Adding Images from Image Hosts

There are dozens of free image hosting services available on the Web these days.  In this demonstration we’ll use Google’s Picasaweb service and link an image from there to a page in our hobby Mega Mall.

We first locate the image in our online gallery we want to use in our Mega Mall. What we really want is the URL or Location of the image.

The next steps are similar in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Here’s both in screen shots to demonstrate.

An something like this in Internet Explorer…

Make sure to swipe (highlight) the whole location or address. For images, this will always start with http:// and end with .gif, .png or .jpg. Our homemade stout image from Picasaweb has a location that looks like this:

Once you press the CTRL key and C keys together you make a copy of the location to your computer’s clipboard. Now go to your Dashboard and to your WYSIWYG editor for adding the image to your Mega Mall page.

Start by clicking at the location where you want your image to appear.

Click the Insert Image button from the editor toolbar.

Swipe the initial http:// in the Image URL box (so it’s highlighted)

Paste the location URL from your clipboard by pressing CTRL and V together.

Now type some Alternate Text which briefly describes the image. (This  Alt Text is good for search engines too!) Choose how you want the image to be displayed (Left, Right etc.) and click the Submit button.

No matter where you keep your images online, you can use this method to have them appear in your pages, providing they are made public. Picasaweb, PhotoBucket, ImageShack are a few of these services.

Next we will look at adding a clickable link to an image.

Best wishes,

DotStartUp

Adding Hyperlinks to your Mega Mall pages

One of the fundamental things that glues the Internet together is the hyperlink or sometimes just called link. Every one of your Mega Mall pages can have many custom links that you create yourself or copy and paste from somewhere else. In the next few posts are going to look at three different ways to get links into your pages.

Linking Text

When adding a link to some text use your WYSIWYG editor and highlight the word(s) you want to link and click the Insert Link button.

Now we’ve found a vendor on ClickBank that is paying 60% for referring sales for their scrapbook products. This is a product that is perfectly targeted to the page content and our audience. We located the vendor and made a hoplink at ClickBank. The page looks like this.

This is not critical for the linking operation but we thought that now is a good time to analyze a hop link from ClickBank. The hoplink contains three variables. They are shown in the image above.

Affiliate Nickname - this is your nickname you created when signed up at ClickBank.

Vendor’s Nickname - this is the vendor’s identifier at ClickBank.

TID or Tracking ID - this is some short identifier to let you know where your sales come from.

We simply copy the URL from ClickBank into our clipboard by highlighting it and pressing CTRL and C together.

Now we need to paste the URL  and click the Submit button.

Now the page is updated and shows our selected text as a hyperlink.

Congratulations! You now have an affiliate link in your page. Whenever someone clicks on this link, ClickBank records the fact that they came from your web site and will credit you for sales you refer. Next we will add a link to an image.

Best wishes,

DotStartUp