Foothold eBusiness / Blog

Making money from your website via affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing
Retailers will pay you a small commision for advertising their products on your website. A customer will then click on the advert on your site and be taken to the retailers website. The retailer will only pay you when the customer purchases from their website.
How this works in practice
You sign up with the retailer for their affiliate program. In some cases the retailer checks your website and accepts you onto their program. Retailer sets up a payment account with you.
Technicalities
The retailer asks you to put a block of code into your website. Inserting the code allows the automated mechanism to “kick in”. Without this the reatialer cannot identify where the sales lead has come from. This results in them not being able to pay you!!
Benefits of affiliate marketing
Once you have set it up you dont have to do anything. Choosing a good affiliate scheme with products that people actually want can result in a small but regular income stream.
Finding a retailer who offers a scheme
Choose a retailer who sells products that compliment the services or products offered on your own website. Go to google and in type in a leading retailers name and the words “affiliate program” and see whether they have one. Typically retailers offer between 2-6% however Amazon offer 10%. With Amazon you can choose the best selling books in a certain subject - for instance ”marketing” and display those on your website.
Help setting this up
If you feel your business would benefit from affiliate marketing and you would like some assistance in signing up to programs and carrying out the technical aspects to get it up and running - please get in touch, we offer competitive rates for the South Wales area and are very approachable.
email me on cpottinger@foothold.org.uk or give me (Catherine Pottinger) a ring on 01554 779919 and let us see how we can help your business making some money off your website.  

Finch Accountancy Client Feedback

Foothold eBusiness recently completed work on the Finch Accountancy Web site. The work involved updating and overalling the existing web site to promote the online accountancy services provided by Finch Accountancy of Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire. A Finch Accountancy Blog was also setup, which now allows Tessa Finch to keep her clients up to date with taxation and accountancy issues.

Tessa Finch kindly supplied feedback on the service provided by Foothold eBusiness upon completion of the work:

“I realised my website needed some work for search engine optimisation. I had already had a discussion with Catherine, who explained and demonstrated how the higher placed websites achieve this. I was very impressed – she clearly knew exactly what she was talking about, and she was able to demonstrate this to me in a way that I could follow. I decided I wanted her to work with me on this.

Our consultation was an enjoyable and motivating experience. I told her about my business, its history and my future aspirations. She listened, and advised, and we brainstormed. As a result, I was much clearer about the future direction – and it also became apparent that the website content needed updating, too. At this point, I was introduced to Justin – who dealt with the editing of the text, layout and graphics, as well as introducing a new Blog to the website.

I have been delighted with the service I have received. Catherine and Justin have been a pleasure to work with – friendly and patient. The whole exercise has been completed promptly – which is so important when you’re on a creative “rush”! The result is even better than I’d had in mind.”

Tessa Finch - Finch Accountancy

Local Business Gets Noticed in USA

Pembrey based handmade wedding stationery business, Confetti Designs has used the web successfully to win orders from throughout Britain & Ireland since launching its web site in 2006. Building upon this success, Confetti Designs has recently received an enquiry from the USA for its ‘VW Camper Van Hearts‘ wedding stationery design. Furthermore, two additional enquiries from potential customers was received on the same day.

Excited by this development, Victoria Lewis - wedding stationery designer and owner of Confetti Designs, was interested to know how her business got noticed across the Atlantic. Some research showed that ‘Wedding Stationery Gallery‘ had featured her unusual VW Campervan Wedding Stationery design and this feature had led to a number 1 position on Google for the phrase ‘campervan wedding stationery‘.

This is great news for Victoria at Confetti Designs, but also nicely demonstrates that local businesses can successfully use the web to reach new geographical markets.

Free Website Review

FREE expert appraisal of your web site focused on achieving your business objectives.

You will receive jargon-free feedback and recommendations on how you can increase the performance of your site. Depending on your business objectives the feedback report will cover issues such as:

• Presentation - the look and feel of your site
• Web Site Marketing - how to increase the number of visitors to your site and to yield a higher conversion rate
• Usability - how you can improve the usability of your site
• Accessibility - can visitors with disabilities use your site

This web site appraisal service is completely free of charge and with further obligation.

Book your free review

Shall I have a website?

The thought of getting your first website can be a daunting one. Do really need one is the first question, are you offering a service that potential customers look for on the internet?

The answer is possibly yes many people now use search engines to find what they are looking for.

Your website doesn’t have to be a complex all singing and dancing representation of what you do, you could simply:

List your services
Say a small bit on who you are and the benefits of choosing you
Provide a map to your premises (if needed)

A small website like this isn’t going to cost you the earth, you pay to register a website address from as little as £2 for 2 years, plus the cost of having the website hosted which is an annual cost of rougly £50. The largest cost you will incur is for the design of the site which for a small site like the one described in this article can be from £200 upwards depending on the design company you choose.

We have recently launched a new web design service at Foothold ebusiness, if you would like to have a chat with us about designing your website please get in touch on: 01554 779919 and ask for Catherine or Justin 

Whats in a name ?

People make simple mistakes when they choose a domain names for their web sites. A domain name is the address where your web site lives, the address you choose creates a perception of who you are to your customer. Unless you are already an established brand then a potential customer outside of your immediate geographical area may have heard of you.

So to create a name that sticks in their mind think of who you are and what you do, look at us for instance: www.foothold-ebusiness.co.uk
Foothold is the name of our organisation
ebusiness is the service we are promoting
.co.uk is the prefix which shows we are a British company

You can choose from a variety of prefix’s to have at the end of your web site address, co.uk and .com or org.uk if you are an organisation, these are most easily recognised by people in UK, however there are plenty of others to choose from. You can have more than one name for instance we also own www.foothold-ebusiness.com to ensure a potential competitor doesn’t register it for themselves and if somebody types in our address incorrectly we can still be found.

Promoting your web site by educating your work force

The speed at which your business takes up the idea of trading online is determined by a number of factors. For instance the key decision makers within your company may not readily buy into the idea of promoting your web site for the fear it will cost them time and money. There are so many things that can be done to promote your web site for free such as joining sector specific online directories and taking an active part in forums by “showing off” your experts.

The easiest way to get people within your company to buy into their ideas for promoting your web site is to educate them on the benefits this will bring to your business. We run a series of web site workshops which cover every aspect of ebusiness, right from the inital planning stages of structuring your site to the long term strategy of promoting it for the world to see. The workshops are one day courses, and are run on a regular schedule so you can attend as and when you need them .

Take a look at the schedule on: www.foothold-ebusiness.co.uk or call us on 01554 779919 for an  informal chat about which courses you need. 

Launch of Foothold ebusiness