Advertising a product or service is always tricky particularly in a niche so when it comes to monetising your site you need to first sit down and work out what products and services you wish to promote, who they are being aimed at and how you will target them.

Niche products don’t sell in their own niches

There is always exceptions to a rule but generally a product such as an SEO book will not do well being promoted on SEO sites. Tad recently posted that Aaron Wall SEO Book does not sell well on his site. Now you may have glanced to the right and spotted we are also promoting it so does it sell here? yes but we will explain why in a minute.

First lets take a look at Tad site, its aimed at Search engine optimisers who have some knowledge and can understand Tads’ musings this means the majority of his readership will read a wide range of SEO orientated blogs I wonder what product is promoted on those blogs?

Aarons book has completely saturated the market almost every SEO blog that runs advertising will have at some point dabbled with his book, their is not an intermediate level SEO that has not heard of it, many will have bought it, plenty have blogged about how great it is for people at all levels its the perfect book for some one who wants to cover all bases.

Why does it sell occasionally here, well its a really good book for starters but the focus of this blog is not search engine optimisation but monetising sites we occasionally mention SEO techniques and ideas and recommend our readers dabble. The SEO Book therefore is a niche product but in a niche different to our own we are introducing the product to a new readership not the over saturated readership in the SEO community.

Say hello to your neighbour niches

Now that we have worked out that selling niche products in their own niche does not work how do we choose what products to promote after all promoting cooking products on an SEO blog doesn’t seem to be any better then promoting an SEO book. Look at your blog or site does it fit into a niche so to continue our theme Tads’ blog is clearly an SEO blog, its got a very narrow focus now we need to think of niches around SEO, I’m not going to list them all but basically SEO niche neighbours a wide range of web services and development including but not limited to:

• Web development
• Web Hosting
• Directories
• Online advertising
• Graphic Design
• Programming

Their are loads of others but you are getting the idea all these separate niches have their own niche products what’s more finding them is easy enough look for the products that are saturating the market. This tactic doesn’t always work to go back to Tad blog he mentions that he promotes Dreamhost a hosting company (use promo code TIMSEO (monthly plan)) but once more he has not received a single sale this is an interesting one the company has a mixed reaction with the community but does offer one of the best deals in term of goodies they also have very good support but still have at times come in for criticism that said I have an account with them so they can’t be that bad.
So why does Dreamhosts not work for Tad? Well I think its simply that most SEO’s have hosting and its a long term thing its a lot of hassle to move hosts and Dreamhosts lack of dedicated servers does not make them the choice for those looking to expand. Would Tad be better promoting a different web hosting company? Possibly but Tad has a level of integrity which will ultimately drive through the promotions, when he promotes a product he is promoting something he knows works be it tool or service. While he would have more success promoting a service offering dedicated servers or resellers he has no experience of either (as far as I know).

Getting the products to the users

So how can we help Tad? Well lets first look at his current products he is promoting:

• Search marketing Standard - a publication for SEO and SEM
• SEO Book - Aarons book
• Web CEO - SEO software
• Dreamhost - Web hosting

I have used Tads’ affiliate links on the above and I encourage you to take a look in particular Search marketing standard and web CEO may be new to many of you. Remember they come with the Tad seal of approval!

I would be tempted to drop several of the programs here in particular the Dreamhost, SEOBook and possibly WebCEO. Not because they are not great programs or services just they are already saturating the market. So what would I replace them with?

• Directories have become quite a big bone of contention recently but their are still several good affiliate schemes out there BOTW has been getting a lot of press recently and we will be covering their scheme soon as an interesting case study.
• Web hosting, this is a odd one I find promoting web hosting takes a long time people as I said earlier do not change hosts often and when they do its normally to go up the chain so it makes sense to promote schemes with dedicated or semi-dedicated servers and reseller accounts.
• Domain names this is not the way to make a fortune but I find that many SEO’s are slowly becoming domainers hoarding domains so promoting a registrar might be the way to go I tend to promote 123reg a UK registrar but its a good idea to look at a more generic registrar, you could even have a go at being a domain reseller yourself with a company like Enom.

Of course affiliate programs are not the only way to go, do you know a Graphic designer, landing page designer, web developer why not offer them space to promote their products? these are the sort of people who often don’t have an affiliate scheme, they are also the perfect people to advertise on your site as few people will have come across them.

Aaron book does sell in the right audience

Through out this post I have repeated the mantra niche products fail in their own niche but this is not always the case. Even within a niche their is a diverse audience within a readership, a product that sells to the enthusiastic amateur may not do well for the pro and vice versa. Sometimes its a case of know thy audience for example a great place to sell Aarons book is on a website devoted to rookie and new SEOs apart from the fact they are impressionable folk they also haven’t been conditioned by the mass of adverts.
There are plenty of examples of niche products selling in their own niches but if your struggling with product sales have a look at what your selling and ask yourself how many times have you seen that product before?

Well I got a little laugh when I ran a few of my sites through Talklinkcentre Paid Link detector thanks to fantomaster for pointing it out. Scarily the detector managed to completely miss any paid links and instead decided that links to Feedburner and Google were clearly paid for.
To make things worse they use scary statements such as

Paid Or Not
These Links Are Useless To SEO

Which is complete tosh, from what I can tell they simply decide any link with anchor text and is not a nofollow is a “paid link and or useless” but they did get me thinking how would I create a paid link detector?

Elements of a paid link

Lets start cooking to identify a paid link we need some tell tell signs such as;

• A dofollow full juice link
• Off Topic
• Associated keywords - sponsor, advertisment
• Neighbourhood checking
• Link viability

Walk with me,
So the first check is to see if a link is a full link i.e no use of the nofollow and that the link is external, this would be followed by some sort of relevancy check, and magic keyword check, this would leave us with 2 piles of links one lot we know or suspect are evil, the other we just suspect, so we then check each link against a list of known offenders looking for a match.

Getting into the logic

This is all pretty simple now isn’t it?

The two sticky areas are Link relevancy and the Evil keyword matching list, you see what is a relevant link? if I am writing a computing blog is an Apple an irrelevant term? We could perform some amazing Latent semantic Analysis (or swallow a really big thesaurus) to determine relevancy but could we get it anywhere near close enough? Without some sort of relevancy engine how would we know which links are paid for or not. Google and the other search engines must have this cracked (note that was a sarcastic comment) so let us ignore this small problem and go to the second one our Evil keywords. This is far more straight forward we simply look at anchor text, heading or div container that has terms such as Advertiser, sponsor,click here etc. Once we have amassed our list we pass our links and the surrounding code through them, just to be sure we better also have a flag system for terms such as Page Ranks as people who discuss such things must be selling links.

Ultimately when it comes to developing our paid link detector script we have hit a large problem without some sort of relevancy checker, and a huge database of known offenders we will be unable to catch those evil paid linkers damn. We could harness list where we do know their are offenders such as the Pay per post market place or Text Link Ads but certainly with the Pay per post we could get ourselves into a bit of hot water did the buyer pay for a link or a blog post or we could ignore this small problem.

How would you go about creating a paid link checker, the above is one idea its up there with writing “all those who have paid links please step forward” line but perhaps you could do better? maybe you think the guys at talklinkcenter got it right and if its an external link it should be nofollowed just in case?

Please note their was a certain level of sarcasm in this post, you may also note using the above diagram to try to create a paid links detector will not work nor will it help you take over the world.

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Today a new advertising network, WidgetBucks has been announced. This looks as a good opportunity for publishers, as their ads look very clickable as they don’t look to what we are used to think of as an advertisement.

Why to use WidgetBucks ads

The best reason is that their ads have high CTR. Now according to their site you earn $3-6 CPM which is a great amount (if that is true of course ) They pay through cheque and the lower payment is $50 which is very reasonable.

The adverts are separated into 13 categories with each category having several sub categories, their is also the option for a pseudo contextual advertisements which they have called ‘MerchSense’ widgets themselves come in a range of sizes and colours which can be used to match a site or to make the widget stand out.

$25 bonus for signup

As an opening promotion they are offering $25 just for sign up, which makes the target of $50 much easier.

Last comment

I always look into testing new programs and this looks very promising. So I am going to test it and give you a full review later this month. In the meanwhile here is how their ads look like :

With a $25 promotion its worth signing up even if you later take it down as the offer is part of their initial opening and may not be around for ever to sign up to WidgetBucks takes just a second or two.