If you're anything like me, you might have a stash of old domain names hanging around the place doing nothing. I recently bought a reseller web space package with unlimited domains, so I've been abe to bring a few to life through there at minimal cost to myself using basic or retired websites.

But another - and very effective - way to make use of the domains is to list them for sale and park them with Sedo. Sedo is a market place for domain names, handling the sale of thousands of them. Once you have listed your domain for sale, you point your website's naming servers (done through your host's control panel) to Sedo. When a user types in that website, he gets a nice page saying the website is for sale and a selection of related adverts. If they click on the advert, you get money.

This presents you with two opportunities. If someone buys your domain, you will make money. If someone clicks on your ads, you will make money. Either option sounds great to me and better than leaving a domain to do nothing.

Visit Sedo to find out more.

My technically challenged aunt called me a few weeks ago saying she wanted help booking a hotel for a weekend in Blackpool, and had heard about a website called LateRooms. Not being much of a traveller myself, I hadn't really heard of it but looked it up and booked her a couple of hotel rooms.

It seemed like a completely brilliant system. Browse locations and hotels, check availability, and book - either online or through their call centre, using a unique reference number generated by you search.

It struck me that this was a brilliant business. In fact, I liked it to so much, I wanted to immediately start promoting it and I was very pleased to see that they offer an affiliate scheme.

They actually operate their own affiliate scheme, or you can join up through the Buy.At network. The commission is 5% of the order total. They have a range of cool banners and search boxes for you to integrate into your website. You also have the option of creating a full fledged white label site.

One of the things that often bothers affiliates is that you might send users to a merchant's side but the sale might not be recorded because the customer might phone up and make their order. LateRooms is completely prepared for this by tracking the unique reference numvers that visitors quote when they call up. This is such a good system, that if you can get traffic to them, you are bound to generate sales.

To join up, visit their site or find them on Buy.At

Just noticed this is my 101st post - yay!

I thought I'd spend a few minutes today considering domain name suffixes - top level domains and second level domain names.

When buying a domain name for a new site, most people will try and for a .com.
Just the phrase "dot com" is recognisable to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the web and has a great sound do it. It also builds in scalability to your project as there's no real geographic location indicated in the domain name. You can market your site effectively anywhere in the world using a ".com"

If the ".com" that I might want to use is already taken, I'd consider if the site I want to build is realistically only ever going to be a UK site, in which case I'd plump for ".co.uk". If I wanted to retain the possibility to go global, I'd want to see if a ".net" was available.

Last on my list of preferred domain names is .info. Whilst you don't see many big firms using these TLDs as their main domain, they are becoming increasingly common online and I have ranked well on Search Engines using them.

I shy away from .biz as I think it sounds a little bit tacky. I purchased a .biz a few years ago and most people didn't like the name when I tried to promote it. I've seen quite a few people using .org and .org.uk for their affiliate sites. I wouldn't criticise other people's choices - sometimes you just have to get what you can with the right keywords - but for me, .org and .org.uk should be respected and left for their intention which was non commercial organisations, such as charities, non profit groups, political parties etc. I don't think Nominet enforces these rules for org.uk so it's a bit of a free for all.

Lastly, there's the newcomer - ".eu". I've got a couple of .eu's and I have to say I quite like them. Firstly they are short, which if you are concerned about keyword density in your URLs is a great thing, and they are easy to say. I've got a site about weekend breaks (www.weekend-breaks.eu) which has a European emphasis, so the .eu domain seems to just work and fit the site well.

What top level and second level domains do you go for? Who's the best registrar? Tell me what you think.

Labels: domain names

As you will see in my sidebar, I had a go at a couple of podcasts on affiliate marketing last year. To be honest, the novelty wore off a bit and I couldn't really be bothered doing any more. Also I sold my Mac Mini which I had used to do them, using the GarageBand software.

There are some other excellent podcasts out there though which make for great listening.

WebmasterRadio's Affiliate Marketing Today podcast offers lengthy discussions between its hosts - Brian Caldwell & Robin Walsh - and key guests about whats happening with affiliate marketing. They also hae lots of other podcasts which might be of interest such as "SEO Rockstars".

Paul Colligan is the Affiliate Guy, and in his podcast he examines the models, the technologies and the gurus that make up the affiliate marketing industry.

One of the thing that tickles me about these American podcasts is that the trailers and jingles sound very professional, glossy and sound studio produced - but the quality of the podcast thereafter is a bit more like a poor phonecall. Luckily the content of the podcasts usually makes up this.

For an affiliate podcast with a UK bent, check out Fraser's affiliate podcast. He's done some interesting editions with interviews with key figures from the British affiliate marketing scene.

Amazon have a cool new tool for their Associates (affiliates to you and me).

You can now create your own Amazon store in a feature called aStore - you'll see the link next time you login. Just fire up the wizard and in a couple of short, easy steps you can build your own branded affiliate store using the Amazon catalogue.

I have been meaning to get to grips with Amazon Web Services, and still will, but this seems to be a nice middle route between just displaying a banner and the fully fledged development required to set up web services based site using their API.

You can see the aStore I just created here.

Because this store is hosted with Amazon and you'll either need to just link to the URL or embed it into an IFRAME, it's not particularly useful for SEO purposes but I'm going to try it out and see how it goes. Have you set up an astore yet? Tell me what you think and share your URL in the comments box.

Labels: amazon

This was an impulse purchase on a recent trip to Waterstones.

The author provides an easy to read overview of the rise in importance of the "blogosphere" and really makes the case for companies getting a better understanding of how to blog, and how to have a dialogue with their customers.

He gives an insight into how blogs can be used to create or change opinions held about your business. There's practical information about to run a blog, and track blogs using services like Technorati.

There's no real affiliate marketing angle to the blog, but I found that it helped excite me about the potential of blogs to talk and evangelise about a subject. Once you're really enthused about the potential to inform and sway your audience, the natural progression is to then integrate affiliate messages into that.

It's definitely worth checking out
Blog Marketing by Jeremy Wright - £9.98 from Amazon

Microsoft has quietly launched the UK version of adCenter.

adCenter is their pay per click advertising tool which allows advertisers to place ads on relevant search results pages. It will rival the popular Google Adwords and Yahoo's Overture offering.

The website says:

MSN reaches nearly two out of three Web customers, and MSN Search reaches over 40 million a month.Reach the right customers with search ads targeted at the audience you want.

I find that a little bit misleading because Google is obviously more popular for search, so I'm not sure by what measure they (or Nielsen/NetRatings who provided the stat) reach that figure for reaching two out of three web customers, but I suspect they don't reach them in terms of being their preferred search tool which would actually be the relavant fact for this advertising tool.

That said, it's still an interesting new avenue for pay per click advertising, and since the number of advertisers is lower than Google, the competition is less and the ads should be cheaper for the time being.

If you want to set up an affiliate marketing website but have little or no web programming ability, you might find PageRank10's Affiliate Scripts resource very handy indeed.

They have created tonnes of useful scripts explicit aimed at specific merchants and affiliate networks so you can get a website up and running in next to no time.

So for example, you might want to start a mobile phone website. You can goto PageRank10, find the script for Carphone Warehouse using Buy.At and build your site with a few clicks. The scripts aren't free - the Carphone Warehouse/Buy.At one costs £19.99 - but you're saving lots of time in development and you should soon make your costs back when you start getting sales.

They have lots of scripts to create website for lots of great merchants, whatever affiliate network you want to use.

Check it out now - PageRank10 Affiliate Scripts.

Over at Fraser's affiliate marketing blog, he has kindly released a Firefox extension that sits in your status bar and will keep track of your Commission Junction revenue.

Seems a nice little widget for affiliate marketers who use Firefox and are joined up to CJ.

Check it out.

Not got Firefox yet? Download it - it's free and excellent

Liberator is an American company that sells an innovative range of bedroom furniture to help couples spice up their love lives. Their "shapes" such as the wedge and the ramp are each designed to help couples experience better lovemaking.

The site is slick and glossy, and the products were recently featured on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross on BBC1, so they have had great media exposure recently.

Their affiliate scheme offers 10% commission on all purchases and the average order total is $200.

Click here to visit Liberator Affiliate site