Small business and e-commerce advice

This is a free service brought to you by Stuarts Page and should be invalauble to the small business man or the budding e-commerce entrepenuer.

If you already have your own homepage or website but are just looking to earn a few extra pounds to subsidise it keeping reading on. If you are a small business man or a budding e-commerce entrepenuer click here to go to that section.

Well, since you don't have a Java-enabled browser, this isn't much fun for you is it?

Having flashy graphics like the one above isn't essential for your website. What is important is having relevant content.

That is one thing a lot of people seem to forget when they pick the affiliate networks that they join. There's no point in having affiliate banners for Cars if all your content is on your favourite pop band. You should in that case be looking at banners for CD's etc.
This may seem like a plainly obvious point to most people, but im sure we've all been to sites with advertising for sites that have nothing to do with that pages content. What you have to look at is what kind of content does my site have and what sort of things would I want to see if I visited this site.

The best way to look at this is not, does that look like a good advert, but more does this look like part of my page, would going there give me more information on the topic im currently interested in. If im looking at a football page, it's a good chance I would go to another site offering more information on football

A good way of getting people to visit you affiliate sites is instead of putting them in as Banners, use text-links instead. Here's one example for you if you look at my Links page you may think 'This is just a list of some sites that may be of interest.' But no, within these are my banner sites, but hopefully all of these will be of interest to the visitors on my site.

You must now be wondering who do I become an affiliate to these programs, where do I sign up. Well that will come in a minute, but there's one more bit of advice to come.
When you look at the affiliate programs you will notice that there are two distinct types. The first is the commision based program and the other is the Commision per click (CPC) type.

If you have a site dedicated to music or similar, a commision based program may suit better. When someone who was directed to your affiliate partners site from your site, buys something you recieve a percentage of the sale. This is usually between 5 - 20%. If you have marketed your site properly and have the correct affiliate program this sort of thing can generate a lot of money. The only draw back of this is that you will need a site that generates a lot of traffic

The other type of affiliate program is the CPC program. This is hopefully self explanatory, being that you recieve commision for every click that that the link banner recieves. This is generally between 3 and 10 cents. One good thing about this is that you can generate your own income by clicking on the link yourself every day.

Now for the really usefully stuff. How to get registered on an affiliate program. Firstly go to The Reporting Net
Once here browse through all the various affiliate programs. Remember you can sign up for as many as you want but don't go over board on putting them on your site. To many and it will make your site look cluttered. Remember actual content and presentation is just as inportant in making people click on the banners as the banners themselves!
Then pick and choose the banners you want to go on your site. A good strategy to remember when doing this is to pick colours that match your pages so the banners blend in. We don't want any colour clashes now do we. Another good thing to do is swap your banners round every so often, people will get bored after a while of the same ones and want something new.

As I said if you need any help with HTML coding, you can get help here

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