http://www.articletrader.com/ Articles at ArticleTrader en-us http://www.articletrader.com/internet/affiliate-programs/the-newbie-world-of-affiliate-programs.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/affiliate-programs/the-newbie-world-of-affiliate-programs.html Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0600
Over recent years the number of Affiliate marketing programs has increased dramatically. This is due to several reasons. Firstly an increase in the number of people seeking a work-from-home, low start-up cost business. Secondly the attraction to the merchants of having an army of salespeople selling their products has meant that more and more merchants are offering such schemes. Thirdly the increase is partly due to the ease with which it is now possible for most people to have a web presence. Some affiliate marketing schemes even provide completed web pages that only require simple personalization and the site can be up and running almost immediately. Sadly, another factor having its influence is the false impression created by some marketers that the Internet provides the means to get rich quickly and easily with minimum of effort. Some skilled affiliate marketers earn thousands of dollars a month. Some of the reasons why you should consider such a scheme are

No experience required

No stock to purchase

Low set-up cost

No premises to rent or buy

Can be operated from home

No sales experience needed

No goods to ship

Potentially good income

Addressing a world marketplace

Operates 24x7


So what factors do you need to take into account if you are just starting out as a newbie affiliate?


What commission does the affiliate scheme pay?

Commission rates vary considerably depending upon the type of product chosen. These can range from, say, 5% on a range of garden products to 50% and over on ranges of ebooks. Initially you should consider the high paying rates usually to be found on books and software.


How frequently are the commissions paid?

The frequency of commission payment varies from company to company. Determine whether your selected affiliate schemes pay weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly. Some companies require a minimum accumulated amount of commission before making a payment.


What form of tracking cookies does the company operate?

Tracking cookies, which have a set like, are used by the marketing company so that they can trace a customer back to you as an affiliate. Often purchases are not impulse buys, consequently the longer the life of the cookie, the greater chance you have of earning commission. The life of a cookie can range from several days to several years.


Does the affiliate scheme cater for second purchases and beyond?

Some schemes pay commission only on the product that you are promoting. Better schemes credit you with commission on any future products that the customer you introduced subsequently makes. If you can, therefore, opt for this latter group, and check that this applies if the customer, in future goes directly to the merchants site.


What marketing materials are available on the merchant’s site? As nearly all affiliate programs are free to join you can easily gain access to the resource pages of your intended merchants. Examine the quality of the material. Do they provide free gifts for you to offer? Do they offer any means of branding ebooks so that you can stamp you affiliate identity on them?


Do they respond to emails?

A future relationship between you as an affiliate, your customer and a merchant of your choice, can be partly dependant upon the ease with which you, can communicate. Send the merchant an email with a question about their affiliate scheme and look at how you are treated. Discount the affiliate if there is a delayed reply, or worse still, no reply at all.


How popular is the merchant’s website?

Alexa at www.alexa.com carries out a continuous process of site ranking. And will tell you how your merchant’s site ranks in popularity against all of the other sites on the web. Ranking somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 might be considered ideal. A word of caution here, however. If the ranking is below 100,000 there may already be too many affiliates associated with that merchant. If the ranking is greater than 500,000 it could just be that you have come across a new product where you have chance to make money as one of the first affiliates. Always examine the product in detail, and do a Google search to find any adverse postings. Join the forum at www.warriorforum.com and post a topic asking the members if they have any experience of the merchant. Again a word of caution. Be aware that any glowing report may be coming from an existing affiliate.

--
© Paul Lewis 2006. All rights reserved. Reprints welcomed with article and resource box unedited. You can see the authors first web site, with an in-depth review of the product that created it, at http://www.re viewxsitepro.com Paul is also CEO of Demovision, a company specializing in talking heads. You can see examples if you go to the "Contact Us" page at http://www.re viewxsitepro.com You will need Internet Explorer to view.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/internet/web-design/things-a-web-site-newbie-should-know-to-save-money.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/web-design/things-a-web-site-newbie-should-know-to-save-money.html Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0600
There are thousands of sites out there trying to get you to part with your money, and inferring that you will immediately start reaping the rewards. Don’t be fooled by compelling one page sales letters, often with copies of bank statements, and invariably concluding with free gifts worth hundreds of dollars. Often the letters are sprinkled with testimonials and attempt to close the sale by offering only a limited number left remaining for sale, or you are warned of an imminent price increase. Check some of them out. Make a note of the price and the suggested uplift date. Does it really happen. Check out some of the reference sites. Are they really sites of substance, in which you would place the utmost faith in their recommendations. Yes, you can make money, but is usually after the passage of time, and not without a good deal of effort.


Don’t pay for information on How-to.

There are thousands of publications offering, at a cost, to teach you how to bring about search engine optimization, rank highly with search engines or become an affiliate guru.

Keep your money in your pocket and seek similar advice for free. Let me start you off by pointing you at some free publications which will get you on your way, and all of which are available to download from our web site. Brad Callen’s “Search Engine Optimization Made Easy” is a useful read. To emphasise my point about rogue web traders, I did a Google Advanced Search for exact matches to the title. At the top of the first page, ranking No1 out of 26,400 was a site offering to sell you this free book for $29.95.

Ken Evoy’s Affiliate Masters Course is an excellent free read. Whilst one of its aims is to educate the reader about affiliate schemes, much of the content relates to pretty much any web site.

You might also want to download another good free read, “The Netwriting Masters Course.”


Don’t pay over the odds for domain registration.

There are thousands of sites offering to register domain names. Do find a site that not only provides search facilities to see if your chosen domain name is already registered, but also provides alternative suggestions if it is. Don’t pay more than $10.00 as an annual registration fee. Let me stress that we are not affiliates of the company we use. We last paid $8.95 for a dot com at Godaddy.com. We liked the access to nameservers so that we could activate the transfer of the domain name to a host of our choice. Do not subscribe to hosting at this site.


Do get yourself a suitable domain host.

There are some very important points here. To ensure minimum of downtime from your host do not join any of the free hosting sites. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Choose a site that offers to host an unlimited number of web sites for you. The fist host we selected still has a maximum of two sites before they start to increase the annual fee. You should possibly consider one that offers an unlimited number of autoresponders, if you feel that you may need this facility in the future. Although not the site we have recommended on our web site, you might find that Hostgator.com compares favourably with anything else. Make sure that you are comparing like with like when it comes to number of domains, web space, band width etc.


Don’t buy links or email addresses.

Don’t buy links and more importantly do not purchase from web sites offering you tens of thousands of email addresses. Whilst it can be a pain, you must build up your own links, and your own opt-in list of email addresses. To assist with link building, particularly with keeping track of where you are in a link relationship we use a truly excellent piece of software, outlined on our web site. Not only does it generate the link pages but it handles the sending of emails from templates.


Do carry out search engine optimization.

Your site will go nowhere unless you have carried out the basics. By this I mean searching for and using keywords, developing a link strategy, writing and submitting articles, and promoting your site in other ways. For keywords use the “Tour” at wordtracker .com and then try it for free. For SEO read Brad Cullen’s free e-book available on our web site. For tuition on how to write articles, go to Joe Robson's site at adcopywriting.com. Joe has had many years of copywriting experience, and his advice is free.


Do get good article submission software.

For our experiences do a Google Advanced Search for the exact phrase “Articles to Directories in the Newbie World” and select a site to read about our experiences. We found disappointing submission companies, mediocre software and again came across the heavy sell, one pagers with free gifts. This prompted us to design our own. We have now made the decision to share it with others, and we are currently preparing it for commercial use.


Get easy-to-use web design software.

Nearly all web design software writes the HTML code for you. Some packages are very cheap with, reflecting functionality. Others are very expensive, but with considerably longer learning curves. Nearly all require the purchase of some extra software for search engine optimization. We have recently carried out an in-depth review of a web design package which led us gently by the hand through SEO, and optimized each page for us. Feel free to visit the review at the web site shown below.

--
© Paul Lewis 2006. All rights reserved. Reprints welcomed with article and resource box unedited. You can see the authors first web site, with an in-depth review of the product that created it, at http://www.re viewxsitepro.com Paul is also CEO of Demovision, a company specializing in talking heads. You can see examples if you go to the "Contact Us" page at http://www.re viewxsitepro.com You will need Internet Explorer to view.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/internet/site-promotion/articles-to-directories-in-the-newbie-world.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/site-promotion/articles-to-directories-in-the-newbie-world.html Sun, 12 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0600
I was further aware that one route that I had to go was to write articles, a daunting task for a newbie. Even more of a problem was the means of getting the article to the numerous article directories, groups, and ezines that populate the web.

I appreciated that there were three possible distribution routes. I could submit my article to an article distributor who would send out my article to their selected directories. An alternative would be to do it myself, accessing each of the directories, cutting and pasting into the numerous input fields, having subscribed to each prior to submission. I discounted this method because of the time involved.

A third possibility would be to use available software to speed up the latter process. Unsure of the best route, I decided that I would write two articles, one for each process, and measure the results. The purpose of this article is to share the results with you and the conclusion I reached..

My first article was a review of the software that I had used to create that first site, and entitled “Dreamweaver too complicated?, Go Live and Frontpage too steep a learning curve?” I decided that I would use one of the professional article distribution services for my first effort and looked at available agents. I selected one, paid my quarterly fee of $39.95, which allowed me an unlimited number of submissions for three months. I searched, today, for the title, using the “exact phrase” box of Google’s “Advanced Search” and found only 15 matches, which is way below my expectations.

My second article, “The Newbie World of Affiliate programs” followed shortly afterwards. Having spent the last twenty years with software houses, the last ten being with the world’s largest database company, I am aware that I can sometimes be over- critical about a product. To distribute this second attempt, I selected a software program selling around $150, and offering a three day free trial. I downloaded, and examined the submission sites, finding some of them obscure, and others where the software did not submit at all. There were103 web sites, 9 needing a logon, and 23 email sites. Again, at the time of writing an “exact phrase” Google search yields 4 matches.

At this stage I started to think that it was my ability as a first-time author that was in question.

Far from happy, and having wasted a good many hours, I paused to take stock of the situation. I didn’t like the software I could find, I thought that the article submission services were too expensive and I did not want to do it manually. The answer must be to design my own.

The prototype submits to 220 sites. I have excluded specialist directories and, therefore, all will accept articles on a wide variety of subjects. The software logs on automatically, fills in every field on the submission form, including the category, and presents me with the filled-in web form.. All I have to do is scan, then press the “submit” button. It takes around 10 seconds for one article to be sent to one site, most of that time being the directory response time. At 6 submissions per minute, with concentrated effort, it takes around 35 minutes to submit to all 220 directories. Whilst I could make the procedure completely automatic, without the need for me to do anything, I still value the peace of mind that the quick scan provides.

Six days ago, I wrote my third ever article, and submitted it using my system. The title of the article is “My Mistakes as a Web Design Newbie”. Again, going to Google’s “Advanced Search,” and entering the title in the “exact phrase” box, at the time of writing, the results show 34,300 entries.

My next stage will be to add around 150 email submission sites, and then a further 100 non-specialized directory sites.

--
© Paul Lewis 2006. All rights reserved. Reprints welcomed with article and resource box unedited. You can see the authors first web site, with an in-depth review of the product that created it, at http://www.reviewxsitepro.com. Paul is also CEO of Demovision, a company specializing in talking heads. You can see examples if you go to the "Contact Us" page at http://www.reviewxsitepro.com/xsitepro.html/contact us.html. You will need Internet Explorer to view.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/internet/web-design/my-mistakes-as-a-web-design-newbie.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/web-design/my-mistakes-as-a-web-design-newbie.html Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0600
Approaching retirement age I was made redundant last year and decided to create my first web site, initially knowing little about it. I hope that, by reading about my experiences, I may save you both time and money if you ever find yourself in the position of wanting to build a site with little initial knowledge.

eBooks
I bought five or six ebooks on how to make my web fortune from the one-page web-sites that you see on the web. The prices ranged from $9.95 to $29.95. It would be unfair of me to say that they were of no use, as you can always pick up the odd pointer, or contact. However, with the benefit of hindsight I would not have purchased any of them. Instead there are free, better written books which give you at least the same pointers, and often have more substance. You can download from my web site, for free, two excellent books by Ken Evoy, which will provide you with a good basic knowledge to move forward. Don’t get carried away with the sales hype contained in some of these “get rich quick” single page sales letters that offer huge free bonuses and an imminent price increase.

Universities and colleges
There are various colleges and universities on the web which promise you the ultimate in web creation, site marketing, search engine optimization and much more, “all under one roof” They usually have libraries of “how to” books and membership is by monthly subscription with some offering a lower fee for the first month. Have a look, by all means, I looked at three and claimed my refund within the stated period. I found that I could obtain similar information offered for free with a little searching, and that what they really offered was convenience.

Web Design software
I initially purchased a web site building package for $69.95 and was soon disappointed by its lack of functionality. I then looked over the shoulder of a friend whilst they showed me the workings of a top-end product costing nearly $400.00 but I found it to be too complicated with too steep a learning curve too be quickly productive. I posted a request for help on the Warriors forum and there were more recommends for a particular product than any other. So I decided that my first web site would be a review of that product, which I would create as a trial, before I went on to build a site that would aim at generating income.

What should the web site be about?
Several of the books that I read suggested that the subject matter should be about something that you enjoy doing and therefore you will create your site with more passion and enthusiasm. Whilst this is sound advice I found that the need to create a trial site, which would force me to learn the basics, was more than a sufficient driving force.

Domain name & Web hosting
Go for a dot com registration and pay no more than $10 per annum. Don’t go for free hosting, you get what you pay for. I looked at hosting sites that offered complete package with hosting, autoresponders, SEO and linking software and much more. Whilst everything was conveniently in one place they failed to convince me that each product would stack up well if they were competing in each niche market. I therefore opted for the best of breed approach and a little less convenience.

Search Engine Optimization
This was probably the subject that I was most worried about as I new that it referred to making a web site as easy as possible for the search engines to find, but I had no clue as to how to go about it. I have a free ebook that you can download entitled “Search Engine Optimization Made Easy” which will give you the basics to carry out this process. The book is really a plug by the author of SEO software for his excellent product. I was fortunate in that the web design software I selected also, somewhat unusually, held my hand through this process, carefully pointing out page, by page, what I needed to do.

Article Distribution
I was aware that, in order to succeed, I should submit articles to the numerous Article Directories present on the Internet. There are two ways to do this. By purchasing one of the two major pieces of software to assist me in doing it myself, or to use a company to do it for me. I looked at each way and found that, whilst both software solutions cut out some of the tedious manuals tasks of submitting to over 150 directories, it was still time consuming. Having examined the market place carefully, discounting any company who charged for a fixed number of submissions, I opted for one who for a fixed quarterly fee would submit any number of articles.

Link software
Again, so that I would get more site traffic, I new that I should get other sites to link to mine and that I would have to manage those links and the emails back and forth etc. I initially started to design an Excel spreadsheet linked to Microsoft Word but decided that I would still have to create the links pages by hand. My advice is to obtain software which houses all your links in a searchable database, handles all of the emails, including template housing, and that automatically creates the HTML link pages for you.

--
© Paul Lewis 2006. Paul Lewis is the author of an in-depth review of web site design and building software, XSitepro. You can see detailed functionality, and much more, by visiting the XSitePro full review at http://www.reviewxsitepro.com. He is also CEO of Demovision Systems who specialise in Talking Heads. Examples can be seen on the About Us page at http://www.reviewxsitepro.com

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]>