Results matching “affiliate” from Ye Olde Rad Blog III

Enrolled in Amazon's Affiliate program, something I probably shoulda done years ago. They claim it takes ~3 days to process an application, but I received my acceptance letter today. (Applied late last night.)

Being a n00b, I don't know much about their program yet, except that they pay a percentage whenever a visitor clicks a link on my site and makes a corresponding purchase. (How big of a percentage I'm not sure.)

I've long included links to books at the Amazon site [ in pages such as this one » Best Books for Learning the Basics of Web Site Design (XHTML & CSS), and this one » Andy Budd's Book: CSS Mastery ] without ever taking advantage of their program.

If I start making considerable cash, I'll be bummed that I didn't enroll sooner. And if I don't (earn cash), I'll be bummed too, for wasting my time with this program. So either way .. which might be why I hesitated so long.

What I like best about the Amazon program is that it allows me to monetize the site without including visible ads (.. unlike Google's AdSense program). All I need to do is add the following code to the end of each Amazon link » ?ie=UTF8&tag=radifiedcom-20. So it's virtually invisible to visitors. If I didn't tell you, you might never know.

I also like that it doesn't cost visitors anything extra when purchasing a book via a link from this site.

After establishing an 'Associate' account (and logging in to the Amazon site), a toolbar magically appears at the top of the browser window whenever I visit Amazon.com.

The Associate toolbar allows me to create targeted links to the particular book/page I'm at/on .. with a single click. Couldn't be easier. I simply paste the auto-generated code into my web page.

Biggest problem I had moving the site (to our new VPS server) .. was the blog not working.

Readers could still view pages/entries, but the blog-interface (which allows me to create new entries) would not load.

Instead of launching the interface, the master script-file (mt.cgi) prompted a *download*. ("Would you like to download, open or cancel?")

That suk'ed .. cuz I make much use of the blog .. to help keep the home-page lean-n-mean.

(Tho I create these entries in Dreamweaver, cuz it's a far superior tool to what you find in the MT interface, far as web page creation goes. Then I copy-n-paste into MT. That's why the blog entries always come after you see/read it on the home page.)

Normally I have a plenty of tools in my Troubleshooting bag-of-tricks, but this problem left me scratching my head.

I'd never seen this type of behavior. And neither had anyone at the Movable Type forums. (I use the new Open Source version of Movable Type » v4.1.)

Not being able to use the blog was a major bummer. Fortunately, I found an article that offered a solution .. even tho it appeared to address a different problem.