You are here: Home / Internet Marketing

Making Improvements

February 1, 2008 By Tiffany 7 Comments

Kelly McCausey has been talking a lot lately about examining and improving your existing business. Basically the idea kicked off around the start of the new year and instead of coming up with all sorts of new ideas for your business to expand it…you just knuckle down and an examine and improve what you already have.

While I do have some ideas and plans for NEW stuff I have also been starting to really examine ways to improve what I already have going for me. I started with my naturemoms.com site. I have been going through the site page by page…adding content, tweaking Adsense, examining the Adsense activity with Adpsy Tracker, adding new affiliate promotions, chucking affiliate promotions that didn’t perform very well last year, and generally just improving each page. Oh…and I added a nifty script to the footer that will keep my copyright date current. Thanks Lynette!

I had quite a few slap on the forehead moments when I realized that I was ignoring some prime affiliate promotion opportunities and I had tough decisions to make about dropping certain products and promotions. For instance, I had a quite a few banners promoting Earth Mama Angel Baby products but yet my last check from them was only $9.00….blah. So I decided to give up that real estate to a new product and test the waters.

I worked on that throughout January and still have 1/3 of the pages left to do but I am already seeing results. My Adsense revenue jumped $80 from the previous month and that particular site became my top Adsense earner. Amazon sales jumped about that much too and since I am switching out my Amazon tracking IDs I am better able to see where the sales are coming from. As suspected, one site dominates. So when I focus on my other big content site next month I will step up the Amazon promotions.

I am also “improving” my attitude about outsourcing. I am very much a control freak and I like to be able to everything myself. With the exception of a few tiny things I do EVERYTHING myself… BUT last month I made the leap and signed a 2 month contract to outsource some things that were weighing on me. Already I can see that it will be well worth the expense.

Here is to mining for the gold you already had!

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, My Experiences, SEO

Squidoo Tip for Poll Modules

January 16, 2008 By Tiffany 1 Comment

One of the more fun features or modules on Squidoo is the poll module. It allows you to create a poll with a question or a statement and then multiple choices for your visitors to choose from. But did you know you you can hyperlink the poll choices to Amazon products…increasing your chances for affiliate sales?

It is actually very easy to do. Just login to your Amazon affiliate control panel, choose the appropriate tracking ID, and then start creating product links. Copy a text only version of the link and where Squidoo directs you to “Enter your poll response options” you enter your Amazon link instead of plain text.

Here is a picture of the process:

pollmodule.jpg

And here is a picture of the poll after the page is published and you get some voters. The best part about this trick is that the full affiliate commission goes to me. I don’t share it 50/50 with Squidoo as I would with many other modules.

poll-module.jpg

 In case you were wondering these two images are from different Squidoo Lenses. Hope this helps you boost your Squidoo profit!

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Filed Under: Affilate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Making Money, Squidoo, Stuff I Love

Amazon Affiliate Tip for Tracking

January 15, 2008 By Tiffany 1 Comment

I am an Amazon affiliate and I promote their products quite heavily. The payout out for me is usually 7.5-8% and considering that the conversion rate is high I can get past that. Well, except for maybe at years end when I see that I directed over $24,000 in sales to them and I compare that with my cut.

I made some big boo-boos in regards to properly tracking where my sales come from though. Until very recently I never really took advantage of their tracking codes so that I can see which sites, Squidoo pages, blogs, etc are pulling in the sales. Depending on the product I can pretty much guess some of the time but not all. The need to use these tracking codes became really apparent after I received several offers to buy one of my sites. I am not ready to sell for personal reasons but I realize that since all offers were nice 5 figure sums I would need to demonstrate the site’s ability to turn a profit and it is kind of hard to do that when all of your sales from your large network of sites all get pooled together. So I have started using Amazon tracking codes and will begin the tedious task of replacing existing links very soon.

It is actually pretty easy to do. When you log into your Amazon affiliate control panel you will see a blue box at the top that shows you are logged in under your affiliate ID. Beneath that it says Tracking ID and hyperlinked next to that it says “Manage”. Click on that and you will see a listing of all your tracking codes. You should have at least one. Then click on Add Tracking ID and you will get to add a custom tag that describes whatever site, page, blog, etc you will be creating links for. I just created one recently for my Squidoo pages so it had the word Squidoo in the tag.

Once you have your new tracking code you use the drop down box (inside the blue box) and you select you select the tracking ID of your choice and start building links with it. Easy as pie….if only I had done this from the beginning.

amazon tracking

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Filed Under: Affilate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Stuff I Love
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »