“Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.”

                                                Tim Berners-Lee (Inventor of the World Wide Web)

Whether it is a static or dynamic website, it has to be viewable with any web browser. Even though most web surfers use the IE (Microsoft Internet Explorer), your web site has to be viewed in other browsers such as Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, and more. Due to the fact that IE is the most popular browser, many web designers disregard less popular browsers.

When you are building a web site your goal is to create a great user experience for all visitors regardless of what browser they use.

Affiliate programs are the ideal way to make your web site profitable. There is such a variety of web affiliate programs now available to suit you and your site. You may become and affiliate and earn extra revenue through your website, or you may create your own affiliate program enabling others to profit by driving traffic to your site. Either way, affiliate programs should be part of a complete online business strategy.

You can profit from affiliate programs, even if you don’t have a product to sell. You could become an affiliate for other businesses. If you enjoy writing, you could start a blog and earn affiliate revenue. Make sure you only enter into partnership with reputable companies. If an affiliate program sounds too good to be true, you can bet your boots that it is. The products you market should have a proven track record for being successfully marketed and sold online.

The best part about affiliate programs is that they don’t require any financial investment on your part. If you are asked to send money to join an affiliate program,, you should walk. It is a sign of bad things to happen.

Finding affiliate programs is easy. There are several reputable affiliate directories.

An affiliate marketer is one who sells products through his website without actually owning the product. Therefore, there is no cost for buying products, maintaining inventory, or shipping. An affiliate marketer has only one responsibility that is to complete the desired transaction be it selling or lead generation. They are mostly paid by commission for every sale that could be as little as a few percent or a set dollar amount per transaction.

What is an affiliate program?

It would be difficult to imagine e-commerce without affiliate programs. Online businesses hope to increase revenue through their affiliate programs. An affiliate program is an opportunity for the advertiser, and the publisher. The advertiser is the company with a product to sell. The publisher is driving traffic to the advertiser’s website making money on commission.

Real world example: Let’s say you have a mortgage business and you want to generate leads through your brand new website. The website looks great, your online lead generation form works like a charm, except you have no visitors. You could create an affiliate program and pay your affiliates for each lead. In essence, you have created a win-win situation for your business and your affiliates. You only pay for leads not promises, and you have created a profitable opportunity for content publishers.

Multi Tier Affiliate Programs

Many affiliate advertisers offer multi tier affiliate programs. It enables affiliates to recruit additional affiliates building a hierarchy of affiliates. For examples, affiliate A could recruiter affiliate X to the same program and earn an additional percentage per each sale. Multi tier programs encourage affiliates to recruit others benefiting the affiliate advertiser and the affiliate. The concept is similar to network or pyramid marketing.

Affiliate marketing is an excellent way for someone to start a home-based business with minimal cost. You can make a great side income for yourself as you are learning. Once you become experience, you might become a fulltime affiliate marketer. The key is to build websites that drive relevant traffic to the right affiliate product websites.

How do I get started?

Affiliate marketing is easy to start. All you need is a website targeting a particular niche. Niche websites do well because there is less competition. If you want to succeed as an affiliate marketer for mainstream products such as digital cameras, you are going to fight an uphill battle.

The goal is to develop multiple sites dedicated to niche markets. Your biggest challenge as an affiliate publisher is to create unique content and to drive a significant amount of traffic to your website. Once you have visitors, you have to focus on getting them to click the affiliate ads. If a visitor clicks on any such banner, and then makes a purchase, you receive your commission. Consequently, the more sales the affiliate advertiser makes through your website, the more commission you receive. Compensation varies depending on the type of program.
            It is not as easy as it looks. Treat affiliate marketing as a business. If you will treat it as a hobby spending a couple of hours a week on your affiliate marketing business, expect to earn a couple of hours worth of pay. There are a myriad of get rich quick sites selling you the latest “best kept” secret about affiliate marketing. The truth is, affiliate marketing is a business. If you are prepared to treat it seriously, and dedicate your time and effort you will succeed.

Performing market research is your first step in developing content. Create real value for your site visitors. The simplest and most effective market research is asking questions. Ask your customers what interests them. Pay attention to the questions they have for you. Keep a history of the most frequently e-mailed questions or concerns. In the process learning about your customers, you can begin developing your content.

Valuable content helps your site visitors to make better purchasing decisions or to learn about your product offerings. In addition, content drives more traffic to your site. Search engines love content. The more the merrier. Search engines consider frequently updated content valuable. When search engines believe your site contains valuable content they send you more traffic. If you have the same content as other sites your site may be penalized. Too much duplicate content and your site could be banned. Getting banned is considered a death sentence for a domain because it is excluded from search engine results thus losing out on visitors.

Content without organization is chaos, so be sure your site is optimally categorized. Name each category with a concise and descriptive title. The categories should be consistent throughout the site for optimal navigation.

Usability

A website with poor usability results in decreased revenues. Your website is not about you, it is about your customers. Dedicate yourself to creating a website that is best suited for your audience. It is not enough that you fell in love with your web site the first time laid eyes on it. The only fact that matters is what your customers think. Do they like it; do they hate? The only way to find out is ask.

            Your customers can be your best usability testers. If they hate your site they will leave immediately, unless you have zero competition. Don’t even think about it, there is no business without competition. Your visitors may put up with smaller inconveniences such as a broken link. Don’t assume that your customers love your site because they don’t tell you anything. Be proactive and communicate, offer online surveys, e-mail them with specific questions.

Purpose

Be precise as you define the purpose of your web site. The planning process must include careful consideration of the reasons to create the site. It is not enough to state that the web site should make money, or that it should be profitable, or that it should provide excellent customer service.

A clearly defined purpose will help the rest of the planning process as the audience is identified and the content is developed. Don’t even think about hiring a web designer until can define the purpose of your site in one sentence. If you have to go into lengthy explanations, you have more refining to do.

So what’s the purpose of your website?

• To inform?
• To build a community?
• To reduce the cost of doing business?
• To generate and prequalify sales leads?
• Market research?
• To reach a bigger audience with your message?
• To carry out e-commerce?
• To entertain?
• To sell advertising space?
• To brand your business or your product?
• To create buzz?
• To establish trust?
• To reduce paperwork, printing, and mailing costs?
• To find new employees?

Audience

Defining your audience is an essential step in the website planning process. Your audience is your customer. They will be visiting your the website for a specific reason and it is imperative to know exactly what they are looking for when they come to your site. Your audience should have an effect on the features, functionalities, technologies, and overall flow of your site.

As you define your audience consider their web experience, age, interests, their browsers, etc. If your audience is the teenage market, your website will look very different than a website created for baby boomers. Taking into account the characteristics of the audience will allow a valuable website to be created that will deliver the desired content to your target audience.

Content

Website content has two audiences, your site visitors and the search engines. Content is not filler material. As you develop content you are not just adding words to a page to fill real estate. In essence, you are organizing materials according to your audience’s needs. It is content that brings your visitors back over-and-over again.

Payment fraud is a more significant issue for online merchants than for bricks-and-mortar businesses for, unlike a face-to-face sale, an online transaction does not require a signature or credit-card imprint. “It’s a damnable problem for Web merchants,” said David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report. The trade publication figures the rate of credit-card fraud to be 18 cents to 24 cents per $100 of e-commerce sales — three to four times higher than the overall rate of payment fraud. As an online business, you can take several steps to reduce the amount of payment fraud.

1. Only ship orders to the billing address.

2. Don’t accept international orders. Since address verification is not available for international credit cards, you can’t verify if the shipping and billing address are the same.

3. Require signature for all orders, and post it clearly during the check out process.

4. Require CVV (Card Verification Value) number. The CVV number is a 3- or 4-digit number printed on the front (AMEX) of the card or signature strip (VISA, MasterCard).

5. Use real time credit card verification processing service

6. Check the IP address of the buyer. If the IP address is outside of the USA, reject the order.

7. Do not ship to PO Box addresses

8. For unusually large orders, call the customer to confirm the order. Make sure you can reach the customer. Leave a message if you have to, but talk to a live person prior to shipping the order.

9. Do not accept e-mail addresses from free e-mail providers such as hotmail, yahoo, etc.

Unfortunately, returns and refunds are part of online business too. The key is to have a clear policy posted on your website. Don’t hide it from your customers. The more visible it is, the easier it is for your customers to understand your policies. Encourage your customers to read your return policy.

The most important aspect of dealing with returns is to not to take them personally. It is just a part of business. Dissatisfied customers, if handled right, can become your best customers. To create a quick and efficient system, encourage you customers to contact you through e-mail. Explain to your customers that handling returns through your website simplifies the process.

Simplify the return process. If you create a return process that is complex, slow, or inconvenient you will alienate an already unsatisfied customer. A pleasant return transaction builds trust. You may lose the original sale, but you might gain a loyal

Shipping is a hotly debated topic. Everybody has an opinion on the matter. Should you offer free shipping or not depends on several factors such as your competitive situation, your product, your profit margin, and you unique selling proposition. It is a business decision that you have to carefully consider. About 60 percent of e-commerce businesses regard “free shipping with conditions” as their most successful marketing tool. However, don’t jump on the bandwagon and start offering free shipping without understanding its impact your bottom line.

Some customers might start salivating as they learn about free shipping; it doesn’t mean it is the right approach for your business. If your product is small with a shipping cost of only a few dollars, free shipping may be easy to justify. An online jewelry store, selling high-ticket items can easily justify free shipping. An online bookstore, on the other hand, selling books at an average price of $19.95 can unlikely justify free shipping.

Free shipping is more of an art than science. One of the reasons consumers’ love free shipping is that it resembles their offline shopping experience. When they buy in a store they are not charged for a shipping fee, and may expect the same online. It is something you have to test on your own customers. Try offering free shipping, but build it into the price. You should also try offering discounts instead of free shipping, and see how your customers respond.

The bottom line is that there is no such a thing as free shipping. Someone is going to pay for it one way or the other. You may decide to build the shipping charges into your prices, or you may offer free shipping over a certain dollar amount. The concept of free shipping is a topic all e-commerce businesses have to face. With careful testing and consideration, you can determine if free shipping is the best option for your business.