Many people are intimidated and would never give a thought to setting up their own website - I was one of those people and have to say I am still one of those people.  I am giving it a shot with this website and I know if I sat down and read the help tutorials that are offered online it would be much easier.  I just need to find the time to do that, so I listed it on my To Do list as a daily reminder.  I have played around with various websites in the past and always hit the wall when it came to html and placing items on the site.  It's foreign to me and I really have no interest in it.  Nonetheless, it is a necessary part of creating a website and GoDaddy does make it as user friendly as I have seen.  So I figured that I need to place the GoDaddy link and Amazon link (I find them very reputable) on my website.  This is called Affiliate Marketing and basically if someone clicks the links I have placed on my site and ultimately purchases from that connection, I receive a referral fee.  For a more detailed explanation on affiliate marketing, you can read the Wiki entry which I included here.  I skimmed over it and will read it in depth later (adding to my To Do list).

First you have to apply to these companies - GoDaddy and Amazon - to partner with them as an affiliate.  You can easily find the links on their sites to do this for they encourage affiliate marketing since it brings them many more customers.  You fill out a brief application, they review your website (make sure your website is up and running) and then they email you if you are accepted.  I received acceptance from both companies a few hours after I applied and was thrilled!  Of course, I sat down and immediately went to my accounts to find the links I would display on my website.  I sure didn't want to miss any of those referral fees!  Well, after a whole day of clicking around I finally succeeded in placing a GoDaddy link on my front page.  You can see it is placed all the way at the bottom in the left corner - not really where I want it.  The GoDaddy link in the middle of the page is not mine and I probably should figure out how to remove that.  Anyways, I was thrilled once again to see that I did manage to get the link active - I inserted it into the page using the Java prompts.  When I fully understand how to insert and move these around, I will leave detail here for my own reference and for those who may be interested.  If you are a novice such as I, this information will save you tons of time and quite a bit of frustration.  Actually, the instructions are probably in the help tutorials that I need to read!  The Amazon link - well, that I dappled with briefly and decided to concentrate on that another day since the format to insert on the website is different - one can only take so much thought on this subject!

I am very happy to say that I did discover how to insert pictures on the web pages and you can see how neat this came out on my Grow a Garden page.  At first I was trying to insert my own pictures from my computer and then decided to see what they had on here.  The link when you go to insert an image asks if you want to insert yours or theirs...I found they had some nice photos to use AND it was a breeze to insert.  Inserting my own gave me this Huge picture which I had to keep downsizing to make it fit.  Their pictures fit right in with one click.  Another feature I was interested in was seeing the statistics for my website - how much traffic I receive daily.  The blog feature is easy to see, but I wanted the whole website activity.  I followed the instructions to set up that type of account on here and lo and behold - I can't get into it!  It wants my user name and passcode - which I keep putting in but it says unauthorized.  So that goes on the To Do list to figure out.  A word of caution I have learned is "Don't get hung up with the statistic numbers".  Yes, it is nice to see that people read and are interested in what you are writing about, but it can become an obsession and really does eat up alot of time checking those numbers, especially if you do it countless times a day.  I know!  Schedule yourself to check that once a day since I think they are only updated on a daily basis.  At first there is very little traffic since the search engines haven't found you yet - not sure how long that takes .... but that's another day(s) of learning.

                                                                                                          (to be continued)

Till next time,
The girl @ TheRunningGarlic