Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Plug-ins to rule the world

I often times stress myself out. My mind is often so far ahead of my body's ability to follow through with ideas that it has become a constant source of frustration. It would be manageable if I had a few ounces of patience in my blood, but I am lacking in that department as well. Hence the source of my self-educed stress.

The Premium PLUS Remote site, a technical name for my Google-killer app for Commission River affiliates, has been in my mental whiteboard for the better part of 10 years. The premise behind the website is fairly simple, yet complex: 1) create valuable content for agents that they don't need to constantly update, and 2) electronically"bind" the agents together in a way that will help all of them achieve the highest ranking for the keywords that they want. (The rising tide floats all boats theory.)

The first tenant of my new design revolves around valuable content. But just what is valuable content? In an affiliate marketer's world,valuable content is something that helps convert web visitors into real-world customers. In my experience, this has meant just one thing: calculators and comparison shopping technology. People come to the internet to find the best deals. Although review sites and classified-type listings are great, without some sort of calculator a web site would resemble nothing more than a real-world store without any sales professionals available to assist you in the decision making progress. With such a huge array of products available for purchase on the internet, having a calculator that can show you the exact prices of services you want to use is a massive benefit. Just simply providing this type of consultative advice endears visitors to your site and creates a bond that often times results in a sale, not to mention repeat sales.

The major hurdle to calculator design is the remote delivery of the content to the affiliates own web site. Anyone can cobble together a calculator that posts the user's data to a common data processing site. The real trick is to be able to create a "plug-in" that enables the web affiliate to host both steps of the user experience on their own web site. (Without leaving).

The second, and bigger hurdle, to mass success in affiliate marketing is to help your agents channel their collective resources so that each one can enjoy the fruits of top organic search engine placement.That can only be done through very thoughtful web content and through link popularity. The Achilles' heal of most agents is their inability to attract, and/or manage the massive numbers of link partners that are required to ascend to the top. By carefully linking each agent to each other, and by helping them find links to other non-affiliated web site around the world, I am going to weave a web of Commission River sites that will dominate - to the benefit of all of the agents who chose to work with me.

The "affiliate link web" idea is a novel one, but if not done properly, can fly like a lead balloon. The reason why I know my idea will work rests in the fact that my system obeys all of Google's"rules", namely:


1) all sites will have unique, and in most cases, randomized, content
2) all sites will be registered to different owners
3) all sites will be hosted in different locations (IP Class-C blocks)
4) all sites will be further modified by agents who will be in actual possession of the source code
5) none of the sites will link to Commission River sites. All of the data collected on them will feed back to the mother ship via XML, which Google can't detect.

This all seems superficial, but in reality, it requires a ton of technical expertise. The code base is so technical, in fact,that I have expert programmers doing the work for me. I have not written a single line of code - my involvement is strictly limited to the architecture and design of the system. To date, by team has been making exceptional progress. Expect to see the final rollout in September 2008. Let the games begin!