I have been reading, analyzing, and {insert action verb here} for over a year now. As a young pollywog I read all the popular blogs. Such as John Chow, Shoemoney, and Super Affiliate. In fact I still do today. They seem to love to share and live the life of a superhero such as Iron Man. Basically, everyone knows who they are, what they do, and at a high level how they do it. They also love to show the fruits of their success dining, cars, and homes. I guess they love being a “superhero”.

Then there are underground superheroes such as UberAffiliate (Sup3rNova). Who instead tell you a little of what they are working on or discuss what other affiliate marketers are doing. UberAffiliate never tells you how he handled his marketing and the details of his campaigns. He is basically very secretive on his “super affiliate marketing powers”. And besides him there are many more underground superheroes that do not even blog or think about blogging.

These are the guys I want to know about and meet in person. But I can see how the underground superheroes do not want to ruin a good thing. I had a chance to experience being a superhero. It happened last week Friday while at my day job. One of the guys I work with told me he was reading about an alien task force being created in Colorado. The purpose of the task force was to greet aliens visiting Earth. I joked with him that it was most likely a link bait story with the intent of making the keyword “E.T. Taskforce” popular. I told him I bet some marketer got some affiliate pages ranked on the first page of Google with the keywords of “E.T. Taskforce”. The discussion carried on and I shared with him the Fox News link bait story where a 13 year old boy supposedly stole his dad’s credit cards and purchased services from a bunch of strippers

I could tell he was interested in affiliate marketing and has done some reading. I figured I would let him know what I have up and what I am working on. It was fun to share and let him know how some of the online marketing stuff works. I guess I felt like a superhero. We spoke for about 45 minutes and he seemed interested. With his new found knowledge I hope he does do something within affiliate marketing. If he is successful enough to quit his day job then I will have been a real superhero in his eyes.

Brian Solis over at TechCrunch has written a blog post on 12 PR secrets. His “secrets” are actually widely known and practiced in the marketing community. I think the number one theme expressed through out his post is that start ups need to have a mind shift. The mind shift is to build relationships with various communicators or I like to call them “repeaters”. Similar to repeaters in a electronic network, media repeaters take in stories and repost them word for word or add flair. The ones that add flair are the ones that are able to distinguish themselves. These are the ones start ups should seek out and build a relationship with.

It would be nice to know how much a start up should budget or plan to spend on marketing upon its launch. I have submitted an Ask500People question and hope 500 people respond. I will update this post with results from the Ask500People.com question.

So with Brian Solis sharing his 12 secrets, do you have any web start up marketing secrets or experiences you would like to share?

UPDATE: Got back some results from Ask500People. It seems the majority of the peeps who answered said $0 to $1000 per month. Then next it was $1001 to $5000. Not one individual answered $10k or more. So it proves that a start up should use social media and other tactics to generate traffic. I am following the survey results and going to try to use the least amount of money to market my projects. Lets see how it goes.

Been researching all the various shopping cart software solutions out there. And there are many. On the open-source end, there is OSCommerce, ZenCart, MagentoEcommerce, Substruct, Drupal+Ubercart, and Prestashop. As for purchasable solutions, there is X-Cart. My main requirements so far has been PHP or RoR and if possible free. I have not looked at any of the ASP.NET solutions and really do not want to.

Currently, I have OSCommerce installed and set-up for my HawaiiFloristOnline.com. I have not integrated it with Authorize.net yet so I am unable to take orders. I am just fearful that OSCommerce is so easily hacked. Anyone have any experiences with OSCommerce being hacked?

Also anyone got any experiences with the shopping cart solutions I listed above? My top three are currently (notes in parenthesis):

-*List below is in no particular order*-

Substruct (RoR based and will require some dev to make perfect. Not sure of SEO capabilities.)

MagnetoEcommerce (First production release slated for 3/31/08. Early adoption can be painful.)

Drupal+UberCart (Still not a full production release of UberCart)

Please advise.

Yeah! EBay is rolling its affiliate programs in house. The announcement was made today and it has been written up by every blog out there.  So I am going to write about how this affects me personally. One of my top things to get down ASAP or at least before May 1st is the migration to eBay affiliate code numbers. In my sites I use a wordpress plugin called phpBay Pro and it uses a commission junction affiliate code. I will need to see if I can switch out the code without having to break anything. Keep your fingers crossed.

Some of the stories I have read have said that it is for the best. As EBay should be able to save a few bucks by removing the middle men (i.e. commission junction) and gain more control over the content their affiliates produce. I am glad I did not buy the other eBay listing product called Build A Niche Store (BANS) . I have heard that BANS is built around the use of commission junction links so migration may not be possible without a major update.

Do you have a BANS or phpBay pro site that needs to be upgraded? Answer below.

I wanted to share my earnings from my eBay affiliate sites for the last 30 days.  Drum roll please. I made a grand total of $13.86. That is right boys and girls $13.86. I need to work on my conversions because they suck. I think I need to add more authoritative content to help people feel safer on the site. I have found that sorting the eBay listings by end time (soonest) is best. As it is a call to immediate action. I will continue to promote the five ebay sites I have and see how they do. Also was able to move along a few projects. Just none of them are finished yet. Do you have any projects you are working on that you wish to share about below? I am always interested in learning what other people are working on to generate online transactions or cash.

In my last post about Yahoo! Search Marketing I provided a link to get $100 in free advertising from Yahoo! Search Marketing. To get the $100 you had to be a new customer and had to put a deposit of at least $30 in your account. Well, a few days after I signed up my $100 of free credit disappeared and my charge card got automatically charged for another $30. I was not to happy so I contacted their customer service who came back with a response in 24 hours. In the response they stated that they screwed up and was forwarding my request to the accounting department. The Yahoo! accounting department credited my account for $100 in about 48 hours.

During this time I suspended my campaign and continued to do research keywords for my ebay affiliate site.  Following the advice of the marketing gurus out there in www land I tried mis-spellings of my keyword phrases as well as negatives of other similar products. I got my list and then wrote a few different ads. Basically, setting up my A/B split testing. It is very exciting to see what kind of click thrus you get based on the text in an ad. I am surprised how receptive people are to question based titles in an text ad. Also it seems that Yahoo! traffic is better than Google traffic when reviewing my bounce rate of my site. The big exception is that the amount of Yahoo! traffic is 50% less when compared to Google. So making $$$’s might take longer with Yahoo! traffic.

Since the credit mix up, I have since turned my campaign back on and have set a daily budget of $5.00. I need to get at least 25% on my investment(advertising expense) to make it feasible. So I need to make $6.25 gross for the day.

I will be doing another post in a few days with some traffic numbers. Now back to the hustling.

Well it looks as if eBay will be reducing their listing fees and increasing their commission fees. I am hoping this helps me out on my niche stores. Because an increase in the eBay commission means I make more money on each transaction. My current understanding of my affiliate agreement is that I make 50% of the eBay commission fee when a transaction is completed.

UPDATE: As I have described earlier I built a few Wordpress sites with a eBay affiliate plug-in. So far I have only marketed one of the sites and I have grossed a whopping $14.25. The kicker is that over half of the revenue came after I stopped my AdWords campaign. Want to know why I continued to generate revenue? Cookies! Yep, good for 30 days. So anyone who visits my sites and clicks on a link gets a cookie. And if they buy anything on eBay I get a cut of the commission. Below are my eBay store sites. Check them out and tell me what you think of them. I am looking for feedback.

www.supermotowheelsonline.com

www.cocktaildressstore.com

www.maclaptopshop.com

www.yourweddingdressstore.com

www.ukulelepro.com

So besides working on this blog and other projects I attempted a another revenue generating idea. I read about it from my idol of hustle and flow Shoemoney where he talked about building a niche store. So what is a niche store? It is basically a site that contains ebay auctions specific to the niche you are trying to service and sell to. Ebay has over 60 million products listed at any one time and this across all of their specific country eBay sites also. Their affiliate program is great because it pays you $25 to $35 for someone just signing up for an eBay account. As well as getting a cut of the transaction fee for each product that is purchased through your niche store.

I thought to myself awesome, I get new content automatically for my site and as well as being able to make a few dollars. So I checked out the product reviewed by Shoemoney called Build a Niche Store (BANS) and another product called phpBay Pro from Wired Studios. BANS costs about $97 and is a self contained content management system/store site. It integrates with RSS feeds from eBay and presents the auctions as items in your store site. I read a few reviews and most people said it was ok but the templating/skinning of the site was a chore and not easily done. I researched the other product phpBay Pro, and it seemed to offer the near same functionality but all within a Wordpress site and with a low intro price of $39. Using Wordpress makes things easier as there is a bunch of plugins, it integrates easily, and there are a bunch of free templates available out on the net.

After my detailed and through review (less than 30 mins) of the two products I purchased phpBay Pro. Whipped up a wordpress site in under an hour and got this to show for it. Did a little marketing with adwords and have gotten an average of 20 visitors per day coming to the site. Well on 12/29/2007 I got my first commission and it was for $4.08! Now I feel fired up to earn more online. I have been trying to make a buck online for over six months and now that I have I am ready for my next goal. To earn $100 a day with online transactions. Be on the lookout for more updates.

It looks as if the War of the Worlds is going to be happening soon enough as Google has deployed their mobile phone platform SDK called Android. I would wager to say this is an excellent strategy as far as timing and tactic. First point is that Google timed their SDK release months before Apple’s planned SDK release of March 2008. Thus giving developers time to adapt to Android and possibly provide new applications way before any will be written for the Apple Iphone. The second tactic of just developing an platform and not providing the hardware allows for Google to work with a multitude of mobile device manufacturers. And allows them to quickly enter markets without having to go through any communication regulations.

There is also a video on Youtube showing how the interface looks and operates. I watched the video and had to chuckle at the first guy Sergey Brin as he seemed like he was Android. I know he is a brillant guy and co-founded the mecca of all tech companies but he needs a beer to loosen up.

I am excited about the Android SDK and will try give it a whirl since it has a built in emalutor. On a side note, Google wanted to drive home the fact that there will be no Gphone (Google phone) so squash that idea.

So the last month I have explored multiple ways to try and make money off the web. As noted in my about page my goal is to make enough so I can quit the day job.  I am taking the approach of trying a whole bunch of different things at the same time. Might not be the best approach but at least they are all web related.

Below is overview:

1- Develop a custom web application

2- Purchase an application and deploy it to do online e-commerce

3- Watch and assess other web sites that are for sale

4- Niche research and development of that niche

5- Develop a business that services local businesses

6- Domain name research and purchase similar to number 4

So in the coming posts I will discuss each one further.