By: Francois du Toit | Source: selfseo.com

More and more companies are offering attractive affiliate programs as a way of attracting more sales through the efforts of affiliates, giving an affiliate the opportunity to become a money maker with his or her own home based business. These programs can be very successful for both the company and the affiliate. However, there are good programs and bad programs. Knowing what to look for in an affiliate program can save you a lot of time and money.

It is amazing to think how popular affiliate programs have become in recent years. Today nearly every ecommerce website has an affiliate program.

Although it is normally very quick and easy to join an affiliate program for free, you can save yourself a lot of time and money in the long-term by making sure that you start of with the right company.

I normally always base my decision on joining an affiliate program on the following 10 factors:

1. Product (or Service) - Must be a high quality product that is useful and can help people. You must be able to create a need for the product, at least in your own mind.

Read the rest of this entry »

By: Solomon Rothman | Source: webpronews.com

As in any community, there are the trend setters, the visionaries and the superstars. They’re the ones that are quoted, read and referenced most, the movers and shakers of their particular realm. Blogging is no different.

Pick any topic or industry and you’ll find at least one super “A” list blogger, who is most often a prolific poster who has devoted large portions of his or her life to developing their online presence.

Why should you care?

Well, for one, they may be saying something interesting, if you need content ideas you can comment on what they write and use them as a source of inspiration when you experience writers block. Two, if you can get them to notice your blog or website and to it, that link will be extremely powerful, not only in bringing you traffic, but increasing your brand and trust factor.

Some A-list blogs have so much link power that just ONE link can result in many other bloggers also linking to you and your entire search engine rankings going up. Now you could wait for an A list blogger to happen upon your site, or you could try to strategize and be proactive.

Read more here…

Spread the word: bookmark it/ readit

Source: researchbuzz.org

Now this is an interesting idea. The Ageless Project, at http://jenett.org/ageless/, lists blogs by the birth years of their authors. As you might expect the majority of blogs listed are by bloggers born in the 1970s, but the directory lists bloggers born as early as 1911 to those born as late as 1988.

The site’s simple. You can do a keyword search or you can browse by decade of birth. (There are so many blogs from the 1970s that you can optionally browse that decade one half at a time.) The 1911 blogger unfortunately does not write in English, but the gentleman who was born in 1913 and writes Don to Earth does some really nice stuff. Blogs are listed with a screen thumbnail, name, year of birth, and name of blogs. Blogs open in a new window. I would really like more description than is provided but to be fair most of these are personal journals with not much in the line of specialty. (Though “My Mom’s Blog” has a recipe for a pie that includes ketchup. I’m going to have to make that for my husband.)

I’m surprised how many people from the 20s and 30s are blogging — awesome! To get an idea of how the site breaks out across ages, visit the stats page. There are a total of about just over 1700 blogs listed here. The site includes information on how to submit a site, but there are several restrictions (mostly concerning amount and type of advertising on sites.) A fun browse!

Spread the word: bookmark it/ readit