Did you know that people made millions arbitraging traffic online?

Before getting into online marketing, I would have never imagined that in the period between 2003-2007 people got rich by buying online traffic and by sending it to affiliate programs to earn commissions. Did you know that some of them faced the problem that they would not have enough cash to buy more traffic since they could buy almost unlimited amounts of it.
Basically they would buy so many millions page views, send them to an affiliate program that would pay them a commission for each sale. They would know, out of experience, that a certain percentage of traffic would always convert into buyers. So if the put in a 100 bucks they would generate 200 bucks of commissions. Would they put in 100000 they would get 200000 out of it. What a nice business problem to have…

The same thing was done with Facebook ads… cheap targeted traffic. Well some people still do it today with highly sophisticated systems where they generate thousands of ads and buy thousands of computer generated Google keywords and sort them out by performance. Manually this probably cannot be done anymore. If you happen to know otherwise please get in touch with me and share.

Another nice post for my PR generation project.

E-business in Switzerland – Is the pond deep enough?

Freelancing at bitzli.com, I came across thousands of Swiss websites and naturally quite a few businesses online. Now, there is no doubt that e-business in Switzerland has tremendous potential, considering the perfect postal system, trust into financial transactions online, the high level of internet penetration as well as high standard of living. However, I wonder if at a cultural level the Swiss will be capable of connecting online and develop sharing communities besides Facebook, where one had “no choice” but to join at some point? Is the pond of participating Swiss citizens deep enough? Will the Swiss internet finally pick up steam? Never wondered why Blogging is a profession in the US while in Switzerland blogging has almost 0 commercial value? Would it not be ironic for the social internet to fail in this wonderful direct democracy?

Digital divide in Switzerland? No way, right?

The expression “digital divide” has been originally used for describing the lack of education in IT related topics which led to a competitive disadvantage for the population in Africa for example, in terms of accessing free information.
Interestingly, the aging population in Switzerland will be having a hard time switching to digital publishing. Where in the US at least one family member is blogging or active in ecommerce, in Switzerland people still consider a website to be a major project that requires major resources to be realized. Now this is about to change. I am excited to see if and how content management systems such as WordPress will be taking over the country.

I have started a humble link collection for those who are interested in getting into ebusiness or into digital publishing