Affiliate Marketing – Online Marketing – Websites

UPDATE June 2010 – the party was great – but Niche Devil is longer available – and yes I still make money from it LOL

The last few days have been rather entertaining. Vic released a {kick arse cool money making on steroids|automated worthless con} script called Niche Devil. If you haven’t caught up with all this you could call Niche Devil – the best alternative to BANS for eBay affiliates. Its faster to set up than BANS, has a very small footprint, indexes very quickly and has the potential to make me a great deal of money. It takes me under a minute to create a full blown site with this script – and yes the site is full of legal, unique content.

I must admit I had reservations on the script because I knew that some of my readers would be worried that it was in conflict with some of the other approaches to making money online. Lets be clear – it is. There are lots of ways to make money online – life is complex – you will just have to make your own decisions.

Quite a number of people I know and respect are basically saying no this is just the same as the BANS debacle of last year – not going there again! Well as others have commented on Griz’s post – people are still making money from BANS … I believe that its different – but I am be wrong. I personally think its worth of a few hundred dollars for the size of the pay off.

It sounds dodgy – how can it take Vic 35sec to set up a site?

He’s got a faster Internet connection than me! He shows it real time on his Niche Devil launch post. That’s exactly what you do it step-by-step. In reality of course unless you have Vic’s experience you will take longer to find the right keywords and buy the domains – but that time is going to be the same regardless of whether you are building a KeyWordAcademy niche site, a HubPage or anything else. The difference is that nothing is faster for actually setting up the site than Niche Devil.

But it can’t be legal right?

I don’t believe that sending targeted buying traffic to vendors is illegal – I think its called “effective lead generation” by marketers. The sites aren’t splogs – the content displayed on them are done so legally, there are no illegal copies of people’s copyrighted work involved.

It may not work forever?

To be honest – do I give a shit? Even if all my sites are banned and deindexed I still have the chance to make money with this – I won’t be returning that money whatever happens LMAO!

Aren’t the websites worthless?

To whom? If I find the site looking for hairy midget thongs and then click through to Amazon and eBay and buy the same – I think that’s pretty good value for the searcher who got what he wanted, for the vendor who made a sale, and for me the affiliate who got the commission. Niche Devil will NOT create a flagship blog or encourage you to stay around an explore the site and start a conversation with the author – its not designed to.

So is this is a license to make money why are you selling the script?

That’s about the best question! Personally I don’t know that I would have released it and I am not not sure the motivation – but I strongly suspect that Vic wants his core group of students to make some quick money from the affiliates sales – I know I have and thank you those who have bought via my Niche Devil affiliate link! <no longer available>

Also its not guaranteed to make you money – you still need to do the keyword research and actually set up the sites. Oh and Niche Devil is only going to be available for 14 days – so no its not going to be sold indefinitely.

Is Niche Devil Right For Your Business?

I have no idea to be honest! I failed pretty badly with BANS because I didn’t know how to find buying keywords at the time – and I got fixated on that. Instead of just going out and buying 100 dot infos and putting up the sites – I stopped at less than 10 – I still made $10 this month from one of the those sites – wonder what that would have been if I had done 100 sites.

How I am Using Niche Devil in My Business

I using Niche Devil for two main reasons:

I have been using HubPages to find easy to rank for, well paying niches – well know I am going to use Niche Devil to do the same thing – and it will be quicker and cost less the same on HubPages (I outsourced the writing on Hubpages – that’s the cost).
Income diversification- most of my income is from Adsense and I want to diversify. I have signed up for Chitika which is an Adsense alternative which Niche Devil Supports. I am also going to use Amazon for some of my Niche Devil sites.

What’s the Risk?

Well for me zero/nada/none. Thanks to affiliate sales I am in the black on the cost of Niche Devil and I have a bunch of undeveloped sites lying around which need sites put on them.

For you the risk is higher:

$97 for Niche Devil
$79 for 100 dot infos (if you buy in bulk via godaddy)

So are you in? Are you prepared to risk less than $200 and a few days of work to develop genuine passive income ?

How do you manage your affiliates? My management has evolved, primarily by accident I admit, but a recent post over at Passive Family Income got me thinking. PFI manages his affiliate links manually – I don’t and here’s why.

Whats the Problem with Affiliate Links?

In short an affiliate link is what pays me online income, it includes the code that says “pay Lis” to the vendor. There is a problem with affiliate links too, in fact two problems:

first they are ugly – would you really want to click on a link that looks like : http://47b252e70zsw9sdoja39pbvq2r.hop.clickbank.net/ Many people don’t.
often you don’t know if anyone is clicking – clickbank comes to mind they don’t provide any stats on home many clicks you get – just how many people buy.

Here’s the kill though: what if the affiliate changes the code? Yes it happens – and it just happened to me with one of my more successful affiliate earners. You have to change the code, everywhere you used it? Maybe you can remember every place you used an affiliate code – good on you – I can’t!

I use a product called PHP Link Cloak. What a Link Cloaker does (and no its not shady though the name is a little unfortunate IMHO) – is change the link I quoted above to something more user friendly in this case https://lissowerbutts.com/recommends/PHPLinkCloaker If the affiliate changes the code on me – I have to change it in one place – it took me longer to login than it did to actually change the code!

Its more useful than that – it tells me how many clicks I have had on that particular link. As I can have as many links as I like for the same program I can track how many people click on links on my blog compared to my HubPages, for example.

Its simple to install – you do have to install it on a host that has the following available:

PHP 4 or PHP 5
MYSQL 4.x Database

Hostgator works just fine, apparently GoDaddy does not.

Once you have uploaded the software onto your hosting account you can use the links anywhere you like: email, blogger blogs, on Web 2.0 sites like Infobarrel and HubPages – so for many people will only need to set it up once. However as far as I can tell you can install it as many times as you want if you do want to keep websites separate – for example I wouldn’t use a lissowerbutts.com/recommends …. link on a site which is run by one of my other personas.

And I should probably point out that there are other products out there that do the same job, maybe even for free, but this one was recommended to me by a friend and it worked so I didn’t see any point on wasting any more time on what to me is an online income admin funcition. The instructions worked just fine and there is a free demo site where you can try before you buy and the standard 60 days money back guarantee from ClickBank. And it costs less than $20.

How do you manage your affiliates? Do you ever forget which products you are promoting? Seriously if you are not using anything and are starting to make some passive income from affiliates check out PHP Link Cloaker Its much easier to put these systems in sooner rather than later!