Affiliate bloggers & marketers are looking at ways to invest in building & strengthening their online presence for rapid growth in the times to come.

1. Use a Creative WordPress Design that is geared towards your business. Don’t just get any theme, shop around & customize the theme to meet your business needs. (Look up Creative Theme Design for WordPress Marketing Themes.)

2. Customize your Marketing Website so that it reflects your motto, the customizations help build your brand. At the same time, customization would help you emphasize the calls to action leading to better ROI on marketing campaigns.

3. A Flexible Email Service that caters to your marketing needs of capturing leads, follow up messages, blog broadcasts & can scale up easily as your business grows. We have grown well with one of the best email services available today.

4. A Reliable Web Host to help you run a business secured & a system that can scale up quickly as your business grows. Dont try to save pennies on selecting a host because you might end up losing your entire website to hackers.

5. Business Marketing Plugins that make your website more effective. Click Here for Professional Money Making Plugins used by pro marketers. This is an exhaustive list of plugins that affiliate bloggers & affiliate marketers using WordPress for their business use to make their marketing activities & blog more effective.

Where else are you investing to make your website / blog ready for the booming business?

The technology is still new & various companies are using various ways to sell, exchange money & fulfill orders for Facebook customers. Small Businesses have an inherent advantage when it comes to fulfillment – they can run supplies from various locations.

Bigger organizations need to consolidate orders before fulfillment so that they can still leverage the lower costs of a larger scale.

Travelocity Car Reservations – they have launched a Facebook ECommerce application where customers can reserve cars.

Easy Jet Airline Reservations – an European airline travel reservations company uses a Facebook ECommerce Airline Reservation application but targeted to group holidays.

Expedia Hotel, Air & Car Reservations – named NewTravelCo, this application which also runs on the Facebook platform as an ecommerce software & helps customers book hotels, flights & vehicle reservations.

Hallmark Greeting Cards – Hallmark deployed the Alvenda Facebook ECommerce application so that customers can buy cards from their Facebook page, customize them & mail them from the site directly. Behind the scene, Hallmark consolidates all these Facebook Orders & mails out the cards from their shipping warehouses.

Equator Estate Coffee & Teas – they are a California based Coffee & Tea e-retailer. But customers ordering their supplies from Facebook is fulfilled through various smaller distributors located across the state. Being small in business, a distributed supplier network helps Equator Estate Coffee & Teas to keep their logistic costs low.

Facebook applications for ecommerce is gathering momentum. The Facebook platform offers a stable, efficient & compartmentalized ways to businesses to adopt marketing & sales channels to grow the businesses online.

This powerful theme is designed by very experienced Affiliate Marketers & they have been testing this WordPress Affiliate Marketing Theme in real live affiliate websites for over a month now – the results are astonishing!

Sample images of the Affiliate Product Landing Pages

• Click Here to Read More on the WordPress Affiliate Convertible Theme

Our tests in various live affiliate sales websites showed that:

• the WP Landing Pages Theme is 60% easier to operate than any HTML landing pages
• The innovative design saved over 15% of maintenance & running costs for most of the affiliates
• The efficient design renders the Landing Page in milliseconds – way faster than most other WP themes of static HTML pages
• The Theme is 80% cheaper than similar Affiliate Landing page templates available in the online marketplace
• The organic search results are better than other similar conversion landing pages
• Less than 10% shopping cart abandonment – that is a 40%+ improvement over traditional landing page simply because of the clean design & effective styling

There are numerous simple but innovative features of the new WordPress Affiliate Landing Page Convertible Theme. But the ones most liked by our users are;

• Quick Set Up time – simply install & use
• Ability to change designs on the fly, even after you have created & published your sales landing pages
• The effective BUY NOW buttons that are provided free with the theme & are customized to work with this theme
• Can be used as conversion landing page for a wide variety of affiliate products – health care, fashion & beauty, teenage products, diet & fitness products, electronics, home improvement, gardening etc
• Helps to leverage the combined power of WordPress Posts & WordPress Pages

• Click Here to Read More, View Demo & Buy the New WordPress Affiliate Convertible Theme Now!

The reason probably is quite simple – Craigslist is overshadowed by Facebook, Twitter etc. And the second reason is probably the fact that there is absolutely no advertising about Craigslist – it hardly shows up in any of the Social Media news. It’s rarely that we get to hear from Craig Newmark about the immensity of his website.

Click Here to Read the Interview of Craig Newmark of Craigslist & Dan Zarrella.

Craigslist, under its CEO Jim Buckmaster, now spreads over 700 cities internationally. And as Craig mentions in the interview, the real strength of the site comes from people’s willingness to come back to it for their daily need & the fact that the site has expanded more by word-of-mouth than by any advertising.

Is Craigslist in your Viral Marketing plan?

Have you tried using this plain & simple looking website in anyway to promote your business? Though apparently, this site is more transactional in nature & not many tools (automated or manual) exist that can directly help your business.

Can Craigslist be Your Viral Marketing Channel?

If you have not thought about using Craigslist as a successful viral marketing tool for your affiliate business, here are a few tips that can excite your about Craigslist:

1. Using the Page Rank – The CL Blog has a Google Page Rank of 6 & allows comments & ping backs

2. Craigslist Search – More people are searching Craigslist than Facebook – click here to read the published report that there is 12% increase in Craigslist Search

3. Craigslist Spread & Readership – Readers in over 700 cities in 70 countries read Craigslist – click here to read how Craigslist has expanded

4. Craigslist Popularity – Craigslist gets more than 50 million unique visitors every month from US alone & total monthly page views exceed 20 billion – click here to read the Compete report on Craigslist

5. Craigslist Free Features – Most of the features of Craigslist necessary for affiliate marketing can be used free of cost although you can still opt for paid ads & job ads

6. Craigslist Forums – More than 100 topical forums are available to market your business on Craigslist – most of these forums are localized so you can actually target specific cities in your campaigns

7. Craigslist Connect – Craigslist forums lets people connect with each other – you can create new customers & generate leads easily with Craigslist

8. Craigslist Word of Mouth Promotions – as Craign Newmark said in his interview, the main reason behind the growth of the site is by to word of mouth promotions by its users. This is still the most trusted method of promotion & creates a strong engagement with the reader (customer) from the very beginning

There are more factors that should interest you to take a deeper look in using Craigslist to market your Affiliate Business virally. The design of Craigslist is very simple & you need to create a free user account to be able to start viral marketing & promoting your business at either low or absolutely no cost.

I will highlight a few interesting points from this McKinsey report on Post Recession US Consumer Behavior.

• 18 percent of consumer-packaged-goods consumers bought lower-priced brands in the past two years when the country was in recession
• 46 percent of the consumers who used “cheaper” alternatives, said these products performed better than expected
• 34 percent of the consumers to switched to “cheaper” alternatives, said they no longer preferred higher-priced products
• additional 41 percent said that while they preferred the premium brand, it “was not worth the money”

A great example at our hand is our custom themes for small business (sold from Business CMS Themes & soon will be available on Creative Themes Design websites):

• all these business CMS themes (designed for multi ads sites, affiliate marketers, MLM business owners & individuals who make money blogging) are priced under $10 – compare this to an average price range of $100 – $150 of similar themes from other vendors
• we are able to offer these quality business CMS themes at $10 by saving expenses on advertising & relying more on “word of mouth” of satisfied customers
• we sold an average of 35% more of these business CMS themes for WordPress in the last 12 months
• since the themes had to be created once & can be sold over & over again, our margins per business theme sold is now 50% higher than expected
• we have not offered any additional discounts & no incentives were offered during this period
• because customers could save over $100 in buying business themes from us, we had over 50% additional requests to provide additional set-up services to help them advance faster with their business website set up

The McKinsey report could be a clear trend during the post recession stabilization period. Clearly a large segment of the internet customers have started to realize that there are “cheaper” alternatives available & that such products or services are of good quality but without the added price for the “brand names”.

You can follow these instructions carefully & you will see significant changes to your website or blog’s time to load.

Load Time definition: In layman’s terms, it is the time that is taken to render a single web page completely on an internet web browser.

The First Step towards improving the website’s loading time is to benchmark your site’s load time before you make any changes. You can use a free internet tool like Pingdom.com & note 2 things:

1. how long your takes to load now

2. which all sections (images, scripts etc) takes long time to load

The Second Step towards improving the website’s loading time is to carry out these following modifications.

• Tip 1 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google caffeine Page Rank – Reduce File Sizes
  

Make your website files smaller in size. Blogs use template files, while static websites could be made up of individual pages (with various extensions like .htm, .html, .asp, .jsp, .php etc).

Edit your files or blog templates to delete any white spaces. Each space, line break, tab that you insert in the template files or the website page adds to it’s size. Deleting any such unused spaces will reduce the file sizes & make your page load faster.

Note that spaces are often kept for formatting & it usually helps to maintain & edit them later on if you have spaces.

Similarly, remove any unwanted comments from your pages & blog templates as well. Comments also increase the file size without affecting the look & feel or the contents.

• Tip 2 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google caffeine Page Rank – use CSS stylesheets rather than inline styling
  

A stylesheet (files with extension .CSS) contains the codes that define how your website or blog would look, including areas of texts, images, links etc. You can also define these look & feel by including styles within templates & individual files. These are called inline styles and override the ones in stylesheets.

But each inline style you use, your website or blog page’s loading time increases. Remove all inline styling & copy them into your stylesheets.

• Tip 3 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google caffeine Page Rank – Consolidate Javascript functions into 1 file

Much like stylesheets, Javascripts can be coded inside the individual pages or templates. Or they can reside outside of them in files with extension .js. Instead of using multiple small javascript files, you can copy all your scripts into one single file.

You can edit individual javascript files, copy all the content & paste them into 1 javascript file. You can then refer to this single file in the <head> section of your page or template.

• Tip 4 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google caffeine Page Rank – reduce image file sizes & eliminate “include” files
  

Look into the the report you had from Pingdom.com in First Step. Find out all the images that are taking long time to load. Edit them to a smaller file size.

Check your files & blog templates for places where you are using the “include” function. In WordPress templates, you will find codes like <?php include(“filename”) ?>. Its best if you can avoid including external files & bring them into the main page or template directly.

• Tip 5 to Improve Page Load Time & Improve Google Caffeine Page Rank – enable caching on your server

Speak to your website hosting service provider & ask for steps to allow “server caching”. If you are using WordPress, you can use any of the popular caching plugins. The ones that are very reputed are WP-Cache & WP-Super Cache.

Caching plugins help you to serve cached pages to the visitors automatically. Cached pages load faster than normal template based WordPress pages or posts.

A Note on Using Advertisements & Analytic tools

Advertisements & analytic tools built into the pages often slow down the websites. It is a good idea to place ads strategically so that they do not slow down your website to a large extent. As for the analytic tools (like Google Analytics, Site Counter codes etc), it is best to place them in the footer of your website or blog templates.

The Third Step towards improving the website’s loading time is to measure the loading time again, after you have implemented all the 5 recommended steps. Use pingdom.com & measure the improvements against the benchmark you had before you made any changes.

Google also publishes updates on the Caffeine blog & has posted an interview with Mike McDonald on YouTube as well. Google has already started to roll out Caffeine in various data centers & its believed that by the time the holidays are over, Caffeine will be in full effect.

While many bloggers are technology savvy, most are not. But there are several easy ways to ensure that your website loads fast & you can implement several easy changes to improve your website or blog’s loading time.

In the follow up post, I will provide you with 5 easy & quick changes that will help you. You do not need to be a programmer to try out any of those.

One of the major issues that we wanted to protect ourselves from was the downtime of our sites. The second issue on our radar were security & safety. Infrastructure is one of the key areas of focus for any webmaster.

We wanted to leverage the popular Web 3 Tools & SaaS options to keep our content safe & available in case anything bad happened to our hosting services.

Option 1 – Safe Secured & Easy to Use Internet Storage from BOX

We have been using the Free Box account for years now, not so much for media files (like images, audio or video) but mainly for the content. This includes all our files related to the sites as well as back up of our contents.

Apart from just storing the files, this system lets you securely access & share all your files over the internet. We don’t send large files in emails any more – we load them on our Box account & send the link in an email. We can also protect certain content with passwords so that no everyone can see them.

Since we do a lot of work from our mobile offices (read about Setting Up a Simple Mobile Office & how its an easy & low cost option), using the Box system saved us a lot of internet bandwidth too. Now I even send presentations to my customers from the same Box account without physically printing the large presentation files.

Option 2 – Similar Internet Based File Storage system from Amazon S3

This is also similar to the above except that you pay for only the bandwidth you use. The S3 stands for Simple Storage Services. This is supposed to provide the customers with a scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

However, as we found out, that Amazon S3 has too many problems. Apart from being the cheapest solution, S3 did not appear to be the right solution for us. Setting up Amazon S3 is painful & time taking & so is maintaining & uploading files. The biggest challenge is that it only works with Firefox!

I spoke to a lot of my colleagues who run high traffic business blogs & they all seem to agree on the hassles of using the Amazon S3 services. Mary Jaksch published a similar report on the difficulties in using Amazon S3.

Our Final Decision & Recommendation

We chose to go with Box. We have used them over a year now. Using the services is as simple as A-B-C. And we have not had any problems so far.

They also provide free trials so that you can test out their services. We have now opted for the more reliable Enterprise version. The customer support for all Enterprise Accounts is prompt & there are practically no downtimes. They already have close to 2 million international users & the number is growing. Though it is slightly costlier that the S3 (it is still less than $25 a month), the amount of time it would save us is immense. And any of my team members can learn to use it in less than 2 minutes flat!

Click Here to Get a 14 Day Free Trial with Box.

Here are a few of the videos on YouTube on Christian the Lion:

• Christian the Lion 1 minute 16 secs
• A Lion Called Christian – Their Story from Animal Planet TV 2 minute 8 secs
• Interview with John Rendall (2008) 7 minutes 44 secs

There are tons of similar videos on this amazing story of a lion cub, called Christian, who transformed from a house pet in London to a survivor in the wild African jungles.

The story is about John Rendall & Anthony Ace Bourke rehabilitating a pet lion & set him free. The story ends with Jon & Anthony re-uniting with Christian a year later & the emotions in the few seconds when Christian recognizes his trusted friends & rushes to greet them!

The book is an excellent read with over 50 images of Christian from a cuddly cub in London to a magnificent lion in the wild in Africa. Here is a link to the book on Amazon: A Lion Called Christian: The True Story of the Remarkable Bond between Two Friends and a Lion

The videos of Christian went viral on the internet starting off with YouTube, collecting over 44 million hits very soon it was uploaded. The total hit count exceeded hundreds of millions with the amazing story of struggle & perseverance of Christian along with the determination of Anthony & John to give him a free life to live.

A good read, both entertaining & highly emotional!

Twitter emerged as an online tool to exchange quick notes – sort of a sticky, open instant messaging system. Today, Twitter is talking about ways to make money off the popular microblogging site.

MySpace, Twitter & FaceBook have been experimenting with ways to monitize their sites. On & often we have seen ads on Twitter while MySpace & FaceBook have been showing ads more regularly.

Here are the news articles from Reuters:

• MySpace to be the new place for social networking where people can play video games - this move is explained more in lights of New Corp’s intention to build business in the video games market
• Twitter to pitch as platform for Business Marketing – Biz Stones report that Twitter is pitching add-on tools to make Twitter as a marketing platform for businesses

Many small online publishers & thousands of bloggers (if not all) have used faceBook, MySpace & Twitter since they were created. Many have started to depend on the amount of business that these micro-blogging & social networking platforms are bringin in. With the moves above, what changes should we see in the way we use Twitter or FaceBook?

The obvious questions that come to my mind are:

• are small publishers & bloggers going to compete with the big enterprises on entertainment & social sites as well?
• I can imagine an “enterprise Twitter” being rolled out for intra-company blogging, but how will that impact the small publishers?
• will these social sites continue to be useful to the bloggers & small publishers in spite of the big businesses coming in?

What do you think?