One day, while creating a video where I mentioned an affiliate product, I thought… how do I make this affiliate recommendation stronger? How can I encourage people to click through to my affiliate link?

Photo credit: Rodolfo Clix

Well, one way is to make your video automatically jump to the affiliate URL after it finishes playing. If you use Camtasia, this can be done very easily. But this is not always ideal either because I don’t want to piss people off by automatically sending them to another site and sometimes, I want them to stay here on my blog.

Then I started to add a clickable hot spot at the end. Again, very easily done in Camtasia but I’d have to wait till they finish watching which may never happen. Then, while watching TV one night, I noticed the promos they use now a days that are at the bottom of the screen

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Here’s a little trick I’ve learned along the way. Sometimes when files begin to fill up a folder on your computer, the list can become - well… difficult to manage.

In Windows [File] Explorer, you can click the column heading to sort by date or application type or file name and so on but that doesn’t always work. For example, you would much prefer to have one particular file on the very top of the list, but the file name begins with an alphabet in the middle of the pack.

If you sort by file name, that’s going to put the file somewhere in the middle or the bottom. In the screen shot, see how I have that file PDFBrander.exe in the middle of all those files? While working with the files in that folder, I would much prefer it to be listed as the first file in the list.

Easy peasy.

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Q: If I were to monetize my blog, it is better to use affiliate methods rather than Adsense,or should I use both methods?  If I use both methods, would my affiliate income suffer? Thanks.

A: Both absolutely. Adsense is all about numbers. The more traffic you have, the easier it is to get clicks. The same argument could be said of affiliate programs, but I personally believe affiliate programs have a better long run pay off even with lower traffic volume, especially when you have mechanisms to bring people back to your blog like an email list and invite people to subscribe to your feed.

For me, affiliate recommendations have been more rewarding. But don’t just slap an affiliate banner up there and think people will buy. ‘Sell’ it by blogging about it. Why do you like it and why do you recommend it? What exactly has the product help you

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Being in the small business to small business market, I’m always on the lookout for factoids and snippets of data. These can be great to back up an article or even to debunk a myth in your articles, blog posts etc.

411SmallBusinessFacts.com might just be the place you need to get these facts. Very interesting, even if its just for your personal consumption. Kinda gives you a glimpse into what’s happening with fellow small businesses and business owners.

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Photo credit: gary tamin

The younger generation loves texting. Almost all new cell phones are capable of text. I personally like using text messages for alerts like appointment alerts from Google Calendar. Simply because I’m the type of person who needs prompting.

What about you?

Do you use text in your business at all? Do you communicate with staff or even customers with it?

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