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Introducing a new, unique Affiliate Program. Capitalize on both sides of the market.

19 Feb

affiliate_splash

Many of you may not know this… but I have been working on a tech startup venture for the past year and a half.  It’s called Flevy and it’s an online marketplace for premium business documents.

Today, Flevy is the #1 online provider of high quality business documents. We sell presentation templates, financial models, PowerPoint templates, and more. We cover a wide breadth of corporate functions, from IT to Corporate Strategy to Communications to Change Management to Corporate Finance. Read more about Flevy here: http://flevy.com/about.

I am excited to announce that we just launched an Affiliate Program for Flevy.

Flevy’s Affiliate Program is structured like the Amazon Associates program. You direct customers to our site and earn a commission on each sale. Commission % is based on monthly sales.

For a limited time, we are boosting commission rates–up to 15% on each sale. These rates will be LOCKED IN for the lifetime of your account if you join within the limited promotion period.

Full program details and commission rate structure can be found here:
https://flevy.com/affiliates

What does our typical customer look like?

Our most common customer profile is someone who works in a corporate role at a mid-size to large enterprise. Here are several random examples to give you a better idea:

A marketer, working for P&G, needs to develop the pricing strategy for a new product. This person would be interested in this document —
https://flevy.com/browse/business-document/pricing-strategy-226

A project manager is getting frustrated with Microsoft Project and is looking for an alternate solution, preferably built in Microsoft Excel and customizable. This person would be interested in this tool —
https://flevy.com/browse/information-technology/project-management-tool-in-excel-212

A VP wants to establish a proper scorecard and KPIs for his team. He may be interested in learning about the Balanced Scorecard methodology —
https://flevy.com/browse/business-document/balanced-scorecard-134

What makes this Affiliate Program unique?

Flevy is a marketplace, meaning people join us to both BUY and SELL their business documents. As part of the Affiliate Program, you can also refer document sellers to Flevy. You will then earn a commission on all sales that the document sellers makes off Flevy.

This is an important distinction from other Affiliate programs, such as Amazon’s.

Who is this Affiliate Program best suited for?

In my opinion, this program is best suited for someone who has held a corporate role in a previous life.  In other words, previously, you worked for a large company in some corporate function — e.g., Marketing, Operations, IT, Supply Chain, HR, Program Management, Safety, etc.   This could’ve been an internship or a job you’ve held for 10+ years.

The Flevy Affiliate Program allows you to capitalize on both your expertise and professional network.  Furthermore, you will a significant advantage of others trying to sell these same documents, because you have domain knowledge of these highly specialized products.

Data Galore, Thousands of Publicly Available Datasets.

1 Jul

I can’t believe it’s been over a year, since I’ve updated this blog.  I’m actually shocked.  Time flies.  I’ve been busy with a number of ventures, many of which I plan to share on this site.

For those wondering (and I’ve received many emails asking), 300K Job Search In-a-Box is still working and being supported.

As my first post since 2011, I thought I’d share this: an absolutely excellent collection of Thousands of Public Data Sources.

As you may recall reading one of my earlier blog articles, using publicly available datasets is one of the easiest way to create a Value-Added Megasite: http://themanwhosoldtheweb.com/blog/2011/04/autoscaling-with-publicly-available-data/.

What is freemium? And what is the strategy and psychology behind it?

8 Sep

I came across this great article on TechCrunch earlier this week on the freemium business model.  This article discusses the business model, psychology behind, and critical aspects you should consider when you determine your own product pricing strategy.

First, the basic question.  What is the term freemium mean?

As Wikipedia so articulately put it, freemium is a business model that works by offering a product or service free of charge, while charging a premium for advanced features, functionality, or related products and services.  Sounds familiar?  Yes, a ton of web services operate under this freemium model.

In fact, most software-as-a-service offerings offer 3 or more pricing options.  The introductory option is free, while the 2nd and 3rd ‘premium’ options are offered for a fee, because they include additional value-added features.  Or, the introductory option is free for a trial period, then the fee kicks in.  In fact, BacklinksGenie uses this freemium pricing strategy. […]

Here’s a great data source for food and nutrition facts.

24 Aug

I stumbled across this earlier this food nutrient data set earlier this week: http://ashleyw.co.uk/project/food-nutrient-database.  What the author, Ashley, did was take food nutrient data from the US Department of Agriculture and make some sense of it.

It’s available as a free download on his site.  The data set comes as a single JSON file, so may be a bit hard to parse.

In this data set, there are…

  • 6,636 unique foods
  • 375,176 nutrient figures
  • 94 unique nutrients across all foods

What you can do with this data is create a food nutrients site of 6-7 thousand pages (easily).  It would act as a great, value-added companion to a health site (e.g. food blog, fitness blog, recipes site).  […]

Here’s a live case study with some eye candy. Case of the supermodels.

4 Aug

About a week ago, I stumbled across what may very well be the holy grail of search keywords.  These are keywords that, according to Google AdWords Keyword Tool, have the lowest possible competition (i.e. competition score of 0) and receive tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of local monthly searches.

I am referring to this as the holy grail, because we’re not  talking about a small handful of search keywords.  I’m not talking 5, nor 10, nor even 50 search terms.  I’m referring to hundreds upon hundreds of these keywords that you can dig up in the matter of 30 minutes.

Now, don’t worry.  This is not an eBook sales page and I’m not selling you anything.  You won’t need to spend $17 to discover what this big “secret” is all about.

So what is this holy grail? […]

Fresh out of the box – 300K Page Job Search In-a-Box!

20 May

I am very excited to announce the release of 300K Page Job Search In-a-Box.  This is a turnkey solution based off the Case of 300,000 and Counting.

Just like WordPress, all you need to do is download, upload, and configure.   The difference is… with WordPress, out of the box, you have maybe ~10 pages and will need to continuously add content yourself.  With my solution, out of the box, you will have 300,000 pages and it will autoscale with fresh content itself.   In other words, you have an autoscaling, autopilot megasite.  Big difference!

To my blog readers, here’s a link with a 25% discount.  This coupon will also expire after a set number of uses.

25% Discount for 300K Page Job Search In-a-Box

Questions?  Just ask.

dave

 

21K in 21 Days (my latest free eBook).

8 May

Last week, I took the results from the first 21 days of my live SEO case study, analyzed it, and compiled everything (data + analysis) into a book, 21K in 21 Days.  This is another free guide, which you can download here.

Here is some of what you will find in the book:

  • Day-by-day update log — so you can see indexing growth rates and plateaus
  • Detailed analytics — screenshots taken from Google Analytics
  • Key insights
  • Site architecture/design

  • SEO strategy

I think many people may find the “Key insights” section the most interesting part of the book, because I highlight insights that counter conventional “wisdom” about Internet Marketing.  So, I’ve reproduced most of that section below here (for those too lazy to download the book). […]

Here’s some inspiration from Steve Jobs.

15 Apr

Sometimes, all we need is a little inspiration to get things going.  One of the most motivating speeches I’ve come across is by one of the most successful and well known entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs, as  their class commencement speaker, delivered this speech to the students of Stanford, class of 2005.  Here is the full transcript. […]

Use publicly available datasets to create a value-added megasite.

14 Apr

A few days ago, I launched a live case study where I created a 300,000 page site. One curious reader emailed me and referred to it as a “megasite.”  She saw the value in creating these massive sites and was very interested in creating her own megasite.  So, let’s discuss this concept further.

In my recent case study, I was able to create 300,000 page site (upon launch) by leveraging an API.  In this article, we will explore another method of creating a value-added megasite.  We will leverage publicly available datasets, instead.

First thing’s first.  What is a dataset? With some help from Wikipedia, a dataset is defined as a collection of data, usually presented in a table. Each column represents a particular attribute.  Each row corresponds to a given entry of the dataset.   For instance, if we have dataset on cars, the columns can be “model,” “make,” “color,” “year,” and “license.”  Then, an example of a row entry could take on the values “Accord,” “Honda,” “White,” “2009,” “TMWSW23.” […]

Live Case Study: The case of 300,000 pages and counting.

11 Apr

This is my first live case study.  In this case study, I will build and grow an autoscale, autopilot, value-add site from scratch.  The purpose of this case study is to demonstrate techniques in real time.  With the exception of coding the initial site (these activities are tabulated under day 0), everything is done in real time, including domain registration.

The subject of this case study will be a a niche jobs search site, built off the Indeed API.  Indeed.com is an established jobs search engine of US-based job opportunities.  They have a publishers program with an API that allows our site to pull the job results.  For job seekers that click through to Indeed, we will also get paid as a publisher.  A nice added bonus, eh?

Our niche job search site will focus on clerical jobs.  Within clerical jobs, we have 3 sections: 1 for accounting jobs, 1 for bookkeeping jobs, and 1 for auditing jobs.

Now, how does the autoscale work?

First, upon launch, the site will have 300,000 pages.  Note, this does not mean all 300K pages will be indexed by Google.  It only means a Googlebot will find 300K unique pages across our site.  Here’s how I came up with that estimate. […]

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