Google maps provide a very good API so you can show google maps on your website. Most webmasters are using google maps to help customers find the location of their business ( usually on contact pages ). Others are building full applications based on google maps. It is very easy to implement google maps on any website. [Read the rest of this entry…]
Whenever I make a new website, I don’t like to stuff it with all the plugins that I think that the website will someday use, or with all the plugins that I use on another websites. I like to start clean and to install only what is needed. As you may know, every plugin you install will eat up processing power whenever a page is loaded.
But, there are few plugins that I install on every website from the very begining. [Read the rest of this entry…]
Even when buying digital goods that require no shipping and no real contact with the buyer, people will still try to find more details about a company to be sure that it is not a scam. Some of the information they would like to know are the company contact options, mailing address, etc. If you are not based in US they will notice that very fast and they will be less interested in buying.
The reason is obvious that they trust more a USA based company. Running an USA company from outside it is hard and very costly ( 500-1000$ a month ). Most online marketers and webmasters don’t have that much money to spend, but even if you don’t have a USA based company, you can have an USA mailing address. Using a service like USA2ME, you can have a real USA mailing address and have all your mail scanned and delivered to your email inbox.
As an affiliate marketer, you face many problems because you are not in control of what you sell. You can’t control the way the products is sold and handled. Merchants usually promote the products trough different channels and you will lose commissions because the buyer was also referred by another affiliate or trough another campaign.
Affiliate marketers can live with all these. But there is a thing that annoy us a lot. When a merchant change the affiliate network. From time to time, some merchants decide to move from an affiliate network to another. This means that you have to change all the links you have. To prevent this, you should use a link cloaker, but if you used many links from the same merchant and he moves, then you have to invest a lot of work to get the links working again.
Some people are opening every website they like to read the latest articles, but most readers will want to receive all posts from blogs they like directly inside their favorite RSS feed reader. When someone reads your content from a Feed reader ( such as Google Reader ), he will see only your content and not the ads, related posts, and any other adverts where you earn money on. Starting today, you can change this. [Read the rest of this entry…]
I know that link selling was blamed by Google in the past. I also consider it bad to buy links to manipulate search engine ranking positions. The main goal of a link placed on one website that leads to another is a classic form of advertising. Is advertising bad ? Not at all, even google most profitable business is around advertising ( google adwords ). During the search engine optimization gold days, the myth that a strong sidebar link will greatly influence the position of a website in google. I always tended to believe that relevant quotations are the most important factor in google algorithm. The result of this popular belief was a rapid growth of link sales. Most black-hat SEOs didn’t wanted to diaplay the link to normal users, only to search engines and this is why Google started to take action against paid links. [Read the rest of this entry…]
Every wordpress template or plugin author writes in the header of the theme or the plugin, the version which the template or plugin was tested. While this will ensure you that the theme will work for your wordpress version, wordpress theme developers won’t get back to re-test the template and rewrite the readme.txt file. How important is this for you ? I would say that this is not important at all.
Lately, I got a lot of spam emails into my inbox, coming from the contact forms on my website. At first, I ignored all of it, because it was 1 every week. But suddenly, I started to get dozens of spam messages every day. The good part is that I am the only one who receive those spam messages, and all of them got into the spam folder ( due to the content ). The bad part is that the IP Address of the website might get banned and marked in blacklists.
Even if you are selling a product, promoting affiliate offers or just blogging about topics that you like, it is important to build a list of subscribers. Since they subscribe at their own consent, there is a high chance that they will read the emails that you send with special offers, news, etc. It is important for every business to attract more subscribers. The bigger the list is, the more success you can have. However, most people fail in attracting subscribers because they are not using the right tools. [Read the rest of this entry…]
Promoting products where you earn a comission when someone buy the product is a great business. It is called affiliate marketing and there are a lot of people that generate full time income trough this ( count myself too ). In theory, it is very simple: pop up some posts promoting products, add sidebar links and banners, get visitors to your site and wait for the money. Well, in practice, there are a lot of issues that appear in this simple process. One of the issues is when the links you used are not working anymore, what to do then ?