One of the sites owned by my employer (Tailored Consulting) is called Brand Boots.com. Today, Brendon tells me that BrandBoots is ranked #5 in Yahoo for the phrase "ugg boots" - and thats great news.

BrandBoots was a venture by Brendon and Mel to sell Ugg Boots (Ugh boots, Ugg boots, Ug Boots - however you want to spell it!) from an online shop. Over Christmas etc, they would sell LOTS of boots overseas. (Don't forget, its hot here in Australia - but other countries can get snow, and warm sheepskin boots are great in cold weather). But they had a lot of trials and tribulations, including:

  • Dispute over the phrase 'ugg boot',
  • Lots of returns when the material turned out to not be high quality
  • Mel sacrificing her Garage to serve as a ugg boots warehouse!

And now they’ve stopped. Nobody was really putting any effort into growing and marketing the website, because there were just too many hassles. So now its over – but they haven’t closed it down.

See, BrandBoots.com is a quality ugg boot domain name. Its been around a long time, and its got a lot of content, and lots of sites linking to it. So what they've done, is put up a notice on the homepage:

Over the past couple of years here at Brandboots.com we have sold 3 different brands of Ugg Boots.

To the right is a photo of our packed boots awaiting pick up one day - that's in excess of 80 pairs of ugg boots sold per day. But no more!

And whilst these ugg boots have been fine, we've stopped selling them completely.

No more will be sold of these other brands. The reason why is simple. Because they are nowhere near as good as UGG Australia boots. Simple.

There ya go. They've decided, "if you can't beat em - join em" and have signed on as an affiliate for Ugg Australia.

So now Brandboots.com can make money as an affiliate without anybody having to spend time on it!

In fact, Brendon tells me that it cleared several hundred dollars last month - and the only time invested was to remove the store a few months ago, and add affiliate links in. Very minimal stuff.

Perhaps you should consider affiliate systems instead of adsense/PPC ads on your website?