A few short years ago your website could stand alone, an island in the sea of information washing around the Internet. Now, with the advent of web 2.0, social media, mobile internet, etc., your website can no longer survive alone. In fact, it would be foolish to ignore the latest technologies and try to do so. Indeed, these days some websites are becoming little more than a central point that lists links to online social media services.

Here is a list of the online services, most of them free, that I use on my website and that I find essential. It's not a comprehensive list of all the web services out there by any means, and there are several that I use but haven't integrated with my site yet, such as posterous and flickr, which aren't on the list. Anyway, in no particular order, here goes;

Here, in no particular order, are my top tips for online affiliate marketing in the UK.

1: Do add value. It's a dreadful term, but it's very pertinent to affiliate marketing. Build websites that are different and that add something to the online shopping experience. It could be, for example, a site featuring in depth expert reviews of digital cameras, if that is your area of expertise.

2: Do find you niche. This is closely related to the first point. If you have a subject you know a lot about then concentrate on it. It's likely that you'll be able to provide unique, relevant content that search engines will love and your users will find engaging. If it's your passion as well, all the better.

3: Do think like an end user. Ask yourself A: "What would I like this site to do for me?" and B: "Is my site doing this?". If the answer to A is "Show me some relevant information about something I'm thinking of buying" and B is "Yes", then you're doing well.  

4: Don't join get rich quick schemes. You'll probably come across plenty of 'upload this link and retire' type affiliate programs which promise the Earth for very little effort. Avoid.

Here's a little bug I hadn't come across before. While updating and testing some TradeDoubler links on one of my sites they all suddenly stopped working and returned this error:

Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Size of a request header field exceeds server limit.

This turns out to be an Apache server error. Strangely, the links worked in Firefox but not in IE7 (my main browser). I was a bit confused and assumed that there was some kind of problem with the TradeDoubler servers. When the link stills didn't work after several hours I tried clearing out the IE7 cookies and, hey presto, that did the trick and all the links came back to life. Thinking about it, I'd clicked on a lot of TradeDoubler links with IE7 that morning while I was testing them. I'm thinking that maybe TradeDoubler just keeps on adding and adding to the same cookie until it can take no more and gives up the ghost.