Harry Spencer’s Internet Business Blog

Affiliate Marketing is a form of marketing used by many business leverage the selling power of other people. Affiliates act as a middleman or lady between the merchant and the customer and for every sale or lead the affiliate can send the merchant they will be paid a commission. This method of marketing is nothing new and revenue sharing schemes have been used by travel and insurance firms and in dozens of other industries for many years. The affiliate marketing concept was quickly adopted by the web world with the some the first web companies starting affiliate programs very early on in the history of the World Wide Web. Merchants won’t solely rely on the affiliates to bring them customers but affiliates will drive merchants a lot of business and for this reason merchants will often pay affiliates a generous commission. The total commissions paid will vary greatly depending on the type of product being sold but what is known is that affiliates can grow a business and make it more profitable faster than a company can on its own.

Affiliate marketing is often seen as a good way for new Internet businesses and marketers to make money, as becoming a affiliate for a company doesn’t have a lot of requirements. Affiliates don’t need to deal with customers, distribution of products or any after sale support; this leaves time for affiliates to concentrate on what they do best, driving prospects to the merchant. Although many well established affiliates will have their own customer base, many new affiliates will start affiliate marketing as it is easy to start as long as you can drive targeted traffic to offers there is money to be made.

As affiliate marketing is such big business for web companies there are several affiliate network companies. They specialize in bringing together merchants and affiliates and managing the intricate tracking and monitoring of affiliate activity and paying of commissions on behalf of the merchant. Many big and well established web companies will often run their own affiliate program allowing affiliates to register directly with them. Here are some of better known and popular affiliate programs and networks you can register with.

Commission Junction – one of the most well known affiliate networks managing the affiliate program for many of the web’s biggest companies. CJ offer everything from Insurance, Travel, Clothing, Electronics, DVDs and everything in between.

TradeDoubler – Between them TradeDoubler and Commission Junction control a large share of affiliate programs for the biggest Internet companies. You will find products and services to promote including, Mobile phones, Internet and broadband subscriptions, gaming and dating sites.

ShareASale – A smaller affiliate network often the choice of smaller web companies that might not have the merchant experience expected from TD and CJ.

Clickbank – An affiliate and payment processors for digital download products selling ebooks, videos, audio, software and everything else digital.

Amazon Associates – As probably the web’s best known online store selling everything from DVDs to Kettles, Amazon manage their own affiliate program once registered you can promote any one of Amazon’s products.

As someone who is just getting going with their own Internet business I’ve found affiliate programs a great way to get started with making money on the Internet. You don’t need much to get started, a bit of hard work and determination will go a long way to getting the ball rolling.

Thanks for reading and look out for another post tomorrow about a new web application I’m releasing that will help you manage, cloak and track your affiliate links.

Even if you’ve only been involved in Internet Marketing for a short period of time you’re likely to have been invited to take part in a promotional event know as a giveaway. Giveaways are promotional events that aim to help Internet Marketers, beginners and seasoned professionals, build a reputation and a mailing list by offering a product to anyone who joins their mailing list. I’ve been contributing to a few giveaway events recently as part of my marketing campaign for my first product Resell-Profits.com and have had been very happy with the results.

To be a contributor to a giveaway event you should already have a product ready and waiting to go, you’ll also need a mailing list ready to take on subscribers and be prepared to promote the giveaway event yourself as this is often a requirement of participation. If you haven’t yet got a product that you can contribute to the Giveaway Event then you can always signup and find a load of offers that may interest you and access them completely free of charge. You can then prepare yourself for the next event and take notes on how other marketers are using the giveaway to promote their own products.

Here are my top tips for giveaway events

• Use your own product although you can often use PLR or other marketer’s products you will get a much better response if the product is new and not been seen before.
• Promote the giveaway yourself using your affiliate link this will often help you get a higher ranking in the giveaway.
• Make sure you have everything ready for the start of the giveaway event, product should be ready to download, plus follow up messages loaded into your auto-responder.
• Re-introduce yourself in your follow-up message and don’t try to sell anything for at least a few messages. As people are often signing up to loads of offers you need to make sure people remember you and you stand out from everyone else so offer some good follow-up messages packed with free content.

I’ve setup a page on blog that I’ll update with information on the latest giveaway events I’ll be contributing to you can check out the page here you’ll also find a link to a free PLR download all about giveaways.

Click here to find out more.

Using royalty-free content to compliment your own work is a great way of giving your products and written work that little extra something, and can really make your offer stand out from the crowd. Royalty-Free content can come in many forms and as the name suggests you are not required to pay any royalties for distributing the content within your products. There are sometimes restrictions on how you can distribute the content and some websites that offer royalty-free images, vectors and videos charge a fee of some form but the content really can help your products shine.

Royalty-Free Images

There are several sites that have huge libraries of photos and images from photographers and graphic designers from all over the world. With access to these sites you can use the images to help make your products and services that much better. Web designers and graphic designers will often use other people’s images to improve their own designs allowing them to create designs faster and without having to go out and take their own photos. When creating ebooks and reports adding images helps break up the text and keep the readers attention focus on what you’re saying. The same goes for blog posts and website articles, you can also add images to your video presentations. Having images and other graphics included within your video presentation really helps keep your customers focus and get the message across to your audience. The libraries listed at the end of this post have such extensive collections of images that you will find something to match your content.

Royalty-Free Vectors

Vectors differ from conventional images and graphics, where images use pixels to represent the image a vector using mathematical equations to draw the graphics, allowing you to magnify the image without losing clarity. Bitmaps and Jpeg images will become grainy when you magnify the image, vectors are often used in desktop publishing or work that requires final design work to be in a very high resolution. Vectors can be used in a number of different software applications including, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and so come in a number of different formats.

Royalty Free Audio

Audio can be used also to improve your own products such as pod casts, blog and website intros, scores for videos and anywhere else you can think of using audio in your products. Using Royalty-Free Audio really spices up your audio products and work, think about how much better your pod casts would be if you had a 15 second music score to accompany your introduction to the pod casts. Using software such as Audacity you can edit your audio work and include royalty-free extras.

Royalty-Free Video

As video now plays such a big role in providing surfers with multimedia content it didn’t take long for royalty-free video to start being released. Many websites that specialise in Royalty-Free Stock Photos and Images now also distribute video for the same purpose. The videos can be combined with your own work to create better and more impressive products. Royalty-Free Stock Videos can be included in the intros to your own videos or used in cut-scenes you just edit them into your work to give your videos more life. As well as Royalty-Free video you can also find a lot of old videos that fall into the Public Domain, these are often quite dated video material but can still break up your video material and add more life to your work.

Common Royalty-Free Restrictions

Although Royalty-Free Images, Vectors, Audio and Video is free after the initial setup of an account you’re not free to distribute the content in anyway you like. You will often only be able to combine the content with your own work and not just distribute the content without changes or as a package. When using the content make sure you read the terms and conditions of the website so you know what you can and can’t do. It is also considered polite to email the photographer to let them know where you will be using their images.

Where to Get Royalty-Free Content?

SXC is a completely free source of royalty-free images and photos.
http://www.sxc.hu/

One of the big names for providing stock photos and royalty-free images, now also do videos. The membership fees are expensive but the content would be of great to anyone who specialises in graphic design.
http://www.istockphoto.com/

This site specializes in animations with a range of video, flash and presentation animations that you can use.
http://www.animationfactory.com/

The last two sites specialize in royalty-free music and audio, perfect for anyone creating podcasts, audio recordings or videos.
http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/
http://www.premiumbeat.com/

You can find many more sites offering Royalty-free content by searching Google try searching for precisely what you want, for example if you’re looking for a classical music audio search for “royalty-free classical music” this will help you locate a royalty-free site that specializes in exactly what you looking for.

Over the last few years video has become one of the biggest forms of media on the Internet. This trend is only going to become a more integral part of websites and providing visitors with good quality content. Visitors often expect to see video on websites and if you can’t give your customers what they want you’re going to fail. So if your business is not already involved in web video production then you should seriously consider getting some of your web content developed into video in one form or another. With all the information that is available on the Internet it is difficult to keep visitor’s attention focused on your content and video gives you the upper hand by keeping your visitors’ eyes fixated on your website and what you have to say.

Screen Capture videos allow you to capture everything that is happening on your computer’s desktop, these videos are great for producing computer/software tutorials explaining how to accomplish tasks on your computer. Many software companies are starting to use video in their help files and in training tutorials for their products. These types of videos provide a lot of value to customers and creating them is not beyond the reach of the average individual. There are several software applications that can be used to create screen capture videos I’m going to show you three applications I’ve come across and have used. Techsmith develop Camtasia currently in version 6 this software is the industry standard for creating screen capture videos. Techsmith also launched a free version of their software called Jing. The third application is CamStudio an open source project. All of these applications will allow you to create screen capture videos and render a video file which can then be uploaded to your website or on to video sharing sites like YouTube, Viddler and Screencast.

Camtasia is the leading software application in the field of screen capture and video presentation. Camtasia has loads of useful features that will help you create screen capture videos that are capture your audience attention and help them stay focused. I’ve been using Camtasia on my first product Resell-Profits.com to create video tutorials I had a lot of fun developing these videos and will definitely be making more. If you’re going to be creating long videos that may need editing Camtasia is the software for you.

Jing Project is Techsmith’s cut down version of Camtasia, it doesn’t have all the features of their leading product but it is free and if you’re interested in creating short videos or want to practice your screen capture skills before downloading the trial of Camtasia then get started with Jing. With Jing you can only create videos up to 5 minutes long and the software doesn’t have the editing features of Camtasia but is a great free tool for beginners.

CamStudio is an open-source project released under GPL license and with a dedicated team CamStudio is developing into a great free tool for creating screen capture videos. The software gets the job done but doesn’t have any of the editing features you get with Camtasia.

These are my recommend applications to create screen capture videos, Camtasia is currently selling for $299 but if you’re going to be creating lots of videos for your business and websites then it is well worth the money. You’ll find an abundance of features that aren’t available in free screen capture video software. Thanks for reading and if you have any questions or comments please post them below.

*Instructions aimed at Windows XP users, but is possible on Vista

The power of computers has grown exponentially in recent years and software developers now have the power to do so much more with their applications. Some visual styles and appearance settings look great but can take up power that could otherwise be used to power your business. I know that it’s essential for software to have an intuitive interface that looks clean and well organised but sometimes all the additional power I can squeeze from my computer is beneficial too. Below are a few tips for making sure you can get the power you want from your computer without purchasing any major hardware.

Uninstall Your Unused Software

First off, remove the software you no longer use. If you’ve not used a piece of software in a few months remove it chances are you won’t use it again.

To view and remove installed software from your computer go to,

Start > Control Panel > Add & Remove Programs

Go through the list of software and uninstall anything you don’t use, you may need to restart your system but once you’ve removed the unused software you will have more space and power.

Disk Clean-up & Program Maintenance

Next thing you should do is install CCleaner, I know you’ve just uninstalled a load of software but this application will do wonders for your computer’s performance. Once installed run the cleaner, this may take a while but if you’ve not run the cleaner before you’re likely to find gigabytes of clutter that can be deleted.

CCleaner is an essential part of regular computer maintenance and is used by computer technicians around the world. The software has a couple of other useful features. The first is a registry fixer which will scan your computer’s registry for errors and correct them. You will also find a section that allows you uninstall software as well as change the start-up program settings. Programs that load at start-up will slow down your computer’s loading time along with the processing power that you can get. Start-up programs often (but not always) load an icon shown in your system tray but if you don’t need it when you first start your computer there is no need to load the software at start-up.

Appearance Versus Power

You can increase your computer’s processing power by reducing the appearance settings and visual styles. Changing these settings will effect the way Windows looks but will give you nice chunk of additional power. To access the Performance settings go to,

Start > Control Panel > System > Advanced Tab > Performance > Settings

Click on the Advanced tab and under the Performance section click settings. You should then click Adjust For Best Performance, remember this will change the way Windows looks and you may want to switch some of the most noticeable options back on if you’re unhappy with the way Windows now looks. The most common options to turn back on are right at the bottom of the list.

• Use common tasks in folders – selecting this gives you quick access to common tasks when looking at a folder’s contents (the panel to the left of the folder window).
• Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop – selecting this makes it easier to see labels of icons on the desktop especially if you have a photo as your desktop image.
• Use Visual Styles on Windows and Buttons – This is the overall look of Windows and if you leave it unticked you may feel like you’ve taken a step back in time with Windows looking like it did before XP.

ReadyBoost

If you have a spare USB Memory Stick, you can also take advantage of ReadyBoost this is where Windows utilises the additional flash memory of your memory stick as additional virtual memory improving the start up, and load time of Windows and other applications you might use. I would only bother doing this if you have a spare memory stick that has at least 1GB of space.

To turn on the ReadyBoost feature insert your spare flash drive into a USB port and go to,

My Computer > Right-Click on the Flash Drive Icon and select properties. Click on the ReadyBoost tab and follow the instructions to turn on ReadyBoost.

Defragmenting your hard drive

When you use your computer regularly to copy and move files about your data becomes fragmented. This is another reason why computers start to slow down after a while. Defragging reorders the data on your hard drive so it can be accessed faster. This can take several hours if you’ve not done it in a while and is best done overnight as you won’t be able to do anything while it completes the process. To defrag go to,

Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter

You now need to analyse your computer’s hard drive this will take a few minutes and will determine whether you need to actually defragment.

I hope the tips provided here have been useful to you and given you some quick ways to increase your computer’s power. If you have any other suggestions or questions please comment below.

Launching your company’s website should be an exciting and prosperous time for your business but choosing the wrong company to manage your domains and hosting your web sites can drain your time and resources. Turning the whole process into a nightmare. This doesn’t need to be the case and you don’t need to be the most technically capable person to run your website smoothly and successfully you just need the support of a good web host.

There are some important features that the company you choose should always have and if they don’t have these feature you shouldn’t consider using them.

cPanel - cPanel is the most commonly used control panel for administering your hosting settings and features. cPanel can be loaded with different features and skins so it may not always look exactly the same but because more web hosts use cPanel than anything else you’re more likely to be able to find information and help on using it.

Multiple domain hosting - If you’re anything like me you’ll always be coming up with new ideas for projects and you want to be able to add new domains to your web hosting package without having to buy an additional hosting package.

99.9% Up time - When checking out the features of a web host make sure they offer 99.9% up time if not more you don’t want you’re site going down when you most need it. If the features don’t mention an up time percentage they are unlikely to be doing very well and might not be the best choice of web host.

Good Technical Support - When you first purchase a web hosting package and domain you will almost certainly have a lot of questions regarding many aspects of the service and what you can do. So it is essential to have a good support team on hand to answer your questions, having email, live chat and even phone support is essential. My personal favourite is having live chat support this is unlikely to be available 24/7 but in my experience it is the fastest way I can get my questions answered.

Back ups - Your web host should make regular backups of everything stored on your system, if this isn’t done then you will be the only person capable of restoring your site and this could be complicated and take you sometime to get everything working again. Just because your web host backups doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make you own backups but you want your web host to be the first line of support and you only get involved as a last option. Remember that you need to make backups of MySQL and other database separately to files stored within your domain.

POP3 email - Having email that matches your web domain is great and give you that professional look, there are different options to how you can setup your domain’s emails. You can use email forwarding, where email@yourdomain.com will forward directly to another email of your choice. This is good if you want to keep your regular email and also give your domain a matching email. The other option is to setup a POP3 email or similar account this will allow you to download messages to email software like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird.

Gigabytes of Storage and Bandwidth - A large amount of storage and bandwidth is standard with most web host just remember that there is no such thing as unlimited. Bandwidth will always costs and no host can offer an unlimited amount if your check the small print you will find a fair usage policy or similar stating that the unlimited amount must be fair so everyone can use the system.

There are many web hosting companies that will be able to provide you with the features and services you want. Just make sure you check out what’s on offer and don’t just purchase the first package you come across. Remember you pay for what you get, $10 per month is a reasonable price to pay for a basic to medium package.

Below are three web hosting companies that I would highly recommend take a look at them all and see which one best suits your needs.

Hostgator are a very popular web host with many features and a great reseller package if you want to offer your customers web hosting and domain registration as part of a product you sell.

NameCheap - offer the most competitive price for domain registration and have many features you need from a web host.

D9 Hosting - A younger hosting company but more capable than most at offering the features you’d expect over their competitors. Plus their support is second to none, the perfect choice for those just starting out.

If you have any questions about hosting please post a comment below and I’ll do my best to help.

Starting an office based business from home automatically gives you a head start over other small businesses with any premises, employees, wholesale credit or any other overhead. You get to build your business from the ground up, taking small steps at first but accomplishing so much more than your competitors as your overheads are much lower. So if you find yourself with extra cash from avoiding overheads then reinvest the money wisely in your business. Find products and services that will benefit your company’s future and help you on your way to making a successful living from home. The main point to remember is that the very basics are all you need, if your business is done online then a computer and Internet connection and you’re half way there now all you need is a good idea and a stead flow of motivation. Think of the number of business that have sprung out of a garage or bedroom and into the global marketplace. All you need is the ability to provide your customers with a reliable and trusted service that will keep them coming back for more. So find a quiet spot in your home to “set up shop” away from the hustle and bustle of your home life, somewhere you can concentrate and really get down to work. If you have a spare room make use of it otherwise dedicate a portion of another quiet room and get down to business. This is a great opportunity for you to succeed, have faith in what you do, reinvest in your business and never ever give up.

If you do have a bit of spare cash and are looking for products to help your business then here are a few products that might interest you.

Self Inking Address Stamps – These are fairly cheap nowadays some online companies are even giving them away free (+P&P) as promotional products; they’ll even brand them for you. Here’s a quick tip instead of putting your name at the top put your website address.

Monitor Desk Arm – These cost about £25 ($50) they can be a bit more expensive but even the cheap ones will give you more space to make use of and your desk will immediately feel less cluttered.

Large Dry Wipe Whiteboard – £30 ($60) These are amazing for idea creation and brainstorming or just for dotting down a brief plan for your business week ahead.

Another quick final tip for any business that has a computer, make use of free and open source software. There are packages out there to do almost every computer task imaginable that cost absolutely nothing and could save you a lot of money here are some essential business software that cost nothing and could be very handy to your business.

OpenOffice.org – a free suite of office applications that will help you keep track of your business and provide you with a free alternative to a commercial package. OpenOffice will even create PDF ebooks or manuals.

NVU – This is a HTML editor which can be used for designing and editing webpages and templates, simple to use and very affective.

Thanks for reading and check back soon for more Internet business tips.