Making a living online is a difficult thing to do and it’s something that 98% of businesses that are currently online are not successful at. There are a lot of reasons for this and those reasons increase when websites leave the US.

To start with websites outside the US do not have as many people purchasing items online and for this reason the marketing and the website design have to be much better than those in the US.

A website needs to build trust, guide the visitor in the direction we want them to go and help them to make the purchase.

A major problem in any country is finding a web designer that understands marketing, web design, graphic design, programming and most of all conversion.

Let’s take a look at asicamericas.com.

The website was designed for smaller browsers which are rarely used today and what makes it worse is that the design is not centered. It hangs in the top left corner of the screen like it’s scared to be seen.

Every time someone is forced to click the mouse to find information there will be a percent of visitors that will leave the site never to return. By not having contact information on every page of the site we force visitors to click links and hunt for information.

If it’s a real business then the phone number and contact information should be in the header of every page. And the header and design of the site should tell me something about the business before I ever read the first line of text.

You’ve got less than 3 seconds to get me interested in your product and this is done on the graphical side of the website.
And colors will affect my reaction and the action I will take on your site.

Red indicates anger. It’s a strong color that conjures up a range of seemingly conflicting emotions from passionate love to violence and warfare. Red can have a physical effect, increasing the rate of respiration and raising blood pressure.

Blue would have been a better color to use. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.

Blue is considered beneficial to the mind and body. It slows human metabolism and produces a calming effect.
Another problem with the site is the scrolling text; it causes your eyes to be pulled in that direction and forces us to read the information at the speed the website decides.

The website has no call to action and in no way tries to get me to purchase any type of product.

On the SEO side of things the website has less than 8 links pointing to it and not meta tags. Meta tags are used by search engines like MSN who will be spending $100 million on advertising their search engine. By ranking on their search engine you get some of the benefit of the 100 million they are spending.

Java script and other coding was left on the site, it should have been pulled out of the code and placed in external folders to make it easier for the search engines to read and understand the site.

It doesn’t take long to come to the conclusion that this site has never made money online.

Website Designs for Affiliate Marketing

This is more or less a second part of my rant today. After I finished my rant I decided to put it to the test and made a post about silicone wristbands to show that I’d not make any sales. However, to my surprise I did, as a matter of fact I made a couple sales. But it is still not as good as my silicone wristband site.

When it comes to affiliate marketing you have to have something unique as well as the ability to stand out in that industry. A website talking about how much money you make as an affiliate marketer is not going to make you money in affiliate marketing.

At this moment I have my silicone wristband site that makes me about $1,000.00 per week.

It’s had quite a bit of drop in sales from last year and for this reason we’ve decided to start a website about fundraising events. After all there is only so much that can be said about silicone wristbands however, there is a heck of a lot that can be said about fundraising.

A website about fundraising allows me to stand out in that industry and it allows me to find people looking for silicone wristbands or rather ways to make money with fundraisings ideas.

A post about silicone wristbands on a website about making money online might make me a sale to two today but has very little chance of doing much more than that.

Website Designs & Affiliate Marketing

For those of you that don’t know I started playing a little in affiliate marketing last year. I didn’t do anything record breaking however I did make a little over $40,000.00 for the year and really didn’t get started until around the middle of the year.

This year I’m hoping to double what we did last year, however I’ve had to do some reading and studying in order to improve my chances of doing that.
I’ve come to the conclusion most people claiming to make tons of money with affiliate marketing are full of crap. They build blogs about nothing and place ads all over them. Then from time to time will make a post about this product or that.

The blog you are currently on gets about 1,000 unique visitors per day and I could double that if I put a little effort into it.

Here’s the thing.

If I make a post about silicone wristbands, on this blog, it will not make me as much money as a post on my silicone wristband blog, about silicone wristbands. I don’t care how many readers a blog has got, most readers are just that, readers, and will never purchase anything.

You can brag about the number of readers that come to your blog everyday to read what it is that you have to say but you and I both know those people are not making purchases.

The people that are buying go to the search engines, do a search for a product and then go to the website to check out that product. If you happen to rank for that product then I agree, you stand a good chance of making the sale.

But Joe Blow that hangs out on your blog is not buying the product that you’re talking about today, nor is he clicking the banner ads on your site. Hell, he’s been seeing those same banner ads for the last couple months and has become blind to them.

And most likely he ignores the post about this product or that and is more interested in the money you claim to be making. I’d be willing to bet the only money you make is from people buying banner ads on your site and from the people paying you to post about their products. Not only are you not making money in affiliate marketing but you are misleading the people that want to make a living online.

If people would stop trying to bull shit everyone and be honest about what they are doing it might make it easier for everyone involved to figure out how to make money online.

Including the bull shiters.