Monetizing This Gold

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ROIShare

ROIShare

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Oct 17, 2008
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Hey,

Month ago I was employed by a company that runs
overboost.com
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At the moment it's a blank coming soon page. They hired me to multiply their profits from it. The site was taken down early last year. While it was online, it was steadily netting $200,000 monthly selling automotive parts. Their goal is to get back to that level.

Currently the site is receiving an average of 400 visitors daily. 90% being new. 75% of traffic going direct, rest via search engine. Which is pretty good amount, concerning that it's been empty for over 1.5 years.

But, since they are currently busy, they gave me the chance to totally run it on my own for the moment being and pretty much split the profits in half.

That offer is good to me, since the site itself will be easy for me to grow to a respectable side income.

What I would like to ask, is if anyone has further suggestions on monetizing the site. I thought of putting up a blog concerning cars, surrounding it with affiliate offers related to automotive industry. That way to start piling up return visitors.
 


Create a full product-based site from another auto parts retailer that has an affiliate program. I'm pretty sure there are a number of them on CJ that have datafeeds you could use.
 
I was thinking of just trying to stick with lead type offers versus sale of tangible products. Something along the lines with auto-insurance, car loans and car quotes. Put the blog up to build a reader base and return visitors. Plug in a subscribe to collect emails, and make monies.
 
With insurance offers, there are always the comparison offers on every CPA network. CJ has specific brand-name insurance lead offers from providers like Esurance, Allstate, and Geico. You could build a form of your own, capture email addresses, and then send the visitor to multiple insurance offers (though a single comparison offer from a CPA network may give you a higher EPC). For new auto quotes, there are plenty that I know of on CJ - Edmunds, Yahoo Autos, Cars.com, and Vehix. Automotive.com is on CJ and Azoogle from what I remember.
 
That domain name is perfect for a fleshlight comparison site

...or maybe you could sell parts for modded rice rocket street racer type cars, or NOS cars, or something along those lines.
 
johu said:
With insurance offers, there are always the comparison offers on every CPA network. CJ has specific brand-name insurance lead offers from providers like Esurance, Allstate, and Geico. You could build a form of your own, capture email addresses, and then send the visitor to multiple insurance offers (though a single comparison offer from a CPA network may give you a higher EPC). For new auto quotes, there are plenty that I know of on CJ - Edmunds, Yahoo Autos, Cars.com, and Vehix. Automotive.com is on CJ and Azoogle from what I remember.
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That's a good idea to try out. I'll probably try several different variations, and record the money made, while maintaining visitor interest in content.

I don't think I'll have a trouble of hitting a 10-15% conversation rate.

Honestly, this is my first time working offers on an established website. I've constantly dealt only with landing pages with PPC. Never ventured into established websites.

That domain name is perfect for a fleshlight comparison site

...or maybe you could sell parts for modded rice rocket street racer type cars, or NOS cars, or something along those lines.
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I don't want to go with cAR products yet. They plan to release their own products once they officially launch. They are practically giving me the site right now to earn easy money for them and myself; and build up the name again before they officially launch. So I don't want to promote physical car products.
 
I understand what you are/aren't wanting to do, but people are coming to the site with their wallets open expecting to find their part. If you take the site in a different direction, you will continue to lose your returning visitors.

Whatever you decide to do, it is in your best interest to keep the site as close to topic as possible. If your client can give you the OK to sell one or 3 of their own products, you would be able to maintain a good userbase in a certain niche while they are putting together the rest of their catalog. This way, you will still have a bit of brand loyalty when the site relaunches.

Otherwise, when the time comes for the site to start selling car parts again, it is going to make your job that much more difficult in the long run because it will put you in the position of having to explain that while they only sold $3,000 of their stuff, they sold $197,000 worth of fleshlights.
 
So do you have complete control over the site until they are ready? Meaning you can take it any direction you like until they want to use it for their primary use?

If this is the case, throw up a phpbay site with all types of auto parts, accessories, and shit, even cars...
 
jryan21 said:
I understand what you are/aren't wanting to do, but people are coming to the site with their wallets open expecting to find their part. If you take the site in a different direction, you will continue to lose your returning visitors.

Whatever you decide to do, it is in your best interest to keep the site as close to topic as possible. If your client can give you the OK to sell one or 3 of their own products, you would be able to maintain a good userbase in a certain niche while they are putting together the rest of their catalog. This way, you will still have a bit of brand loyalty when the site relaunches.

Otherwise, when the time comes for the site to start selling car parts again, it is going to make your job that much more difficult in the long run because it will put you in the position of having to explain that while they only sold $3,000 of their stuff, they sold $197,000 worth of fleshlights.
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I understand what you're saying. But I will not be capable of getting any of their products for sale at the moment. I want to add though, that they wouldn't mind selling other products, as long as it brings profit. They aren't restrictive towards their own brand.

-Bill- said:
So do you have complete control over the site until they are ready? Meaning you can take it any direction you like until they want to use it for their primary use?

If this is the case, throw up a phpbay site with all types of auto parts, accessories, and shit, even cars...
Click to expand...

Correct, I have complete control and can do anything to my liking.

That's actually a very good idea. Do you have any idea around how much the site would make daily with 400 targeted visitors a day? Never bothered with EPN.
 
Ok... its hard to tell because I don't know how "willing" your visitors will be to click through to ebay.
The biggest thing is setting a cookie... it doesn't matter if they buy something related to what you send them to, all that matter is that they buy (or register and bid)

I've got several sites that get around 500 clicks each month, and they make about $25-$50 each respectively.
 
-Bill- said:
Ok... its hard to tell because I don't know how "willing" your visitors will be to click through to ebay.
The biggest thing is setting a cookie... it doesn't matter if they buy something related to what you send them to, all that matter is that they buy (or register and bid)

I've got several sites that get around 500 clicks each month, and they make about $25-$50 each respectively.
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I just applied for EPN. I'll probably run a 7 day test with them, and see how it performs.

Otherwise, I'll stick to affiliate offers. I believe I might have a bit more success going with offers.
 
I'd assume you'd have a better shot with epn.

I would set up a sort of splash page on the main site..
A square cut 4 ways...
Each corner having something like:

-edit-
Fuck typing it looked all gay, one sec while I make an image.

To where each of the four boxes, when clicked, would bring the user to domain/autoparts, domain/accessories...
Each page having a more detailed menu with specific products to choose from (such as muffler kits, turbo chargers, nitrous kits, conversion kits, wheel covers, tires, rims, blah blah blah)

Underneath the nifty "4-box" creative is where you would have some offers... such as car insurance, etc.
 
this is the 4 way creative I was talking about...
autoshit.jpg



would break off to more pages which had

Auto Parts:
Mufflers
Brake Pads
Brake Shoes
etc

Accessories:
Wheel Covers
Floor Mats
Shift Knobs
ETC



MS Paint FTW
 
I'm for the PHPbay idea. I think that a product-feed based site (w/ the feed coming from an affiliate network), if not executed just right, won't get you any sales. That's because its totally duplicated content, which can be found on bizrate and shop.com etc.

My personal advice is to take some time for a reality check: site shut down last year, currently a blank "coming soon" page - getting 400 visitors a day? 75% direct? I think your stats package is showing you bots who are trying to crawl the site rather than people. Its a very slim chance that 300 people a day will remember the site's name from last year and enter it directly in their browser. And I'm not saying this to be a smartass - just to point out that you're treating this like a done deal, where all that's left is to pick the method and watch the cash flow in. I've been involved with stuff like this, and you gotta ask yourself - what do these guys contribute that you can't do alone? It seems to me that you're building a site from scratch, that you can do for yourself without hassling with partners.

Not knowing the entire situation, the only thing that I can see that they offer is a bunch of pre-existing links to give the site a jump start in google. Take a look at the Yahoo site explorer: 288 incoming links to the top domain, and 8,992 to the entire site. In this case, the practical advice would be, that to gain the maximum from the inlinks you must redirect all these 8,700 minor pages somewhere. Don't forget to do a 301 redirect on all nonexistent pages in order to capture their pagerank - regardless of the actual option you pick for monetization.
 
-Bill- said:
this is the 4 way creative I was talking about...
autoshit.jpg



would break off to more pages which had

Auto Parts:
Mufflers
Brake Pads
Brake Shoes
etc

Accessories:
Wheel Covers
Floor Mats
Shift Knobs
ETC



MS Paint FTW
Click to expand...

Very good advice, I may actually go down this path. Just need to wait to get approved into EPN.

zany zoroaster said:
I'm for the PHPbay idea. I think that a product-feed based site (w/ the feed coming from an affiliate network), if not executed just right, won't get you any sales. That's because its totally duplicated content, which can be found on bizrate and shop.com etc.

My personal advice is to take some time for a reality check: site shut down last year, currently a blank "coming soon" page - getting 400 visitors a day? 75% direct? I think your stats package is showing you bots who are trying to crawl the site rather than people. Its a very slim chance that 300 people a day will remember the site's name from last year and enter it directly in their browser. And I'm not saying this to be a smartass - just to point out that you're treating this like a done deal, where all that's left is to pick the method and watch the cash flow in. I've been involved with stuff like this, and you gotta ask yourself - what do these guys contribute that you can't do alone? It seems to me that you're building a site from scratch, that you can do for yourself without hassling with partners.

Not knowing the entire situation, the only thing that I can see that they offer is a bunch of pre-existing links to give the site a jump start in google. Take a look at the Yahoo site explorer: 288 incoming links to the top domain, and 8,992 to the entire site. In this case, the practical advice would be, that to gain the maximum from the inlinks you must redirect all these 8,700 minor pages somewhere. Don't forget to do a 301 redirect on all nonexistent pages in order to capture their pagerank - regardless of the actual option you pick for monetization.
Click to expand...

I understand you're point regarding bots crawling. But a month ago, I made sure to disallow any bots to crawl the site, and the visitors volumes were barely affected, and then I allowed the bots again.

With search engine traffic, 50% of SE traffic came from the visitors searching for : overboost.com
They literally typed it in with the .com. And that accounts for 50 visitors a day.

I do believe that people still remember the domain. Since this site used to be huge. Over 50,000 daily visitors. They used to sell tickets to races, luxary car parts, host shows themselves.

They also used to advertise through Adwords. Their daily spend was $5,000.
 
Have you thought about Auto insurance, Warranty?

What about a pop up/under with a blu tooth headset for states that now have the Hands-Free Phone law.
 
radio said:
someone's not listening...
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Actually, I'm recording all the suggestions. As I stated earlier, I plan to do several different variations. Then see which variation produced the best results. Someone just mentioned a pop-up, so I commenting on what type of pop-up I would have if I have one.
 
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