Affiliate Marketing with VigLink

Making money with your website can be a difficult task sometimes. Even if you have a great product or service that you promote and are making sales with you still might not be optimizing your website earnings as much as you could be. Not to mention the trouble it can be to find the perfect affiliate relationship that can help you make great money from your website. Then there is the problem that a merchant might decide to drop their affiliate program or change their links and all of your hard work could be gone.

One of the ways to not worry about all of those issues is to use a service like VigLink. VigLink takes many of the headaches of affiliate marketing and makes them disappear and lets you focus on what you do best with your website, making great content!

VigLink works by automatically taking care of all of the affiliate links for you. If you write a product review on the latest web design book from Amazon, your link to Amazon.com is automatically converted into an affiliate link by VigLink. All you have to do is link the way you normally do in your article.

Not only can you just start linking to merchants normally but VigLink has affiliate relationships with a HUGE number of merchants. So all of the links to those other stores that you created in the past or will in the future will become affiliate links as well. You can write posts about the latest BBQ you just bought from Home Depot or the latest movie you bought on iTunes and those links will also be turned into affiliate automatically by VigLink.

VigLink opens the door for your website to be able to concentrate on your content instead of worrying about if your links will break because your merchant dropped their program. The beautiful part is VigLink does not charge an upfront fee for you to use the service, but they do take a 25% cut of the commissions that you make in sales. That might sound like a lot but because they have better commission rates with many merchants you might not even notice the amount they take.

VigLink also gives you the ability to test out new merchants without having to join up for the program yourself. You can try them through VigLink and see if your are able to make some sales. If things go well then you can apply to the merchants affiliate program directly if you want to. A much better way to experiment in different niches.

I have been using VigLink here on Free Favicon for a little while now and have been please with the results. The site does not make much money to begin with but since VigLink has been installed the site has been able to double the monthly income. If you are interested in affiliate marketing I would encourage you to check out VigLink and see if it works for your website.

Apple Touch Icon

The iPhone and iPad have been out for quite awhile already and you might have noticing requests in your website log for a file called apple-touch-icon.png. If you have congratulations your website is getting traffic from iPhone and iPad users, the bad news is their mobile web browser is looking for a file to create a custom icon on their devices that you don’t have.

The good news is it is an easy fix. The Apple mobile browser is looking for a file called apple-touch-icon.png to create a fancy Apple styled icon on the iPhone or iPad. The easy way to fix it is to create or add a file called apple-touch-icon.png to your root folder of your website. The PNG image should be at least 45 pixels by 45 pixels.

If you can’t save a file to your root folder, perhaps because you are on free hosting or simply do not have access you can point the Apple mobile browser to another location using the following code:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/folder/iphone-ipad-icon.png" />

Like the favicon code you will need to add the code to the head section of your HTML.

Once you have either have a apple-touch-icon.png or have pointed the browser to another location using the link code your visitors will be able to save your website on their Apple mobile devices with a nifty icon on their iPhone and iPad devices. It will definitely make your website stand out on their machines.

How to Add Your Favicon to Blogger

The original post on How to Add Your Favicon to Blogger is the most popular post here on FreeFavicon. It was time I wrote a new post about the topic because Blogger has improved considerably and those instructions are no longer needed.

To add your favicon to your Blogger blog is now a simple three step process.
Step 1: Goto your layout in Blogger.
Step 2: Click Edit on the box that says Favicon. A new window will open.
Step 3: In the new window that opened up select your image for your favicon and click save. Blogger upload your image and use it as your favicon.

Nice to see how Blogger has improved adding your own custom favicon to their sites. No need to edit code anymore.

Hosting Your Favicon with Dropbox

Dropbox is a fantastic service. I use it regularly to sync files between my desktop and laptop. It does have other uses though, like sharing files with your friends and even hosting a website. While I would not recommend you host your main business website with a Public shared folder using Dropbox, using the service to host some images, like your websites favicon, has some advantages.

If you are using a service such as Blogger and want to add your own custom favicon you have several choices of where to host your favicon. You can upload it and host it on Google’s server, although last time I tried they did not accept the .ico format. That works until you want to change your favicon then you have to do it all over again including updating your code that points to your favicon.

You could host your favicon on an image hosting service, but then they might delete it at anytime. Again if you want to change your favicon you will be redoing all of the code.

Since Dropbox can host files that are publically accessable on the Internet you now have another option. Following the tips and tricks wiki to making your own website you can simple create a folder for your favicon, and copy your favicon into that folder. The advantage of hosting your favicon in your Dropbox public folder means you have more control over it. If you decide to change your favicon all you need to do is simply copy over your existing favicon and it will be replaced on your website. You don’t have to redo the code pointing to it, and you never have to worry about an image hosting service deleting it.

If you have not tried Dropbox, you really should give it a serious look. They offer 2gb of space for free, which is more than enough to share and sync files between computers.

They also have a great favicon if you are looking for some inspiration.

Dropbox Favicon

Favicons in Google Reader

I have been using Google Reader as my feed reader for a couple years now. It works well, but it is difficult to to find the feed you to read sometimes because they all tend to blend together. Well not anymore. Google announced on the Google Reader blog that Google Reader was now going to show websites favicons beside the feed.

If you have been holding off to create your own favicon, now you have another reason to create a favicon to help your RSS stand out in Google Reader.

favicons