Today I want to show you how you can setup heatmaps for free on your website to track clicks on your webpage.  You can see from the image below, it will show clicks on the page which can give you valuable info that you mightn’t already be tracking like, is the search function being used on the site?, are people viewing your twitter profile. etc.?

The tool I use is called ClickHeat and it is opensource. To set it up just download it from the site, upload it to your server and follow the installation process (which is very simple). Finally add the javascript to your template to enable tracking.

When you look at affiliate marketing more in depth, you’ll realise it’s not just a way to monetise your existing site, it is in fact a business opportunity in itself. Sometimes you’ll find offers and realise you can make more money building sites just dedicated to those offers. The offers available very from CPA (Cost Per Action) to CPS (Cost Per Sale). Online merchants/stores generally run cost per sale. Depending on the amount of products they offer a lot of online merchants offer datafeeds of their products through their affiliate programs. This allows you to build your own online store. Think about it, having your own online store, not having to deal with managing stock, processing sales, etc. and still making money?It’s a no brainer!

This is great but how do you build your affiliate store? Well I’ve found a FREE script which will allow you to do just this! It’s called Affilistore and you can find it at Affilistore.com.

So what does Affilistore do?

Affilistore allows you to pick a niche and develop a store around it. Take for example Perfumes, we could select feeds from Perfum Merchants and build it into our online store. The image below is store built using Affilistore importing feeds from Perfume Point, Cheap Smells, BeautyBay.com, SendMeScent, Jason Shankey and TheFragranceShop.

So Where’s My Affiliate Link?

When a client searches for a product, it will compare the products from all the merchant feeds you have setup as shown below, each one is an affiliate link as shown below:

So download Affilistore today and start building your own online store!

Let me start off by stating that this is a new blog, it’s been up a little over a week. Since it’s a new blog which we havent actively promoted it yet so our traffic is quite low around about 20 uniques a day.

You can imagine my surprise last week when I logged into Google Analytics and seen that the sites traffic had jumped over 500% in one nite to 130 uniques.

Now this was all down to one post we put up on our blog last week about Facebook Personal URL’s becoming available.

Google Analyitcs

Google Analytics

So What Have I Learned from this?

Blogging about topical trends or events can have a huge influence over your traffic. So if there is an upcoming event for your niche, even if your not going to it, blog about it.

Let me know if you’ve had any similar situations on your blog in the comments.

My friend Sean from www.smemon.com is running this special offer to raise funds for a sky dive for charity. I have to stress that this is a limited time offer and the quality of his work is unmatched, check out www.beerchief.com or have a look at his logo portfolio.

To get your logo Now!

Please Click this link:

Free Logo Design

Now for the boring part, the conditions:

• 3 logo requests per person – i may accept more but this is to stop abuse of the system and to stop me spending all my time with one person.
• 3 site requests per person – same story as above, to stop abuse.
• max of 3 logo revisions per logo -  to protect my time.
• turnaround time for logos should be 1-2 days – depends on demand, but i’ll keep you updated daily.
• turnaround time for sites should be 2-5 days – depends on demand, but again i’ll keep you updated daily.
• hosting is not included with the $99 site offer, but i can host the site on my own server for a small charge.
• domain is not included with the $99 site offer, you just pay domain name cost but i can help organise that for you if necessary (free of charge).
• if offer is ended, i will update this post saying so – any requests after that do not have to be honoured (but they may be – just because i’m nice!)
• terms can be changed at any stage as i see fit.
• contact sean if you want any more info

So how do you use myipneighbors.com for Competitor Analysis?

Well for an example I’m going to use Collin de Ruyck who was on the Top Affiliate Challenge. Collin was great on the show and I have a lot of respect for what he has achieved. His website is www.feedflare.ca.

So when we put feedflare.ca into myipneighbors.com it will list all other sites sitting on that server:

Now we have a list of all Colins sites and landing pages, we can see what he’s advertising and how he’s advertising:

If you like this trick, please leave a comment!

How do you make money from Affiliate Marketing?

There are 3 ways to make money from Affiliate Marketing:

1. Pay Per Click — Every time a potential customer leaves the affiliate website by “clicking” on the link leading to the merchant’s website, a certain amount of money is deposited in the affiliate’s account. This amount can be pennies or dollars depending on the product and amount of the commission.

2. Pay Per Sale — Every time a sale is made as a result of advertising on the affiliate’s website, a percentage, or commission, is deposited into the affiliate’s account.

3. Pay Per Lead — Every time a potential client registers at the merchant’s website as a result of the advertisement on the affiliate’s account, a previously determined amount is deposited into the affiliate’s account.

History of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing has only come to promenance since 1994 with the birth of successful ecommerce portals such as CDNOW and Amazon.com. CDNOW launched it’s affiliate program in 1994 called BuyWeb and Amazon launched its affiliate program in 1996. Amazon associates placed a banner or text ad on their website and if a visitor clicked on these links they would be taken to Amazons website. If they proceded to purchase an item from Amazon, the associate received a commission.

The Future of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is experiencing rapid growth. According to a report by MarketingSherpa’s in 2006, affiliates worldwide earned US$6.5 billion in bounty and commissions from a variety of sources in retail, personal finance, gaming and gambling, travel, telecom, education, publishing, and forms of lead generation other than contextual advertising programs such as Google AdSense.

The increase in online transactions and the low barrier of entry to ecommerce is fueling this growth. The main market for Affiliate Marketing is in the United States who were the earlier adopters of this form of marketing but the U.K. is starting to embrace it at a rapid pace too. In Ireland it is still a very small industry with only a handfull of companies running affiliate programs.

I feel that this is definitely going to be a growth industry in Ireland over the next few years much like the rise in the Search Engine Optimisation Industry in Ireland. For anybody reading this I’d love to hear your views on the future of affiliate marketing in Ireland and the U.K., please comment below!