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.

Okay, I haven’t tended to this blog in a while.  So, why not re-ignite things with a new live case study?

This will be a completely new venture for me.  I am going to give Multi-level Marketing (MLM) a  try.  This is my first time playing in the MLM space.  For those unfamiliar with the concept of MLM, give the wikipedia article a read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing.  Many large, successful companies use this business model — the best known examples include Avon and Tupperware.

The specific program I decided to join is called Isagenix.  Isagenix is an ecommerce site that sells health supplements.  Specifically, they sell health supplements promoting body cleansing, anti-aging, and weight loss.  Here is their official slogan: Isagenix: World Leader in Whole-Body Nutritional Cleansing, Cellular Replenishing & Youthful Aging.

So, why Isagenix?

There are 4 primary reasons why I decided to join Isagenix. […]

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. […]

When I first launched this site, the only product I had was this ebook here: Pick Your Niche.  It’s about making autopilot money from niche business directories.

Some people were wondering if it was still possible to make money from niche business directories given the rise of Google Local listings.  I’ve always answered “yes.”

Just the other day, I was browsing BlackHatWorld and came across a number of new forum threads from people who reported making a lot of money from niche business directories.  Here, have a look:

• Guaranteed $10K/month from hybrid method.
• How I made $5K+ on vacation.

I’ve also come across a number of recent offers on WarriorForum related to the topic of making money from niche business directories.

In short, I still strongly believe you can make a lot of money from niche business directories and there are tons of different ways and permutations of similar ways to achieve this goal.  Have a look at those 2 forum threads and be inspired!

dave

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? […]

By the end of my undergrad college years, most of my income was coming from my websites.  This was 6-7 years ago (damn, time flies!).

Back then, I always struggled with monetization.  I was playing the ad revenue game, which is a tough game–particularly, if you rely mostly on Google AdSense.  That’s when I began to shift my focus and research from AdSense to direct ad sales.

Around that time, the big thing to sell was sitewide footer links on a highly indexed site with good PageRank. I sold hundreds of dollars worth of those footer links.  I sold them as monthly subscriptions, so month over month, my income would increase, as I continued to pack in those footer links.

These days, due to changes in Google’s algorithm, sitewides aren’t nearly as hot of a commodity.  Nonetheless, the ways to find and make a direct ad sale from the years yonder still apply today.  I know this, because, just last month, for LocalClericalJobs.com (the subject of my 300K Case Study), I made $100+ worth of direct ad sales.

Here’s how you make direct ad sales. […]

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. […]