June 2008

It’s beginning to feel like that.

I’m currently experimenting with an eBay affiliate program. I have seen these sites around the place and been ridiculously annoyed when I visited them. They’re like a tarted up version of Made For Adsense websites.

However, once I had the option to start mucking around with it… Of course it was ok. It was more than ok!

So, today I built a page for Country Road Bags. Why? Well, the idea here is to drive down to niches with 3+ leyword search terms. Terms which noone would build a website around if it took more than 30 minutes. Luckily it takes me 25 minutes.

So if you want to check out the Country Road Bags page go ahead, check it out. Is still extraordinarily basic and will remain so for a little time. But I hope those country road bags lovers will get a kick out of being able to pick up a few cheap bags in the process. Or maybe even some cheap Second Hand Country Road Bags.

Well, anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time will be familiar with the travails of Jonk’s Bargains, everyone’s favourite site. It receives an eye-popping 1000 visitors a day. Wowee.

Now to the new experiment for Jonk’s, a cheap baby clothing site. Well, not quite. It’s an eBay affiliate store which drags up all the listings for cheap baby clothes. Innovative? No, not really? Going to be a money spinner? Highly doubt it? Worth trying? Yes. Yes. And Yes Once More. If this page makes more than $20 over its entire lifetime the word you’ll need to describe my reaction will be stunned. Second Hand Baby Clothing FTW? We’ll find out soon.

Until the design is put up, it will look horrible. And once the design is put up, it will then look extremely horrible.

A few weeks ago I blogged about the new hype machine, SocialSpark.

It’s a site where you can get paid to talk about things. Generally about companies and their websites. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s by the same company as Pay Per Post as a matter of fact but it has a different business model about it. Firstly, the links all MUST be No Follow. So noone will get smashed by Google (as this one got smashed) for putting up paid links like naughty boys.

Not only that, but each post has disclosure of the sponsor. Look at the bottom of this one if you want an example of it.

And also, you get real opinions. Although I’m not sure of what that means. I think SocialSpark has been an exciting start but is still a ways off where it could be. Firstly, the site looks nice but the functionality is not quite up to the standard of PayPerPost.com. Yet. Also, not many advertisers have jumped on board. Yet. So I don’t log in all that much I’m afraid.

However, the opportunities that ARE there are generally much more interesting and fun in appearance than PPP. And not only that, the required disclosure means you don’t have to feel guilty about posting as happens occasionally with PPP when you aren’t allowed to disclose on a specific post.

It’s still very, very much a work in progress but according to SocialSpark, it is well ahead of PPP at its equivalent stage of development which is great to hear. I will start logging in a bit more in the future.

Although.. I have a dilemma. I have a few different blogs registered, and also my friends do as well, and all of us have had Page Rank stripped for carrying the PPP Real Rank widget. I hope that doesn’t happen with the Social Spark widget!

It doesn’t matter with this blog because it’s already PR0!