Carlo Bertocchini is an engineer who loves robots. His site is a natural extension of his own interest, applied in a very specific and profitable way. Here's an interview with Carlo.

Overview: "I work full time as a mechanical designer. I have been involved with robotics (mostly as a hobby) since about 1993. I have built several robots for robotic competitions. I won the heavyweight division of Robot Wars in 1996 and 1997. My robotic Sumo wrestling robot has won the annual competition at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco every year since 1994. RobotBooks.com is the first web site that I have put together (except for a site about one of my robots on one of the free web page services).

I noticed Amazon's affiliate program one day while I was shopping for books. It sounded like a great idea, so I reserved the RobotBooks.com URL that same day."

"I have contacted over 700 robot related web site owners and asked for a link. My first email does not offer a reciprocal link, but I give one to most of the sites that ask for one. This is important not just for the traffic that you will get from the links, it is also important because some search engines take into consideration the number of other sites that link to yours when they decide how high to rank your page in their search results.

I have submitted my web site to over 100 search engines and directories. There are many businesses that will do this for you for a fee. Here is a free one: http://www.selfpromotion.com/. Most of your search engine traffic is going to come from the big ones (Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, Hotbot, and a few others). You want to come up on the first page of the search results. It's not that easy, and there is a whole cottage industry devoted to raising search rankings. We have pretty poor rankings right now. I have a lot more work to do in this area, but that is where much of our growth will come from.

I wrote two articles for the magazine "Robot Science & Technology". Almost all the readers of this magazine are hobbyists. In exchange for writing the articles, I get six months of advertising and some cash. I'll use that cash to buy small ads in other magazines.

I have announced my site on several news groups, and I started an on-line forum on robotics at www.delphi.com. Delphi provides the forum for free in exchange for the right to post advertising banners on it. This forum is now getting about 100 unique visitors per day, and each of them sees my advertisement every time they log on.

I had a service send out a press release to about 1300 newspapers and magazines. This cost $225, and I have gotten two calls from reporters so far. I don't know yet if this will pay off.

Banner adds probably won't work for a product that such a tiny percentage of the population is interested in, but I might look into one of those pay-per-click banner add services for bringing in more traffic."

"We sell books, toys, kits, movies, and magazines that have something to do with robotics. The market I am going after is the hobbyist market. Each item that we sell has a picture and a short description. All the order taking, money collecting, and order fulfillment is done by the companies that I am affiliated with. My plan is to never touch the merchandise myself. I spend all my time on content development and promotion.

Our first full month was September '98. We averaged 50 visitors per day, and we earned about $100 in commissions. In October we averaged about 140 visitors per day, and we earned about $250. It is now near the end of November, and we are on track for an average of 275 visitors per day and earnings of about $500.

Our book vendor is Books.com. They offer 12% commission on all sales, which is the best deal I have seen for books. I actually started with Amazon, and I was looking forward to those 15% commissions they offer, but it turns out that most of the books that I wanted to sell did not qualify for their 15% plan. They would only pay 5%.

Our toys vendor is eToys.com. They offer 25% commission to serious sites that have their own domain names, and 12.5% to smaller sites.

Most of our sales are books. Toys are doing pretty well, but magazines and videos are not moving. I will keep offering them though because it adds content and rounds out the site. They may also help bring some people to the site."

"To be successful with affiliate programs on the web you have to bring several things together. First of all you need to have a product that people want. If you choose a popular product like computers, you have the potential to make lots of sales, but many businesses are selling computers, and you will probably have to spend some big bucks to get their shoppers away from them. I chose to go with a niche product.

Robots aren't as popular as computers, but selling them has some advantages. The robot hobbyists are easy to find. Alta Vista returns almost 700,000 hits on the word "robot". The interest in robots is growing rapidly, and very few web sites offer as large a selection of robotics products as we do. In fact, when it comes to robot books with reviews, we are the biggest.

You need a good web site that is easy to navigate. The user should also be able to get something of value from it without spending any money. We have a "Robot News" page on which we post a new press release or article every week, and a links page where we link to over 20 robot clubs, and 25 robot competitions around the world.

GoTo.com, one of the smaller search engines, allows you to pay for better rankings. I reserved top position for about 25 key words and phrases and most of those only cost me 1 penny each. For example, at the time of this writing, I have top position for the phrase "robot toys". If the surfer clicks on the link to my site, I pay GoTo one penny. This is a great bargain. But if your keyword is "computers", be prepared to pay almost 30 cents for top position. I don't know if GoTo is going to make it with this mode of doing business, but I hope they do because we get almost 10% of our traffic from them. This will probably go down to 2-3% when we get our rankings up in the other search engines.

"Visit http://www.associateprograms.com for lots of info on affiliate programs.

Notice the high commission levels of most of my vendors. Most operators of affiliate programs offer much lower commissions. Don't waste your time with them. If all you are getting is 5%, you really can't afford to pay for any advertising. Even the few pennies you pay at GoTo.com will start to eat into your profits.

This isn't easy. It takes a lot of work to put together a decent web site. Once you have done that, your real work begins. Marketing is the best name for your new job if you decide to try to earn a living with affiliate programs.

I reserved several other domain names, and once I get RobotBooks.com going pretty good, I plan to do the same thing with GourmetBooks.com, VideoGameBooks.com, NutritionBooks.com, and several others. It should be a lot easier the second time around.

How can our readers contact you for more information?

Visit us for an introduction to an interesting and fun new hobby!
http://www.RobotBooks.com or email Webmaster@RobotBooks.com