cms, seo, custom web projects & web advice

Affiliate Marketing – What is It?

In one of my personal web endeavors, I have been enthralled in the world of Affiliate Marketing, to learn more about modern effective marketing, click here. You may of heard this word, but what the heck is it?

Affiliate marketing revolves on one basic concept. Traffic. The more traffic you get, the more money you make. That simple. A site I make that is traffic driven would be considered an affiliate. To do affiliate marketing, you need a business to be an affiliate for. Luckily there is a huge amount of programs that let you choose which business to affiliate for on the internet.

This blog by Super Affiliate Jonathan Volk provides a lot of information on affiliate marketing. It even provides a list of suggested affiliates for the different types of advertising you would be interested in pursuing.

One cool thing about affiliate marketing (at least cool to me since I love Economics) is that it is a fun economic game to play. Target market is always a very important thought to keep in your mind for picking advertisers. This means you must think about “What is the demographic of my market?”. For example, if you make a site that has a predominantly male audience but advertise Mary Kay, that might be a bad decision.

I will keep playing this game with custom websites I produce. I find it to be a very appealing way to make money. At the same time, understand this means I can easily affiliate up your site for you if you see large traffic numbers. Why not make some extra money as long as it doesn’t annoy your audience?

Google Insights – Useful for SEO Analysis

Knowing what keywords to go after with SEO can be difficult. Some words may have a lot of competition. Some words may not be used frequently in searches by your target market. Luckily, Google has provided us with a useful tool for analyzing what keywords to target for your website.

Google Insights is a tool developed by Google. It is a pretty simple to use website. You add search terms and then choose history specifics. In turn, when you click search, it sends you results of the historical trends of these search terms.

For example, which word is more frequently search, “lawyer” or “attorney”? Here is a Google Insights historical comparison of the two words. As you can see attorney has consistently been the more frequently searched word on Google.

But what to do with these numbers? This is where it can be tricky. You also have to think about how competitive the words you want to use are on search engines. This means, which search term are you going to be able to crack into the search results easier? This analysis can be done by searching google for the terms you want to go after and thinking about how big the sites you first find are. If you find a bunch of sites with high Alexa ratings (high traffic), odds are you are not going to be able to compete.

As you can see, SEO is complicated. I find it enjoyable to analyze. It’s like its own economic game where you have to consider all the angles. In fact, thats how I view most of web development. Just a game with a lot of angles.

Tutoring – Beneficial for Teaching Content Management Systems

I part time tutor Math as a second job. Tutoring goes hand in hand with the websites we make for a customer.

We do more than web design. Included with each sale is also a detailed tutorial on how to update your WordPress content management system and a lesson about the tutorial. This is where tutoring comes into play.

I’ve always been good at understanding and then re-articulating my understanding on a more informative level. I see this as having the ability to take what seems complicated to you and make it simpler in your eyes. At my previous job, I acted as a Business Development Manager using tools such as those available at Paystubs.net. Part of this job entailed taking the developers complicated speak and explaining it to my former companies sales team (and vice versa).

Being successful at this communicating makes me confident I can make a customer’s website understandable to him or her. Think of me as an interpreter of complication. Let me deal with the complicated thoughts and make them simpler for a better understading.

In addition to tutorial lessons, this is beneficial to a customer who wishes to use me as a web advisor. A lot of the ideas on the web make no sense to people. Let us be your bridge in closing this gap as well!

Using Filters with Google Mail

If you are a gmail user, one extremely useful add-on in gmail is something called filters. Filters allow you to apply labels to specific mail, creating a folder-like organizing effect. For example, if you wanted to make every message sent from my domain (@gpmwebsolutions.com) be flagged with a specific label/folder, you have the ability to do this.

Setting up filters is pretty straightforward. Here is a tutorial explaining filters made by gmail’s help team. Tutorial on Creating Filters in Gmail.

Filters are useful for not only organizing but also filtering out spam. I recently moved my mailbox all to one place for 3 different email addresses. During the process of the switch, I ended up having 4000 messages marked as unread in my mailbox. Using filters, I was able to organize this mailbox in what one would think would take days in a couple hours. This is because you can flag specific email addresses to forward straight to a filter folder and skip the inbox. I found myself doing this for emails sent from Amazon, Best Buy, Ebay, Paypal, etc.

One of the services we offer is a full Google Apps set up for your business, just like this software available at https://www.paystubcreator.net/. This comes with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and more. Filters is just one useful example of how using this service will benefit the organizational strength of your company. Contact us today at info@gpmwebsolutions.com or by calling 314-397-2751 to discuss these options.

Speed Up Your Old 3G iPhone – Downgrade to older software Release

If you have an iPhone 3G and upgraded to the new iPhone operating system, iOS 4.0 or above, you may notice your phone moves slower than it did before. Here is a very useful tutorial I followed.

Useful iPhone 3G Downgrade Tutorial.

Steps to Downgrading iPhone 3G

1. Download the files the tutorial tells you to. (There RecBoot link wasn’t working but I found it on google – link to RecBoot download.
2. Put the phone in DFU mode using the tutorials instructions.
3. Restore the iPhone and use RecBoot to boot restored and downgraded iPhone.

If you really want to play around with your iPhone go to jailBreakMe.com. Voids your warranty but not considered illegal.