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Cashing in on eBooks as an Affiliate

I talked about this a bit back in the early days of this site, but the last six months or so have been a bit odd for me, as an affiliate marketer. I’d put almost all of my affiliate eggs in the casino and poker basket the last few years, which was unceremoniously tipped over last October with the passage of the UIGEA.

Since then I’ve been casting about, launching new affiliate sites, trying a bit of this, a bit of that, and slowly rebuilding my monthly income. With an emphasis on “slowly”, as it’s been a bit of a grind, especially since I was pretty spoiled in the past with some of the juicy CPA payments from casino and poker sites.

While my wallet may be lighter, the experience has been good, though, and I feel like I’m expanding the bag o’ tricks, even if it’s a niche or idea that I don’t pursue full-bore moving forward. Promoting eBooks falls directly into that category, as far as something I’d never done before, that made me a little money, and is not a bad option to have in your affiliate toolbox.

I read an article on EarnersBlog a few months back about promoting eBooks on Clickbank, which provides an affiliate program to promote a variety of eBooks and earn a commission as an affiliate whenever someone buys the eBook.

The idea is fairly simple, but with a few twists. Sign up at Clickbank, search for eBooks that you’d like to promote, and write up some reviews for the eBooks, praising their virtues. 

The ultimate style and tone is up to you, as far as whether you attempt to be an impartial reviewer, an enthusiastic devotee to the eBook, etc. Over-the-top enthusiasm worked best for me, but your mileage will vary here.

Do some basic keyword research first, after selecting an eBook to promote. If it’s a guide to power leveling on World of Warcraft, poke around with your favorite keyword research tool to find phrases to target that are highly searched on, such as “WoW Horde leveling guide”, “World of Warcraft leveling guide”, etc.

I wrote three different reviews for each product, each targeting and optimized for a different phrase that was highly searched on. Don’t write an epic tome as far as the review, just make sure it’s well-optimized for the subject. I typically wrote three or four paragraphs, from 300-500 words each, with many links to the eBook embedded throughout.

The next step is the slightly unusal one, as far as publishing your reviews. Typically you’d put them on a website of yours and wait days/weeks/months for them to get indexed by search engines, etc. In this case, though, you publish them on a third-party site, with USFreeAds and Squidoo being good options.

The reason you don’t publish them on your own site is that both of the above sites are regularly spidered with new content published on them almost immediately getting indexed and ranked well for even competitive terms, due to the high PageRank and authority that both sites pass on to content. Your eBook reviews should be ranked and getting clicks in search engines within days, often grabbing top three spots in Google right off the bat. It would likely take weeks to months to replicate that same effect if you’d published the content on your own site, unless you’re sitting on a very authoritative PR6 or above site.

Once your reviews are indexed and producing search traffic, it’s basically a numbers game. If you write good, compelling copy and get enough traffic, you’ll inevitably get some conversions. It depends on the eBook and your marketing skills, but some of my best reviews were converting at 1 sale for every 100 clicks, which isn’t bad at all for a slightly schlocky product like an eBook.

Keep in mind, too, that your out-of-pocket expenses are very, very low. You don’t even need a website of your own, as you’re publishing the content on a third party site. Posting on Squidoo is free and USFreeAds charges a nominal monthly fee for a basic account, under $10/month, and you’ll make that back plus some with your first sale.

So what’s the catch, and why am I speaking about my efforts here in the past tense? The biggest drawback for me was that while the reviews initially ranked well and got gobs of traffic, they pretty quickly fall out of those top spots in search engine results. Even with extra effort to build a variety of optimized incoming links to the reviews, I couldn’t make them stick in search engines.

It also was fairly time consuming, as far as writing the reviews themselves, and Clickbank has all sorts of issues, from lack of support to track clicks to more serious issues about not crediting affiliates for all sales. Unfortunately, there’s not a good alternative to them, if you want to promote eBooks, which is the only reason I’m mentioning them here.

In the end I made a bit over $500, so it wasn’t a total loss. I probably invested 20 hours or so in te project, so a $25/hr earn rate isn’t too bad at all. What ultimately turned me off the project was more psychological, as I didn’t necessarily enjoy writing the schlocky, over-the-top reviews for eBooks that I’d never read and were more than often a waste of money for the poor sap that bought them. I also didn’t feel as if I was working towards anything, due to the fact that the content was published on another site that I was building links and traffic for, even when I was making a bit of scratch for my efforts.

Those issues aside, it’s not a bad technique to have in reserve, as far as a way to make some affiliate money with a very quick turnaround. If you’re willing to keep banging out the reviews and constantly put up new ones to replace the old ones that fall out of search results, you can make some decent money, without waiting for months for your content production efforts to really kick in and start making you some money.

Lo and Behold, He’s Still Alive

While I’m not out of the crazy-bust woods just yet, I can sort of see daylight, peeking through the trees. Many apologies to my 4 faithful readers who keep checking back, looking for new content here.

One nice thing about the somewhat forced hiatus from my online affiliate scheming while I tackled umpteen other projects was the reminder that one nice aspect of affiliate marketing is that you don’t even have to be driving the mothership actively to make money. Yes, indeed, you need to always be hustling new content and getting stuff out there, but things will indeed click along on their own for quite awhile, making you money, once you get lots of irons in the fire. I actually had my best month in quite awhile in April, and barely had time to add much of anything to any of my sites.

Still a bit pressed for time, but plans are to ease back into the posting saddle here. I’ve got all sorts of ideas for posts, and the plan is to get a little more specific and advanced, now that anyone following along at home has got the basic chops down, as far as getting sites up, picking niches, comfortable with banging out content, and all that good stuff.

Not Dead

I promise. Content coming soon. Just insanely busy at the moment.

Getting More Shillings for Your Shilling

Much of my affiliate work of late has been centered around trying to make the most of the traffic I’ve got, as opposed to cranking out new content, and I’ve been trying out various programs, kicking the tires of this program, trying that new program, etc. In no particular order, I thought I’d share some of the results here from some of the newer programs I’ve been trying, for the folks interested in such things:

• Text Link Ads continues to treat me very well, and I’d highly recommend them for anyone with a blog who’s looking to make some extra bucks. They pay promptly at the first of the month and have an active base of advertisers looking to buy text links on blogs like yours. They pocket a large chunk of what the advertiser pays, so you’re likely better off selling text links on your site directly if you can from a pure dollars and cents perspective, but they provide access to your site to a much wider range of potential advertisers.
• AuctionAds is a new program that’s very similar to Google Adsense, except it features eBay auctions. What’s nice is that you can target the ads using keywords that fit your site, so it’s more niche-friendly than some programs, and since it pulls from eBay listings it almost always can find something relevant to display, unlike similar programs such as Chitika. It’s also not a PPC program, so you can potentially make more if you refer someone to an eBay listing and they’re the winning bidder, since you get a percentage cut of the final purchase price. If someone drops $500 on a poker table, you’re obviously a lot better off getting a percentage of that action instead of getting paid something like .20 per click, like you do with Adsense.
• Sponsored Reviews is a new paid review site, much like ReviewMe, but with a twist. In their system, you set your review price, then you browse through all of the potential reviews that advertisers have listed. If you find one you’d like to review, you subit an application and your price. If accepted, you write the review and get paid. I just signed up so no trip report on payment promptness, etc., but on the surface I prefer the way it works to ReviewMe, as I’d rather see all the opportunities instead of sitting around, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for an advertiser to send me an offer.
• Agloco swears that its rolling out its viewbar thingamabob, that’ll pay users for surfing the Web, but that’s been their claim for a few months now. Honestly, who knows if this thing will really make anyone money in the end, either people using the viewbar to get paid for surfing or affiliates who have referred lots of people. I have no clue, but hey, you’ve got little to lose from signing up and encouraging others to do so. If anyone makes money from this thing, it’ll be people who get in on the ground floor and have lots of referrals under them.

March Monthly Wrap-Up

(Umm, wait, what? March is already gone? But February is just supposed to be starting up, not April. Good lord.)

Needless to say, March has been pretty busy, and the posting regularity here has suffered. I’m a bit of two minds about that. One of my minds obviously feels bad, and a bit guilty for not making more of an effort to post daily here. My other (larger) mind is just too busy to worry about such things, especially with so much going on. I picked up a ton of freelance SEO/content creation work this month, which is keeping me very busy. I’m still plugging away at my own sites as well, with further eats into time. Now I suddenly have two houses to get fixed up and on the market, on top of all that, so things have been a little hectic.

As far as how I spent the bulk of the month, I actually managed not to start up any more new sites. I didn’t create a ton of content on the existing sites, spending more of my time trying to build up external links, now that the sites are starting to get indexed in various search engines. I also invested a decent chunk of money and time into simply working smarter, buying tools such as Bookmarking Demon and the SEOBook.

I also started dabbling in promoting ebooks via Clickbank, and had pretty surprising success so far. I wanted to add some CPA products to what I was promoting, just to wean myself away a bit from dependence on Adsense and similar PPC programs. The ebook field is pretty shilly and I feel a bit dirty perpetuating it, but, in the end, if someone wants to buy a shilly guide to help them power level on World of Warcraft, well, more power to them, and I don’t mind getting a piece of that action as an affiliate.

I’ve been a little disappointed with my Adsense results so far, to be honest. It’s been a few years since I played heavily in that field and, like anything on the Internet tubes, things change pretty quickly. In the past the bar was much lower, as far as the ease of getting ranked pretty well for decent paying terms with a minimum of effort. Basically you could slap up a site, optimize the pages, and get enough traffic for it to be worthwhile, without ever really focusing on building out a deep site, submitting it to directories, getting external links, etc.

While that’s still somewhat the case, there’s simply more competition these days, and I’m finding that I can’t simply rely as much on quantity as in the past. So I’m slowing down a bit and spending more time fleshing out the sites, instead of just banging out content pell-mell. Part of it, too, is the realization that I have a lot to learn, having been away from the hardcore SEO scene for a bit, so I’m slowing down a bit in general, and trying to keep my eyes and brain wide open to new ideas and techniques.

Revenue-wise, it’s looking like I’m once again going to come in around the $1,000/net profit mark, after backing out hosting costs and money spent on Adwords campaigns. Which, again, is very welcome, but it’s still skewed towards my poker blog, with is responsible for about 2/3rds of that profit. It’s a bit of a glass half full/half empty scenario, as it’s not the worst thing in the world that I can start up a bunch of sites in January and have them producing $200-$300/month in net profit for me, but that’s not exactly quit your day job money, either, especially considering the amount of time I’ve invested.

Gimme a Big Wet Sloppy Kiss, Failure

It’s pretty easy to chalk up any self-helpy lingo about “embracing failure” to out and out loser talk, but it’s pretty hard to succeed in affiliate marketing (or life, for that matter) without falling on your ass from time to time.

If you subscribe to the notion that experimenting with different types of affiliate content, models, and sites is a good thing, it’s inevitable that some don’t pan out. You wouldn’t know that from perusing most of the affiliate guru sites out there, where people effortlessly crank out sites that make $192,026 within the first sixty days, but the reality is that for every successful profitable site you spawn into the world, most affiliate folks in the trenches have five or six stinking corpses of sites, which actually cost them money.

I’ve been dabbling in the semi-sordid waters of eBook promotion (cough, outright shilling, cough), and had pretty surprising success so far. I wasn’t entirely convinced that people would really fork out cash for eBooks, especially some of the more outlandish, over the top titles out there, promising all sorts of things, but lo and behold, people do seem to actually buy them.

What with my tinkering with Adwords of late, I thought I’d take the eBook promotion to the next logical step, and buy targeted, related keywords. Based on the conversion rate so far from the natural organic search traffic I was getting, it looked like I could make a little extra money from buying clicks through Adwords.

$100 worth of Adwords traffic later and I had exactly 0 eBook sales to show for it. Umm, yeah, nice work. Go, me.

There are lots of moving parts to the above equation, so there’s really no conclusion to be drawn as far as the ultimate potential for sending Adwords clicks though landing pages for eBooks that you’ve created, but for the time being I’m sticking to what’s worked, which is simply going after search traffic the old-fashioned way, with no purchasing of keywords.

Simply put, you don’t know until you try. And the fact that you’ll have four or five failures for every success isn’t a reason not to try. If anything, it’s the best reason to try, as you’ll likely never get very far in the affiliate world if you stay in your comfort zone, exactly copying other approaches that you’ve read or heard about.

Getting Started with Google Adwords

While I have babbled muchly about incorporating Google Adsense ads into your affiliate sites, I haven’t really discussed the other side of the equation at all, which is Google Adwords. In general, affiliate marketers tend to use Adsense to monetize their sites, while retailers and other service providers tend to use Adwords to market their products. In some cases, though, affiliates make quite a lot of coin by using the Adwords system, so today we’re going to look at a quick example of that.

Let me start out with a silly sort of warning, as the example I’m going to use is from one of my sites, and it’s something I threew together last night for an example, and is not well-optimized at all. So do as I say, not as I do, mmkay?

The Adwords system lets you create campaigns where you create ads and target certain keywords and keyword phrases. You set a certain amount that you will pay, per click, for your ads, and based on that amount the ads are shown in various positions on pages that are running Google Adsense ads. If you bid higher than anyone else, your ads show up in the top position; bid lower than anyone else, and your ads are on the bottom (or not displayed at all, if too many other ads are ahead of yours).

So right off the bat we’re talking about a bit of a different beast, as far as using Adwords for our nefarious affiliate marketing purposes. Up until this point, everything I’ve discussed is largely free (other than your web hosting and domain registration). Not so with Adwords. This costs you money, for each and every click, so keep that in mind. Tread lightly here, especially when getting your feet wet.

I’ve been experimenting lately with some CPA pages (cost per acquisition) on various sites, just to try some new things. CPA campaigns are a bit different from Adsense, as they’re basically a set fee that you’re paid when a user completes an action (such as submitting a web form for a car quote) or buys an e-book or subscribes to an online membership site. While CPA deals can pay out very well, they’re a bit riskier for affiliates, as it’s all or nothing; either you refer someone who follows through and makes you cash, or you get zero. With Adsense, you can pretty much bank on some revenue, if you run enough ads in front of people, but CPA campaigns have a lot of peaks and valleys and a lot more variance in general.

Back to my example (I know, finally). I’ve been playing around with some campaigns on Azoogle that pay out when users submit their email address, along with name, address, telephone number, and sex. To be honest, most of these are really annoying for the surfer. as they promise a free KRZR phone, but you have to wade through a kajillion survey pages with offers, only to finally find out that you need to complete six subscriptions with people like Columbia House and Stamps.com just to get the damn phone. On the affiliate side, though, you get paid when the surfer reaches the second or third page, which is usually after they’ve submitted personal details, so for some deals it doesn’t matter if they ever buy anything.

I poked around for a deal involving a product that should get decent search traffic, that also wasn’t too godawfully annoying and didn’t ask for credit card info early in the process, as that’s typically a deal killer. If you dangle a nice enough carrot in front of people, you can get email/address/personal details enough for it to be profitable, but it’s insanely hard to get more than that.

I ended up finding an offer to promote a sweepstakes entry for a free 2007 Mustang Shelby, that paid out upon submission of email/personal details only, and pays $2.55 per lead. That’s not great but decent enough, so I decided to give it a whirl. I had an old domain lying around where I created the following page:

Get a 2007 Mustang Shelby for Free

Now, like I forewarned, that page and site are NOT well-optimized. Successfully using Adwords to make money as an affiliate is tricky, as you’re suddenly very much in the world of marketing. I went with a fairly honest pitch on that page, and did little to pretty it up, and it’s very possible that it’d be more successful if it were more shilly, just upselling the free car, doing anything to get people to click through the links. Do not mimic my approach, as it’s pretty clumsy and un-tested, and I just wanted to get something up and run traffic through it and see what happens.

After I created that page, I went to Adwords and started building my campaigns. First you have to create your ad, that shows up in Adsense ads, and again, this takes much practice, refining, and skill, as far as writing ads that attract clicks. This isn’t something I do much of, and honestly, I ain’t that good at it. So keep that in mind. The biggest single factor with using Adwords is to tweak, refine, and analyze your campaigns, until you find what works. Here’s the ad I created for my keywords:

Free 2007 Mustang Shelby
Too good to be true? Find out for
yourself, if you can handle it!
www.bonusbug.com/freemustangshelby

Once your ad is created, then you need to input your keywords. A book could be written on this subject, so I’m just going to show you how to find a big honking list to start with. Refining your keywords and how they’re displayed is important, so again, success here takes some practice and work. For my initial keyword list, I used the Google Keyword tool and simply input “Mustang Shelby”.  I exported that list to CSV, then copy and pasted it into Adwords.

The next step is to set your daily budget limit and your maximum bid foryour keyword terms. I set my daily budget limit to $20 and maximum bid of 0.26. The estimator tool will give you a rough idea of what you should expect to pay each day, but keep in mind it’s a rough estimate. Again, these settings take refining moving forward.

Okay. I did all of the above and let it run. The campaign has been up for about 24 hours and so far I’ve spent $9.56 at Adwords, as far as what I’ve paid overall for the clicks on my ads. At Azoogle, I’ve made $10.20. So, after a day, I’ve made a whopping $0.64. Not going to retire anytime soon, and given the time I spent on setting it up, I’m still in the hole. Due to the nature of the CPA deal, I could easily have made $0, too, so I’d need a better profit margin than the quick, 24 hour results to justify continuing to run the ads, more than likely.
But that’s not quite the entire picture, as I also made $2.60 from clicks on Adsense ads on the Bonusbug website yesterday, and all of the traffic came from the Adwords campaign. To be completely honest, I hadn’t considered that, as far as the people inclined to click on an ad for a shot at winning a car for free also being inclined to respond to other content on a website devoted to free offers, coupon deals, incentives, etc. So that’s something to keep in mind, as far as the possiblity that a break-even Adwords campaign (where your expenses offset your profits) could actually be worthwhile for you, if the traffic it sends to your website sticks around enough to respond to other things there.

So, in a very cursory nutshell, that’s one way to use Adwords as an affiliate to potentially build traffic and profits. Again, playing with Adwords is very tricky and potentially expensive, so poke around on Google and od more research before you try it out. I’m just trying to explain the basic framework here, and this should in no way be seen as a guide to how to do it right.  Just some fodder to get you started and an example of another way that affiliate marketers ply their trade online.

Lots of Monkey Manual Labor Completed, Not so Much Affiliate Scheming

While I’ve had the whole week off from the day job, the vast majority of my time has gone into trying to get two houses up to speed and ready to sell, so I haven’t had much time for affiliate marketing work. What time I have put into the sites has been more in the vein of monotonous drudgery, as far as updating WordPress on all the sites, getting some new plugins set up, making sure all the .htaccess files are good to go, setting up each site in my admin console at Google Webmaster Tools, yada yada yada.

Now that the sites are getting some search traffic, the real work really starts, as far as scheming up ways to build links, working harder to squeeze as much money as possible out of what traffic the sites are getting, and other fun stuff.

Back to the monkey manual labor. Whee…

SEO Book by Aaron Wall

Despite Aaron Wall’s SEO Book getting positive reviews and plugs from just about anybody who is anybody in the world of affiliate marketing and SEO, I’d held off on buying a copy for myself, until earlier this week. Why would I wait so long to give it a whirl, when it’s more than patently clear that it’s a valuable resource? Well, honestly, I’m pretty much a cheap-ass, and $79 is a lot to spend on an e-book, especially when there’s a goodly chance that I already am familiar with a lot of the material.

Having worked my way through most of the 300+ pages of SEO Book, I have to say I’m pretty happy with the purchase. Most of it wasn’t that new to me, having picked up bits and pieces of what’s covered in it over the years, but it’s really well-organized and well-written, and packs a lot of meat into it. If you’re just getting started, it’s a pretty amazing resource and will literally shave years of wasted time off your learning curve.

Probably most importantly, SEO Book is heavy on the solid fundmentals, as far as guiding you through the entire process, as far as how search engines work, how to write good content, how to structure your site, and so on. It’s also very white-hat, relying on solid basic principles to improve the rankings of your sites and pages, instead of dealing with much more dodgy practices that might work today, but won’t a week from now. Yeah, the title is SEO Book, but another alternative, much longer title could be something like “Learn How to Create Solid, Fundamental Content and Websites that Will Rank Well in Search Engines for Years to Come”, as that’s more what the book focuses on, as opposed to the minutiae of things like optimizing your alt-img tags.

You also get some other useful freebies with the book, such as a listing and ranking of various paid and free directories to submit your sites to, and access to other keyword research tools and other good stuff. You also get free access to any updated future editions, which is actually pretty useful for something like this, as Aaron updates it frequently to reflect the rapidly changing world of SEO.

On the down side, it’s in pdf format and it’s 300+ pages, so unless you can print it out at work on the company dime, you’re probably faced with reading it on your computer or printing out sections at a time, which can be a bit of a chore.

All in all, though, SEO Book is definitely worth checking out. $79 ain’t cheap, especially for us tight-asses of the world, but it’s money well spent, and will pay for itself if you’re serious about the affiliate marketing thing and take the advice to heart.

Site Review: Best Air Miles Deals

(Remember, if you’re playing along at home and would like a review of your site, just shoot me an email or comment and it shall be so.)

Best Air Miles Deals is an interesting idea for an affiliate site, and a bit different than most sites I’ve talked about here. Most of the sites I’ve been cranking out are pretty squarely targeted at search engine traffic, and aren’t necessarily designed to build an audience and keep them around. There are some exceptions (such as this site and a few others), but by and large I find potentially profitable niches, build small sites with content driven by keywords for those niches, then move on, with no real effort to make the site sticky.

Best Air Miles Deals, though, is completely different. Jeff has set up the site so that, from day 1, you have to keep returning to his site, if you’re interested in finding the best way to maximize the air miles you accumulate. He’s doing a lot of the research and legwork for potential readers, so they’re locked in to checking back to his site, each and every day, if they want to tap into his knowledge. It’s not only potentially sticky and interactive, but it also leaves interested readers no choice but to return.

It’s also got some nice tie-ins to existing affiliate programs, especially with credit card affiliate programs. Those are some of the most lucrative out there, paying a very high cost-per acquisition (CPA) rate for everyone you refer who signs up for a credit card, and it’s a very natural fit to market those, given the nature of the site. Any niche with high CPA deals also tends to pay pretty well for clicks to Adsense ads, too, so that’s working in your favor as well.

As a whole, the site layout is solid enough. The category structure works well for you and I think opening up posts to comments is smart, especially as the site gets traffic and people start leaving comments, as that could be a draw in and of itself, especially if savvy people leave comments about other great air miles deals, etc. (I might tweak the theme a bit to remove the background colored box for the comments section, as all of those horizontal boxes are a little intimidating, but that’s more in the personal taste realm, and it’s fine as is).

As far as suggestions and possible improvements, don’t be afraid to be an expert (even if you don’t consider yourself one). The current “About” section is honest and accurate, but it isn’t the most compelling of tales. If I’m a random reader who lands on the site, I’m not exactly overwhelmed by the fact that you’ve only been accumulating air miles for 6 months and are halfway to earning a free flight (or already have earned one, the text is a bit unclear).

Should you lie instead, and claim to have earned millions of air miles from the tips and tactics you recommend on the site? Well, I’m not going to tell you to lie, necessarily, but I’m also not not going to tell you to lie, either. Remember, there’s no law that says that the persona writing the content for the site has to be you. Affiliate sites exist to make you money, nothing more, nothing less.

In a case like this, I’d ask myself the following questions, if I were debating whether to adopt a more “experienced” persona for the site. Am I completely misleading users and talking about something I’m far from an expert about? In this case, no. You obviously are good at playing the air miles game, and users still get great tips on maxing out their own air miles. Are you taking advantage of readers somehow by pretending to be more expert? Again, no, you’re just spinning the text in a slightly different way. So, personally speaking, I’d probably adopt a more experienced, wheeling-and-dealing persona for the site, but that’s just me.

The biggest obstacle for a site like this is going to be all of the legwork you have to do, as far as finding good deals and constantly posting content to the site. It’s not the sort of site that you can let sit for weeks at a time, slowly building content for, etc. Because most of the deals are time-sensitive, you have to keep feeding new deals into the hopper, or risk losing any readers that you accumulate over time. So your load is doubled, as far as maintaining the site, since you not only have to constantly find good deals, but also post about them on the site.

Marketing the site and growing traffic will be a bit different, too. You’ll have to take a slightly more active role in growing traffic, as far as taking part in existing forum sites devoted to coupons/deals such as FatWallet.com, and siphon people off to your site via strategic use of signtaure URLs, direct links to your content, etc. While search engine traffic is always good, you really want to attract active users who play the air miles game themselves, and who will comment with the own deals they find, as that’s when the site will really take off.

In that vein, this would be a good site to consider adding an email collection box in the sidebar, as far as a breaking-deal sort of alert that people could sign up for and get emailed about, when you find a really nice deal somewhere. It’s kind of a pain to manage such things but it can be invaluable for sites like this, as it gives you a way to ping people and remind them that hey, there’s that cool website out there about air mile deals that I used to check out but had forgotten about. It’s also a very natural fit, as far as an email service, and would probably get more people signing up as opposed to a generic email collection box on a site about wombats, which would have no real reason to ever need to email people.

All in all, you’re off to a great start. It’s going to be a lot of work to do it up right and maintain it, but the site definitely has legs and is an interesting idea. Interactive community sites like that are harder to get rolling, for all the obvious reasons, but once they acquire momentum they tend to pick up steam quickly, as users end up shouldering much of the workload themselves.