Online Marketing
One Easy Way to Diversify
May 5th
After Black Friday, almost everyone in our industry is getting more serious about diversifying and getting some eggs out of the online gambling basket. One hiccup that gambling affiliates have had with diversifying is finding an idea that is not only interesting, but profitable. This post is going to give you one easy way to find new, profitable niches outside of gambling.
Flippa.com
Flippa.com is one of the most popular marketplaces for buying and selling premium domains as well as existing, profitable websites. One of my favorite ways to find new website ideas is to check out Flippa.com once a week and see what is up for sale.
When I arrive at Flippa, I like to look at High End Websites (this is a preset search that shows websites priced at $5,000+) that have a profit of at least $500 per month. This weeds out all of the ridiculous domain auctions that are listed at a high price but have no profit or potential.
From here, I will take a look at the ongoing auctions as well as the recently ended auctions. Whenever I see something that catches my eye, I open up the auction in a new tab to review it later. When I am searching through the auctions, I am usually looking for affiliate-type businesses that have at least $500/month in revenues (so I know the market actually has some financial potential).
Once you have a few promising auctions opened up in new tabs, start looking through them to see what you’ve got. A quick way to whittle down the auctions are to close any auctions that are for websites that require a live presence, inventory, credit card processing, shipping, customer support, etc (unless you actually are interested in/capable of handling those tasks).
Once I find something that seems promising, rarely do I actually buy the website that is listed for auction. If I can get a good price on it, I will go ahead and buy it, but oftentimes I would rather seek out a good domain to go after a larger segment of the specific market.
For example, if I found an auction for an affiliate site selling candles that ranked in the top ten for “large scented candles” and was making $500 a month, I would try to find a good domain to purchase, such as scentedcandles.com. Then, I would start my own affiliate website on the exact match domain with a much higher ceiling than the smaller, non-exact match website.
The Flippa auctions often include the dropshipper’s or affiliate network’s contact information, so you don’t have to look too far for someone to work with. Also, the
Google Analytics are often right there for you to look at and gauge the market potential.
Sometimes you may determine that it makes more sense to buy the existing website and improve it than to start fresh, but oftentimes you are going to want to go after a larger segment of the market than the site for sale originally did.
A lot of the stuff on Flippa is not going to be relevant, but if you keep monitoring it for a couple weeks you may just find a great new niche with available exact match domains.
This article was provided by Michael Wittmeyer of BusinessCards.org, a business card print shop.
London Affiliate Conference 2011 (Part 1)
Feb 7th
2008 was the last time I had a chance to make it out to the London Affiliate Conference where I had a lot of fun, so I decided it was time to head back, even though the idea of being in London in January didn’t appeal to me that much. Regardless, I had always wanted to go back to the iGB Awards, so decided to make the trip this year to catch up with some old friends and meet some new people.
Wednesday
I flew out on Tuesday night and arrived in London at 9am Wednesday morning. Since my hotel would not be ready for several hours I decided to head over to the main hotel (as I stayed at the Shaftesbury Notting Hill Hotel the first night, which probably had the world’s smallest hotel room) to meet up with Nick (from Casino Coins) and his girlfriend Jenna for lunch. Upon arrival to the hotel there were many familiar faces in the lobby. I ran into Riyaz from Bodog Affiliates, Mike Wittmeyer and Roger (2 PAL members) and we hung out for a bit, and grabbed Nick from upstairs. After lunch we Nick, Jenna and I decided to head over to ICE (another big more land based focussed casino conference) that was going on just before the LAC event. It was pretty cool to see some the “future of games” in land based casinos. I saw some of the coolest slot machines that I have ever seen, with a lot more focus on electronic chip management for table games. Still running on no sleep from the morning before, I had to head out as I had dinner plans with Odette from PKR. Odette took me on a tour of the offices at PKR which have apparently been expanding like crazy over the past few years. It was pretty cool to see what happens behind the scenes at an online gaming company. After the tour, we headed for dinner at Shaka Zulu, which was a really cool South African restaurant at the same venue as where the Fire and Ice party was being held that night. We tried some Biltong (a South African cured meat), had some curried shrimp, fish as the main course and of course some delicious cocktails. Odette ordered an Ostrich dish which she let me try, which was also really delicious! After dinner we headed upstairs to the Fire and Ice party where PKR had a table right in the best location of the club. The rest of the evening involved lots of champagne, vodka, and all sorts of mystery shots plus some excellent entertainment involving many painted naked ladies, midgets, performers and much more. All in all, it was a great night and I got to party with many other affiliates and affiliate managers (too many to list everyone). One nice parts of the night was I managed to work out some differences with Nick Kisberg, an affiliate who I had some issues with in the past but I think he might have finally started to see my side to the problem from the past 
Here is a picture of our table with some other affiliates(borrowed from Odette’s pics):
Thursday
After getting home late from the night before I managed to get a few hours sleep before getting told that I needed to check out by the Shaftesbury hotel, so I headed over to the Grange St. Pauls, and checked into my room there. I had always wanted to stay at the main confernce hotel, as there is where most people usually congregate but in the past I typically booked my hotel last minute and it was always sold out, fortunately I did this time, as this hotel was quite amazing! The rooms were really nicely done and had tons of space (even though I hardly spent any time in there). Most of Thursday during the day was spent hanging out in the hotel Lobby with Nick and Jenna. I met lots of different people (affiliates and affiliate managers) and had a couple of beers to help overcome the hangover from the night before.
Thursday evening I was invited to the iGB Affiliate Awards with Martyn from Affiliate Edge (formerly CWC Affiliates). Martyn is highly regarded as one of the best AM’s in the industry, so this was an excellent opportunity to hang out with his team and meet some new casino affiliates since I am trying to learn more about the casino side of the industry. Affiliate Edge had 2 tables and I got to have dinner with several casino affiliates that I had seen on the forums such as CasinoMeister, Simmo (Ian), Christine (Streak Gaming / Affiliate Guard Dog), as well as several others. After dinner I decided I was going to call it a night and ran into Tony (belgamo on the forums) and hitched a ride back to the hotel with him and his wife. Right as I entered the hotel lobby I ran into Troy from Bodog who was with Dana Workman (the new CalvinAyre.com reporter) and said they were heading to Chyna White to meet some affiliates and asked me to join, so I decided sleep could wait for a bit. At the club Nick and Andreas were partying with a few other affiliates and balling out of control on several massive bottles of vodka. I only had a couple of drinks though but it was still lots of fun and finally around 2:30 or 3 Troy, Dana and I decided to call it a night and headed back to the hotel (our oringinal plan to only stay an hour quickly went out the window).
Here is a picture from the Awards (photo credit to the iGB Events Facebook Group):
Continued in Part 2
Real Estate Negotiations vs. Website Purchase Negotiations
May 6th
After spending the last 2 or so years trying to buy a condo which I finally found a couple months ago I learned a lot about the negotiation process (after many failed offers). Here are a couple things that I think could be used to negotiating the purchase of a website or domain (if you aren’t already using them).
Time Sensitive Offers (BUYING) – One of the things that I picked up that I thought could be applied to the affiliate industry is the use of time sensitive offers. Basically what I mean by this is putting in an offer, but telling the person your offer expires in X # of hours. This way you put the pressure back on the seller to either accept your offer (if it is the highest at the time there is a good possibility this will happen) and risk losing it, or holding out for a better one. Typically if you come in around the amount they are looking to get, but a bit lower usually you will get the site you want and save some money doing it. I find that far too many people on PAL and other forums have the worst approaches to both buying and selling their sites. People post offers in a thread (which is now visible to any other potential buyers) and give the seller an endless amount of time to make a decision. For me personally if I am going to commit to a purchase I want to know if I have it almost immediately, which is why I like using this approach.
Offer Conditions (BUYING) – Another thing that could work with purchasing websites (like they do in Real Estate) is putting restrictions or conditions on your offer. Almost every real estate deal will have some kind of condition on the offer, so why not do the same with virtual real estate (or domains). This way you can come in with a good offer and ask the seller to take the site off the market if he accepts, but also give yourself some time to do some due diligence on the property you are buying to make sure there is nothing funny about it.
Holding Back Offers (SELLING) – One common tactic used in the real estate market is to hold back offers. Basically this means you set a sell date, and allow everyone to present their best offer anonymously. This can create bidding wars back and forth as the seller will then usually try to work with the top 2 offers on price. Sure, its annoying as hell from a buyers standpoint and it might discourage some, but this could also lead you to making a lot more on the sale of your property than you had planned.
Anyway, I am sure there are some other things and I didn’t really plan to write this post so most of this is off the top of my head.
Life Update… Well I have spent the last month or so getting settled into the new condo. It has been a ton of work, but its pretty close to done now. Just need a couple more small things. Other than that I have been trying to get some other projects going that I have been working on for a long time. One is a men’s magazine kind of site that is a cross between Forbes and AskMen.com. Another one is a Casino Site that I will post more about once it is complete. Then I have a few more sites that I will be developing further down the road which include a real estate site, a local furniture store site and a site about local restaurants. I am really just trying to dabble in a bunch of different industries to see what works and what doesn’t. I also hired a writer that is helping me get many of these sites ready.
Here are a couple of pics of the condo that I think I promised in the last post:
The View:
My Workcenter / Dining Room
Guest Bathroom:
View of most of the place (there is a new sofa now and the dining table is now white glass):
Kitchen:
Affiliate Tip: I don’t think I have ever really posted many good tips on how to make money for a while so, here is an easy one. Scour around for domains that have some good keywords in them (I know all the really good ones are gone, but if you look for ones with lower search volumes or find dropped ones its possible – preferably generic with things like “online” “poker” “review” “code” “bonus”, etc. in them). If you have to spend $50-$100 to get a pretty decent domain. Then get someone to build you a decent template that you can reuse for several sites (this will be the most expensive part but it is a one time cost and the more you spend the more you will get in return). You should be able to get something decent for around $400. Write around 25 pages of good content (the more the better) and add it to the site. You should instantly be able to flip that site for around $2000 or more depending how much content is there on your $500 investment.
3 Cool Tools For Tracking Visitors On Your Website
Oct 1st
Reading Justin Goff‘s latest facebook status update kind of inspired me to write this post…. So without further adieu, here are 3 cool tools for affiliates to use for cyber-stalking the visitors of your website that you might not have heard of:
ClickTale – Last week my friend John told me about this cool tool. Basically you add a couple of lines of code to your pages that allow you to see everything people do when they come to your site. By everything, I really mean EVERYTHING! ClickTale creates a video for you that tracks what every visitor is doing on your site including mouse movements, heatmaps and when they are scrolling down on the pages. This allows you to determine how effective your pages are at driving a sale and what aspects of the page are actually getting the visitors attention the most leading them to click (or not click) through on to your offers. There is a very small delay in the time it takes to create the videos (probably like 5 minutes) but it is pretty much live data. The free version allows you 100 free recordings per week or you can pay like $80 per month for the bronze package which allows multiple sites and something like 20,000 recordings.
HitTail – This is another live stats system that allows you to see how people are getting to your site from referral sites or search engines. It shows you exactly what they searched to get there or the specific page where they clicked a link to your site. I know most of this information is available in Google’s Analytics but its nice to have this info live so you can see what is causing traffic spikes on your site. It also helps you understand where the visitors are coming from (ie. Google.com/Google.es/Google.ca etc.) to reach your site.
Woopra – This is a cool tool that allows you to track the people on your website live. You can see what pages people are on, how they got to your site, and how they have moved about while on your site. One of my favourite features of Woopra is it even allows you to send a message to the people on your site if you want to “help them out” or ensure that all their questions have been answered to help drive the sale better. (Shout out to Cheryle for telling me about this one)
Of course Google Analytics is also one of the best, but I left it out of the list because I assumed everyone already was either using it, or knew about it. Hope this helps and if you have any other great tools you want to share post a comment below.
LOL – “I will sue if you don’t remove your site from Google”
Oct 1st
Came accross this funny pic. Best line “If you don’t agree to remove your site from google for this keyword we may go upto any extent and may sue you for this”:
People make me laugh sometimes!
No Way That Is Her!
Jul 31st
I was just on facebook when the following ad caught my attention:
No way that is her in the after!!! I actually thought this was a great ad though because it caught my attention and I clicked the link to see if there were more pics of the hot girl. Unfortunately there were not 
They did have a cool site though with a bunch of good affiliate links in it and am sure they probably make some money from this.
Anyway, this just goes to show that sometimes the best ways to grab people’s attention is to make them not believe you.
/end of weird blog post
Affiliate Managers Contacting Through Facebook
Jul 23rd
I understand, its hard to get new affiliates to promote your room but sometimes I just want to tell these people to LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE! It’s one thing to send emails to addresses associated with sites, but sometimes the contact becomes a tad too invasive. I get random people adding me to MSN with no clue who they are, and a few times now I have even received messages to my facebook account.
Like I said, I have grown used to the emails, but I look at Facebook as a more personal venue. Even though it can be used as a great networking tool for people you have actually met or talk to, it should NOT be used as a method to promote your brand and contact potential affiliates. It is actually just kinda creepy to me.
Anyway, I decided I would try and turn this into something productive that hopefully other affiliate managers could take something from and provide pointers on what I don’t like about these or most forms of “first contact” from affiliate managers.
Here is the message I received from NAME REMOVED of Cool Hand Poker with things in bold that could be improved if you had to use this method to contact an affiliate for whatever reason:
Hi Graham,
Not some mad stalker – I promise!
I am sure you prefer the term “e-stalker”. “Stalker” is so real world.
I am an advertiser interested in promoting our Poker room – Cool Hand Poker via your network. Network eh? I bet you couldn’t even list some of the sites I have.
Been doing research to find appropriate media partners for my client, Belle Rock Entertainment. The company owns various online gambling sites (Poker, Bingo & Casino) and have been operating for over 10 years. If you had done your research properly you could maybe tell me a few of my sites and why you think they would be a good fit for your room.
Cool Hand Poker is a relatively new and small poker room – it was launched late last year and we are aiming to grow the business. It is quite unique in its marketing, as the target market is “everyday people” or people wanting to learn & play poker socially / newbie poker players onto the site. We are not aiming for the big-stakes Professionals who usually go to the more aggressive sites such as Full Tilt or Poker Stars. More on how this is a retarded idea later. Do you really think you can keep out the “sharks” from a site. Also, you do realize those are the ones that make money, not the guy who plays poker once a week.
We are focusing our marketing efforts on the UK, Canada Europe and Australia & NZ (not USA or Africa) – would be helpful to understand your traffic split (USA vs. target countries above) and targeting capabilities better?
In order for me to motivate for any media deal, we must provide as much detailed information as possible. Besides Cool Hand Poker, we also market Casino and Bingo – further opportunities to work together! Oh, I forgot I was trying to sell you on why I should promote your stupid site.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Warm regards
NAME REMOVED
The thing that annoys me more than anything is NAME REMOVED has probably copied and pasted this message to hundreds of affiliates. Anyway, since it wasn’t an email I will let facebook deal with the spammers roaming their site:
Her messages lack personal touch, and really do nothing to make me want to work with them. For further proof here is an email from NAME REMOVED with the things that need improvement in bold:
TITLE OF EMAIL: Advertising/Affiliate partnership (FuzioPoker) First off, the site is Fuzion Poker (instant points off for spelling mistake)
Hi Graham,
By way of introduction, my name is NAME REMOVED and I am the Poker Affiliate/Publisher Manager at COMPANY REMOVED. And, you already lost my interest. I don’t give a fuck who you are, why are you contacting me! It’s bad enough you creeped my whois info to get this email instead of looking for the site contact email.
I am an advertiser interested in promoting our Poker room – Cool Hand Poker via your website. Would be grateful if you could contact me to discuss opportunities? “Cool Hand Poker”, really, thats the name you went with? Ummm… I don’t care about opportunities, you contacted me, remember. What do I get out of this?
My aim is to find appropriate media partners for my client, Belle Rock Entertainment. The company owns various online gambling sites (Poker, Bingo & Casino) and have been operating for over 10 years. Whatever.
At this time, I am specifically focusing on our Poker room – Cool Hand Poker – the emphasis being on fun, free or low-stakes, social poker games. Especially for newbies wanting to learn poker in a friendly, safe environment. Fun, free, low-stakes? Let me guess, you probably want me to send these players that will make me no money on an MGR deal too, right?
We are focusing our marketing efforts on the UK, Canada Europe and Australasia – would be helpful to understand your site and traffic split better? Do your own research.
Looking forward to hearing from you. Not likely.
Warm regards,
NAME REMOVED
Anyway, I hope someone learns something from this post so I don’t have to use you as an example for one of my future posts.
Back in Canada
Apr 2nd
Well, I’ve been back home for about a week now and have been kinda sick since getting back. Definitely miss Argentina and can’t wait to head back again.
Tax season is upon us now and one of my least favorite times of the year. Nothing is more fun then sending the government a big fat ass check that they are just gonna blow on stupid bullshit.
Missed out on Amsterdam this time, but looks like everyone is having a blast as usual. Trying to decide which conference to go to next. Where is everyone else going?
Jeremy Miller launched a blog recently. Please, turn off the stupid “YOU MUST BE LOGGED IN TO COMMENT”… where’s the fun in that!
Been having some awful poker sessions as of late. Just the other day was playing some 2/4 PLO and hit a set on the turn in a decent sized pot. The other guy bet, I reraised big, and he shoved me all in on a JT53 board (I hit 5′s). I made the call, and he showed AA97??? Anyway, river came an Ace… gg asshole. I need to stop playing.
This weekend is the Toronto FC opener and my brother is taking me (allegedly). I don’t always believe everything he says, but he seems to be serious so hopefully its a go because I really want to go to the game. Gotta pick up a new jersey for that.
Other than that, life is boring… can’t wait to travel again.
/end boring post
How Do Retarded People Get Jobs as Affiliate Managers?
Mar 10th
Recently I received an email that was titled “Attractive Proposal” so I decided I would investigate further to see what this affiliate manager was offering….
Original Email:
Dear Webmaster,
My name is NAME REMOVED; I am an Account Manager at
www.Affiliateclub.com.
I find your website very attractive for our brands:
www.casinoclub-poker.com,
www.pokerkings.com
Our affiliates are getting fantastic conversion rates!
Do you want to hear more about it?
Kind regards,
NAME REMOVED
Account Manager
My response:
Hi NAME REMOVED,
I am in the process of trying to find a room to get a league going
ASAP. Here are my requirements that I have been asking rooms for:
Hybrid CPA/Rev Share Deal
Tourmanent Prizes
Tell me a bit about your software and what you can offer.
Regards,
Graham Rowlands
GNG Media Inc.
Her reply to my email (notice how she doesn’t even READ MY FUCKING EMAIL!!!):
Dear Graham,
Thank you for your reply.
We have 2 brands with Boss Media software:
1. At www.casinoclub-poker.com – we offer 100% up to 200€ Welcome bonus ( here we can make a special promotion for you)
2. At www.pokerkings.com we offer 100% up to 300€ Welcome bonus
WE are usually working on Rev Share Deal.
What do you think about it?
Kind regards,
NAME REMOVED
My last and final response ever to Natasha:
Well NAME REMOVED, here is what I think about it…
For one, you never even gave me a proposal, but rather decided listing the standard
bonuses on your websites would get my attention. I am not sure how that is supposed to
sell me. I think you started this off with a great attention grabbing title to your
email, but you really need to work on the follow through.
And two, there was nothing “attractive” about it. I get a million of these kind of
emails all the time, and this kind of junk just wastes my time. Don’t beat around the
bush, sell your brand, tell me what I am gonna make, and give me good reasons why I
should promote your brand, over one of the competitors.
Anyway, hopefully this helps you in the future and thanks for giving me something to
write about on my blog.
Better luck in the future!
Graham
