I’ve always meant to get back to it and make it more interactive. So over the past several evenings, I’ve rebuilt it as an SVG-based visualization. The main point of doing this was so that when you hover the mouse pointer over one of the little color boxes, it will fill the center of the color wheel with the hovered color and tell you its name and HSL values. Which it does, now. It even tries to guess whether the text should be white or black, in order to contrast with the underlying color. Current success rate on that is about 90%, I think. Calculating perceived visual brightness turns out to be pretty hard!
Other things I either discovered, or want to do better in the future:
Very nearly half the CSS4 (and also CSS3/SVG) color keywords are in the first 90 degrees of hue. More than half are in the first 120 degrees.
There are a lot of light/medium/dark variant names in the green and blue areas of the color space.
I wish I could make the color swatches bigger, but when I do that the adjacent swatches overlap each other and one of them gets obscured.
Therefore, being able to zoom in on parts of the visualization is high on my priority list. All I need is a bit of event monitoring and some viewbox manipulation. Well, that and a bit more time. Done, at least for mouse scroll wheels.
I’d like to add a feature at some point where you type text, and a list is dynamically filtered to show keywords containing what you typed. And each such keyword has a line connecting it to the actual color swatch in the visualization. I have some ideas for how to make that work.
I’d love to create a visualization that placed the color swatches in a 3D cylindrical space summarizing hue, lightness. and saturation. Not this week, though.
I’m almost certain it needs accessibility work, which is also high on my priority list.
SVG needs conic gradients. Or the ability to wrap a linear gradient along/inside/around a shape like a circle, that would work too. Having to build a conic gradient out of 360 individual <path>s is faintly ridiculous, even if you can automate it with JS.
And also z-index awareness. C’mon, SVG, get it together.
Most of the theme names should give you a good idea as to the niche they serve, but if you aren’t familiar with StudioPress themes, AgentPress is a real estate theme, while Essence Pro is a theme for sites in the health, wellness, and lifestyle niches.
So, what did we learn about profitable niches?
Well, it seems that the following niche markets continue to dominate:
Food
Lifestyle
Real estate
Wellness
Health
Business
And that makes sense, right?
Everyone eats, should be concerned about their health and wellness, and hopes to enjoy a wonderful lifestyle. As for real estate theme sales, my guess is that more real estate agents now understand their need for a personal and professional website.
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Then Best Buy learned to Be a little more Like Amazon and it is doing great. You too can Be Like Amazon while not being like Amazon.
Any business, retail or services, online or brick and mortar can learn from these principles.
Build relationships, help people buy instead of focusing on selling them, understand your employees & customers’ motivation. Find ways to remove the friction in the experience through innovating your current processes.
You’re interested in affiliate marketing as a way of making money online and I know that’s a great choice for SO many reasons. I started affiliate marketing in 1997 and my online business as an affiliate marketer has provided me with a lifestyle that I would never have even dreamed possible had I continued working at my day job.
So, let’s get you started…
NOTE: Most of the links on this page will take you to other pages on this site. You can either hit the ‘Back’ button at the top left-hand corner of your browser window or the “Affiliate Marketing for Beginners” link at the top of every page to return to this article.
If you haven’t already decided to become an affiliate marketer, you might have the following questions about affiliate marketing.
Now that you know what affiliate marketing is and what it’s advantages are, let’s look at how you can start an affiliate marketing business.
Starting an affiliate marketing business involves the following 8 basic steps:
Choose your niche.
A niche is a topic. The topic you choose should be one that you are both passionate and knowledgeable about. You can, however, choose a topic about which you are not knowledgeable IF you have a passion to learn about that topic.You may already know exactly what you want to blog about and that’s great. But if you aren’t so sure about your topic or if it is viable (can make money) then you’ll have to do some niche market research.
Register your domain name.
After choosing a potentially profitable niche market, you need to buy and register a domain name. Sorry, but free hosting sites like WordPress.com are unacceptable to reputable merchants. Far too many affiliates with free hosting sites have had their sites shut down without prior notice. As a serious affiliate marketer, you absolutely need to have your own domain name and website.
Create your website / blog.
If you registered your domain with GoDaddy, then you’ll need to pick a hosting service on which to create your website. I heartily recommend that you use WordPress as a platform for your website, and WordPress specifically recommends certain hosting services. Each of these hosting services makes it easy to install a WordPress blog. A WordPress blog has been the best and easiest way to create a website for the better part of two decades now. WordPress is a free platform that just keeps getting better and better.
Here are a few articles about WordPress that you will find useful when building your site / blog .
I suggest that you create at least 10 articles on your website before you attempt to join any affiliate programs or advertising networks such as Google Adsense. Good merchants will check your website to make sure that it looks good and has great content before they accept you into their programs.
To learn more about creating content for your blog, please read these articles:
The biggest mistake that many new affiliate marketers make is thinking that they do not need a list of subscribers. Let me say that it is absolutely imperative that you have a list to grow your business.
I suggest that every affiliate marketer start monetizing their site with Google Adsense and ‘easy to enter’ affiliate networks such as Clickbank until they have traffic to warrant joining larger affiliate networks such as CJ Affiliate and Shareasale.
Put affiliate links on your blog
In your initial articles, you’ve written about products that you like and want to promote to earn commissions. Once you’ve joined affiliate networks you can get links from them to promote those products. Go back through your articles and add your affiliate links.
Promote your site
Google is your friend. When you structure your site appropriately you will show up in Google’s search results.
To enhance the process of getting recognized by Google, you should do some basic social media marketing, such as creating both a Facebook profile and Page, as well as a Twitter account. Note: The previous links go to my personal accounts to demonstrate how I promote my sites.
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In simple terms, affiliate marketing is the promotion of products and/or services to earn commissions through an affiliate program.
An affiliate program is a program that facilitates the relationship between online merchants and their affiliates — allowing the affiliate to promote that company’s products or services for a commission.
Affiliate programs may also be referred to as:
Associate Programs
Referral Programs
Bounty Programs
Partner Programs
Revenue Sharing Programs
The merchant provides the affiliate with a link to their site or a specific product that credits the affiliate with the sale or lead when one is successfully concluded.
To help you learn more, I’ve prepared some videos for you:
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WordPress plugins enhance the capabilities of your WordPress blog. There are literally tens of thousands of WordPress plugins from which to choose, but I’ll make this easy on you.
Below is a list of my most frequently used WordPress plugins, along with descriptions of how I use them. Each of these plugins can be accessed through your WordPress Administration Panel by clicking Plugins > Add New and then entering its name in the resulting search bar at the top right-hand corner of the page.
Ad Inserter
Ad management system by Igor Funa allows advertising (such as Google AdSense ads, DoubleClick, Amazon Native Shopping Ads, Media.net ads and rotating banners) to be inserted just about anywhere on your blog, either automatically or manually.
Akismet
Included with your WordPress installation, Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. As you can see in the screenshot below, Akismet has protected this blog from 377,052 spam comments. I use Akismet on all my blogs.
You will need an API key for Akismet. Just follow the instructions when you activate the plugin.
Broken Link Checker
Exactly as the name suggests. LOVE this plugin. Placed on all my blogs — works especially well when I actually use it.
There is, however, a HUGE caveat to using this plugin. When I started using it (years ago) the Broken Link Checker was sending so many ’empty clicks’ to CJ merchants that they sent me a warning letter to suspend its use. I almost lost my CJ account – the account WAS in fact suspended for a while! Now I use it sparingly and deactivate the plugin when not in use.
Classic Editor
With the introduction of WordPress 5.0, the new Gutenberg block editor came into being. Because I was too busy blogging to learn a new way of working with WordPress, I installed this plugin which enables the WordPress classic editor and the old-style Edit Post screen with TinyMCE, Meta Boxes, etc. Supports the older plugins that extend this screen.
Relieved a LOT of frustration!!
Deactivate Visual Editor
For use with Exex-PHP to ensure that you don’t break php code placed in posts and pages. That happens if you use the Visual Editor to make changes to, and save a blog post that contains php. I almost never use the visual editor, preferring to use the ‘Preview Changes’ button to see how the post looks.
Exec pHp
Exec pHp is used to execute PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets. See also ‘Deactive Visual Editor‘ plugin.
External Links
Marks outbound links as such, with various effects that are configurable under Settings / External Links. I’ve set the plugin to open all outbound links in a new window. Gee, now I can use Search and Replace to get rid of all that target=new coding!!
Faq Tastic
Plugin that can generate multiple FAQs. I use Faq Tastic on my FAQ page. Granted, it would be just as easy to create a list of questions that link to answers on a page named FAQ.
GDPR Cookie Consent
A simple way to show that your website complies with the EU Cookie Law / GDPR. I wrote an article about this plugin at “Is Your Blog GDPR Compliant?”
Genesis Plugins
Because I use Genesis by StudioPress as the theme framework on each of my blogs, I’ve added Genesis-specific plugins to enhance the functionality of my themes. Those plugins are Genesis Simple Hooks, Genesis Simple Edits and Genesis Simple Sidebars.
Grammarly
Although not technically a ‘plugin’, when installed on your computer Grammarly works within your WordPress blog to help you fix grammar and spelling mistakes. I’ve been using Grammarly for years and it’s saved me from some very embarrassing moments!!
Indeed Social Share & Locker PRO
Social Share & Locker Pro is one of the best Social sharing plugins for WordPress that I’ve found.
Pinterest Pin It Button On Image Hover And After Post & Page Content
Pinterest pin it button shows up when a visitor hovers their cursor over an image on your site. Makes it super simple for your visitors to pin your blog posts, pages, and images into Pinterest account boards. Go ahead, try it with the image at the top of this article.
Pretty Links Pro Pretty Links is a WordPress plugin that lets you shrink, cloak, track, organize, share and test all of your links on your own domain and server. To learn more about the importance of link cloaking for affiliate marketers, please read “10 Good Reasons to Cloak Affiliate Links“. There is a free ‘lite’ version and a more robust paid version of Pretty Links Pro. I use the latter.
Search and Replace
LOVE this plugin! As name implies, Search and Replace allows you to search and replace anything in your ID, post-content, GUID, titel, excerpt, meta-data, comments, comment-author, comment-e-mail, comment-url, tags/categories and categories-description. Excellent for changing links throughout your blog, if you haven’t created a single redirect page. Learn more about the Search and Replace plugin.
Search Exclude
Hide any page or post from the WordPress search results on your blog by checking off the checkbox from within a page or post.
Subscribe to Comments Reloaded
Allows commenters to sign up for e-mail notifications. Includes a subscription manager that those who comment on your blog posts can use to unsubscribe to certain posts or suspend all notifications.
TablePress
Embed beautiful and feature-rich tables into your posts and pages, without having to write code.
UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
You can take backups locally, or backup to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, (S)FTP, WebDAV & email, on automatic schedules.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache improves the SEO and user experience of your blog by increasing website performance, reducing load times via features such as content delivery network (CDN) integration.
WP No Category Base
Completely removes the mandatory ‘Category Base’ from your category permalinks.
WP Forms
Manages multiple, customizable contact forms. Super simple installation. I was so impressed with the plugin that I wrote an article about WPForms.
WP-Polls
Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Displays a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.
Yoast SEO
This plugin is written from the ground up by Joost de Valk and his team at Yoast to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects. While this WordPress SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, more on that below, it first and foremost helps you write better content. WordPress SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing articles and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.
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