Case Study Intro & Building An Audience
It’s no secret that the best traffic sources have begun a war against affiliates. Rather then fighting back, a lot of affiliates are getting frustrated and moving to new traffic sources to avoid the issues and hopefully make some easy money. At the end of the day, the easy money at these “new” traffic sources will dry up due to affiliate over-saturation. Although I’m not one to run around and say the sky is falling, I do believe in heavy diversification. You can’t build an empire on a house of cards so you need to have multiple streams of revenue.
This brings me to the concept of building an audience. I think that a lot of affiliates forget that there are other ways to get traffic then simply buying it. There are several ways to do this. You can collect email addresses, build an rss subscriber list, or build a search engine optimized content website. I love making money without expending much time or money to do it. A few months ago I was brainstorming what has made me money over the past few years. I was looking over my books and realized I was still making money off some old PHPbay sites that I have. Over the years i’ve made a lot of money on those sites, although the eBay Partner Network now completely SUCKS. I went and checked the traffic stats on these sites and they were each still pulling in significant traffic. I hadn’t done much off page SEO to these sites at all yet they were still sucking people in. This gave me the idea to create a few new SEO sites to see if I could generate some money off of them using a different affiliate program.
This brings us to datafeed sites. I know some people who bank pretty hard on datafeed sites so I decided to give them a try. I will also be sharing what I did and the results as a multi-part case study. Stay tuned.
Bring on the data feed case study!
Cool man. I had that same revelation recently, about old phpbay sites making money. I’ve been looking for a good EPN alternative so I’m excited to read what you find.
Looking forward to read more.. datafeeds were my first source of affiliate income when I was doing BH SEO with scripts. Staying tuned!
BMan (haha) good post man. It’s the best thing any affiliate can do (diversify). Everyone knows at any given second things can change. Case studys are killer! Not only does it give you a huge voice, but will help others wrap their brain around certain things to help them think differently and get some great ideas. I will stay tuned!
awesome! have been building up a few feed sites lately with mixed results, looking forward to reading your thoughts about it!
@Jon – My results are definitely nothing to write home about revenue wise. I have generated some decent traffic though which i’m trying to monetize. You’ll see more as the case study unwinds.
I was recently thinking about getting entangled with ebay. Why does their partner program suck?
Cool man. I had that same revelation recently, about old phpbay sites making money. I’ve been looking for a good EPN alternative so I’m excited to read what you find.