Website Design

Over the past 5 years that I have been working online, web site design and functionality has changed enormously. Check this video out:

When I first contemplated working online I had to learn Dreamweaver or Frontpage. XSitePro or blogs hadn't been invented then! Now, dreamweaver is best left to the geeks among us, Frontpage has gone off somewhere and sulked because it is hardly (if ever) used and XSitePro has become the program of choice for those who absolutely must have a static website...and there is often need for one of these.

The website building tool of choice today is definitely Wordpress blogs. There are of course others like Joomla, Drupal etc...but far and away, wordpress is the king of website tools because you can do so much with it design-wise.

As an affiliate marketer, you will need to know both a WYSIWYG static html platform and a blogging platform. 

How to Write Better Web Copy

I have recently read an article on how people read on the web. It is interesting to note that in the last five years people's web reading method hasn't changed. The only thing that has changed is how the researchers can better view the intensity with which they now read certain areas of a web page. This is very interesting information for anyone who is a web publisher and writes copy for web pages. For affiliate marketers it is essential reading here

Track Your Website and Blog Actions

It can be very frustrating when working diligently as an affiliate marketer or Adsense publisher only to find that the results don't change and few visitors have found your Web site. This can lead one into some precipitous actions of making several changes all at the same time and in the space of a couple of days. Then you find that you've had an influx of visitors or your earnings have gone up dramatically but you are still none the wiser as to what worked and what didn't.

So by being impatient and not recording in a diary what changes you have made to which website you can still end up as baffled or even more frustrated because you still don't know for sure which precise change made such a radical difference so you can 'rinse and repeat' the exact action.
No doubt you have heard this said many, many times before and if you are like me, you sort of said "Yes, I'll do that one day when I start getting some traffic" and of course, you start getting traffic but have no idea of how, where, why, what or even when. By that time you could well have missed a great opportunity simply because you weren't monitoring the site as closely as you should have been. It doesn't need doing hourly but daily is best. Yes, it's time consuming but so is going broke slowly.

If you can't or don't want to pay for a paid tracker, then at least use a free one like Google Analytics and there are other free programmes that do an excellent job. Some of these programmes have a paid version that will do even better. At least make sure you monitor all your websites at least weekly.

I have finally learnt that one of the many steps when designing, making and launching a new website is to make sure I add the tracking code into the site at launch time. I have made myself up a check list because I've found that there are so many 'little' things that have to done simply because they make a "Big" difference.

Slide Ins Need to Slither Out for Affiliate Marketing Success

Has anyone else noticed the rash of pop ups, slide ins, computer generated virtual assistants with a special offer deal that seem to have attached themselves to many info product pages lately? I find these pop/slide ins annoying and time wasters, and they show me their web site visitor a certain lack of respect. It reminds me very much of trying to walk out of a store in a mall and the shop assistant grabs you by the arm and drags you away from the door. Is this kind of behaviour effective marketing or good customer service? Not in Australia nor in most other countries I believe.

I, and I'm sure many others, would be rather interested in seeing what the testing results of this type of marketing is showing. For my part, I would have to question the effectiveness of it and I would also like to see the results of an actual survey that some one has run? The other thing that would be interesting to know is how many repeat visitors do they get back?

If someone was to treat a customer like that in real life, wouldn't you go and tell all your friends and neighbours about the rudeness of the shop assistant in that store? I would and then I'd have a bit of a laugh at the ineffectiveness of it. If the owner of the store found their shop assistants behaving like this, do you think that the offender would still have their job at the end of the day/week?

Why do some Internet marketers think they can hide behind the anonymity of the Internet and practise these bad-mannered disrespectful sales pitches? Are they all so desperate for a sale? Trying to sell me something this way reeks of desperation to me and if I feel uncomfortable about the treatment I'm receiving why would I want to buy anything from their website?

I believe it's time the slide-in computer generated virtual assistant packed up their pixels and took a very long walk of a very short plank.