Are you building an ecommerce site? Use this infographic to think of who you are marketing to and how. Give me a call, I can help!

1. An affiliate program is an automated advertising campaign.

Affiliate tracking software is the perfect marketing tool because you literally implement an automated advertising campaign that will promote your product or service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And, it's all done automatically!

Affiliate registrations and sales reports are processed automatically. Visitors and sales are tracked automatically. All you have to do is recruit new affiliates, train them, and pay them at the end of the month. It doesn't get any easier than that!

2. You don't pay money until you make money.

This is the absolute best part of having an affiliate program. Your marketing force promotes your site for free and you don't pay them a dime until they generate a sale for you. It's like having hundreds of sales reps working on straight commission except you don't have to go through the hiring process.

You can use affiliate tracking software to get hundreds, even thousands of people to promote your product or service for free and increase your sales exponentially. There is absolutely no better way to promote your product or service online.

3. You get fringe benefits.

There's another unnoticed benefit of starting an affiliate program. Even if visitors don't purchase your product, there's a good chance that they will subscribe to your e-zine or bookmark your site. You only pay your affiliates when you make money. Until then, you are getting loads of traffic absolutely free! That's what's so great about an affiliate program.

4. You won't ever have to buy advertising that doesn't work.

Let your affiliates test the waters for you. You write ads, they place them in various places on the Internet, and you measure the results. If your ads don't work, you lose nothing, and you can improve and test them for free until they do work. You can test various banner ads and sales copy without fear of losing advertising dollars. You only pay commission to your affiliates if they sell your product.

5. It's the ultimate viral marketing strategy.

Viral marketing is power. Remember the old Pert commercial? And they told two friends... If you start a two-tier program, your affiliates earn money on affiliates who sign up under them. This encourages your "automatic sales reps" to recruit more affiliates. Thus, creating a viral marketing strategy with unlimited growth potential!

*6. You get better search engine placement.

Link popularity plays a huge role in the ranking of your site on the major search engines. 

The more sites that point to your domain, the higher your position will be. And, there is no better way to get hundreds of sites to link to yours than by starting your own affiliate program.

Article above written by June Yeap.

*I would add to #6 that you do need to try to have some kind of relevant connection as to why your links would be on someone else's site. Just having your link on random sites does not really help your search engine optimization, especially with all the changes in algorithm Google has made in the last year. But, the traffic it may generate to your website may outweigh that fact for you.

I have vetted the affiliate program yoursoft-tm in my search for affordable affiliate software. I have found it to do what I needed; track clicks and sales well and to be extremely affordable by comparison to other software.  You simply can not lose with an affiliate program because you invest nothing up front except the cost of the software. You don't have to pay for advertising unless you make money first!

Thanks to http://b4bconnect.com/forum/topics/infographic-when-email-is-more-important-than-social-media?

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One of my favorite movies growing up was 'The Princess Bride.' Strange as it may be, my favorite scene was with Carol Kane and Billy Crystal where they found Wesley was only mostly dead. I get a good chuckle when Valerie runs around the cottage screaming, "Humperdink!," at her husband.

I find myself recalling the movie more and more because I hear myself repeating that scene with new clients when they come to me with search engine listings that are mostly dead -  only I am saying, "hyperlinks, hyperlinks, hyperlinks!" When I do analysis, one of the things I find over and over is that hyperlinks are not being used to their full potential.
So here it is! Your guide to hyperlinks...

1. Put Hyperlinks In Profiles
Make sure any descriptions on high profile sites such as business listings, guest blogs, and YouTube have a working hyperlink to your website. You can't assume that just typing www.mywebsite.com is enough. Check, and if you aren't taken anywhere when you click on your website address, go back and add an http:// in front of it.

If you don't do this you are not only losing hits on your own website from the exposure of being on listed on a high profile site, but the SEO benefit of having your link associated with that same high search engine ranked site.

Example: http://www.mywebsite.com

2. Don't Forget Your YouTube Videos
Make sure you take advantage of the text box under your video to support your visual content with keyword rich descriptions. Always use an http:// hyperlink -  it won't work otherwise.

Why bother? Even if your website address is in the video?
Because people are not likely to copy and paste or remember your website address if they have to. If your website is just a click away, you have a real shot at a visit on your website from your YouTube video. The same principle applies to any video publishing site.

Example:

3. How To Make A Hyperlink In A Website Editor
Let's get down to basics.
If you are adding a description in an HTML editor about your business/website or appropriately sharing your link in a string or blog comment there will most often be a button that looks like an infinity sign.

1. Highlight the word(s) that you want linked to a page on your website
2. Click on the hyperlink button
3. Type in the http://www.yourwebsite.com  hyperlink
4. Submit
   

Example:
Hyperlink

4. Hyperlink HTML
If you don't have a hyperlink button to use while in an HTML editor, you can use HTML code to create a hyperlink for text or a website address.

<a href="http://www.yourwebsite.com">text or website address</a>

Example:
I want the word service to link to my services page on my website, the HTML code would go like this:

<a href="http://www.mcdesignservices.com/services.html">services</a>

Please remember these hyperlink tips, because I sure don't want to turn into Valerie! ... and if you do, you can get the most out of your online presence.

"Have fun storming the castle!"

There is a trend I have noticed emerging from social media for service businesses: we are giving too much information away for free. We lull ourselves into giving away services and expertise that we should be charging for. Before we know it, no one wants to pay for what we have to offer.

Does this sound familiar? You try to gain attention to your business by running a smart campaign where you offer  a sampling of your service for free - maybe it’s a free consultation or download - and the people who take you up on your offer enjoy it, but never come back for the paid service. Why?

Maybe they have gone on to someone similar to you for another free sampling? Maybe they feel they got exactly what they needed from the initial free service.

Maybe people have now come to expect to get something for nothing.

There is psychology involved in this. You have heard the saying “you get what you pay for”? What do you think people perceive they are getting when it is free? I think most of us assume that something that costs more must be worth more – we attribute expertise we may not even know about to the person who is charging higher than the other.   This is a psychological effect called prestige pricing, which points to a strong correlation between perceived product quality and price. The higher the price the more likely customers are to perceive it has higher quality compared to a lower-priced product. According to psychologist Dr. Peter Shallard, “Being expensive cultivates an aura of expert and elite status”… “setting your price is the psychological equivalent of setting the value of YOU. Your life, your work, that thing you’ve poured your energy and soul into.” He recommends you ask customers who don’t want to pay your set value what they are comparing your price to; you and they may find it is not apples to apples. When Shallard first asked this question he found out his life-changing services were being compared to piano lessons!

But with a tough economy people have been forced to settle for less and to become used to it. And maybe we have convinced ourselves we are worth less in the process. So if you are going to offer something for free or discounted, what should you do?

• Always include the numerical value in your offer.

• Always include the time value in your offer - i.e., the actual time the service will take (example: a thirty-minute consultation for $30). According to a study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, marketing time sells better than marketing money because our relationship with time is much more personal than our relationship with money.
  

• Make them pay a little. With even a small “buy in” made on the customer’s part, a psychological commitment is made. There will be a tendency to continue with the service because they are already invested and don’t want to feel they have lost that initial $5.00. This is known as loss aversion - studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.
  

• Make them pay more than a little, but include the original price. According to research by cognitive and mathematical psychologist Amos Tversky and Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who also were the pioneers in proving loss aversion, creating an anchoring bias has a very strong psychological effect (the anchor being the original price in this example). If consumers are unsure about the price they will look around for comparative prices – you provide them with the price to compare with.
  

• Offer coupons. Your potential customers will feel they are getting a deal and you still get paid. Again, include monetary and time values in your offer.
  

• Social media posts that show you are well versed in your field – statistics, what famous people say about it/quotes, questions that get people thinking about their need for your service. Do NOT give away your service in bite-sized portions.
  

If you don't want to believe the psychologists, why not listen to conventional wisdom? This is just one more example of my belief that SEO and Online Marketing rules are like dating ... what is it your mother always told you about why buy the cow and giving away its milk?

The following is an ongoing compiled list:

1. "Always date a girl with a good reputation." When buying a previously owned URL make sure it has a good reputation, as years of cached links may show up on the search engine that you don't recognize.

2. "Be yourself." Google's Panda update is cracking down on content farming.

3. "Why buy the cow, if the milk is free?" Be careful not to give away too much of your service that you should be paid for in your social media marketing.

4. "There's always more fish in the sea." Watch your ROI, if your efforts to get a prospective client's attention on social media are falling on deaf ears ... or blind eyes, move on. Social media can take up a lot of your time and money - a big picture strategy should go hand-in-hand with focus.

5. "Don't move too fast; take your time to get to know each other." A sudden influx of SEO activity can actually hurt your search engine rankings in the long run. Also, being hasty can allow mistakes to go unnoticed. It is more important to take your time to be accurate and strategic where your website's information and links will be placed.

6. "It's not nice to lead people on." Make sure the links that you post with your content on social media or websites go directly to the page with the information you are talking about. You will lose people along the way in a string of links.

7. "If you like it, put a ring on it." When liking an article by a higher profile company or individual, make sure you comment with something compelling that will result in views to come back around to your website or social media page.

8. "Beauty is skin deep." Your website may be attractive and innovative, but if it is filled with shallow content, grammatical errors and is hard to navigate, the viewer will lose interest.

9. "Stay away from Lover's Lane." Don't park your website's URL while you are building your website. Sure, you may make a few bucks, but you have no control of what is going to be linked to your parked domain by the registrar. You may have cached links and content that can harm the brand image you are trying to portray once you go live.
 
Can you think of anymore?

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Did you know that you had a limit of how many people you can follow on twitter? If you do, you probably found out by accident when you could no longer follow any more people or businesses.  Most likely one of the first questions that popped into your head was, "then why can Justin Beiber follow 122,496 people?" OK, maybe Justin Beiber didn't come to your mind ... sorry, I have 4 daughters ... but some famous person or brand that you relate to probably did. It is all about keeping a fairly even ratio.  If you have more followers than you are following that is always good and you have plenty of room to follow, but if it is the other way around you need to be aware of the disproportion.

Is following as many potential clients and industry related brands a good twitter strategy given these limits?

Here is twitter's explanation as to why this is THE RULE.

So, what is a tweeter to do when they find themselves in this predicament?
Open up your following page and keep in mind these tips to whittle down your following number.

• Look for egg's - this usually signals inactivity. Anyone who hasn't bothered to upload their picture probably doesn't use twitter very much, or took their picture down when they stopped using twitter.
• Look for the date of the last tweet - again, why follow someone who is not active and is therefore not seeing your tweets either.
• Did they follow you back? If they aren't seeing your content then it is not helping your business to follow them.
  
• Go back to the oldest people you followed - Ask yourself if they are someone who would be interested in your services or not?, do they share valuable information about your industry?, have you read a tweet from them recently?, would you miss them if they weren't there?

Once you are aware of these policies you may begin to feel like a twitter snob, evaluating each follow and whether it is worthy of your follow back. If you are feeling like you are going to develop a mid twitter life crisis over this new revelation of twitter not being all inclusive as you thought it would be, I recommend you read "Ted's twitter back policy". It may just inspire you to forget everything you just read above and establish one of your own. Here is an excerpt and my favorite point ...

If you need help putting together an effective social media strategy, contact me and we can come up with a plan. It may not be about how many you are following, but rather how you are using twitter that could make a difference.

Thanks to some very astute clients, this new scam has come to my attention...
Beware of real looking invoices (they call it a statement, but they know that means invoice to you) from DNS Services, or anyone else making this claim, in the mail that appear to be for back up services, or any web related services, that you don't recognize.

Red flag #1: What keyed me into the scam was the nameservers 3 and 4, it seems they pull as much information from the domain's WHOIS listing and then add what looks like their supposed namservers to the record they send you. So you are supposed to say, "Oh, I must have signed up for that without knowing it and since it shows me right here I have been receiving the service, I guess I better pay for it." This scam has shown up from west to east coast, ignore it and they will be out the $0.45 in postage.

What is scary is that they have a very legitimate looking website, so I checked it out to see if the website listed on the invoice was an innocent victim of this mail in scam, but the same phone number and address is listed on the website too. So it appears they offer some kind of service, but they are hoping that you do not notice the inactive next to their nameservers that magically got on your WHOIS record according to their "statement".

Red Flag #2:  They also have included an "this is a solicitation...." disclaimer mixed in with other text many are sure to miss to cover their asses.

Red Flag #3: What I am left thinking is how will they gain access to your domain without your consent, so do they offer a real service?