***** VERY IMPORTANT WARNING: Adult content on NSC

[BlythMeister]

I see you have an amazon affiliate, but what about other affiliates. there are plenty of companies out there who would target the audience of NSC. then members of NSC use the links when shopping online. this could bring a healthy income.

also, I'm not sure about vb licence fees, but how about moving the domain and hosting to somewhere cheaper, or at least telling the current provider you ate looking to. try and cut a deal on a cheaper contract.

 

[Bozza]

We used to have other affiliates but there are a few problems...

- Maintenance. It's all very well having a load of affiliates but how do you make people use them? You can simply have a 'shopping' page with all affiliated links to all but my belief is it will rarely be used. Then on the board itself people post links to something - "good deal on this PS3 game at play.com" - it's not affiliated unless someone does it manually. And they have to know it's there first.

- Payment - for most etailers, the %age paid is pretty poor, c1%. Amazon are far better though and we earn c6% (although there is a cap on max paid per item of £6, I think) and, of course Amazon sell almost everything now, are very competitive on price and I don't believe there are many/any Cashback sites that pay for Amazon purchases so there is not temptation for people to earn the affiliate income themselves rather than helping NSC.

However, a while back I installed something called Skimlinks which parses each page when it is rendered and auto-affiliates links where possible, without NSC having to explicitly join the programmes. Skimlinks take 30% of any income earned but it's very painless for us to earn money we would otherwise have missed out on. I think we've earned about £250 to date, all yet to be paid. You'll see Skimlinks links when people type terms such as iPad, iPod, iPhone, ebay, PS3 etc etc. I've not typed any URLs there but they might well be links by the time you read this post.

I've also installed another plugin to the board that allows any specific piece of text to be replaced with another piece of text. This will allow easier auto-affiliation as I can set it up to replace each merchant name with an affiliated link. It's not perfect but it's pretty decent and seems to work quite well. I just need to be able to spend the time joining all the affiliate programmes again and getting the details I need.

vB fees aren't too bad and we're committed to vB now. I am still appraising cheaper hosts, essentially swapping our current 'billed for what you use' setup to a fixed cost per month. This will mean returning to our own dedicated server. What I need to get right, and this is the difficulty, is making sure the server can cope with the peaks in our usage. There's no point having a discussion site that doesn't work when there is lots to discuss. We've been there before and we don't want to go back. I'm hopeful though, but it's not something I want to rush in - moving hosts is a pain.

 

[Bozza]

I've submitted an appeal to Google so will be crossing fingers for the next week or so.

We'll be publishing some more defined 'rules' in the next few days that will better outline what is acceptable and what isn't and will also attempt to permit moderating decisions to be more consistent as currently there's not much structure about how things are done.

 

[BlythMeister]

How about using Amazon cloud (other cloud services are avaliable) for hosting!
this way you pay for how much usage and you can expand very quickly.

Personally, i've never used cloud servers, but i've heard and read a bit about them and then seem to be ideal for applications/sites which can peak and then die back down.

I understand how annoying keeping affiliates "up to date" is, since i help manage the website for my parents nursery which contains affiliates, and the upkeep can be tedious, and i agree some offer really low return.
Though NSC has around 6,000 active members, if everyone buys just 1 £10 DVD every year through the affiliate working on a 6% return, that's £3,000 a year!
if you work on each member spending £20 the return obviously gets better plus the more you get people using the affiliate the bigger % that Amazon can give.

Basically...People of NSC...click the red link at the top of the page before proceeding to the checkout on Amazon.co.uk!

Bozza, maybe one of the dynamically changing banner adds may help attract attention, and these are easy to setup in the amazon affiliate site.

 

[BlythMeister]

Also, as an FYI...the Amazon link doesn't work

 

[Bozza]

How about using Amazon cloud (other cloud services are avaliable) for hosting!
this way you pay for how much usage and you can expand very quickly.

Personally, i've never used cloud servers, but i've heard and read a bit about them and then seem to be ideal for applications/sites which can peak and then die back down.

I understand how annoying keeping affiliates "up to date" is, since i help manage the website for my parents nursery which contains affiliates, and the upkeep can be tedious, and i agree some offer really low return.
Though NSC has around 6,000 active members, if everyone buys just 1 £10 DVD every year through the affiliate working on a 6% return, that's £3,000 a year!
if you work on each member spending £20 the return obviously gets better plus the more you get people using the affiliate the bigger % that Amazon can give.

Basically...People of NSC...click the red link at the top of the page before proceeding to the checkout on Amazon.co.uk!

Bozza, maybe one of the dynamically changing banner adds may help attract attention, and these are easy to setup in the amazon affiliate site.

We are in the cloud with Rackspace which is why our monthly billing varies - we pay for what we use and, because we are in the cloud, there are massive resources available to us when we're busy, but we don't use or pay for them when we're not.

We're probably not too far away from £3000 a year with Amazon once the Christmas peak is taken into account, something like 10 months @ £150ish, and 2 @ £500 ish. The exact figures are in the Finance forum.

We're going to try and stick with Adsense as it's a relatively pain-free programme and we know it works and pays well for NSC. If that fails we will look at a plan B for income generation such as other ad networks (although all the good ones have the same terms as Adsense), further affiliation, local company sponsorship and a low-cost premium membership with extra privileges.

 

[Bozza]

Also, as an FYI...the Amazon link doesn't work

It does for me and we have purchases every day via it.

 

[BlythMeister]

fair enough, must just be me

i get "We're sorry!
There was an internal error in our system. We logged the problem and will investigate it later. Our apologies for the inconvenience."

please ignore the "it's not working" as it obviously is

 

[Bozza]

fair enough, must just be me

i get "We're sorry!
There was an internal error in our system. We logged the problem and will investigate it later. Our apologies for the inconvenience."

please ignore the "it's not working" as it obviously is

What URL is it taking you to?

 

[BlythMeister]

it takes me to http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.co.uk%2Fexec%2Fobidos%2Fredirect-home%3Ftag%3Dnorthstandcha-21%26site%3Damazon%0D&tag=skim0x10089-21&linkCode=ur2&camp=1634&creative=6738

if i right click and copy url i get:
http://go.redirectingat.com/?id=7722X665682&site=northstandchat.com&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.co.uk%2Fexec%2Fobidos%2Fredirect-home%3Ftag%3Dnorthstandcha-21%26site%3Damazon%0D%0A&sref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.northstandchat.com%2Fshowthread.php%3F203601-*****-VERY-IMPORTANT-WARNING-Adult-content-on-NSC%26p%3D4180770%23post4180770

 

[Falkor]

not really adult content but are we supposed to see who has been banned and that in the mods forum.

 

[The Oldman]

Looks as if Google Ads are back. Well done Bozza and everyone behave.

 

[seagullsovergrimsby]

not really adult content but are we supposed to see who has been banned and that in the mods forum.

name and shame is part of the rules.

 

[Falkor]

name and shame is part of the rules.

oh ok cool.