Don't Make These Affiliate Marketing Mistakes!

Author : William Perkins

If you?re new to affiliate marketing, or if you?ve been doing it awhile but you aren?t making any money, you might be making one of these big mistakes in your business. What follows are three of the biggest mistakes I see affiliates making as I cruise the net, and some solutions for creating a better website that converts more visitors into paying customers.The first big mistake many affiliates make is building an amateurish or downright ugly website. There are design principles that you must follow when you build your website to achieve success in affiliate marketing. There are also plenty of tools to help you create a professional looking site.When a visitor arrives at your site, you have only a few seconds to create interest in your site and to build credibility and rapport. First impressions are vitally important! Your banner must be of professional quality and must be simple and to the point. The name of your website and what you say in your banner must tell the visitor exactly what your website is about upon first glance.Too many graphics is a bad thing. Your site should be simple text for the most part. Keep your site simple, easy to read, clean and uncluttered. That means having margins, easy to read fonts, and easy on the eye colors. White backgrounds with black type are best. Eliminate all the gaudy colors, wild graphics, and blinking lights. Use only one or two colored fonts.Your goal is create credibility, reliability, and trustworthiness with your visitor. Think conservatively. Other ways to create credibility and rapport is to put a photo of yourself near the top of your page. Be sure to display your email address and contact details prominently.Just below your banner should be your headline in large type. This headline is the most important part of your webpage. It must be interesting and bold and draw the visitor into your site. You must compel the reader to continue reading! Your headline should address the needs of your visitor or provide a solution to your visitor?s problem.Finally, do not overwhelm your customer with choices. Design your navigation so that the visitor has no more than five links to choose from. You do not want to confuse your potential customer. A confused mind simply won?t make a purchase. More often than not, the confused visitor will exit your website in search of an easier and clearer solution to their need or problem.Your navigation should be placed in the same place on every webpage to make it easier for your visitor. Keep your visitor happy! The happy mood is the buying mood. What?s more, a customer that is happy to have found you and the products you have provided will more likely return again to your website.The next big mistake I see being made by so many affiliates is their failure to capture their visitor?s name and email address. This is vital to the success of your online business. It?s amazing how many websites just try to sell products. I guess a lot of people who are new to affiliate marketing have not yet learned that most people have to see a product as many as seven times before they actually buy it.Getting visitors to your site takes time and money, and maybe one in a hundred will buy your product. What about the other 99 visitors? Don?t let them get away from you! Get their name and email address. Then continue to market to them. After they get to know and trust you, they will buy from you again and again.Your customer list is the most important asset in your business. You will make more money on the back end than you will on the front end of your affiliate marketing business. Be sure to use an opt-in form and capture your visitor?s name and email address! One good practice is to put an opt-in form on every page of your website; another is to offer some kind of freebie product that?s related to your offer to bribe the visitor to opt-in.The third big mistake I see affiliate marketers guilty of, not just newbies, is selling to their customers. Your job as an affiliate is not to sell, it?s to PRE-sell. It?s the merchant's job to write killer copy to convert the visitors you send them into paying customers.I see lots of affiliates who swipe copy from merchant sales pages with the result that their webpage resembles a sales letter. This is the wrong approach to affiliate marketing salesmanship. It turns people off. People don?t want to be sold to, and people don?t like reading advertising.Pre-selling is all about sharing your personal experience with a product. This is why you had better actually buy the product before you try to recommend it. You should relate your own feelings about the product and what it has done for you. Explain why you like it. Do not try to sell the product!Instead of hyping a product the way sales letter pages do, you should describe to your visitor the product?s benefits. Make a bulleted and detailed list of how you have used the product successfully. What it has actually done for you. Personalize your recommendation. Then casually offer the link to the product. About The AuthorWilliam Perkins writes about how to start an online business, affiliate marketing, and making money online. He has packaged much of what he knows into a brandable ebook titled, "Fast Track To Internet Riches!" which you can get for free when you opt-in at his website. http://www.BigWillySite.com.

Category : Marketing

Record Keeping for Homeschoolers

Author : Michael Russell
Keeping records for each school year is important for different reasons. They'll help you to monitor your child's progress, keep track of lesson plans and become part of a portfolio for college entry. Record keeping will help you to meet short and long-term goals for your school year. They will help in planning your lessons and help keep you on track during the school year.Write a list of all the books and materials you use in school and keep with your records. You might want to include a list of books and materials you find interesting to research for later use in school.Lesson plan books come in many styles. The most popular have the weekdays listed across the top and places along the sides for the subjects. You can easily create your own lesson plan book using a ruler and paper then inserting it in a three ring binder. Your local teacher supply store should also carry simple lesson planning books. This type of record keeping helps to plan out your curriculum on a weekly basis.A daily logbook is like keeping a diary or journal for school days. It is used for writing ideas or activities that your children participated in each day. You can buy a logbook for homeschoolers or just use notebook paper and place in a binder. Write brief descriptions of the school day events and also include the date. If a school day doesn't go as planned, then a daily log will help you to keep track of exactly what was accomplished that day. Have your children keep their own daily log if they are old enough to write down the day's projects and activities. This will help them to retain what they learned and will help them with their writing skills.Some states require a list of the books, curriculum and materials used by each child, every school year. Simply record each item used in that week in either your weekly lesson plan book or on the back of your daily logbook. Include the book title, author or publisher and you may want to give a brief description of how the book was used.A home school portfolio may be required by your state but even if it's not, it is useful when applying for colleges and for an annual evaluation of your child's progress. The portfolio can include anything related to your child's education. This may include lesson plans, logbooks, worksheets, test results, writing assignments and book reports. Field trips taken, special events, experiments, scrapbooks of projects and artwork should also be a part of the portfolio. Although most homeschoolers do not keep grades, you may find them beneficial. After grading your children's papers, record their score in a grade book, available at a teacher supply store. Every six weeks, use a handheld grader, such as E-Z Grader to determine the average grade of each subject. By knowing their grades, you can determine any weakness your children may have in a particular subject and can now help them to improve their grade average.Most children like receiving certificates for good grades or just a good job done well. They are available for almost every situation such as preschool, reading, science, honor roll and more. Certificates help build your child's self-esteem by giving them a feeling of accomplishment and pride in their work. It also shows them the progress they've made in the school year.Keep all your records in one binder for easy access, using tabs to separate by topic, subject or by child. Be sure to check with your states regulations for record keeping before you home school to make sure you follow their requirements.Michael RussellYour Independent guide to Home School
Category : Reference-and-Education:Home-Schooling

Free Computer Security Software - A Leaking Seal!

Author : Msingathi Mnyengeza

There is nothing wrong with taking less than adequate measures
to prevent a bigger damage to anything you treasure if you have
financial or other constraints, as long as this is done
temporarily over a short time. Similar reasoning applies
when it comes to computer security threats.

Unfortunately some (if not most) computer users tend to forget
this. They search on the internet for free computer security
software which they dump into their computers and hope for
the best. Most of the free software developers consistently
forget to inform the downloaders of the inadequacies
of their software - and they are many and significant!

A simple search for free anti-spyware programs on any search
engine yields significant results. If we exclude genuine
beta-software from these results, almost all of these
anti-spyware programs operate on the principle - "Get
infected first, then call us". In other words these
programs are reactive. They scan and destroy spyware as it's
found in the user's computer. The real downside of these
programs is that they offer no real-time protection. Are
you surprised? Maybe you've forgotten that "there's no such
thing a free lunch"!

The big computer security software developers spend millions
of dollars every year developing products that can quickly
detect and destroy new computer security threats like spyware,
adware, viruses, hacking techniques, Trojans, worms keyloggers
etc

Do you think the developers of free computer security software
inject millions of dollars in order to bring users of their
software regular software updates? I think not!

Computer security software is such a critical purchase
that I think one should actually buy the software before
bringing home a new PC!

The most critical software that you should have in you PC
is:

1. Firewall - To protect your PC from hackers and
internal malware that maybe trying to "phone home".

2. Spyware/Adware - To detect the "ETs" that are "phoning
home" from your PC, endangering your sensitive information such
as passwords, credit card numbers and other sensitive
information. These programs also use lots of your critical
computer resources. That's why your computer is slow and
crashing lately!

3. Anti-virus Software - These can either completely wipe
out your critical data or render it or your computer useless.
The most dangerous thing is that you may end up (unaware!) being
a source of the virus (e.g. through email or infected website
pages).

Here are common-sense measures you can take to protect
your PC:

1. E-mail - Avoid replying to chain letters. Also be very
careful of image attachment. Hackers attach malicious JavaScript
program on these.

2. Regularly update your anti-virus definitions by
running the update function of your security software.

3. Before buying a computer security software or package
make sure that it offers regular updates to keep up with
new viruses, adware, spyware and other computer security threats.

I want to repeat what I said at the beginning of this
article: There is nothing wrong in taking temporary security
measures as far as your computer security is concerned (i.e.
using free software/downloads). What is wrong is forgetting that
the measure was supposed to be over a temporary period in the
first place.

Copyright: 1st Analyst Information Services 2006, All rights
reserved.

Website owners can use this article on their websites and
ezines, as long as no part of this article is changed/amended.

Category : Babies

Travel to Turkey for the 2006 Total Solar Eclipse

Author : Seb Jay

Wednesday March 29th 2006 will be a very special day in Turkey. Shortly before two o'clock in the afternoon local time an eerie darkness will descend across the land. Birds will begin to roost and streetlights will flicker on as the sun slips behind the moon in the first European total solar eclipse this millennium. Standing in the path of a total solar eclipse is a dramatic and awe-inspiring experience. To watch the light fade from the sky and to see the last fiery wisps of the sun's disk be engulfed by the black moon is a stunning spectacle that stays with you forever. Adding to the thrill is the fact that the path of a total solar eclipse beats a track through Europe very rarely. The last was in 1999 when the path of totality passed through Cornwall (SW England); the next will be in 2026 when totality touches Northern Spain. The eclipse begins across Turkey at around 12:45 in the afternoon, more than an hour before totality is reached. These early stages of the eclipse will go largely unnoticed. It is not until some 25 minutes before totality, when the sun's disk is more than half-covered, that it becomes noticeable that the light is fading. The ensuing half an hour is then nothing short of magical.At t-minus 20 minutes the air is filled with the sounds of birds settling down for the night. A chill starts to circulate in the air and although the sun shines high in the sky, an eerie gloom reminiscent of a dull winter's afternoon establishes itself. The light only fades slowly at first, but with 5 minutes to go the onset of darkness becomes ever more apparent. By this time the birds have gone quiet and little in the way of daytime wildlife stirs. In the last minute the light falls more rapidly as if it were late twilight, and with only seconds to go a huge dark shadow sweeps in at speed engulfing you in almost complete darkness, although the horizon all around you appears lighter. Looking at the sun, wisps of fire can be seen around the dark disk; close-by stars shine out from an ink-black background. Then, all too soon, the sun reappears in a dazzling display and totality is over. For the best views of the total solar eclipse in Turkey, you'll need to locate yourself in the path of totality - a 100-mile wide swathe of darkness that runs northeastwards from Antalya on the Mediterranean coast to Samsun on the Black Sea. Outside this zone the eclipse will still be visible, but it will never reach totality. International travelers should arrange their flights into Istanbul from where internal flights to Ankara and Antalya can be caught. The path of totality crosses the land to the south of Ankara and can be reached in less than an hour by hire care from the airport. Car rental can be booked in advance for pick-up at Antalya, Ankara or Istanbul airport through http://www.your-carhire.com

Category : Publishing