As a small business owner, another way to create income from your website is through affiliate arrangements for products that your clients might be interested in but that you don’t carry in your brick and mortar store.

Affiliates are people who sell other people’s stuff and get paid a commission for each sale.  There are thousands of affiliate opportunities on the internet and you should definitely check out the possibilities they afford to anyone with a website.

I live in a resort area and one of the ideas I present, regularly, to potential clients is getting email addresses from people who come into their stores.  For most of these businesses, they could find a gold mine just by getting all their past customers into a database and beginning to communicate, regularly, with those people who already know and trust them…but that’s material for another post.

When I mention this idea, most people reply that “these are tourists” why would I want their email address?

How about “because tourists are people and people buy things.”

Just because you have a “Tahoe trinkets” store doesn’t mean that people on your email list won’t buy other things from you on your website.

First of all, tourists obviously travel, right?  Why not present email offers that would appeal to people who travel?  You can have affiliate relationships with travel companies, luggage companies, camera stores, etc.

You might be pleasantly surprised to find that these people would buy just about anything you offer if it’s in line with their buying habits. Discover the profitability of affiliate marketing here.

Have you used Pay Per Click advertising for your business?  If so, you’ve taken the risk of click fraud.

When using Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, you pay a pre-set bid amount each time someone clicks on your advertisement in the search engine (whether or not a purchase is made). Click fraud takes place when these clicks are not made by legitimate consumers looking for information or looking to buy your product or service.

Click fraud can be committed in many different ways:

When you use Google Adwords Pay Per Click advertising, your ads are run on various websites, hopefully, that have content that relates to what you are advertising.

Owners of those websites could click on the ad to generate revenue from Google Adsense.   Of course, this is a waste of your ad budget for that click because the person has no intention of buying from you.

The most common type of click fraud is usually done by high tech scripts or bots, running in the background, and clicking your ads automatically.

Some click fraud can’t be stopped, but there are certain things you can do to eliminate the majority of the click fraud in your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns.

First, use the larger search engines, like Google or MSN, to purchase your traffic from so you have their reputation to rely upon.

The larger, more reputable, search engines are constantly putting things into place, on their end, to protect against click fraud.

Next, monitor your website’s traffic religiously, using a strong analytics program.  Look for any spikes in non-converting clicks from odd domain names, specific keywords or other countries.

If you think you’ve been had, by click fraud, you can contact the search engine for a credit back to your PPC budget.

The bottom line is keeping close track of  your own traffic with a strong analytics strategy and then acting accordingly by contacting your PPC ad host.

Do you actively use more than one social network?   Do you only have one purpose for being involved in social media?

If you’re like most people, you use one for business related discussions and one for more personal types of communications.

Though on the surface many social networks seem similar, to use them skillfully you should understand the different roles they can play in your online activity. Here’s what I have discovered in my use of both Facebook and Twitter.

I seem to receive most of the “late, breaking news” types of communications on Twitter.

I know that lots of people post on Facebook about current events but Twitter just seems to be about the latest breaking news.

I usually use Facebook more for communicating with established friendships and family members while Twitter is a broad range of people with whom I think I have common interests.

I have many followers on Twitter who only post those great sayings that we’d all love to have time to read for ourselves but the little 140 character snippets fit much more easily into our lifestyles than going to the bookshelf.

There’s a lot to be said about a person from scanning what they’ve tweeted over the past month than you can find out about them by what they choose to share in their Facebook profile, wouldn’t you agree?

If scanning their tweets indicates a commonality between us, I might ask them to become a friend on Facebook.  That just seems like a much more reliable way to “see” what someone’s all about.

What are your thoughts on this subject?  Please leave a comment and share your opinions.

In the last post I discussed some Firefox add-ons that I thought you might find handy in your work as a web designer or web developer.

Today, I’m going to pull a few more out of my bag of magic tricks and see if you think they’re as neat as I do.

1. Xray - Once installed the X-Ray command is available by right-clicking or you can access it in the Tools menu.

When applied to a page it can help you see how the document was constructed without having to go back and forth between the sourcecode and the page in your browser. Is that list made of li, dd or p elements?

Is that an h3 tag or just some bolded text?  Aha, X-Ray shows you what’s beneath the surface of the page.

2. Palette Grabber - Creates a color palette for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, Flash, Fireworks, Paint.NET, or OS X based on the current page.  I’m sure it will work, also, in Gimp Shop, a hack that makes Gimp look and feel like PhotoShop.

3. Firebug - Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a ton of development tools at your fingertips while you are browsing. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

With these add-ons, you should be able to work much faster and with more insight.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you like and/or dislike about the add-ons.  We can even start to collect other add-ons as you suggest them for future posts.

Firefox presently is my favorite browser for web designers because of the seemingly unlimited amount of add-ons available.

It’s amazing just how many add-ons I run across each week and just don’t have time to check them all out.  With that in mind, I thought I’d check out a few and report on the good ones for you.

These add-ons make your web designing jobs easier and faster because they contain useful tools that you’d normally have to open a software program to have access to, so they’ll save you some time.

Here’s a  list of Firefox add-ons that I used in my web development projects, you’re welcome to comment on any you don’t like or suggest ones that you might be currently using in your work.

1. Web Developers Toolbar - This is an ideal tool for web designers as well as developers. It contains tools such as CSS displays, Edit Forms, Tools for mark-up Validation (W3C, CSS, HTML etc.)

2. IE-Tab - This is very helpful to web developers since you can easily switch between IE and Firefox. This is a great alternative for browsershots.org

3. MeasureIT - Need a ruler or need to measure an element in an existing website. This tool will become handy.

Ok, that’s it for today.  We will look at more tools in the next installment.

In the meantime, you can click on the hyperlinks and check out each of the tools to see if they’re something you’d be likely to use in your work.

I think they’re all good to have on hand as you are designing and developing websites for yourself or someone else.

In the next post, I’ll look at XRay, Pallette Grabber and Firebug.