Affiliate Three » Development

Does the design of a website turn people away?

James — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:25:05 +0000

One of the things I’ve often thought about is how much design matters. Does a poorly designed website cause people to go elsewhere? Or does the content matter? Well, I think the answer lies somewhere in between

If I think about how surf the net (admittedly I am a fairly seasoned surfer, unlike most web surfers), the design matters in that a site hosted on a default wordpress template or on a blogger account will certainly cause me to close that browser window (or tab for that matter). Unless there is something really compelling on that site, the little “x” gets my attention. I guess what goes through my mind is that if the writer/blogger couldn’t make the effort to use a decent template or some paid-for hosting (or at least point a paid-for domain for a wordpress.com account) then surely their opinions hold no value – if their value is the amount of time or money they spent setting up the website, then their opinions must be worth just as much.

I think the same holds true for affiliate sites – subconciously, the average man on the street arrives at a website and assuming their criteria are there, design dosen’t matter that much – however if the design is poor and dosen’t have the elements they’re used to (such as a shopping basket like Amazon, a nice looking header or credit-card pictures, a surfer will get the next wave.

What are your thoughts on this? How much do you think design matters for conversions? How about the initial “grab”?

Tools for automation

James — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 13:06:15 +0000

One never forgets the excitement of building your first few sites and the adrenaline rush when you log into your affiliate dashboard and see your first commissions. This excitement and adrenaline drives you forward into adding more content and building more sites. However, the key to driving your affiliate success forward is automation. Building and managing sites, keywords and campaigns and tracking your statistics is key to becoming a more successful affiliate.

For the EPN’ers out there, I use a combination of scripts, plugins and Linode VPS’ (which give me root access) to manage my eBay sites. Setting up a new Wordpress site with PhyBay Pro takes approximately 15 minutes, with the content and link-building outsourced I can quickly attract visitors through organic search.

For affiliates who use other networks with Pay-per-Click (PPC), a self-hosted Prosper installation provides everything you should need in terms of tracking and statistics. For those that prefer an outsource pay solution, there is Tracking202 Pro which should meet your needs for an outsourced solution.

There are of course many other tools out there, some of which I will be covering in future writing, such a keyword tools (Google Adwords Tool is great) and the iMacros plugin for Firefox, which is invaluable in the long-run.

Must have Firefox extensions for affiliate marketers

James — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 09:19:31 +0000

Firefox is a great tool for affiliate marketers, which can be made even more useful through the use of these must-have extensions.

1. Web deveveloper

The Web Developer extension adds some very useful tools to your Firefox browser window, including cookie information and other validation menus. I find the CSS tools most useful for troubleshooting and coding CSS.

2. SEOQuake

Absolutely essential, this extension adds useful SEO information to your browser, such as pagerank, incoming links and allows you to save them for comparison purposes.

3. Screen Grab

This extension allows you to easily capture parts of the Firefox screen. I find it exceptionally useful for grabbing excerpts to use in posts and affiliate sites.

4. Alexa Sparky

Yes, Alexa can make something useful. Alexa Sparky allows you to track trends and compare the current sites reach and rank.

5. Colorzilla

Exceptionally simple plugin that allows you to grab colors from the current page, browse colors and also measure distances – time-saving extension.

If you are not already using Firefox, I highly recommend grabbing a copy.

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!

PhpBay Pro: an introduction

James — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:22:42 +0000

Affiliate marketers love products which can make their life easier. PhpBay Pro is one of those products – using the Ebay Partner Network, Ebay’s affiliate program, PhpBay Pro allows

PhpBay Pro

you to easily insert auctions from Ebay into your Wordpress blog (or other website such as Joomla, using the PhpBay Pro API). PhpBay Pro also supports the PepperJam, Mediaplex, TradeDoubler and Affilinet affiliate sites, so you’re not limited to EPN.

Easily integrated into Wordpress, PhpBay Pro allows you to customise the number of auctions, category of auctions, keywords of items and many more parameters, giving you exact control over the auctions which are displayed to your site visitors. The flexibility of Wordpress coupled with PhpBay Pro give the affiliate marketer the ability to create a unique site. With built-in country targeting features, which allow you to display auctions to users based on their global location, PhpBay Pro allows your to cater for a world-wide audience.

A popular forum available to PhpBay Pro users only provides community discussions on a variety of topics, including search engine optimisation (SEO), PHP programming, popular plug-ins and of course PhpBay Pro itself.

I personally use PhpBay Pro on several of my niche sites, with great success. New sites are exceptionally easy to setup, literally taking 10 minutes to get PhpBay Pro installed and working. PhpBay Pro’s built-in SEO allows to rank higher in search engines, thus bringing more visitors to your site. PhpBay Pro should definitely be one of the products in the affiliate marketers arsenal!

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!