Useful Resources for Amazon Associates

Our pick of the best free resources:

Amazon.com now has over 500,000 associates (or affiliates) and this web site is aimed at any amazon associate looking for useful resources to increase traffic to their site and increasing their earnings. Here we have compiled a list of the most useful webmasters resources we have come across to help you make the most of your web site. Although we are an amazon associate ourselves (and therefore feel qualified to share our advice, hints and tips) we are not officially linked to Amazon.com in any other way.

Useful Web Sites: Sites for webmasters that you may find useful:

Your first step should be to subscribe to the free Amazon-Affiliates Discussion List, a moderated discussion list covering sales tips, technical issues, marketing methods, etc for affiliates of the Amazon on-line book sales program. The list is open to anyone interested in the Amazon.com™,Amazon.co.uk™, and Amazon.de™ affiliate marketing programs. Another useful resource is Virtual Promote, which is an excellent site on web promotion and also includes a free search engine submitter - submit your site to over 35 top search engines and more than 400 directories; with one form - for free! They also have free tutorials and advice on web site promotion and search engine placement as well as an excellent free newsletter.

Another excellent site is Search Engine Watch which contains just about all you ever wanted to know about search engines. If you are looking for a good book on internet marketing and web site promotion, consider Net Results: Web Marketing that Works by Rick Bruner; which is available from Amazon of course!

Amazon also have their own Associates Newsletter which contains information on best-selling books, CDs and videos and information on new products features and promotions.

Another good way to get more traffic is to join a webring and you can join the Amazon Associates Bookstores web ring or take a look at the current list of members. You can also visit the Webring Home Page to look for other webrings that match your sites theme.

There is also an abundance of internet marketing advice available on the net - much of it free - but one very worthwhile source of information is the Internet Marketing Challenge Web Site which is highly recommended. Subscribe to their excellent free weekly e-zine.

Also take a look at the Make My Site Sell Web Site where you can sign up for an excellent free e-zine and also download a free book on affiliate programs, which is useful if you join their affiliate program but also contains valuable advice that applies to the Amazon associate program. The Make My Site Sell Web Site also has the excellent book of the same name for sale at a very reasonable $17 US dollars or just over ten British pounds - this is without doubt the best value for money internet marketing book on the net and free sample chapters can be downloaded.

There are an abundance of free items for webmasters available on the internet - the following are particularly good resources for increasing traffic and improving your web site:

• Free Clip Art, Photos and Fonts: You can get a FREE 3-day trial membership to the Net's premier clipart site at Art Today . Instant access and unlimited downloads to 1.2 million Clipart images, Fonts, Photos and Sounds for 3 full days - absolutely free. If you like the service you can then sign up for 1 years unlimited use, which costs $29.95. For links to more web sites offering clip art, web graphics, photographs and animations for your web site try this useful guide to finding images for your web site.

• Free Counters: Tracking your visitors is important and you can get a free counter from Extreme Tracking or The Counter. Of the free counters we have used, these two are our favourites. If you want a counter which is not visible to your visitors, you can get one by paying a $5 monthly fee at Extreme Tracking. By finding out where your visitors are coming from, you will know which search engines are sending you traffic and where you need to resubmit. You will also know which keywords are being used to find your site - very helpful for meta tags and improving your search engine position. The countries your visitors are from is also useful in targetting your advertising and your site content.

• Free Search Engine Submission: Submit your site to search engines; web directories and awards sites at the excellent Self Promotion Site or use the free search engine and directory submission service at Jims Tools, which has several other useful free tools for webmasters and is part of the Virtual Promote site. For more information on search engines we recommend the excellent Search Engine Watch web site.

• Free Autoresponders: These useful e-mail marketing tools for your site can be had free from Send Free. If you want a lot more features, then an excellent auto-responder service can be purchased online at AWeber.

• Free Traffic: An excellent free way of increasing traffic to your web site is to add a "recommend this site to a friend" service to your site by placing a small graphic; button or text link to one of several free services of this kind available on the Net. The best of these goes one better by allowing you to earn money every time somebody recommends your site - so you win both ways by earning money and increasing traffic. This is another service run by MailBits who will pay you 25c for every person who recommends your site to a friend. This is paid for by them placing a small ad for their free newsletters in each recommendation e-mail they send out. To start using this excellent traffic booster on your web site you just need to sign up for their affiliate program.

• Message Boards and Web Polls: Adding a message board to your site is a fantastic way to build a community and get your visitors to return again and again. An excellent message board is offered by VBulletin. If you are looking for a free message board, then ezboard is recommended. Building a community is one of the key ways to get visitors to return to your site and to increase your traffic.

• Free Mailing List Manager: Starting an e-mail newsletter is one of the best ways to get people to return to your site by keeping them up to date. You can also earn revenue for your site by having e-zine adverts placed in your newsletter or placing your own ads using affiliate links. List Power offers a free mailing list manager, as does Topica.

• Free Banner Exchanges: If your site is new, these can be a way of boosting traffic and for promoting affiliate programs. One of the best on the web is the Exchange-it Banner Exchange. You can have up to 5 banners (with different urls if you like, so ideal for promoting more than 1 affiliate program or for testing banners). Also recommended is Linkbuddies Banner Exchange. You get a generous ratio of banner displays and receive 500 free displays just for joining. However you need to target your banners, as banner click throughs generally are low and dropping!

• Free shorter urls: If your site is on one of the free site hosts such as Geocities, Icestorm or Tripod, you probably have a very long and difficult to remember url. This problem can be solved by using one of the free redirection services on the internet. By far the best of these is CJB who will allow you to change your url to http://'yourchoice'.cjb.net as long as you promise not to use your url for spam in any way.

• Scripts for Amazon There are a number of CGI scripts aimed at amazon affiliates wishing to try and get higher commissions by creating 'hard' (direct) links to books and thereby earning themselves 15% instead of 5% commission. A good version is offered by Anaconda and Computer Mentors offer a similar script.

  
  

  

  
  

• Free Content For Your Web Site: An excellent way of increasing visitors to your web site is to offer interesting content and links. A very good way to increase your site content with little effort is to add news headlines to your site. Subportal offers free, dynamic content for your website, including real-time news, domain registration, contests, and much more - click here for more details

  You can get even get paid for adding free content! Try adding free subscriptions to the entertaining free trivia e-mail newsletter from Mailbits by joining their affiliate program and they will pay you 25c for every new subscriber.

  There are lots of other free services that you can add to get visitors to bookmark and return to your site. Two of the most popular ones are virtual greeting cards/postcards which you can add to your site for free by going to the Digital Postcard and personals which you can add by joining the One & Only Affiliate Program.
  

  
  
  Clip Art, Photos and Fonts for your site: Click here for a FREE Trial
  

• Other useful free tools for webmasters: Meta Tags are important in helping search engines to rank your site and you can check your Meta Tags at the Meta Medic or Meta Tag Analyzer and generate Meta Tags for your site before submitting it to the search engines at MetaGen. This tool also provides a detailed analysis of the generated Meta Tags. Make sure that your most important keywords are in your page title too!

  You can analyze the frequencies of the keywords used on a web page at Keyword Count and compare 2 keywords or phrases to discover which is most popular at SpellWeb. To test your search engine ranking with different keywords on 10 of the biggest search engines use RankThis. For a free weekly e-mail report listing the top 200 keywords and keyword phrases used on the internet, sign up at WordSpot.

  Keeping the links on your web pages up to date and avoiding frustrating your visitors with 'dead links' is also important. This can be a time consuming process, but an excellent service we have found that automatically checks all your links for you is LinkAlarm. This is a regularly scheduled check of the links on your web site. Every month (or more often) they scan your site testing every link on every page looking for problems. An email is dispatched to you summarizing the results, including your report URL where you can view all the problem links found at your site. You can use Link Alarm on up to 200 pages of your site and the service can be tried for free for 2 months by visiting the Link Alarm Test Drive Page and simply inputting your url and e-mail address.

  It is important that your page loads quickly and if it has lots of large graphics it won't! You can speed up page loading by using the free Gif Cruncher to reduce your graphics.

  Another factor that is becoming increasingly important in search engine ranking is link popularity (how many sites link to yours) and you can find this out at LinkPopularity. To increase your link popularity, do a search for your web site's topic at a high traffic site. (At Yahoo, for example). Then e-mail sites which rank highly in searches for your topic and ask them very nicely for a reciprocal link. If you need free web site templates, then take a look at http://ifaces.radicalweb.net/templates.html or take a look at the list of sites offering this service at the brilliant Jim Tools web site, where you will also find many other useful free tools for webmasters. Finally, make sure you check your site by submitting it for a free 'check-up' at the Web Site Garage who will also send you a free monthly e-mail report on your site with lots of suggestions on ways to improve it.

  Search Engine Submission software is also a good way to ensure that you are well ranked in the search engines. We recommend WebPosition Gold (tm) as one of the best (although it is expensive) and the software can be downloaded for a FREE trial.

• Free Domain Name Reservation and Ideas: Having your own domain name is essential if you are serious about doing business online and is a prerequisite for joining many of the best affiliate programs. The best domain names are going fast, but you can search for domain name availability and reserve your domain name for free by clicking here.

  If you are searching for ideas for your domain name, take a look at Unclaimed Domain Names who publish a weekly list of unclaimed domain names. Also try the excellent domain name ideas tool at NameBoy. A good tip is to try and include your most important keyword or keyword phrase in your domain name.

• Web Hosting: There are thousands of web hosting companies out there - so how do you choose a reliable host for your domain? Word of mouth is a good way - speak to other webmasters, see who they recommend and find reliable. We have heard very good reports of FutureQuest Web Hosting.

• Other sources of free stuff: Of course there are dozens of other sites on the internet offering these and other services for free, however the ones just mentioned are the best we have come across in their respective categories. Another good site is Grantastic Designs which offers some excellent website design and online marketing tips.

If you know of (or even provide) a useful free service or tool for webmasters, please e-mail and let us know. We will add a link to the site if we consider it one of the very best of it's kind!

Other Useful Web Sites: Sites for webmasters that you may find useful include: Virtual Promote which is an excellent site on web promotion and also includes a free search engine submitter - submit your site to over 35 top search engines and more than 400 directories; with one form - for free! They also have free tutorials and advice on web site promotion and search engine placement as well as an excellent free newsletter and dozens of free tools for webmasters. All in all, a very impressive site which is highly recommended.

Another excellent site is Search Engine Watch which contains just about all you ever wanted to know about search engines. For more information on affiliate programs, take a look at our Top Ten Affiliate Programs.

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Web page by Mark Southgate, Affiliate Programs Guide, Edinburgh, UK.
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