Cagora?

Tiff,

Never heard of it before. Going to check it out now...

Yep. It's basically about buying "bulk" advertising from the site and then selling it to local companies so that its targeted to their zip code/location. There are a few other features (like SEO websites) that you can earn on. (Those are like $249, and you get 20% direct commissions). Its been in prelaunch mode for a few years.

Hi folks I'm the CEO and Founder of Cagora,

We're about to come out with our 'Community Blueprints' - our turnkey systems for Niche Marketers and Local Offliners and some new videos that will better explain what Cagora is.

it's so much more than just an advertising site and whilst like Google, advertising will always be a very significant income stream, it's certainly not the only revenue stream.

It's a global network of Local and Special Interest 'worlds' - a new style network of One stop Community Portals with all the typical community building tools but with some free and paid innovations.

We'll shortly over 10,000 Local and 15,000+ Niche worlds and each will have a Community Partner who will tap into the systems to get a bigger chunk of the traffic and income than the standard free user.

The main problem we're solving is a new approach to helping you find what you want online about hobbies and interests and your local area.

It's basically an alternative to the search engines for people to find what they're looking for online around Local or Special Interest. It's rather like a mashup of Yellow Pages, Facebook, Wikipedia, Squidoo, About.com, StumbleUpon and Google. Each world has a Community Partner that shares in ad revenue.

Cagora is powered by a single tier free affiliate program - however until March 31st anyone that registers (it's free) becomes a JV affiliate and earns lifelong JV commissions. So even if you don't do anything more at this stage I'd strongly recommend you grab JV affiliate status.

The project was created as a social enterprise to help forge stronger communities (both local and global communities of interest) by creating win-win outcomes by connecting people, businesses, charities and community groups. On top of the affiliate commissions and Community Partner revenue share, we distribute 80% of profits to the members and member chosen charities and Community groups. The original concept in 2000 was to operate it as a non profit - but we subsequently took on investors and its now a social enterprise (for profit company with a social impact agenda) - Part of this social impact agenda is to foster entrepreneurship which is why we distribute a big chunk of earnings out to Internet marketers.)

So yes it has been on the go for a while but it was only in the last couple of years that we forked out the $400,000 to build the platform to enable us to transform the vision into products.

One of the main USP's for Internet Marketers is that we only have one local or special interest niche per topic and we share the traffic and income with our members (both free affiliates and also paid community Partners). So as a marketer, there will be one marketplace per niche rather than 100s of groups that you can gain free exposure or you can dominate the niche as the Community Partner.

The other key aspect is that the we are using Community to build the worlds by attracting mainstream Internet users, to provide leverage for the Internet Marketers that seed the communities - (think Facebook, YouTube, Twitter where the users create the content and word of mouth trafffic). Prediction (and I am a bit biased) but Tribal / Community Marketing will be a hot topic later in the year - given that most lists are really still operating according to the web 1.0 model of publishing, rather than the web2.0 model of truly connecting the people on the list with one another. The other hot topic of convergence of online/offline and mobile technologies is another space Cagora is very much in.

In the early stages of the 8 phase rollout of our Community Blueprint (Lisa has a link to that above) we are focussing on engaging Internet Marketers to kick start things and then after the April 30th launch it's mainly targeted at mainstream consumers and businesses.

The $14,000 commissions earned by Lynn - is in fact not correct - we held a couple of pilot seminars to Lynn Terry's group and had about 80 people on two calls and had 11 people come on as Community Partners resulting in over $45,000 in sales with $18,000 in commissions but it was not all Lynn's it was shared amongst 4 affiliates. Most world's are $500 one time out of pocket expense so as you can do the Math(s) we had quite a a few Partners buying more than one world. That's why we refer to the prelaunch phase as The Community Landrush- as we're selling off the Community Partnerships of a new style of Virtual Real Estate that acts as a gateway to the real world.

Any more questions , I'd only be too happy to answer.

Hello,
I have become a community partner as well and must say that the potential seems amazing. You can localize in geographical areas or subjects of interest, (i.e. Music, business, hobbies) these main interests can then be broken down into more specific interests within a main category. The only limits are confined to ones creativity and bank roll. Though truly, sign up is free and you can earn without spending any money if you are a great networker. Well worth the investment.