RosalindGardner.com

Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner

Rosalind Gardner

Super affiliate, blogger, and speaker, Rosalind is best known for her affiliate marketing training in the Super Affiliate Handbook: How I made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other Peoples' Stuff Online. You can connect with her on Facebook.

Are You Alienating Your Subscribers?

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How irritating is this? You get an email offer or see an offer (for something you actually want) on a website, click the link and end up on a page that says something like, “Offer not available in your area”.

Otherwise, you send out an offer like the Maxim magazine offer (pictured left), and your non-U.S.-based subscribers get redirected to SurveyScout instead.

Residents of Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand (or anywhere else that isn't the U.S.) end up on those pages far too often when marketers send U.S.-only offers to their entire list of newsletter subscribers.

There are two big downsides to this.

First of all, you may lose those subscribers through alienation.

Secondly, your affiliate manager may terminate your affiliation with their program when they receive thousands of invalid clicks which then wrecks their EPC.

If you accept newsletters signups from all over the world, subscribers from countries other than the U.S. probably represent a HUGE percentage of your list.

Here are a 3 ways you can avoid losing those subscribers and your affiliations. [Read more…]

Don’t Get Held Hostage by a Webmaster!

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Many folks are surprised when they find out that I do most of the design work on my web sites and have been doing so since I started my business in 1998.

You may think that doing your own design is a waste of time and that it is better to outsource it all. And sure, I have outsourced some of my design work, particularly the ebook covers. But I personally find it frustrating to wait for site and logo designers.

Sometimes you fork out $199 for a logo or header graphic which ends up looking like a 2 year-old could have done a better job; or, you hire the same designer that everyone and his brother in the niche uses, and your design ends up looking like the ‘same old, same old' with only color and text variations.

So, I don't wait for designers… especially when I can do a good job myself in 10 minutes to an hour. Not to mention that it's fun! For me, it's a break from the ‘work' of writing. 🙂

What's ‘fun' for me however, is a a DAUNTING prospect for others. For newbies especially, designing or building their own website may seem absolutely impossible..

Quite frankly, however, I think it is a far worse prospect for your business when you let someone else have control over every aspect of your site. Too often the webmasters I talk to have been ‘working on their sites' for six months to a year and more, and they still don't have a clue how to FTP a page to the server, let alone insert a table into an HTML page.

As far as I'm concerned, that's like making your auto mechanic responsible for making sure that there is gas in your car and air in your tires.

For example, one webmaster, with whom I spoke recently, spent a THOUSAND Aussie dollars, (about $780 US) to a company for initial hosting and design work. All she got was … [Read more…]

Four Questions to Ask Your Merchant

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Here's a commission-increasing tip that Willie Crawford picked up from the Super Affiliate Handbook and then wrote about in his blog. (I'd point you to the entry, but Willie isn't moderating comments on his personal blog and some of that stuff is just nasty!)

Rosalind Gardner has put the most direct dollars in my pockets. When I read her Super Affiliate Handbook it was a real eye opener. Here was a woman earning nearly half a million dollars a year selling affiliate products and she's telling me exactly how she does it.

OK… one of the biggest tips I picked up and ACTED UPON in her book was that even though affiliate programs have stated commissions, you CAN negotiate that. So I now get a higher than advertised commission for many of the affiliate products that I sell.

Yup, it's that simple. Just ASK for a better deal.

Want to increase your own commissions? Here are 4 questions that you should consider asking your merchants…

[Read more…]

How I Broke My Blog

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Here's a caution for all those who make global changes to their site's design in Dreamweaver or Homesite and then upload the whole mess to the server.

I'd been doing just that when I saw one of my blog posts arrive in a Google Alert and just had to click the link.

Ohmigod! Not only did the page not show up, but there was a HUGE error message telling me that something was probably wrong with my wp-config.php file. Yikes!

I then realized that in my haste, instead of uploading just the HTML files, I uploaded all the files for the blog as well, including the WordPress configuration file (wp-config.php) which was not the file for the Sage-Hearts, but the one from Net Profits Today. Oooops!

Not only couldn't I see the page, but I couldn't login to the blog's admin interface.

Fortunately, Steve Hetrick from DataWebPro saved the day and had it all fixed up in no time flat.

Anyway, if you're doing a big overhaul, make sure that you haven't been tweaking or moving some of those program files from directory to directory in the meantime, or you might end up breaking something important.

Better yet, upload only the HTML files. 🙂

Leavin’ on a Jet Plane

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Hurray! Ed and I are just about to leave the house for a long-awaited trip to Malaysia and Vietnam.

Adventure right along with us over at Roamsters.com… and never fear – there will still be lots of affiliate marketing news and tips on NPT, even while I'm building sand castles on the beach in Borneo. AMAZING how that works. 🙂

B.S. Alert: Is That a REAL Success Story?

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Like you, I'm always on the lookout to find more ways to increase the size of my business and as such, I'm always happy when I come across a success story about someone who has recently made it BIG. Not only does it tell me that the opportunity to build a business online is still wide open (something I know to be true but love to see proven again and again anyway), but perhaps they know something I don't — and perhaps I can pick up another piece of the puzzle through reading or listening to their story.

However, you and I both also know that there is a lot of hooey flying around the ‘net —especially related to Internet marketing and online business opportunities — so I therefore approach every success story with a healthy dose of skepticism.

First of all, many of the ‘success stories' are published by that person's mentor who wants to sell you a book or course that teaches their online marketing method. There's nothing wrong with that — provided of course, that the story is true.

OK, I admit to having somewhat of an ‘inside track' for digging up dirt, but there are many things YOU can do to determine whether or not a story is true. For example, here is what I did to test an affiliate success story that came down the pike just recently. [Read more…]

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