RosalindGardner.com

Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner

Change Your Permalinks Without Losing Traffic

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Would you like to change your permalink structure from /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to /%postname%/? Are you worried that you will lose traffic when those pages are no longer indexed by the search engines?

Fear not!

Dean Lee has created a “301 redirect” plugin that tells the search engines that a page has moved permanently. When you use his plugin the SE's update their indexes quickly, you retain PageRank and you still get your traffic through the engines.

Safely change your permalink structure using Dean's plugin which is available at http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/.

Affiliate Summit West Overview

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Finally back in the home office again after 13.5 hours of travel from the Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas and a desperately needed good night's sleep. 🙂

Affiliate Summit has grown considerably in size and scope, boasting 2,000 attendees, 83 exhibitors, 26 classroom sessions and rotating roundtables, as well as fun events such as oneNetworkDirect and Wynn Las Vegas party that was held at the TRYST nightclub at the Wynn.

During the party, the Pinnacle Awards Show took place and six awards were presented to outstanding affiliate marketers. The winners were:

  • Affiliate of the Year: Scott Hazard
  • Affiliate Manager of the Year: Angel Djambazov
  • Exceptional Merchant: Amazon.com
  • Affiliate Marketing Advocate Award: Brian Littleton of ShareaSale (should gotten a best network award too!)
  • Best Blogger: Jim Kukral
  • Wayne Porter Affiliate Marketing Legend: Todd Crawford

In addition to points picked up at classroom sessions, outside networking is the point of the Summit for many. Included below is a pic of one such session that happened on Tuesday afternoon. From left to right: Michael Sperber, Raja, Rosalind Gardner, Matt Frary , Colin McDougall and Michael Stark.

Affiliate Summit 2007 East will be at the Intercontinental Hotel in Miami from July 8th through the 10th.

P.S. I'll be posting some of my better takeaways from the Affiliate Summit over the next couple of days. 🙂

P.P.S. My apologies if you posted a Shout Out! for me and I didn't get back to you. I'll be doing follow-up calls today and tomorrow.

Your Web Site Building Options

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You have 3 basic options for building your web site, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Site Building Option 1: Hire a Web Site Designer

Although I do believe in using designers to produce quality header graphics for your site, I am strongly against hiring a web site designer to build your whole site, and here's why.

You may spend $1000 or more to have a site designed, and there is no guarantee that you will be completely satisfied with the results.

You are also at the mercy of the designer's availability to revise or update your site. This poses a major drawback to content publishing affiliates who should regularly add new articles and products to their sites.

Imagine how disappointed you would be to miss an opportunity to promote a super deal because you couldn't get in touch with your webmaster?

For example, if a merchant contacted you with a REALLY good time-limited offer that you had to get out to your customers right away; you don't have time to wait until your web designer returns your phone call, or comes back from his 3-week vacation.

Then, when he does finally get in touch, you will have to EXPLAIN where to get the graphics, the page you want it posted on, and so on and so forth.

Blah, blah, BLAH!

Missed opportunities mean lost revenue, so let's look at a better option for building your site.

Site Building Option 2: Use a Web Site Builder

Web-based site builders give you more control over your site's design and maintenance than having a web designer build it for you, but without the need to build your site ‘from scratch'.

Some site builders are in fact total ecommerce packages that include credit card processing, built-in affiliate program management systems, free domain name registration, email accounts, autoresponders, market research tools and more.

As such, a web site builder such as SBI! may be an excellent option for many new webmasters and affiliate marketers. This is especially true for those who prefer to have all the services available to them in one package for a set monthly or yearly price.

One limitation to site builders is that they don't help you learn web site building basics like HTML link coding, which I believe is absolutely essential if you intend to build a business.

So, for those who want total control over their websites, there really is only ONE option, and that is to do it yourself.

Don't panic, I'm won't suggest that you do it ALL yourself — there are in fact many helpful tools available to make the DIY option very attractive…

Site Building Option 3: Build Your Own Website

Back in the days of yore when we walked 5 miles through 4 foot deep snow to and from… Oh, wait, that's another story!

Back in 1998, when I was starting out, there weren't many professional web designers around for hire, so I learned how to build my own HTML pages from scratch using Notepad.

In general, sites at that time looked awful and my 101Date.com site was certainly no exception, with spinning globes, blinking banners, yellow fonts on a black background and other such horrors.

But I kept learning and upgrading to new and better tools as they became available. Moreover, I have fun building my sites and best of all, I am able do what needs to be done WHEN it needs to be done.

Fortunately for you, the site building options and tools available now make building your own website pretty darned easy by comparison.

For example, RosalindGardner.com now uses just a WordPress blog which is basically a ‘content management system'.

To start your own website using either WordPress, you will need to first register a domain name and arrange for web hosting. I currently recommend BlueHost, as it offers cPanel hosting and your domain registration is included in the price.

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