Affiliate Ecommerce Sites

[chiTown22]

Creating affiliate ecommerce sites appears to be a low cost business. The vendor provides the inventory data feed and handles all order processing. You simply need to drive web traffic to your site. Which is easier said than done, but it does not necessarily have to be done in a manner resulting in a large cost.

Anyone have any experience creating and running an affiliate site? At the moment I am looking at the secondary ticket market.

Thoughts?

[chiTown22]

nothing? [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

[MrBlue]

all those old MMB are gone and are now trading stocks like the rest of us here. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img].

j/k. Sorry, nothing to add.

[Gugel]

Q: What is your competitive advantage sir?
A: I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing "Nothing".

[chiTown22]

A. Superior customer experience.

Basically I am interested b/c from what I can see my overall risk is near zero due to the extremely low overhead and start up cost, basically just hosting costs.

If the site makes $17 a month, that is $17 more than I have now. There is no to very little downside.

However, I also have zero experience with running an affiliate site.

[BradleyT]

So you think you just put crap items out there for sale and then the magic traffic fairy brings visitors who are knocking down your doors to experience your "superior customer experience"?

[chiTown22]

[ QUOTE ]
So you think you just put crap items out there for sale and then the magic traffic fairy brings visitors who are knocking down your doors to experience your "superior customer experience"?

[/ QUOTE ]
No, I believe the cost of putting products out on a site is basically nothing as an affiliate and therefore why not put a site up? The secondary ticket market is a multi-billion dollar market, so I'm not sure what you mean by "crap" products.

I have zero experience driving web traffic. That is the kind of advice or feedback I was hoping to get. However, I have experience in UE as that is what I currently do in my day job.

Basically, If I can get 1-3 orders a month I will turn a profit.

[BradleyT]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
So you think you just put crap items out there for sale and then the magic traffic fairy brings visitors who are knocking down your doors to experience your "superior customer experience"?

[/ QUOTE ]
No, I believe the cost of putting products out on a site is basically nothing as an affiliate and therefore why not put a site up? The secondary ticket market is a multi-billion dollar market, so I'm not sure what you mean by "crap" products.

I have zero experience driving web traffic. That is the kind of advice or feedback I was hoping to get. However, I have experience in UE as that is what I currently do in my day job.

Basically, If I can get 1-3 orders a month I will turn a profit.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not sure what UE is but anyway as far as traffic goes you either need good unique content (which you won't have since 80 other sites will have the same tickets for sale) or lots of inbound links with good link text so you'll rank high in the search engines. Since you won't have good unique content I don't see you getting too many "free" inbound links.

But hey, if you think it will work go ahead, all you have to lose is $10 for a domain and $50 for 6 months of hosting. You could probably make more money just starting a blog about UE (whatever that is).

[Ps3tn0NcYk]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
So you think you just put crap items out there for sale and then the magic traffic fairy brings visitors who are knocking down your doors to experience your "superior customer experience"?

[/ QUOTE ]
No, I believe the cost of putting products out on a site is basically nothing as an affiliate and therefore why not put a site up? The secondary ticket market is a multi-billion dollar market, so I'm not sure what you mean by "crap" products.

I have zero experience driving web traffic. That is the kind of advice or feedback I was hoping to get. However, I have experience in UE as that is what I currently do in my day job.

Basically, If I can get 1-3 orders a month I will turn a profit.

[/ QUOTE ]

1.) Find a specific product niche. Being a Walmart is not going to work, you need a niche market that is not already over-saturated. BTW, the secondary ticket market is highly saturated and hyper competitive. Stay away unless you have a preexisting database of potential customers or a massive marketing budget.

2.) Start a blog and begin reviewing the products you are eventually going to sell. Do this for 3 months / 100 products to build up unique content.

3.) Once you have a base of "spiderable" (by the search engines) content, launch your ecommerce site on a separate domain.

4.) In subsequent product reviews link to the relevant product on your ecommerce site.

4a.) Manually (or, if you have skillz, programmatically) revise your previous reviews to include links to relevant products on your ecommerce site.

4b.) For increased probability of success and visibility in search engines, etc. -- it is important to do it assbackwards - base of reviews before ecommerce.

5.) Between step one and step four, attempt to build backlinks to your blog from sites that offer synergistic cross marketing opportunity (i.e. site about dogs links to site reviewing dog products, etc.)

6.) Continually plow all of your after tax income during the first year into paid advertising (Google AdWords, etc.) in an effort to grow your traffic and sales volume exponentially.

7.) After netting a trivial sum of money over a two year period, discover that there are more optimal ways to make money from the internet.

BTW, UE (user experience?), aside from site navigation factors, carries little importance when shopping online.

Consumers' primary concern is trust followed by timely delivery and last, but not least, a reliable customer service backend in the event of damaged products, returns, questions, etc.

If you are a good merchant you will rarely communicate with your customers beyond confirming payment, shipping date, follow-on offerings, etc.