Small Business Information

Lots of affiliate marketers start out small, they work from the dining room table or use an old box as a desk with something even worse as a chair simply because they can’t afford anything better. Unfortunately they don’t realise that starting in that way can actually be counter-productive but when money is tight what can they do?

Well if that’s the situation you find yourself in you can always go to freecycle.org because you may just find someone in your area who is trying to give away what you need. You’ll also find that it’s not just limited to the United States - there are local freecycle.org groups across the world.

So have a look, there may be somebody in your area giving away exactly what you want.

A hat tip to Build a Solo Practice, LLC for the link.

It’s hard to believe that I haven’t stepped in here for a whole two weeks … but then our small business has just gone ballistic in those with new clients and work for old clients and those two weeks have just whizzed by.

But here I’m back and I want to know if you think that all the affiliate advertising you see in online newspapers these days is any sort of threat to your attempts at affiliate marketing?

There certainly is plenty of advertising around … but is it really having any affect on people see the advertising while reading the online news? Off Target Ads is an interesting take on advertising from a journalist’s point of view.

If you’re like us then getting to the top of Google’s search engine results pages is very important. If you’re not in the top four listings for any important word or term that you might be targeting then you’re not anywhere has been a driving force for us for many years.

That’s why we weren’t all that impressed when Universal Search came along. It reduced the number of spots on the front page and sometimes it even took away the top spot and gave it to a map or a picture. That’s fine if you happen to own the link behind those maps or pictures but it just seemed to make life more difficult for the rest of us.

But now perhaps an image can change everything for the searcher and so they can work in our favour.

There are a lot of affiliates who are involved in marketing mortgage products so there should be a lot of very nervous people watching what’s happening in the States right now.

But what’s happening over there isn’t just affecting the sale of mortgage products, there’s a flow-on effect that’s affecting people in all sorts of jobs and eventually that is going to impact on all affiliate marketers. Of course there are those who are suggesting that the sub-prime meltdown isn’t going to bother the online advertising industry all that much and you can read one of those boosters here but somehow I think that this is not a whole lot more than wishful thinking.

Even today, here in Australia, our stock markets are down because there have been more jitters in the United States over the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Unfortunately I think that this is something that’s not going to go get better any time soon but the affect on countries like Australia may not be as bad things look right now.

One of our leading industrial giants is focusing its attention on China and even  though that’s a hard market for affiliates to sell into it might be something that’s worth looking at.

So many people come into the online affiliate industry thinking that they can make a fortune simply by throwing up a few banners. Sadly there are some major sponsors out there who seem to think the same thing.

If only they would understand that most surfers are blind to banners and there are better ways of advertising their products than by using banners. Perhaps we should all be pointing our sponsors to the latest report by Jakob Nielsen; you can find it here and it should make you think twice about using banners in future.

You’ll also find an interesting little gem tucked away in that article about navigation too

What do you do when you find that one of your merchants - or a range of products that you might be selling online - starts getting a lot of bad press?

Do you temporarily pull your - or is that just a waste of time? Do you run away from the product or merchant and never touch them again? Do you do nothing and hope that it all goes away?

Over the weekend boat licences has become a rather hot topic here in the part of Australia where I live and that occurred just at the same time that one of our clients was starting to promote that aspect of their business. So I wrote to the company that our client is the local agent for and asked what they intended to do so that we didn’t step on their toes at a local level and got this reply.

I’ve been in this business for 13 years and seen similar incidents. President Bush arrives today for APEC, so by tonight everyone will have completely forgotten the accident.

Completely ignore it and go along as planned. Todays news is tomorrow’s chips paper

I think that there’s a lot of wisdom there and I think it certainly applies in this instance … but I don’t think it will apply to every instance that affiliates are going to face. Developing the skills to know which form of damage control should be applied when problems do arise is very important for affilaites and something that is really up to the individual.