In my previous posts I have mentioned how important it is to become a pepperjam affiliate if you are serious about making money online. They have just made your work easier with the introduction of “pepperjam store builder”. Now you are just one minute away from building the perfect store for your website / blog.

The process here is very simple. Log in to your account and go to the pepperjam store builder page. You will see all the advertisers with product feeds in this section. Remember, You will only see a product feed if you have applied and got approved to that particular advertiser’s program. Select all feeds applicable to your web site or blog’s niche.

If you need, You can filter results to get more specific products. For example if your advertiser has a wide range of clothing products, you can filter it to show only t-shirts. If you leave this field blank, you will get all the products available in their program. You can also select how many products you want to display in one page. I suggest you to use at least 6 products to give your readers a good variety.

Once you finish selecting products, you can customize the look of the store. Don’t be lazy and Do not use the default settings. You can be creative here. Try testing with many color combinations as possible till you get the perfect store to impress your visitors.

You can build the store in your existing web site/ weblog or purchase a new domain just for this. I have seen many publishers built pepperjam stores on new domains. For me, I created a seperate page for my store here. The product feed will be replaced with t-shirts later on.

Doesn’t it looks good? And it can’t get simpler than that. No need to program anything. You just have to copy paste the code given by pepperjam. If you run on wordpress, Do not forget to tick the “Wordpress Optimized” radio button to get a wordpress optimized script.

And to make things much more interesting, they are holding a contest to select the best pepperjam store. If you emerge a winner, you will receive a grand cash prize of $1000. Isn’t that great? Even if you do not win, if you are among the first 100 blogs to showcase a store in your blog, pepperjam will credit $10 bonus to your account.

Do not forget to read,
Virus Guards Eating Your affiliate earnings?
Spy your competitors to become successful !

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I was putting up some banner ads the other day which I got from market leverage and pepperjam.

After adding the code I tried to preview the banners to see whether they blend with my pages. To my disappointment it was an utter mess. Only a blank space showed up, but when I click on this blank space it re- directed to the affiliate page somehow.

I used to add some CJ affiliate links to my product web sites months ago and they could be integrated without any problems. So, I was really disappointed about the situation and I thought it must be a problem with the theme.

When I had time I spent hours in forums and related web sites to find out what the problem is. Why my banner ads are not showing up? It was “Kerosene” from Sitepoint who advised me to view my web site through “browsrcamp.com”. And to my surprise all my banner ads were clearly visible there. By the way, using brwsrcamp is a very good way to test the compatibility of your web design with Mac OS X browsers. Later on I found out that my recently purchased Kaspersky anti virus guard is the one responsible for blocking banners coming from affiliate network URL’s in my PC. Which made me realize, Most of the web surfers now days use kapersky or another powerful virus guard to protect themselves against malicious viruses.

It certainly gives user a good surfing experience but to poor affiliates who are trying to make some money using commission junction, pepperjam ,Linkshare ,Market Leverage and most of the other advertising networks it gives nightmares. (Click bank banners shows up just fine with kaspersky.) What is the point of using a banner ad if it cannot reach at least 50% the site visitors. As you know it is not easy getting traffic these days to web sites. And adsense is not what it used to be 3 years back. Most visitors now days are adsense blind. And only hope for most site owners these days is the square shape banner ads like 125*125 or 250*250 if they are to recover the hosting fees and make a decent living.

I am not talking about the big shot blog owners or other web sites which can opt for private ad selling. 70% of the web sites out their Do not have the ability to engage in private ad selling. Even if they do ,it has to be for ridiculously low prices.

Since we cannot ask our visitors to turn off their virus guards while visiting our web site, a good practice would be to put text links more often than using banners. after doing little pre-sale using the “click here to….” phrase still gives wonderful feed back in terms of conversions. If you insist using banners make sure to put a text link near by like I have done in my “share market suckz” post. That post is the one giving me amazing conversions and I realize using the text link plays a major part of that. And always remember to get the best use of alternative text tag. If your banner image does not show up ,the visitors will see your alternate text so make sure to use a catchy phrase to get more attraction.

Or else, You can download the banner image and host it in your own server. If you use your server image URL instead of the image link given with the affiliate code, Then the banner will show up without any problems. The down side here is, in your affiliate manager area it will not record any impressions. Only the number of clicks will be recorded. If you are using this method contact the affiliate network customer care and let them know you are using your own banner. Otherwise they will not know how you are getting clicks without impressions, unless someone from the network manually visit your site and check the set up.

There is one more thing I should add if you are a newbie affiliate marketer. Yes, Affiliate marketing has its own advantages. But for me, Most money come from my own product selling s. (No, I don’t sell e-books and not planning to do either..). As an affiliate, if you find a good niche where you get few good conversions, it is always better to develop a similar product and try to sell it. You will not believe how cheap you can get things developed at elance.

I have already completed writing one of my own experiences where I turned an affiliate product in to my own product back in 2004 and how I made a killing out of it. To make this post nice and short, I thought of publishing it tomorrow.

If you enjoy reading this post, please bookmark it and share. You can stay updated by joining my RSS feed. And I warmly invite you to join my community and share your experiences. Wish you all the best for your journey.

You might also want to check,
Share market Suckz, Let’s play the Forex game.

One easy way you can start earning in the next hour.

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