A Good Time is Blog Time

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online, either through a Web site or a blog. The concept is simple: You sign up with an affiliate program, decide which products you want to feature, and place a specialized code on your blog. If your readers click on the ad and purchase any of the products, you receive a commission. Some programs will pay a commission based on an actual sale, but others will pay a set amount based on the number of clicks the ad receives or the number of customers who provide their personal information after clicking on the ad. Income potential from affiliate marketing varies widely, based on a number of factors including the popularity of your blog and the affiliate programs you choose. Some bloggers only make a few extra dollars a month, but others claim to make thousands. If you are interested in trying out affiliate marketing for yourself, here are a few ways that you can maximize your efforts to make the programs profitable:

Choose Quality Programs

The easiest way to get your readers to check out your ads and to buy the products is to choose quality programs that offer products they will want. Ask yourself whether you would want to buy the products that you are featuring. If you wouldn’t, why should they? Also consider the reputation of the company or its products. Amazon is a well-known affiliate program with a solid online reputation amongst its customers and quality products. Its affiliate program would be an ideal choice for your blog. Programs that have a poor reputation (or none) or poor products should be avoided.

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There are big differences between the two however and Google Checkout is limited in the number of currencies it supports and as a pure online system it only accepts payments in the UK and USA. Plus Google Checkout cannot be used to transfer funds.

Paypal on the other hand operates in multiple countries and currencies and allows easy transfer of funds through their system. Question has to be asked then if having a Google checkout account is really a serious competitor to Paypal or not.

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Google checkout came into existence to become a direct competitor to Paypal who hold the prime position as the go to facility for accepting online payments.

Both Google checkout and Paypal are what are called a 3rd party payment processors, which means when you register with them you are given access to software that places different payment options on your website. When a customer clicks on the payment button they effectively are dealing with a 3rd party i.e. Paypal for example take over the purchase, accept the payment on your behalf and redirect the customer to a page that tells them what happens next. This might be a page where they can download a digital product or a page that simply informs them that the payment has been accepted and that the product will be shipped to them in the next few days.

For a merchant, Google Checkout or Paypal is a great way of handing off the responsibility of dealing with secure payments. This does of course come at a cost, both Paypal and Google Checkout charge for the service and Paypal insist that you have a business Paypal account for providing this service as opposed to a free personal Paypal account.

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Smart Media Technologies is about to introduce a new concept called ‘Home Page Pays’. It is designed to be instantly accessible to Free members with nothing to download via a PC or a Mac computer and it can be used with any web browser. It doesn’t stop there, the new ‘home page pays’ concept is going to be available on 3 platforms:

• The existing Smart Media Desktop – a downloadable application with a huge range of features, including HPP when it is released
• The new Home Page Pays which will be accessible through your favourite browser
• Smart Media Mobile – a completely portable option designed to work on mobile products and smart phones offering all the benefits that come with Home Page Pays

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I often read in forums and ‘question and answer’ type sites requests for information on how to create and release a business blog that can be used to support a particular product or products that are going to be sold to the public. It is easy to forget that for the uninitiated, there is no such thing as straight forward and a need for a clear and concise explanation of the process.

The question I saw that prompted me to write this article was placed on the WordPress forum from one of it’s members. He was simply asking about a book promotion he wanted to do. The scenario being he had just written a book and wanted to sell it directly to the public at a fixed price straight from a WordPress blog. There were lots of helpful suggestions on exactly how he could do that using his free WordPress platform in a way that he would not fall foul of the WordPress terms and conditions.

The one point that occurred to me was, why on earth use a free WordPress blog anyway, from a commerce perspective there are way too many constraints. Dare I say it even a Blogspot blog would be preferable, although I hasten to add this would not be my recommendation.

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