Liverpool 08 Business Connect

I heard about the Liverpool 08 Business Connect site recently and I’ve just registered for free. It appears to be a popular site with some 3700 organisations listed along with about 4600 individual members.

The aim of the site appears to be along the lines of a social networking site for people looking to do business in and around Liverpool (we’re over the water on The Wirral in Hoylake - home to the Open Golf in 2006 …what a fantastic event that was!). You can create your own profile page (here’s mine) and can search for other businesses and make contact. There’s supposed to be a members-only offer page too, though it’s currently missing.

I’ll let you know if I make any new contacts or drum up any business. Let me know if you’re also listed by the way - leave a comment here or get in touch.

Finance Affiliate Buys sport.co.uk For £135K

Media Corp announce today the purchase of premium, generic domain name, sport.co.uk for �135,000

What’s interesting is that Media Corp run, amongst other topics, affiliate sites promoting credit cards and HD TVs (using the premium Revolution Tech theme I see).

They obviously have develop and resell plans for their new purchase. Justin Drummond, Chief Executive of Media Corporation plc, commented:

The value of a top-tier domain name combined with a profitable advertising-driven business model was recently illustrated by the Group�s successful sale of Casino.co.uk for up to �3.625 million. We are aiming to replicate this success with Sport.co.uk as we continue to increase the scale and diversity of the Group�s Web Publishing business.

Along similar lines, another company I spotted before Christmas is AIM listed Hecta Media. This company intends to identify and purchase sites and domains and

..consolidate a number of such websites across a few content genres, with the purpose of creating advantages of scale in each vertical market.

I’m waiting for news on what they purchase - I’ll let you know.

December Sales Rocket at Play.com

Not talking about ours here as we tend to work closely with amazon and we’ve only had a low number of sales with play.com.

One of my tips for anyone involved in search marketing is to read a newspaper, especially one that reports upon business news because you’ll often get really useful stats about businesses. Wouldn’t you like to know how major retailers that you are working with are performing?

For example, The Telegraph reports that play.com saw sales rise by 24% in the 4th quarter of 2007. It’s peak trading period was on 3rd December when play.com processed an average of 700 orders a minute, up from 422 orders a minute in 2006. The best selling DVD over Christmas was Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Leona Lewis was the best selling CD. Russell Brand’s My Booky Wooky was the top selling book - this grates with me a little because it was one of my few poor performers last month.

Did you know that Play.com has a 5% share of the UK music market and a 7% share of the UK DVD market? Stuart Rowe, CEO, has indicated that play will start to offer digital downloads in the coming months too (which reminds me that I should either sell or do something with my parked DRMfree.co.uk).

So, congratulations to play.com and here’s wishing them and everyone else a successful 2008!

Video Games: A Big Fat Affiliate Niche

The BBC technology news feed reports that UK consumers have spent a record-breaking £1.52bn on titles in 2007, up 25% on last year and with two weeks of sales yet to be counted - that’s a lot of sales revenue. A whopping £30.4m a week in fact on average with the Christmas run up seeing much higher figures. I don’t know what the split is between high street and online sales - that’d be an interesting statistic.

With more than 78m titles sold that’s an average unit selling price of about £19.50 (about £16.60 without the VAT). Now, say you partner with amazon and you’re on the 7% tier that gives average commission of £1.16 per title. Use direct links successfully and you’ll earn up-to 10% giving £1.66.

Having shifted more than a few copies of specific game titles myself in the last month or so I’m fairly convinced it’s a profitable niche for affiliates. I know the consoles sell like hot cakes (and that stacks of merchants choose not to pay much, if any, commission on them) but the games market is way bigger than I’d imagined.

Now this might not be news to you but as someone who doesn’t play video games at all I’ve previously not been too interested in promoting them aggressively. With the likes of the Nintendo DS Lite being cleverly targeted at the mass market with the likes of this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUgemPGvUuo[/youtube]

there should be a few niches within the big video game niche to target. Publish a smart wordpress blog, find your USP and give it a go.

Any tips for a virgin video game affiliate will be gratefully received and worthy of a mention!

Adwords Exact Match: [buy]

I’ve just been doing a bit of keyword research, went to google search and just searched on buy

Try it and you’ll see that several of the big online merchants are targeting buy as either a phrase or an exact match. Okay there is some strong intent indicated there by the searcher - they want to buy something. But buy what? DVD’s, a wii console (you’ll be lucky), an orthopedic mattress? It’s such an unqualified search that I’d imagine that the conversion rates are really low.

Or am I wrong on this one… anyone gone down this route and had success?

And as a slight aside as I’ve mentioned mattresses. My amazon tracking IDs (a must use BTW) show me that a user did indeed buy the book I was targeting and then they also spent nearly £300 on a new mattress. Talk about impulse shopping!

The T Factor: Trust Is Everything

Merchants email loses the trust factor.

I received an email earlier today from the sales director at a pre-paid card company offering me the opportunity to join their affiliate programme. I nearly didn’t open the email because it looked rather suspicious with a strange non-title. I checked their website and that looked okay so I crossed my fingers and opened the email.

I was being offered the opportunity to promote a pre-paid credit card and I presume (because they didn’t actually say) that they wanted to include it on our personal finances site. But the email immediately made me suspicious - the fact that it was poorly capitalised, didn’t address me directly and was in about 4 different fonts didn’t help. The terms of the affiliate programme were not detailed and there was not even a link to an affiliates page.

So, I have no plans to take them up on the offer. Affiliate marketing doesn’t work if there is no trust on either side of the merchant/affiliate relationship and in the case there wasn’t any to begin with.

Tesco & Spice Girls Ad

New Tesco ad features The Spice Girls. Or …

The Spice Girls ad features Tesco. You decide!

Dragons Den: Websites Update

As an update to a post in my old blog, here’s the list of Dragons Den panellist websites including a new link to James Caan.

• Deborah Meaden
• Peter Jones
• Duncan Bannatyne
• Theo Paphitis
• James Caan
• Rachel Elnaugh
• Richard Farleigh
• Simon Woodroffe
• Doug Richard
• Evan Davies

Entrepeneur Magazine

Managed to stumble upon En The Web this morning, a magazine for entrepeneurs everywhere but with a North West slant. There are some interesting articles about businesses from various sectors. Currently there’s news about Just Search.

A couple of quick bits I’d do if En The Web was my site:

• Offer an RSS feed (even though you offer paid-for hard copy mags)
• Resolve the duplicate content issue with http://www.entheweb.co.uk and http://www.entheweb.co.uk/news/
• Include email details on the contact page default view

Paid Content Is A Good Thing. Apparently.

A week or so ago I posted about free content being a good thing. But today I’m posting about an opposing view.

As many of us visit or subscribe to the same blogs you may well have caught sight of the new Brian Clarke (of copyblogger fame) site teachingsells.com? But if you haven’t, I recommend that you simply subscribe to the site and get a copy of the free pdf document. I didn’t bother until one of my favourite bloggers, Aaron Wall, gave it the nod today. It’s well worth the 15-20 minute first read.

There’s some obvious link bait headlining and content in it (suppose I’ve fallen for it of course by blogging about it!) but there is also some great thought provoking content too. Brian suggests that his reason for blogging is as an attraction strategy - I like that phrase and it’s why I started blogging about search marketing myself last year. As an aside, my own initial aims for publishing this blog (it used to be here) were to:

• attract the attention of other blogging affiliates and search marketers
• join the community - to both share and learn useful information
• promote our search marketing company
• and a bit of me too, I blog

It isn’t my intention to make marginally significant money from this blog. Though as Brian says in his pitch:

To make money online, you’re always selling something—even if it’s just space on the
page.

That’s certainly true of course and what we’re all about on our commercial sites. Typically, on a site or page that includes content but no affiliate links I’d obviously consider monetising the page with adsense. Brian suggests that this method is flawed and is promoting his own view that you should charge for your content. I’m not in total agreement with his comment:

The people who do manage to make money with niche content and AdSense have to
be quite ruthless about getting people to click away as soon and as often as possible.
Beyond aggressive positioning of ad units that obscure the actual content, there is no
motivation to make the content engaging or even useful.

If you’re using adsense for commercial gain you do need people to click away but I’d argue that there is motivation to still publish content that is engaging or useful. But hands-up, on reflection I could do better on the engaging content front!

Don’t forget that Brian is concentrating on content that he believes can be paid for. He isn’t concentrating on earning money from things like credit cards, DVD rentals or mobile phones. My understanding that his proposed new platform is focusing on charging for information or intellectual knowledge. Free content or paid content aside, you still need eyes on pages …or at least eyes on your content. The latter is what Brian seems to be aiming at when he says:

When you have something to sell, you have leverage. You don’t necessarily need
traffic, because you can borrow someone else’s audience as long as you can offer that
publisher a compelling deal.

Knowledge is power perhaps.

Take a look at teachingsells and feel free to comment.

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