Getting started

Hello there, fellow marketers! In my previous post, I spoke about the research necessary to get familiar with affiliate marketing. Hopefully, by this point, you’ve done your homework and we can move on.

Now, on to outlining and reconfiguring Tinderbox Blog. The first thing I did (and this is something I recommend anyone to do) was download Free Mind. Free Mind is a really great way to organize your thoughts and put them in a way that you, and maybe more importantly, others can understand. Think of it as an electronic whiteboard.

For the tindberbox blog home page, keep in mind a couple of things: 1) the layout is based on LiteJazz Regions, which breaks the webpage up into about 12 parts. Also attached is a copy for reference. 2) There are “users”, contents, headers and footers, and sidebars. This determines where to place ads, content, and whatever else.

One of the first big adjustments we made to the site is the actual location of the home page. What J and I did was make the home page the cigar purchasing page. So, instead of coming to a home page that contained a bunch of directions, you went straight to a landing page where you could buy cigars.

This eliminates an unnecessary step for consumers. When it comes to online shopping one of the things you need to remember is that the less clicks a consumer has to make, the better. If a consumer has to go through a myriad of sites to get to the shopping cart, then in all likelihood they will abandon the search somewhere along the line. While we were only eliminating one page in this process, we feel that the transition best suited the needs of the consumers.

Next, we reformatted the first three users of the layout. As mentioned earlier, the webpage is made of users, content, etc. This can again be seen with the link to the LiteJazz picture. For posting the direct links in user 1, I simply copied the direct links from the tinderbox website and I pulled the ad for user 3 off of Comission Junction. For future reference, I get just about all my ads from Commission Junction, and then paste their HTML code into the website.

For me, this was the first time using Front Page, so it was a little daunting. But, you pick up on little pieces pretty fast, and so it’s a lot easier the second time around. Learning the patterns of HTML code will go a long way in helping you efficiently post whatever content you need. For the user 1 region, I simply copied the links from the actual Tinderbox site and pasted them into Front Page so that way we had a direct link. The second and third users I had to copy the code from CJ. That was the first real lesson I received. The next step will be to readjust the publisher links and then start searching for original content that can be used for RSS feeds.