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StudioPress Affiliate Program

March 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

StudioPress is one of my favorite affiliate marketing partners to deal with.  For those of you that have never heard of StudioPress before they are a WordPress Theme development company, they’ve developed their own framework called  ”Genesis” and they were recently acquired by CopyBlogger.  Some of the things that they offer affiliate that choose to partner with them are…

  • Regular Monthly Newsletters - Sounds great eh?  The truth is that these newsletter pack in a great amount of information about what is happening at StudioPress including recent theme releases, what themes were the best selling themes in the past month and the occasional affiliate tips to help you sell more.
  • Decent Sized Payouts - The average payout on a sale is 35% which is fairly high.
  • Products Regularly Updated and Strong Community Following - In the world of theme development, if you aren’t updating your themes then you will soon find yourself out of business.  StudioPress has managed to stay on top of this which is part of the reason why they’ve been so successful promoting their products.
From the Customer’s Perspective: As a customer of StudioPress I can also attest that they provide great customer service, something that is rare in the theme development community.  Case in point is an email that I received after requesting an update for a 2.0 version from their customer support team.  This is the email I received…

So when I looked it up…you’d spent enough at the time of your last purchase to be upgraded to Pro Plus :-) I went ahead and did that for you – so now you can get any theme at any time! You may need to clear your cache/cookies to see the new forum areas.

Pro Plus members can download the latest version of all child themes here
Thanks,

Copyblogger Media Support

What this told me as a long time customer and as an affiliate is that StudioPress and its parent company has a solid focus on making customers happy.  As an affiliate this should also translate to increased sales because…

Great Products + Solid Customer Support = Happy Customer

StudioPress is one of my top affiliate picks and you might find it worth it to check them out of you are looking for an affiliate marketing program that is well managed and pays well.

Become a StudioPress Affiliate and Make Money!

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Tagged With: ,

How to Add Courses to Your Education Section in LinkedIn

March 23, 2012 By 2 Comments

One thing that has long been a concern of mine when using LinkedIn is the inability to show specific courses that you’ve taken under a degree, diploma or certificate.  Recently the team at LinkedIn released  a feature that allows you to add courses to the education section on your profile in no time at all.  Let me guide you through some steps to set this up on your LinkedIn profile right now…

Step 1: Navigate to your profile and scroll to the “Education” section on your LinkedIn profile.  If you haven’t set this up you must first have a school to link the courses to.

Step  2: Click the “Add Sections” link and select “Courses” section.  This will then direct you to start adding courses to your LinkedIn profile including the name of the course, the course code and your relationship to that course (example “You were a student of University X”)

Step 3: When you are finished adding the courses that you want to add simply click the “Add Courses” button.  When you are on your LinkedIn profile page you should now see courses associated to your education and also a newly created “Courses” section.

I hope that you find this tip useful in adding courses to your LinkedIn profile whether its part of your job search, keeping your resume current or using it to highlight your skills and achievements!

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing, Website Tips Tagged With:

How to use the Repeaters and Repeater Elements in SiteForce

March 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For those of you who’ve never using SalesForce before, chances are you’ve never heard of SiteForce either.  SiteForce is a CMS tool with the power of SalesForce as a CRM behind it.  You may have read the other article that I wrote about Web to Lead forms and with SiteForce a lot more is possible now which is great to see about extending functionality online from SalesForce.

The concept of Repeats and Repeater Elements is new and its simply that you can now pull information from objects (as long as guests have access to view the object in SalesForce) and display them on a SiteForce site.  Today I wanted to walk you through just how easy this is to do on a SiteForce website in 3 easy to follow steps.

Step 1: Click on the “SiteForce” app from the right hand side drop down menu and go to your SiteForce site.  Note: If you don’t have a SiteForce site you will need to set this up first in order to use this functionality in SalesForce.

Step 2: Drag the “Repeater” object into the pane and select the object you want to display information about on the SiteForce website and click “Save”

Step 3: Then drag and drop the “Repeater Element” into the pane where you just added the “Repeater” object and select and customize the data that you want to show.

You can also sort, filter and showcase the data you want to display in your SiteForce site which is a useful functionality.  If you happen to be using SalesForce as a CRM system then using SiteForce to run an aspect of your online business can also be beneficial.  Check out SiteForce today.

Filed Under: CRM, Website Tips Tagged With: ,

How to Create a “Clone” Button on Accounts in SalesForce

March 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I wanted to give you a quick tip on how you can create a “Clone” button on your accounts in SalesForce to clone accounts as you need them.  It won’t take more then a few minutes so let’s have a look and get started.  To do this first go to Setup | Customize | Accounts | Buttons and Links | New.

One you are there the next thing that you will need to do is enter the following information in each field…

Label: “Clone”
Name: “Clone”
Description: “Button to clone Accounts”
Display Type: Detail Page Button
Behavior: Display in existing window without sidebar or header
Content Source: URL
Link: /{!Account.Id}/e?clone=1

The only thing to remember is that you will need to add this button to any page layout that you want to want to use it on and you should be ready to go!

Filed Under: CRM Tagged With: ,

How to Install Apps on a Shopify Site

March 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve never used Shopify to run your ecommerce business I wanted to take a few moments to show you how you can quickly and easily add apps to your Shopify website.  The great thing about this is that you don’t need to code anything to add a Shopify App to your Shopify website and you can have it up and running in a few minutes.  So with that let me guide you through some easy to follow steps to add apps to your Shopify website.

Step 1: Once you are logged into your Shopify site click on “Apps” on the menu and then select “Get More Apps” from the drop down list as you can see below…

Step 2: You will be directed to the Shopify App Store where you can download any number of apps.  For this tutorial I will download a free app called “Plug in SEO” and once you click on the app you want you will then be directed to a page similar to this…

Step 3: Once you’ve clicked the “Install App” button that you can see above you will be directed to a page like this to enter the URL of your Shopify website.

Step 4: Next you will see a screen that says something to the affect of “You are about to install this app” where you can click the “Install” button to install it to your Shopify website

Step 5: Lastly, go to “Apps” on the menu in your Shopify store and you should see the app installed there and ready to use!

Using apps on your Shopify website is a very useful way to ensure that you can extend the standard functionality that Shopify already offers with a customized flavor of usage whether you are looking for a social media app, accounting app, or something else you should definitely checkout Shopify’s App Store for all the apps currently available to you.

Filed Under: Ecommerce, Website Tips Tagged With: , ,

How to Use Page Insights on Facebook Pages

March 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For those of you who’ve read my other posts about using Facebook there is a lot that you can do with Facebook these days.  It certainly has changed a lot of the years and lately with the rise of Facebook pages what really interests me is the ability to report on the reach of posts, the “virality” which is basically how viral a post that you made on your Facebook page is and a number of other data sources.  I wanted to take the opportunity to run through how you can find this on your own Facebook pages and help you understand just exactly what the metrics that are displayed mean to help you become even more successful using Facebook pages.

Step 1: The first thing that you need to do to check out your page insights in Facebook is to click on the “Admin Panel” button as seen below.

What you will notice once you click this button is that you are brought to a page that gives you an overall view of your Facebook page covering snapshots of Insights, Notifications, New Likes you’ve received, Messages and Page Tips.  Have a look at what this looks like below and we will drill down into Facebook Page insights next.

Step 2: Click the “See All” link which will allow you to drill into the Facebook page insights section.  Below shows you what the Facebook page insights reporting looks like and there is a lot of information that you can get by looking at these standard reports.

The Facebook page insights reports includes a number of which you can see along the top of the report including the Overview report which shows you 3 key metrics including Posts, Reach and People Talking About This.

The next view that you get with Facebook page insights is the Likes View which you can see above shows a demographic breakdown of the people liking your page and it can show gender and age metrics of people liking your Facebook page, Cities, Countries and Languages that are all related to the people liking your Facebook page.  Outside of that it also shows your Facebook page’s “Like Sources” and whether likes came in from Facebook Like boxes and buttons.

The Reach View in Facebook page insights includes a breakdown of demographic information similar to the Likes Report view but it also includes additional reporting about the types of reach including Paid (for those of you using Facebook Ads), Organic, Viral as well as a metric around the frequency with which people viewed posts on your Facebook page.  Check out the screenshot of this below.

Finally let’s talk about the “Talking About This” View which is probably one of the most interesting report views in the Facebook page insights reporting options because outside of the demographic reporting its also great at showcasing the more viral aspects of using Facebook pages with “Viral Reach” and “Talking About This” reporting as you can see here…

After going through each of these report views in Facebook page insights what I really like is the fact that you can really gather key insights into who is looking at what you post from age and sex to how viral the posts on your Facebook page are which if you use a Facebook page as a part of your business’ marketing strategy become very valuable analytics to gather insights from and really that is the goal of any reporting system.

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing, Website Tips Tagged With: ,

How to Decide to Move to a Responsive Web Design?

March 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

There is a lot of talk these days about making your website responsive so that people can use it and view on tablets and mobile devices.  Theme development companies are responding to this change by offering more and more responsive website themes to meet this demand.  So, how do you decide to move your existing website to a more responsive design or create a new website using responsive web design?  If you are considering a new website then choosing this option is a good idea from the very start because mobile devices and internet access through mobile devices will only increase in the coming years.

Where I do want to focus are the businesses that have an existing website because if you use a tool like Google Analytics it makes easy to understand how many of your visitors are visiting today on a mobile device and the type of mobile device they are viewing your website on specifically.  Once you log into Google Analytics go to Visitors | Mobile | Mobile Devices and you should see a similar screen to the one below…

This gives you the ability to look at the types of devices that people are using to view your website and needless to say if you find that more and more people are using mobile devices to view your site it might be time to consider a change to your existing website.

Filed Under: Website Tips Tagged With: , ,

3 Things that Great Affiliate Marketing Managers Do

February 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

When you are choosing an affiliate marketing program there are lots of “okay” or “good” affiliate marketing programs but what is it that make some of the rare few great affiliate marketing programs?  Well to be honest it has almost nothing to do with the products, commissions and payouts because with a great affiliate marketing manager at the helm the sky is the limit.  The true top performers in affiliate marketing do at least 3 things very well which we will get to in a minute.  First, for those of you looking for affiliate marketing programs to join once you’ve figured out that the affiliate marketing program pays well, has content and banners to place on your site the next thing to be considerate of is what kind of support the affiliate marketing manager provides in terms of support

Produce Valuable Newsletters!

By producing valuable and informative newsletters for their affiliate marketers an affiliate marketing manager can enable and help affiliate marketers that sell their products to be more educated about the products, the company and tips and tactics to increase conversion of their products.  All of which usually spells more and more sales but it also means that you’ll be able to rapidly grow your affiliate marketing channel and help your affiliate marketers which will have them coming back for more.  Let’s have a look at an example of an affiliate marketing newsletter (names and products have been changed but the structure is a winning one)

Dear Affiliate,

     I just wanted to touch base as we have seen very little activity in your account since you have joined our program. I also wanted to give you some tips on what we feel will help you bring more traffic and convert.

1) Targeted site- if your site doesn’t target our niche market then I would suggest creating a site that does or at least a section of your site dedicated to this. To convert in our industry from a non-targeted site is almost impossible.

2) Targeted content- make sure your content is targeted to the audience that is looking to buy our product. This means advice, education about the product and other types of articles as well.

3) Sell online buying – convince your viewers with good copy that they can save lots of money by buying our product online. This includes creating a guide on how to buy online.

4) Review our website or a number of online vendors explaining why our site is the best place to buy online. Convincing copy with links goes much further than just banner ads.

5) Make sure you tweak your content so it is optimized for the keywords you want to target.

You are more than welcome to reach out to me so we can work on more site specific ideas. I would be happy to provide you with a list of some “good affiliate sites” which should give some more ideas on the right keywords and content to target.

Best Regards,

Your Affiliate Marketing Manager

As you can see the affiliate marketing manager has provided tips, ideas and use cases to help their affiliate marketers sell the product with proven tactics in a simple and easy to digest format.  No complex “techie talk” just plain and simple information and education on how to effectively market products as an affiliate marketer.

Highlight Top Selling Affiliate Products!

Now that we’ve discussed newsletters and their effectiveness let’s focus on one particular piece of information that will have your affiliate marketers sing your praises.  Most affiliate programs unfortunately don’t tell you what is the best selling product for the company which is not only counter-intuitive but a sign that they really don’t want to make more money.  Here is an example of how you might go about wording this to your affiliate marketing audience…

Top 5 Selling Products
Here is a list of our 5 top selling products which include…  

1. Product X – Bestseller!

2. Product Y

3. Product Z

4. Product !

5. Product #

Click here to check out our Top 5 products for December 2011 and let us know what you think! 

As you can see by highlighting the products that have sold it tells motivated affiliate marketers what is selling and where to focus in terms of products on their sites.  Which is a true “win – win” situation for the affiliate marketing manager and their affiliate marketers.

They Help to Make Their Affiliate Marketers Better!

The best affiliate marketing managers understand that in order to empower their affiliate marketers they need to educate them about their products and make them, their websites and communications better.  When I say better I mean to say that they help them to become better affiliate marketers of their products, they provide strategic insight into running better promotions of their products and they make themselves available to affiliate marketers.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Tagged With:

How to Fix Facebook Timeline

February 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In a recent article that I wrote about the coming Facebook Timeline functionality the one thing that most people agree with is that if they don’t want the feature in the first place they are stuck with it.  Kind of a “So sad, Too Bad!” feature that Facebook is soon to release to all of its users.  Today lets talk about an option to help with this since there is some outrage over this feature being released.  There is a an app that has been around for a bit that addresses some of the annoyances of Facebook and currently they are releasing version 6.4 which will address the following issues…

A “Timeline” tab in the Social Fixer options – This gives you a want to customize how your Timeline page displays to everyone.

Without this you were stuck to accepting the Facebook Timeline as it exists today.  Interested in learning how to use this feature on your Facebook Timeline?  Let’s discuss how to install this in your Facebook account…

Step 1: Download and Install Social Fixer to your web browser

The first thing that you need to do is click on the corresponding web browser that you are currently using when downloading Social Fixer as you can see above.  When you choose a web browser you will see the following dialog box asking you if its okay to install it.  Click the “Install” button…

 Step 2: Make sure Social Fixer is Enabled on your Web Browser

For my demonstration, I am using Google Chrome.  If you are using a different web browser please refer to their prompts during the setup phase.

What you see in the screenshot below is that Social Fixer is enabled in the web browser.

Step 3: Go to Facebook

At the top level it really is a 3 step process to start using Social Fixer however there are a lot of options that social fixer provides in terms of how and what you want to customize in your Facebook account.  What you will see below is what you will see once you’ve logged into Facebook and have Social Fixer enabled in your web browser.

As you can see you’ve got the recommended and minimalist settings available for installing Social Fixer.

On the right hand side of the page in Facebook you’ll see the Social Fixer icon by your profile picture including the option to fix your Facebook timeline using Social Fixer.  The great thing about Social Fixer is that you can customize, restrict and edit parts of Facebook to your liking.  Enjoy customizing Facebook to your needs!

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing, Website Tips Tagged With:

How to Design Your Shopify Website

February 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Today I am going to discuss two different approaches to designing a website using Shopify.  The first approach is using the “clicks not code” approach for people that are more comfortable working in Shopify’s user interface.  The second and more programmatic approach is using the “code not clicks” method of developing a site using Shopify.

Once you’ve finished signing up for the free trial of Shopify and you are logged into your Shopify website you are going to want to see how you can design your Shopify website.  The first approach to develop a Shopify website is to take the “clicks not code” method of website development.  This approach should help those of you looking to for an easy way to setup a Shopify website by clicking and selecting options in the Shopify back-end.  No additional coding required.  The first thing that you need to do after logging into your Shopify website is go to Themes | Theme Settings which will give you open access to make changes to your Shopify website.

There are a number of settings that you can setup for your Shopify Theme by default including General site options, colours, fonts, buttons, and styling for a number of areas including…

  • Page Background
  • Header
  • Homepage and Homepage Carousel
  • Right Column
  • Product Grids
  • Product Page
  • Cart Page
  • Blog
  • Footer
  • Additional Layouts
Depending on what you want to modify on your Shopify website you are going to find that the user interface highly useable as shown in the following screenshot.
As you can see there are a lot of ways in which you can customize your site without any coding at all.  The next option for getting your Shopify site customized is to use the “Code Not Clicks” option to really dig into the code behind Shopify to begin to understand how you can extend Shopify for your own needs.  This is not for the “faint of heart” because it requires coding knowledge but if you are comfortable you can definitely being to customize your Shopify site in virtually no time at all.  In order to get to the Shopify templates that run your website go to Themes | Template Editor.

The Template Editor in Shopify allows you to do a number of things including editing and developing Layouts and Templates to run your Shopify site, access the variable reference guide that allows you to understand how to code your Shopify site.  Shopify uses a language called “liquid” which is a mark-up language that the Shopify team developed to customize and code Shopify pages and templates quickly and easily.

Filed Under: Ecommerce, Website Tips Tagged With: ,
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