Posts filed under 'web design'
I talked earlier about one of my current projects in affiliate marketing the My Affiliate Store service and outlined some of the special features of this method of getting involved in affiliate marketing.
The more I work on this project the more impressed with it I become and there is probably no easier way of getting a good looking website up and populated with a good range of affiliate products. The products here can be almost anything including a impressive range of even physical products, it’s not just all downloadable digital products either, although it does those as well.
The topic I chose to get into was gardening at www.TheGardenLovers.com as I live on a smallholding which has a large garden and I spend a lot of time working on the garden and have got more interested in gardening as a result. This has the benefit when doing research for the site that it’s an area that I know and in doing so continue to learn more about. This makes adding content such as articles much easier and it keeps it more interesting. It also helps in chosing relevant products and in creating logical department and category indexing.
The built in SEO in the product is pretty good at getting your pages indexed and as content and product numbers increase over time they should climb in the rankings organically. I am seeing this work already and have only had the site up for about a month although traffic does take time to increase. Obviously in addition to leaving it to their system you can employ any of the other traffic generation methods you want, such as pay per click adwords campaigns, article writing, blog posting and trying to get incoming links.
The sites themselves do come from templates but these are very customisable and a number of other members are a bit ahead of me and have improved the visual appearance by steps such as customised banner heading and added more functionality like customer voting surveys and video articles.
Two particularly good examples of what can be done with the websites at My Affiliate Store are www.stylishcoffee.com on a subject which is very close to my heart, as you may know from my earlier posts and www.dreamweddingsource.com which I think is another very attractive site.
So I am planning to emulate some of the features from examples such as these sites by getting a professional banner done first off, which is very important, as the banner is really the first impression someone gets of your website. I also plan to add an “ask us a question” type feature which improves the browsing experience making it feel a lot more interactive.
As well as improving the look and functionality of the site, it continues to just need a steady progressive approach in adding product content and is an ideal type of project to keep just ticking over and growing, in the hope that it will start to pay dividends some way down the line. It and can therefore easily be combined with “juggling” some other more demanding projects.
John
www.TheGardenLovers.com
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
September 1st, 2007
Juggling a number of projects is hard to avoid. We all know that completing one project before starting another is the best option.
But the temptation is usually overpowering to “just do a little bit” on another one, to get it ready for when you are, or tweak another a little bit here or there. Before you know it you have at least 5 projects on the go, like I have right now.
I mean, when is a project complete anyway? In online marketing you could say it is at product launch, but it’s not really done and dusted there. You can’t then just “leave it on the shelf” to sell itself. In some ways that’s more like the start rather than the end of the project, and for certain other products it almost literally is the start like a membership website.
I try to console myself that this is the nature of the business and think the best way to deal with it is to accept it and learn to enjoy multitasking.
My feeling is that for practical purposes an important staging post to get to as a minimum with each project is to get a website live. I’m not saying, put up a substandard site but if your website is your shop don’t leave the door shut!
The juggling also has to include time to read, listen to, or participate in e.g. webinars etc. all of the learning materials that you pick up along the way.
I’ve got some high priority webinars to listen to at the moment, for example and the most pressing of which is the last 2 in a series of Google adwords classes by Greg Cesar. I mentioned these in an earlier post and promised to update my thoughts on these after being very impressed with the first. They do last 2 hours and I for one reason or another have been unable to participate live in any of the classes. I’ve been listening and watching them via a Camtasia recording later which actually suits me better. I will be giving my impression here when I’ve got through these last 2.
For me though the need to get on and use some adwords in a campaign before I could learn everything there is to know about them! Has overtaken the time to do so, as it seems to have done in web design and almost every other area of internet marketing that I’ve been involved in so far.
Sometimes you just need to get going with something and pick it up along the way. This is not a bad thing as when it comes to getting back to the theory and teaching I find a bit of experience places it in context and makes things easier to understand.
Although so far in the case of Google ads so far I’ve lost money.
So I’m off to do my homework and to try to continue to keep all the balls in the air 
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 27th, 2007
Bank holiday weekend and as usual lately it seems I’m always working. The family have gone off to a local beach leaving me to do a little business, before having a BBQ this evening as at last it’s a sunny day in the north east of England.
I started the day, like every day, with a double espresso with added milk frothed to perfection, to make a beautiful latte. It’s not much of a breakfast I know but when coffee is this nice who needs food?
It’s taken me a long time to get the equipment right to do a “proper” coffee at home which equals or betters any of the chain or independent coffee shops that have finally taken off in the UK. I’ve spent a small fortune on manual grinders, automatic grinders, espresso machines and all in one bean-to-cup machines and I have now settled on a combination of two devices.
The first of these is a freshly ground coffee pod based espresso machine from the Nespresso range. I only recently got over my coffee connoisseur snobbery and finally gave in to the convenience of these devices after tasting a sample espresso in a retail outlet. This was produced in about 10 seconds and tasted fantastic. No messy coffee grounds around, no using the grounds before they go stale and no tamping with just the right pressure and still a perfect cup! I was impressed and thought to myself that I no longer need my finely tuned and self taught barista skills and I bought one straight away.
However good the espresso is though the mild frothing is equally important in getting a latte that is just right. Again I’ve tried all sorts of machines for this and disappointingly something called and aeroccino again from Nespresso, which was supposed to revolutionise milk frothing for convenience and quality, was a bit of a letdown which is a shame considering I got two of them! It did the milk not too badly but produces far too small a volume for a decent sized latte. Leading me to the second machine, a 700 quid bean-to-cup Gaggia Titanium, this with the use of small add-on device automatically draws the milk out a container and froths it into the coffee without any mess.
With another latte for lunch and by mid afternoon a single espresso to keep me going I’ve been toiling with java scripts and various codes to add some function to some of my web sites. I came across a very cool little program called MyContactStation which adds some forms to your website for contact, feedback, opt in to mail list and refer my site to others if you like it. This is very neat but I have to say it was not the easiest to install. Installation required editing two php scripts, a theme css file and manually inserting 4 to 5 code links on your web pages and adding the aweber opt-in code to another php file. It did work however and if you want to take a look at it in actions it’s at the top of my home page at www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com . I’m still toiling trying to get it onto one of my other sites which is on my “My Affiliate Store” site www.TheGardenLovers.com . This is a bit trickier as the site is produced from a template that they provide so I am still trying to work out how to access all of the appropriate files that on a locally produced site would be straight forward.
The rest of my afternoon was spent again meddling with code with google analytics. This was relatively simple in comparison and involved simply getting the code from google and inserting it into the right place on the web pages. It was a little trickier installing it to my Wordpress blogger page and this required a plug-in which was a little tricky to get going but eventually worked.
So quite an intense days work all in all for the start of a bank holiday weekend. No proper work really in terms of developing the business although, I guess if the opt-in buttons work I may at least get a boost to my lists. I certainly learned a lot anyway about codes of various types, drank a lot of coffee and now I’m off to fire up the BBQ and start to smell the beer.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 24th, 2007
