Asking For Help

By Bill Freedman

For many people, especially clever people, asking for help is hard. Very hard. Like many of you, I enjoy solving problems on my own. I get great satisfaction from solitary problem-solving tasks such as finishing a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, mastering a particularly challenging Sudoku or climbing a difficult mountain trail.

There are other kinds of problems that need solving. No, I’m not talking about crossword puzzles, but the fuzzy, complex and nuanced problems faced in business and life. The ones where a worthy solution creates a new crop of problems (or in business-speak, opportunities) that need equally thoughtful consideration.

These problems come in all shapes and sizes. The economic: what is the best use of my abilities? The political: how can I foster peace, understanding and growth in my community? The business: how much money and skills (if any) should I invest into solving a market need or customer problem?

On the surface, asking for help creates the appearance of vulnerability. But a deeper analysis demonstrates that asking for help is one of the most powerful forms of leadership. Why? Because solving fuzzy problems isn’t an individual task. This is mainly because not everyone agrees that there is “a problem” or that a particular “solution” is valuable.

Those who seek to solve these sorts of problems on their own are tilting at windmills. To paraphrase H L Mencken: for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat-and wrong.

Alternatively, asking for help is an opportunity to understand how others feel about the issue. Does the problem need urgent attention? Is a solution vital to others? Sometimes you’ll find out if the problem is correctly framed. For example, is the use of modern phone call recording technology a matter of personal productivity, national security or constitutional rights? No simple answers here.

Asking for help is a chance to get feedback on a potential solution to the problem. If others agree with the solution, you can take a more aggressive step and ask for an endorsement or for resources to further your proposed solution. It is in these important moments that asking for help crosses the line from vulnerability to leadership. It’s important to note that this type of leadership and persuasion brings with it an obligation to further the desired end. I’ll discuss obligations at a later date.

Fuzzy problems need organization, clarification and consensus, not a solitary solution. So the measurable unit of success in asking for help is the degree of support behind the proposed solution. Building support, building a coalition, accumulating resources toward an end involves as much problem-solving attention as any puzzle. And the help, the support, the admiration that you get from others in advancing the solution is mighty satisfying.

Evidence, Persuasion and Perception

By Bill Freedman

Marketing-speak is littered with all kinds of trite sayings. I was in a meeting today at a business software organization where the words “perception is reality” was uttered yet again. I sat quietly listening to the speakers’ claims. My client does, after all, have experience in the market, with customers and with the technology.

I understand the logic of the truism. If a customer believes something to be true, they will act on their beliefs. In my experience, prospective IT customers are a skeptical bunch. They distrust advertising slogans and sales claims. And for good reason: they’ve been burned by bold claims and vendor promises.

So the real question isn’t “if” the prospective customer believes your claims, but rather how to persuade the customer to conclude that they need your product and services. In other words, what can you do to induce the prospective customer to take the actions you prescribe. These words are easy to say, hard to accomplish. Changing individual behavior is hard to do. Changing the behavior of a large segment of the market is a remarkable accomplishment.

Evidence, I believe, is the strongest tool for persuasion. Evidence comes in many forms: quantitative studies, product demos, customer references, cost/benefit analyses and others. Evidence stands apart from claims in that it is grounded in one or more forms of reality. Typically evidence is tangible. Most importantly, customers can assess and experience evidence on their own terms.

Creating evidence with the power to change market and individual behavior is hard. It is rarely the case that your product aims at a greenfield opportunity and has no relevant competition. People are very much creatures of habit, making incumbent solutions to problems seem acceptable. Evidence however, can shock markets and individuals into action. They may not buy immediately, they may not even fully accept the evidence, but they will use the evidence to test and perhaps alter their perception of reality.

Is perception reality? Perhaps. But if you want to change perception, you better get some evidence.

Should You Use .svg Images in WordPress Posts?

By Bill Freedman

Graphics make blog posts and web pages better. A picture is worth a thousand words—but including pictures on the web is harder than it should be. There is a whole alphabet soup of formats, graphic features such as transparency, different resolutions and the dreaded browser compatibility, find out more at this Kinsta blog post. Wouldn’t it be nice if creating and publishing graphics was as straight-forward as publishing text?

New and Improved: .svg or Scalable Vector Graphics

.svg images WordPress

.svg images in WordPress are here! This is the official .svg logo (in .svg format) served up from this blog’s media library using the Safe SVG plugin.

I’ve been tracking .svg for some time. .svg format stands for “scalable vector graphic,” which is described in a W3C specification. The format provides a modularized language for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster images.

As of February 2017, .svg delivers numerous advantages for designers and developers alike. .svg images are supported by most browsers. The files are tiny compared to it’s .png and .jpeg brethren. And there are multiple tools, including my favorite graphic design tool, Sketch 3, that save files to the .svg format.

The advantages of .svg come from an industry standard format that comprises (1) vector graphic shapes (e.g., paths consisting of straight lines and curves), (2) raster images and (3) text that display beautifully in all modern browsers. In other words, the .svg image file contains instructions for rendering images at any resolution rather than compressed rasters. And for the designer and webmaster, this means you have a single tiny file to manage rather than exporting 1x, 2x and 4x versions from a graphic tool which need to be managed in a CDN or media library and delivered to desktop, mobile and retina displays based on the viewport setting…very, very complex.

With the advantages of broad compatibility, tiny files and simplicity, it’s time to make a switch. Or is it?

.svg Images in WordPress…Not For the Masses…Not Yet

As of February 2017, WordPress doesn’t officially support .SVG images. Sure it’s easy to enable SVG in your WordPress instance through a function or a plugin. But if it’s easy to support the .svg image format, why isn’t support included in WordPress core?  The answer: security.

It turns out that the .svg format is more of a document format than an image format. That means you can embed all sorts of things in a .svg file. This includes JavaScript. So that seemingly benign graphic could easily contain a not-so-benign script that hijacks visitors, data and web experiences. Not so good. And with 25% of the web running on WordPress, the core development team prioritizes security and reliability over simplicity. The four years of engineering debate is visible to all in WordPress Trac ticket 24251.

.svg Images in Controlled WordPress Sites: Bring On .svg!

In sites where only skilled web designers and publishers with a strict file chain of custody procedure, the advantages of .svg can be realized today. For security, I strongly recommend that you think twice about deploying .svg support by hacking the functions.php file and or using the less secure plugins that you can easily find in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Instead, focus first on training and procedures to mitigate potential risks from .svg. Just as you wouldn’t let anybody upload JavaScript to your site, you shouldn’t let just anyone upload .svg files to your site. The first and safest approach is to let savvy designers include .svg files in theme assets:

  1. Produce your own .svg files or review code in files provided by others
  2. Run the .svg file through a sanitizer, like DOMpurify
  3. Save the resulting code locally.
  4. Add the .svg file to your CDN or production file system
  5. Directly reference the sanitized file with CSS or HTML code <img src="/blah/file.svg" />

How About Media Libraries?

Enabling the media library opens more risk. If you are ready to limit access to the media libary using WordPress user roles, the risks should be manageable. There is one .svg plugin I can recommend today: Safe SVG by Daryll Doyle. It not only enables the .svg mime type for the media library, but it sanitizes .svg files on upload. The plugin is young but works. And developer Daryll Doyle is actively developing Safe SVG. He deserves our support!

.svg has a bright future for web publishers who value great user experiences with content and compatible graphics files that are simple to manage. Let’s embrace a secure future for SVG and WordPress.

Create Web Content That Gets Noticed With These 5 Tools

By Bill Freedman

We all know that content management systems makes it fast and easy to publish to the web. Fast and easy, however, isn’t the same as optimal. Optimal is harder to achieve—and squishier to define. On the web it means you have to think about multiple variables: your audience, text, images, search engines, standards, guidelines, technology and a lot more, since there are different options for this purpose, from using websites to market your products to other strategies like send text message online to promote your products or services.

Your reader comes first. Period.

This should be obvious. You are publishing content for your audience. You are trying to inform, educate, persuade and amuse your audience. But when traffic or ranking on search engines is lower than you’d like, it’s tempting to make changes that negatively impact your audience in the hope of a short term traffic boost. My advice: don’t do it. Earning a loyal audience and avoiding penalties are two good reasons to take the high road. Concentrate on creating good content that keeps your audience engaged, opt to use AI content writer like Copymatic.ai to personalize your content even more.

Earning a loyal audience

If you’re like most web site owners, you want the audience to visit more than one page. Perhaps you want them to buy something or register for update or browse other content on your site or return again in the future. That first visit is your chance to earn trust and loyalty. If you think it’s hard to get somebody to your site, just wait until you learn how hard it is to keep them on your site or to convert from an anonymous visitor into a potential customer. Yes you need to get people to your site, but success requires planning for a journey, not just a single step.

Avoiding search engine penalties

Search engines have the power to reward and to punish publishers. Remember, they’re competing for users and trust just like you are. The are continuously tweaking and improving algorithms to present the best and most relevant information to users with each and every search. So when a page or an entire site is employing tactics that inflate the relevance of your content, you may get a short term improvement in your rankings and visits.

Users and search engines are smart. Users will abandon pages with weak content (called pogo-sticking). Search engines will take notice of sketchy practices and issue algorithmic or manual penalties. If your site relies on search engine traffic for revenue, getting penalized will be very painful. Future traffic could drop by 20% or more. And even after you clean up the user un-friendly tactics, it will take weeks or months to regain the trust of a scorned search engine vendor.  Those are significant costs and effective deterrents for mainstream site owners.

The flip side of penalties are rewards.  Following Quality Guidelines will not only let your avoid penalties, it will reward you with engaged readers and higher rankings in search engine results pages. Surprisingly few people have read Google’s quality guidelines. Fewer have put them into action. And even fewer still embrace these guidelines consistently across their site and content. That is your opportunity. Below are five tools that help authors succeed at publishing content that gets noticed by readers and search engines alike.

The more visitors to your site, the more of them you can eventually hope to convert to paying customers. SEO tends to be one of the best-converting traffic channels, because it relies on pulling in actively interested people instead of trying to capture their attention with paid ads. Partnering with an seo agency manchester also ensures you’ll know how to handle unexpected changes, like algorithm updates or even penalties. SEO agencies  have experienced these many times before, and can guide you through each potential issue smoothly and quickly. You may also attend an Internet Marketing Conference to learn more about effective digital marketing strategies.

As your financial services company starts showing up for more searches, more people will become aware of it, use different software or apps for finances, the seamless payroll operations system will be an improvement for your business. Soon, they’ll be associating your brand with being a major player in the field of finance. In time, if your on-site content truly delivers what they’re looking for, you’ll also strengthen your brand credibility by positioning yourself as a reliable expert.

5 Tools for creating irresistible content that gets noticed

Below are several of my favorite tools that help you create elated and sticky users and sites that are easy for search engines to crawl, parse, index and rank highly in search results. These tools focus on “on-page optimizations” which means that each page you create is ready for consumption by readers and search engines. “Off page optimization tools” which focus on building site-wide credibility and links are beyond the scope of this article. All of the recommended on-page optimization tools have free versions. Some have extremely useful professional editions that are worth evaluating.

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is an excellent plug-in for WordPress and Drupal that helps authors follow on-page search engine optimization best practices.

Get Noticed: Yoast SEO

Incorporating this tool into the writing/editing/publishing workflow is super easy for everyone from authors to content strategists, blog editors and WordPress administrators. Use this tool before publishing posts to validate that the content is set up for success across multiple dimensions. Yoast SEO uses the idea of a “focus keyword” as an organizing principal. It then provides guidance to authors for improving the content for robotic search engines crawlers such as increasing article length, incorporating useful hyperlinks and subheadings and crafting optimized meta descriptions. Now it’s even better because of 2016 improvements for post readability. Yoast SEO provides helpful and light-handed readability suggestions by scanning your content for long sentences, passive voice and use of transition words.

Yoast SEO also does a ton behind the scenes optimizations too. Webmaster best practices such as maintaining sitemap.xml and robots.txt files happen without direct intervention from authors, editors, administrators or theme designers.

2. ImageOptim

ImageOptim is a free and open source MacOS app that strips images of extra pixels and unneeded meta data. This is extremely important because photographs, stock images and even images created in tools like Photoshop include a lot of information that isn’t needed by image consumers. Extra information results in bloated files that download slowly. The result is small image files that render beautifully and transfer across the internet quickly.

Get Noticed: ImageOptim

Adding ImageOptim to your workflow is super simple. Once you’ve downloaded and install the app, add the icon to your Mac’s dock. Before adding new images to your post, drag it onto the docked icon. The reduced-size file replaces the original. Lossy compression is a available as a user preference if you want to reduce file size even further.

3. Web Developer Extension for Chrome

Web Developer is a Swiss Army Knife of web development tools used by just about every experienced web developer and publisher—and you should start using it too. Your initial focus should be on using the extension to run validation tests using the W3C validation engines for your HTML and CSS code plus any links that are on your page.

Get Noticed: Web Developer for Chrome

Many HTML and CSS errors are benign. Others cause pages to render poorly. Poorly formatted pages discourage users and diminish trust. The same is true of hyperlinks. Nothing frustrates a visitor more than clicking on a link and not getting the desired payload.

4. SEOQuake Browser Extension for Chrome

SEOQuake presents a consolidated audit of SEO metrics and ranking factors for published pages.

Get Noticed: SEOQuake

It gives you information about how easy your pages are to be indexed along with useful information on effective keywords. Not only does SEOQuake help you evaluate your own site and pages, but it’s highly useful for evaluating how effective your competitors are at creating irresistible pages.

5. Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is a web application focused on the all-important page load time. You provide it with a URL and it identifies fixable elements on your pages for improving performance on desktop and mobile devices. Research studies suggest that in 2016 users prefer pages to load on any device in 3 seconds or fewer and that pages that take more than 5 seconds to load risk abandonment. What’s more, Google uses page load time as a ranking factor.

Get Noticed: PageSpeed Insights

The tool presents a numeric score for your pages, but the real value is in the detail. Drill in to learn where PageSpeed bottlenecks are and how to fix them. The report is a gold mine of issues that are generally easy for authors to fix, like compressing images with ImageOptim.

There’s a lot more you can do but I strongly recommend start with a “high road” philosophy and this initial set of tools. Take the time to learn their features. Figure out how to incorporate the tools into your publishing workflow. And, when you have a few moments, you should also run these tools on previously published pages.

Demand Generation Best Practices Aren’t About Digging Deeper

By Bill Freedman

It’s 2016 and the current debate about marketing tactics in Silicon Valley resembles the tactics for farming crops in the increasingly parched San Joaquin Valley. Let me rant a little and explain.

I just got out of a long meeting. A meeting that many marketers have every quarter. The topic: what campaigns and spend levels do we need to hit this quarter’s lead quota. These meetings are incredibly important, but today’s meeting turned in a less useful direction when the focus switched to which tactical “best practices”  to use in the upcoming quarter.

digging deeper wells

Photo Source: Rakshith M Gowda. Shared via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

This unfortunate turn in a marketing meeting led me to draw an analogy with California’s current, and historic, drought.

“Digging Deeper Wells” Isn’t a Marketing Best Practice

With California farmers not getting enough surface water for their thirsty crops, they’ve turned to digging wells. Farming, you see, has exactly two sources of water: surface water (rain, reservoirs and snow melt) and ground water (digging wells). They can’t control rain, but they can invest in wells. So they dig. 20 years ago they might have dug a few hundred feet. Today they are digging a few thousand feet. And so goes the discussion amongst farmers: tactics, timing, ROI and viability of digging deeper wells.

The “digging deeper wells” analogy is relevant to marketing spending because fresh leads are getting tougher and tougher to find. Organic—the surface water of B2B marketing—is the preferred source of leads, but few organizations generate enough organic leads to meet their growth objectives. So they hire marketers and allocate budgets for lead generation. The ask: create the campaign equivalent of digging well water. The budget is set by how deep the hole needs to be to hit water.

Herein lies the problem. Instead of building demand generation engines based on innovation, many marketers simply recycle and reuse demand generation tactics from the recent past: purchase yet another compiled email list, send yet another nurture email to the marketing database, launch yet another Google AdWords campaign, host yet another webinar, and set up yet another gated white paper. Yes, these tactics continue to work. But they are no where near as efficient in 2016 as they were in 2009.

Demand Generation Best Practices: Build for the Future Instead of Replicating the Past

Unlike the exactly two options available to farmers seeking water for their crops, marketers have nearly unlimited options for building future-oriented demand generation success. As a professional marketer my value is from strategizing, executing and measuring demand generation programs that are relevant to today’s target buyers and that will likely out-perform tactics from five years ago.

So instead of just re-allocating larger spends across traditional SEM and content tactics, I suggest marketers build fresh new plans based on projections for the competitive climate, projected company differentiation and latest assessment of target buyers. In other words, instead of defaulting to digging deeper wells, it is very possible for B2B marketers to find fresh sources of water by looking for buyers in fresh locations. Here are a few suggestions:

  • Revisit your target personas, segments and use cases—does your recent product release have new differentiated features or appeal to new buyers? Can you re-segment your existing database? Can you find new and different target lists? Tap into the green fields with your new campaigns.
  • Partner with sales on a target account strategy—here’s an opportunity to proactively reach out to your sales team: offer to provide augmented contact info for, say, five specific job titles at a handful of target accounts. To benefit from this offer, each representative needs to provide the specific account names for research. And together you are building personalized emails and talk tracks to earn meetings and win deals.
  • Find fertile activity patterns in web visitor behavior—still using point based lead scoring? Stop. It never worked and there are better approaches like predictive lead scoring. Even if you can’t invest in fancy predictive lead scoring solutions this quarter, you can start doing the analysis toward identifying sales-ready buyers. Explore the behavior of every user with > 5 visits in the past 90 days. Explore the behavior of every user who has an email address associated with a forecasted deal. Build charts of the findings, share the details with your extended go-to-market-team … and start using those findings to define sales-readiness.
  • Look for “first time” events and partnerships—think you have to be at the largest trade show in your industry with a major presence? Don’t make this an either-or decision. The cost of participation in hyper-targeted shows will be less that for the mega-events, and you’ll have less competition for buyers’ eyes.
  • Switch it up with your pre-paid channels—you probably have an existing multi-quarter media buy in place. How about making experimental changes to your ads, landing pages and assets and perhaps even the target audience within the publishers’ site/publication portfolio.

These are just a few of the ways you can get away from drilling deeper wells and the associated diminishing returns. There are many, many, many others.

Embrace Strategic Demand Generation Best Practices

The best practices from five years ago aren’t the campaign tactics. It’s the relentless focus on relevance, measurement and data. As you move forward apply what you’ve learned from:

Predictive analytics brings data to marketing decision-making.

Predictive analytics enhances marketing decision-making.

  • Being relevant, helpful and targeted—are you still promoting that allegedly evergreen white paper from 2014? If the content is still good, make it great with a modest refresh. Update the trend data, add fresh quotes from customers and analysts, insert new use cases and correct your boilerplate. Even evergreen content needs a bit of pruning and fertilizer. If the people in your marketing database trust you, they’ll quickly jump at an updated white paper from you—which is yet another reason to reopen a dialog. And new prospects will reach out for the new and timely information you’re providing.
  • Measuring everything—if you’ve set up your infrastructure correctly, this is free. You’ll be able to compare different channels, classes of offers and campaigns against your benchmarks. Once you have a meaningful engagement sample, you can compare new programs against historical success.
  • Listening to your data … and customers—in 2016, data has earned a seat at the table for campaign success decision-making. Bring it to your meetings. Discuss what it means. And absolutely use data to challenge ingrained assumptions on the team. If you don’t have a large enough sample size for statistically significant findings, bring qualitative feedback (from prospects, buyers and customers, not employees) on the utility of the campaign asset.
  • Taking smart risks—don’t be afraid if a great campaign effort doesn’t generate lots and lots of leads. Reduce risk from any single campaign by having a portfolio of campaigns running concurrently. That way every campaign is a success if you have data for improving decisions about future campaigns. With multiple campaigns you can act like a portfolio manager and not a water-hungry farmer: cancel the clearly ineffective campaigns quickly, double-down on the clearly effective campaigns, and iterate and improve those that have unfulfilled potential.

In summary, the best practices from the digital era are a refreshed point of view on campaign strategy, more than deeper reliance on going back to the well with specific campaign tactics.

What Do You Think?

Look at your plan for next quarter. Do you stand a better chance of winning by writing your own 2016 playbook or following legacy demand generation best practice of digging deeper wells?

 

Affiliate Marketing for B2B Publishers

By Bill Freedman

It’s time to shake it up again at “Bill Freedman’s Soon to be a Major Trend.” I’m going to start experimenting with Affiliate Marketing links. In this post we’ll take a look at the Affiliate Marketing players, the transactions and the industry dynamics. And we’ll explore my first foray into Affiliate Marketing featuring DreamHost, my web hosting provider for over a decade.

The main purpose of this web site is to share perspectives on B2B marketing. But it’s also a site where I experiment with new technologies and tactics. Experimenting with Affiliate Marketing is consistent with the blog’s charter, so let’s dig in!

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is hardly a new topic, but it is new to this site and is easy Understanding data with machine learning. It is a form of performance marketing that rewards “affiliates” for promoting third-party products to their audience.

Let’s dig deeper, starting with the cast of characters in a web-based affiliate marketing program and then digging into the transaction details.

The Affiliate Marketing Cast of Characters

  • Brand – This is the organization that provides rewards in exchange for sourcing new customers
  • Publisher – This is “the affiliate” or organization that publishes and promotes links to the brand’s web site and purchasable products
  • Customer – The is the publisher’s audience who ultimately buy products on the Brand’s web site.
  • Affiliate Network – The Affiliate Network acts as a broker between the Brand and Publisher. It provides infrastructure and services like account portals, metrics, links, etc. that make it easier for brands to attract Publishers, and for Publishers to share affiliate offers on behalf of the Brand. Amazon Associates is an example of an Affiliate Network.

The Affiliate Marketing Transaction Flow

The actions taken by the Customer, Publisher, Brand and Affiliate Network are outlined in the diagram below.

affiliate marketing transaction flow

Affiliate marketing transaction flow.

The Publisher attracts Customers to their web site, typically through valuable content. Only when the Customer buys a product does the affiliate marketing transaction flow take effect. Affiliate marketing programs rarely compensate for impressions or even clicks. As a result, the Publisher is typically rewarded in the form of high Commissions for Buy transactions, especially compared with cost per impression or cost per click compensation schemes. In many situations, the Affiliate Network facilitates setting up the relationship between Brand and Publisher and is the clearing house for metrics and payments. Larger Brands may run programs without an Affiliate Network intermediary.

Setting up an Affiliate Marketing program makes sense for Brands that seek an incremental method to extend their distribution reach via trusted partnerships. Participating in affiliate marketing programs make sense if the Publisher is confident they can drive purchases and earn commissions.

Before You Begin with Affiliate Marketing …

It seems easy and low risk to join the affiliate economy. As with many things the model makes sense but reality can be very different. I have three pieces of advice for anyone looking to join an Affiliate Marketing program:

  1. First, build an audience. Without an audience and web traffic, it’s pretty tough to convert affiliate links into cash. So focus first on your audience by creating assets–content–that they value. Yes, you can deploy affiliate links starting on day one, but your ultimate affiliate marketing strategy may evolve as your audience evolves.
  2. Keep it relevant. Affiliate ads pay per action, which means that you get paid only when readers click on the ad and make a purchase. The more relevant the offer/link is to your site content, the higher the likelihood visitors will click on the ad and perform the desired action. If visitors don’t purchase, it is a win for the vendor (through their branded link or ad), but not for the Publisher.
  3. Assess each program’s value. There are lots of Brands offering affiliate programs, but not all affiliate programs are created equally. Read the fine print and make sure the compensation from the Brand is a fair exchange for promoting their products through your web site.
  4. Integrate offers wisely. Use site design to balance the core content with affiliate and other offers. Skew too far toward affiliate offers and your site looks like a NASCAR race car. Skew to far to content and you’re missing monetization opportunities. Use experiments wisely to find the optimal mix … but do it in a way that doesn’t ever scare away readers.
  5. Keep your “SEO Juice” to yourself. When adding affiliate links to your site, make sure to include rel=“nofollow” in the link tag. That way search engines will not automatically confer domain authority to the affiliate. You may also check out here the best website designs of 2022 according to WebCitz.

I’ve used DreamHost shared hosting since 2003. I’ve grown up with them. I’ve enjoyed extremely high service levels and I’ve even stayed with them through some ugly outages (they’re ancient history now). While you can always find a cheaper hosting provider in this highly competitive (dare I say cut-throat) business, DreamHost has earned my loyalty. DreamHost’s core shared hosting service is competitively priced, includes unlimited storage and bandwidth, includes a parade of new feature releases every month and is backed by honest and transparent customer service.

They’ve also offered an affiliate program forever. I’m just taking advantage of promoting in on my blog now.

Affiliate Marketing link: DreamHost Web Hosting

Sponsored Ad: Dreamhost (I am compensated if you register using this link. Thank you!)

My motivation is two fold. First, I want to understand how the Publisher side of affiliate marketing programs work. I’ve offered Google AdSense for some time on this blog (and made a modest return from it). Now I’d like to learn about another blog monetization channel. Second, I want the coin. Yes, I expect to profit from including DreamHost affiliate links on my site.

Click here (affiliate link) to sign up for DreamHost’s truly great shared hosting service.