It may seem like a silly question, but I believe many have websites just for the fun of it. They could also be basic information sites, but all the same, I am curios to know how many of you want to make money from your site.
Here is the poll: Are you trying to make money with your website or blog?
Are you trying to make money with your website or blog?(trends)
I am happy to announce that Best Web Image now has an affiliate program!!!
If you have a website or blog that targets: webmasters, developers, designers, SEO specialist, and anything where you suspect website owners will visit then this is a great program for you!
Your task is to sell the popular web usability and design analysis offered by Best Web Image. It’s priced aggressively, has an excellent payout, and has consistently received high praise from its customers. You can link by banner or text, and if you like to blog this could probably be your most effective method of converting.
Are you one of the first ten new affiliates? If you are, expect a quick post thanking you for joining, and a link to your site where your affiliate link is found.
Contest Kick Off!To kick things off, and get this affiliate program running well right away, I am offering a grand prize for the first affiliate to sell just ten analyses. If you are the first affiliate to sell ten analyses you will not only earn your commissions, but you will also win $200 for being the top affiliate to date.
The second place prize of $100 will go to the next best affiliate that has sold at least five analyses.
You just made some minor changes to you site, nothing big, but wait! You’re not done yet. This post is just a friendly reminder to start your week out right by testing your site. Yeah, Yeah you say, my site works fine. Here is a little poll that you may like: Order Forms. Feel free to vote on it.
Way, way too many times we simply hit and run, making changes to our site, and don’t even bother to make sure it’s working right. I’ve ton a ton of usability testing on sites where their online order form simply did not work. Talk about poor usability. No wonder so many site owners can’t afford getting an analysis, they are not making any sales.
What inspired me to write this post was an analysis I was doing this morning on Rock Music Forum. I had to put on the brakes second one. The site administrator had accidentally changed the permissions to the forums, and it appeared that you had to be a member to simply read it. At first I thought this was the way they wanted to keep it, so I created an account to see how life was behind the brick wall. What I found was that the administrator forgot to test their site after making some changes. I still couldn’t read any of the forums, and obviously could not even post. Big Whoops. If they had tested, a two second fix would have solved the problem.
I can not stress how important it is to test. There is simply way too much to lose. In the case of the Rock Music Forum the owner was not only missing out on gaining new members, but was also killing off the existing members. That equals marketing dollars lost twice!
If you forget marketing money lost, don’t forget potential revenue lost. No sales on your site often equals sales on another site, a.k.a. your competitors. It’s bad publicity, and it’s bad for your pocketbook. Too many times I have found order forms that simply don’t work, and I am betting one of you reading this will find a broken form as well.
In regards to the Rock Music Forum the site was only “down” for a few hours, but imagine if those changes had been done right before the weekend? Think you want your rock music forum down on a Friday or Saturday night? Visitors are getting more and more used to finding broken sites, and they are also learning. They are learning to go to the sites that don’t break, or very rarely break leaving the junk second one.
There are a ton of webmasters out there that make a descent living off of referral or text link ad income. Some do it better than others. There are several factors that can play into how successful their sites are, are they optimized for search traffic, is the target audience being reached, and the methods they used to get the ads clicked.
Check out Online TV. Here is a great example on how to link to sites with your affiliate code. When you look at the site, you will probably see the Google ads. They are hard to miss. The part that I am talking about is the top right menu.
What makes this menu great is the fact that it’s not really a menu at all. It’s links to another site, and when you use it, the site owner starts making money. A great method to get visitors to click on your ads is getting your ads to blend with your content. On this site, it’s done on a superb level, minus the Google Ads.
Another great way to keep from people from editing your referral link, and also make it appear to link to your site is by using a htaccess redirect. By editing your htaccess file you can have a link on your site point to a specified folder, and your htaccess will 302 it (redirect it) with the referral link. Online TV uses this method as well on their Watch Movies Online page. It’s in the form of a text link in the main content.
To accomplish this all you have to do is create a folder on your site, put nothing in it besides your htaccess file, and make the access file read like this:
Redirect 302 /[subdir]/[filename] http://affiliatesite_example.com/?id=123
There are a ton of tutorials out their on how to do this, and to do it with several affiliate links. The whole process is very easy though. So next time you think about putting an ad or an affiliate link on your site, think how will this effect my visitors, and how effective will it be. If it’s not worth the time to blend professionally with your site, I say don’t do it at all.
If you are selling a product online you should know that visitors often look for trust factors. Having a phone number to contact you is one of those methods. This poll asks voters if they would think twice about making a purchase online if you phone number is not there. The way I see the results for this poll are like this. The percentage of “No” votes equals the percentage of sales you could be loosing if you don’t have a simple phone number on your site.
Here is the poll: Would you purchase something from a website if they didn’t have a phone number listed?
In regards to improving the usability of your website, it’s always a good idea to have a search function for your site. It helps the visitor find what they are looking for faster on your site, and it supports your site when simple navigation fails to help a visitor find what they are looking for. Many platforms come with a search engine, like Joomla and WordPress, but you don’t have to rely on them. A great alternative is using Google’s search function, and you can actually make money from it as well.
Here is an example of it in action on this Investment Blog. When using the Google search, the visitor has the option on how to search. They can search all of Google or only the sites content. By default the results page take the visitor to Google to show the results, but you can also set this up to display on your own site.
When the results are displayed Google Ads are also displayed. When a visitor clicks, you make coin. You do lose your visitor though, and that is the downside. It really depends on your sites business model on what you want the visitor to do. Really though, if you don’t have a search function for you site, I would jump on this right away. It’s a win for you, and a win for your visitors. The investment blog also displayed a Tag Cloud which can also support visitors in their quest for your content by quick search. No surprise their biggest word is DOW.
I you are unfamiliar with Google’s AdSense, you can sign up here: Google Adsense. Once you have an account set up, just click on the second tab labeled Adsense Setup, and you are on your way. Good Luck!
And on a side note, I try to avoid getting political, but I am getting tired of these stimulus packages. It’s seems like we are just paying off debt with another debtor. Anybody else hate these things?
You have probably heard that marketing virally is a good idea, and that using video is a great way to do it. After seeing some YouTube stats today I think you can almost prove this with the numbers alone.
In March of 2008 there was about 70,000,000 videos on YouTube. Using an older stat I found, but I am sure it is higher now, 100,000,000 videos are watched a day. Your video is going to get seen, and it won’t be difficult to get it seen often. I even have a few silly family videos on YouTube, and they get hits with me just telling my Mom about them.
Think of it this way. According to Google, over 25% of all its queries are from YouTube. In fact, YouTube actually beet Yahoo in search queries. As a webmaster we fight to get our sites to rank best for our favorite keyword, and we do this competing against one trillion plus sites. Don’t you think it would be a little easier to compete against 70,000,000? 70,000,000 is still a huge number, but it’s less than one tenth of a percent of the pages indexed by Google. The odds are certainly more in your favor. Another number to recognize is 200,000. The 200,000 is the number of YouTube publishers. That means those 200,000 people are the ones capturing those 100,000,000 daily views. Now that is a stat that just astonished me. Ready to start making videos?
Just came across a good post about using Google’s Adwords. There is plenty of room for error/wasting money using Adwords, and though I have seen many posts with tips, this one pretty much nails most of them very accurately.
The first tip mentions to not use the content network. This is generally good advice, but proof is in the testing. I have actually had one site that performed better on the content network so you never really know until you try. My advice, just keep a close eye on it.
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