Internet Marketing: A Beginners Perspective

I continue learning more things, with my new journey into Internet Marketing.

AFFILIATE LINKS

It seemed obvious to me, when I started looking at my own affiliate links, that I was trying to promote something or other. Once again, I had to wonder why anyone would buy from me, when my affiliate links were practically shouting out to anyone who looked at them, that I was trying to sell something to somebody.

Then I discovered the many different sites that “cloak your links”. This protected me from the possibility that my future potential customers would bypass me. Seeing my obvious Affiliate Links, they might buy whatever I was promoting, directly from the parent company instead of buying it from me. If I didn’t cloak my links, it was possible that other devious internet users could replace my affiliate links with their own. There go my hard earned commissions that I hadn‘t even earned yet!

Here's one of the programs I like to use for cloaking my Affiliate Links.
http://www.virallinktracker.com/vlt/links/4898.

Granted the links that contain words like “sign up to be my affiliate slave” “buy from me now or else”, “I’ll make money, you might not” are dead giveaways that other affiliate marketers are creatively cloaking their links.

We often wave or honk our internet car horns at each other, as we pass each other on this vast Internet highway we’re all traveling on. There goes another affiliate marketer, who is cloaking his or her affiliate links just like I am. We’re all members of the same big team after all.

I must be a “hard sell” as I’m not easily willing to part with my money. And considering that I haven’t earned anything yet, in my new adventures of Internet Marketing, it might be near impossible for some of those other affiliate marketers to convince me to buy their products.

At least now, I’m less likely to lose those commissions that I haven’t even earned yet. My affiliate links, are proudly wearing their lovely new cloaks. They come in a variety of sizes and colors.

Plus my links and I could use that added warmth. We’re in the middle of that cold, snowy, season here, fondly known as winter. There can be ice, snow, rain, slush, and extreme wind chill factors where I live. I sure wouldn’t want to present ice cold, numb, frostbitten affiliate links to anyone. I don’t think that would go over too well, with my future potential customers.

It’s been recommended that I should have my own product to sell. Maybe I should pick up my knitting needles and my crochet hooks, and start knitting my own hand made cloaks designed to fit a wide range of affiliate links. I’ve got plenty of yarn and different colors to choose from. I have a love for both knitting and crocheting.

My hand made cloaks, will be warm, practical, colorful, and reasonably priced. I’m sure I’ll soon be overwhelmed by the amount of people, now rushing to my blog, wanting to buy a handmade cloak, from me to protect their affiliate links.

I’m glad that my precious affiliate links will now be wearing their nice warm cloaks of protection. They’ll still be wearing them even when it’s 90 degrees outside, and high humidity in the summer time.

I don’t understand why there would be so much protest about having to wear those lovely affiliate cloaks, in warmer weather, but I’m new at all of this.

Website Designs

PART ONE

Have you ever noticed that some of the web sites wanting you to join their program or buy their product tend to look pretty much the same? Many of them seem to have a graph with blue and green bars. These are supposed to reassure me, of how much money they’ve made from this product, before I part with any of mine.

It's not to hard to create those graphs. I’ve done it myself in a spreadsheet, when I was using different colors for a striped sweater I was knitting. I was easily able to put in blue and green color bar graphs of varying lengths, and transfer them to my word processing program, where they all lined up nicely in one column. From there I threw in a weeks worth of dates and then, I threw in a few random dollar amounts. Then my blue and green bar graphs looked pretty similar to those I've seen on so many websites.

With the random dollar amounts I just tossed in there, and inputting dates from Dec. 1, 2007 to Dec. 7, 2007, apparently I made a total of $3,722.53 for that one week alone. I can only wish! Or at least in my dreams I must have made that much. Multiply that weekly amount, by 52 weeks in a year, and I guess I had a very good year financially this last year, and didn't even know it. I guess if I actually made that kind of money, I'd probably have a top notch accountant on board, and he or she would be keeping track of all my wonderful earnings.

That means I made over $193,000 for the year! You believe me don’t you? So what are you waiting for? Why aren’t you signing up for this product immediately?

Maybe I’m as skeptical as most, and more cynical then some. But putting up this kind of information to potential buyers or customers, doesn’t convince me that the owner of this web site, actually made that kind of money. Not when I was easily able to create a similar graph, using my system of randomly selecting some dollar amounts in a spreadsheet.

I have nothing against blue and green bar graphs. I think they’re great colors separately or together. Maybe they just happen to be the favorite colors of the daughter of the CEO of these web sites, and maybe that’s why those blue and green bar graphs appear so frequently, so many times, in so many different web sites.