Affiliate Progress

One of the aspects of setting up a new project that I find most interesting is investigating and deciding on the best affiliate networks and affiliate products to monetize my new baby. Finding the best affiliate networks is an area that is sometimes not given the amount of consideration it really deserves. It needs research to see what affiliate networks are available for the niche products that you wish to promote, and amongst other things, you need to consider the returns you are hoping to make and the promotional tools that the affiliate networks provide.

This post aims to highlight some of the areas you may wish to consider when deciding how to monetize your blog or site. (more…)

Do you operate a comment policy on your blog? I think spam is a curse at the best of times, but sometimes it is borderline, and how do we decide where that line is to be drawn. I certainly don’t want to hack off any genuine visitors, but neither do I want be used as a traffic generating tool by spammers.

Right from the start I’ve had a rather loosely defined policy which I’ll describe below, but now that the number and type of comments I’m getting are steadily on the increase, do I need a re-think? Should I tighten things up a little? (more…)

In the last of my six part series – Free Affiliate Tools – we will cover free affiliate reports and guides. Whilst there is a huge amount of free information available to the budding affiliate marketer on web sites, blogs and forums you can also often get free reports and “how to” guides from some of the world’s most successful marketing gurus just by signing up to their news letter.

Use a webmail account like Google Mail if you don’t want to give out your primary e-mail address, but you can certainly learn an awful lot about marketing from the news letters and offers that you will inevitably receive from these guys. Take a close look at both the products and marketing techniques they use, nobody is forcing you to buy anything, and you can always unsubscribe when you want to, so you are in a win-win situation. (more…)

Even if you use an online site builder or a content management system such as WordPress, at some stage in your affiliate marketing career (probably sooner rather than later!) a little knowledge of HTML is going to be needed. After you’ve mastered some HTML, or started building your own pages, a knowledge of using FTP applications will also be most useful.

So in part five of my – Free Affiliate Tools – series we are going to take a look at what free resources are available as a reference for Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), what free HTML editors are available, and I will also point you towards some free File Transfer Protocol (FTP) applications.  (more…)

In part four of my series – Free Affiliate Tools - we will be looking at what free tools are available to measure and provide statistics on the traffic that your sites and blogs are receiving.

In the distant past of the Internet this largely consisted of placing a visitor counter on your website and watching the numbers slowly creep up! Luckily these days things are a lot more sophisticated and there are many ways of keeping tabs on how your site or blog is performing. (more…)