I was frankly quite surprised by the massive take up rate of Ewen Chia’s Secret Affiliate Weapon, and I am in the process of sending you the special reports I promised.
For those who’ve sent me their receipts, Bee Heng and Terence, can you please use the feedback form and include your emails in the body of the message?
My script is giving some problems and the name and email fields have not been captured.
I have to rush off to a seminar shortly, but I promise to send you the documents by 10pm this evening.
As a bonus, I will look for some additional ebooks to mail you too. I have ebooks on Adsense, SEO, Aritcle Marketing. Please indicate which you prefer.
This special bonus will also apply to any further take-ups today (22nd Aug 2006).
Please include your email address in the contact form, so I can email you the documents.
When’s the best time to go into Internet Marketing some ask.
Anytime.
But if you’d want to capitalize on huge masses of people, rabid for products, and willing to shell out top dollar for products and services, you can’t get better than special events, celebrations and holidays.
The Olympics and World Cup are way past (with some racking in revenue in the tens of thousands off affiliate marketing) and retailers rejoice as the year-end shopping comes about.
For some retailers, more than half their annual revenue could come from the Christmas shopping season alone, so there’s adequate time to do strategic planning to capitalize on the business opportunities.
We can’t kill Santa, but we can sure make a killing at Christmas.
How fantatical are the consumers? Consider Zach Comm’s (son of Adsense guru Joel Comm) post on: Bionicle – A Fan Critiques the New Sets.
Fanatically loyal fans can make and break the market.
Put toys and Christmas together and you have a lucrative market.
To succeed however, you’d need to do accurate research to position yourself for success.
Here’re some suggestions:
- Scope out the forums: What’re the hot topics? The Xbox360 and PS3 are on everyone’s lips, but could there be a sleeper hit? Maybe paintball guns? The new-fangled Furbies? Star Wars toys? Only insiders have the inside scoop, so blend in, get the buzz.
- Top seller’s lists/wishlists: Amazon and other retailers list their bestsellers (possibly updated hourly depending on their order processing infrastructure). Identify trends. What’re the hot new technologies that’ll be in toys? GPS? Bluetooth? USB/firewire connectivity? What will the next ‘killer’ toy be? Is it for boys? girls? unisex?
- Support for other channels: Successful retailers will tend to expand their branding and presence by branching into other media like Web sites and TV programs, cartoons, etc. You can gauge the popularity of these media by looking at their Alexa/Google PR rankings (for the Web), Nielsen ratings for TV, and rating services for radio programs.
- Offline still rules: The above channels are adopted by manufacturers/brand owners, but it’s important to adopt a needs-based approach and get feedback from the consumers themselves. Poll your little nephew/niece and his friends. Talk to your friends kids. Get a pulse for what’s hot and hip. Not from the advertisers, but from the consumers.
With good data at your fingertips, you can then position yourself.
Opportunities are always out there.
It’s just a matter of seeing them.
Credit to Gwen for pointing this site out on her site: GwendolynTan.com.
Let’s look at the elements of this site:
Jose’s friends moved to Seattle and did not have a job. Although they managed to get housing, they didn’t have furniture. They decided to built furniture using Federal Express shipping boxes.
Some time later, Jose moved to Arizona and faced the same problem. He decided to follow their example building his own furniture, which now includes:
- desk
- bed
- couch
- dining table
- chairs
Whether you’re curious about how they did it, or just wondering if they’re plain crazy, you’ll be drawn to their site.
How sticky is their site?
Very. Even though they don’t have a technorati account, there are 91 links to their fedexfurniture.com. (now 92 after counting this post!)
Their Google PageRank (PR) is a mighty 6. (anything above a 4 means the Google Spiders crawl your site very regularly). Their Alexa ranking is also a respectable 439,637 (as of Aug 19,2006).
What helps is that lots of traffic has been generated from links from several high authority sources like:
- Digg
- Livedoor (a large Japanese portal)
- USA Today
- Wired
- TechCrunch
- Boing Boing
- The Seattle Times
Controversy, controversy
The biggest element of their publicity likely has been the frenzy whipped up by FedDex. Look at the legal letters they’ve sent to poor Jose.
It’s better publicity than anything you could buy at Google AdWords.
Where’s the money?
To monetize their traffic, Jose and company could consider revenue streams such as:
- Google Adsense
- Leveraging off their PR ranking to sell backlinks to other sites
- Affiliate marketing to monetize their incoming traffic
- Do promotions for other companies like furniture or deliveries companies (can you imagine UPS or Ikea advertising on their site?)
