In other words: I will provide you with free education and the potential for profit if you provide me with free work.

It’s an internship. You’ll be responsible for building out the best, most useful, most respectable web hosting review site on the planet. If you are successful, and meet pre-set goals, this could turn into a full time job as I will give you the first $5,000 per month, each month, in revenue (please note, the site currently makes nothing… it hasn’t been developed). Let me know if this opportunity excites you, both the topic and revenue potential (the education too;) and prove to me that you have a good research ethic and work habits -> ryan@college-startup.com

So here are 5 things to consider when trying to establish a POD for your Internet business:

1. Visual Design and Layout

It shouldn’t be your only POD, but you can definitely set yourself apart by presenting a top notch design

2. New Angle On Information

Chances are that you have competitors. Chances also are that there is a standard formula for the navigation structure and content a site in your niche should have. There’s probably a reason for this convention. Don’t throw it out. But think of ways you might improve up on it. Or maybe come up with a new angle on content that makes your site distinctive and useful.

3. Discern For Your Audience

Make discernment for your readers. Do rankings. Most people are looking for recommendations. Top this. Best that.

4. Added Value … Free?

Give away free products. Free shipping. Free service. Free warranties. etc.

5. Unique Product or Service

Identify an unmet need in your niche and meet it. Can always give it away for free to gain attention / traction.

Also check out: 5 Steps to Improve Your Online Business

So you might be wondering “what the heck is a POD?” Basically, a POD is a point of difference… something that sets you apart. As a background, here’s a great new article with advice for establishing a POD for your internet business.

The idea behind a POD is to become useful to your audience. A POD not only makes your site more linkworthy (and thus authoritative in Google’s eyes) but it also makes your site more value laden in the eyes of your users. Users are more likely to take action (buy something) on a site that is value laden than a site that seems junky or spammy or thin.

A POD makes your site meaty and entices prospective customers to take a bite.

So what’s your Internet Business’ POD? What are the things that you think set the successful online businesses apart?

That’s why I wanted to try a site that’s built around the affiliate product. And so we got started on March 1st.

For better or worse, I hadn’t read this news at the time. The gist of the story is that student loan default rates are at an all time high and the government is poised to do something about it. They’ve identified Community Colleges and For Profit Colleges (read: online colleges) as the main culprits. Regulation is most certainly on it’s way.

So what’s an affiliate marketer to do?

Initially, I was upset. If people can’t get access to loans for these kinds of colleges, then the market will surely dry up. And it probably will dry up a bit. But the fact remains that our society still values college education as one of the highest ideals… the best method of self-improvement. And another fact remains: higher education is one of the most profitable business sectors in the United States. And yet another fact remains: the colleges who market the best are going to be the ones who get the most business.

It’s hard for me to picture a United States without a massive higher education infrastructure. For most people, higher education is the platform to a career. And jobs are the bedrock of our economy. And higher education is one of those things that people just do. It’s a once or twice in a lifetime investment that most people agree is worth the cost and effort. So unless the economy goes completely to hell, there’s going to always be a demand for degrees.

Nonetheless, I do see regulation having an effect. I just don’t think it’s a game changer. The market will slow, but it won’t virtually disappear like the credit card market did about a year ago. That is unless the fundamentals completely disappear and too many students are unable to pay for their education. But the profit margins on higher education are so extreme (each student can bring in tens of thousands of dollars per year) that I suspect that schools can absorb some defaulting and also possibly restructure their “quality” measurement for affiliate leads to require a certain degree of proven credit worthiness.

In any case, “for profit” colleges will always have to market their product, and that’s what I’ll be here to help them do.

The reason I bring this up is to give you an example of the power of a powerful domain. Jeremy’s post is now the number 1 result for a Google search on visa black. Why? Quite simply, it has to do with the authority of Jeremy’s domain shoemoney.com – He has lots of fans and loads of backlinks to his site. His site is perceived as extremely authoritative. Content is thus filtered upwards in the search results.

This is an example of a more general principle that I like to emphasize. The work you do online has the potential to compound at an astounding rate. Unfortunately, most of the hard work comes up front with little reward. But if you make it through the first year or two of hard work, amazing opportunities will present themselves. Think about it. All Jeremy had to do was make a quick little post about a new product, sit back, and watch the money roll in. Each time a hot new affiliate program gets launched, he can do the same thing.

There was so much low-hanging fruit in this industry that persistent, entrepreneurs (yes, even one-man shows) were able to compete for search results with the big companies, and come out way ahead. One such company, Bankaholic, managed to rank on the front page of Google for the term “credit cards” and for that reason (his ability to rank and therefore convert), imho, was able to negotiate a $15 million sale to the large online company Bankrate.

Times have changed though. Anyone working in the credit card affiliate niche knows that credit card companies have tightened up. With the credit crunch firmly in place, most card companies are now more focused on reducing their own sub-prime ratios, which some have estimated to upwards of 25%. Because the driving force behind the credit card industry is no longer customer acquisition at any cost, the deals that card companies offer are no longer sugar-sweet. And because the deals that card companies offer are not as sweet, affiliates get less conversions.

So, there are really two ways that a new affiliate marketer can react to such bad news: either give up or get strategical about economic cycles. It would be easy to just give up, as the motivation for new affiliates is “potential” – the stories you hear about the massive amounts of money to be made. And when you see a few conversions, then a few more, you get excited and it motivates you to keep on pushing. But when you run into a brick wall like the credit crunch, it can be debilitating.

On the other hand, if you want to get strategical about economic cycles, there are two important ideas to keep in mind. Let’s use a farming analogy to make better sense of the ideas:

1) If it’s not the season to harvest the crop, then you might as well start planting and nourishing the seeds in anticipation for when harvest time comes.
2) Different crops can have have different harvest times. Diversify your crops and you’ll have more opportunities to harvest, and less times of “hunger”

So even if something is out of season in the economic cycle, you can use that time to prepare yourself for the next time that product or service comes back into season. Plus, you can minimize the effects of economic cycles by diversifying your marketing efforts to include things that compliment each other throughout the cycle.

At the end of the day, we have made the decision to go the quality route in the hopes of profiting on volume rather than deception. Unfortunately, this means that our earnings per conversion will go down, and quite possibly even our conversion rate per visitor. This is a common compromise that plagues those of us who earn money off affiliate sales.

So what we’ve set about doing (still in the early stages) is creating the kind of web hosting review site we’d want if we were looking for a good web host. First off, we are setting up a Web Hosting FAQ to answer common questions in an objective manner. Rather than copy other web hosting faqs, we’re starting from scratch with questions that we think common folks have when choosing a web host. Second, we are starting a unique blog called The Firewall which will provide tips and tricks to make running your website a smoother process. Third, we will only be reviewing web hosts that we’ve actually used, and will break reviews down based on the purposes they serve well. We recognize that different hosts are good for different reasons. If you’re looking for a host to run your personal blog you’ll want a different host than if you plan to run a high-volume e-commerce site.

So those are our three PODs for this review site. There is some compromise to the bottom line, but ultimately we hope the site will become popular enough to make up the difference in volume.

What are your thoughts? Is the purpose of setting up an affiliate site solely to make money, or is there room for integrity?

First point: it has taken hundreds of hours of development time to get this site up and running smoothly.

Second point: the site is simple to use and makes it easy to find exactly the product the user is shopping for

So, sometimes it takes a lot of work to make a simple product that’s effective for it’s user. Sometimes, the hard part of doing things right is making things simple.

Doing affiliate well is a lot more difficult than doing CPC publishing. Doing affiliate well basically boils down to whether you can provide an added value service to the shopper. It’s got to be more than the occasional Amazon link in a blog post. I mean….to really make big money.

As I study up on affiliate marketing I’m discovering that the most successful people have basically created sites that look and feel professional. Either they look and feel like professional review sites or they look and feel like professional shopping sites.

It takes a lot of upfront work to get an affiliate site in proper shape for success. Hundreds of hours. Lots of patience. So many hours and so much patience that the field of people with high-profit affiliate sites ($10k plus per month) is amazingly small. It’s my goal to spend the next 3 years building high-profit affiliate sites and to join that rarefied group.

Basically, Teenormous makes it’s money by indexing as many quality t-shirt companies online as possible. Teenormous signs up as an affiliate with each company, and when people find a search through Teenormous, my friend Brian and his business partner get a cut of the total sale.

Why is Teenormous the most successful t-shirt search site online? Because they did things better. They built a better index. They built better search features. They decided to place functionality over glossiness. And people just like using it!

The moral of the story: when building an affiliate site, you want to make it the most useful and interesting shopping tool on the Internet.