Get Yourself Out There

When you’re organizing your wedding the last thing you want to be doing is throwing your money up the wazoo. Let’s face it the money goes out like there’s no tomorrow anyway when you start dealing with wedding venues, caterers and all the rest of it.

You have to be really on the ball and making ends meet can be tough. In a wink you’ve just spent another grand. It is as easy as that. On the day the last thing you want is for your photographer to take his eye off the ball. You want him to go the extra mile for you and record your special day in a unique way. This is what differentiates a professional photographer from someone who is just going through the motions for the money.

Having someone treat you like an easy touch is something you need like a hole in the head.

As far as choosing your photographer goes it will often come down to the wedding photography packages on offer. Of course you’ll be wanting to see examples but a good package will be what you’re after.

You need nerves of steel to maintain your sanity! Of course the Internet is a really good place to do lots of research when organizing your wedding. Once in a blue moon you’ll find a web site which provides exactly what you need.

When a friend of mine was organizing her wedding she found this page: www.wedding-photographer-bristol.org.uk and it was one of those rare finds which gave her exactly what she needed. You can request a call back from some of the top wedding photographers in the Bristol area.

It’s every site owners dream to have hundreds of affiliates marketing their site for years, unfortunately the sad truth is most affiliate programs see a peak when first launched and then the interest dwindles to just a few affiliates when the next new product hits the affiliate directories.

Why does this happen? It’s mainly due to the affiliate programs not being set up properly. What most affiliate program owners don’t get is they should be doing most of the hard work for their affiliates. What do I mean by this? I mean the site owner should be supplying their affiliates with the materials to advertise their sites, so all they have to do is spread those materials over the internet. Give them articles to post, pay per click ads, ezine ads, press releases, banner ads, viral reports, emails and even go as far as supplying keyword research for the website.

Setting up an affiliate program like this will increase how many affiliate are left advertising after the initially hype, and if the site owner keeps supplying new material for the affiliates it’s pretty much guaranteed that they will make a good income from their affiliates.

Using this method is definitely a good start but how do the experienced affiliate marketers get their affiliates falling over themselves to advertise their product year after year? They achieve this by implementing the following 3 affiliate program secrets:

Pay your affiliates the larger share of the profits for their sales. Yes you read that right, pay the affiliates the big share. Why? Firstly, everyone else will be paying their affiliates 50% or lower, if you enter a chosen market and offer affiliate 60 to 80% of the profits, who do you think the affiliates will promote? They will go were the money is best, which will be yours. Secondly, you should be making the majority of your money on the “back end”; this is when you offer customer’s related products that will compliment their purchase.

This is where a lot of site owners fail, they only focus on the first sale and don’t want to pay their affiliates the big share. All that happens is they end up making no money as the affiliate’s loose interest. You see the big money is made when you promote back end products to the list of customers you acquire from your affiliate’s sales and as you have already paid your affiliates for their sales all profits you make on the back end are 100% yours.

Pay the affiliate on your back end products as well, I know this sounds a little strange but this is how the big boys do things now to make their six figures plus online. Put yourself in the affiliate shoes, if your looking for a product to sale and there is a product that offers 60% commission on each sale and a product that offers 60% commission on each sale and 40% commission on the back end sale, which one will you promote? Exactly, setting up your affiliate program like this will attach over 90% of the affiliate in your chosen market. Consider how much profit you would make if there were 1000’s of affiliates promoting your product instead of just 100’s, I’ll let you do the maths.

Finally, to send your affiliate program sky high by offering a second tier, done correctly with the above you can wipe out any competition in your chosen market. Basically, a second tier is when you offer your affiliate commission of sales from affiliates they get to promote your product. So if affiliate 1 refers affiliates 2 and 3 to your affiliate program affiliate 1 will make commission on all sales affiliate 2 and 3 make.

The above strategies are advanced techniques and if used correctly can generate affiliate money for years to come. Before trying any of the strategies make sure your affiliate program has the necessary materials for your affiliates or your affiliate program will crash and burn.

1. Does My Website Have To Be Accessible in 2008?

You do have a responsibility at some level, whether or not you are the designer or the commissioner of the website, to ensure your website design does not discriminate against disabled visitors to your site.

2. So what happens if your website design is not accessible?

Unsurprisingly, you leave yourself open to criticism, bad press and and more seriously legal action if your site is not accessible.

3. What level of compliance should your website design meet?

No case has been brought to court in the United Kingdom to date, so there is no case law guidance. In any event, case law can only provide broad guidance – what websites have to do may vary from site to site. What is important, however, is the outcome: the DDA requires that you make what it refers to as “reasonable adjustments”, to your services to ensure that a person with a disability can access that service. This means making changes to websites – which offer 24 hour service, and a variety of features not available via, for example, a telephone service – so that disabled people can use them.

4. Web Accessibility Opinion

Basically, you need to make sure your site is built to W3C standards for good website design. That means valid html and valid css. It means passing Priority 1 W3C WCAG (Google it!) at least. It means well formed website code (i.e. without errors) and simple and correct use of technologies. Actually – this is fairly simple to do for an experienced web designer – do not accept that you need to pay more for accessible web design – it should come as standard, part of good practice web design. You could go one step further and ask “vision impaired” testers to test drive the site. Finally, you need to listen to your web site visitors. If someone contacts you about the inaccessibility of your web site – then fix it!

There’s a business case and moral obligation to make your site as accessible as you can. There are over 8 Million people registered as having a disability in the UK, and a lot of them use the net – do you really want to ignore them? Prosecutions have been successful in Australia and the US – it will happen in the UK, just not any time soon – so don’t worry too much about prosecution – and don’t listen to the snake oil salesman who want your hard earned cash for total website redevelopment!

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