I'm sitting here this morning sipping from a steaming mug of PurJava coffee and thinking about how you can most easily get started in marketing affiliate programs on the Internet.
Perhaps you're just getting started and are looking for a way to get your message out without having to learn how to build a website and build traffic to your site.
Maybe a good starting point would be to create and maintain a blog on a regular basis. As you probably know, a blog (short for web log) is an online journal or diary that is displayed in reverse chronological order (last item shown first) and can be as easy to create and maintain as sending email or participating in an online discussion forum. If you can write clearly and put text into a box on your browser, then you can maintain a blog.
I truly believe in blogs for business and personal purposes. Currently, I maintain about a half-dozen blogs. Search engines tend to like them and, if you post quality content, you'll attract a group of regular readers.
For the blog newbie, I believe blogger.com offers the easiest introduction and the simplest software. It's easy to set up and easy to update. When you learn more, you can customize the look of the site and add links to other sites. Be sure to turn on the syndication feature.
The last time I checked, you could have as many blogs as you want at blogger.com. I tend to write about anything that interests me, and it is usually business related, but sometimes I get a burr under my saddle and just want to rant about something!
I think my last rant was either about spam or about people who don't protect their systems from viruses, thus making it more difficult for all of us.
You can see my blogger.com blog at johndilbeck.blogspot.com.
Next up on the list, and my personal favorite is Radio UserLand, which costs $40 per year. It's a more powerful blogging system and you can have multiple categories so that, if you -- like me -- have many different interests, the computer will automatically sort them for you by simply selecting a check box for each category for which you want a message to be routed. You can choose one or more categories for each posting. Dave Winer, founder of UserLand and one of the chief architexts of Clay Basket, which became Frontier and Manila, which then became Radio Userland, created one of the first content management systems for the Internet that was affordable. He was a co-creator of RSS, and had one of the very first blogs.
Radio Userland is more powerful than Blogger.com, has an annual fee, and takes longer to learn. Unlike Blogger.com, RU is a downloadable program that runs on your computer. It's available for several platforms including Windows and Mac. You can download it and use it for a month for free to try it out.
Part of your $40 annual fee pays for up to 40 MB of webhosting on a public server. You can see my RU blog at radio.weblogs.com/0133364/.
I started out a long time ago with Clay Basket, which was the first content manager I ever encountered that was reasonably priced. It was free! It took a long time to wrap my tired old brain around the concept, however.
As the next couple of years progressed, Dave and his team introduced Frontier and Manila, which were, and still are, very powerful content managers. Frontier ran on a particular machine as a user application and Manila was designed for servers and could even allow multiple authors to publish to the same site under the control of one or more editors.
My first weblog is still hosted on one of the first publicly-available Manila servers at EditThisPage.com, but they no longer offer hosting services. You can get a free 14-day trial of using Manila to see what it's all about if you like. At this time, I'm not aware of any commercial Manila hosting services, but the program can be licensed for about $900 per year and you can host as many sites as you'd care on your own server, if you find that of interest.
My Manila website is at johndilbeck.editthispage.com and I update it on a semi-regular basis.
If I only had access to one blog service or software, I'd choose Radio UserLand without a second thought. It has all the power and features I need for blogging, and I also generate all of my static websites using its advanced website building tools. I'm currently managing over 4,000 web pages on a dozen sites and all of them are stored in the Radio UserLand database. It's like no other web management system I've ever encountered. Nothing else even comes close for the sites I like to build.
(Now, if you're just going to concentrate on building one website, I'd have to steer you to Site Build It! or Host4Profit. They don't provide blogging services, but you could have Coranto (discussed below) installed at Host4Profit.)
I have used a program called NewsPro in the past on several sites to maintain a blog, but the lead developer disappeared and the program fell into limbo. This program is a set of PERL scripts that may be hosted on any commercial webhosting service that supports PERL.
You can see one of these blogs on my brother's news page at GeorgiaDragRacing.com/news/.
Since the demise of NewsPro, which was very popular, a team of developers around the world extended it into a new program called Coranto that has much more capability -- at the cost of being more difficult to install and configure. I spent the month of December getting it to run on a couple of my sites, including my main site. It has the capability of generating a static web page for each message I post, and Google loves blogs. The more I post, the more little strands I leave out on the web for people to find me. This will work for you, too.
You can learn more about Coranto at the unofficial site at coranto.gweilo.org.
I really like Coranto, but it took me about a month to really get the hang of it and to learn to configure it to take advantage of just some of its power. You can see some of my Coranto blogs at JohnDilbeck.com/news/, DilbeckConsulting.com/news/, and DetailsNow.com/news/. I'll be installing this script on more sites as I have time.
Even now, though, it takes me most of a day to install and configure Coranto, even for a basic blog.
On JohnDilbeck.com, I went a step further and used the advanced feature of not only including each posting into the normal blog and archives, but also of creating a single stand-alone static page with specific keywords for that story. This is just like creating a normal web page with all the meta tags that make it easy for the search engines to find and index it. You can see this in action by going to JohnDilbeck.com/news/ and clicking one of the headlines in the left column. On my other sites using Coranto, it will take you to the story in the weblog or the archives, but on JohnDilbeck.com, it will take you to the stand alone page for that story, which is also included in the archives. One example is at Cognigen introduces new products.
Once installed and configured, Coranto provides outstanding features and excellent quality. It's a free product and may be too technical for many people to install on their websites. If you go to coranto.gweilo.org you can find the links to the support forum, and you can probably find someone there who will be happy to install and configure it for your site -- for a reasonable fee. If you're really trying to build traffic to your site, I recommend Coranto configured to create stand-alone static pages for every article you post.
(Please don't contact me to help you with this. I just don't have the time.)
Another possibility is DK3.com - Webmasters Resources which offers several things of interest -- both free or ad-free paid services -- including a complete Web Portal, webhosting, discussion groups, mailing list and more. The Web Portal offers the most power, but also takes the most effort to learn and use. I have a free portal that I've played around with and later this year plan to develop a site based around SFI and its opportunity and products.
I haven't done much with the portal I have there, but I'm surprised at how well it ranks in a couple of the search engines with practically no effort on my part, so far. You can see it at John Dilbeck Recommends. It is more complicated than a blog, and provides many of the same services as Dave Winer's Manila. This portal is open-source software and you can find it by searching for PHP-Nuke.
Eventually, I'll be using this site to recommend books, services, tools, and so forth to help folks build their home businesses.
When I was just getting started a few years ago and had no money to spend on this, I made extensive use of the free tools offered by Bravenet.com and even though I'm not using their tools these days, I recommend them highly. They've been around forever and look as if they are a good choice, especially when you're just getting started.
I may still have a free site hosted by them. Let's see. Nope. It's gone. So, let's see what it takes to rebuild it from scratch starting at 11:32 AM. First, go register for the free hosting. Then check out the free and paid templates -- no need to design it from scratch.
(Let me say this about free templates: be very careful. I've researched a dozen or more sources of free templates, and I found many of them to have javascript attached to the links so that no matter what you think you're linking to, it's going to link to what they have pre-programmed. If you use a free template, be sure to get it from a reputable source, and Bravenet.com is as reputable as they come.)
Ok, since I like simple blue designs for my websites, I found a template on the first page that I liked. I moved it to my favorites page and clicked on the button to upload it to my new free website at free site hosted by them. It took only a couple of minutes from clicking the button to upload the template to being able to view the new site. Not bad.
Now, let's go to the hosting manager and see what I can do to spruce it up and link to a few of my sites. The Visual Editor didn't work on my Mac, but to be fair that may be because I have a lot of options turned off in my browser. I limit what javascript can do and don't run java. If you use a Windows machine, it will probably work just fine for you. (But, I don't know that for sure.)
So, let's try the Text Editor.... Nope, didn't work for me, either. This isn't unusual since most sites ignore Mac users when programming custom tools.
So, let's download the file, edit it locally and re-upload it. How do I do that? Let's try the File Manager.... Nope.
OK. What happens if I enable Java and try the editor, again?
Well, it's been an hour. Enabling Java didn't make any difference. It's not working on my Macintosh. So, enough of that. Let me know if it works for you using your PC, OK? Feel free to discuss it in the appropriate section of my forum.
In addition to free webhosting, they have a new service they call their web journal, which is a cross between a blog and a portal. It looks like it will do everything you can do with blogger.com and some of the things you could do with a portal from DK3.com.
Yesterday morning, after writing the message on a discussion forum that became this article, today, I created my Bravenet.com-hosted web journal at johndilbeck.bravejournal.com and I'm happy with how easy it was to set up and how well it works -- even with a Macintosh.
I find that I get good results from my various blogs, discussion groups, mailing lists, and websites. Blogs are the easiest to maintain, and can be used to start building your mailing list -- which in the long run will become your most valuable asset. I'll save discussion of this topic for another article.
I'm very interested in this topic and have been blogging since before there was a word for it.
I'm sure there are other excellent blog services and tools available. The main thing I would look for is whether they are well-indexed by Google and/or Yahoo before I invested a lot of time or effort into creating and maintaining my blog.
Anyone who doesn't have at least one blog is missing a very good opportunity for marketing on the Internet. As long as you update it on a fairly regular basis and write something interesting with truly useful information, it will be indexed regularly by the search engines and your visitors will come back. The more you can get them to interact, the better the whole system will work.
Give quality content first, build traffic, PREsell your offers, and then monetize it.
All the best,
JD
(Ordinary people are making extraordinary money working from home on the Internet! Go to 21stCenturySales.com and sign up for my newsletter. Do it today!)
2:11:35 PM 
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