Business – Vitals

Certain affiliate link formats are not ‘protected’.

In other words they have a simple format such as

http://www.abc.com/123

and if you display that in an email type message, for example in a newsletter, then your reader can substitute his own affiliate code and claim commission on his own purchase.

So you need to protect (or disguise) your link, and there are a few ways to do this

Use a redirect file
Use a ’short URL’ service
Use an ad tracking link
These may only partly eliminate the problem, the affiliate code might still be visible at the affiliate site.

The ideal solution therefore is to use an affiliate cloaking tool.

The simplest way to profit on the Net.

Someone else has done the hard work of creating a product, producing sales copy and promotional material, and handling orders, while all you need do is lead customers to their site using advertising.

This section includes:

Which affiliate programs to choose and which can LOSE you commission.
Forget banners and text links, you’ll see the best way to promote a program.
Commission theft and how to prevent it

It’s a good idea to invite questions from visitors at your website, so that you can provide a personal touch and establish a good relationship.

But as your traffic inevitably increases you certainly don’t want to be swamped by email queries.

So here is what you can do – and it brings added benefits.

First, you accumulate a list of common questions and set up a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page.

This is a common solution but at this point most sites provide a link from their sales page to the FAQ page but keep their email address on the sales page.

The secret is to remove the address and only put it on the FAQ page.

Why ?

This will force your visitor to read the FAQ first, hopefully eliminating 90% of the questions you would otherwise receive.

But don’t just put a series of questions and answers.

Take the opportunity to surround every question with a positive benefit.
Introduce additional material that may have been too much to include on the original page.
And finish up with some motivating copy to get your reader to order.
The result ?

Your reader will have gained by finding answers to questions he had not thought of and discovering extra benefits offered by your product.

We know that pop-ups are controversial.

We know that many surfers dislike them, though marketers claim a good success rate in getting extra sales, all for the sake of a bit of additional code.

But, even if you oppose pop-ups, what cannot be denied is that if a visitor is going to leave your site without taking any action you may as well provide an exit pop-up.

As someone said “It would be a sin not to use a pop-up”

Here’s an example of how it’s done, by extending the ‘body’ statement.

body onUnload=”window.open
(‘pop.htm’,
‘newWindow’,
’scrollbars=0,
resizable=0,
height=120,
width=170′)”

The content of the pop-up could be a final pitch for your newsletter, or a special bonus or whatever.

You may be very surprised at how long information can remain floating around on the Net.

For example, I’ve had requests for articles published in other newsletters dating back several years.

The links pointed to pages at my site which I could easily have removed thinking that they were no longer needed and I would have lost potential visitors.

So rather than remove an out-of-date page simply change the content to point to a current one.

If you’d like to be notified every time such an occurrence happens there is a program easyClick404

which can do this for you and automatically do the switch (just one of it’s many features)
And for a variation of link switching: I no longer promote my very first book written in 1998 as it is so out-of-date, yet there are sites which still link directly to the .exe file as opposed to the download page itself.

Fortunately easyClick404 comes to the rescue once again and I am able to intercept the visitor and switch him to a more modern book – this one !.

Here are a few tips I picked up after redesigning one of my sites.

1. The old home page is here

As you can see the main navigation options are listed in two lines (both at the top of the page and repeated at the bottom). But as the site has expanded there are more pages I wanted to add, and having more lines would begin to look untidy.

The solution ?

A vertical navigation bar.

Here is the new page

This gives me scope to add more menu options easily but also, very important, I can group the options into categories.

2. I had a choice of putting the navigation bar on the left or the right. I chose right, one advantage being that the main text of each page (as opposed to the navigation bar text) is now nearer the top of the page which helps the rankings in the search engines.

3. I’ve long wanted to use SSI (Server Side Includes) for my navigation bar. This means that you just have one copy of the bar and any change takes effect in all the pages.

In order to ‘include’ an element such as a navigation bar in a page you need to give the page an extension of .shtml

The problem has been that for an existing site you don’t want to rename pages which may be ranking well in the search engines.

The solution ?

I found an option on my server to process .htm or.html files as if they are .shtml files.

Note that there is one disadvantage of using SSI – you cannot view files locally as they would be seen online, the include instruction does not work.

CSS (Cascading style sheets) enable you to use a common design format across your web site with greater control over all the HTML elements.

For example you can declare that all the main headings are a certain font, size and color: then you simply change that one declaration if you want to change the format of all the headings on your site.

Some time ago I took the plunge and rewrote a huge chunk of my site supertips.com (some 70 pages) to use CSS.

One immediate visual benefit was the smooth flow as I clicked from page to page and saw the same layout, color and format for headings and text compared to the previous assortment of different size headings and sub-headings.

The HTML code is now so simple that I no longer use a web design program to make changes to my pages – I just use a text editor (NoteTab)

Here are two indispensable free tools which helped me

1. W3C CSS Validation Service
Includes checks for invalid CSS which works fine in Internet Explorer but not in Netscape. Click here

2. TidyGui
This cleans up your code and also adds the closing tags for the elements.

They say that a simple change to a headline can make your sales rocket.

There’s a way to scientifically test the impact of such changes.

The key point is that you should change one component at a time and measure the results, so that you are able to pinpoint exactly the effect of each single change.

So here are the chief components that you could experiment with to increase your sales conversion

headline
sub-headline
bullet points showing the main benefits

• page design and color
• adding or removing graphics
• the ordering process (is it too complicated ?)
• the addition of bonuses
• the guarantee and refund policy
• the first fold (the initial visible screen of your page
• site navigation

As a customer what do you like to see at the end of a sales page ?

I expect you will say – an order form with

the price clearly shown
a minimum number of steps to complete the purchase
However I’m going to suggest a slight deviation from this, namely one additional step and the price not immediately shown.

How come ?

Well, many visitors in a hurry may click to a long sales page, immediately cast their eye towards the bottom, see the price and leave without stopping to read the benefits of purchasing.

Now look at my sales page here

Just when you expect it to end as per norm with a summary of benefits, a bonus and an order link it just says “Order Now and receive Bonus Title”

I believe that anyone reading through that page is going to want to know, even if out of curiosity and no intent to purchase

what is the price ?
what is that bonus ? – there’s been no previous mention of it
On taking that one additional click they find a short easy-to-read page with

the key benefits summarized as bullet points
the bonus revealed
an instruction “If you decide NOT to order please click here” which pops up a final inducement to order
If you took the time to read that second page then you may agree that splitting the sales page into two sections is well worth a try.

It is useful to be aware of other web associated technologies once you have learned the basics of HTML. A brief summary with references to ideal beginner’s books follows.

1. CGI
If you wish to install software, then a knowledge of CGI and the CGI-BIN is very handy.

CGI (Common Gateway Interface) allows communication between a site visitor and the site, via the browser.

It is CGI therefore that allows interactive operations such as forms on web sites, live surveys, shopping carts, search engines.

Click here for The Absolute Beginners Guide to CGI.

2. PHP
PHP is short for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.

It is one of the various server-side scripting languages with which to write CGI programs, others are Perl, C/C++, Java.

Click here for Simple PHP.

3. Javascript
Javascript is a client-side programming language used particularly to create special effects on your web pages.

So it can create rollovers, splash screens, colored scroll bars, flashing and highlighted text, pop-up windows, mouse over effects. It can also validate forms, display date information and provide password protection.

As a comparison:

- A CGI script resides on the server and interacts directly with it, so a CGI program can run with any browser.

- JavaScript is run by the web browser, which limits its functionality to only things that the browser knows about