Online Blog of a UK Based Affiliate Marketer

As a professional web designer I do by best to adhere to web standards when building web sites, this has numerous advantages in many aspects of web design, many of which can directly benefit the design of your landing pages and in turn make you more money.

What are web standards

Anyone designing web sites in the past few years will have at least heard of, and are probably using web standards. Put simply they are a set of rules, guidelines and best practices set up by the World Wide Web Consortium that should be adhered to when constructing a web site. They ensure maximum compatibility between web browsers and platforms, make administration and maintenance of a website very easy, and most of all they ensure that your code - and therefore content - of your site is structured in the best possible way.

How do standards help you?

• One of the greatest benefits of keeping your code structured makes it far easier for your site to be indexed by search engines, and if you don’t already know by now SEO is one of the essential factors in running a sussessfull website.
• Using web standards means seperating the design of your site or landing pages from the content. This helps by keeping the file size down to a minimum, making your site as fast as possible.
• Another benefit of seperating the design of your site from the content makes it very easy for you to make small changes to the design with very little work. You can try out different colour schemes, layouts and styles with very little effort and see which ones convert the best.

What should you do next?

There are hundreds of websites around singing the praises of web standards, but to start of you want to teach yourself some XHTML and CSS.

Cloaking your affiliate links is a great idea to use on your landing sites, fortunately if you’re running PHP this is a very simple thing to do.

Let’s say you want to link to www.myaffiliate.com/index.php?id=12345

1. Create a file called myaffiliatelink.php
2. Add this line of code to the php file
   <?php header('Location: http://www.myaffiliate.com/?id=1234') ;?>
3. Replace http://www.myaffiliate.com/?id=123 with your affiliate url
4. Upload this file to your website
5. Link to myaffiliatelink.php instead of your affiliate link.

Amoung other benefits this prevents you from losing vital PageRank and stops the affiliate URL from being displayed in the status bar, which can dissuade many savvy users from clicking your links!

Having recently started getting into Affiliate Marketing online, I have decided to start a blog to chronicle my progress and give other budding entrepeneurs the benefit of what I have learned so far.

One of the first things I noticed when I began researching affiliate marketing is that there is a hell of a lot of information on this subject out there, and the majority of it is useless - most of my search results returned a plethora of ‘tried and tested systems’ and ‘get rich quick schemes’.

None of these seemed to offer my any decent information, at least not without paying for it. I understand the old addage, you need to spend money to make money, however I’m not in the business of paying for somthing I could get for free. And there is a lot of great free information out there, you just have to spend some time looking for it. Don’t rush, do your research and be patient.