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Table of Contents
Web Notes: Becoming media
Turning Web traffic into revenue -- affiliate and related programs by Richard Seltzer
Brand names on the Web -- a raging success story by Richard Seltzer
New electronic texts: from Gutenberg
It's easy to create Web pages. But what does it take to transform your personal site into "media"? For it to be not just a place to post messages, but a place where people will actually read them, a reliable delivery mechanism? For your site to be not just a means of for you to express yourself to a close circle of friends, but a way that others would like to use to reach the public?
Gradually, since May 1995, my personal site www.samizdat.com has grown to include over 1200 pages, some of which are entire books. These pages are well-indexed at search engines, especially AltaVista, where I submit each and every page as it is created and whenever I make significant changes. Over time, people who have found my pages and liked what they saw have bookmarked them or added links to them from their own sites. Today about 1500 pages at other sites have links to pages at my site. In addition, dozens of Web sites set up temporary links to selected articles of mine in an online syndication program run by iSyndicate. My ISP, Acunet.net, likes my content and the traffic it attracts, and hence doesn't charge me for my virtual name account. A company in London, Lovely.net, likes my content and hence maintains a mirror of my site for free. In recent months, my main site has been averaging about 80,000 page views per month from about 30,000 visitors. Over 1200 of those visitors click through on links of mine to Amazon.com and shop there, bringing me a trickle of money as an affiliate. Now, I'm also joining the affiliate programs of other online businesses that I frequently mention at my site and that I respect (following up on what I recently learned about such programs through my chat program -- see the article below). Surprisingly, in the first few days of trying that for AltaVista, I had a click-through rate of 79% to the AltaVista free translation page from pages that talk about how to get the most out of that service.
Meanwhile, my chat program, Business on the World Wide Web, has gradually been transforming from a local curiosity to a minor media event. The number of live participants still varies widely -- from about three up to a max of about three dozen. But the average edited transcript (which you can get to from www.samizdat.com/chat.html) gets about a thousand visitors over the course of a year. And now, instead of me scrambling to come up with good topics and recruiting guests, PR people representing book publishers come to me hoping to place their authors on my schedule.
In My Readers' Room (www.samizdat.com/readers.html) I post lists of all the books I've read, and lists of my favorites, and book reviews, and suggestions and comments from other enthusiastic readers. And now, thinking of my site as "media", I am trying to build a "Writers' Showcase" in that area as well, a place to post the fiction and poetry of other writers (at no cost) in hopes of putting them in touch with readers, for them to get useful feedback and build audience. Since I have limited Web space and also limited time, I cannot read all submissions and hence ask for recommendations from established agents and editors, who know of good books that have not yet been published in print because of the strange state of the traditional book market today.
This feels like the beginning of an interesting new journey.
Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com
(The following article is based on what I learned from a chat session about the book Affiliate Selling: Building Revenue on the Web with the authors, Greg Helmstetter and Pamela Metivier. You can read the edited transcript of that session at www.samizdat.com/chat130.html).
Do you have a Web site? It doesn't matter whether it's a business site or a personal one, whether you run it on your own server or hosted somewhere else, whether you have your own domain name or you run it on free Web space. If you get any kind of traffic to your site, even as low as 500 page views a month, chances are good that you are leaving money on the table without realizing it -- not big money -- but money is money.
By signing up for affiliate programs and adding special affiliate links from your pages to sites you know and respect and to which you might already have plain ordinary links, you could generate a steady trickle of cash.
Amazon was the first to set up a large, successful, affiliate program on the Web. You link to their site or to particular items for sale at their site. And when people who click to there from your site buy, you earn referral fees that range from 5% to 15% of the sale price (up to a maximum of $10 per item).
I've been an Amazon affiliate for about four years now. I'm also an obsessive reader and have lots of content at my site related to books and lots of links to Amazon. I get about 80,000 page views per month, and last month 1101 unique visitors clicked through from my site to Amazon. That amounted to 1755 total click throughs, 39 items ordered, and 49 items shipped that month, amounting to over $1400 in revenue for Amazon. But for all that, I only wound up with $55.51 in referral fees, and it will be another three to four months before I receive a check for that. So we are definitely not talking big bucks.
But while I have been focusing exclusively on Amazon, thousands of other affiliate programs have sprung up, as well as companies that act as intermediaries, making it easy to signup for dozens of programs at a time and to keep track of many programs from a single site, rather than having to go to each and every one of them to see reports.
The terms differ widely and whether you get paid a percent of sales, or a flat rate per click through. And yes, it takes some time to sort out the details and add the appropriate links to your site. But once you create those links, there's nothing more for you to do. If people come and click, you make money.
So where do you go to learn more and sign up? First try free intermediaries like Reporting.Net, Linkshare.com,BeFree.com, and Commission Junction which is at www.cj.com.
Meanwhile, other related and possibly more lucrative kinds of business relationships are coming along. For instance, Cross Commerce is putting into place a way by which customers will be able to buy goods referenced from your site, without leaving your site. Purportedly, they'll provide a private labeled shopping carte and take care of order fulfillment and after-sale customer support, and you'll wind up with a much higher commission than with affiliate programs. The program is in closed beta now, but according to the book authors, it is due to be publicly launched this summer. Another company, Vitessa, has a similar offering.
Also consider virtual storefront providers like Affinia and Vstore. According to the book authors, such services let you choose products and arrange them in a storefront environment. They provide templates, and those pages of yours end up looking like Affinia and Vstore sites. But it's another way to generate revenue, with a minimum of hassle, and far greater revenue than you are likely to get from traditional affiliate programs.
For more information of this kind, check the chat transcript at www.samizdat.com/chat.html, or check the Web site of the book's authors at www.affiliateselling.com, or buy the book, Affiliate Selling: Building Revenue on the Web by Greg Helmstetter and Pamela Metivier.
(The following article was prompted by reading Differentiate or Die by Jack Trout, who will be a guest on our chat program, Thursday, May 18. For details on the chat program and edited transcripts of previous sessions, check www.samizdat.com/chat.html To read an excerpt from that book, check www.samizdat.com/diff.html).
Many people confuse brand with graphics and advertising; when in fact brand is what sticks in the mind of customers, the opinion they form of the content and service of a Web site -- if they form any opinion at all.
Back in December 1995, Digital Equipment launched AltaVista as a research project, not a business. It was a no-frills, no-advertising, extremely fast search engine, with a very large index. The response was overwhelming. Soon millions of people used that search engine on a regular basis and the name became associated in their minds with speed, accuracy, efficiency, search power.
According to focus groups, within a few months, the AltaVista brand was far better known and better thought of than "Digital." And no advertising money at all had been spent to build the AltaVista brand, while the company had spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of more than a decade to build the Digital brand.
Suddenly, this research project became the target of intense internal political wrangling. A new group that was slated to focus on software succeeded in winning the prize and relabelled itself the AltaVista Group. Trying to hitch a ride on the AltaVista brand, they renamed all their software products: AltaVista firewalls, AltaVista forums, AltaVista whatever they wanted to sell.
The outcome was just what Jack Trout, author of Differentiate or Die, would have predicted -- they confused the marketplace and diluted the brand. The products never took off. And money spent on print and television advertising for the total AltaVista line probably hurt rather than helped the image of the search site.
Soon they sold banner advertising and, in pace with the competition, added fancy graphics and new services. Over time, AltaVista and its direct competitors evolved into portals -- trying to serve every imaginable audience, and providing an immense and array of choices. And except to the expert, all those sites looked and felt the same.
All along, AltaVista let users choose a non-graphics version, which was simple and fast to load. But because very few people knew they could make that choice, new search engines like Google and Alltheweb were able to position themselves as the fast and simple alternative.
Then, last week, a new search site appeared: Raging Search, www.raging.com, catering to a set of people that the more established search engines had abandoned -- search enthusiasts: people who want quick answers to particular questions, who know what they want, can be very specific, and just want to get to the Web page with the most relevant content, without distractions.
While this is a new domain name and a new brand, it is actually the same search engine as AltaVista, stripped of all the banner ads and portal-style parphenalia. It's the same crawler, the same index, the same query language -- just a different brand, focused at a difference audience.
The look and feel is very much like the original, non-commercial AltaVista, but with the current huge index and all the power and precision of five years of investment in search-related technology.
This is a very interesting twist. In the past, business managers had taken an excellent name and diluted it by trying to apply it to unrelated products. And in the past, the whole concept of a search site had become blurred as all well-trafficked sites dressed themselves up as "portals." Now, AltaVista was launching a new search-only site and giving it its own separate name and identity.
The old AltaVista is still there, serving its loyal audience of millions of users.
But Raging.com is also available, serving a new niche audience, competing with the likes of Google and AlltheWeb, differentiating itself based on performance, and building a reputation of its own.
This is right along the lines of what Jack Trout, author of Differentiate or Die, would have advised, and it looks like it will be a raging success.
Adding dozens of new titles every month, Gutenberg has already made about 2500 etexts available for free over the Internet. These include classic works of literature and history, as well as out-of-print and little-known works by great authors. If you can, connect by ftp, rather than the Web, to get the most recent ones. Here's a list of those recently added, alphabetized by author. The file name is useful for fetching the text from the ftp site. Many of these are also available on diskette from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK for those who cannot get them themselves. For the current catalog, check http://www.samizdat.com/catalog.html or send your email request to seltzer@samizdat.com)
Aristophanes --
Thornton W. Burgess -- Old Mother West Wind (ldmww10.txt)
Samuel Butler -- Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (alpsn10.txt)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (cfinq10.txt)
Pierre Corneille -- Polyeucte (translated by T. Constable) (plyct10.txt)
Fyodor Dostoevsky -- Crime and Punishment (7crmp10.txt)
John Galsworthy -- Man of Property (mnprp10.txt)
Elizabeth Gaskell --
Henry James -- Eugene Pickering (eugpk10.txt)
Rudyard Kipling -- The Day's Work (dyswk10.txt)
Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon -- Memoirs of the Comtesse du Barry With Minute Details of Her Entire Career as Favorite of Louis XV (7dbry10.txt)
Andrew Lang -- How to Fail in Literature (fllit10.txt)
Jack London -- When God Laughs et al. (gdlgh10.txt)
George MacDonald -- Robert Falconer (rflcn10.txt)
Moliere -- Amphitryon (translated by Waller) (amphi10.txt)
George P. Morris -- Poems (mrrsp10.txt)
William Morris -- The Story of the Glittering Plain (gltpl10.txt)
Clarence Edward Mulfod - Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up (or BAR-20) (hcrru10.txt)
Mrs. Oliphant -- Jeanne d'Arc, Her Life and Death (7jnrc10.txt)
Samuel Smiles -- Character (crctr10.txt)
Robert Louis Stevenson -- The Pocket R.L.S. (pkrls10.txt)
Hippolyte A. Taine -- The Origins of Contemporary France, consisting of:
Mark Twain -- On the Decay of the Art of Lying (lying10.txt)
H.Wilfred Walker -- Wanderings Among South Sea Savages and in Borneo and the Philippines (wasss10.txt)
Alfred Russel Wallace -- The Malay Archipelago volume 1 (1malay10.txt), volume 2 (2malay10.txt)
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