I received an e-mail from Amazon today with a really cool promotion that they’re doing called Customers Vote. Basically it allows you to vote on a total of 6 different rounds deals on products at pretty ridiculous prices (ex: the first week has PS3 bundles starting at $199 instead of a list price of $574+). Each round has 3 different deals that you can choose from.

Each round of deals is tied to a specific day, so the PS3 stuff is for the first day which is November 27th (Thursday – Thanksgiving). If you get randomly selected, you’ll see an e-mail the day before letting you know. That means you should then login early on Thursday as you’ll have the opportunity to buy the product. Keep in mind that there are going to be a lot more participants selected than products available, to it is a race to try and buy first. There are a good number of products though, for example there are going to be 500 of the PS3’s.

This is somewhat familiar to Amex’s My Wishlist, but I actually like the way it works better. Generally for those doing Amex’s My Wishlist, the servers always get pounded, and a majority of the time the site goes down…pretty annoying. By Amazon pre-selecting the participants, I’m sure a big part of the reasoning behind that is to limit how many people are hitting the site. This way there should be no server issues, and you’ll know from the get go whether you’re too late or not.

This is a great promotion from Amazon for a few reasons:

• It’s a cool promotion, hey, it got me writing about it
• It will get people onto the site and looking at products. Amazon is known to have a very high conversion of visitors:buy ratio. Getting visitors to the site is the main step.
• The promotion page links to the products they are selling at a discount. This helps the conversion:buy process, and should help generate some sales simple for awareness factor.
• They are not giving the products away. A PS3 bundle which they normally sell for $574 is being sold for $199, which means they aren’t giving away their true cost. If they were to give these bundles away it would be $287,000 worth of product. Let’s say there is a 30% margin on them, they end up giving away $200,900. Instead,? they are charging $199 for 500 units, which is about $100,000. That means they are really only giving away about $100,000 of true dollars…a savings of $100,000.

If you haven’t already done so, get over to the Amazon Customers Vote page, and vote for each of the 6 days to try and get some deals of your own!? If you happen to win, make sure and post in our comments to let us know.

Last weekend I launched Carbon Fiber Gear, my first site in experimenting with affiliate marketing. For more of a background on the site, check out the post I made earlier this week. I wanted to talk about what processes I went through to get the site launched so quickly.

What First? Domain Name

When I thought of the idea to do a blog about carbon fiber, I started off looking for a domain on GoDaddy (Use coupon code OYH3 for $6.95 domain). I searched for a variety of things like carbonfibeproducts.com, carbonfiberstuff.com, etc. Using thesaurus.com I found the word gear, and gave that a shot…luckily it was available, so I picked it up right away.

I later found out that carbonfibergear.com had previously been registered, but expired back in October. It looks like it was just a placeholder, lucky me

Setup Hosting

The next step was to setup the host in order to get this new .com up and running. We have a dedicated server through my IT company, Tri Megatech, so this made it easy enough for me. I set everything up on the back end, and uploaded a clean install of Wordpress to run the site.

Setup The Site

Here’s where a majority of the time was spent to get the site going. Once I had a clean install of Wordpress on the server, I went out to find a clean looking, well coded theme to work off of. This is just a side project, I didn’t want to spend much money or put too much time into it until I know it will be worth it. I’ve always been a big fan of Chris Pearson’s work. For those of you that don’t know who he is, he did the design for Copyblogger, a popular blog on copywriting. Chris converted Copyblogger’s old design into a theme, which I picked up and slightly modified to look the way I needed.

I popped up Photoshop, and I already had an idea of how the logo should look. A few minutes later and with the help of a couple suggestions from Crystal, I had a nice logo design.

Another important aspect was setting the site up for SEO so that it could get picked up by Google as quickly as possible. There are a few standard things I do when setting a Wordpress site up:

1. Setup a Google Analytics account and implement it on the site in order to track stats
2. Install the all in one SEO pack plugin
3. Install the Google XML sitemaps plugin to automatically build a sitemaps file
4. Install the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin in order to have my feed tracked through Feedburner
5. Install the subscribe to comments plugin so that anybody that leaves a comment can choose to get an e-mail when there are any updates
6. Install the related posts plugin to easily promote content within the site
7. Setup the site through Google Webmaster Tools

Content and Making Money

Luckily I already had some basic accounts setup to monetize the site like I had in mind. I wanted to start off with Amazon, eBay, and AdSense. I found some carbon fiber products that I wanted to write about online, and wrote a few posts so the site wouldn’t be completely blank for new visitors. I also setup a few post ideas for future posts I wanted to make in order to get things rolling.

Once that was done, the site was ready to launch!

Little Bit Of Promotion

Unique carbon fiber parts are very “diggable”, so I’m hoping that works out for me over time. I’d like to use Digg, but I also want to wait a little bit until I have more content on the site so that I can hopefully have a higher retention rate. I figure in about 1-2 weeks I can start trying to utilize Digg (unless the readers Digg themselves ). I’ve noticed a good amount of traffic already come from StumbleUpon, but this isn’t very valuable traffic…lots of people just going in and out. I think the best traffic will be organic (aka search engines), but it will take some time before I see a buildup of that. I’m also doing some conservative advertising using AdWords to target traffic directly to posts that I can monetize on. We’ll see how that works out over time…I have noticed really high CTR percentages on the ads I do have (8%!).

Conclusion

Setting up a new site is pretty easy, especially once you’ve done it a lot of times!? If there is anything you think I’m missing, please let me know. Are your new site processes pretty similar?? If anybody needs any help or has any questions, I’d be happy to do what I can, just ask.