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I had a post already planned for today, and then I came across The Shrinking Window Of Opportunity by Gyutae Park over at his blog. It is a great article that’s really a wake-up call for Internet marketers to get busy because of the way the landscape of the net is changing. If you aren’t building your web empire yet, it could be too late real soon for the small, independent webmaster.

I’ve always believed that if you have an idea for a business on the web, you should have started it yesterday, because of the time it takes to get established and now this seems more important that ever with Google’s preference for older, well established web properties.

Even though we all know how evil Google is, the simple fact is that they control the game. While you may be able to get some traffic from various sources on the net, at this point if you don’t have traffic from Google, you probably aren’t doing all that well, and it’s only going to get worse. Gyutae points out that Google seems to be giving less relevance to or even completely discounting things like paid links, directories, widgets and more, resulting in the small business person on the web being driven out of business.

What Google supposedly wants is more relevance and in their eyes, large, established web sites will get more attention and will be pushing out the little guy and soon start to take over search results. So goes the day when everything on the web was to be on equal footing.

I don’t believe it is the end of the road for Internet and affiliate marketers and neither does Gyutae, but now is not the time to procrastinate with your ideas. If you are going to make your mark on the web, you have to start to establish yourself as an authority in your niche today. Rather than explain again how to go about that, go read Gyutae’s post about the dwindling opportunity for the independent webmaster.

As a little counterpoint though, I’m not so sure Google will always have the monopoly they do. Google’s track record as of late is to just make people mad. We aren’t reading about how wonderful Google has been to webmasters lately, we’re hearing about exactly the opposite, from lots of different sources. While they are trying to create a cleaner search index with more relevance, they could (some would argue they already have) become out of touch and elitist somewhat like the United States government.

Not that I would ever want to see such a thing, but companies who control commerce in such a way that it effects the economic stability of a large mass of people, attract the snooping eye of government intervention. With Google’s increasing record of putting people out of business, no telling what could happen if this were to manifest itself on a much larger scale. We would then have one out of touch bureaucracy giving orders to an out of touch company that controls a huge portion of commerce. Can you spell disaster?

The point of all this is to start building a relevant web empire today that will add value to the web for years to come. Don’t wait until the entry point for the small businessperson is beyond your reach.

Some days the the eBay affiliate program pays off in big dividends. Sunday was one of those days. Too bad this isn’t a consistent amount, but earnings for my Build A Niche Store sites came in at $278.01 for a single day and earnings for my top performing site were $273.52 and that was on 40 sales for a single site. But as big of a payoff as it was one day, it’s back to normal the next as you can see from the chart below:

Sunday’s earnings from eBay were 20 times what Monday’s earnings were, coming in at $12.04. Yes, consistency would be great, but at least from this example you can see the potential earnings you can get through eBay and BANS. Now, this isn’t some anomaly where The eBay Partner Network is paying back for missed commissions (even though some are wondering if they’re getting things right) because after downloading my eBay affiliate report for Sunday and spot checking some of the winning bids, these were all auctions than ended on Sunday and were paid for on Sunday.

Build A Niche Store really works.

Tags: ebay partner network, ebay affiliate program, build a niche store, bans

This will be kind of a rant. What’s the point of Technorati? Can anyone tell me? Does anyone even go there any longer except me? Is there a point to it? I used to get a decent amount of traffic from them on a couple of other blogs, but here at Affiliate Confession, if traffic from Technorati were considered water, I would be dead. This blog is more than 6 months old but I still can’t get, or at least I don’t think I can get, my Technorati tags indexed. I haven’t tried in a month or so, but were going to try a little experiment here just for the fun of it.

One of the ways to get Technorati traffic was to blog about something on their top 10 tags list and publish your post around 7 to 9 in the evening. Within minutes traffic would come rolling in and I used to be able to get 600 to 700 visitors just from Technorati to some posts on my American Idol blog. This was when the top 10 tags used to be listed on the front page in a much more prominent way. This also used to be in the day when something wasn’t always wrong with Technorati as well. Right now if you head over to the rising posts and stories, there’s nothing there.

Anyway here’s the little experiment: Instead of just blogging about 1 thing in the top 10 tag list, I’ll blog about everything in the top 10 tags as found at Blogger Central and include those tags at the bottom of this post. I’ll include the tag title and a nice link bait one liner to offend as many people as possible. If you’re not offended by something in one tag, you will be in another. But the whole point is to see if we can generate some traffic from Technorati.

So let’s get started and have some fun.

News - Have you heard the news, Technorati is lame.

Politics- My top political hero is George W. Bush. I think he is the best President evar and wish he could run for 2 more terms.

Barack Obama- Why don’t we ever mention this guy’s middle name? It’s Hussein, and I want to know why Bush isn’t asking Barack about those weapons of mass destruction. Is there a connection?

iPhone- What can I say about the iPhone, besides there are morons paying over $600 for a 16 GB iPhone on eBay right now when you can get it from AT&T for $499. Duh!

Google - Evil

Music- I miss the good old days of Captain & Tennille and Abba, now there was some real music.

Video- Great, everyone thinks they’re either a director or producer these days. YouTube is a waste of bandwidth.

Hillary Clinton- If Hillary were to appear on a granny’s HotOrNot I’d give her a 5 cause she’s not bad lookin’ for an old hag, but I darn sure wouldn’t want her as president.

Media- See I told you Technorati is lame. Why’s this even a tag?

Apple - How was Steve Jobs able to take a generic word and copyright it? And to top it off the Apple affiliate program really sucks. They make so much money, yet they can only afford to offer their affiliates 1% on sales. Would anyone be wiling to admit they’re an Apple affiliate?

There you have it. Now, Technorati traffic, come to pappa, if you dare!

Tags: news, politics, Barack Obama, iphone, google, music, video, hillary clinton, media, apple

Finally after a long 33 days, The Webmaster Talk contest is coming to an end. I know I’ve been blabbing a lot about this one, but this is a huge contest with $25,000 in prizes going to 5 fortunate winners. That’s right 5 winners will each get $5,000 in prizes including a sweet MacBook air and some other killer prizes including:

$750 in cash combined from MaxBounty and Pepperjam Network
24 custom T-Shirts
An Apple iPod Touch from Rocket Profit
A Professional Shopping Cart Solution from Interspire
The Flip camera from Advaliant
The complete multi-pack of the Revolution Theme
$500 in gift certificates to Text Link Ads
A Nintendo DS Lite
3 Months Of free training in Aaron Wall’s SEOBook
and I think that’s it.

The contest has been based on a points system and the top 5 people with the most points totaled each win one of the $5,000 prize packages. If you have already entered the contest and want to earn a few more points before it ends tomorrow night at midnight, then check out the full rules here.

In the mean time you can get a ton of great information at Webmaster-Talk.com forums including help on CSS, HTML, PHP, website design, directories, making money online, blogging and a whole host of other topics. There are more than 50,000 members registered at Webmaster Talk and more than 130,000 threads. It’s definitely no fly by night forum and worth joining in on the discussion, even if you aren’t into contests.

You can join Webaster Talk forums here.

I’ve been reading and thoroughly enjoying Aaron Wall’s SEOBook mainly because Aaron takes a very honest look at building businesses on the net, providing value for your visitors and what it takes to make a successful web site. In reading SEOBook I came across a quote that’s by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Internet (sorry Al Gore, the net wasn’t your baby). Aaron quotes a longer passage by Tim of which I’m only using a couple of sentences:

Core in my upbringing was a value system that put monetary gain well in it’s place, behind things like doing what I really wanted to do. To use net worth as a criterion by which to judge people is to set our children’s sights on cash rather then what will actually make them happy.

While it is apparent to those of us who either work at home or are striving to do so, that working at a job and climbing the corporate ladder probably is not the thing that will make us happy, we can be equally as culpable in the things we strive for in the Dot Com world. I’ll be the first to raise my hand, not very high, and somewhat sheepishly exclaim, “guilty”. The prevalence of the get-rich-quick mentality on the Internet can be a detrimental influence that must be tamed.

What about you? What’s your perspective on the things that really provide happiness?

Over this last week I’ve been listening in live to Jeremy Palmer’s course, The Black Ink Project which Jeremy is graciously offering for free. This first week covered some pretty basic stuff, but was very good info for the beginning affiliate as it mostly covered setting up your business, finding niches and developing a plan for your business. Even though this week was basic info, the last session on Friday was probably the most important one for me as it dealt with time management and work habits of which I struggle with.

Now, if you don’t know Jeremy Palmer, he is one of the top performers at Commission Junction earning over a million dollars in commissions per year for the last 3 years or so. What makes Jeremy different from a lot of the top guru affiliate marketers is that he is probably the most transparent person in this industry. With his decision some time ago to get completely out of information marketing, because he doesn’t want to be associated with the clowns selling worthless ebooks, that makes him all the more trustworthy. Jeremy used to sell an ebook entitled High Performance Affiliate Marketing for $49 which I bought a while ago, but he now gives it away for free for the reason that there is very valuable information in it, but he doesn’t want to position himself as selling the six-figure-per-year-dream just from buying an ebook.

Along with the ebook being available for free, Jeremy also runs the Quit Your Day Job forums and came up with the idea for The Black In Project to get people excited and increase participation at the forums. With participation by some of the top money making affiliates and internet business experts, The Black Ink Project could cost you a couple thousand dollars or more, but if you click this link and join the course, you can get it for the unbelievable price of…absolutely nothing. That’s correct the course is free and you really don’t have to click on the link to get it for that price, I guess you could type in theblackinkproject.com if you wanted to. The course was originally intended for only 1,000 people, but it filled up so fast that Jeremy decided to open it up to 2,000 more people. But seriously, don’t even get involved if you aren’t committed to it.

The next three weeks will get more into the meat of the course and will cover topics such as designing an eye appealing site, individual landing page design, mastering pay-per-click marketing, building links, social media, outsourcing and more. It will also feature top name affiliates such as Amit Mehta, Aaron Wall of SEOBook and more. I’m really looking forward to the PPC marketing course because I am a PPC guru at losing money. If you want to know how to lose money at Google Adwords, I can definitely show you how to do that. I’m dedicating the next couple of months to taking a completely fresh look at PPC so someday I might actually know what I’m doing in that arena and be able to help people out.

If you are serious about improving your affiliate marketing, and I do mean serious, you can join The Black In Project here. You can also read more about Jeremy’s free ebook here.

I find it interesting that there are people on the net who literally scrape out a living day to day. I guess that’s what you’d say about those individuals who seem to think the only way to earn money on the web is to copy other people’s content. I just can’t get my mind around that kind of thinking, at least not in today’s era of more algorithmically (yes, that is a real word) advanced search engines.

I was alerted by a commentator yesterday about my post on the Moped niche where a scraper site ranked at the number one spot for a couple of search terms I suggested people look at. However, as I checked this morning, they are no where to be found. The weird thing about this particular scraper site in question is that it isn’t monetized in any way. No Google ads, banners, affiliate links or anything are on this site, yet it consistently outranks me for several of my keywords for a short time and then it’s off into obscurity again. Most splogs like this are monetized in some way, this one is the exception to the rule.

I also see big name bloggers getting scraped on a much more frequent basis. I’ve written a few guest posts for John Chow and won a couple of contests on his blog and every time I get a link from him, in my WordPress dashboard I see links coming at me from probably 10 scraper blogs before I see the links show up from John. It’s amazing that there are that many people who can’t, or won’t, do something original.

I saw a similar thing in an online forum where someone asked for a review of their financial blog and allthough it wasn’t a scraper site, the person had copied every bit of content from financial news and information sites. Every snippet of content I checked by copying and pasting it into Google was from another web site and this person had 20 or 30 posts already. What did they think they were doing and where did they get the idea they could make money long term with a blog built this way?

One of the cruelest things the Nazi’s did to prisoners during WWII, besides the heinous experiments they did on them, was in giving them meaningless work. Nazi guards would one day have prisoners move a huge pile of bricks across a 100 yard field, only to have them move the pile back the next day and and repeat that action again for several days. Or prisoners would be told dig a deep trench only to be told the next day to bury it and again the next day to dig the trench in the exact same spot. Madness soon set in for the captives.

I’m beginning to wonder how far behind the captives these scrapers are. There’s really no end to the work if you think your going to scrape your way to the top. You’ll never get there.

High gas prices have most people bummed out. I pretty much felt that way the other day when I spent $65 to fill up my 4Runner which cost me around $40 to fill up just a year ago. But there is always an opportunity in even most of the worst circumstances, just short of the world coming to an end. The job for affiliate marketers that make their living from the net, is to be able to see the opportunity and take advantage of it.

With gas prices insanely high, people will be looking for other means of transportation and one of those ways will be via mopeds and scooters. That sounds like a great opportunity to me. I can’t believe I’m giving away this niche, but go to eBay and search for scooters and mopeds and you’ll see that nearly every auction that comes up has several bids on it, many with 10 or more. Then go check out the Keyword Discovery free search suggestion tool and see that there are a boatload of searches for all kinds of mopeds and scooters. There are several different kinds of scooters such as razor scooters and wheelchair type scooters that don’t fit the bill here, but you can weed through the search terms and see that there are plenty of the kind we’re looking for.

The thing that convinced me this is a good niche to exploit was what I found next at Google. I did a simple search on “build a niche store” moped and “build a niche store” scooter and found lots of results, the only problem was, hardly any of them are good results. Really, most of the stores built on this niche are so poorly done, with no content and no H1 tags on the product pages, I think someone could clean up here. The only reason I’m not going to is because I have 11 BANS stores right now that need attention and I don’t have time to build another one.

This is just an example of a niche to exploit and how to think and go about finding that niche. If you are looking for an eBay niche to take advantage of and want to see what kind of competition is out there, just Google “build a niche store” and “your keywords” and see what comes up. Now, when you build your store you’re going to want to turn off the little “powered by build a niche store” option that is a BANS foot print so people can’t find your niche like we just did. We also don’t want to give Google any reason to think our BANS store is just like everyone else’s.

Put on your thinking cap and see if you can come up with niches to exploit out of negative situations such as high gas prices. No matter what happens, people will be buying something.

You can get more info on Build A Niche Store here.

If you’d like to have a chance to win one of 5 great prize packages that include a Macbook Air and are valued at $5,000 each, you have just under 7 days to do so. Webmaster Talk has recently merged with the Earners Forum and is offering some great prizes besides the MacBook Air such as:

A Flip Camera
An Apple iPod Touch
$500 cash from MaxBounty
$250 cash from Pepperjam Network
24 Free T-Shirts from Ndesigns
The cool revolution blog theme
A professional shopping cart from Interspire
3 Months of Aaron Wall’s SEO training

and much more.

This is one of the best contests I’ve ever seen on the net and if you want to win one of these great prizes, you better get on it. The end of the contest is May 13th at midnight and all entries must be submitted to Webmaster Talk by May 16th at 12 noon. There are a variety of things you have to do to earn points that go towards you winning one of the prize packages. You can get all the details of the contest by reading all the rules here.

The number one rule to enter the contest is to be a member of Webmaster Talk forums and you can join right here. Even if you aren’t interested in the contest, you should certainly be interested in Webmaster Talk because they are about as extensive as any forums I’ve ever been a part of. For the online marketer or someone wanting to learn how to build a web site they are a great repository of information, tips, tricks, Photoshop advice, CSS advice, affiliate marketing advice and lots more. With over 58,000 members, there is probably someone there that can answer any question you have.

Of course you can always offer your expertise in the forums as well and that’s always a good way for people to get to know you and trust you. And trust helps you build your brand and will ultimately make your business more successful. So head on over to Webmaster Talk forums and don’t forget to check out the contest.

How would you compare and contrast Twitter and Facebook? I’m tempted to say Twitter is instant messaging on steroids and Facebook is just like another email address I have to check daily and weed through spam. I’m tempted to say that, but I won’t.

No really, I’ve made some decent contacts and connected with friends on Facebook and that’s been beneficial. I also joined a few affiliate marketing type groups and now I’m inundated with spammy requests every day to install some silly application and join up with marketing thingy type deals from all over the world. Maybe their great, I don’t know, but honestly, I don’t have the time to check all of them out and rent space in my brain to whatever it is they’re doing. I also don’t have time to deal with a flood of requests everyday.

This is a problem with Facebook that isn’t even possible with Twitter and that’s one of the reasons I dig Twitter so much. I can follow who I want on Twitter and I get one screen to watch throughout the day to see if there’s anything interesting I’d like to go look at or respond to. It’s a genius system and because of the 140 character limit you have to say whatever it is you want to say concisely and to the point. I can also shoot a quick note to a friend without having to open my email and dig through a pile of spam or be potentially distracted with an offer from some Barrister in Nigeria I can’t refuse.

Okay, there is a little fly in the Twitter ointment here if you haven’t figured it out yet. What’s that you ask? They don’t have a monetization model and they aren’t makin’ any money. While we all love this little clean tool were supplied with for free, one of the reasons their interface is so clean is because there aren’t any ads cluttering it up. All those VC people will want to get their money out of Twitter some day and Steve O’hear over at ZDnet has a few ideas how that might happen.

Hopefully the monitization issue will be taken care of in a way that still keeps Twitter the cool thing that it is, because it pokes Facebook right in the eye.

You can follow me on Twitter here.