One of the most common things I see, and I have made this mistake myself in the past, is people putting ads on their affiliate sites in prime locations such as at the very top of the website page in the header or above their content before affiliate listings. Many people don't think about this when they are putting a site together but just imagine for a second you are not that familiar with the internet and you're doing a basic search for a product you want to buy. You click on a link from Google which brings you through to an eBay affiliate website which lists auctions of the product you are looking for but instead of staying on that website and browsing the content and the listings you see a nice big advertising banner or adsense listing at the top of the site and you click on it, immediately you are taken away from the site.

You would be surprised how many people show me sites which have this kind of scenario going on. Their stats show their site visitors leave almost immediately after entering but their adsense account is making some money from the site. Read the rest of this entry »

Well it's been over 3 weeks now since I launched my competition which is kindly sponsored by Brad Hansen over at ReviewAZON.com and I have had over 150 entries for a copy of the ReviewAZON review plugin for WordPress.

The competition is completely FREE to enter and the winner will be announced here on the 1st of July around the same time that July's competition is launched. If you are wondering what the FREE prize will be next month then all I am going to say is it will be along similar lines to Reviewazon but it will be slightly different......confused?! You're not the only one.

Okay, so you have just 10 more days to get yourself entered into the June competition for a chance to win a FREE copy of the amazon wordpress plugin, ReviewAZON. You can enter by clicking here and answering the simple question...may the force be with you.

Click here to enter

My first proper affiliate website was built using the platform known as Build A Niche Store (aka BANS). I say proper because I had actually toyed around with iFrames and Amazon aStores for a while before that, along with associateomatic, but all in all I didn't really know what I was doing and had little success with either of the latter. BANS was where I first started to learn how to make money through the eBay Affiliate Program and from that point of view I owe a lot of my basic knowledge to buying BANS back when it was first released, albeit somewhat different from the platform we see in front of us today.

I currently have no BANS sites left as the few remaining ones had 'died' off and just weren't making any money and so from then onwards I stopped using BANS. You may also have heard about BANS V3.0 sites being de-indexed from Google for....well little or no reason whatsoever other than the fact the Google algorithm does not like affiliate sites, or at least thin affiliate sites anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes you read correctly, if you haven't bought your name in a DOTCOM domain name yet then you are completely mad in my opinion. If you are looking to get anywhere online then I truly believe that you should own the DOTCOM for your actual name, after all domains cost a small pittance at around $8-10 for a DOTCOM. If you are ever going to brand yourself properly online then you need to buy yourself your DOTCOM name.

I know you are sitting there asking me 'Okay Ben if you think this then why don't you own BenJohnson.com?'. There is a simple answer for this and that is I missed the boat so to speak, BenJohnson.com was available at a point back in the past and I missed my chance to acquire it. I have tried to contact the individual who owns it to try and purchase it but they have ignored my emails and I have been unable to make contact with them so far.

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This is the first competition I have ever run on my blog and depending on how popular it proves to be then it may become a regular feature every month.

Competition Details

This month's competition is kindly sponsored by Brad Hanson who is the creator of the ReviewAZON plugin for WordPress. Simply by answering the question below you will be in with a chance of winning a FREE copy of the ReviewAZON plugin for WordPress along with access to my ReviewAZON101 video series which consists of a total of 20 tutorial videos to guide you through every step of the ReviewAZON site build process. That's well over a $100 worth of prizes up for grabs.

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