RedHedd.com

 Steve Warrington operates a web content business that he monetizes through affiliate marketing. As described in our last segment, Steve initially stumbled into this business trying to publish an ebook on mortgage finance and realizing he could make much more money giving the content away for free and placing ads next to it. In this segment, Steve describes how he has systematized these business practices as he has opened new content areas:

• He now discovers new content, assesses the opportunity it presents, and creates content.
• Once a content area shows promising results, Steve hires outside people to manage the sites and post content. His main sources for additional personnel include:
  • elance.com
  • Get a freelancer
  • scriptlance.com 
• Steve focuses his content creation efforts toward the "long tail" of organic search:
  • Organic search refers to the part of search results that are not influenced by advertising, in other words, the search results that are not labeled as sponsored links. Although it takes considerable time investment to do well in organic search results, you do not have to pay per click as you do with sponsored links.
  • The long tail refers to low volume search terms where there is not a lot of competition. On the order of 60 to 70% of searches occur using these terms. It is much easier to appear high in search engine results for long-tail search terms, although more of these terms are required to generated adequate visits.

Steve refers to this process as "automating" his work. What he is really doing is taking advantage of his contributors inputs into a well defined system designed to work in the search engine ecosystem.

Steve Warrington came up with the idea for RedHedd.com when he was working on "resource" sites for social networking sites. These "resource" sites provided tips on customizing the social networking sites and were highly popular. Steve's business model was to gain high search visibility for the sites and then monetizing the resulting traffic by referring it to sites with which he was affiliated. These sites would pay significant amounts for each click through.

The only problem with the "resource" sites was that producing content for them was extremely time consuming. RedHedd.com was an experiment to see if Steve could harness a social network site to produce easily monetized content. So far, the experiment has only produced break even results, making it a labor of love compared with his main business of developing affiliate marketing sites.

Steve happened into affiliate marketing in 2005 when he wanted to sell an ebook about mortgage financing on the web. He quickly discovered that he could make far more money providing the content for free and using it to draw traffic for the sites with which he was affiliated. Since, he has created a total of ten sites focused on different topic areas, and affiliate marketing has become a full time occupation for him.