There's a nifty little tool out called "Page Strength" and it takes Google's PageRank to a new level. It offers more insight into how valuable, important and popular a site or page is as compared to others on the web.

Check it out here.

I apologize if that title offends you, but at least I got your attention. :) And if you're affiliate sales don't suck, then you probably already grasp what I'm about to talk about.

Did you know 90& of affiliates never make hardly anything? That's not a very encouraging statistic if your goal is to earn a lot of money out here.

The good news is I can tell you how to fix that easily and it won't cost you a single dime if you already have a website. It will cost you some time, though.

First of all, if you don't have your own website and you're relying on the merchant's site to do all the work you're doing yourself a disservice. You need more than just that affiliate link with your ID attached.

As affiliates we must PREsell through our own content first. That means we have to put our visitors in a "ready to buy" mood BEFORE they click our affiliate link.

That doesn't mean to write a page with benefits about the product or service and just paraphrase copy from the company's sales page. When you do that it looks too much like you're trying to sell. That's the merchant's job to close the sale, not yours.

Stay with me here...

Let's say someone joins an affiliate program of a company who sells books and courses on how to improve your golf game and other golf related products.

Here's what UNSUCCESSFUL affiliates do:

If they have a website, they may write a sales page for the products listing the benefits, and then at the end they link off to the merchant site with their affiliate link.

Their audience instantly feels "pitched" and they arrive at the merchant site less likely to buy because they came from what felt like an advertisement.

What's worse is when the affiliate's website is not even related to golf so when (or if) a visitor sees this "write-up" they'll either be uninterested or smell the sales pitch right away.

Here's what a SUCCESSFUL affiliate does:

First off, they already have a content-rich site on golf that is already getting good traffic. (search engines LOVE content and reward those that provide it in abundance!)

This affiliate knows who their visitors are because they check their site stats to see what keywords people use to find their site. He ensures the content delivers information his audience wants.

Second, because his site is already filled with useful content, he probably has visitors that bookmark the site and return often.

Instead of just posting banner ads and writing a sales pitch for the golf products, he cleverly weaves in a recommendations for them inside his articles, blogs and newsletter.

Instantly the credibility for this affiliate is a lot higher than the one in the first example because his site is providing a ton of useful content that benefits his audience.

When he recommends products, his visitors don't feel pitched. They are just taking advice from someone they believe is a credible source. After all, they have learned so much from his site on golf, they trust his recommendations. Useful, informative content allows you, the affiliate, to build that trust.

You CANNOT become a successful affiliate if you don't have visitors that value your content and view you as a credible source in your niche. You have to give them a reason to trust you.

And if you are a "backward affiliate" (That's what I call those people who join affiliate programs first and then build a site afterwards), then perhaps you need to start over. Create a site on a topic you love, THEN join affiliate programs that fit your theme.

Also, don't feel like you have to choose "Internet Marketing" or "Home Based Biz" affiliate programs to make money. These topics are way too competitive and the market is overly saturated. Choose something you know about and have an interest in. It could be acne tips, marrital advice, weight loss tips, etc.

Problem-solving websites that offer advice and solutions are the BEST because you are helping your visitor with their problems - an INSTANT credibility booster if your content is useful.

After a while the search engines will start to bring you free traffic. Your content will help you PREsell to your audience and they will be more likely to buy products from companies you are affiliated with because your site has helped them.

What's cool about this is many of your visitors may even realize you're getting a commission from the products you recommend and they don't mind because you've helped them so much.

(I've had people email me and tell me they want to make sure I get the commission because my site helped them so much.)

If you follow this advice, you'll join the small percentage of affiliates who actually do this right and make a lot of money. Just make sure you select a topic you know a lot about like these successful affiliates did.

If you want an awesome, free course on PREselling, join the 5 Pillar Affiliate Program. Even if you choose not to promote their products you'll still get a free guide on how to PREsell and you can use it to help you become a better affiliate.

When will people learn that if it sounds too easy, it probably is? I've made a lot of money on the Internet, but I would never tell you it was "easy" or done overnight. Yes, it was fun because I build websites on topics that interest me, but I work hard.

After getting an email from someone who got "had" by an Internet scam, it inspired me to write an article. Read it here.

It took a while for me to bite the bullet and learn about CSS. I had always known bits and pieces but didn't really dive into it until a few months ago when I redesigned my site www.2createawebsite.com.

For those of you who have been designing for a while, CSS is no new concept...in fact it's probably very old news to you.

Now, for those that are just grasping or only know HTML, you won't want to ignore what CSS can do for your site.

It's a great way to manage your layout (colors, styles, etc.) all with one file. CSS also makes changing certain aspects of your design a breeze. You can even change the color of the scroll bar on your web browser to match your design if you want.

Here's a great CSS tutorial for beginners.

If you are trying to build traffic to your website, giving away a free item that your audience values can be an excellent way to generate visitor loyalty. It's even better if you can give away something on a regular basis.

Just make sure if you do decide to do this, your gift is relevant to your audience and is something they can use. Don't insult them by giving them away cheap or useless items they can find anywhere on the net.

Put some thought into your freebie and you can create dozens of loyal fans if you do it right.

Ken Evoy of SiteSell.com definitely does it right.

He knows the importance of giving away valuable freebies. In fact, some people have called him "crazy" for giving away such great products when he could easily charge for them.

I don't think he's crazy at all. In fact, I think he's brilliant. He understands that giving away free items that his visitors value immediately puts them in a "ready to buy" mood for other products.

See how Ken creatively markets his premeire web host by giving away a variety of free services and products that do an excellent job of PREselling his other products.

Here's a book I wrote on traffic building. It's called "20 Ways to Build Traffic to Your Site". In this eBook, I discuss various methods (most of which I still use) that will help bring in more visits to your website.

I'll admit some of the tips are pretty elementary if you've been marketing on the web for a while, but it's amazing at how many people still ignore the basics.

You'll also find a handful of innovative ways to promote your site that you should take advantage of (screensavers, contests, etc.)

If you have a website, you're free to offer this book as a free download from your own site.

Download it today.

As I've stated, I am NOT a technical person and really don't care to be. Although, I've always wanted the ability to use some Flash to enhance my site.

I tried using Flash at work and the program intimidated me. I'm sure for some it's easy to learn, but I don't have the patience to sit down and figure it out.

Well the folks over at CoffeeCup keep making it easier and easier for us non technical folks. They have a product called Firestarter and it creates Flash animations in seconds.

I just tried their online demo and it's amazing how simple they make it. You won't believe it. Try Firestarter today.

Someone emailed me yesterday and asked me about "Adsense Ready" websites. Apparently it's a program where people pay $100 or so for access to a database full of pre-written articles.

All they do is choose the ones they want to their site, upload the articles and Voila! their site is complete and ready for Adsense profits. I did a Google search and a there appears to be several sites out there like this.

In other words, these programs are for lazy people who don't want to take the time to develop their own unique content.

People are always looking for shortcuts to success online. What many of them don't realize is that the major search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) all penalize sites for duplicate content. So over time, as more and more people join Adsense Ready and start to use the same articles, the search engines will begin ignoring these pages.

After all, the key to success with Adsense is drawing in enough traffic to make a profit. That's pretty hard to do if the search engines are ignoring your entire site because of all the duplicate content.

There are no shortcuts to success on the Internet. If you want to make money with a website, you have to work at it and build your own, unique content.

It really angers me when I see companies like this taking advantage of people's ignorance. After finding out about "Adsense Ready" it inspired me to write an article on Internet money making scams.

Colors on a website represent different moods and emotions. Before you settle in on a color scheme, determine which mood you'd like your site to convey.

------------------------

RED is associated with love, passion, danger, warning, excitement, hunger, impulse, action, adventure. (Great color for food related websites)

BLUE is associated with trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, professionalism. (Works well for learning or business sites)

GREEN is associated with money, nature, animals, health, healing, life, harmony. (Suitable for health related websites)

ORANGE is associated with comfort, creativity, celebration, fun, youth, affordability. (Great for sites targeted to kids)

PURPLE is associated with royalty, justice, ambiguity, uncertainty, luxury, fantasy, dreams.

WHITE is associated with innocence, purity, cleanliness, simplicity.

YELLOW is associated with curiosity, playfulness, cheerfulness, amusement.

PINK is associated with softness, sweetness, innocence, youthfulness, tenderness. (Works well with sites geared toward women)

BROWN is associated with earth, nature, tribal, primitive, simplicity.

GREY is associated with neutralality, indifference, reserved.

BLACK is associated with seriousness, darkness, mystery, secrecy.

Partial content provided by milleniummarketers.com

Most of my family and friends now know the success I've had with the web, but I still don't think they really understand how doable it is to make a decent living with nothing but an information website.

People often think they have to be a techy or computer savvy individual to build a website....much less make any money. Or they believe they have to come up with some product or service to sell.

Sure you could sell something out here, but that's the hard way. Why not make it easier on yourself and just earn money by writing about something you love. A hobby. A sport. Anything you're passionate about.

Even if your plan was to create a fun or personal website, why not get paid for it?

Sure, Nori's website, Anguilla-Beaches.com could have just been a typical teenager's website about her family's vacation to Anguilla. Instead it's a content rich site about a beautiful island and it is making a ton of money.

Is she selling anything? Nope! She just writes about her favorite spots in Anguilla and recommends her favorite places to stay. The resorts pay her a finders fee for every new customer. The site ranks high in Google for "Anguilla related" searches so she receives loads of free traffic.

When you go to her site it's not one big sales pitch for hotels and resorts like you may think. In fact, you may wonder how it even makes any money. That's the point. She's not going after the hard sale. She's simply making resort and restaurant recommendations based on her own experiences, and most people probably don't even realize she's making a profit.

That's the whole point! Choose a topic you are passionate about and make recommendations for products and services related to a particular niche. That's all Nori does. Her site is very helpful because she's offering valuable information that people are searching for (Anguilla beaches), and at the same time she is getting paid for her content in return.

Nori also earns money with Google's free affiliate program called Adsense, where they pay you to help them advertise by simply displaying their ads.

The result of all this....

Her college education is paid for!

So many people are doing it the hard way and I just have to shake my head. Make it easier on yourself. Learn how to create an information website that will pay you for life.

I have been an owner of CoffeeCup's HTML editor for quite some time. I just happened to be browsing their site yesterday and noticed they offer a boat load of software for webmasters.

What's even better is that they are all wizard-based so the setup process is super easy. I don't know about you, but I don't know how to write scripts so I prefer to take the easy way out. :)

Thanks to CoffeeCup, you can have the following on your website in minutes:

- Photo Gallery
- Flash Wizard
- Site Search
- Site Map
- StyleSheet Maker
- Button Factory
- Gif Animator
- Password Wizard
- Chat Room
- Site Music Player
- ...and more!

Go to their software list page and try all of these tools for free!

If you want your search engine traffic to grow, you MUST build an effective link exchange campaign. And I'm not just talking about building a "Links" page where you swap links with other webmasters. Those are not as effective anymore.

Search engines are starting to ignore those kinds of links pages because they realize webmasters are just using them to help inflate their link popularity.

If you want to learn how to get the search engines to love your site, it's imperative that you download this free book called "Make Your Links Work". It's probably the best guide out here on effective traffic building.

I love writing content and marketing my website, but I am not too fond of programming and designing. In fact, I came very close to hiring someone to do that for me until I finally found a template online that I liked.

I get a lot of questions about how I designed my website, www.2createawebsite.com, and the answer is quite simple.

I already own the web page building software, Microsoft FrontPage. Then I went to a site called www.thetemplatestore.com and bought one of their FrontPage templates ($20).

It already had all the files that I needed for my site. So all I had to do was download the files, open the template in the software, add my own content and then save it to the web. (I also did some graphic customization in Photoshop).

If you are not into learning how to design I would highly recommend doing something like this. You can get some very nice templates out on the web. Some are free and some may cost you.

FreeWebTemplates.com has some pretty good ones for free but www.thetemplatestore.com is one of the bests as far as I'm concerned.

Grab a copy of Microsoft FrontPage, and this all makes the process of creating your website much easier.

Don't forget you also need a web host that supports the FrontPage extensions so you can save your work directly to the web from the software. I use Powweb.

You can submit to Yahoo, Google, and MSN directly by going to their individual "Add URL" pages, but getting listed is one thing and ranking well is another. Billions of people are listed in the major engines, but few rank high.

If you're not on the first two pages of results, you can pretty much forget about getting much traffic.

First you have to build a lot of content. If your site is only 3 or 4 pages long then you'll want to build up to at least 20 to 25 pages. Next, you also want to get as many inbound links to your site as possible.

For example, a paid listing in Yahoo's directory is an excellent inbound link that may help your site rank higher. It's $299 per year but may be worth it in the long run.

Adding your site to DMOZ.org is another way to get a good inbound link. Although lately it's been tougher and tougher to get listed there.

You'll also need to work on link exchange campaigns with webmasters that have sites related to yours. Go to any search engine and find sites that compliment yours and contact the webmaster about a link exchange.

Write articles and submit them to www.ezinearticles.com or www.articlecity.com. These sites allow webmasters to display submitted articles on their sites for free.

You are allowed to add a sig file to each article you submit so when people start displaying your content on their sites, your sig file will appear on websites all over the web.

Search engines eventually see this and will start to realize your site is getting several inbound links. This helps with your overall ranking.

I found an excellent free guide that shows you how to build an effective link campaign for your website. It's called Make Your Links Work. The information in this eBook is invaluable!

It amazes me that many web hosts don't speak to beginners. They advertise their hosting services using technical words like "bandwidth", "transfers", "gigabytes" and more.

The average first-time website builder is not going to know what is meant by a lot of these terms, and mosts hosts don't bother to explain it. That's always been my pet peeve and I'm willing to bet they lose many potential customers because of it.

Below I've explained, in laymen's terms, many of the features you'll see advertised as part of the web host package.

Web Space - The main feature web hosts promote is the amount of space they offer for your site. It's usually expressed in MBs or GBs. (megabytes or gigabytes). Just for the record there are 1,000 MBs in 1 GB.

The average web site will never use more than 50 MBs, but because of competition, web hosts keep increasing their space and are now offering up to 20,000 MBs (20 GBs) in some cases. I would estimate 90% of webmasters will never need anywhere close to this amount, but it certainly can't hurt to have it.

Like I said, competition is what's driving these hosts to keep increasing the amount and they want people to think they need this much space when they really don't.

However, if the price is low ($7.77/month) like Powweb, then it certainly can't hurt to have more than you need.

Bandwidth/Transfer - This is the amount of data sent from your web host down to your visitor's computer. So every time someone visits a page on your site, they download all the images and text from your host's web server right to their PC. This process happens behind the scenes and most people don't realize it even occurs.

Your web host will generally offer a bandwidth limit (expressed in megabytes or gigabytes per month), and it's important you don't ignore this number. If you go over, you will be charged a certain fee. The more you exceed the limit, the more it will cost you. Each host has it's own rate for overage.

Now I will say, most websites don't even come close to going over the bandwidth alloted, but every now and then this does happen - especially if you have a site with a lot of pictures, video and/or large amounts of traffic.

A good way to determine how much bandwidth you'll need is to use this simple formula:

Visits x Page Views x Average Page Size x 30 days in a month

So if your site gets 2,000 visits per day, 3 page views per visitor and the average page size is 25KB then your bandwidth usage for the month is...

2,000 x 3 x 25KB x 30 = 4,500,000 KB = 4,500 MB = 4.5 GB

So for this site you'd need to make sure your host offers at least 4.5 GB per month. These days that won't be a problem. Powweb, for example offers 400 GB per month and would be plenty of room for most sites.

Beware of the unlimited bandwidth claim! Some hosts will advertise unlimited or unmetered bandwidth as if you have no limit to the amount of traffic you can receive. What that usually means is they don't monitor your traffic up until you reach a certain limit, but once your site exceeds it, they will start monitoring you.

It's never UNLIMITED. That's just a marketing ploy because they realize most people never come close. Trust me. Big brother is always watching and they will charge you if need be.

FrontPage Extensions - Having this feature allows you to create and publish your website using Microsoft FrontPage. This is great if you are a beginner and plan to use an editor to create your pages. I highly recommend it.

FTP Access - FTP stands for "file transfer protocol" and it's the process of transferring files from your local PC to the web server.

So let's say you don't have any web editing software that publishes right to the web like Microsoft FrontPage, you'd create your HTML pages locally on your computer and then use an FTP program to transfer the files to your web server.

I recommend using WSFTP. It's free and pretty easy to use. You can learn more about how to use it here.

SSL Certificate - SSL stands for "secure socket layer". Basically you'll want this if you plan collecting sensitive data from your visitor (address, credit card info, etc.) Unless your host is free, almost all of them offer some kind of secure method of transmitting data.

Now that you understand more about various web host features, you can make the right decision about choosing the best host for your website. View my web hosting options page.

I really try to stray away from using phrases like "easy money", but I can't help it when I'm referring to Google's affiliate program called Adsense. I hope you'll forgive me. :)

It really is one of the easiest ways to earn money with your website...especially if you already get decent amounts of traffic (at least 300 visitors per day).

If you are a webmaster and haven't joined, you're missing out on a great income stream for your website. Not only is the program free to join, but it requires no additional work on your part except for pasting the ad code into your site. It doesn't get easier than this.

Learn more about Google's Adsense program.

If you're looking for some web editing software but don't want to pay a lot for it, I would highly recommend that you download the free trial of CoffeeCup. I like the fact that the trial version is not limited. You can use all the features and functions of the software for 45 days. That's plenty of time to see if this is the right web design editor for you.

I love the DHTML menu generator. I have never coded DHTML from scratch in my life (and never plan on it), but the CoffeeCup menu makes it super easy to build a fly-out menu in seconds. You can customize the colors, size and font of this menu and it can be as detailed or simple as you'd like.

CoffeeCup also has a built-in FTP feature which means you can publish your site right to your web server directly from the software.

I bought the full version after my trial was up. I like being able to upgrade to their latest version at no extra cost. Plus, you get access to tons of images and even more templates.

You won't find a better deal for $50. HomeSite and Dreamweaver aren't nearly as easy to use and they cost hundreds of dollars more.

Download a free trial of CoffeeCup here.

Affiliate URLs can be long and complicated to type. I've discovered a neat little trick that can shorten them.

1) Create a new directory (folder) on your web server.
2) Create a new page and name it index.html (save it inside the new folder).
3) Paste the following code into the index.html file and save it. Be sure to add your affiliate URL where it says url=http://your-affiliate-url-here.com.


<html>

<head>

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;

url=http://your-affiliate-url-here.com">

</head>

</html>


4) That's it! Now when you go to http://www.yoursite.com/folder it will redirect to your affiliate link.

When you post affiliate links in your signature file, emails, forums, etc. you won't have to worry about it wrapping. Not to mention it just looks better having a shorter, concise URL.

It amazes me how many times I still see webmasters trying to trick the search engines by using really tiny text or changing the color of the text to match the background. That is so 1998 and will probably get you banned from Google and other popular engines.

Search engine optimization has changed. It's not so much about what's in your meta tags as it is who is linking to you. Google especially is looking to see what quality sites have a link pointing back to your site.

It checks to see if you are listed in prominent directories like Yahoo, DMOZ, Joeant, Gimpsy, etc? How many pages are on your site? Do you steal content or are you original? (Yes, Google can spot duplicate content.) How often is content updated? Is your site flooded with affiliate links and no real content?

Learn more about how Google is cracking down on "worthless" websites and how to keep from being on the blacklist.

Ever notice that little icon next to some websites after you bookmark them? These are called favicons and you can make them pretty easily if you have a graphic program (I prefer Photoshop).

If you don't have any graphic programs there are several sites that offer free favicon generators.

Here's a favicon creation tutorial and links to sites that allow you to generate them on the fly.