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Archive for October, 2010

Finding The Best Affiliate Programs To Promote

FINDING GOOD AFFILIATE MANAGERS
They’re all over the place thousands of them. Everywhere you turn you’re tripping over them. You can’t advertise for all of them so how do you narrow it down to the best ones to fit in with the theme of your website?

Two primary methods:
1 Join and use an Affiliate Network. They have many merchants listed. You can usually search for merchants by keyword or product by brand by company name etc.
2 Do some Google searching and Find Them Yourself. Search with your own keywords by brand by location etc. You can be really picky this way. If you look at a merchants website and don’t want to associate with them just leave.

Once you find a few merchants that you think would be a good ‘fit’ with your website:
Compare them. Compare price shipping policy return policy etc. Compare their shopping cart systems. Compare their websites overall usability. Decide which one you would prefer to do business with as a customer.

Note: Watch for a prominent 800number showing on a merchants pages… if they show one odds are pretty good that you will lose sales commissions to their phone system. Very few merchants will even ask a caller to provide an affiliate code when they call.

Most online purchases are made based on convenience speed and easeofuse .. Not Price. So don’t let cost comparisons carry too much weight when you are deciding on what merchant to advertise for.

In a very real way you are going to be putting your reputation or at least the perceived validity of your website on the line. So you want to associate with the best possible partner. This will have a direct effect on your longterm success as a webmaster and as an affiliate.

Once you have found a company that you would like to associate with finding their affiliate program details is usually easy. Most of them will have a small link at or near the bottom that simply says “affiliate program” or “partners”… something like that. Some of them have it really big near the top. Depends on how much emphasis that company puts on recruiting new affiliates.

Read the affiliate agreement carefully. I can’t stress this part enough. You need to know what you’re getting into should you decide to apply. Make notes about the payment options linking options amp; limitations etc.

Some of those ‘Join our Program’ links will take you to an affiliate network some to the merchant inhouse affiliate program. If it’s a network that you already joined apply to that merchant program from the network website.
If it’s a network that you don’t belong to go to the network main page and apply from there not from the merchant website. After you are accepted then join the merchant program.

You may not find a ‘Join our Program’ link. that’s ok just find the contact page and send them an email.

Some merchants work with two or more networks. They won’t tell you that but if you don’t belong to one network and you want to partner with a particular merchant there may be another option. Email them and ask if there is an optional affiliate program.

A few thoughts about Affiliate Network Programs vs “InHouse” Privatelyrun Programs.

Networks:
At the risk of overgeneralizing: The top affiliate networks are for the most part easy to work with full of merchants and experienced at this game.

The benefits of working with a network:
* They will provide a fairly wide assortment of linking methods.
* Most have a pretty good “Affiliate Training Center”.
* You will be able to track your statistics for several merchants from one place.
* Low minimum payouts and your earnings will be combined into one check sent by the network.

The drawbacks to working with affiliate networks are:
1 You cannot adapt the provided text links to your audience. With very few exceptions it’s “use it or forget it”. If you can convince them that your audience would respond better to a different wording they may allow you to edit the text.
2 They tend to concentrate most of their manhours on the big affiliates that are moving tons of product. If you’re just starting out you can’t expect that they will find the time to give you the oneonone kind of help that you need the most.

That’s assuming that they accept your application at all. Many of them require a minimum daily or monthly traffic level before they open the doors to you.

So if you get accepted to an affiliate network plan on learning their system quirks all by yourself. Some of them have affiliate FAQ or Help pages but it’s still a struggle until you learn your way around.

“InHouse” Programs
Privatelyrun programs can be either really great or really sucky. Depends on how much effort the company is willing to put into their affiliate program and the person who is managing it.
So how to find out who the bad ones are? Simply talk to other webmasters… Join the forum at ABestWeb the primary focus there is on affiliate programs.

You can also send an email to the merchant affiliate manager and see how quickly they respond. You should get a reply within one business day. It’s not a good sign if it takes them three days to reply.

For the most part though you can’t tell if a merchant program is well run until after you get into it.

There are some real benefits to getting into a well run inhouse merchant affiliate program:
* Linking options most of them are willing to give you a pretty free hand in how you set up the affiliate links. Many will even set up special linking datafeeds and storefront codes allowing you to showcase some or all of their products right on your site.
* Personal help. It’s been my experience that most of them are ready and willing to help you in any way they can… after all the better you do the better they look to their boss.

There are a few drawbacks to working with them though:
1 Time. It can be tedious to find and apply to them but it’s not really a decision that should be rushed into.
2 Payments. Payroll options are as varied as the companies themselves. Some have fairly high payment thresholds and limited payment options.
3 Some of the larger wellknown merchants don’t want to work with you until you have a minimum amount of traffic.

If you’re an internet marketter and you’re searching for an affiliate program thet fits with what you’ve just read then there is a sure bet; The affiliate manager is willing to give the fullest support you need any time.The product is easy to sell and the site is easy to navigate. It is a product that is applicable to all internet marketters because it deals with traffic generation which of course is every site owners’ priority.
The C.E.O also offers a unique 80 commission to anyone who agrees to become his affilite to promote his product”The Traffic Builder” the latest and most updated traffic generation masterpiece report. He has the most unbeatable affiliate offer I’ve ever experienced.

If you need more info on his outstanding Affiliiate program feel free to contact me any time at atlasebizlive.com

About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;Do you want to learn how to earn 1000 per month? Visit my website:Affiliate Marketing.And to earn even more download my 2000/ Month’s Affiliate Secret Weapon:http://www.mynetmarketingland.com/

Web Design Articles – Managing Your Keyword Research

Good planning and a systematic approach will allow you to get the best results from your keyword research. It is very important first to fulfill this criteria rather than jumping on to hosting or designing your site. Take the time to think it through and understand exactly what you’re trying to achieve before you start work. People who think about keyword research before jumping in are much more likely to spot and exploit major opportunities.

Organizing your Keyword Research

Why do we need to conduct keyword research? Can’t you just publish useful content? Won’t people find it anyway?

If you simply guess at what people are looking for you take the very real risk that you’ll be wrong. Why take that risk when keyword research can give you such tremendous insight into what people are really looking for?

What the site developers often overlook is the fact that they never look from the customers or visitors point of view. To perform keyword research properly you must put yourself into your customer’s shoes. If you do your research properly not only will you be able to optimize your existing web site content but you’ll also be able to tap into an endless stream of ideas for new content that you know people will be interested in. You may even uncover valuable niche markets for your existing products as well as some smart ideas for new products.

The aim of keyword research is to help you make more money from the content you’ve got at the moment and lay the foundations for creating even greater profits in the future.

So what’s the basic approach you should take for a keyword research project? Let us see the approach for this concept.

Step 1: Start with a Good List of Seed Keywords

Seed keywords are the words you use to start a keyword research project. In themselves they’re not very useful but the directions they take you in can produce a rich source of moneymaking keywords.

Suppose we are researching keywords for an information site on the side effects of some dreaded disease like cancer. The words like Chemotherapy Radiation WBC count etc might be a promising seed keyword because they would lead us to disease of Cancer or Malignancy.

The greater the number of promising seed keywords you have at the start of a project the more comprehensive your final results will be.

Jotting down notes will get you started but it won’t give you anything near a full list of possibilities you’ll need to do something to stimulate your creativity.

Get yourself secluded in a separate room and give some time to think about this keywords.

Read some magazines and articles about the disease and just note down the main points from the articles which are relevant to the disease. Than prepare a list of some words which you think could be the ideal keywords for your research.

Step 2: Find Related Keywords

We’re obviously very proud of the service we can offer webmasters at Wordtracker because it provides two main types of keywords: ‘related keywords’ and ‘long tail keywords.’

Related keywords are words that are often used in a particular subject area. For example related keywords for ‘back pain’ would include ‘sciatica’ herniated disc and ‘spinal problems’; related keywords for ‘home business’ would include ‘weekend entrepreneur’ or ‘working from home’.

Long tail keywords for ‘back pain’ would be ‘back pain treatment’ ‘lower back pain’ and ‘exercise for back pain’; long tail keywords for ‘home business’ would include ‘home business opportunities’ ‘how to set up a home business’ or ‘home business support. We’ll take those seed keywords that we collected from the magazines and look for ‘related keywords’ for each in turn. You may be tempted to delve into detail but you should resist this temptation for now. Find as many related concepts as possible you’re not looking for the first right answer but for many right answers.

If we are researching a web site on buying property overseas we’ll not only be interested in keywords such as ‘homes abroad’ ‘property abroad’ and ‘international property’ but also ‘international mortgages’ ‘ global real estate’ ‘property rights’ ‘buying off plan’ ‘health insurance abroad’ and ‘expatriates.’

Always look for niche opportunities. Keyword research is one of the most effective ways to identify niche markets that others have failed to recognize.

This process should give you hundreds of related keywords. You can now test their popularity how often each word is searched for on average every day. These numbers together with your own assessment of how important the keywords are for your business allow you to prioritize your keyword lists.

Step 3: Map out Your Web Content Structure

You can use the keywords to map out the content of your site. Group them into themes for example ‘legal pitfalls’ might be grouped with ‘property rights’ as part of a major section on the laws of buying and owning property overseas.

How you perform this grouping task is entirely up to you. You should aim to have groups that reflect your products and services and are targeted to specific target markets. Start with 6 to 10 themes and then build on this later.

Step 4: Find Long Tail Keywords

Let us go into the details of this subject. The keywords you’ve grouped into themes are the starting point for digging into the long tail. Take each of the keywords you’ve researched in turn and analyze how they’re used in longer search terms. For example ‘property abroad’ is used in these longer search terms:

property for sale abroad

property abroad

investment property abroad

buying property abroad

mortgages to buy property abroad

mortgages second property abroad

residential property investments abroad

eco investment property abroad

resale property abroad

Next look at the daily search counts to get an idea of the relevant importance of each term. Using this technique you can very quickly build up a matrix of hundreds if not thousands of keywords.

Step 5: Create Your Detailed Content Plan

Now start looking for specific content ideas. I’ll often go back to my original notes and follow this formula to create content ideas:

Hot issue Popular keyword = Content Title

If for example you know that working with local estate agents and officials is a hot issue you could combine this with the keyword ‘homes abroad’ to create the content title:

‘Legal pitfalls in buying a home abroad’

Don’t be afraid of highly competitive terms. Include them in your web site copy even if you have no immediate chance of ranking well for them you’re laying the foundations for the future.

Good keyword research helps map out a detailed content plan. This means that you won’t waste time on irrelevant content but will focus on highly relevant content ideas that will bring the traffic you’re after.

Keyword Research Complete? Now that you’ve established your focus you’re ready to start creating your content. But your keyword research needs to be an ongoing process. Once you’ve published your pages your need to monitor your performance make adjustments accordingly and then systematically expand the keywords that you rank well for. We shall discuss about this in details in our forthcoming articles.

About the writer:  Head SEO Marketing at AIT India

Website Accessibility One Size Doesnt Fit All

Website accessibility is all about enabling website users your customers to access and use your online business service in a way that suits them. It is an allinclusive approach to website design and development and one that you cannot afford to neglect especially in the current economic climate.

The law states that businesses must make reasonable adjustments to ensure that their website considered a business service is accessible to all and does not discriminate against any member of the public by being unreasonably difficult or indeed impossible to access and use.

However legal stuff aside accessibility is not just about disability. Statistically your customers are likely to fall in to at least one of the following categories:

• Physically Disabled Including blind deaf and the visually impaired. There are currently up to 10 million disabled adults in the UK
• Colour Blind. 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some form of colour blindness in the UK
• 60 Plus. More than 20 of the UK population are 60 or over
• English As A Foreign Language. There are estimated to be approximately 2.1 million foreign nationals currently working in the UK
• Users Of Mobile Technology. Mobile internet usage has increased by 25 in UK
• Not Using Internet Explorer. 47 currently do not use Internet Explorer to browse the internet
• Low IQ. Information displayed on websites should be accessible to those with below average IQ
• Dyslexia including variants of. Dyslexia accounts for more than 10 of the population in the UK
• Inexperienced Internet Users. We cannot assume that all website users know how websites typically work

There are many reasons why your website should be accessible:
Complying with the law ensuring good website design and development standards because its morally right and/or it makes great business sense.

Clearly youd have to be bonkers to ignore the vast potential customer base in the categories listed above.

What Are The Benefits For My Business?
The benefits of ensuring website accessibility far out way any costs involved in the redevelopment of your website. Here are just a few benefits of having an accessible website:

• An improved business image promotes credibility and confidence providing reassurance for your customers.
• Through standards based website design and development search engine rankings are likely to improve resulting in more traffic to your website and therefore potentially more business.
• Common sense tells us that if your market is opened up to a wider audience you are more likely to generate more business.
• Through good design and development and the separation of content and presentation websites are more efficient and economical to manage and administer.
• Compliance = No legal worries
• Accessibility goes hand in hand with good website usability which is beneficial for all website users and can result in up to 100 increase in online business

Convinced? 10 Things You Can Do Today
This is obviously just an overview of website accessibility and is by no means meant to provide you with the information needed to assess your website accessibility comprehensively however to obtain a quick snapshot of your website; here are 10 things you can do today:

• Can you resize your text? If your website doesnt allow the user to change the text size this is a sure sign that your website is currently not accessible to all.
• Can your users change the way in which your website is viewed for example colour contrast? It is important that users can choose various colour combinations of text and background colour such as a softer background or highcontrast combinations.
• When you roll over your website images do you see a descriptive name for the image? If you answer no you will need to add alt tags to your images.
• When you roll over decorative images or images used as bullet points do you see a descriptive name for the image? If you answer yes you should think about the relevance of this. There is some debate as to whether alt tags should be included on decorative images spacers or bullet points. To be WAI WACG compliant The World Wide Web Consortiums Web Accessibility Initiative Web Content Accessibility Guidelines it is stated that all images must have alt tags including decorative images and images used as bullet points etc however it is recognised and we would agree that for screenreader technology this is not necessarily the best approach and the alt tags should be left blank as there is no meaning to convey. To add an image description in this instance may cause confusion or disorientation.
• Does your website have a sitemap? If not you should provide one. This not only helps human users that cant find what they want on your website but also helps search engines to index your website properly and therefore potentially improve your search engine ranking.
• Do you provide easytoaccess information about how to use your website? If you do include accessibility tools on your website tell your users how to use them. Provide help with regards to using forms or tools on your website.
• Do you use click here next or more in links on your website? If so think about providing a more meaningful phrase in the text of the link. Not only will this improve your users understanding of the link but you will also gain brownie points for your search engine ranking if you link this in with your keywords on that particular website page.
• Is your website designed with the content and presentation separate? If you dont use stylesheets for the design of your website it is possible that some assistive and mobile technologies wont be able to comfortably access and use your website.
• Check your website from a mobile device or a different browser. You may be surprised to see the results.
• Contact a website developer today and ask for a free basic accessibility review.

Take time to understand your users and how they use your website. Dont assume they are all the same.

As technology and the way we use the internet changes accessibility should be regularly reviewed and should be considered an ongoing process. This doesnt have to be a burden carried out inhouse and can be outsourced very easily without interruption to your online business services.

Sheila Dale Design4Usability
www.Design4Usability.co.uk
Contact us for a Free Basic Accessibility Review
November 2008

References:
Equality and Human Rights Commission The Age of Difference November 2007
The Institution of Engineering and Technology Colour Vision Defects July 2007
National Statistics Population gt; Ageing gt; More pensioners than under 16s for first time ever August 2008
Statistics Commission Foreign Workers in the UK December 2007
Nielsen Online Mobile Internet Growth 8x Greater than PC Based Internet Growth November 2008
W3Schools monthly statistics and trends October 2008
British Dyslexia Association Pennington B F 1991 Diagnosing Learning Disorders New York; Guilford
Useit.com Jakob Nielsen

About the writer:  Design4Usability telephone 0845 680 1079 offer high quality bespoke website development and content management systems to businesses based in the Midlands and throughout the UK.