Web Marketing Strategy Update

If you’re interested in writing ebooks and the like to sell online, here’s a good and fairly comprehensive article on the subject posted by Aaron a few weeks back.

He gives a ton of advice together with his personal experience from his SEOBook that will be of value to almost anyone considering marketing ebooks, etc.

He talks about:

1. Surveying the Market
2. Competitive Analysis
3. Your Goals
4. Writing the Book
5. Using Paypal
6. Business Models
7. One Updated Book or Many?
8. Marketing Your eBook
9. Bundling
10. Joint Ventures
11. Tracking Content Theft
12. Product Naming
13. Sales Letter Writing
14. Leveraging Affiliates
15. What Aaron Could Have Done Better
16. Sales vs the Knowledge Curve

This is something I rarely talk about, but datafeeds are a great way to make money with affiliate programs.

A datafeed is essentially a product database that merchants make available for their affiliates to download.

The data is contained in a large text file, with one product per line. Each line will contain things like the product name, its code number, price, description, order link, and image links.

These different bits of information are usually separated by commas or tab stops, (although the pipe (|) symbol is sometimes used), leading to comma-separated value, .csv or tab-separated value, .tsv files.

Whilst the datafeed might look like an unreadable mess in a text editor, if you open the file in spreadsheet software like Excel or Filemaker, you will see the information is actually in neat columns as defined by the commas or tabs.

You can buy software and scripts (or roll your own) to manipulate this data to create websites with hundreds, even thousands of pages in no time.

These can be static pages pages you upload to your server, or dynamically generated on the fly as the page is requested (my personal preference).