Hightide Web Resources Articles, News, and Reviews

Once upon a time there was a great…no, GREAT service called “Instant Attention.” For a fee each month, you got to feature floating “attention grabbers” on your websites or blogs. Their service wasn’t the only one available, but it certainly did have the most professional-looking graphics. To be honest, in my opinion, the others look very, very amateurish compared to theirs.

Unfortunately, the story hit a snag in the road when the original guys sold out. The new crew has ruined a once good thing. Originally, you wrote the message you wanted on the image (Such as “Sign up for our newsletter…” or “Check out our new blog….”) - and since you were paying for the service, for the love of God, only your message and link appeared.

Not any more. Imagine my surprise when I saw that all of our floating layers now feature their link at the bottom….and if the visitor’s mouse is off a hair, they’re taken to their website instead of where you intended for them to go. That’s the sort of crummy trick you pull on people who are using your service for free - NOT FOR PAID CUSTOMERS!

I’m in the process of taking down the graphics/links and what amounts to promoting a service I no longer value or believe in. I’ll leave the one up on Hightide-Web.com for a day to show you what I’m talking about. This story turned into a nightmare fast.

If anyone has enough knowledge and graphic artistry at their disposal, this would be an incredible business opportunity. More than those attributes, though, you need to know how to treat people.

It seems to be kind of a rare trait these days.

by Maranda Mann

There are many advantages to becoming an affiliate for a company and earning a commission for sales. One of the obvious ones is you don’t have to create your own product! Here is how the affiliate business works:

You first sign up with with a company after a little investigating to make sure they have good products, their commissions are good, and they are honest and will actually pay you when the sell is complete. After you find a good company to work with and sign up, you will be given a affiliate link. This is how the company identifies you and makes sure you get paid for your referrals. Then you need to get people to click on this link and they will get redirected to the company’s website. If the customer buys a product, you get paid a commission. If the customer decides to come back later and buy, don’t worry! The websites software will keep track of them and you will get paid even if they come back moths later. Commission is between 1 and 100%, and its pretty common to get 50%. If you plan to only work affiliate programs some of the time, or make it your main focus, you need to have your own website! Now matter what your selling on the Internet you need to be capturing the emails of your customers. That way you can send them future promotional emails to sell the affiliate products. This list can be a great asset to you that you can only get if you have your own website.

Pros of becoming an affiliate:

You can start making money right away! Because the company takes care of everything for you but the marketing, you can put all your focus on making sales. As soon as you can get customers to their site, you are making money.

You can make more money per sale than they do. Good affiliate programs can pay 50%. This is actually a pretty good deal for you because other business expenses come out of their profits so you end up making more money from the sale then they do! Alot of the time a good company will provide you with all the marketing materials you need including pre-written emails, reports, ads, etc.

The Cons of become an affiliate

You are competing with other affiliates for sales. Other people out there are doing the same thing you are! You need to watch out for dishonest companies, or you could end up wasting a lot of time and money.

You can have your own affiliates so there is no way to increase the value of your efforts like you could if you were selling your own product.

Becoming an affiliate can also be a great way to break into a market before releasing your own product.It is also a great way to make some money if you already have a large email mailing list.

If you are looking for an unlimited income, you may want to consider developing your own product!

Best Wishes! Maranda Mann

Want to learn how to make a website, create your own product, and tons more absolutely FREE?

Get over 12 hours of video and a 120 page E-book Get your FREE course http://www.internetprofitmentor.com

About the Author:
Maranda Mann is relatively new to the Interent marketing world, but is an up and coming star in Internet marketing. She is working on a website, which will soon be released.

by George Peirson

Just like spring cleaning a house, the html code of your web pages should get periodic cleaning as well. Over time, as changes and updates are made to a web page, the code can become littered with unnecessary clutter, slowing down page load times and hurting the efficiency of your web page. Cluttered html can also seriously impact your search engine ranking.

This is especially true if you are using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web design package such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver. These programs will speed up your web site creation, but they are not that efficient at writing clean html code.

We will be focusing this discussion on the actual html coding, ignoring other programming languages that may be used in a page such as JavaScript. In the code examples I will be using ( and ) characters instead of correct html so that the code examples will display properly in this newsletter.

Up until recently when coding a page in HTML we would be using tags such as the (font) tag and (p) paragraph tags. Between these tags would be our page content, text, images and links. Each time a formatting change was made on the page new tags were needed with complete formatting for the new section. More recently we have gained the ability to use Cascading Style Sheets, allowing us to write the formatting once and then refer to that formatting several times within a web page.

In order to speed up page load times we need to have fewer characters on the page when viewed in an html editor. Since we really do not want to remove any of our visible content we need to look to the html code. By cleaning up this code we can remove characters, thereby creating a smaller web page that will load more quickly.

Over time HTML has changed and we now have many different ways to do the same thing. An example would be the code used to show a bold type face. In HTML we have two main choices, the (strong) tag and the (b) tag. As you can see the (strong) tag uses 5 more characters than the (b) tag, and if we consider the closing tags as well we see that using the (strong)(/strong) tag pair uses 10 more characters than the cleaner (b)(/b) tag pair.

This is our First Principle of clean HTML code: Use the simplest coding method available.

HTML has the ability of nesting code within other code. For instance we could have a line with three words where the middle word was in bold. This could be accomplished by changing the formatting completely each time the visible formatting changes. Consider this code: (font face=”times”)This(/font) (font face=”times”)(strong)BOLD(/strong)(/font) (font face=”times”)Word(/font) This takes up 90 characters.

This is very poorly written html and is what you occasionally will get when using a WYSIWYG editor. Since the (font) tags are repeating the same information we can simply nest the (strong) tags inside the (font) tags, and better yet use the (b) tag instead of the (strong) tag. This would give us this code (font face=”times)This (b)BOLD(/b) Word(/font), taking up only 46 characters.

This is our Second Principle of clean HTML code: Use nested tags when possible. Be aware that WYSIWYG editors will frequently update formatting by adding layer after layer of nested code. So while you are cleaning up the code look for redundant nested code placed there by your WYSIWYG editing program.

A big problem with using HTML tags is that we need to repeat the tag coding whenever we change the formatting. The advent of CSS allows us a great advantage in clean coding by allowing us to layout the formatting once in a document, then simply refer to it over and over again.

If we had six paragraphs in a page that switch between two different types of formatting, such as headings in Blue, Bold, Ariel, size 4 and paragraph text in Black, Times, size 2, using tags we would need to list that complete formatting each time we make a change.

(font face=”Ariel” color=”blue” size=”4″)(b)Our heading(/b)(/font) (font face=”Times color=”black” size=”2″)Our paragraph(/font) (font face=”Ariel” color=”blue” size=”4″)(b)Our next heading(/b)(/font) (font face=”Times color=”black” size=”2″)Our next paragraph(/font)

We would then repeat this for each heading and paragraph, lots of html code.

With CSS we could create CSS Styles for each formatting type, list the Styles once in the Header of the page, and then simply refer to the Style each time we make a change.

(head) (style type=”text/css”) (!– .style1 { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; font-size: 24px; } .style2 { font-family: “Times New Roman”, Times, serif; font-size: 12px; } –) (/style) (/head) (body) (p class=”style1″)Heading(/p) (p class=”style2″)Paragraph Text(/p) (/body)

Notice that the Styles are created in the Head section of the page and then simply referenced in the Body section. As we add more formatting we would simply continue to refer to the previously created Styles.

This is our Third Principle of Clean HTML Code: Use CSS styles when ever possible. CSS has several other benefits, such as being able to place the CSS styles in an external file, thereby reducing the page size even more, and the ability to quickly update formatting site-wide by simply updating the external CSS Style file.

So with some simple cleaning of your HTML code you can easily reduce the file size and make a fast loading, lean and mean web page.

About the Author:
George Peirson is a successful Entrepreneur and Internet Trainer. He is the author of over 30 multimedia based tutorial training titles covering such topics as Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. To see his training sets visit http://www.howtogurus.com

Article copyright 2005 George Peirson

You know the oddities of life that send you back on your heels, making you scratch your head and wonder if you’re seeing or hearing things correctly? I’m about to throw you one.

I’m a web designer who is prepared to look you directly in the face and tell you that you don’t need me, nor any of my kind. No, I haven’t taken leave of my senses and I most definitely have not grown tired of having food on my table! I am, however, looking into other trades besides web design. You see, one Jim Edwards has gone and shortened the shelf life of us web designers! (And I had always been such a fan of his….)

Here’s the deal. He has created an absolutely amazing course called the Mini Site Creator. The only flaw I’ve found in the entire course is in the name. It’s far too unassuming. You could build any sized site you wanted to upon “graduating”, not just mini sites! I want to just give you a brief overview along with my 2 cents. Then I’ll give you the link to his website where you can find out a lot more.

I’ve been familiar with Jim Edwards’ work before. He has never even associated his name with a bad product, let alone produced one himself. So, when the Mini Site Creator became available, I knew I had to have it. It was honestly the best purchase I’d made in years.

Like Jim, I’m very careful what I put my name on the line for. So, the responsibility of influencing someone to buy something isn’t something I would ever take lightly. Like me, you work hard for your money and should use it as wisely as possible. If I felt that this was anything less than a 100% great deal and a 100% worthwhile investment, I wouldn’t be writing these words right now. I give you my word, this course is absolutely something you NEED to have and the sooner the better. WHY?

Jim will show you how to make websites for yourself, rather than being at someone else’s mercy. Why pay a web designer (a-hem) when you can do it yourself and actually MAKE money for yourself?!!

You’ll gain so much confidence (and pride) as you learn new skills. Confidence breeds success like nothing else can!

You can LITERALLY have your first website up and running within a week. I put together the following mini site in less than a day using one of the templates that comes with the course:

Video Games

With this particular mini site, not only does income come from sales of the video games and products, you’ll notice that we’ve put Google ads on the site - MORE income!

While I already knew html, I had never used a template, and the Mozilla html editor that comes with the course was as new to me as they would be anyone. By the way, the course also includes customizable templates!

Anytime you learn a new craft or skill, you get to add quality “bragging rights” to your resume. Wouldn’t you love to list “Web Designer”, “Web Editor” and “Web Publisher” amongst your talents?

Your options are truly limitless. Below are links to Poster Websites that my teen-aged daughters put up using Jim’s Mini Site Creator Templates and Mozilla html editor. The posters are selling, they’re making money and learning first hand how to run their own internet marketing business! Do you have any young people in your life who you’d like to see gain the same skills? This is the course they need!

Janet Jackson Posters
Will Smith Posters
50 Cent Posters
Tori Amos Posters

I want so badly for you to get your hands on this course that I’ll make a special offer to you. If you buy the course through this website, after you have paid for the course, we will give you access to 100 Hightide-Web-Designed background images and even help you with the design of a banner if you need it. F-R-E-E.

If you have any questions at all about the Mini Site Creator, please feel 100% free to e-mail me: joi@hightide-web.com.

Do yourself a really nice favor, go to the following website and let Jim, himself, tell you all about this revolutionary course.

Click Here —> Mini Site Creator

By the way, we have already earned back more than we spent on the course through sales of these posters and products! A free education and multiple sources of income - pretty darn hard to beat that!

Joi

by Talbert Williams

Those of you who popped your heads in the door last week are now thoroughly convinced that targeted email is the ticket to e-tailer bliss.

But how do you write email that cuts cleanly through the mumbo jumbo of mass marketing and enhances customer relations, while also boosting sales? Follow these top 10 tips to writing email that sells, and watch your response rates grow faster than a Paul Shaffer retort.

10. Be yourself. Remember the old adage “Don’t talk to strangers.” People live by those words. Introduce yourself, and your company, right away. Existing customers will greet you like an old friend, while potential shoppers won’t be forced to wonder if you are a shady scam artist.

9. Be clear and concise. What exactly are you offering, anyway? A sale on neon pink XXL gloves? Buy one Beanie Baby get the second at half-price? Free Ginsu knife in exchange for completing a marketing survey? Guessing games aren’t much fun and rarely lead to a sale. State your offer up front and without (too much) hype.

8. Be available. Can I get it express mail? What’s your return policy? Even when you address such questions up-front in your offer, these questions and others are bound to be asked. Let your customer know someone is minding the shop. Make it clear how and where to get more information.

7. Be a clock watcher. Is this an ACT NOW situation or is the offer good indefinitely? Include this information in your pitch. It is tempting to call for immediate action. However, if you go that route, be certain you don’t make the same offer twice. Remember, no one believed the e-tailer who cried wolf.

6. Be show AND substance. A little chic goes a long way toward keeping your customers interested. And lively writing never goes out of style. However, a good deal and flawless customer service is certain to linger longer than even the most eloquent turn of phrase.

5. Pass Go. Collect $200. The customer is sold on your offer. Now don’t mess up the actual sale by forcing Bob Buyer to hunt down details on how to give up his hard-earned cash. List purchase price and payment terms, plus delivery method and time, in an obvious location and in easy-to-understand terms.

4. Be an editor. You’ve heard it before: Your email reflects upon you. Your customer needs to know he is buying from the best. Proofread. Break up run-on sentences. Use simple language. Catchy phrases don’t make up for sloppy punctuation and typos. And if you can’t write, hire someone who can.

3. Keep it clean. I’m not talking language here. But unless you are marketing to an exclusively adult audience, I’d stick to puritan wording. Avoid the temptation to be too sophisticated in your design. Many systems still won’t support fancy formatting. Plus, most of it gets lost on the trip through the network anyway. Keep it easy on the eye with lots of line breaks and white space.

2. Get to the point. According to Jupiter Communications research, only 15 percent of web users read all email messages in their entirety. More than half (51.2 percent) read the first few sentences and then decide whether or not to continue. Forcing your customer to wade through paragraphs of superfluous information is the quickest route to the delete key and to the death of a sale.

And the number one way to write e-mail that sells (drum roll, please):

1. Target your message to the right audience. Never forget what you are selling and to whom you are selling it. Remember: Even the most well-crafted pitch is worthless if it’s delivered to someone who doesn’t want it.

Copyright 2001 LeadsandTraffic.com

About the Author:
Talbert Williams offers debt consolidation, debt reduction, credit card debt referrals and advice. For more information, articles, news, tools and valuable resources on debt solutions, visit this site: http://www.1debtfreedom.com

by Martin Andrew

Everybody is raving on about blogs, it seems everyone has one, and it seems that everyone is telling you that if you want to get on in Internet Marketing you need one too!!

But what exactly is this Blogging Thing??

OK well like everything else, theres the Long answer, the short answer, and Martins Answer(often quite similar to the long answer, only, well, better:-) )

Blogging, Like MOST of the other New Trends, isnt actually new at all. Blogging has actually been around for quite some years now, I would probably say its Infancy was pre-2000 if I really wanted to push it back.

A Blog, or Weblog, is qute simply an Online Journal or diary.

BUT, Thats not what people Nowadays mean, when people talk to you about Blog and Blogging, they are *Really* talking about using this Blogging software to run your sites.

The Simplicity and Design of the software enables even the most technically challenged to add updated fresh content to their webpages, basically if you can type and use Word, you can run a Blog, this in turn is why it is becoming ever so popular, and also why most people do use it for, or at least most people *Were* using Blog and Blog software to run little Personal Diary Blogs.

However, what it really is, is a way to have a Regularly updated website related to your Business or Theme at the push of a button.

Here are the three most popular “blogs” at the time of printing this, they probably will remain like this for a long time, but although these are “Blogs” they are more along the lines of an actual real content website, rather than a Personal Diary type blog

# 1 Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things 67,001 links from 19,265 sites. # 2 Engadget 65,581 links from 14,884 sites. # 3 PostSecret PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. By frank warren 21,503 links from 12,892 sites.

The MAIN Difference between a blog and a standard website, is the fact that Bloggers tend to be more Personal, tend to leave more of a Personal Stamp on their work. Thats why those first two sites above are WAY more popular than if they had just been a standard Impersonal Website.

DONT Let this Blogging Craze Confuse you, its really not that complex, or infact that different to things you may already be used to, dont worry about this whole “Blog Revolution” thing, it is more of an Evolution than a Revolution, and the evolution involves Websites and Online Business in general, not Blogging on its own, Blogging has simply become a tool to enable the following things -

Through Free services such as Blogger, anyone anywhere anytime can start a website, without having any technical knowledge.

Through Blogging software, it has become easier and easier to add fresh orginal content to your website on a regular basis,

Bloggers Share information, ideas and thoughts with eachother through reading eachothers blogs and talking about them on their own blogs,

Those are the Simple Elements of what Blogging is.

When you start looking at the Software running the Blogs, and the Functions it has, you can see even more benefits, and why it is Much Much More than just “a Weblog” I am talking about, I want you to understand that Blogging is an ESSENTIAL Part of your Entire Marketing Campaign, along with Article Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and all the other aspects I cover, blogging is essential.

BECAUSE, Not only does your average Blogging software enable Push Button Content Updates, BUT it also has the ability to do a MULTITUDE of the Mundane tasks we have to undertake to build our traffic up to our websites.

Your Blogging Software can pretty much take care of all your On Page Search Engine Optimization AUTOMATICALLY!! All you need to do is post new content!!

Blog Softwares can automatically reformat your content into different Code Types readable by Different types of technology, with a little help, your blog could kick out pages viewable in Web Browsers, Palm Pilots, Mobile Phones, and perhaps the best one at the moment is RSS!!

Yes, your blog will easily produce a Reformatted version of your webpage that can be Syndicated by other sites, read by people directly on their desktops, and much more!!

I do cover a Wide Range of Advanced Blogging Tactics which I wont go into here as I would be here for TOO Long!!

Quite Simply, a Blog, is a Software to Power your websites, how you decide to use it is up to you, but one thing I WILL STRESS here at the end is that The Whole Idea behind the fact that blogs are easy to use is to use them Well, and update them regularly, to see the full benefit. Its because of this fact, that a *Good* Blog should be updated Regularly to get the most benefits, that Most Blogs are really qute a Personal Type Weblog but DONT let that start to limit your thinking about what you can do with a blog, look again at the Top 3 blogs, go to Technorati.com and look at the biggest blogs,

Dont you think, actually, that Most of the Big blogs look more like a Magazine now, rather than a Journal or Diary?

Remember what I said about Evolution and not Revolution?

You can use a blog for whatever you want, all I stress, is MAKE SURE you use it, and use it every day(or as often as you possibly can regularly)

Thats it for that, more will come soon, thanks for reading!

About the Author:
Martin has decided to share his Ideas and Experiences on Succesful Online Marketing. Read More Online Business Advice Be sure to check out Martins tips and Tricks, and follow his experiences in Success @ More Traffic Please