Brandon Hopkins' Reputation Management and SEO Blog

Build a Niche Store (eBay Affiliate Store)

While products like the Build a Niche Store (BANS) are usually not on my list of things to try, I thought I would solicit some reviews about the product. If you’re not familiar with BANS, the premise is simple, you pick the niche and the script delivers products in that niche through the Commission Junction eBay affiliate program.

Sounds confusing, but you’re basically an eBay affiliate through Commission Junction. The part that entices me is that I know a few niches that aren’t horribly flooded with similar sites. Since I also own a few extra domains with crappy content, it could be a perfect match. Build a Niche Store claims to be easy to install and if a newbie can do it, so can I.

The price is $97 which is irrelevant because the eBay affiliate program is pretty easy to make money with. If someone signs up for eBay through your link, you get $25. If someone clicks your link and buys ANY product on eBay in the next 7 days, you get 50% of the revenue (not total sale price). By just selling a few items and a few signups you’ve easily made your money back.

I’ve never actually used the Build a Niche Store software but am curious to hear from actual users.

What did you like? What don’t you like?

By Brandon|January 6th, 2008|Projects, Reviews|8 Comments

TNX.net Rocks for Buying Links!

As all good web 2.0 style companies, TNX.net is in beta. However, generally being in beta means that somethings don’t work and the product or service is lacking real features and isn’t useful, yet. TNX is quite the opposite, it’s feature rich and seems to work good all the way around.

Sell Links on Each Page

Unlike many other text link companies, TNX allows you to sell links on each individual page. That means I can sell links on one of my most popular pages, and a regular page that gets moderate traffic. Naturally TNX will sell the links on my page that is more popular for more money. The benefit to this is obvious. If I’m going to be sending a large amount of traffic to an advertiser, I’m compensated more than if I’m sending fewer visitors away. Exactly as you would expect advertising to happen.

DigitalPoint Special Offer

One of the initial reasons I signed up with TNX was because I saw a thread at digital point about free text link ads. Anything that involves “free” and “text links” always gets my attention. Check out this thread, make a post and TNX will give you 5,000 credits in the TNX system.

Payouts and Commissions

As should be expected from any major advertising company, payouts are through Paypal, Check, Wire transfer, and are willing to take suggestions on other payment methods. As long as they pay through Paypal, that’s all I care about. Unlike most other advertising companies, TNX only takes 12.5% of the profit. Most companies that I’ve worked with take 50% (TLA), except Adsense, from my experience they take between 60-70% leaving you without much in terms of profit. TNX wants to keep advertisers happy, and in a competitive market they had to do something different.

Buying Links

An absolute necessity, with Google on the war path killing sites that sell links, is discretion. From TNX’s website, “Our system is Secure and Confidential: No public list of users. All sales are automated.” That is exactly what I want, a company that doesn’t advertise that I buy links and doesn’t list who sells the links.

Buying links through TNX is difficult because it’s different. It’s not necessarily bad, just different. With most advertising companies you buy a link on a specific page or site-wide link on a specific site. With this method of advertising you’re buying specific links one by one. With TNX you specify the criteria of the sites that you want to buy links on and TNX fills the order. For example, I can buy links on sites that are PR5 and better with 5,000 or more links. TNX then goes out and finds those sites that fit my predefined criteria and fills my order.

Link Buying Dangers

Since buying mass links is easy with TNX you’ll want to keep it in check in the beginning. One of the worst things you can do with your website is to buy 10,000 links that show up overnight. Google will see you trying to manipulate the SERPs and is likely to slap your site with lost rankings and drop your PR. If you’re going to start buying links through TNX, start slow and ramp up link buying over 6 months or more. This will hopefully keep Google in the dark about your link buying.

Final Thoughts

Overall, TNX is an easy way to buy links. As you can see from the Alexa graph below, I’m not the only one who thinks TNX.net is a great link buying system!

By Brandon|December 15th, 2007|Link Building|21 Comments

Zero to Hero Final Update

Well, the 30 days has come and gone and our final totals are as follows:

GOAL – 2,000 unique visitors
ACTUAL – 33,038 unique visitors

GOAL – 150 Total posts
ACTUAL – 143 Total posts (Andrew did his part, I was off my 7 posts)

GOAL – $100 Income
ACTUAL – $104.39 (Adsense 50%, Affiliates 50%)

All in all it was a good month, we have a lot of great content that is bringing in a lot more organic traffic this month.

11/2007 Google Traffic: 1137 total
12/2007 Google Traffic: 1458 (through only 12 days)

Huge increase in organic traffic is also helping to sustain Adsense earnings. We’re beginning to focus more on specific call center terms such as call center software, call center outsourcing and giving tips that can help find a call center job. With more call center posts tailored towards jobs we hope to start ranking for a bigger term.

Last month we saw 60,922 page views come from StumbleUpon. So far this month we have 30,850 (through 12 days) so it looks to be another record breaking month for SU as well.

Another interesting stat was that we used 12.45 GB of bandwidth last month. That is a lot of bandwidth for a site not offering downloads and only a rare post with pictures. We did have this post about funny office signs so that probably took it up a few GB’s.

Our goals for this month are completely different. We’re going for twice as much income, 30-35 total posts (5 times less) and focusing our marketing efforts more on link building through guest posts, article writing and social means.

So there you have it, the project was a success in my opinion and our stats show that it was definitely a success since we exceeded the important goals.

Zero to Hero Project Closed!

By Brandon|December 12th, 2007|Projects|11 Comments

Zero to Hero Day 24 – More Traffic, Need More Clicks

We’ll, the 30 day project is getting close to wrapping up. We’ve implemented the use of the Digital Point keyword tracker and are tracking about 300 keywords. Since we’ve started doing this, I’ve been amazed at how quickly Google and MSN are picking up our new posts and getting them in the index. I noticed a few of my posts we’re ranking in the 150 range on the first day the post was live and down to the top 10 within 3 days. Granted, these are long tail keywords, but it’s still great to see such a quick success from MSN. Google has been getting our new posts into the index and SERP’s within a day or two. See the screenshot to the right for an example, the post was made live on November 20th.

As of 10/24 we have a total of 23555 total uniques. Just to remind you, last month the site had 88 total uniques. Since our original goal was 2,000 uniques, we’ve WELL surpassed that goal. You can see that a vast majority of those uniques are from StumbleUpon. Unfortunately those visitors only come for our linkbait, and not for our content.

As for our second goal, 150 total posts, we’re close. To date we have averaged 4.2 posts per day. Our goal is 5 posts per day and in the next 6 days we need 49 posts. In the next 6 days we need 8.16 posts average. That is 4 posts per day. I’ve seen Andrew have 10-12 post days and I’ve done 10-15 posts per day so I know it can easily happen.

Our third goal was $100 net earnings. To date we’ve earned a couple bucks from a few different affiliate, less than $5 total. Adsense, our biggest earner is at $36.99. Average daily income is around $1.66 per day. We need that to go to $9.8 per day if we’re going to hit the goal. Unless we really pick up our organic search visitors I don’t think we’ll hit that goal.

Here are a few screenshots from the project:

Daily traffic.

Visitors from Search Engines (including StumbleUpon and Digg):

By Brandon|November 24th, 2007|Projects|6 Comments

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