DanITech Blog

What is Affiliate Marketing and how do I make money from it?
Merchants provide incentives to webmasters (Affiliates) for diverting traffic from their website or email campaigns, for example, via an advert.  Affiliates are financially rewarded either per click, lead or a percentage of a sale.

How does it work?
Affiliates are provided with code that will automatically track diverted visitors and credit an Affiliate account with the appropriate commission. Very little technical knowledge is required.

What are my options on advertising?
Advertising options include:

• Placing banners/ text links on your website/blog/emails.
• Writing reviews about a product/service/merchant.
• Advertising special promotions/discount codes.
• Providing price or product comparisons.
• Product Feeds.

DanITech use a combination of the above, for example, we run a Designer Clothes website which is based solely around Affiliate Marketing. We advertise special offers, discount codes and provide links to merchants and our recommended items of clothing.  

What products/services should I advertise?
It is very tempting to sign up with Merchants who offer the highest commission or incentives but in order to ensure the highest conversion rates, you should always choose products or services that are relevant to, and/or compliment, your website.  

How do I get started?
A number of websites provide Affiliate Programs direct or you can gain access to hundreds of merchants via Affiliate Networks.

Which Affiliate Networks can you recommend?
DanITech regularly use and highly recommend the following:

Affiliate Window: affiliatewindow.com
Affiliate Future: affiliatefuture.co.uk
Webgains: webgains.com

What is Google Adsense?
Google Adsense is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program enabling webmasters to display Google Ads on their website or blog. Google will crawl your site to ensure that the adverts are based, where possible, on the content of your site and your target audience, ensuring the best conversion rates.

Is it easy to set up?
Yes. Once you have signed up for your free Google Adsense account and your application approved, you will be provided with a snippet of HTML code which you can simply copy and paste into your site, so you can be up and running within minutes. 

There are a wide range of advertisements to choose from that can be customised to suit the style of your site, including text and images. Another great feature is the Google Search Box providing your site with its very own search engine that displays content driven ads on the results pages.

How much can I expect to earn from Google Adsense?
This is hard to predict as you earn an undisclosed percentage of the amount paid by an Advertiser to Google per click. Therefore, much depends on the current rate being paid for certain keywords included in the topics covered by your site, where you place the adverts and of course the volume of visitors. Google claim that the only way to find out how much you are going to earn, is to sign up and give it a go!

When will I get paid?
Once your account reaches $100 in unpaid revenue, Google will, depending on your location, send payment by cheque/electronic transfer at the end of the following month. Payments are made subject to certain terms to include providing your tax details and address.

What if I don’t want to drive traffic to a competitor website?
Google Adsense provides a Competitive Ad Filter to prevent competitors appearing on your site.

What is Twitter?
Twitter is a micro blog service which enables you to post immediate updates (”tweets”) of up to 140 characters in answer to the question “what are you doing?”. It is a service that allows your friends and family (”followers”) to stay up to date with your updates, thoughts, whereabouts etc via the web, Instant Messenger (IM) or by text messages.

Twitter as a Business Tool
Whilst predominately a social networking site, businesses are also adopting the Twitter services as a powerful marketing tool to develop relationships with their clients by announcing news headlines, special offers, customer support and feedback etc.

Your “tweets” can be imported to your website/blog or alternatively, TwitterFeed is a service that directs your blog/rss into your Twitter account,  whilst developers can use the API to make their own Twitter tools.

Twitter: http://twitter.com
TwitterFeed: http://twitterfeed.com
Twitter Fan Wiki: http://twitter.pbwiki.com

Tutorial: How do I add a YouTube Video to my Website or Blog?

YouTube have made it very easy to share videos via your website or blog with the minimum of fuss.

To add a video to your site, take the following steps:

1. Next to any YouTube video you will find the About This Video box.
2. Select Customize if you want to change a video’s style.
3. Copy the Embed code and paste it into your HTML code.
4. You can change the size of the video by amending the width and height of the object:

<object width=”212.5″ height=”175“><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/nfx3aDAlKtA&rel=1″></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/nfx3aDAlKtA&rel=1” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”212.5″ height=”175″></embed></object>

Tips: YouTube and Increasing your Website’s Traffic

1. When adding your own videos: Include a link to your website in the description (preferably at the beginning of the description so by default it is visible) and add tags relevant to the video and your website.
2. Link to other videos of relevance. As you drive traffic to YouTube, a link to your website will be added for example:

Sites Linking to this Video:
88 clicks from http://www.fiatracing.com/
10 clicks from http://www.motorlawyers.co.uk/fiat_racing_challenge.htm