Power to Earn Money

Due Diligence: 9 Questions You Should Ask

Regardless of what you’re doing, due diligence should be part of the equation. Like most of you, I’m always looking for the newest or easiest way – to market either a product, ebook, or such on the Internet. So, when I received an email from one of the Internet’s long-time gurus touting a program that would allow me to publish content in a manner similar to Click Bank, my interest was piqued. Seems I could upload my content, set my own price and share the link to start making sales right away – and for free – I was impressed. But I wanted to know more.

I visited the multiple links embedded in the email and found that each one went to the same page. No where could I find any information about the website and the process to make all this happen. No terms and conditions, no user agreement defined, and no privacy policy. All the stuff you need and want to know beforehand. Bottom line, I had a lot of questions… particularly since it would appear they are based out of the country.

In addition, there was also an affiliate program tied in with no clarification. All of this had me wondering….

Who are the owners running this system?
How long have they been in Internet Marketing?
Do I maintain ownership of my product once it’s on their site?
How are payments made when a sale is made?
Who gets the affiliate sales monies… and how is it paid?
If there is a problem, which country’s laws are used for resolution?
How are product returns handled?
Can I remove my product when I want with no penalty?
Will you at sometime charge for this program in the future? And if so, can I opt out at that time with no cost?

In all honesty, I have to say I did not go through the sign-up process… all this information may have been available there. But for me I like to know what I getting into before I have to sign up. And, while everyone is hoping to find the best money-making program out there, you have to know what you’re getting into before ‘signing’ on the dotted line” which means taking a deep breath and spending a little time to perform the necessary due diligence before making a decision and commitment.

How to Get Pictures with White Backgrounds

With most people the primary goal of having a website is to make money. That being said, how you present your product is important, i.e, having good, quality pictures. While we’d all like to have catalog type pictures – you know the kind….no shadows and nice white background – getting this type of picture is not easily accomplished for the amateur photographer who is using basically ‘off the shelf’ equipment and software. However, there is a way you can maximize your picture quality using the equipment you have to get a comparable ‘catalog’ image. OK – maybe not as good… but totally acceptable for not having to spend any extra cash.

Getting Started

This procedure can be done pretty much using any good graphics program that allows you to manipulate the image’s color. And, we’re assuming you are taking pictures with a standard digital camera. If you happen to have a light box then this makes the process even easier as it will help eliminate shadows. Even if you’re not using a light box, you want to have the objects placed on a snow white background. Depending on the size of the item this might be a sheet of paper, poster board or a white bed sheet. The less texture the background has, the better and easier it will be to get a good quality image.

Graphics Program

If you’ve used any graphics program, you know about adjusting the color,brightness and contrast of an image; however, you may not be familiar with using Curves to brighten the background. The curves function is typically available through the program’s Color icon.

A good graphics program will allow you to use the curves function to edit all color channels (RGB) at once or individual channels as needed. My experience has been that I’ve found using all three channels results in getting the best catalog picture for individual items.

For our sample, we’re using the picture of a tile, taking it through the process we needed to get the background we wanted. In the picture bar, we’ve used a black background for the dual images to highlight the white background from the post background. The white (or non-white) you see around the tile is what would appear if we were using it on a web page. Also, the original picture below was taken inside, on a white sheet of cardboard with no special lighting or flash. Not what we’d ever want on a webpage.

Steps:

The steps below are the basic steps to follow to accomplish a white background. The only step you would most likely skip would be step 4 – otherwise you will need to go through the whole process.

1. Take picture on white background with as little shadows as possible.

2. Size the image and save

3. Open the ‘Curves’ function and adjust the brightness to your satisfaction and save (If you are satisfied with the results you can skip Step 4 and go to Step 5, however, if you want to enhance the contrast of the item(s), then continue with Step 4)

4. Use the ‘color adjust’ to further brighten the background and adjust the item colors/contrast as needed and save

5. Use the ‘magic wand’ selection tool to select the product item including the image’s edges. When this is done you should have both the item and the edges of the image selected, ie., each major piece of the image will be selected… this will vary depending on how many product items you have in the picture. You may also find that setting the feathering to 3-5 will give a better result when you fill in the background eliminating any hard edges.

6. Once you have the different portions of the image selected, use the color fill tool to fill in the background with white and save.

The left picture above is Step 3; the right picture is Step 6.

Conclusion

Note in the sample image on the right, there is a slight increase in the white background from the left image (note light ‘yellow’ to left side of left image). While this may seem a multi-step process just to get one ‘catalog-style’ picture, if you’re looking for a way to get images that have white backgrounds without having to hire a pricey professional graphics person or spend money on fancy software and equipment - then investing a little time is not a bad trade-off in my opinion.

How to Get Professional Looking Headers

If you’re designing a website, you’ve probably given a little, if not a lot of thought to the header.

How big?
How busy?
How much information should it include?

In years past when monitors were much smaller, the maximum width was pretty much set at either 800 or 1024 pixels. However, today there are some very wide monitors allowing you a lot of flexibility. A few things to keep in mind when planning the size of your header are:

Where you place the navigation bars (across or down the page)
Length of text lines
Size of images you want to use

All of these things should be taken into account when considering a header. Another consideration is whether or not you want to have AdSense or some other advertising medium on the page. If this is the case, you will want to have a bit wider site with room on either the left or right to display your ads. This type of site would do well at 900-950 pixels. Anything wider than this can be distracting because part of the page may be off the screen, the text lines may be too long to read easily and overall it is distracting for the viewer trying to ‘put it all together’.

Most of the top websites including Twitter and eBay fall within the 750-950 pixel range. A good rule of thumb might be to use 750 for single column websites and 950 for those websites where you want to use either a navigation menu or advertising to the left or right.

If you’re artistic you probably won’t have any trouble putting together a good header, but for those that have trouble with design or perhaps don’t have a graphics program, then you need to take a look at xHeader. This is a program that comes with pre-designed headers where all you do is select the one you want and fill in the name and slogan. You can get a free version of this program with 500 headers by visiting this link.

Once you’ve downloaded it be sure to take a few minutes and watch the tutorials. It is very easy to understand and when you’re through you’ll have a header you’ll be proud to call your own. BTW – the images used on this post are from the free version I downloaded.

Floating Images – Part II

We’ve seen how to use the align tag to make images ‘float’ to one side or the other of your page. We’ve also seen how the text will wrap around these images. But what if you don’t want the text to wrap?

Since a floated image will affect all the elements that follow it, you will need to insert a special line break: clear to control the text. Using the clear attribute along with the regular br tag indicates that the text should not start until the specified margin is cleared. This ‘specified margin’ would be at the end of the image or images.

How to Stop Text from Wrapping

To stop the text from wrapping you would place the cursor at the place where you want to stop wrapping text and elements to the side of the image. In most cases this will follow the image. The code used would look like:

  – to stop flowing content until there are no more floating images aligned to the left margin

  – to stop flowing content until there are no more floating images aligned to the right margin

You can use   – to stop flowing content until there are no more floating images on either margin

To see how this might look, we’ve taken the same HTML code we used for our last sample, but this time we’ve included the clear attribute to see how the text is affected.

Begin HTML Code Sample (Using clear Attribute):

<table width=”400″><tr><td>

<center>SAMPLE PAGE WITH FLOATING IMAGES & CLEAR ATTRIBUTE</center>

<img src=”/leftfloatimage.jpg” align=”left” width=”150″ height=”75″ />

 

Floating Image . . . Left Side This image has been coded to float to the left of the page using a clear attribute. Notice how the heading and text now display below the image around the image.

<img src=”/rightfloatimage.jpg” width=”150″ height=”75″ align=”right” />

 

Floating Image . . . Right Side Notice how the image floats to the right side of the page… but since we’ve used a clear attribute, the text and heading appear below the image. </td></tr></table>

How to Add Space Around an Image

If you look at the sample above, you’ll see that the text and heading associated with the second image are butted right up next to the images. However, you can use the vspace and hspace attributes to add a margin of space around the images. Both of these are included in the same line of code you would use for the image. For example, to add space around an image you would use the following:

hspace=”x” for horizontal space where x is the number of pixels you want to add on both the right and left sides of the image

vspace=”x” for vertical space where x is the number of pixels you want to add on both the top and bottom sides of the image

Your code might look like …

<img src=”image_name.jpg” align=”left” width=”150″ height=”100″ hspace=”10″ vspace=”5″ />

… where we’ve placed 10 pixels on the left and right side; and 5 pixels on the top and bottom.

Note that you do not have to add both horizontal and vertical space at the same time. However, using this attribute does not allow for adding space to only one side of the image. If you want to have space on only one side of the image or if the space needs to be uneven, you would do better to use a graphics program to add in the blank space.

Don’t miss our post next week, we’ve got a super new FREE program to tell you about.

How to Make Images Float

We’ve seen how an image can be placed in a specific area of a page by using tables. However, you can also include images by using the ‘align’ attribute to make images float along one side or other of the page. If you’re familiar with using Word Press, this ‘align’ process is much the same as inserting images in your post. When you align an image on a page – left or right, you have the image display with the text and other elements wrapping around. The code used to accomplish this is within the page’s HTML code.

Floating a Image on One-side

Sample line of code:

<img src=”image_name.jpg” align=”left” width=”150″ height=”100″ />

Type <img src=”image_name.jpg” [ image_name.jpg is the image name and location of the image on the server ]
Type either align=”left” or align=”right” depending on which side you want the image to float to. Remember, any text associated will flow to the opposite side of the page.
Add other image attributes, i.e., width, height, border, etc. before you….
Type the final /> to close the line
Create the elements, text that should flow next to the image

Floating an Image on Both-sides

To float both left and right side images on one page you put in two (2) lines of code; one for the left image and one for the right image. The screen capture below shows the results when having two (2) images float on one page.

To force the text to wrap for our sample, we’ve put our images inside of a table with a width of 400 pixels. We’ve placed the code used below for reference.

Note: we’ve use the paragraph tag  to begin a new paragraph and have the text align with the new image. Use the  tag to close paragraphs, text, etc. associated with any image.

HTML Code:

<table width=”400″><tr><td>

<center>SAMPLE PAGE WITH FLOATING IMAGES</center>

<img src=”/leftfloatimage.jpg” align=”left” width=”150″ height=”75″ />Floating Image . . .

Left Side This image has been coded to float to the left of the page. Notice how the heading and text wrap around the image.  <img src=”/rightfloatimage.jpg” width=”150″ height=”75″ align=”right” /> Floating Image . . . Right Side Notice how the image floats to the right side of the page, while the text and heading appear to the left. More text will continue to wrap around the image filling in the blank space. </td></tr></table>

Helpful Tips

When aligning images, remember it will be the image that appears left or right – not the text.
Place the image directly before the text it is to ‘disrupt’.
The text will continue to appear on the opposite side from the image until there is no more text or a break is encountered.

Conclusion

This is an easy way to include images and incorporate them with text without having to use tables. However, there may be times when you don’t want the text to wrap. Next week we’ll look at how to stop elements from wrapping and we’ll learn how to add space around a floating image.

Basic lessons in HTML, CGI, SEO, domain registration, hosting – build an on line business!

Categories

Pages

Search PTEM

Due Diligence: 9 Questions You Should Ask

How to Get Pictures with White Backgrounds

Getting Started

Graphics Program

Steps:

Conclusion

How to Get Professional Looking Headers

Floating Images – Part II

How to Stop Text from Wrapping

How to Add Space Around an Image

How to Make Images Float

Floating a Image on One-side

Floating an Image on Both-sides

Helpful Tips

Conclusion