What Is An Affiliate Program?

Affiliate programs allow you to make money by referring your website visitors to a specific companies products or services. Most affiliate programs are free and can be setup in about 5 minutes.

After you have completed your registration you’ll be given a unique id within a link to the website for example, www.VendorSite.com/affid=1234. When you make your own website you’ll simply link to the vendors website using this unique URL.

When a visitor to your website clicks on that link a cookie is placed on their computer to ensure that you are given credit for the referral. If the visitor completes a purchase with the vendor you’ll receive a pre-defined percentage of that sale.

Some companies pay you per lead such as mortgage companies. What happens here is if the visitor completes a form or some other lead generating method you are paid for that as well. As I mentioned, you’d run into this will mortgage companies in addition to insurance companies, credit card companies, etc.

Low Startup Cost

As I mentioned, setting up an account as an affiliate is generally free so it’s a great way of making some additional money without having to come up with any sort of money up-front.

If you happen to have a particular subject that’s related to your website you can search for companies that offer affiliate programs and link to them. This is your best option because if your website is related to cars it doesn’t make much sense to have affiliate links to baby gifts.

Additional Information

I have created an ‘how to’ page on making money with affiliate programs if you’re interested in reading information on affiliate marketing and easy ways to manage you’re affiliate campaigns it’s definitely worth reading.

Best regards,
David L.
www.WebsiteToad.com

He’s been a friend of mine for many years so I knew that he knows a lot about Ford Mustangs and he stays up on the latest Mustang trends. I mentioned that he may consider making a blog and adding Google Adsense to it. Once I talked to him about the ease of it and his only investment is $6.95 a year for a domain name and about $4 a month for web hosting he was sold.

We registered the domain name and setup a hosting account and then we installed Wordpress on the domain name and found a free Wordpress template to give it the feel that he wanted. It took us about 30 minutes to the the blog online.

After that I had him sign up for a Google Adsense account and added the code to a couple of places to his blog. After that he was ready to go and started writing various posts related to Ford Mustangs.

That was about 5 months ago and since then he says that he’s bringing in about $500 a month through his Google Adsense account. It’s not something that he’s going to retire on but as he builds a larger following he’ll start to earn more. Plus it sure helps with the way gas prices are today.

The other thing is that he’s considered starting a couple more blogs and if he can get them to the point where he is now he can make a nice supplemental income for about 1 hour worth of work a day.

What I’m getting at is that it’s very easy and affordable to make money online especially when you can integrate something like Google Adsense onto your blog. It’s free to setup an account and after you go through a short wizard you’ll be given a snippet of code that you can place in your blog.

If you’re interested in reading more on making money with blogs take a look at ProBlogger.net. In my opinion it’s the authority on the internet about how to monetize blogs.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

In my opinion the best book for SEO is SEO Book. This is the most complete source for optimizing your website for search engines. Aaron Wall, the author, has taken the time to write an entire book on SEO and has done a fantastic job. Realizing that you’re new to website building I would strongly suggest that you spend the $79 for this book as it starts from scratch and build from there.

The great thing is that he tests his theories on his own personal sites and has developed the book based on his results. The great thing is that once you’ve purchased the book he offers a huge selection of free SEO tools to help you with your search engine rankings.

Here’s my personal case study that had me floored. I run the website SteakBrands.com and used to rank very well for my top keywords. Well slowly I started to slide down the top 10 until I was nowhere to be found. I purchased SEO Book and read it cover to cover even though certain parts were very basic. I then registered SteakBrandingIrons.com and built the site based on the information that he suggested.

Well, since I published the new website based on Mr. Wall’s recommendations, I rank in the top 5 of majority of my top keywords as well as number 1 for a ton of other keywords related to steak branding irons. His suggestions took some time to put in place and were very time consuming but in the end I achieved the search engine rankings that I expected.

With all of this said, I wouldn’t refer you to a product that I didn’t stand behind and this is definitely one that I would suggest. Also, Mr. Wall has a blog that he updates just about every day that has great tips for SEO.

My suggestion is to take a look at the SEO Book site and the testimonials. You’ll be very happy that you did!

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
CEO/Founder – www.WebsiteToad.com

For those are unfamilar with an online website builder, it’s an online application that will allow you to build a website without needing to purchase software that needs to be loaded on your computer. You simply visit the login page and everything is there ready for you to make updates from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection.

This is ideal for those who just want to put up an informational site with some text, photos & images related to their business without having to learn all of the HTML involved with building a website we offer Website Tonight.

Online Website Builder Demo:

URL: login.websitespot.com
Username: wssdemo
Password: Wsspassword1

Popular Online Website Builder Features:

1. Step by step setup
2. No HTML needed
3. 100+ Templates
4. Video & Audio Uploads
5. Easily publish changes
6. Click Here For A Complete List Of Features

This will allow you to login and see exactly how easy it is to change templates add images & text as well as publish your website. Once you’ve made some changes & published them you can view your changes at www.WebsiteSpotDemo.com.

The great thing is that you can update the template that you choose at any time and we offer upwards of 100+ templates to choose from. It’s definitely an option for building a website without the struggles of developing a website from scratch.

Another great thing is the built in HTML modules that will allow you to customize your site with HTML if you happen to need to insert HTML code or you’d like to have more control over the look of your site. You won’t find this flexibility with a lot of online website builders so please be sure to take a look at this when you’re testing out our demo.

Please contact me with any questions because I think that once you’ve had a chance to try the demo that you’ll love the online website builder.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

Search engines are always changing and the competition is becoming more informed so it’s important to visit sites that are dedicated to the subject of search engine optimization. By far, my favorite site in regards to keeping up with the latest search engine trends & releases is definitely SEO Book.

Tip 9: Reciprocal Linking Campaigns

I’m going to write a couple of in-depth posts on linking in the near future but I wanted to at least give you a heads up to again at least let you know that it exists and to get you thinking about it. Reciprocal links are links to another website placed on your site in exchange for links back to your site from theirs. This is a very important method of building link popularity which is an instrumental part of getting high search engine rankings.

It’s actually very simply to do but there are certain things to think about. Basically you come up with an agreement with the webmaster of a website related to your topic and you place a link of your website to their website and in exchange the webmaster places a link back to you.

The most important aspect of reciprocal links is the ‘anchor text’ that’s used to link back to you. For example, you have a website name ChromeWheels.com, you would want the anchor text from the other website to use the anchor text of chrome wheels in the link back to your site. It would appear similar to this: Chrome Wheels. The code would appear something like this <a href=”http://www.chromewheels.com”>Chrome Wheels</a>. This is basically telling search engines that this page is related to chrome wheels.

As far as I know, it’s not important if the link is case sensitive such as ‘chrome wheels’ or ‘Chrome Wheels’. This definitely doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter so I would just request that it be formatted the same with all websites. Also, I request that all links contain the www such as www.chromewheels.com rather than just chromewheels.com.

It’s best to manually contact potential link exchange partners but I use Arelis to manage my link exchange campaigns as you can run a script to see if anyone has removed links to you plus a variety of other features that makes managing a link campaign easy. Again, I would never use it to automate link exchange request emails but it’s a great way to manage your current links.

Again, I’m going to do an couple of in depth posts on reciprocal links but I wanted to at least bring it up.

Tip 9: Meta Tags

In my opinion, as well as many other people, the most important meta tag is the Title tag. This is the tag that displays at the top of your screen and is a very important part of SEO.

A couple of other tags that are used are the Description & Keyword tags. As people have abused them by stuffing them with keywords, related & not related to their website, they have become less effective. With that said, you’d never find a page of mine without these two tags because it definitely won’t hurt, just keep them related to your web page without stuffing them with too much repetition of your keywords.

Here is how a basic meta tag would appear on a web page. I’ll again use the chrome wheels example.

<HTML>
<head>
<title>ChromeWheels.com – Chrome Wheels, Custom Rims and Tires</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”ChromeWheels.com offers the internet’s largest selection of chrome wheels. Shipping discounts available on all chrome wheel and tire packages.“>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”chrome wheels, chrome wheel, custom rims, tires, rims, discount chrome wheels“>
</head>

I’ll save some additional meta tags such as ‘revisit-after’, ‘robots’ & ‘distribution’ for another post but these are definitely the tags that you don’t want to miss when creating your pages.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

Tip 7: Images & Photos

How often to you revisit websites that don’t spice up their site with images or illustrations? For me, it’s rarely. I like to look at images & photos because it can answer questions without having to read through tons of content.

It’s important to place images on your website but don’t over do it. Many people still use dial-up for their internet connection so it’s important to use images that aren’t to large or exceed 72 pixels/inch. Most monitors don’t resolve more than 72 pixels/inch so you’re just making the images larger for no reason at all.

Another important part of images is the ‘alt’ tag, obviously search engines can’t figure out what an image relates to so it’s important to give your file a descriptive name and use the ‘alt’ tag. A good example of this would be something on the order of <img src=“chrome-wheels.jpg” alt=“Chrome Wheels” />.

To break this down you’re telling the search engine that your image is named ‘chrome-wheels.jpg and the alt tag is another way of describing to the search engines what the image is related to. It’s important to use the alt tag as often as possible because it’s a way of optimizing your web page for search engines.

There is a huge selection of image editing software on the market from free options like Gimp to higher priced editors such Adobe PhotoShop & Adobe FireWorks. I personally use both, I use PhotoShop for editing photos and I use FireWorks for creating and editing images such as banners & buttons. The later two offer advanced features so be sure to research them before making a decision.

Tip 8: Blogs

I’m running long so I’m going to make this short. Blog is short for Web log that consist of regularly updated entries displayed in reverse chronological order. Essentially an online diary or journal. The great thing about blogs is that search engines love blogs because of they are generally updated with new content and generally updated with unique content. You’ll find that almost every single web host offers a blog application with their hosting services.

There are a lot of different options in regards to blogs from hosted versions such as BlogSpot.com to versions that you host under your own domain such as WordPress. I personally use WordPress because I can host it on my own server and there are so many features that you can add to it. By the way, no matter which you choose, blog software generally is free.

You’ll find that we offer WordPress with all of our web hosting accounts as well. One final thing, I’ve covered just a very small area of blogs. In my opinion the best website regarding blogs and how to make money with blogs is at ProBlogger.net. I personally check with ProBlogger.net about 2 – 3 times per week so it’s a great idea to check them out.

In my next post I’m going to cover a couple of SEO, search engine optimization techniques.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

Tip 5: Styling Your Website With CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets which is used to describe how an HTML document should be formatted. CSS is great for styling a website within 1 CSS file which allows you to update your entire website by updating this 1 file rather than going into every page and making the updates. This is a real time saver that also cuts down on the HTML code within a web page.

Look at it this way, say your website is made up of 100 pages and the text for your content is black. One day you decide you’d like it blue instead. Rather than opening all 100 pages and updating the color, you can open you CSS page, update the color within the CSS, upload it to your server and you’re done. It’s that simple, update 100’s if not 1000’s of page by simply updating 1 page.

CSS can be used to define text, tables and more. There is a lot to learn about CSS and a great place to start is by visiting http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp.

One note, in a previous post I had mentioned purchasing website templates. Well most likely the styling on the website template pages are based on CSS so if you download a website template you’ll have a CSS template already setup which you can mess around with to learn a bit more about it. Just be sure that you have a backup of the CSS file before you start testing it out.

Tip 6: Writing Website Content

Writing website content seems like an easy thing right now as you’re full of ideas but as time goes on writing content is an area that becomes more and more difficult. The sentiment going around is that content is king when it comes to search engine optimization. Search engines such as Google want unique content on websites.

When you’re first starting a website it’s not too difficult to come up with new unique content but as your site grows it becomes tougher. The best thing to do is become familiar with the subject of your website and the content will come naturally.

One of the biggest things that you need to know is who your audience is. For me, I realize that I’m writing for people that are new to building websites so I need to start from scratch and write in a way that my visitors can understand. I don’t want to use a bunch of acronyms that seem simple to me. Rather than right that it’s great to use CSS, I need to explain what CSS is, as I did at the beginning of this post, and explain what the benefits are.

I plan on writing a detailed post on writing website content in the short future but I felt that this was important enough to at least briefly cover now.

In closing, you’ll find that both of these tips are important to building a website and if you take the time to write unique content that search engines will reward you for your hard work.

In my next post I’m going to cover graphics & images and creating a blog.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

Tip 3: Naming The Files That Make Up Your Website

This is actually a very important step when you build a website because it’s part of the SEO, search engine optimization process. One of the first things that I do after determining the subject of my website is to do a bit of keyword research. This is going to tell you what people are searching for related to your website. I personally use Wordtracker for all of my keyword research. They offer a paid & a very basic free tool for researching keywords related to your website.

The reason that I do keyword research is that I try to use keywords in all of the pages of my website. If the keyword is more than 1 word you’ll definitely want to seperate the words with a dash (-) rather than a space or an underscore (_). Quite a bit of research has been done and found that search engines such as Google prefer the dash.

You’ll see in my site at www.SteakBrandingIrons.com that I’ve done exactly that. For example, a branding iron that I offer is a Jeff Gordon branding iron and have named the page jeff-gordon-steak-branding-iron.php. This is a way of letting the search engines understand what your pages are about.

One other thing, it’s always good to structure your site by category. For example, say you sell car parts. You would create a folder in your web editor called wheels, tires, radiators, etc. Then within those folders you would save the files that relate to that product.

Here’s an example, say you own BillsCarParts.com and you review or sell tires, wheels & radiators. You are creating a page about chrome wheels and you save it as chrome-wheels.htm in the wheels folder. When you FTP, discussed next, the website to your hosting plan this page would be found at BillsCarParts.com/wheels/chrome-wheels.htm.

This is great for search engines plus it’s easy for you to organize your files. The bottom line is try to come up with a good blueprint of how you’d like to structure your website before just going in and creating a bunch of files and putting them in 1 folder.

Tip 4: FTP or File Transfer Protocol

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, which is the way that you move the files that make up your website from your computer to your web hosting plan. I personally use FileZilla it’s free to download.

Many website editors come with built in FTP capabilities but I find that they are slower plus FileZilla allows you to do some advanced features is changing files directly within your web hosting plan and change permissions of files which is common when you get into scripts such as CGI & PHP. I’ll explain them further in the future but I at least wanted to let you know why you may consider FileZilla over your built in FTP program.

That’s about it, in my next post I’ll cover tips 5 & 6. At this point I would take the time to get familiar with what I’ve reviewed above and check back tomorrow for a couple more tips.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
CEO/Founder – www.WebsiteToad.com

Tip 1: Choose Your Website Editor

There are a few different editors on the market which make building a website much more simple without having to be extremely knowledgeable in HTML. One term you’ll see is ‘WYSIWYG’ which stands for ‘What You See Is What You Get’. You’ll find that they are referred to as WYSIWYG Editors.

The two most popular website editors are Microsoft FrontPage & Adobe DreamWeaver. Just a note, FrontPage is being phased out but it’s what I will continue to use because it’s so similar to Microsoft Word. The issue is that they won’t be adding any new features but it still works great.

With that said, you may want to consider DreamWeaver because it does the basic functions of designing a page plus, as you grow, it has the capability of performing the advanced items such as CSS, PHP, among other functions. The great thing is that DreamWeaver is so popular that there are sites out there that cater to DreamWeaver templates, which is covered later.

The catch is that DreamWeaver & Frontpage are a bit pricey so if you’re on a budget you should take a look at CoffeeCup or an online website builder such as Website Tonight. They’ll give you the tools to build a basic website and as your skills grow you can always move into an editor such as DreamWeaver in the future. I would check with eBay for some better pricing on FrontPage & DreamWeaver.

CoffeeCup offers 100’s of templates and is priced a bit better than DreamWeaver & FrontPage. You’re going to lose a bit of functionality but again, you can always move to DreamWeaver in the future. You can actually get a FREE download of CoffeCup by clicking here.

Either way, just be sure to research the products and find out what will work best for the type of website that you’re wanting to build.

Tip 2: Search For Website Templates

The easiest way to achieve a professional looking website is by finding a website template. A website template will provide the layout, images, & formatting of a web page and all you will really need to do is fill in the blanks with your content and images.

The great thing is that there is such a huge demand for website templates that you can find a template for about any subject that you’re site may be related to. Please keep in mind that you’re going to need a WYSIWYG editor to make the changes that you need so you’ll need to get into DreamWeaver or even Frontpage.

A couple of great places to view some templates are Dream Templates, Dot Com Builder, & The Template Store. The great thing about Dot Com Builder is that it is a subscription service and you can download unlimited templates from their collection of 100+ templates.

That’s it, I’m running long so I’ll save tips 3 & 4 for my next post. This should give you enough to do until tomorrow when I post the next tips.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

1. Databases – Databases are a structured collection of records that can easily be recovered via queries. There are thousands of needs for a database such as forms that collect information, the products in your online shopping cart, blogs, etc. Basically any information that you need to store and retrieve via a programming language such as PHP or ASP. There are 3 main types of databases that you should be familiar with, MySQL, SQL and Coldfusion. In future posts I’ll cover these the difference in these databases. I personally find MySQL to be the easiest to manage & setup. This blog actually uses MySQL. I would say that 10 databases would be the minimum number that any web hosting plan should offer.

2. Free software – It’s difficult to actually find a web hosting company that doesn’t offer some of the basic free applications such as forums, blogs, forms & shopping carts such as osCommerce. These are applications that can easily be installed on your web hosting account via a few clicks and some information. You’ll find that a popular group of free applications is Fantastico, it will generally contain Wordpress for blogs and osCommerce for online shopping carts. You’ll also find that Fantastico will offer some great scripts for Live Support, FAQs & Website builders. You can find a list of the free Fantastico scripts at http://www.netenberg.com/fantastico_scripts.php. Many companies will offer the complete list while others will only offer a select group of scripts. Be sure to take the time to find out the free scripts & applications that your web host offers before spending money on a propriety application.

That’s it, normally I would give a couple more features to look for but I’ll save that for my next post so that I don’t run too long. I realize that I have left certain items out but I’m trying to cut my posts down so please leave any comments with any questions or anything that I may have left out.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
CEO/Founder – www.WebsiteToad.com