Yes, it is, and it can make you money too!

Easyart have a cool art website with loads of great quality prints to browse through and order online. It's great website that's easy to navigate through and order from.

And best of all, they have an affiliate scheme too! 15% commission for affiliates with an average order value of about £75.

Find out more from their website.

I was doing quite will with at least a post a day to this blog, but I got completely sidetracked this week when some thieving toe rags smashed my car window and made off with a whole load of valuble kit. I won't say what as it's just too embarrasing to think what a fool I was to leave the stuff in view. Oh well, we live and learn.

I'd not had too many dealings with the police before, and always taken most of the criticism they get with a pinch of salt, but it turns out it's all true! They really are a useless shower who really don't want to get involved in the business of actually solving crime. I've been on the phone to various people - I've no idea if they were actual police officers or civilians. If they were police officers, I'd be seriously worried.

But since my dealings with the police have been entirely over the phone and apparently they have some new online system too, it got me wondering: how long will it be before most of the police functions are outsourced abroad? And is there scope for affiliates to pick up this seemingly non-police police work and just pass across the real leads maybe? I might go and register a suitable name.. something like Police4U or Police365 so I'm ready for when the opportunities arise.

I downloaded the Woolworths data feed from Affiliate Window the other day.

Yikes!! That's a CSV file with over 200,000 rows.

Now normally I'd want to open up a CSV and make sure it's all in order, and maybe filter out stuff I don't want. So there I am, double clicking on this CSV, starting Excel when - eek! - it hits Excel's limit on the number of rows, 65536.

So what do you do with a CSV file of over 200,000 rows? I don't fancy putting it straight onto my production SQL database as I only want a subset of the data and it seems a bit OTT.

I guess I will have to try and import it into Access and do what I need to do in that.

Got me thinking.... I wonder who wins the prize for the biggest data feed in all of affiliate marketing? I know size isn't everything but I reckon Woolies must be one of the front runners?

I downloaded the Community Technical Preview of Microsoft Expression Web Designer. Expressions is a suite of applications for designers with three distinct flavours: Graphic Design (codenamed "Acrylic"), Interactive Design ("Sparkle") and Web Design ("Quartz").



So what's it like?

The web design app seems very much like a sequel to Frontpage - and considering there was no Frontpage in the Beta of Office 2007 I downloaded, I'm assuming that's exactly what it is.

A lot of the dialogue boxes are actually identical and the menus seem very similar.
So if you have used Frontpage, you will feel at home in Expression Web Designer very quickly.

To me, this seems like Frontpage but with a much bigger emphasis on web standards and a push towards using CSS for design. When you create a document, it inserts a valid Doctype (which you can easily switch to another). You can also choose from a selection of CSS page layouts such as 2 and 3 column pages with headers and footers.

Another immediately noticeable improvement is that if you used Frontpage and broke your page up using server side parts like "Includes" or .Net User Controls, when you were in Design mode you couldn't see what the page actually looked like. In Expressions, the Design view compiles the various components of the page so you can see what it looks like, even if the content is split between several includes or user controls. Of course, because Expression fully supports .net 2.0, you can work with Master pages and also see them fully compiled with content units in the Design view.

Expression Web Designer seems like a pretty decent application which I'd happily recommend to friends they try out. If you've been meaning to make the switch to CSS designs, this certainly makes it easy with the layouts available to you. I'll probably carry on using it in place of Frontpage and seeing what other features it has, and look forward to the final release.

"But who seriously uses Frontpage anyway?"

I know that Frontpage has a bad reputation amongst serious website builders and you'd probably get laughed for using it. Personally speaking though, I find it pretty simple to use and effective - I mainly use it as a nicer version of notepad which colorizes my code to make it more readable and lets me quickly switch to a Design view to see how it looks. It's also handy for getting all the attributes right when inserting .net controls thanks to Intellisense. I don't use any real Frontpage specific features and make sure it doesn't give me any code bloat.

What other Web Dev options are there?

There is another option which I am starting to use increasingly and that is Visual Web Developer from Microsoft. It's a really cool lite version of Visual Studio which is great for .net 2.0 development. I might revisit that subject with a detailed review later. I'll only really touch it if I am doing a really code heavy project.

I also downloaded Nvu a little while ago and wanted to love it but we just didn't really get along.

Way back when I was starting out, I tried Dreamweaver. It was kind of OK, but it filled the code with its own stuff and relied upon its own DLL file for the most basic stuff like pulling data from a database. At the time, it seemed cool but it's become a hassle to keep. My web host made some change to their security policy and all my sites using the Dreamweaevr DLL were inaccessible. So I have a heap of code I need to revisit and redo sans Dreamweaver's influence.

I was chatting to some Mac guy the other day and he was telling me how brilliant this product called iWeb is and how that is the future. Is it? What do you use for web dev? Use the comments form to let me know!

Thought I'd do a quick spot check of where I'm at on the search engines with this blog for the search term "affiliate schemes".

Let's start with the easiest....

MSN - #1
http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=affiliate+schemes

Cool, thats where I like to see it!

Yahoo - #6
http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=affiliate+schemes

That's ok... it's getting there.

Google - #???
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=affiliate+schemes

Yikes, no where to be seen! Looks like I gots work to do!

I buy a lot of books. Coding manuals, design guides and even personal development books. To be honest, I usually start off with good intentions, read the first chapter or two, get distracted and that's as far as I get.

But two books have stood out for me as absolute must reads and I have literally read them cover to cover and back again.

The first one was Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen. I came upon it purely by chance whilst having a look around the brilliant Waterstones in Picadilly, London. I wasn't aware of the time that Neilsen is a highly regarded expert on usability in technology. This book made me stop in my tracks and really consider for the first time about how important it is to have a website which as many as people as possible can access, and how essential it is to know that your user has certain expectations of how a website should work, and when you mess with those expectations too much, you risk using your user. This book taught me about the integrity of the web page metaphor, and the importance of the hyperlink. It made me consider the best ways to quickly display to the user the information they were seeking, with the most minimal amount of clicks.

It's no lie to say I consumed this book avidly and still refer back to it. Once you're in that state of mind, putting usability and function as a priority, it's hard not to feel anything but disdain for Flash sites with odd custom navigation sites which might just about be usable to someone who is higly web aware but will make little sense to many other people.

I worked in a job once where they had come up with a new corporate website. It was flash based and had some arrow based mechanism on the left hand side that let the user scroll up and down the visible text. Now, you have only got to look at any computer application to see that common convention is for a standard scroll bar on the right hand side, which not only lets you scroll up and down but also to judge how close to the bottom you are and how tall the page is. To consider throwing away that common convention is surely bizarre and can only be confusing your users. This is an example of where design forgets about its users.

The second book that is up in there in my must-read-every-word selection is... Prioritising Web Usability by - you guessed it - Jakob Nielsen assisted by Hoa Loranger. This book only came out a few months ago and is the sequel to Designing Web Usability.

He has updated his advice to take into account developments in technology, and user awareness of the web. He revisits recommendations in the first book to assess how relevant they are today as a uability problem. For instance, in his first book, he was very hot on hyperlinks preferably being blue and underlined. In his new book, he recognises - after thorough testing sessions - that the user awareness level of how the web works has moved on such that you no longer need to keep a hyperlink blue but he reminds the designer that it is still critical to keep the visited link as a different colour so as not to confuse the reader and cause them to visit the same pages twice. That's just an example of the kind of thing this book is about. Essentially its about meeting your user's expectations of a website and allowing them to get the most from it.

I don't really consider myself as a graphic designer, so it probably suits me in a way to focus on function and usability (even though I do slip up myself sometimes), but it does seem to make business sense: if you enable as many people, with as wide a range of computer skills as possible, to access the information you have, then you can create more sales opportunities. I don't follow all of Nielsen's advice all of the time - I often find myself taking shortcuts or being a bit slapdash - but these books act like a conscience and I know I'm being bad with those shortcuts and have it in mind that I will revisit that piece of dev and make it better.

Find out more about the work of Jakob Neilsen at his website - www.useit.com.

If you want to check out these books, you find them on Amazon:

Designing Web Usability - Jakon Nielsen
Prioritizing Web Usability - Jakob Nielsen & Hoa Loranger

One of my favourite things about Regnow.com is that everytime I make a sale, I get a little email telling me. I've set up an Outlook rule to put these messages into a folder and play a nice bell sound. So when I get back to my PC, I can easily see that I have more Regnow commission and how much.

This is a great system and works brilliantly!

So why don't all the affiliate networks do it?

Affiliate Window has a little app which popups and tells you when you've made a sale. It works ok and I like the cash register sound effect, but sometimes it's a hassle to have extra programs running and there was really no need for them to write a bespoke application to relay messages to me. There's an existing and well used method for relaying messages to other net users - it's called E-M-A-I-L.

At least they make the effort to do something though. With TradeDoubler, CJ, and Affiliate Future I have to log in and find out. It's time consuming logging into the different websites to see where you're at, and if you're anything like me, you'll be checking quite frequently.

So come on Networks, follow Regnow's lead and start emailing out to affiliates when a sale is made.

Maybe some networks do offer this and I didn't know? Let me know if they do.

Spread betting is an increasingly popular type of betting where your winnings - or losses - are determined by the the degree to which your prediction on an index or sporting event is correct. It has the potential for big wins, but also for big losses, so it's a bit of a dangerous game to play if you don't have the funds.

The affiliate payouts for Spread Betting are great - and usually range from about £50-£60.

Affiliate Merchants

Sporting Index is available on Commission Junction and Buy.At. They pay £60 for a signup. I like Sporting Index because they send you content and articles which are easy to throw up on a website.

City Index is on TradeDoubler and pays out £50 per sign up.

I've incorporated City Index and Sporting Index links into my own spread betting website, which you can check out here.

Have I missed a spread betting merchant? Email and let me know !

Found this Affiliate Scripts resouce, which is a repository of handy scripts for affiliate web masters. Personally, I prefer to do all my coding myself and there's not much on there at the moment for asp.net (for not much, read "none"), but it's still a nice idea and worth a browse.

http://www.affiliatescripts.co.uk

Labels: affiliate tools

The cliched view of an internet success story is that he or she would have their laptop by the beach and be making loads of money without getting up from the sand. But actually, that isn't a million miles from the truth - in this game, you really can work from anywhere providing you have a computer and net connection.

I could quite easily work from home, and in fact I do a couple of days a week, but there's a lot to be said for having to get up and actually go out to work sometimes, so I have a cool office in Greenwich which is right by the park. Going to hang out in the park is my version of working from the beach.

I also make use of Remote Desktop, which is built into Windows XP. It lets me connect up to my normal PC desktop in the office from any other net enabled PC in the world, which means if I am at home, or out somewhere else, I can always connect up to my computer in the office and access all my usual files, development tools and email.

If you're an affilliate marketer, where do you choose to work from?

Network marketing is an interesting area and often receives a bad press. From what I know of it, it usually involves selling a product to people, but also signing up people to resell the product and then claiming a percentage of the commission they earn through a tiered system. So you sign up customers and you sign up sellers.

Considering the negative association that network marketing has, I was suprised to find out that Tiscali broadband run such a scheme. I looked at the website and it seemed to have the usual kind of spiel: "Are you satisfied with your current job and income?", "become debt free", "change your life". To be honest, I find that kind of patter to be a little OTT and it would deter me, but maybe it works? I do know a friend of a friend who has signed up and is apparently doing "ok".

I guess the attraction is that you can earn a residual income, because once you have signed up resellers, you can sit back and should in theory be earning money without doing much else.

If it sounds interesting to you, find out more on the website.

I've written before about how much I love Regnow. It allows users to instantly buy and download leading software and the commissions are usually great, often between 30% and 50%. Up until recently I had most promoted the very popular Uniblue range of software, such as WinTasks and Registry Booster.

I've now tried to get to diversify my Regnow interests thanks to two recent additions to their service. They now have an catalogue of software available as a CSV, which means you can list all of the software and links on your site. They have also introduced a search box that lets users find the software they want, and gives you the credit if they then buy the software.

You can see how I've put these into practice at The Software Shop. Regnow is currently my 2nd most successful area of affiliate work, and I'm looking forward to continued success with these new products.

Sign up to Regnow

I've been meaning to do write up about Amazon's new self optimising links. Still in beta mode at the moment, these adverts are like Adsense in that they trawl the content of your page adjust the adverts accordingly.

I tried them out on a couple of sites recently and to honest the results were disappointing. It was on a page of pretty heavy content, but it seemed to latch onto a link to a firefox download, and then wanted to show some advert for a Clint Eastwood DVD called Firefox. As much as I love Clint Eastwood, he wasn't generating many sales for me.

Whilst that experience wasn't great, from what I can see on the Amazon forums, other people are impressed with it. Anyway, its an interesting move and worth checking out so login to your amazon associate pages and give it a whirl I've put a unit in below to show you how it looks.



I had to embed it in an iframe to get it in this page - not sure how well it works in frames. In fact, this is a useful test!

Another form of making money online is drop shipping.

Drop Shipping involves a retailer selling products, but they never actually have the products - they forward orders they receive onto the manufacturer or wholesaler who ships the products to the customer direct.

It's a bit like affiliate marketing in that you are promoting a product that you never need to handle, but it's a bit more involved because you do handle and take payment from the user. You don't pass the customer to a merchant - you are the merchant. Presumably that also means you are the point of contact for returns and warranty issues too.

Do you make a living out of drop shipping? Feel free to share you experiences in the comments section.

Ok, so I should have realised this before now and I kind of always knew but chose not to look into it too much, but I can now say reseller packages are the ideal web hosting solution for affilliate marketers with high numbers of sites.

I thought I was doing ok before with some decent-ish webspace at £15 a year. But that was still a slightly inhibiting amount because it made me think twice before throwing up a new website, knowing it might take the first month to make that back. It was almost like a penalty before you even started making money.

With a decent reseller package, you can get tonnes of space and unlimited domains. My package is with a company called Jodohost, and it seems pretty good far with 24x7 live support. I had a lot of old domains and content laying about which I took down because they weren't performing well enough to justify keeping up, but they're getting a new lease of life now.

Sterling Leads is an independent affiliate scheme for Sterling Knight who handle commercial mortgages. They are promising affiliates up to 1% of the loan amount, which could be as much as £20,000.

Yikes.

Find out more at Sterling Leads

Affiliate Window has announced that it will now be making payments to affiliates twice monthly. See below for details:

Affiliate Window is pleased to announce that it will be paying affiliates twice every month.

This means you will get paid much earlier and more regularly than before.

Who does this affect?

This covers ALL affiliates and ALL merchants on the Affiliate Window network.

How will it work?

You will be paid around the 4th and the 18th of the month. The first payment will cover all commissions confirmed in the first two weeks of the previous month. The second payment will cover all commissions confirmed in the second half of the month. (See table below)

Validated by Merchant	Affiliate Payment Date
1st - 15th (July)	4th (August)
16th - 31st (July)	18th (August)

To clarify, payment to affiliates occurs once the commission has been confirmed regardless of whether the merchant has paid Affiliate Window.

When will this begin?

The first affiliate payment will be around the 4th of August (covering the first half of July) and from then on will be approximately every two weeks.

What do I need to do?

The system will automatically calculate approved commissions and our accounts team will process payments to you every two weeks.

Chuggers are those annoying charity muggers who harrass you in the street and try and get you to sign up to direct debits to pay charities. They're usually good looking and try all kind of rubbish to get you to talk to them. I've even heard that if you do fall for their lines, you are actually paying the company that employs the chuggers for most of the first year of your payments, before anything goes to the charity. Not sure how true that it is, but I'll repeat here nonetheless and you can make of it what you want.

So it seems that charity can be big business. I touched on this last year with a post on some of the charity affiliate schemes available, but thought I would expand on that now since there's more schemes to choose from.

As was the case then, you can still get Oxfam Unwrapped and ActionAid through TradeDoubler.

Buy.At has the RSPCA credit card, RSPCA Gift Box, and Shelter - the charity for homeless people.

Affiliate Future has NDCS (National Deaf Children Society) Challenge, World Land Trust, the RSPB and 21st Century Leaders - which has has a unique concept where artwork is donated from leaders in all fields and then used to create ‘merchandise with a meaning’, including charity wristbands, clothing, tableware, ethical cosmetics and stationary released on the 21CL label

So do something good - promote these charities and get something back in return! Win Win.

Buy.At is a UK based affiliate network, boasting over 150 programs from leading merchants such as:

• 3 Mobile
• Carphone Warehouse
• Euroffice
• John Lewis
• La Senza
• Marks & Spencer
• MBNA
  

The user interface is straight forward and easy to navigate. It perhaps seems a little primitive compared to some of the offerings from other affiliate networks but it does what's required of it. It makes it very easy to access product feeds in CSV or XML format, which is a very useful feature.

Another cool thing which I've not seen elsewhere is that they have come up with a cool system to generate short affiliate links. They seem to register a domain name for each of their merchants, and combine that with your user id to create a much shorter affiliate url than other networks provide. Not sure how useful that is, but it's a nice touch.

One limitation is that it seems to allow you to register only one website, which means that if you have plenty of websites, it's not immediately clear to the merchant how you can serve them because you can't tell them the website in particular you want to use their program on. I came up against this problem once, and the support team were quick and efficient in sorting it out for me.

I think payment is only available by cheque at the moment, which is another limitation.

All in all, a decent network with merchants you would want to promote and a useful support team. Find out more by visiting Buy.At

Labels: affiliate network, buy.at, network review

The middle market tabloids - Daily Mail and Daily Express - are tripping over themselves to teach us new languages with their constant barrage of free language CDs. Odd because the right wing press are usually fairly anti european, and now they want us all to speak French, Italian and Spanish.

Anyways, the Daily Mail is giving away a starter course for French in association with Linguaphone. They are essentially giving away a free sample of what is a pretty good product. So now could be the right time to promote Linguaphone to your UK users, since the Mail is one of the biggest selling newspapers in the UK, and their readers might have enjoyed the taster enough to want to splash out on more courses etc.

Linguaphone is operating an affiliate scheme with OMG and Buy.At - find out more

If you or your readers like computer and video games with a Japanese edge, check out Play-Asia.com for a brilliant selection of new and classic titles on almost any system you care to mention.

They also have an affiliate program which pays out upto 12% commission, and another 5% if you choose to redeem your commission by spending it at Play-Asia.com

They have some cool banners ready to go (see below), or you can create a link to any page on the site.



Find out more about the Play-Asia.com scheme.

Uncommon Knowledge has continued to expand its hypnosis downloads program, with more downloads, hypnosis scripts for professionals, and also a series of articles you can include in your website.

The downloads are great because they give the end user a very quick and easy way to try hypnosis, and the costs compare very favourably with seeing a real hypnotherapist.

The commission available is a very genours 35% and I know from experience that these convert very well.

Find out more: Hypnosis Downloads

Ad:Tech have started promoting their annual online marketing exhibition, held at Olympia on Sept 27 & 28 this year.

Most of the major players will be turning up: Affiliate Window, Affiliate Future, TradeDoubler, Zanox, Advertising.com and plenty more (see full list). There will also be a "Google University" where you can learn more about the search engine and keyword advertising.

I went along last year and actually didn't feel like I got much from it, so I'm not sure if I'll bother this year. I did just check the website though and was amused to see that when you try and book an appointment to see an exhibitor, the form where you enter your name and email address is automatically populated with the details of someone else completely, from a company called Miramedia. A glitch in the system me thinks!

Find out more about Ad:Tech 06

Sometimes when I'm making a new website, I'll look at a space and try to decide if it will be best served with an Adsense unit or with a banner from an affiliate network.

But actually very often the best solution is not one or the other, but a compromise of the two - with Adsense as first choice, and affiliate ad as the perfect Plan B.

Using the feature labelled "Show Ads from another URL" in Adsense setup, you can show an Adsense unit but then automatically switch to an affiliate advert in the event of Google not being able to serve up adverts to your page. It will generate a line of text in your Adsense code like this

google_alternate_ad_url = "http://www.affiliate-schemes.info/banner.htm";

Now create a file called banner.htm, put an image or banner in it the same size as the ad unit, and remember to set the page margins to 0 - so that the advert perfectly fits the space.

This is a useful way to utilize space on your page, guaranteeing either Adsense adverts or an affiliate advert.

Vivastreet is a local classified listing service, in a similar vein to Craigslist and Gumtree. It's a European based site with the usual stuff - things to buy and sell, accomodation, personal ads etc.

They run their own affiliate scheme, which pays out 50p for each ad you generate. They also provide XML feeds so you can incorporate their content into your own site, which is a useful feature.

The scheme pays out when you reach a £100 threshold.

Find out more:
Vivastreet
Vivastreet Affiliate Scheme

EDIT

I joined up, emailed them a quick question before I begun and got absolutely zilch back in reply. From what I've seen on the a4uforum, this is a common experience, so I woudn't touch em!

I've not read either of these two yet, but I just noticed these brand new books on Google's Adsense now on sale at Google. I'll be getting them soon and doing a review, but if you have already read them, feel free to post up your reviews in the comments section.


"The Adsense Code: What Google Never Told you About Making Money With Adsense"
Author: Joel Comm
Published: April 1 2006


"Adsense Unleashed: Adsense A-Z plus 175 Killer Tips & Tricks"
Author: G.A. Barger
June 1 2006

The Early Learning Centre has launched its affiliate scheme on the Affiliate Window network.

Anyone who has kids or has friends with kids will know that ELC is one of the most well known names in childen's retailing. Quite simply, mums love it, and kids love it. They have thousands of toy ranges, 80% of which are ELC own brand - designed to help children and provide fun.

They are providing a 4% commission on all sales generated by affiliates. Get on the scheme by joining Affiliate Window.

If you are interested in affiliate marketing, most likely you will have seen this site already, but it's worth pointing out anyway just in case you haven't.

The UK Affiliate Marketing Forum is a brilliant resource where affiliate marketers, affiliate managers and also representatives from the affiliate networks and merchants, gather to talk about the industry. It's a great place to read up and get some ideas from people already involved in affiliate marketing.

Check it out: UK Affiliate Marketing Forum

I thought it would be kind of interesting to write about how people have benefitted from affiliate marketing, and what they did to achieve it.

So if you have a story to tell, either about you personally or a site that you have, and which schemes you used and how well you did, feel free to get in touch.

Maplin have an interesting feature in their affiliate program, which is running on the Affiliate Window network.

You can download an applicationd developed by Maplin, run it, and create thousands of static, SEO ready affiliate shop pages based on the Maplin product catalogue. You'll need about 300mb of webspace and it will take you a while to generate the pages and then upload them, but its a nice easy way to quickly build a store front for Maplin.

I don't think the pages it creates look that amazing, but if it works, that's all that matters. I just made a site using it, Get Electronics, which hopefully will be indexed by the search engines soon enough and we'll see how it goes.

One of the most popular features of Apache servers for internet marketers and SEO bods is the ability to use mod_rewrite to change the URLs of pages to something more friendly to the search engines.

For example, using mod_rewrite, they can easily create great URLs on the fly that appear to be static content. So instead of having example.com/index.php?a=b&c=d, you could have example.com/b/d/index.htm.

As I really focus my development on Windows IIS servers, this option isnt available to me. But what other solutions are there? I have read about a few .net offerings, but from what I can tell they mostly require access to the IIS control panel in Windows which is not usually an option on shared hosting.

So if you use Windows/.Net in a shared hosting environment, what do you use for URL rewriting?

At the moment I am developing a Windows application to generate SEO friendly static content which is not as efficient as dynamically generating it on the fly but has the same end result. I'll post up details of that when its finished and ready for release/download.

Of course we all know that getting incoming links to your sites is very important to have a chance of getting ranked well on Google etc.

So I really need to get some new links to this site. So if you have any affiliate marketing related content and would be interested in exchanging links, send me an email.