White Label sites - Still profitable? Guidelines?

[bphelps]

I've been doing a search on white label sites on various forums but haven't been able to find much on them. I've found lots of companies doing white label programs but I'm wondering if they're still profitable? Most of the posts I hear about white label making money are about 1 to 2 years old.

Also, apart from conversion rates and layout are there any things to watch out for in a program? Like is it better to host it on your own host or the white label program's host?

[fitnfree]

Gosh, never heard of white label sites -- what are they? Tx

[Larwee]

fitnfree, it is rebranding.

You send traffic to your own domain rather than the merchant.

You have the branding but the merchant takes care of all the back end stuff.

[bphelps]

LOL, I thought that everyone would be familiar with white label. So maybe the reason I can't find many posts on this is because people don't know about it as opposed to it being oversatureated and milked to death.

[Linda Buquet]

Well lots of dating sites for instance offer while label and Market Health (Joe Bucks does too.) Basically they give you a pre-built site, often with a choice of templates you can customize a little. The concern of course is duplicate content penalties if you are doing natural search and if there are a ton of the same cookie cutter sites out there.

One of the more common examples of white label these days is private while label offers with CPA networks. If you run an offer and do some good volume you can ask for a white label deal and some networks will give you the entire landing page or site.

This can work for a couple reasons. A) most of the time these affiliates are doing PPC, so duplicate content isn't a concern B) it helps get around Google's rule of one domain per offer. You don't need compete try to do direct linking, because the offers on your own domains and you don't need to take time to build and test a landing page because the merchant gives you one that is hopefully already tested.

[bphelps]

The white label programs I was thinking of starting out on were for cellphones in the UK. I heard alot of other UK affiliate marketers started off on this.

Sorry, but what's this about google's one domain per offer? I take it Google's TOS says you can only run one white label program per domain name?

[Linda Buquet]

Oops no sorry. For Adwords PPC only one ad per Domain.

Thats to prevent 10 different affiliates all advertising green widgets and sending the traffic to greenwidgets.com. Only one affiliate can direct link, the others have to set up ads on their own domains - then get the click to the merchant. That one affiliate that gets to direct link has to pay more and/or have a better quality score or meet other conditions to be the one and only, so direct linking is hard to do and a bit of a gamble if there's lots of competition.

Nothing to do with white label specifically - just pointing out that having a white label option can make it easier to set up offers on your own domain.

[bphelps]

I've been asking a few cellphone white label sites and they all seem to require an existing website before they issue you with a white label template site. The reasoning is that white label sites are costly to set up since they host the site as well. I thought white label sites were supposed to be standalone and not on a subdomain of a larger website? It seems like a catch 22 here, I won't be able to start my cellphone white label shop if I don't have an existing one!

[Linda Buquet]

I'm wondering if they put it on their server but you need your own domain and just redirect it to that site? Or else they want you to have your own content that draws the visitors to your site and then you just have a link to your cell store that goes to the while label site on their server?

[bphelps]

As far as I know, they host the page for you but you have to get your own domain. Page maintenence with updates and the like are done by them. All you do is customize the page to your own style e.g: Layout, Title banner, colors etc.