From the category archives:

How to

Blog Design, How Much Does It Effect Yours?

by Norhafidz on July 22, 2008

When it comes to your blog, extra attention should be paid to every aspects to make sure it performs well to serve it purposes. Here are four important informations you might want to consider to make sure your blog performs well.

1) Avoid using audio

If your readers is going to stay for a long time reading your site’s content, you will have to make sure that they are not annoyed by some audio looping on and on your website. If you insist on adding an audio, make sure you have some control over it, ex: volume control would works fine.

2) Do not use splash pages on your blog

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrived at certain websites. They usually have this beautiful design with texts like “Welcome”, “Please enter”. Though they are beautiful, they don’t have any purposes. In fact, they are useless. Don’t let your visitors click that “back” button for that reason. Let them ’see’ you without the splash page.

3) Avoid displaying too many banner ads

Let’s admit it, too many banner ads = disaster. Instead of letting your blog being plugged by too many banner ads, write a good content with affiliate links it. Let your visitors feel like they want to buy instead of being push to buy.

4) Have a simple navigation

Create a simple navigation so that even a young kid know how use it. Avoid using flashy and tiers drop-down menus. Why should your readers stay if they don’t even know how to navigate your blog.

In simple words, make your blog unique and rich with simplicity. Does your blog attached with these four factors?

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Cloaking Your Affiliate Links

by Norhafidz on March 25, 2008

If you are an affiliate marketer, you might want to consider cloaking your affiliate links for some of these reasons:

  • Readers are more likely to click on clean links thus increasing your conversion rate.
  • Normal affiliate links are long.
  • Preventing other affiliates from hijacking your links.

You can replace long URLs with fast, short, server-side redirects, so that people won’t feel “pitched” and won’t be turned off by links that are obviously affiliate links. There are many ways to cloak your affiliate links. I’m going to cover 2 simplest method and easiest method.

Cloak Your Affiliate Links using .htaccess

Create a directory on your site called “go” (remember, you can always change the name according to your needs). In the “go” directory, create a directory for each of your affiliate links. For example, create a directory called “go” and a directory in the “go” directory called “norhafidz”. In the “norhafidz” directory, put a file called .htaccess — you can create it by using a plain text editor like notepad.

There should be a line in the .htaccess which look like this:

Redirect /go/norhafidz http://www.norhafidz.com/affialiate=?norhafidz

where http://www.yourdomain.com/go/norhafidz will be your new affiliate links and http://www.norhafidz.com/affialiate=?norhafidz is your initial affiliate links.

Note that, there should be 3 parts on .htaccess file on a line: Redirect command, the location of directory (/go/norhafidz) and the initial URL of your affiliate links (http://www.norhafidz.com/affialiate=?norhafidz). Each must be separated by a single space.

So, if you are giving out the url of http://yourdomain.com/go/norhafidz this will send people to http://www.norhafidz.com/affialiate=?norhafidz which is your initial affiliate links.

Cloak Your Affiliate Links using URL Redirection Sites

This method uses Redirection Sites to “change” your affiliate links. One of my favorite site is tinyurl.com. Once you are there, just enter your affiliate link and it will be shorten in a second!

Know of an even better method? Let us know!

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