little secret that some of the top affiliate marketers use. Register a domain name which is memorable, and simply redirect it to your affiliate URL. Simple, but few use this innovative way of marketing offline. So when you are being interviewed on the radio, or place a classified in a targeted magazine or newspaper or take out an advert somewhere, you use your unique domain name. As an example, if you are promoting an offer for our affiliate network, TrafficSynergy, using the url which we give you, for offline marketing is a little cumbersome, and there won’t be that many people offline who go and type in the entire url.

 

So go and spend the 10 bucks and register a domain like www.number-one-affiliate-network.com (that’s just an example as it probably has been already registered).

 

But when you promote offline, you now advertise that URL and it redirects to your affiliate URL.

 

And when people tell each other about the advert they saw or the radio show they were listening to, they’ll mention the number-one-affiliate-network.com as the URL – and you get credit.

Lots happening @ TrafficSynergy

Well, we’re all very excited. There are a lot of new and exciting changes taking place at the TrafficSynergy affiliate network. Watch this space, as we are going to make a number of announcements in the weeks and months to come.

Higher payouts

We have 3 campaigns that are increasing their payouts:

Cabinet refacing is now $11.25
Guide to siding is now $11.25
Guide to windows is now $11.25

That's a massive $5.25 increase!

Enjoy

Traffic Synergy newbie

Greetings everyone!

This last week our dev department has been working on updating our site and I am happy to announce that it has gone live! You can now see an up to date list of featured and exclusive campaigns, more focus on getting people to read our blog and resources page (there are some awesome power tools!) and a few other little nips and tucks.

Our newest addition to the Traffic Synergy family is Consumer Wireless, owned by Consumer Base. They stock the best wireless brands known to date and they are the leading online provider of wireless devices and services. This is your chance to make the world an even smaller place – and make money while you’re at it! Just sign up.

On a sad note, we have discontined our Looxee offer, but there are plenty more offers for you to pick up!

We are also proud to say that our affiliate base is growing by leaps and bounds! We are still very much on the lookout for new affiliates though, bring it on!

Till next time

Somehwere over the rainbow

another hectic week at Traffic Synergy.

catching up with our affiliates, cold calling, emails coming out of ears. all for the greater good!

you've all seen our exclusive campaigns, now here's just a few of our top sellers:

LinkedIn
Trump University
Education Success Inc.
Looxee
digiFlirt
Survey Networks
Christian Cafe
Car Loan Genie
Quick Car Prices
Home Loan
Guide to Debt Help
Shopping Spree

ok thats enough,I have to leave a few top sellers for you to find for yourselves ( Emitations - Jewelry Boutique, PCSS Privacy Defender, Selective Health Plans, eSurveyRewards: $500 Hotel Gift Card but thats really it! ) sign up, promote, show yourselves the money!

hope you are all enjoying yourselves, and making a ton of money!

till next time