1. The importance of 404 pages
2. The importance of redirect pages
3. Hot offers from last week
4. The power of freebies
5. Don't pass up the FREE stuff
6. Pass me around!
7. Subscribe/Unsubscribe information

404 pages are the error pages that are displayed to your visitors when they reach your site and the page that they were sent to no longer exists.

The vast majority of these are quite plain, and not very informative to say the least.

The reason that I'm complaining about these is that last week when removing dead affiliate programs from my directory I ran across a great number that had closed their affiliate program and just removed the page.

The company was still in business, they had just removed their affiliate information page.

Guess what?

Your ugly 404 page just sent away a visitor, that's what!

Most surfers will click the back button and move on to another site under the assumption that your website is no longer there.

If you are like most website owners on the Internet you work very hard to bring visitors to your website.

Don't send them on to the next website just because you removed a page. Give them a sitemap to help them find the rest of your site, or do as I do and redirect them to the home page.

Depending on what type of website host you use will determine how you go about fixing this, but for those that use the .htaccess file, add this simple line:

ErrorDocument 404 newpage

Replace the newpage portion of that line with the link that you want to send users that get the 404 error.

I use this one:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.affiliatematch.com/index.html

That way when a user reaches a page that is no longer there, they are redirected to my home page.

To see this in action just go to this bogus page on my site and see what happens:

http://www.affiliatematch.com/missingpage.htm

When you clicked that link you should have automatically been redirected to my home page.

If you don't like the idea of redirecting them to the home page at least create a nice page telling them that the page they are requesting no longer exists and provide links to the main pages of your site.

You never know when someone might be linking to a particular page on your site, or a search engine might rank a page favorably, then you go and delete it and lose potential customers.

Always be careful when you decide to delete a page on your site, but more importantly find out how you can setup a redirect for any 404 errors that might occur.

Redirect pages have many uses but this topic is related to the 404 error pages from above.

While removing dead links from my directory last week I ran across another type of major mistake made by many companies.

That mistake is renaming a page, for whatever reason, and then leaving your visitors to reach a non-existent page.

The example here is a merchant has added a link to my database that points to affiliate.html on his site. They then rename the page to affiliates.html which instantly breaks all links to the affiliate.html.

The fix for this one also depends on your website host, but a simple entry in the .htaccess file would look like:

Redirect /affiliate.html /affiliates.html

This line will automatically redirect any requests for /affiliate.html and send them to /affiliates.html.

I was kind enough to go to the home page for each of these that gave me 404 errors and determine whether or not the program was closed or if they had just moved the page.

Your visitors (read potential customers) won't be so kind. They will instead click on and visit your competitor.

Which competitor?

The one nice enough to provide redirects!

I was so surprised at the response to two of my offers from last week that I just had to make a quick comment about them!

The first was a popular website marketing and promotion book that I mentioned called "Insider Internet Marketing" at

http://www.affiliatematch.com/iim

I hadn't been pushing this book because I assumed everybody in the world already had their copy...boy was I wrong!!

At just $23.95, if you aren't one of the many that grabbed theirs from my endorsement last week, get it now!

The other hot topic from last week was the free ebook that I offered to all current subscribers at

I received tons of positive feedback on this one. I knew most of you would grab a copy, but I was really surprised at how much you liked it.

**** Btw, for those of you that like the free ebook, the author of that is also the author of the book metioned above! It gives you a sneak preview of how good his stuff is. ****

On the subject of getting something for free, let me lead into my next topic...

I always believe that you should practice what you preach.

I learned my lesson the hard way on the power of giving away something for free.

I've said in the past that this is a powerful way to get your visitors to respond.

But, until recently I was preaching but not practicing.

When I downloaded and looked through the ebook mentioned above I was impressed with the information presented in it.

I just happened to have an advertising campaign running that was bringing traffic to a particular page. So as a test, I changed the wording that I was using to get visitors to signup for my newsletter.

I changed it from a current subscribers' testimonial to wording that offered the ebook when you signup for my newsletter.

Since this was a special page that I was testing it was easy to track the signups prior to the change, and after the change.

The number of visitors that subscribed increased substantially!!

That particular campaign was getting a 2.7% signup rate (signups / showings of ad). After the change I was getting 13%! For me that was a major increase considering all I had to do for that increased response is change the wording on that page.

Needless to say I've been changing the offer on my other pages of my site, and have been seeing an increased response on them as well.

The moral of this story is to find something that your visitors will enjoy, that you can offer for free, and you will see your response rates go through the roof.

This week I added another freebie site to my list of recommended programs.

I've mentioned in the past that I'm very happy with Onresponse at http://www.affiliatematch.com/onresponse in thier ability ability to make webmasters a decent income.

Add one more to that list:

DirectLeads
http://www.affiliatematch.com/directleads

They have some really decent products to offer your visitors, and the payouts are great as well.

Please don't overlook the power of per-lead programs!

They offer an income stream even if your website isn't getting tons of traffic yet. As mentioned in the last topic, offering your visitors something for free is one of the greatest ways to get them to respond to your offers.

And if the offer they are responding to pays you for that response, you make out even better.

Give this one a look at

http://www.affiliatematch.com/directleads

If you enjoyed this issue please forward it to a friend or co-worker.

I'm working to make AffiliateMatch.com one of the best affiliate program resources on the Net. If you know of any quality programs that should be listed, please let me know!

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