By courtesy of Affiliate Programs College
Your affiliate program fortune is already
sitting in your pockets! You just don’t know it yet. Please allow me to
explain.
You have a 9-5, which, with the commute and
headaches, has turned into more like an 8-6. You maybe have kids, a
spouse, a dog, a car to repair, and a leaky faucet. You have yard-work,
housework, homework, and work-work.
What you understand that people are
making money online. You think that you could create a small fortune
through affiliate programs, if only you could make it fit in your
schedule. You understand some of the basic concepts of setting up a web
site. You have an idea for a site focusing on something you know a lot
about. You’re pretty familiar with making sure your META tags match page
content, and you’ve learned about getting traffic to your site. You know
that you can get traffic, because you have a unique perspective or
approach to the topic of your site. You might also at some point think
about selling some of your own products alongside the affiliate links you
have (or would like to) set up.
So, where will you find the time to run a
site, find affiliate programs, give your visitors great content to read,
and begin to create your Internet fortune?
The answer is in your thinking. Your
thinking has to help you realize that the fortune is not yet in your
wallet. The fortune is, however, already in your pockets. I’ll say that
again. The fortune is ALREADY sitting in your pockets.
How can your fortune be in your pockets?
Your fortune is in the pockets of TIME you have. You have ten minutes
here, and twenty minutes there. You have time while the pot is on the
stove boiling water, and you have time while you’re waiting for your kids
at their soccer practice.
You have pockets of time, and if you ever
want to have more than just pockets of time, you must learn to use the
pockets you do have more effectively, starting today.
This has as much to do with planning your
life as it does building a successful and income-producing web site. You
can take this skill and apply it all over the place for anything you want
to accomplish.
So how can you use your pockets effectively?
Decide
Make a decision that you are going to work on this project for at least 15
minutes each day, no matter what (you can take two days/week off). You
can work more than that, but you must work at least 15 minutes every day
on your site. Decide that you are going to make this site become reality
within 6 months. (Be realistic with yourself. If you’re only working 15
minutes/day, 6 months is a realistic goal.
Take action in the right direction
Begin with the end in mind. You have heard this before, but maybe you’ve
never applied it. I’m saying to you now that you should read this
article, and then apply the principle. Begin with the end in mind. Take
15 minutes/day for the next 5 days. Get your plan on paper. Figure out
what you want your site to look like. Look at the general layout. Keep
it simple, so that you can design it, or explain to someone else how to
design it. Lay out so that anyone can easily navigate to any page of the
site from any other part of the site. Put it on paper first. Have
friends (and even strangers if you like) review your site plan. Ask for
their honest feedback. Don’t be offended if they tell you that you might
try changing some things. Take what works and leave out what doesn’t.
Decide on a color scheme. Color is very important in marketing products.
Here is the hazard of not beginning with the
end in mind: You will spend hours of time working on completely unrelated
projects, surfing the Internet, and reviewing affiliate programs which
will not fit into the layout of your site. (Not having a layout for your
site would be like climbing a ladder that you couldn’t see the top of, but
you thought would lead somewhere good, only to realize once you reached
the top that your ladder wasn’t even leaning against the right wall.)
Start with the big picture of what you want your site to look like, and
work from that plan.
15 per day
Working on it 15 minutes/day, it probably will take 6 months to put
together a quality site, so break down the larger project into 15 minute
pieces. Work the plan and the design backwards. A good-sized site with
lots of content could be about 100 pages. Let’s say you’re building a
site about, oh, I don’t know… let’s say baseball bats. (It’s an example
for purposes of this article.
Your site might be broken up into 4 sections
like:
History of Baseball batsTypes of baseball bats
The baseball bats of famous players
Reviews and places to buy baseball bats
online
Each of these sections might have 22-25
pages each. So here’s how you break it down:
Every day, you’re going to create the content for 1 page in the History
section
Month 2:
Every day, you’re going to create the content for 1 page in the Types
section
...and so on.
At this point, all you have done is taken 15
minutes/day to write a short article about some aspect of the larger
section. Anyone can find or make 15 minutes of time every day, if this is
truly something that they want to do.
At the end of four months, writing 1
page/day, you will have written between 80-100 pages worth of content for
your site.
Now you might be thinking that you don’t
have 100 pages worth of content to write. That’s fine. Take the first
two months, develop a 35-50 page site, and then spend 15 minutes/day
researching, finding affiliate programs, and getting relevant links into
your site. Just use your pockets of time effectively.
#4. Bring it all together
You’re now in month 5, and you’re realizing how valuable your pockets
really are, because you’ve created a great site about baseball bats (or
whatever you want to create a site about), and you’ve done it in the
pockets of time you had. Now it’s time to take 15 minutes/day, and make
sure everything is working right, that your pages are aesthetically
pleasing, and that people can get around easily on your site. You will
also be using these 15 minutes/day to find affiliate programs for your
chosen topic, add the links to your site, make sure everything is running
well, and then get your site up online.
#5. Continue the process
In month 6, getting traffic to your site will be where you spend your
15 minutes every day. (How to get links and what kinds of sites you trade
links with will be reserved for another time, but continue the pocket
principle.
Use the pockets of time you have, and rather
than watching someone else on TV build their dream, start building your
own dream through online business. You can do it if you realize that you
do have small pockets of time, and then use the time in your pockets. If
you’re willing to do the work to make it happen, and are disciplined
enough to build pages and write content no matter what, you will be
successful. In short, you have got to start making your pockets more
valuable.
Thank-you for spending the fortune of your
last 10 minute pocket reading my article. I hope it helps you be more
effective at Internet affiliate marketing, and that you can apply these
ideas and the process elsewhere in your life.
Jonathan Kraft has been specializing in
Internet affiliate marketing for nearly 4 years. He works with a team
on
www.affiliateadvice.us, which has been designed to help people of all
design and ability levels to find and set up money generating sites
through affiliate programs.
To your affiliate success
Stanley Joshua Kudolo
Saturday, 24 November 2007
Thursday, 15 November 2007
Finding a good web host
Why do you need a good web host?
Without a good web host, you have no site. Without a site, you earn
no affiliate program income. Without affiliate program income...
well, you get the idea. This article will discuss some of the points
that you should consider when looking for a good web host.
Free or Paid?
For a first (or practice) site, or for a personal site, free hosting
can be a good solution. You will almost certainly have to put up with some
ads on your site, you cannot expect too much in the way of support, and there
will usually be major restrictions on using scripts, on bandwidth, on
actual page content, and on disk space. Having said that, many free hosts
have good online support, or forums, where you will find other users
willing to help. You may also find that the servers tend to be slow at
times which will affect users of your site.
A couple of free hosts are:
www.geocities.com
www.earthlink.com
For business sites, free hosting is really
not an option. This is partly because of the ads that will appear on your
site, over which you have little control. It is also partly because
you will have a ridiculously long domain name to deal with, such as
www.thefreehost.com/usersites/yoursite/. Mainly it is not a good
idea to use a free host for a business, because it projects a poor image
of the business. If a business cannot afford the small amount of
money it costs for paid hosting, often less than $150 per year, it is
difficult to expect potential customers to take them seriously.
How much Disk Space and Bandwidth?
How much disk space you need will depend both on how large you expect
your site to be. Also, what do you plan to feature on your site?
If the nature of the site is a Flash site, or one making extensive use of
video, audio, or large graphics, you will need more space than one that is
mainly text based.
AffiliateAdvice.us recommends that you keep
your site as text-based as possible, because that will help you to become
more easily listed in the search engines, but that's up to you.
For most newer sites, disk space and
bandwidth needs are usually modest. Statistically ,the average website is
less than 20MB. Being swayed to a more expensive hosting plan
because of a large disk space allocation may not be a great idea if you
are paying for a ridiculous amount of space you will never use. Make sure
that there is a means of upgrading your plan should your needs change in
the future.
Unless your site is likely to be extremely
busy from the outset, or you are making heavy use of Flash, video, or
audio, you are unlikely to need more than the standard bandwidth which
will be provided with standard hosting plan. In general, as the disk space
allocated increases, so does the bandwidth.
Individual Requirements
All sites have slightly different requirements and thus there is no 'one
plan fits all' solution. Make a list of featured that are most important
to you and use this when comparing hosts.
For example, you may need the latest version
of Perl, PHP Support, a large number of POP accounts, access to a secure
server, MySQL, etc. Or maybe you don't know what any of that stuff
is, and really, you just want to be able to build some pages, upload them,
and make sure that when you have problems, someone can help you out, so
perhaps a toll free support number matters more. It is important to get
your requirements clear so that when you compare hosts you are comparing
oranges with oranges, rather than oranges with lemons...
Oh and speaking of...watch out for the
lemons. There are a few web hosts around still who are not great,
and a few bad new ones pop up from time to time. They aren't good because
they don't deliver on what they promise you at the outset.
Any of the hosting programs that you can
resell through the
Web design affiliate
programs page on
affiliateadvice are great, and
our general advice is to use a web host that is recommended to you by
someone you know and/or trust.
For example, if you've been pleased with
your experience so far on affiliateadvice.us, and think you could benefit
from high quality service as well as a very inexpensive (less than
$8/month) web host, you might consider using our web host,
Powweb.
The bottom line is that
there are a variety of web hosts out there, and a variety of them offer
different kinds of services. If you don't know what your needs are,
or do know today,
but don't know what your needs may be in the future, it's a good idea to
have a package which either gives you everything you need from the outset,
for not a lot of money, or have a host that gives you the ability to upgrade when you need
to.
This article was reprinted
from
affiliateadvice.us, where you can
find
great affiliate programs and ways to generate online
income.
To your affiliate/internet success
Headmaster/Principal
Affiliate Programs College
Without a good web host, you have no site. Without a site, you earn
no affiliate program income. Without affiliate program income...
well, you get the idea. This article will discuss some of the points
that you should consider when looking for a good web host.
Free or Paid?
For a first (or practice) site, or for a personal site, free hosting
can be a good solution. You will almost certainly have to put up with some
ads on your site, you cannot expect too much in the way of support, and there
will usually be major restrictions on using scripts, on bandwidth, on
actual page content, and on disk space. Having said that, many free hosts
have good online support, or forums, where you will find other users
willing to help. You may also find that the servers tend to be slow at
times which will affect users of your site.
A couple of free hosts are:
www.geocities.com
www.earthlink.com
For business sites, free hosting is really
not an option. This is partly because of the ads that will appear on your
site, over which you have little control. It is also partly because
you will have a ridiculously long domain name to deal with, such as
www.thefreehost.com/usersites/yoursite/. Mainly it is not a good
idea to use a free host for a business, because it projects a poor image
of the business. If a business cannot afford the small amount of
money it costs for paid hosting, often less than $150 per year, it is
difficult to expect potential customers to take them seriously.
How much Disk Space and Bandwidth?
How much disk space you need will depend both on how large you expect
your site to be. Also, what do you plan to feature on your site?
If the nature of the site is a Flash site, or one making extensive use of
video, audio, or large graphics, you will need more space than one that is
mainly text based.
AffiliateAdvice.us recommends that you keep
your site as text-based as possible, because that will help you to become
more easily listed in the search engines, but that's up to you.
For most newer sites, disk space and
bandwidth needs are usually modest. Statistically ,the average website is
less than 20MB. Being swayed to a more expensive hosting plan
because of a large disk space allocation may not be a great idea if you
are paying for a ridiculous amount of space you will never use. Make sure
that there is a means of upgrading your plan should your needs change in
the future.
Unless your site is likely to be extremely
busy from the outset, or you are making heavy use of Flash, video, or
audio, you are unlikely to need more than the standard bandwidth which
will be provided with standard hosting plan. In general, as the disk space
allocated increases, so does the bandwidth.
Individual Requirements
All sites have slightly different requirements and thus there is no 'one
plan fits all' solution. Make a list of featured that are most important
to you and use this when comparing hosts.
For example, you may need the latest version
of Perl, PHP Support, a large number of POP accounts, access to a secure
server, MySQL, etc. Or maybe you don't know what any of that stuff
is, and really, you just want to be able to build some pages, upload them,
and make sure that when you have problems, someone can help you out, so
perhaps a toll free support number matters more. It is important to get
your requirements clear so that when you compare hosts you are comparing
oranges with oranges, rather than oranges with lemons...
Oh and speaking of...watch out for the
lemons. There are a few web hosts around still who are not great,
and a few bad new ones pop up from time to time. They aren't good because
they don't deliver on what they promise you at the outset.
Any of the hosting programs that you can
resell through the
Web design affiliate
programs page on
affiliateadvice are great, and
our general advice is to use a web host that is recommended to you by
someone you know and/or trust.
For example, if you've been pleased with
your experience so far on affiliateadvice.us, and think you could benefit
from high quality service as well as a very inexpensive (less than
$8/month) web host, you might consider using our web host,
Powweb.
The bottom line is that
there are a variety of web hosts out there, and a variety of them offer
different kinds of services. If you don't know what your needs are,
or do know today,
but don't know what your needs may be in the future, it's a good idea to
have a package which either gives you everything you need from the outset,
for not a lot of money, or have a host that gives you the ability to upgrade when you need
to.
This article was reprinted
from
affiliateadvice.us, where you can
find
great affiliate programs and ways to generate online
income.
To your affiliate/internet success
Headmaster/Principal
Affiliate Programs College
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