Creative Responses To Life

OR...Affiliate Income, Web Publications, The Web & You

This time we are all experiencing, where many of us are being confined to our homes, directed to avoid mass gathering and really, the complete shut down of our usual society is making many of us reconsider our path.

This is natural, for many of us even our work has been closed down!

There will be many people who can no longer make their living doing what they usually do.

I think even when the main threat of the virus has been mitigated, lived through and it has become a faded memory the momentum of its effects will be continuing.

The wisdom, or otherwise of this economic ‘correction’ is not really relevant to us as individuals.

What we do have in our favor is the World Wide Web. We as digitally literate people can become creative with our skills.

Do you know how to publish pages, sites, place ‘buy buttons’ on images?

Do you know how to produce a podcast, a video?

Can you write reasonably well, can you describe goods and services in convincing and socially relevant ways?

These are all skills which can get you started on a different path.

If you are in the position of needing to reinvent yourself, now might the ideal time to look at building your digital skills.

The ‘recipe’ I advocate for you, Grasshopper, is to purchase a domain name, get some decent web hosting, and learn how to work with WordPress, and HTML editors such as ‘Kompozer’.

If you already have some web chops, all the better!

The difference of working with an experienced web communicator who can help you get your project published and visible, provide top tier technical resources and crucially support, this is priceless. 

You can get going with the crappy cheap resources everyone else uses, or get the inside edge with me, I can be your guide, your technical aide.

What is ‘affiliate marketing’?

This is one of the oldest ways of promoting goods and services in our society.

Basically, if you form a commercial relationship with a business, and you agree to promote their offering/s to people which you have access to, like your social media following, or your blog readership, your YouTube viewers (or any video platform), the people you include in your ‘audience’ that business agrees to pay you a percentage of the increased sales.

You might recall the T.V personalities, the movie stars, and other media personalities who suggest to you different products and services, this affiliate marketing.

This can take many forms.

We can be creative with this, and present high value content, for example you could build a specific type of subject site, ‘Nourishing Food from the old days’ for example, or ‘Pioneer Methods of Farming’, or ‘Vaping’, or ‘Technology For Accountants’. The more specific, and specialised we can be the more likely it is we attract a genuine audience.

We can deploy our media production skills, and provide opportunities for people to purchase particular goods and services which match their particular style of living, their beliefs, values and position.

Moreover, we can produce high value subject sites which specific people in society seek, and rent them out, or sell them.

We can have many creative options with media, we have to position ourselves to leverage our skills. What people call ‘internet marketing’ is simply using the publication opportunities of the web to present different kinds of content.

Internet marketing is forecasted to grow into a $335+ billion dollar industry by the year 2021

 

The Creative Reinvention Recipe

Your Domain name is your home address on the web. Just like a real estate address you can build what you choose at this location. Today there are upward of 1,000 choices for what comes after the ‘dot’-this does not have to be either ‘com’ or a ‘Net’, we have even highly specific choices such .beer, .sport, .site, .xyz and hundreds more. Do you think Google knows a little about top level domains? Well Google’s parent company ‘Alphabet’ uses the .XYZ domain type, what does this tell you about the ‘only .com’ brigade? Today it makes zero difference to your outcomes and your SEO. Read up on this for yourself, check out what Google say about it. Anyway, you need your domain name to begin building your own property, this is the first move you make. It does not matter where you buy it, shop around, get a good price.

The hosting service is actually critical to your final outcomes, because we need good overheads, reliable and well managed servers which perform at optimum levels. All this results in the page load speeds of our sites and pages. One of the finest web hosting services I have come across would be Liquid Web. These guys run a specialised, and highly professional  service. They are fantastic with WordPress sites, which leads me to the next item in our recipe!

For the aspiring and professional media builder alike there is no finer set of tools than WordPress. If names such as: The San francisco Chronicle, RollingStone Magazine, Bloomberg, Disney sound familiar then if I tell you that these all use WordPress for their business it should give you a good idea of the quality of this framework. Check out the Showcase tab of the WordPress home site and see for yourself what this software is supporting. We are talking about a versatile, flexible and extremely powerful web media building platform, and it can be yours to use, it is open source which means you do not pay any upfront fees to use it, pretty incredible I think. We can pay for some slick tools which we can use to build our media, but the foundations won’t cost us a cent.

We are going to need some more tools, for the production of podcasts, videos which we can also publish to our WordPress projects. Along with text, and graphics this represents the spectrum of digital media which we can produce, and publish. I will describe and discuss these tools in greater detail. Suffice it to say for Audio you need: Microphone (condenser), Digital audio workstation (DAW) such as ‘Reaper’. For videos something like a Logitech webcam, or a digital camera is useful. Actually the webcam is preferable because we can also produce screen based videos, along with a small window for our ‘talking head’ for demonstration and educational type videos. Graphics we can access all over the web, stock photographs from sources such as ‘Unsplash’ and Pixabay. Text of course we have our own talents, or those of hired talent if we choose.

Affliliate Connections

The process of our creative reinvention includes seeking out the means to monetise our work. If we are going to become publishers of content, and erstwhile ‘citizen journalists’ then like any good media company we need form affiliate relationships, so that we can ethically suggest to, and influence our readers and followers to purchase high quality goods and services which we derive a gratuity, a fee for delivering to our partners. There is absolutely nothing wrong with working this way. If this is good enough for major T.V networks, for Hollywood personalities, it is good enough for us. Our clever reinvention requires the means to deliver a reasonable standard of living. So this is our ‘recipe’, the modern person’s response to being compromised by the plague. This offers us a means to go forward. I work with all of this, I can provide the resources and the wisdom, the knowledge to publish online. I think this is pretty good actually. If any of this interests you, you can get started very quickly, with my help and a little learning you can have a whole different career, a new life. Sound like hyperbole? Think again.

WebStructMB

FREE
VIEW