After being online for a while, I can say I have learned a lot --although I am quite sure I've got a lot more to learn. However, I thought I would share my early beginnings, along with the mistakes. I hope you enjoy the humor in it all.
Build A Website and Get Your Feet Wet In Affiliate Marketing
By Vickie J Scanlon
If you want to have a business online, you need to build a website. A website helps to promote your products, as well as, identifies you on the Internet. When I created my website, I went on the premise of "wanting to learn how to do it" as I experience the essence of building my business. I realize now, that even though I learned quite a bit, it did slow my progress down. Read on, I'll tell you want I mean.
A Little History First
After attempting to do typing on the Internet -- you're right -- my first newbie scam. It wasn't a true scam, because I was paid. However, I put in long hours for very, very little pay. Does that read green, naive newbie all over it? Yes, I'm afraid it does.
Needless to say, I gave that up and began looking for something that would give me a viable income -- affiliate marketing was the answer. Thus, my adventure began.
Getting a Web host and Domain
Well, after much reading, I realized I needed to get a web host and a domain if I was looking for a long-haul attempt at making it in affiliate marketing. I found a pretty good web host, paid for my domain -- And, now I was ready to build my website...
My first advise here is -- If you are inexperienced in web construction and you want a quick presence online, I would go with a web host that has web tools which includes Site Studio. It saves you time, money and gets you up and moving quickly.
Building My Website
I decided to use FrontPage (with a dash of HTML) to create my website -- in my first attempt.
Well, my first attempt was beyond words -- no one wanted to hurt my feelings -- the website was beyond bad and the color was what I call Medicine Yellow. But I was still in the glow, and I must say, working with blinders on. (This was my first mistake, my knowledge was limited -- I should have utilized Site Studio that was available to me.)
Needless to say, my first attempt did not stay up long. I went back to work, restructuring my ugly site -- my second attempt. I changed the color to a dark green with a base of gray. At the time it looked good, I thought. I actually got, "you're improving" from a friend. But somehow, it looked, well -- downtrodden.
Third restructuring came when -- after a year, I came upon an article that stated, "if you are using Times Roman -- even though it is easy to read, it reads amateur all over it." My first internal thought was, "Crap, I've got to do my website over again."
So, once again, I began restructuring my site. This time around, I decided to go with a lighter green for my website (just as well, I was going to have to change everything anyway), revamped by Google Ads (4 times), and changed the lettering to "Arial".
By the way, it has been said that either "Georgia" or "Arial" are the two fonts that will give your website a professional look. And you know -- they were right. After changing from "Times Roman" to "Arial" -- it gave my website a cleaner and more professional look.
Color as well, is important to your website -- it is part of your total presentation of your site to prospective visitors. How important is color -- if they don't like it, they are just a click away from removing your site from their vision.
After all the overhauling and tweaking of my website, I believe it is now presentable, brighter and personable to my visitors.
However, I, as well as you, should realize that you are never done with your website. You should always be looking at ways to improve the appearance, products, and service available to your visitors.
Becoming An Affiliate
You cannot be an affiliate marketer without affiliate products. With that being said, you can start your journey as an affiliate marketer by looking at the following sites for items that fit your theme and of which you can make a commission.
Commission Junction
ClickBank
BeFree
Now, don't be disappointed if some of the vendors turn you down in the beginning -- after you have your website up for a while, you will find that some vendors will be dropping you an email and requesting that you sell their product for them. It's flattering, however, be sure that you can blend it nicely into your website theme.
Getting Your Feet Wet
The water may be cold, tepid, or hot -- it depends on your skill level when you begin your journey online (I believe my feet were in the cold phase when I started) -- but you have to get your feet wet. Do your research, get all your ducks in a roll, and begin your journey. If you sit on the fence too long, you will never jump in.
Get what Internet tools you can, read all that you can, and stay positive, even if it means you have to step away from your computer for a day or two to regroup your thoughts.
As you can see from my experience, I jumped in, had some setbacks, some disappoints, but also some individual triumphs. The most important thing to remember is to close your mind to your own negative thoughts, and the negative words of those around you. Why? They can cripple you, and slow or even end your journey toward success.
If you know in your gut, that what you are doing will succeed -- say nothing -- just keep on keeping on. Soon, the naysayers will be saying something positive.
Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit her site at: My Affiliate Place for free tools, articles, ebooks, how to info, Report Your Scams, software and computers -- all geared to help the affiliate/small business person online.
Read more...
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Friday, March 10, 2006
Learning How to Use A Log File in Your Stats
Using a Log File in your stats can be useful in learning where your visitors are going on you web site and thus, discover what the visitor is looking for, and where the visitor's interest lies. It can help you to better optimize your site to accomodate the majority of the visitors experience -- and possible more sales. Take a look at this article by Zac Hewlett, it is very informative, a little technical, but very useful to know and learn-- if you want a better understanding of what and where your visitors are going on your site.
What's In The Mysterious Log File?
First things first, if your web hosting service provider doesn't allow you to download the raw log file, just go away. You need the raw log file to study and improve your web site performance.
What's A Log File?
Every time someone visits a page on your site, a record is made into the log file, which is saved on your server. You can find some interesting and useful information about the visitors in the log file.
Though log file formats vary, here I discuss the common elements.
Here's the contents of a single line of the log file from this site.
165.21.154.9 - - [03/Jul/2003:06:39:23 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 15549 "http://www.working-at-home-business.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; http://www.working-at-home-business.com/)"
Let´s see what's inside one by one.
User IP Address
165.21.154.9
This is the IP address of the visitor to our site. It tells you where the visitor is from. If you do a reverse DNS look-up on this IP number at DNS Stuff the result is bbcache-9.singnet.com.sg which belongs to "Singapore Telecommunications Pte Ltd". You really can't go further than that to identify a particular person. Otherwise, the Internet would be too dangerous. ;)
Yeah, that visitor was myself.
Date/Time
03/Jul/2003:06:39:23
The exact time of the visit. Combined with the IP address, it enables you to follow a particular visitor sequentially from page to page on your site. More on this later.
GMT offset
0400
This is the number of hours from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). So in our example the offset is 4 hours from GMT.
Action
"GET / HTTP/1.1"
This is either GET or POST. Except for a few CGI programs, this will typically be GET. That is, get a web page or an image that goes on that page.
This line records a command from my own browser to GET a web page from the root directory (Notice the slash "/"after GET) using a protocol named HTTP/1.1. This is the index page of our web site.
Another example.
"GET /web-promotion/index.shtml HTTP/1.1"
It records a request of this URL:http://www.singaporewebhosting.com/web-promotion/index.shtml
Return Code
200
The next item tells whether the action was successful or not. Our example is a return code of 200, which means "Successful Loaded". You've probably got the dreaded 404 "File Not Found" error code when the web page you were trying to find wasn't at that URL, so these return codes aren't entirely new to you.
Other common return codes include:
400 - Bad Request 401- Authorization Required 403 - Forbidden 500 - Internal Server Error
Size
15549
This is the size of the file sent, in this case 15549 bytes.
Referrer
"http://www.working-at-home-business.com/"
This tells us the web page where the visitor came from. In our example http://www.working-at-home-business.com/ ,which is also run by us.
You will find another extremely important piece of information here: the keywords by which your visitors found you. For example:
"http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=web%20hosting%20singapore"
It tells you someone found this page at Yahoo, using the keywords "web hosting singapore".
By studying referrer information, you will know exactly which search engine brings your how many visitors, what they were looking for when they found your site, which links partner is more valuable...then you will know how to spend your advertising dollars wisely.
Browser/Platform
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; http://www.working-at-home-business.com/)"
The final field in the log file tells you what web browser and operating system the visitor is using.
Mozilla is a code name that indicates the browser is Netscape-compatible. In this case, the visitor was using IE6.0 on a Windows NT operating system.
Why my URL is at the end again? Just a little fun. I customized my browser a bit. You won't see it anywhere else unless I did visit your web site. ;)
Tracing A Visitor
Here comes the more interesting part. Lets take a closer look at the log file and see how a visitor passes through your site. I will be abbreviating the log file to simplify this for you.
03/Jul/2003:06:39:23 GET / 03/Jul/2003:06:39:52 GET /web-hosting/index.shtml 03/Jul/2003:06:40:36 GET /newsletter/index.shtml 03/Jul/2003:06:41:04 POST /cgi-bin/followup/auto_followup.pl 03/Jul/2003:06:41:05 GET /newsletter/subscribed.shtml 03/Jul/2003:06:41:27 GET /support/index.shtml 03/Jul/2003:06:41:38
GET /support/log.shtml
First, the visitor went to the homepage of Singapore Web Hosting, then web hosting section to find out more about web hosting package. And then looked at newsletter page and filled up the subscription form. Our CGI script processed the form and the visitor was redirected to "thank you for subscription" page. This visitor continued reading some articles in support section.
I've skipped all the requests for images.
Why should you analyze a visitor's path? Because only when you do that, you begin to discover how a visitor uses your site: which door and from where she comes in, what interests her most, and where she leaves. Lots of small scientific observations will add up to an accurate picture of what a visitor actually does on your site.
That information is priceless if your goal is to optimize the experience, and lead your visitor to the most important parts of your site.
About the Author: Zac Hewlett at Singapore Web Hosting - Visit http://www.singaporewebhosting.com/ for more web site design and promotion articles, proven online marketing tips and techniques.
Read more...
What's In The Mysterious Log File?
First things first, if your web hosting service provider doesn't allow you to download the raw log file, just go away. You need the raw log file to study and improve your web site performance.
What's A Log File?
Every time someone visits a page on your site, a record is made into the log file, which is saved on your server. You can find some interesting and useful information about the visitors in the log file.
Though log file formats vary, here I discuss the common elements.
Here's the contents of a single line of the log file from this site.
165.21.154.9 - - [03/Jul/2003:06:39:23 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 15549 "http://www.working-at-home-business.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; http://www.working-at-home-business.com/)"
Let´s see what's inside one by one.
User IP Address
165.21.154.9
This is the IP address of the visitor to our site. It tells you where the visitor is from. If you do a reverse DNS look-up on this IP number at DNS Stuff the result is bbcache-9.singnet.com.sg which belongs to "Singapore Telecommunications Pte Ltd". You really can't go further than that to identify a particular person. Otherwise, the Internet would be too dangerous. ;)
Yeah, that visitor was myself.
Date/Time
03/Jul/2003:06:39:23
The exact time of the visit. Combined with the IP address, it enables you to follow a particular visitor sequentially from page to page on your site. More on this later.
GMT offset
0400
This is the number of hours from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). So in our example the offset is 4 hours from GMT.
Action
"GET / HTTP/1.1"
This is either GET or POST. Except for a few CGI programs, this will typically be GET. That is, get a web page or an image that goes on that page.
This line records a command from my own browser to GET a web page from the root directory (Notice the slash "/"after GET) using a protocol named HTTP/1.1. This is the index page of our web site.
Another example.
"GET /web-promotion/index.shtml HTTP/1.1"
It records a request of this URL:http://www.singaporewebhosting.com/web-promotion/index.shtml
Return Code
200
The next item tells whether the action was successful or not. Our example is a return code of 200, which means "Successful Loaded". You've probably got the dreaded 404 "File Not Found" error code when the web page you were trying to find wasn't at that URL, so these return codes aren't entirely new to you.
Other common return codes include:
400 - Bad Request 401- Authorization Required 403 - Forbidden 500 - Internal Server Error
Size
15549
This is the size of the file sent, in this case 15549 bytes.
Referrer
"http://www.working-at-home-business.com/"
This tells us the web page where the visitor came from. In our example http://www.working-at-home-business.com/ ,which is also run by us.
You will find another extremely important piece of information here: the keywords by which your visitors found you. For example:
"http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=web%20hosting%20singapore"
It tells you someone found this page at Yahoo, using the keywords "web hosting singapore".
By studying referrer information, you will know exactly which search engine brings your how many visitors, what they were looking for when they found your site, which links partner is more valuable...then you will know how to spend your advertising dollars wisely.
Browser/Platform
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; http://www.working-at-home-business.com/)"
The final field in the log file tells you what web browser and operating system the visitor is using.
Mozilla is a code name that indicates the browser is Netscape-compatible. In this case, the visitor was using IE6.0 on a Windows NT operating system.
Why my URL is at the end again? Just a little fun. I customized my browser a bit. You won't see it anywhere else unless I did visit your web site. ;)
Tracing A Visitor
Here comes the more interesting part. Lets take a closer look at the log file and see how a visitor passes through your site. I will be abbreviating the log file to simplify this for you.
03/Jul/2003:06:39:23 GET / 03/Jul/2003:06:39:52 GET /web-hosting/index.shtml 03/Jul/2003:06:40:36 GET /newsletter/index.shtml 03/Jul/2003:06:41:04 POST /cgi-bin/followup/auto_followup.pl 03/Jul/2003:06:41:05 GET /newsletter/subscribed.shtml 03/Jul/2003:06:41:27 GET /support/index.shtml 03/Jul/2003:06:41:38
GET /support/log.shtml
First, the visitor went to the homepage of Singapore Web Hosting, then web hosting section to find out more about web hosting package. And then looked at newsletter page and filled up the subscription form. Our CGI script processed the form and the visitor was redirected to "thank you for subscription" page. This visitor continued reading some articles in support section.
I've skipped all the requests for images.
Why should you analyze a visitor's path? Because only when you do that, you begin to discover how a visitor uses your site: which door and from where she comes in, what interests her most, and where she leaves. Lots of small scientific observations will add up to an accurate picture of what a visitor actually does on your site.
That information is priceless if your goal is to optimize the experience, and lead your visitor to the most important parts of your site.
About the Author: Zac Hewlett at Singapore Web Hosting - Visit http://www.singaporewebhosting.com/ for more web site design and promotion articles, proven online marketing tips and techniques.
Read more...
Friday, March 3, 2006
How to Grow Your Email List
Building your email list -- Alicia Forest offers you different methods to building your list -- and to keep it growing. It's a short read, but it does have value.
A Top Tip to Grow Your List
By Alicia Forest
If you want to have all the clients and customers you can handle, then embrace the business model of building an email list of people who are interested in what it is that you offer. But it's not enough to just add people to our list. You have to build a relationship with them so they get to know, like and trust you enough to make them want to invest some of their hard-earned money with you.
I'd like to share with you one of the many effective strategies I teach in 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success System(tm). This is a technique I personally implement on a regular basis, and because I do so, my list numbers increase on a regular basis as well.
Like all of the list building strategies I teach, this one is not costly nor difficult to implement - in other words, it's free and easy! Simply find forums that are comprised of your target market. Hang around for a bit, see what's being talked about, and when a question comes up that allows you to share your expertise, pop in and give the group your wisdom.
Most lists will permit you to attach a short email signature to your posts, and this is where you point people to where they can sign up for your list via your Pink Spoon (your freebie offering that entices people into your marketing and product funnel).
And, if it's appropriate, you can also refer to a more comprehensive answer that you have packaged as a product by saying something like, "by the way I've got a free report on this which answers your question more in-depth. If you'd like a copy, send me an email offlist."
If the person who posted the question found your answer of value, they will likely ask for a copy of your free report - and that's how they join your list. And not only will that person likely follow-up with you, but many others who are reading the posts will too. I've attracted more than 70 people to my list from just one posting like this.
If you make this strategy a consistent part of your overall marketing plan, it will help you increase your list numbers, position you as an expert, and spread the word about who you are and what it is that you offer.
Consistently providing valuable solutions to your niche will help you grow your own list full of those people who are ideal clients and customers for your particular offerings. Then if you make solution-oriented and compelling offers to your list periodically, your income will grow too!
Copyright 2006 Alicia M Forest and ClientAbundance.com
Alicia M Forest, MBA, Multiple Streams Queen & Coach(tm), & Founder of http://www.ClientAbundance.com , teaches coaches, consultants, online entrepreneurs and solo professionals how to attract more clients, create profit-making products and services, make more sales, and ultimately live the life they desire and deserve.
For FREE tips on how to create abundance in your business, visit http://www.ClientAbundance.com
Read more...
A Top Tip to Grow Your List
By Alicia Forest
If you want to have all the clients and customers you can handle, then embrace the business model of building an email list of people who are interested in what it is that you offer. But it's not enough to just add people to our list. You have to build a relationship with them so they get to know, like and trust you enough to make them want to invest some of their hard-earned money with you.
I'd like to share with you one of the many effective strategies I teach in 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success System(tm). This is a technique I personally implement on a regular basis, and because I do so, my list numbers increase on a regular basis as well.
Like all of the list building strategies I teach, this one is not costly nor difficult to implement - in other words, it's free and easy! Simply find forums that are comprised of your target market. Hang around for a bit, see what's being talked about, and when a question comes up that allows you to share your expertise, pop in and give the group your wisdom.
Most lists will permit you to attach a short email signature to your posts, and this is where you point people to where they can sign up for your list via your Pink Spoon (your freebie offering that entices people into your marketing and product funnel).
And, if it's appropriate, you can also refer to a more comprehensive answer that you have packaged as a product by saying something like, "by the way I've got a free report on this which answers your question more in-depth. If you'd like a copy, send me an email offlist."
If the person who posted the question found your answer of value, they will likely ask for a copy of your free report - and that's how they join your list. And not only will that person likely follow-up with you, but many others who are reading the posts will too. I've attracted more than 70 people to my list from just one posting like this.
If you make this strategy a consistent part of your overall marketing plan, it will help you increase your list numbers, position you as an expert, and spread the word about who you are and what it is that you offer.
Consistently providing valuable solutions to your niche will help you grow your own list full of those people who are ideal clients and customers for your particular offerings. Then if you make solution-oriented and compelling offers to your list periodically, your income will grow too!
Copyright 2006 Alicia M Forest and ClientAbundance.com
Alicia M Forest, MBA, Multiple Streams Queen & Coach(tm), & Founder of http://www.ClientAbundance.com , teaches coaches, consultants, online entrepreneurs and solo professionals how to attract more clients, create profit-making products and services, make more sales, and ultimately live the life they desire and deserve.
For FREE tips on how to create abundance in your business, visit http://www.ClientAbundance.com
Read more...
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