eBusiness

I Own The Internet!!!

2006-12-01T15:24:00.000-08:00

This is AGLOCO™ 's proposition, just three words: Own the Internet.

Whenever you are online, either surfing, blogging, clicking on an ad, making a purchase, all the money generated by your activities is pocketed by a small number of players. At AGLOCO™ they say not anymore!

AGLOCO™ is a global community, whose owners are its Members (you and potentially the millions of internet users out there). Their goal is to capture a significant portion of the value generated by our online activities and return it to Members in cash. Best of all, it is totally free, Members will NEVER have to pay anything, nor will they have to disclose ANY personal information!

How does this work? Once you sign up on their website, when available you will be able to download the Viewbar software, a free toolbar-sized application (half the size of a traditional Windows tool bar) that quietly sits on your desktop without ever hampering your online habits. That’s all you need to do! Just continue using the Internet as you used to… no need to change your habits!

Do you have several individuals using one computer? You can have different AGLOCO™ viewbars to fit the profile of each user.

Don’t want to see or use the Viewbar at any given time? Just minimize it and the Viewbar stops working!

There are different ways AGLOCO™ can make money for its Members:

Cash: You get cash by surfing the Internet while the Viewbar is running. AGLOCO™ ’s profits are distributed back to its Members. And you can also receive real-time discounts should you choose to purchase from AGLOCO™ ’s partners. They will never include gambling or adult entertainment sites as partners.

Shares: In addition to cash, AGLOCO™ will give out shares in the company to its Members. Eventually, AGLOCO™ plans to go public and will be traded on the London Stock Exchange AIM. You can start earning stock options by keeping Viewbar active while you surf. In addition, you will gain extra shares by referring active users to AGLOCO™ (they lose nothing). Click here to see the calculator.

The more people join AGLOCO™ , the more value the community can generate for itself. The company believes those that build the community deserve more: your own profits become larger the more people you refer. You can accumulate hours not only from your Internet activity but also from those who you refer, and their referrals too… Up to 5 levels underneath you! For example, if you refer 10 people and all of them refer 5 people each, you could make over 7000 shares a month*!

Remember, this is all free, you don’t lose anything, all you have to do is sign up, download the Viewbar and that’s it. Build your network and refer friends, family and colleagues to AGLOCO™ and earn even more!

The guys behind this idea include several Stanford MBA’s and a few individuals who started AllAdvantage back in 1998, which gave over $100 million to its users before falling victim to the burst of the internet bubble. Today, the context is much more favorable: The sophistication of on-line commerce, the rapid emergence of communities, the wealth of advertising revenue sources, etc. Isn’t it time you got your share of the Internet?

Don't wait any longer. This is a win-win opportunity, and you’ll make it even more profitable for yourself when you start referring friends and relatives before others get to them! Since I assume you learned about AGLOCO™ thanks to my website*, please don’t forget to add my referee ID when signing up: BBBD4252. Click here to sign up directly!

* If you heard about AGLOCO™ from someone else please click here to sign up and add their reference number.

SIGN UP NOW FOR A FREE AGLOCO™ ACCOUNT!!!

Use my id# BBBD4252 here

How Should You Put Google AdSense on Your Site?

2006-12-01T15:00:00.000-08:00

The principle behind all success with AdSense is to make your ads look like part of your content, not like ads . Blogger assumes that’s how you want your ads to look and it’s a wise assumption. It’s why the default color scheme when you’re first asked to choose your ads is the “Blend Template.”

This removes the borders from the ads, makes the background color the same as the background color of your blog’s template and matches the font colors of the content and title of the ad to the content and title of your blog. Don’t choose any other color scheme. The Match Template is ugly and while choosing other schemes will make your blog look pretty they won’t do much for your revenues.

But Blend Template isn’t perfect. It doesn’t match the font color of the ad with the font color of your blog. The easiest solution is to first choose Blend Template, then Custom. All you’ll have to do next is change the color of the font. Very easy.

When you’re optimizing your AdSense ads, it’s important to put the right ad format in the right place. You start by placing one ad at the top of the page and you’re likely to get the best results there with one of the following: a 234 x 60 half banner, a 180 x 150 small rectangle or a 468 x 15 horizontal row text link.

Why are these formats the best choices for the top of the page?

The half banner fills the space very nearly above the first blog entry; the small rectangle leaves plenty of space around the ad, helping it to stand out even though it looks like content; and when the ads are optimized, the horizontal text link will look like a menu bar of a conventional website.

Adding Ad Units

So you start your blog with one AdSense unit at the top of the page. Google though lets you place up to three ad units on a page, one text link unit and a search box. Each ad unit will display unique ads so you won’t be spamming your users with the same ads over and over again.

Stick to just the one ad Blogger gives you and you’re wasting some valuable opportunities.

Blogger recommends that for the sidebar, you choose between a 125 x 125 button, a 120 x 600 skyscraper, a 160 x 600 wide skyscraper, a 120 x 240 vertical banner and a 180 x 150 small rectangle. Those are all good choices and you’ll have to test them to see which one works best for you. Start with the button, follow your stats for a week, then replace it with a skyscraper and compare the results. You should soon discover which delivers the best CTR (Click Through Rate) on your site.

I’d probably skip the narrow skyscraper and the small rectangle but I do recommend that you put in a vertical text link. These are perfect for sidebars and slip in so smoothly under the links that you’ll believe they were made to go there.

The colors, of course, should match the colors of your blog.

BLOG LAYOUTS

You can really break a blog into three sections: the area at the top of the page above the first post; the main section where the posts are placed; and the sidebar. Only a few formats fit into each section making it very easy to maximize your earnings.

The Top Of The Page

Most of the templates you’ll find on the blogging services have a large heade r that fills up much of the page. It’s where the name of the blog goes and it’s the first thing the user sees. That makes it a prime piece of real estate for advertising purposes. You either want to make sure that your ads are where people are going to be looking or that people are looking where your ads are going to be located.

And the best thing about putting your ads beneath this header is that you can be sure they’ll be above the fold. That’s a basic rule of AdSense earning. Ads that are located in the first screen before the user starts to scroll down generally do better than ads lower on the page.

When you sign up with Blogger, this is where your first ads will appear and I’ve already mentioned which formats I recommend you use here. I’d probably start with a horizontal text link, track the results and see what sort of earnings it brings me.

What I like about this sort of ad is that it looks like a menu bar on a conventional website. That makes it appear less like an ad and more appealing to users.

The Sidebar

The side bar also gives you some pretty simple options when it. comes to choosing ad formats. Again, I’ve already pointed out that the best options are skyscrapers, buttons and vertical link units. They all work very well and you’ll have to test to see which would do best on your site. Once you’ve narrowed the choice down to about four formats like this, you should be able to do that very quickly.

But here’s a tip:

Most blogging services allow you to add all sorts of things to the sidebar. You can sometimes add a calendar and usually a photo.

Place a photo or some other graphic on your sidebar and put your ad unit directly beneath it.

Eyes are drawn to pictures much faster than they’re drawn to text. Your users will look at your blog, glance at the picture and then look at the ad unit directly underneath. With AdSense, you’re not allowed tell people to click on your ads, but putting a picture right next to your ad units is the next best An alternative strategy is to embed a vertical text unit among all the links in the sidebar.

You’re going to have a number of different links in that sidebar. You’re going to have links to archives, links to recent entries and maybe links to other blogs too.

Put your text link unit in between two of those modules, optimize it so that the text links look like the other links on the page, make sure that it’s showing relevant ads and you’re going to have ads that are not just perfectly camouflaged but ads that are highly inviting too.

And finally, another great strategy is to put two side bars on your blog, place a vertical ad unit in one and a list of links to other blogs formatted in the same way as Google ads in the other. Your ads will then look like they’re an integral part of the blog and that their links have been as carefully selected as your blog recommendations.

The Main Area

While users will look at the top of the page and glance at the sidebar, they’ll be spending most of their time in the middle of the page, reading your posts. At least, you hope that’s where they’ll be spending most of their time!

That gives you three options.

The first is to place an ad at the beginning of a post so that the text wraps around it.

That’s pretty unmissable. Any square or rectangular ad unit will do the trick and even though it doesn’t do much for your site’s looks, this strategy works wonders for your earnings.

An alternative is to put a horizontal ad unit between posts. This is also a good strategy that has been known to work very well. It doesn’t interrupt the reader’s flow, it gives the user somewhere to go once he’s finished reading, and best of all, you can have a lot of fun blending it into the page.

For example, one gre at technique is to end a blog entry with a list of recommended links for further reading and place a well-blended ad unit directly beneath it. Your ads will look both recommended and relevant. Perfect!

Finally, you can plant your ads bang in the middle of a post. I’ ve seen a few sites do this and frankly, I’m not crazy about it. Ads don’t work when they’re intrusive — they work when they’re attractive. Put an ad in the middle of a block of text and your users will read right around it.

So you can put your ads in all sorts of places and in all sorts of ways, using all sorts of little tricks to make your ads look inviting. Remember, the more you can make your ads look like part of your blog, the more recommended they will look to your users. And that’s what gets you the clicks and the money your blogging deserves!

Knowledge belongs to the world.

Google Adsense Strategies and Tips

2006-12-01T14:57:00.000-08:00

Adsense is beginning to make a huge impact on the affiliate marketing industry today. Because of this, weak affiliate merchants have the tendency to die faster than ever and ad networks will be losing their customers quickly.

If you are in a losing rather than winning in the affiliate program you are currently promoting, maybe it is about time to consider going into the Adsense marketing and start earning some real cash.

Google is readily providing well written and highly relevant ads that are closely chosen to match the content on your pages. You do not have to look for them yourselves as the search engine will be the doing the searching for you from other people's source.

You also don't have to spend time in choosing different kind of ads for different pages. Google makes it very easy for you, with no codes to mess around for different affiliate programs.

You will be able to concentrate on providing good and quality content, as the search engines will be the ones finding the best ads in which to put your pages on.

You are still allowed to add Adsense ads even if you already have affiliate links on your site. It is prohibited, however, to imitate the look and feel of the Google ads for your affiliate links. One of the things you can do, however, is to utilize Google's custom palette to customize your Google ads, making them to appear a part of the web page itself. The idea here is to match background and links to match the theme of your site. People on the internet today are trained to click on a link that is blue, and if your Google ads have the same theme as your web page, it makes the Google ads appear to be a portion of your "content."

You can also filter up to 200 URLs. This gives you a chance to block ads for the sites that do not meet your guidelines, and also block competitors. Remember that it is unavoidable that Adsense may be competing for some space on web sites that all other revenues are sharing.

Owners of small sites are allowed to plug a bit of a code into their sites and instantly have relevant text ads that appeal to your visitors appear instantly on your pages. If you own many sites, you only need to apply once. Then ,you are issued a unique "publisher ID", which can be used on any site you currently own. A small snippet of Javascript is placed on your site in the location you wish the ads to appear in, and generally speaking, the ads from Goggle will appear in minutes. This ends the hassle of having to apply to many affiliate programs, and keeping track of many different URL's and user ID's and passwords.

As Google ads are very easy to customize, and can be placed anywhere on your site you wish, you can experiment with placement, colors, and themes. Many tricks are available to the resourceful webmaster, including adding images in conjunction with your Google ads to make them more noticeable.

The payment rates can vary extremely. The payment you will be receiving per click depends on how much advertisers are paying per click to advertise with the use of the AdWords. Advertisers can pay as little as 5 cents and as high as $10-12, sometimes even more than that too. Some savvy lawyers are currently paying as high as $75 for advertising the keyword mesothelioma! And you, as the ad publisher, are earning a share of that money generated.

If your results remain stagnant, it can help if you try and build simple and uncluttered pages so that the ads can catch the visitor's eyes more. It sometimes pay to differ from the usual things that people are doing already. Google has many tutorials, including a "heat chart" which shows you where the best placement for ads are. You will need an account to access these tutorials. Sign up for an Adsense account at https://www.google.com/adsense/. It is also a refreshing sight for your visitor once they see something different for a change.

It is still wise to look at other people's information and format your Adsense in a like manner. A wise old business axiom is to "find a good business model, then copy it." Let others do the hard work for you, and learn from a successful site. Just think about it as doing yourself a favor by not having to work too hard to know what content to have. Look to sites that have high page rank, and carefully observe their layouts, their content, and placement of their ads. A little time spent doing research can put dollars in your pocket down the road.

Publishers have the option of choosing to have their ads displayed only on a certain site or sites. You can also have them displayed on a large network of sites if you so desire. Google now has the option to allow other people to advertise on your site. This only makes good sense. If you are marketing to a tightly defined niche, you can place your own ads, written by you, on site that allow this option. The choice is yours, depending on what you think will work best to your advantage.

It is important to note that you cannot choose certain topics only. If you do this, search engines will not place Adsense ads on your site and you will be missing out a great opportunity in making hundreds and even thousands of dollars cash.

Topics to be avoided includes gambling, firearms, ammunition, tobacco or drugs. If you are being offered more cash in exchange of doing Adsense with these kinds, it is just like signing your own termination paper.

With all the information that people need in your hands already, all you have to do is turn Google Adsense into your own cash cow. It all boils down to a win-win situation both for the content site owners and the webmasters or publishers.

Our website, http://www.for-the-record.biz, http://ebusiness-think.blogspot.com is a good source of information for the beginning marketer. We present a lot of content for those needing more information on a variety of subjects.

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What is Google Adsense?

AdSense may be one of the fastest and easiest ways to monetize traffic to your web site whether you have products or services for sale or you simply provide free content to your visitors.

Simply stated, Google AdSense enables website operators to place some code on their site that connects to Google ad server content database and pulls keyword-relevant advertising onto the web pages. The webmaster gets paid a percentage of the fee that Google receives from the advertiser every time a visitor clicks on an ad. There is no charge for the webmaster to participate in AdSense. All costs are covered by the advertiser who participates in the AdSense sister program called AdWords.

Google sends out digital a robots? which use proprietary algorithms to parse the host web page and analyze the content in an effort to determine what keywords are relevant. It reports its findings back to Google ad server which then serves ads matching those keywords. Given that the entire process is automated, the ad robots do a pretty good job of getting the advertising content right most of the time.

The History of Google AdSense

Google AdSense has its roots in the old Google Content-Targeted Advertising program which they introduced back in March of 2003. Although this program was similar in concept to AdSense, there was no automated way of participating. Each webmaster negotiated a deal directly with Google, and websites that served less than 20 million page views per month were not welcome to participate.

As Google grew, they began to see how much money they were leaving on the table by excluding the smaller sites, which greatly outnumbered the sites serving over 20 million hits that were willing to serve other people ads. Their answer to that problem was AdSense which has no minimum traffic requirements and is open to all sites meeting Google content and decency requirements.

How much can you make running Google AdSense?

The answer to that question depends upon three factors:

1. How much traffic your site draws
2. How many visitors click on your ads
3. How much those ads pay per generated click

With some ads paying as much as $5 or more, It’s possible that you can generate a serious income with AdSense. There are relatively well documented cases of some people earning as much as $500 per DAY and more. Numbers like that are rare exceptions however. Even so, there is no reason why you can’t earn somewhere around $1,000 per month, or more, once you get the hang of it.

How to get started using Google AdSense

Make a visit to Google AdSense Site and sign up. Make sure that you read their Acceptable Use Policy and that you follow their content requirements. Google has their own AdSense Police who will have no problem booting you out of the program if you fail to walk the line.

Using Google AdSense on your site is like collecting free money. There’s no reason not to do it and potentially thousands of dollars worth of reasons to do it.

About the author:
Diane provides marketing and internet profit tips.
For more Google AdSense tips, visit http://www.adsense.deeljeabiz.com/

How much Revenue Do You Generate from Google Adsense?

2006-12-01T14:52:00.000-08:00

Google Adsense is one of the easiest way to allow webmasters to make money from content websites. You just need to add some simple javascript codes on the web pages, and then when visitors click the ads, you make money. No need to sell and think yourself, Google does all thinking for you. Very easy, right?

Google Adsense is really a gold mine. People are creating niche websites just to display the ads and make easy money everyday - automatically. There are so many success stories about people earning thousands of dollars a month from Adsense!

If you don’t have an Adsense account yet, you should get one and start profiting from it!

However, not all who applied for an Adsense account gets approved. You need to show your content websites to Google first to get approved.

Then how if you don’t have a content website? No need to worry, here is a secret method to get approved - fast and easily - just read on...

Google has its own blogging service - Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com ). You can start a blog on Blogger.com with any topics you like - and it is completely free. Once your blog is created, post two or more related articles on it.

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about people who earn over $10,000 a month just from Adsense. Furthermore, there are rumors of a few individuals who earn over $1 million a year just from using the power of Google advertisements.

So what is Google Adsense and how can you use this program to earn a six-figure income?

About two years ago, Google created this program to help websites to monetize their web-traffic.

Here's how it works:

Webmasters obtain a special code from Google which then displays targeted ads on their website. Whenever a visitor clicks on one of these ads, the webmaster earns a commission. Unlike other online businesses, there is no selling involved. All you need to do is get people to click on the ads.

Although this is an excellent way to generate an income, many websites are not effectively maximizing their Adsense potential. As a result, they are leaving a lot of cash on the table.

The question is how can you increase your Adsense revenue without increasing the number of web visitors?

The key to earning an income with Google Adsense is to have your ads match the rest of the site, making them look like part of your content. Your focus is to avoid having the Adsense blocks look like blatant advertisements.

The following are six ways that you can do this and increase your revenue at the same time:

1) Find the right place- Most website visitors read content that is in the middle of a webpage. As a result, the best place to put your Adsense block is in the top part of the page, at the beginning of your web content. You want to weave the Google Ads into your web content to give the appearance that they are extra links which expand on the information of the page.

2) Use the Large Rectangle-With Google Adsense, you have the option of picking different ad formats. Most of the time people opt to use the Leaderboard (728x90) or Wide Skyscraper (160x600) style ads. Unfortunately, this is the wrong choice, because both look like blatant advertisements. Instead smart webmasters have found that using the Large Rectangle (336x280) yields the best amount of click-thrus.

3) Ditch the border- Many people experience a sharp increase in Adsense revenue when they changing their border. What they change is very simple? They get rid of the border on their Adsense blocks. This is another way to make the advertisements look like useful web content.

4) Adapt the font- Whenever you write content, it should be the same font size and style as your Google Adsense block. This will help make it appear that the advertisements are a natural part of your website.

5) Match the colors- In addition to changing the fonts, you also should match the colors of your website. For instance, if your content is written in black, and your hyperlinks are blue, then the Adsense blocks should also be the same color. Again, this helps the advertisements appear to be normal web content.

6) Don't have too many distractions- On a webpage, it is important to give web visitor a limited number of options. By having too many links and graphics, the web visitor might go to a section that doesn't help increase your profits. While it is important to inform and entertain your web visitor, it is also vital that you monetize your site. So if the main focus of your site is to earn an income through Google Adsense, then get rid of all non-essential links and graphics.

By taking the time to implement these six simple steps, you'll see a dramatic increase in the click-thru ratio of your ads. If added to all of the content of your site, your Adsense income will skyrocket!

About the author:
Scott J. Patterson earns over $12,000 a month, mostly through Google Adsense. To read about this and other home businesses you can try, download his free ebook, The Secret-Guide to Home Businesses: http://www.duncemoney.com/adsense.html

Some Advices When Applying for a Job (Part 1)

2006-12-01T14:41:00.000-08:00

HOW TO MAKE RESUME
If you haven't already written your resume, you will need to very soon!
But to write an effective resume, you need to understand that there isn't one magic set of instructions that will make it easy. Instead, here is where your own good judgments about what to include (and exclude!) play a key part.
You will need to know your goals and audience. You will need to apply the ideas presented here to your specific situation. You will need to write and rewrite. And you probably could use some help.
So, if you do get stuck or just want a quick review, come see us. Bring your resume to career professionals for review, or to people in the profession, or other trusted sources. Everyone will have different opinions, but this is about you - so decide what works best for you.
Here are some things to keep in mind when you start writing:
- Your resume is your marketing tool
- Your resume is all about your skills - identify and include your transferrable and job-specific skills that are desired in your field of interest
- Your resume will be highly effective if you tailor your resume to the position, and use specific words, terminology, and skill descriptions that match the job
- Your resume will look best on quality bonded paper for the cover letter, the resume itself, and the references sheet
We know that you can go to the Internet and copy a resume that would be adequate. But, that resume probably won't stand out, or be tailored or focused to get the results that you want.
To craft a resume that will, fully explore this section for key concepts and examples. Pay particular attention to effectively writing objectives and accomplishment statements!

OK, here it is in a nutshell...

DON’T…
DON'T... let someone else write it for you - you are the expert on your experiences and which ones fit best.
DON'T... use templates.
DON'T... use shading, graphics, or underlining - they don't scan well!
DON'T... go over two pages!
DON'T... use personal pronouns.
DON'T... include specific personal information, such as age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, religion, or social security number.

But DO…
DO... write your own resume.
DO... look at the examples here to get ideas for the resume that best represents you.
DO... use present tense for current experiences and past tense for past experiences.
DO... try to be concise on one page.
DO... use action verbs to describe your accomplishments.
DO... consider your audience's needs and preferences before beginning - these things will drive what you say, how you say it, and how you package it.
DO... include transferrable skills that make you successful - like teamwork, leadership, communication, organizing, planning, and initiating.

THE ANATOMY OF A RESUME
Contact information
- Your name should stand out, using large bold lettering, always positioned at the top.
- Include complete contact information with phone, email address, and mailing address.
- May require two addresses: permanent and local may be advantageous if applying/relocating in that geographic area.
- Minimize number of email/ telephone contacts; use professionally appropriate email addresses, and announcements on phone message service.
- Work authorization means “green card” or ability to legally work in the US; international students are generally in the US on an F-1 or J-1 visa, which allows you to complete 12 months of practical training.
- If you think an employer might assume you do not have US citizenship or work authorization, you may include it under the heading “Work Authorization” or under your name:
Odusis Moshibaba
US Citizen
-or-
Odusis Moshibaba
US Work Authorization
Objective
- An objective tells your reader what you want to do, and the remainder of the resume tells her/him what qualifies you to do that.
- Objectives include either a clearly defined interest, position, industry, organization in which you want to work, or focuses on a functional area (e.g. marketing-related, promotions, or management).
- Objectives may include skills, experience, qualities directly related to the position.
- Focus on what you have to offer to the position rather than describing what you want from the position.
- Objectives work best for new graduates.

Summary
- Include either a summary or an objective. Summaries are generally used when you have a depth and breadth of work experiences. A summary includes 3-5 bulleted statements of key qualifications.
- Only use a summary to demonstrate concrete skills/experience and accomplishments as they relate to the position.
- Do not simply list personal skills and/or qualities.
- If the experience/skills warrant it, many employers prefer a summary.
Education
- Spell out degree (as stated or will be on diploma) and major, followed by graduation month and year.
- Minor, areas of concentration, and certificates may be included.
- May specify college/school with name of university spelled out.
- GPA is usually recommended; may use overall/cumulative, major, ASU GPA or GPA from last 3 – 4 semesters as long as it is so noted.
Relevant courses
- Use in cases where you need to demonstrate proficiencies not obvious to the major, highlight concentration areas, fill space, or if you don’t have much relevant experience.
- If needed, provide information that may clarify course content or skills gained.
Athletics
- Athletics may be included under education or placed in a separate category but should not look like a stat sheet.
- May be used to demonstrate teamwork, self-management skills, academic and/or athletic performance.
Projects
- May title section Academic, Technical, Relevant Courses, or Class Projects.
- Focus on task/function, actions, process, resources used and results.
- Include projects that are relevant to career field/industry and that communicate knowledge, teamwork, presentation, or other skills.
- Use key words/language of the industry.
- Define your role on team projects, and the specific tools/applications used.
Study abroad
- Include what you studied, the courses, and location.
- Illustrate experiences that expanded your worldview; identify skills you developed and enhanced.
Activities/volunteer/community service
- Include position/title, organization name, dates, and contributions.
- Demonstrate skills and accomplishments gained through your involvement and experiences.
- May include sorority/fraternity, clubs, organizations, athletics, charity, and community service.
Awards
- Show how the award is relevant to your objective through descriptions of the award and what.
- Be selective in the number and type of awards and scholarships.
- May also be included within the context they were awarded, e. g. education and work.
- Include name and for what you received it.
Internships
- Internships may be included within experience or you may create a separate section for them and set them up the same as experience.
Experience
- Create focused experience sections if possible to emphasize experience and skills in a particular area such as Customer Service Experience, Accounting Experience, and Project Management Experience.
- Begin with the most recent position, followed by previous positions.
- Include job title/position, company/organization name, city, state, and dates that include only the month and year.
- Provide enough information regarding what you did, emphasizing relevant skills and accomplishments.
- Start each statement with an action word/verb that is a skill.
- Use relevant tenses for present and past.
- Quantify accomplishments to demonstrate results and complexity of tasks you performed.
- If more than one position was held for an organization, place the name of the organization followed by City, State and inclusive dates for the time. Second line is for the position held and the dates for that position. When finished with the skills for that position, put in the next position with the dates.
Mission (and additional types of) experience
- Identifying religious, political, some social, cultural, ethnic, or sexual orientation affiliations in your resume could result in bias even though most of these affiliations are a protected status. If you feel strongly this information is an important part of your identity, and is relevant to the employer and/or position, then include what’s most comfortable for you.
- Focus on skills, accomplishments, multicultural, and other rich experiences that make you unique.
- Make decisions about what best qualifies you for the position, and stay focused on the information that will help communicate your ability to do the job.
Skills
- Develop a special skill section for skills that bring value to your resume.
- Skill sections may include Languages, Computer Skills, Laboratory Skills and others that are relevant to your career field.
- List the relevant skills under the headings; keep it simple.
Certifications
- Certifications that are part of your degree/major may be placed under Education.
- CPR, First Aid, and other certifications may be included under a certification section if relevant to the position.
Languages
Communicate the level of your language skills.
On-line resumes
- Protect yourself by omitting personal contact information.
- Check privacy policy to prevent your information from being disclosed to anyone other than the companies you select.
- Avoid sites that charge you a fee.
- Include key words in the content.
- May also include key words in a summary at the top of the resume.
- Use a plain text version so it can be read by most users.
- Create a resume that will look good electronically.
- Refresh your resume once a week.
- Remove your resume when you accept an offer.

Are you looking for a job? Don’t know where you can find some relevant vacancies? If you’re an Indonesian or you like to applying job in Indonesia, here is some websites you can try to be explored:

http://id.jobstreet.com

http://id.tiptopjob.com

http://www.4icj.com

http://www.careerbuilder.com

http://www.clickitjobs.com

http://www.ekarir.com

http://www.indocenter.co.id/jobfaq.php

http://www.indojob.co.id

http://www.infokerja.web.id

http://www.itjobs.org

http://www.itcareersource.com

http://www.itwow.com

http://www.jobindo.com/new/index.php

http://www.jobnetok.com

http://www.jobsdb.com

http://www.jobsoke.com

http://www.karir.com

http://www.lowongan.biz

http://www.lowongan.info

http://www.lowongan-kerja.info

http://www.yellowpages.co.id/job.asp

From: any sources

Some Advices When Applying for a Job (Part 2)

2006-12-01T14:32:00.000-08:00

INTERVIEWING
Preparation for the Interview
a. Self-assess interests (know what motivates you), skills and values.
b. Know your career goals and have a plan for achieving them.
c. Research your industry and the organization.
d. Assess how the organization fits within the industry.
e. Know what makes the organization unique.
f. Know products, services and competitors, the organization’s functions, departments, goals, mission, objectives, hiring policies.
g. Know where you can contribute and what you bring to the organization.
h. Develop thoughtful and insightful questions for the interviewer.
i. Be prepared with knowing your salary range, but do not discuss salary and benefits until the employer does.
j. Prepare examples of situations/experiences where you have demonstrated teamwork, leadership, work ethic, problem solving, customer service; doing more than expected of you; and decisions you have made and the results of those decisions.
k. Practice interviewing with a friend, family member or ASU Career Services advisor.
l. Buy appropriate interviewing attire that is professional and fits you well. Make sure everything is well-pressed and shoes are well-shined.
Purpose of the Interview
- For you and interviewer to obtain information from each other.
- For you and the interviewer to evaluate each other to look for fit with the position and the organization.
- For the employer to assess a match between your qualifications, interests and personality.
- For you to present relevant experiences in your responses to questions.
Interview Structure
Introduction:
-> Introductions are made; remember name and title of interviewer.
-> Generally, in the United States, custom expects a firm handshake, eye contact, a smile and words of appreciation for the interview.
-> Interviewer establishes rapport to help put you at ease and provides some basic information about organization and position.
Body:
-> Asking and answering questions is a reciprocal exercise for you and the employer to evaluate fit with the organization.
-> Listen to each question and develop a full, but brief and focused response.
-> Take appropriate time to reflect on the response. If you need a question repeated or restated, don’t be afraid to ask.
-> Convey enthusiasm and knowledge of the organization in your responses.
-> Use body language that is attentive and interested, not laid back and bored/
-> Be mindful of body language that exhibits nervous habits or mannerisms. It’s distracting and the interviewer may have a hard time focusing on your message.
-> Avoid repetitious phrases i.e. “OK,” “you know,” “like,” “yeah”
Closing:
-> What you do and say here may determine whether or not you are hired.
-> Re-emphasize your specific qualities/skills and enthusiasm for the position as well as the organization.
-> Ask questions not previously asked.
-> Obtain information about follow up procedures and time frame for making decisions.
-> Ask when you may contact the interviewer if you have not heard by a pre-determined time.
-> In the United States, custom expects that you close the meeting with a good handshake, good eye contact, a smile and words of appreciation.
-> Reflect on what you could have done better and what you did well after the interview; use this for future interviews.
-> Follow-up with a thank you letter (laser printed, not hand written)
-> May include information you want them to remember or something important that you forgot to mention.
-> Include something that will help the interviewer remember you from all the other.

Employers are looking for…
a. A professional image which includes attitude, grooming, attire, and self-confidence (how you present yourself).
b. Mature behavior and judgment which means accepting responsibility for your actions, either right or wrong.
c. A realistic knowledge of strengths, accomplishments, and weaknesses, your areas that need improvement.
d. Interaction with others – how you get along with others, including peers, teammates and supervisors.
e. Teamwork and how you contribute to teams, resolve team problems, and motivate others.
f. Demonstrated leadership in projects and organizations.
g. Good work ethic, going above and beyond the requirements of the job.
h. Problem solving coping with policies and procedures.
i. Fit with the organizational culture.
j. Academic performance – GPA does matter.
k. Internships, extracurricular activities are important.
l. Communication skills: oral presentations, interpersonal and intercultural communication skills, and writing skills.
m. Computer literacy.
n. Honesty, integrity.
Portfolios
- If you have a portfolio, you may want to use it in your interview. You have several choices as to how to use it.
- May be used in the opening to introduce yourself and/or to let the employer know you have it as a resource.
- Use it to demonstrate skills/accomplishments/results when you answer a question.
- Use it in the closing as a review and/or leave a shortened version with the employer (Never leave originals! Bring a copy if you plan to leave it for further review).

The purpose of behavioral interviewing is
> To evaluate past performance to predict future performance.
>> The more recent the experience, the more reliable it is.
>> Will require specific examples of situations and experiences.
> To ask questions about skills that relate to job functions and performance expectations.

Trait:
I am reliable
I am good with people
I am a leader

Behavioral:
I have only missed one day of work in the last two years
Last week I settled a disagreement between two team members. We were having difficulty with...
I was elected president of my fraternity for my leadership and communication skills, which I used to...

Using the STAR Response
It is imperative that you answer the questions. A behavioral interview question focuses on a time when\'85 or a specific situation where... It requires a specific response, not how you generally have done something. Use the STAR method to construct your response.
Situation, set up the situation without unrelated information to cloud the response.
Task or role that you performed.
Action, telling what you did, why was it appropriate.
Results tell how you made a difference: did you save money? Was the customer satisfied? Did you make it more efficient? What did you learn? Results are qualitative or quantitative.
Be Prepared To:
-- Describe a difficult problem you solved: How did you identify the problem? What were the pros and cons? How did you solve it? (Describes problem solving)
-- Describe a time when you had to motivate another person: What did you do? How did you do it? (Demonstrates leadership)
-- Describe a time when you decided on your own to accomplish a task: What did it require? How did you accomplish it? (Demonstrates initiative)
-- Describe a time you made a bad decision or you wished you had acted differently with a customer. (Demonstrate the results, what you learned and how you did it differently in the future)
BEHAVIORAL INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
> Tell me about yourself
- Needs an opening, body and closing
- Open with appreciation and interest in being there and a brief background on your education/experience as they relate to the position
- Provide specific examples of skills and the results of using them to make a difference
> Tell me about a difficult decision you made?
- Looking for process, what you considered when making the decision
- Alternatives? Timeline/deadlines, quality, budget/monetary issues?
> Tell me about a time when you had to go above and beyond the call of duty
- Looking for willingness to do more than the minimum, initiative and energy
- Tells the interviewer what you consider to be more than is expected
> What did you do in a team project that contributed to the teamwork environment?
- How do you make a difference? Management style, leadership
- What are your main contributions to the project? To the team?
- Tells about your interaction with others
> What did you do in your last job to be more effective with your organization and planning?
- Looking at how you organize, plan, prioritize
- Do you consider resources and timelines/deadlines, budget, work quality
- Were others considered?
> What class did you like least and why?
- Maturity is responsibility for one quote actions, the good and the bad, not blaming others
- What did you do to make the class work for your goals, expectations?
> Tell me about a time when you had to bend the rules?
- Demonstrates flexibility, continuous improvement
- Did you use good judgment?
> Tell me about a time when you missed a deadline on an important project.
- What were the causes and what did you do?
- Take responsibility for your actions.
- What did you learn from it and how would you prevent it from happening again?
> What would your references say about you?
- Talk to your references and know what they and your co-workers would say about you.

Source:
http://www.bcg.com/careers/interview_prep/interactive_case/interactive_case_qa_2.jsp?cat=implement2

Steps to Take for Optimal Google Indexing of Your Site

2006-11-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

The cornerstone of any good search engine is highly relevant results. Google's unprecedented success has been due to its uncanny ability to match quality information with a user's search terms. The core of Google's search results are based upon a patented algorithm called PageRank.
There is an entire industry focused on getting sites listed near the top of search engines. Google has proven to be the toughest search engine for a site to do well on. Even so, it isn't all that difficult for a new web site to get listed and begin receiving some traffic from Google.
It can be a daunting task to learn the ins and outs of getting your site listed with any search engine. There is a vast array of information about search engines on the Web, and not all of it is useful or proper. This discussion of getting your site into the Google database focuses on long term techniques for successfully promoting your site through Google. It will stay well away from some of the common misconceptions and problems that a new site owner faces.
Search Engine Basics
When you type in a search term at a search engine, it looks up potential matches in its database. It then presents the best web page matches first. How those web pages get into the database, and consequently, how you can get yours in there too, is a three step process:
1. A search engine visits a site with an automated program called a spider (sometimes they're also called robots). A spider is just a program similar to a web browser that downloads your site's pages. It doesn't actually display the page anywhere, it just downloads the page data.
2. After the spider has acquired the page, the search engine passes the page to a program called an indexer. An indexer is another robotic program that extracts most of the visible portions of the page. The indexer also analyzes the page for keywords, the title, links, and other important information contained in the code.
3. The search engine adds your site to its database and makes it available to searchers. The greatest difference between search engines is in this final step where rankings or results positions under a particular keyword are determined.
Submitting Your Site to Google
For the site owner, the first step is to get your pages listed in the database. There are two ways to get added. The first is direct submission of your site's URL to Google via its add URL or Submission page. To counter programmed robots, search engines routinely move submission pages around on their sites. You can currently find Google's submission page linked from their Help pages or Webmaster Info pages (http://www.google.com/addurl.html).
Just visit the add URL page and enter the main index page for your site into the Google submission page form, and press submit. Google's spider (called GoogleBot) will visit your page usually within four weeks. The spider will traverse all pages on your site and add them to its index. Within eight weeks, you should be able to find your site listed in Google.
The second way to get your site listed in Google is to let Google find you. It does this based upon links that may be pointing to your site. Once GoogleBot finds a link to your site from a page it already has in its index, it will visit your site.
Google has been updating its database on a monthly basis for three years. It sends its spider out in crawler mode once a month too. Crawler mode is a special mode for a spider when it traverses or crawls the entire Web. As it runs into links to pages, it then indexes those pages in a never ending attempt to download all the pages it can. Once your pages are listed in Google, they are revisited and updated on a monthly basis. If you frequently update your content, Google may index your search terms more often.
Once you are indexed and listed in Google, the next natural question for a site owner is, "How can I rank better under my applicable search terms?"
The Search Engine Optimization Template
This is my general recipe for the ubiquitous Google. It is generic enough that it works well everywhere. It's as close as I have come to a "one-size-fits-all" SEO—that's Search Engine Optimization—template.
Use your targeted keyword phrase:
- In META keywords. It's not necessary for Google, but a good habit. Keep your META keywords short (128 characters max, or 10).
- In META description. Keep keyword close to the left but in a full sentence.
- In the title at the far left but possibly not as the first word.
- In the top portion of the page in first sentence of first full bodied paragraph (plain text: no bold, no italic, no style).
- In an H3 or larger heading.
- In bold—second paragraph if possible and anywhere but the first usage on page.
- In italic—anywhere but the first usage.
- In subscript/superscript.
- In URL (directory name, filename, or domain name). Do not duplicate the keyword in the URL.
- In an image filename used on the page.
- In ALT tag of that previous image mentioned.
- In the title attribute of that image.
- In link text to another site.
- In an internal link's text.
- In title attribute of all links targeted in and out of page.
- In the filename of your external CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) or JavaScript file.
- In an inbound link on site (preferably from your home page).
- In an inbound link from off site (if possible).
- In a link to a site that has a PageRank of 8 or better.
Other search engine optimization things to consider include:
- Use "last modified" headers if you can.
- Validate that HTML. Some feel Google's parser has become stricter at parsing instead of milder. It will miss an entire page because of a few simple errors—we have tested this in depth.
- Use an HTML template throughout your site. Google can spot the template and parse it off. (Of course, this also means they are pretty good a spotting duplicate content.)
- Keep the page as .html or .htm extension. Any dynamic extension is a risk.
- Keep the HTML below 20K. 5-15K is the ideal range.
- Keep the ratio of text to HTML very high. Text should out weight HTML by significant amounts.
- Double check your page in Netscape, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, and IE. Use Lynx if you have it.
- Use only raw HREFs for links. Keep JavaScript far, far away from links. The simpler the link code the better.
- The traffic comes when you figure out that 1 referral a day to 10 pages is better than 10 referrals a day to 1 page.
- Don't assume that keywords in your site's navigation template will be worth anything at all. Google looks for full sentences and paragraphs. Keywords just laying around orphaned on the page are not worth as much as when used in a sentence.
Five don'ts and one do for getting your site indexed by Google.
A high ranking in Google can mean a great deal of traffic. Because of that, there are lots of people spending lots of time trying to figure out the infallible way to get a high ranking from Google. Add this. Remove that. Get a link from this. Don't post a link to that.
Submitting your site to Google to be indexed is simple enough. Google's got a site submission form (http://www.google.com/addurl.html), though they say if your site has at least a few inbound links (other sites that link to you), they should find you that way. In fact, Google encourages URL submitters to get listed on The Open Directory Project (DMOZ, http://www.dmoz.org/) or Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com/).
Nobody knows the holy grail secret of high page rank without effort. Google uses a variety of elements, including page popularity, to determine page rank. Page rank is one of the factors determining how high up a page appears in search results. But there are several things you should not be doing combined with one big thing you absolutely should.
Does breaking one of these rules mean that you're automatically going to be thrown out of Google's index? No; there are over 2 billion pages in Google's index at this writing, and it's unlikely that they'll find out about your rule-breaking immediately. But there's a good chance they'll find out eventually. Is it worth it having your site removed from the most popular search engine on the Internet?
Thou shalt not:
Cloak. "Cloaking" is when your web site is set up such that search engine spiders get different pages from those human surfers get. How does the web site know which are the spiders and which are the humans? By identifying the spider's User Agent or IP—the latter being the more reliable method.
An IP (Internet Protocol) address is the computer address from which a spider comes from. Everything that connects to the Internet has an IP address. Sometimes the IP address is always the same, as with web sites. Sometimes the IP address changes—that's called a dynamic address. (If you use a dial-up modem, chances are good that every time you log on to the Internet your IP address is different. That's a dynamic IP address.)
A "User Agent" is a way a program that surfs the Web identifies itself. Internet browsers like Mozilla use User Agents, as do search engine spiders. There are literally dozens of different kinds of User Agents; see the Web Robots Database (http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/active.html) for an extensive list.
Advocates of cloaking claim that cloaking is useful to absolutely optimize content for spiders. Anticloaking critics claim that cloaking is an easy way to misrepresent site content—feeding a spider a page that's designed to get the site hits for pudding cups when actually it's all about baseball bats. You can get more details about cloaking and different perspectives on it at http://pandecta.com/, http://www.apromotionguide.com/cloaking.html, and http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/cloaking.html.
Hide text. Text is hidden by putting words or links in a web page that are the same color as the page's background—putting white words on a white background, for example. This is also called "fontmatching." Why would you do this? Because a search engine spider could read the words you've hidden on the page while a human visitor couldn't. Again, doing this and getting caught could get you banned from Google's index, so don't.
That goes for other page content tricks too, like title stacking (putting multiple copies of a title tag on one page), putting keywords in comment tags, keyword stuffing (putting multiple copies of keywords in very small font on page), putting keywords not relevant to your site in your META tags, and so on. Google doesn't provide an exhaustive list of these types of tricks on their site, but any attempt to circumvent or fool their ranking system is likely to be frowned upon. Their attitude is more like: "You can do anything you want to with your pages, and we can do anything we want to with our index—like exclude your pages."
Use doorway pages. Sometimes doorway pages are called "gateway pages." These are pages that are aimed very specifically at one topic, which don't have a lot of their own original content, and which lead to the main page of a site (thus the name doorway pages).
For example, say you have a page devoted to cooking. You create doorway pages for several genres of cooking—French cooking, Chinese cooking, vegetarian cooking, etc. The pages contain terms and META tags relevant to each genre, but most of the text is a copy of all the other doorway pages, and all it does is point to your main site.
This is illegal in Google and annoying to the Google-user; don't do it. You can learn more about doorway pages at http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/bridge.html or http://www.searchengineguide.com/whalen/2002/0530_jw1.html.
Check your link rank with automated queries. Using automated queries (except for the sanctioned Google API) is against Google's Terms of Service anyway. Using an automated query to check your PageRank every 12 seconds is triple bad; it's not what the search engine was built for and Google probably considers it a waste of their time and resources.
Link to "bad neighborhoods". Bad neighborhoods are those sites that exist only to propagate links. Because link popularity is one aspect of how Google determines PageRank, some sites have set up "link farms"—sites that exist only for the purpose of building site popularity with bunches of links. The links are not topical, like a specialty subject index, and they're not well-reviewed, like Yahoo!; they're just a pile of links. Another example of a "bad neighborhood" is a general FFA page. FFA stands for "free for all"; it's a page where anyone can add their link. Linking to pages like that is grounds for a penalty from Google.
Now, what happens if a page like that links to you? Will Google penalize you page? No. Google accepts that you have no control over who links to your site.
Thou shalt:
Create great content. All the HTML contortions in the world will do you little good if you've got lousy, old, or limited content. If you create great content and promote it without playing search engine games, you'll get noticed and you'll get links. Remember Sturgeon's Law ("Ninety percent of everything is crud.") Why not make your web site an exception?
What Happens if You Reform?
Maybe you've got a site that's not exactly the work of a good search engine citizen. Maybe you've got 500 doorway pages, 10 title tags per page, and enough hidden text to make an O'Reilly Pocket Guide. But maybe now you want to reform. You want to have a clean lovely site and leave the doorway pages to Better Homes and Gardens. Are you doomed? Will Google ban your site for the rest of its life?
No. The first thing you need to do is clean up your site—remove all traces of rule breaking. Next, send a note about your site changes and the URL to help@google.com. Note that Google really doesn't have the resources to answer every email about why they did or didn't index a site—otherwise, they'd be answering emails all day—and there's no guarantee that they will reindex your kinder, gentler site. But they will look at your message.
What Happens if You Spot Google Abusers in the Index?
What if some other site that you come across in your Google searching is abusing Google's spider and pagerank mechanism? You have two options. You can send an email to spamreport@google.com or fill out the form at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. (I'd fill out the form; it reports the abuse in a standard format that Google's used to seeing.)
Before you submit your site to Google, make sure you've cleaned it up to make the most of your indexing.
You clean up your house when you have important guests over, right? Google's crawler is one of the most important guests you site will ever have if you want visitors. A high Google ranking can lead to incredible numbers of referrals, both from Google's main site and those site that have search powered by Google.
To make the most of your listing, step back and look at your site. By making some adjustments, you can make your site both more Google-friendly and more visitor-friendly.
If you must use a splash page, have a text link from it. If I had a dollar for every time I went to the front page of a site and saw no way to navigate besides a Flash movie, I'd be able to nap for a living. Google doesn't index Flash files, so unless you have some kind of text link on your splash page (a "Skip This Movie" link, for example, that leads into the heart of your site) you're not giving Google's crawler anything to work with. You're also making it difficult for surfers who don't have Flash or are visually impaired.
Make sure your internal links work. Sounds like a no-brainer, doesn't it? Make sure your internal page links work so the Google crawler can get to all your site's pages. You'll also make sure your visitors can navigate.
Check your title tags. There are few things sadder than getting a page of search results and finding "Insert Your Title Here" as the title for some of them. Not quite as bad is getting results for the same domain and seeing the exact same title tag over and over and over and over.
Look. Google makes it possible to search just the title tags in its index. Further, the title tags are very easy to read on Google's search results and are an easy way for a surfer to quickly get an idea of what a page is all about. If you're not making the most of your title tag you're missing out on a lot of attention on your site.
The perfect title tag, to me, says something specific about the page it heads, and is readable to both spiders and surfers. That means you don't stuff it with as many keywords as you can. Make it a readable sentence, or—and I've found this useful for some pages—make it a question.
Check your META tags. Google sometimes relies on META tags for a site description when there's a lot of navigation code that wouldn't make sense to a human searcher. I'm not crazy about META tags, but I'd make sure that at least the front page of my web site had a description and keyword META tag set, especially if your site relies heavily on code-based navigation (like from JavaScript).
Check your ALT tags. Do you use a lot of graphics on your pages? Do you have ALT tags for them so that visually impaired surfers and the Google spider can figure out what those graphics are? If you have a splash page with nothing but graphics on it, do you have ALT tags on all those graphics so a Google spider can get some idea of what your page is all about? ALT tags are perhaps the most neglected aspect of a web site. Make sure yours are set up.
By the way, just because ALT tags are a good idea, don't go crazy. You don't have to explain in your ALT tags that a list bullet is a list bullet. You can just mark it with a *.
Check your frames. If you use frames, you might be missing out on some indexing. Google recommends you read Danny Sullivan's article, "Search Engines and Frames," at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/frames.html. Be sure that Google can either handle your frame setup or that you've created an alternative way for Google to visit, such as using the NOFRAMES tag.
Consider your dynamic pages. Google says they "limit the number of amount of dynamic pages" they index. Are you using dynamic pages? Do you have to?
Consider how often you update your content. There is some evidence that Google indexes popular pages with frequently updated content more often. How often do you update the content on your front page?
Make sure you have a robots.txt file if you need one. If you want Google to index your site in a particular way, make sure you've got a robots.txt file for the Google spider to refer to. You can learn more about robots.txt in general at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html.
If you don't want Google to cache your pages, you can add a line to every page that you don't want cached. Add this line to the section of your page:

This will tell all robots that archive content, including engines like Daypop and Gigablast, not to cache your page. If you want to exclude just the Google spider from caching your page, you'd use this line:

Getting the Most Out of AdWords

Scrape the AdWords from a saved Google results page into a form suitable for importing into a spreadsheet or database.
Google's AdWords™—the text ads that appear to the right of the regular search results—are delivered on a cost-per-click basis, and purchasers of the AdWords are allowed to set a ceiling on the amount of money they spend on their ad. This means if even if you run a search for the same query word multiple times, you won't necessarily get the same set of ads each time.
If you're considering using Google AdWords to run ads, you might want to gather up and save the ads that are running for the query words you're interested in. Google AdWords are not provided by the Google API; of course you can't automatically scrape Google's results outside the Google API, because it's against Google's Terms of Service. .
AdWords (https://adwords.google.com/select/?hl=en) is just about the sort of advertising program you might expect to roll out of the big brains at Google. The designers of the advertising system have innovated thoroughly to provide precise targeting at low cost with less work—it really is a good deal. The flipside is that it takes a fair bit of savvy to get a campaign to the point where it stops failing and starts working.
For larger advertisers, AdWords Select is a no-brainer. Within a couple of weeks, a larger advertiser will have enough data to decide whether to significantly expand their ad program on AdWords Select or perhaps to upgrade to a premium sponsor account.
I'm going to assume you have a basic familiarity with how cost-per-click advertising works. AdWords Select ads currently appear next to search results on Google.com (and some international versions of the search engine) and near search results on AOL and a few other major search destinations. There are a great many quirks and foibles to this form of advertising. My focus here will be on some techniques that can turn a mediocre, nonperforming campaign into one that actually makes money for the advertiser while conforming to Google's rules and guidelines.
One thing I should make crystal clear is that advertising with Google bears no relationship to having your web site's pages indexed in Google's search engine. The search engine remains totally independent of the advertising program. Ad results never appear within search results.
I'm going to offer four key tips for maximizing AdWords Select campaign performance, but before I do, I'll start with four basic assumptions:
High CTRs (click-through rates) save you money, so that should be one of your main goals as an AdWords Select advertiser. Google has set up the keyword bidding system to reward high-CTR advertisers. Why? It's simple. If two ads are each shown 100 times, the ad that is clicked on eight times generates revenue for Google twice as often as the ad that is clicked on four times over the same stretch of 100 search queries served. So if your CTR is 4% and your competitor's is only 2%, Google factors this into your bid. Your bid is calculated as if it were "worth" twice as much as your competitor's bid.
Very low CTRs are bad. Google disables keywords that fall below a minimum CTR threshold ("0.5% normalized to ad position," which is to say, 0.5% for position 1, and a more forgiving threshold for ads as they fall further down the page). Entire campaigns will be gradually disabled if they fall below 0.5% CTR on the whole.
Editorial disapprovals are a fact of life in this venue. Your ad copy or keyword selections may violate Google's editorial guidelines from time to time. Again, it's very difficult to run a successful campaign when large parts of it are disabled. You need to treat this as a normal part of the process rather than giving up or getting flustered.
The AdWords Select system is set up like an advertising laboratory; that is to say, it makes experimenting with keyword variations and small variations in ad copy a snap. No guru can prejudge for you what will be your "magical ad copy secrets," and it would be irresponsible to do so, because Google offers such detailed real-time reporting that can tell you very quickly what does and does not catch people's attention.
Now onto four tips to get those CTRs up and to keep your campaign from straying out of bounds.
Matching Can Make a Dramatic Difference
You'll likely want to organize your campaign's keywords and phrases into several distinct "ad groups" (made easy by Google's interface). This will help you more closely match keywords to the actual words that appear in the title of your ad. Writing slightly different ads to closely correspond to the words in each group of keywords you've put together is a great way to improve your clickthrough rates. You'd think that an ad title (say, "Deluxe Topsoil in Bulk") would match equally well to a range of keywords that mean essentially the same thing. That is, you'd think this ad title would create about the same CTR with the phrase "bulk topsoil" as it would with a similar phrase ("fancy dirt wholesaler"). Not so. Exact matches tend to get significantly higher CTRs. Being diligent about matching your keywords reasonably closely to your ad titles will help you outperform your less diligent competition.
If you have several specific product lines, you should consider better matching different groups of key phrases to an ad written expressly for each product line. If your clients like your store because you offer certain specialized wine varieties, for example, have an ad group with "ice wine" and related keywords in it, with "ice wine" in the ad title. Don't expect the same generic ad to cover all your varieties. Someone searching for an "ice wine" expert will be thrilled to find a retailer who specializes in this area. They probably won't click on or buy from a retailer who just talks about wine in general. Search engine users are passionate about something, and their queries are highly granular. Take advantage of this passion and granularity.
The other benefit of getting more granular and matching keywords to ad copy is that you don't pay for clicks from unqualified buyers, so your sales conversion rate is likely to be much higher.
Copywriting Tweaks Generally Involve Improving Clarity and Directness
By and large, I don't run across major copywriting secrets. Psychological tricks to entice more people to click, after all, may wind up attracting unqualified buyers. But there are times when the text of an ad falls outside the zone of "what works reasonably well." In such cases, excessively low CTRs kill any chance your web site might have had to close the sale.
Consider using the Goldilocks method to diagnose poor-performing ads. Many ads lean too far to the "too cold" side of the equation. Overly technical jargon may be unintelligible and uninteresting even to specialists, especially given that this is still an emotional medium and that people are looking at search results first and glancing at ad results as a second thought.
The following example is "too cold":
Faster DWMGT Apps
Build GMUI modules 3X more secure than KLT. V. 2.0 rated as
"best pligtonferg" by WRSS Mag.
No one clicks. Campaign limps along. Web site remains world's best kept secret.
So then a "hotshot" (the owner's nephew) grabs the reins and tries to put some juice into this thing. Unfortunately, this new creative genius has been awake for the better part of a week, attending raves, placing second in a snowboarding competition, and tending to his various piercings. His agency work for a major Fortune 500 client's television spots once received rave reviews. Of course, those were rave reviews from industry pundits and his best friends, because the actual ROI on the big client's TV "branding" campaign was untrackable.
The hotshot's copy reads:
Reemar's App Kicks!
Reemar ProblemSolver 2.0 is the real slim shady. Don't trust
your Corporate security to the drones at BigCorp.
Unfortunately, in a non-visual medium with only a few words to work with, the true genius of this ad is never fully appreciated. Viewers don't click and may be offended by the ad and annoyed with Google.
The simple solution is something unglamorous but clear, such as:
Easy & Powerful Firewall
Reemar ProblemSolver 2.0 outperforms BigCorp
Exacerbator 3 to 1 in industry tests.
You can't say it all in a short ad. This gets enough specific (and true) info out there to be of interest to the target audience. Once they click, there will be more than enough info on your web site. In short, your ads should be clear. How's that for a major copywriting revelation?
The nice thing is, if you're bent on finding out for yourself, you can test the performance of all three styles quickly and cheaply, so you don't have to spend all week agonizing about this.
Be Inquisitive and Proactive with Editorial Policies (But Don't Whine)
Editorial oversight is a big task for Google AdWords staff—a task that often gets them in hot water with advertisers, who don't like to be reined in. For the most part, the rules are in the long term best interest of this advertising medium, because they're aimed at maintaining consumer confidence in the quality of what appears on the page when that consumer types something into a search engine. Human error, however, may mean that your campaign is being treated unfairly because of a misunderstanding. Or maybe a rule is ambiguous and you just don't understand it.
Reply to the editorial disapproval messages (they generally come from adwords-support@google.com). Ask questions until you are satisfied that the rule makes sense as it applies to your business. The more Google knows about your business, in turn, the more they can work with you to help you improve your results, so don't hesitate to give a bit of brief background in your notes to them. The main thing is, don't let your campaign just sit there disabled because you're confused or angry about being "disapproved." Make needed changes, make the appropriate polite inquiries, and move on.
Avoid the Trap of "Insider Thinking" and Pursue the Advantage of Granular Thinking
Using lists of specialized keywords will likely help you to reach interested consumers at a lower cost per click and convert more sales, than using more general industry keywords. Running your ad on keywords from specialized vocabularies is a sound strategy.
A less successful strategy, though, is to get lost in your own highly specialized social stratum when considering how to pitch your company. Remember that this medium revolves around consumer search engine behavior. You won't win new customers by generating a list of different ways of stating terminology that only management, competitors, or partners might actually use, unless your ad campaign is just being run for vanity's sake.
Break things down into granular pieces and use industry jargon where it might attract a target consumer, but when you find yourself listing phrases that only your competitors might know or buzzwords that came up at the last interminable management meeting, stop! You've started down the path of insider thinking! By doing so, you may have forgotten about the customer and about the role market research must play in this type of campaign.
It sounds simple to say it, but in your AdWords Select keyword selection, you aren't describing your business. You're trying to use phrases that consumers would use when trying to describe a problem they're having, a specific item they're searching for, or a topic that they're interested in. Mission statements from above versus what customers and prospects actually type into search engines. Big difference. (At this point, if you haven't yet done so, you'd better go back and read over The Cluetrain Manifesto to get yourself right out of this top-down mode of thinking.)
One way to find out about what consumers are looking for is to use Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) or other keyword research tools (such as the one that Google offers as part of the AdWords Select interface, a keyword research tool Google promises it's working on). However, these tools are not in themselves enough for every business; because more businesses are using these "keyphrase search frequency reports," the frequently searched terms eventually become picked over by competing advertisers—just what you want to avoid if you're trying to sneak along with good response rates at a low cost per click.
You'll need to brainstorm as well. In the future, there will be more sophisticated software-driven market research available in this area. Search technology companies like Ask Jeeves Enterprise Solutions are already collecting data about the hundreds of thousands of customer questions typed into the search boxes on major corporate sites, for example. This kind of market research is under used by the vast majority of companies today.
There are currently many low-cost opportunities for pay-per-click advertisers. As more and larger advertisers enter the space, prices will rise, but with a bit of creativity, granular thinking, and diligent testing, the smaller advertiser will always have a fighting chance on AdWords Select. Good luck!
Google, PageRank, AdWords, and I'm Feeling Lucky are trademarks of Google Technology, Inc.

The Mysterious Google’s PageRank

2006-11-29T15:59:00.000-08:00

Search engines for large collections of data preceded the World Wide Web by decades. There were those massive library catalogs, hand-typed with painstaking precision on index cards and eventually, to varying degrees, automated. There were the large data collections of professional information companies such as Dialog and LexisNexis. Then there are the still-extant private, expensive medical, real estate, and legal search services.

Those data collections were not always easy to search, but with a little finesse and a lot of patience, it was always possible to search them thoroughly. Information was grouped according to established ontologies, data preformatted according to particular guidelines.

Then came the Web.

Information on the Web—as anyone knows who's ever looked at half-a-dozen web pages knows—is not all formatted the same way. Nor is it necessarily particularly accurate. Nor up to date. Nor spellchecked. Nonetheless, search engines cropped up, trying to make sense of the rapidly-increasing index of information online. Eventually, special syntaxes were added for searching common parts of the average web page (such as title or URL). Search engines evolved rapidly, trying to encompass all the nuances of the billions of documents online, and they still continue to evolve today.

Google ™ threw its hat into the ring in 1998. The second incarnation of a search engine service known as BackRub, the name "Google" was a play on the word "googol ," a one followed by a hundred zeros. From the beginning, Google was different from the other major search engines online—AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, and others.

Was it the technology? Partially. The relevance of Google's search results was outstanding and worthy of comment. But more than that, Google's focus and more human face made it stand out online.

With its friendly presentation and its constantly expanding set of options, it's no surprise that Google continues to get lots of fans. There are weblogs devoted to it. Search engine newsletters, such as ResearchBuzz, spend a lot of time covering Google. Legions of devoted fans spend lots of time uncovering documented features, creating games (like Google whacking) and even coining new words (like "Googling," the practice of checking out a prospective date or hire via Google's search engine.)

When the Web was younger, the search engine field was all but wide open. There were lots of major search engines, including: AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, and Webcrawler. This proliferation of search engines had both its advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage was that you had to make sure you had submitted to several different places. One advantage was that you had several inflows of search engine spawned trafffic.

As the number of search engines dwindle, Google's index (and influence) is growing. You don't have to worry so much about submitting to different places, but you have to be aware of Google at all times.

But isn't Google just a search engine web site like any other? Actually, its reach is far greater than that. Google partners with other sites to use the Google index results, including the likes of heavyweight properties AOL and Yahoo! Not to mention the multitude of sites out there making use of the Google API. So when you think about potential visitors from Google's search results, you have to think beyond traditional search site borders.

It's becoming ever more important what Google thinks of your site. That means you're going to be sure that your site abides by the Google rules or risk not being picked up. If you're very concerned about search engine traffic, you're going to have to make sure that your site is optimized for luring in Google's spiders and being indexed in an effective manner. And if you're concerned that Google should not index some parts of your site, you need to understand the ins and outs of configuring your robots.txt file to reflect your preferences.

You'll hear a lot of people talk about Google's PageRank, bragging about attaining the misty heights of rank seven or eight, talking in hushed tones of sites that have achived nine or ten. PageRanks range from 0 (sites that haven't been ranked or have been penalized) to 10 (reserved only for the most popular sites like Yahoo! and Google itself). The only place where you can actually see what PageRank a given URL has is from the Google Toolbar, though you can get some idea of popularity from the Google Directory. Listings in the Google Directory contain a green bar next to them that allow you to give a good idea of the listing's popularity without having an exact number.

Google has never provided the entire formula for their PageRank, so all you'll find in this page is conjecture. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it's changing all the time; as millions of people try myriad things to make sure their pages rank better, Google has to take these efforts into account and (sometimes) reacted against them.

Why is PageRank so important? Because Google uses that as one aspect of determining how a given URL will rank among millions of possible search results, but that's only one aspect. The other aspects are determined via Google's ranking algorithm.

If you thought Google was close-mouthed about how it determine's PageRank, it's an absolute oyster when it comes to the ranking algorithm, the way that Google determines the order of search results. The articles in this page can give you some ideas, but again it's conjecture and again it's constantly changing. Your best bet is to create a content-rich web site and update it often. Google appreciates good content.

Of course, getting listed in Google's index is not the only way to tell visitors about your site. You also have the option to advertise on Google.

If the picture that arises when you think of Internet advertising involves people in Armani suits pitchforking huge mounds of money into bank vaults, think again. Huge ad budgets are so 1999. Google's AdWords programs allow even small advertisers to do keyword-based advertising on Google's search results (or even on the keyword results of Google's partner sites, if they wish). In this section, Andrew Goodman chimes in to gives some tips on how to make the most of your Google Adwords program, and we provide a scraper that'll help you save AdWords on results pages if you're doing a little research.

With Google having such a leading position in the search engine world, and so many webmasters looking to Google for traffic, you might guess that there's a lot of discussion about Google in various places around the Web. And you'd be right! My favorite place for Google news and gossip is Webmaster World. It's not often that you can put the words "civilized" and "online forums" right next to each other, but I'm doing it now. Discourse on this site is friendly, informative, and generally flame free. I have learned a lot from this site.

One of the things I've learned is that a lot of people spend a lot of time worrying about how Google works, and further, they worry about how they can get the highest possible ranking.

I can appreciate their worry, because search engine traffic means a lot to an online business. But for the rest of us, we should just relax. As long as we concentrate on good content that's good for visitors (and not just spiders), Google's ranking algorithms will appreciate our sites.

How to Remove Your Content from Google's Various Web Properties

2006-11-29T15:56:00.000-08:00

Some people are more than thrilled to have Google's properties index their sites. Other folks don't want the Google bot anywhere near them. If you fall into the latter category and the bot's already done its worst, there are several things you can do to remove your materials from Google's index. Each of Google's properties—Web Search, Google Images, and Google Groups—has its own set of methodologies.

Google's Web Search

Here are several tips to avoid being listed.

Making sure your pages never get there to begin with

While you can take steps to remove your content from the Google index after the fact, it's always much easier to make sure the content is never found and indexed in the first place.

Google's crawler obeys the "robot exclusion protocol," a set of instructions you put on your web site that tells the crawler how to behave when it comes to your content. You can implement these instructions in two ways: via a META tag that you put on each page (handy when you want to restrict access to only certain pages or certain types of content) or via a robots.txt file that you insert in your root directory (handy when you want to block some spiders completely or want to restrict access to kinds or directories of content). You can get more information about the robots exclusion protocol and how to implement it at http://www.robotstxt.org/.

Removing your pages after they're indexed

There are several things you can have removed from Google's results.

These instructions are for keeping your site out of Google's index only. For information on keeping your site out of all major search engines, you'll have to work with the robots exclusion protocol.

Removing the whole site

Use the robots exclusion protocol, probably with robots.txt.

Removing individual pages

Use the following META tag in the HEAD section of each page you want to remove:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

Removing snippets

A "snippet" is the little excerpt of a page that Google displays on its search result. To remove snippets, use the following META tag in the HEAD section of each page for which you want to prevent snippets:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOSNIPPET">

Removing cached pages

To keep Google from keeping cached versions of your pages in their index, use the following META tag in the HEAD section of each page for which you want to prevent caching:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">

Removing that content now

Once you implement these changes, Google will remove or limit your content according to your META tags and robots.txt file the next time your web site is crawled, usually within a few weeks. But if you want your materials removed right away, you can use the automatic remover at http://services.google.com:8882/urlconsole/controller. You'll have to sign in with an account (all an account requires is an email address and a password). Using the remover, you can request either that Google crawl your newly created robots.txt file, or you can enter the URL of a page that contains exclusionary META tags.

Make sure you have your exclusion tags all set up before you use this service. Going to all the trouble of getting Google to pay attention to a robots.txt file or exclusion rules that you've not yet set up will simply be a waste of your time.

Reporting pages with inappropriate content

You may like your content fine, but you might find that even if you have filtering activated you're getting search results with explicit content. Or you might find a site with a misleading title tag and content completely unrelated to your search.

You have two options for reporting these sites to Google. And bear in mind that there's no guarantee that Google will remove the sites from the index, but they will investigate them. At the bottom of each page of search results, you'll see "Help Us Improve" link; follow it to a form for reporting inappropriate sites. You can also send the URL of explict sites that show up on a SafeSearch but probably shouldn't to safesearch@google.com. If you have more general complaints about a search result, you can send an email to search-quality@google.com.

Google Images

Google Images' database of materials is separate from that of the main search index. To remove items from Google Images, you should use robots.txt to specify that the Google bot Image crawler should stay away from your site. Add these lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image

Disallow: /

You can use the automatic remover mentioned in the web search section to have Google remove the images from its index database quickly.

There may be cases where someone has put images on their server for which you own copyright. In other words, you don't have access to their server to add a robots.txt file, but you need to stop Google's indexing of your content there. In this case, you need to contact Google directly. Google has instructions for situations just like this at http://www.google.com/remove.html; look at Option 2, "If you do not have any access to the server that hosts your image."

Removing Material from Google Groups

Like the Google Web Index, you have the option to both prevent material from being archived on Google and to remove it after the fact.

Preventing your material from being archived

To prevent your material from being archived on Google, add the following line to the headers of your Usenet posts:

X-No-Archive: yes

If you do not have the options to edit the headers of your post, make that line the first line in your post itself.

Removing materials after the fact

If you want materials removed after the fact, you have a couple of options:

· If the materials you want removed were posted under an address to which you still have access, you may use the automatic removal tool mentioned earlier in this hack.

· If the materials you want removed were posted under an address to which you no longer have access, you'll need to send an email to groups-support@google.com with the following information:

o Your full name and contact information, including a verifiable email address.

o The complete Google Groups URL or message ID for each message you want removed.

o A statement that says "I swear under penalty of civil or criminal laws that I am the person who posted each of the foregoing messages or am authorized to request removal by the person who posted those messages."

o Your electronic signature.

Removing Your Listing from Google Phonebook

You may not wish to have your contact information made available via the phonebook searches on Google. You'll have to follow one of two procedures, depending on whether the listing you want removed is for a business or for a residential number.

If you want to remove a business phone number, you'll need to send a request on your business letterhead to:

Google PhoneBook Removal

2400 Bayshore Parkway

Mountain View, CA 94043

You'll also have to include a phone number where Google can reach you to verify your request.

If you want to remove a residential phone number, it's much simpler. You'll need to fill out a form at http://www.google.com/help/pbremoval.html. The form asks for your name, city and state, phone number, email address, and reason for removal, a multiple choice: incorrect number, privacy issue, or "other."

Internet Marketing Strategies For Maximum Profits

2006-11-29T15:42:00.000-08:00

The formula for success for any business is to get your customers to make repeat purchases. There are a number of factors involved for getting repeat customers: pricing, quality of products and services, excellent customer service, etc. One of the best ways is to reward your customers for their repeat purchases. Here are some effective customer reward programs you could implement:

Number Of Purchases

This program is based on the number of purchases made by any customer. You could give away a free product or service to any customer that makes ten or more purchases. To make the program more effective you could require a set time period that all ten purchases must be made by.

Dollar Amount

You can require a certain dollar amount be spent before the customer receives a reward. Tell customers if they spend over $50 in one month at your web site they get a 50% discount on their next purchase. You could also just reward one customer who spends the most every month with a bigger reward like a vacation.

Points System

Reward customers a point for every one-dollar they spend. Lets say customers can get a free computer for 300 points. That means customers will spend $300 dollars on your products and services to get enough points to get the free computer. To push slower selling products or services just offer more points per dollar spent for those particular items.

The kind of rewards you give should depend on what your business can afford. Cheaper rewards could be gift certificates, coupons, clothes, or movie passes. Expensive rewards could be jewelry, vacations, bed and breakfast gift certificates, electronics or computer equipment.

You may want to invest in a good database program to keep track of your rewards program. I also recommend contacting a legal professional for advice, set-up and the structure of your rewards program. I hope these ideas I've given you help make your business more successful.

Cross promoting is when two or more businesses promote their products or services together. I try to find businesses that have the same target audience, but are not in direct competition with my business. Doing cross promotions with other businesses increases your profits, sales, and beat your competition.
You can find businesses to cross promote all over the Internet. Participate in e-mail discussion groups, online forums and newsgroups that deal with your target audience. Subscribe to e-zines that deal with your targeted audience. Note on your Web site or e-zine that you are interested in cross promoting your products and services. Search in your favorite web directories and search engines to find targeted businesses.

Cross promoting has many benefits. Save money by sharing the advertising and marketing costs. Save time when both businesses share the workload. You can offer your customers new products and services. Get referrals from the other business' clients. Receive valuable information from the business.

Once you find a business you would like to cross promote with simply e-mail them your proposal. Tell the business owner the benefits of the cross promotion. Explain to him or her why it would be a win/win situation for both of your businesses. Give them a lot of compliments about their business, Web site, products and services. Using all three methods above will greater your chance for a profitable cross promotion.

All businesses are created first by ideas. Then once you're in business you need ideas for marketing, advertising, solving problems, product development etc. The difference between success or failure could be one just one idea. That's all! Below are three ways to generate profitable business ideas.

1. Communicating regularly with other business people can generate many ideas. There are many resources online and offline to meet new business people lie; seminars, chat rooms, discussion boards, trade shows etc. Sharing your knowledge, asking questions, and taking in new information will stimulate your mind. Your brain will begin to put all this information together to create profitable business ideas.

2. If you're not much of a communicator, try reading. Reading can also stimulate your mind. Read business books, magazines, e-books, web sites, journals, e-zines, newspapers etc. Your brain will generate profitable ideas by absorbing and rearranging this information on a regular basis.

3. Don't have a lot of time to read? You could listen to business audio books, seminars and courses. Listen to them in the car, while your doing house work, working in the yard, or exercising. Also, tune in business related radio stations. This will help you save time and generate profitable business ideas at the same time.

There are a few extra tips that will help improve these idea generation strategies. Take short breaks to brainstorm about the information you absorbed. Keep a notepad and pen handy to record your ideas so you don't forget them. All businesses need profitable business ideas to stay ahead of competition and survive. Good Luck!

Using Google Alerts to Help Your Business

2006-11-29T15:37:00.000-08:00

At times it seems that Google releases more new products and services than we can keep track of. From Google Calendar and Google Video, to Google Base, Google Finance, and Google Trends, it can be overwhelming just to remember what each one does. One of the oft overlooked hidden gems in Google's enormous offering is Google Alerts. Within minutes, you can be signed up for email alerts that can give you and your business a leg up on the competition. Alerts can be used to spy on competitors, keep track of what people are saying about your business, or follow an important news story.

How Does It Work

Google Alerts sends you an email each time a new page for your chosen term makes it in the top twenty results on Google's web search. You can also have the alert chëck Google News and/or Google Groups. To sign up for a Google Alert, all that you need to do is visit the Google Alerts homepage, enter the search term, type of alert (search Google News, Google Groups, or the web), frequency of emails (daily, as it happens, or weekly), and your email address. You can set up alerts for as many terms as you like using a Google Account. So why would you want an unlímited amount of alerts? Because as a business owner, you have a lot to keep track of and very limited time to do it.

Spy on Your Competitors

Every business has a competitor. More likely, you have several direct competitors and several more indirect competitors.

While regularly checking out their websites is an important part of the process, it doesn't provide a whole picture. A competitor's website is very much crafted to the image that they want to portray to their customers. This is great if you want to know what their latest sale is or how much their new product costs, but it isn't likely to feature a negative review in last

Sunday's newspaper

That's where Google Alerts comes in. By simply setting up a News, Groups, and search alert for each of your competitors, you will know what other people are saying about your competition – both the media and consumers, both good and bad.

Keep Up To Date on Your Industry

Equally as important as what people are saying about your competition is what people are saying about your industry in general. If there's a negative PR swing against violent video games, and you just happen to run a video game store, you will probably be affected. By receiving alerts on important key words related to your industry, you can be on top of any sudden changes and react accordingly. By the time your competition realizes what's happening they will be scrambling to catch up to you.

Track Yourself and Your Business

It goes without saying, if it's important to know what people are saying about your competitors and about your industry, it would stand to reason that it's important to know what people are saying about you. I have Google Alerts on both my name and my business name. I know that they go hand in hand - if one is getting slandered you better bet it will hurt the other. By receiving alerts, you can be on top of anything negative relating to you or your business, and hopefully nip any problem in the bud before it grows too large. On the flip side, there's nothing better than receiving an alert where someone praises your business. Those are the types of things that you want to make sure are on the PR page of your business website.

Get News Stories for Your Site or Blog

I own a site where I do weekly news updates about what's going on in the industry. Some weeks, there are tons of news items to choose from, other weeks it's hard to find anything. In addition to the regular industry news sites that I chëck to get information, I have Google Alerts set up for each of the key terms. You'd be surprised how frequently a unique story from a local newspaper pops up in Google News. Many times these stories haven't been seen by my competitors and I am able to break the news to the online community. This works well for blogs too – if you have a daily blog about being an entrepreneur, having an alert for the word entrepreneur can fetch you several quality stories each day to help inspire fresh posts.

In this increasingly competitive business world, you need each and every leg up on your competition that you can get. Used properly, Google Alerts can be an extremely efficient way to track what's going on across the web. The alternative would be to search each term every day for new updates. Who has time for that? Spending less time researching enables you to spend more time on the things important to your business.

Did You Find This Article Useful? Then Digg It.

About The Author:
Adam McFarland owns iPrioritize – simple to-do lists that can be edited at any time from any place in the world. Email, print, chëck from your mobile telephone, subscribe via RSS, and share with others.

5 Mistakes To Avoid When Choosing An Affiliate Program

2006-11-29T15:32:00.000-08:00

When people decide to join an affiliate program to make extra money, or to have a full time job, they often do so with illusions and no idea of how the affiliate program actually works. Read the following top 5 mistakes people make when it comes to choosing an affiliate program and avoid these mistakes at all costs. Then, you will be able to be more effective and make more money for your time, so it is definitely worthwhile to read these warnings and avoid them.

#1 Don't Compete, Support
Too many affiliate programs compete against their competitors which wastes money and puts affiliates out of business. However, if you are part of an affiliate program the more affiliates the better for getting more information and more money. One of the worst things to do is choose an affiliate program that believes in competing against other affiliates. Instead, choose an affiliate program that agrees with supporting and growing other affiliates to have a larger network and access to more affiliates.

#2 Little Reward
Another mistake people frequently make when choosing affiliate programs is choosing a program that offers little reward for the individual's hard work. Too many affiliate programs pay too little and as a result affiliates find it difficult to make the money they should be making. Look for an affiliate program that has a good pay rate for your work.

#3 Old Statistics, if Any
You want an affiliate program that offers good, solid, real time statistics, not old statistics or ones that are no longer valid. There are not many affiliate programs out there that provide the kind of statistics an affiliate manager needs, but do your best to find an affiliate program that offers the most.

#4 No Support
Too often affiliates find themselves waiting days for an answer to an e-mail and an important question for their business. You want an affiliate program that guarantees you support round the clock if possible or at least within 24 hours. If not, keep looking for an affiliate program that wants to help you help yourself.

#5 Fresh Ideas, Creatives
Many affiliate programs provide few ideas or creatives to their affiliates and so thousands of web pages end up with the same advertising. However, affiliate programs would have a better success rate if many different ads were made available so affiliates could alternate ads and place different ads on different sites, depending on the products sold.

Commit these five mistakes to memory so you know exactly what you are looking for in an affiliate program, as well as what to avoid. You will be much more successful and happier as well if you do not get caught in these traps!

About the Author:

Michael Turner reveals step-by-step how you can increase search engine traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com
Source: www.isnare.com

What are the Advantages of Joining an Affiliate Program?

2006-11-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

Every product or service that you can think of. Some have fully automated systems that sell high volumes of hard products all over the world. In case you don't know, "hard" products are those that you can touch...unlike an ebook or

downloadable web template. Many affiliate programs have several thousand affiliates and one or two of the bigger companies have over one million affiliates.

Everywhere you look you see affiliate program offers for every product or service that you can think of. Some have fully automated systems that sell high volumes of hard products all over the world. In case you don't know, "hard"
products are those that you can touch...unlike an ebook or downloadable web template. Many affiliate programs have several thousand affiliates and one or two of the bigger companies have over one million affiliates.

They provide a ready-made business. This is a very big plus for those people who want to earn some kind of living off the Internet but lack the knowledge or inclination to set up a business by themselves.

Commissions and rewards are generally good, and the more established programs offer a real chance of advancement to higher and better-paid levels.

Other affiliates are usually on hand to offer practical support.

What are the limitations?

You are restricted in your promotional activities due to the fact that you do not actually own the affiliate site they give you. You won't be able to put such things as banners, images, links, meta tags, etc. onto your page.
The URL of your affiliate page is often either too long or contains such awkward things as question marks, which many Search Engines will not index.

Any promotional ads or articles have probably already been used by thousands of other people and consequently may have lost its impact, making it more difficult to achieve sales or referrals.

If the program you have joined has not yet established itself (or in some cases even if it has), then you may encounter problems with payments owed to you not being honored. You also run the risk of low quality products or
sub-standard statistics that do not accurately record how many referrals or sales you have made.

You may be required to purchase a minimum quantity of the product on a regular basis before you start to qualify for commissions or even before you can become an affiliate.
You may not get the technical or affiliate support you might expect from the company. This may be due to inadequate staffing, or the company's negligence.

Other people in your downline do nothing to promote the program.

At least four of the above limitations can be overcome with a little time and effort. You could, for example, come up with fresher ads to promote the program (provided this is allowed).

If the company supplies the email addresses of people in your downline, then you could offer to help the less active members. Very often these people are passive not because they are lazy or apathetic but merely because they don't
know HOW to promote effectively! your guidance could mean the difference between no sales or referrals and healthy downlines and residual incomes.

As regards promoting your actual page, here are a couple of little tricks that should overcome a number of restrictions:

Cloak your Affiliate URL to stop hijackers Affiliate Masker While this will not help you to get listed on the major Search Engines, it will make your web page easier for prospects to remember and type into their browser's address bar.

Go to your affiliate page. Place your mouse pointer anywhere on the page and right click once. In the drop-down box choose "View Source". This will display the HTML for the page. Save this to your hard drive as a HTML document using
the "Save As" function. Upload the page to your web site.
If you don't have a web site then get some free web space from one of these:

http://www.tripod.com/
http://www.fortunecity.com/
http://www.hypermart.net/index.gsp
http://www.coolchat.com/
http://www.crosswinds.net/
http://www.htmlpublishing.com/
http://www.freehomepages.com/
http://www.pageproducer.com/

Submit your 'new' page to the Search Engines. You are also now able to place banner codes, links, images, testimonials, in fact anything you want onto these pages, because you are in control of the HTML. A word of caution, though. Don't change the actual HTML of your original affiliate page. Just put the other stuff, like banners etc, around it.

Making this "mirror page" of your affiliate page will dramatically improve your advertising options.

About the Author:

Jude Wright has been an Internet Marketer for three years. She has just created a product that will help other Internet Marketers keep all their marketing information in one database. Check it out at:
http://i-marketingorganizer.com/organizer.htm

Choosing the Best Affiliate Program

2006-11-29T15:25:00.000-08:00

Choosing the best affiliate program means that you are aware of what affiliate programs are and what their ultimate benefits and drawbacks are. To choose the best affiliate program, you will want to decide on one that has the most benefits with the least drawbacks. There are many affiliate programs available online, many of them which are not worth even reading about. Because of this fact, you will need to do your research, talk to other affiliate members, and be 100% sure about the type of affiliate program you are looking for. There are some really good programs available, you just need to be persistent, patient, and ask a lot of questions. The following suggestions will help you choose the best possible affiliate program for you.

>> Commission
Of course, if you are joining an affiliate program you are doing so for the commissions. There are affiliate programs available online that offer great commissions to their affiliates in order to keep them active and working hard. Then there are other programs that do not pay well, do not keep up with referrals, and basically cheat the affiliate out of hard earned money. Make sure you know exactly what kind of program you are getting involved with and that you will make good money for your time and effort.

>> Good Products
Another important aspect of the affiliate programs you are looking at are the products. You might see an affiliate program that has the equivalent of a mall with links to thousands of products. The thought might enter your head that more links equals more business, but in this scenario it is not necessarily true. Generally, the affiliate programs that recognize the most success sell one quality product that a large percentage of the population can use, need, afford, and will actually want. This is the best type of affiliate program to associate yourself with and what you should be looking for.

>> Experience
Experience is also important when it comes to affiliate programs. You want to work for an affiliate program that is settled in the market, that knows how to handle the business it is involved in as well as its employees, and is concerned with treating workers fairly and rewarding them for hard work. An experienced affiliate program knows what works and what doesn't, so don't be tempted to sign up for a brand new affiliate program just because you want to be one of the first people to join... this might not work to your advantage. It is very important to always do your research before jumping in!

About the Author:
Michael Turner reveals his foolproof way to increase website traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it free right now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com

How to Choose A Right Web Hosting Service?

2006-11-29T15:15:00.000-08:00

Indeed, choosing a right Web hosting service for your website is not an easy task especially when there are thousands of Web hosting providers all offering almost identical Web hosting packages. Therefore, it is important to know few major considerations even before you start your Web hosting search. Below are three major criteria for Web host seeker:

Web hosting features requirement

This is probably the most important consideration to start finding a host for your site. You need to decide the technical requirements for your website, this including:

a) Server platform and hardware requirements
If you plan to set up a website that uses programming environments such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic scripts, Cold Fusion or Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL database, in this case, you will need to find a Web hosting service that supports Windows platform such as Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers.

Likewise, if you plan to use programming languages such as Perl, CGI, SSI, PHP or mySQL database, then any Web hosting plans that support Unix/Linux platform should be sufficient to meet your hosting requirements. Once you have these server platform and hardware requirements in mind, you can decide the best Web hosting plans for your need. For more information, you can read "How to select a web server and server platform?"

b) Disk space & Bandwidth requirement
Here is another technical requirement that you need to consider before selecting a Web hosting plan, i.e. disk space and bandwidth. If you intend to publish a website that does not have a lot of contents (meaning, web pages), then the disk space requirement may not be a big concern to you. In general, a disk space with 200MB to 500MB should be enough to meet your hosting requirement. In contrast, if you plan to host a website with enormous amount of graphic pictures, mp3 or video files, then you should consider a Web hosting plan that provide huge disk space, for example, 500 MB to 1,000 MB.

Similarly, the bandwidth requirement will depend on your site traffic estimation. Obviously, a website that expect to attract high traffic will consume the monthly bandwidth allowance very fast. If so, you will need to find one Web hosting service that offer huge bandwidth with 40 GB to 100 GB per month. Depending upon your website requirement, choosing a Web hosting service that provide sufficient amount of disk space and bandwidth is crucial consideration to prevent paying extra costs in the future should you overuse the monthly disk space and bandwidth allowance.

c) Other hosting features
While the above requirements are utmost important, there are other hosting features that you have to consider too. Can Web hosting provider support video clips on your website, if you have? Is the Web hosting service compatible with Dreamweaver or FrontPage web authoring tool? Do you plan to set up a virtual store online? Can the host support the e-commerce features without adding extra cost to your monthly payments? On top of that, you may also want to find out the number of email accounts provided, number of FTP accounts, web statistic software (analyze your web traffic), type of control panel supported (manage your Web hosting account), database and scripting languages supported and etc.

Reliability and scalability

A first-class Web hosting provider offers reliable server uptime and fast Internet connection. You should only choose a Web hosting service that guarantee at least 99% server uptime with high-speed Internet backbones using at least OC3 (Optical Carrier) lines (155 Megabits per second) or above instead of T1 or T3 lines. A reliable Web hosting provider usually invests heavily on their data center infrastructure with high performance servers, high speed multiple backbones providers with fail-over redundancy, backup power generators and firewall software protection in place to ensure they meet the uptime guarantee specified in the terms of service.

Similarly, you should choose a Web hosting service with hardware facilities that designed for scalability, so that they can grow with your business. For example, if you need to increase more disk space, bandwidth or number of mySQL databases, you should be able to upgrade as needed without any problems.

Customer service and support

The last major consideration in choosing a Web hosting service is to find a Web hosting providers that offers excellent customer service and support. You should always search for a Web hosting provider that offers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week technical support that fielded with highly experience technicians, so that any Web hosting problems will be resolved within a reasonable amount of time. You may also want to consider to test how responsive is their customer support by sending few inquiry emails to the Web hosting provider. In general, any response in less than 24 hours is considered acceptable. It is a sign of poor customer support if they take more than one day to response.

In addition, a Web hosting provider with excellent support should also provide multiple support channels, such as toll-free phone support, 24/7 email support, live chat, online knowledgebase, Interactive flash tutorials and FAQ.
Above are few major considerations before you choose your Web hosting service. In addition, how long has the Web hosting provider in business and the number of customers that they currently have are also a good indication of the quality of their hosting products as well as the stability of the company. Even though cost of the Web hosting service is also important but it should not be your major consideration. Because the price of a Web hosting service has been declining over the years due to competition, as a result, the price of most of the Web hosting services offering quality hosting features has been converging to less than US$10 per month. If you can't afford less than $10 per month, you probably isn't in the online business for the long haul. Therefore, price should not be a major deciding factor.

On the other hand, it is more important to ensure the Web hosting service that you choose is able to meet your website hosting requirements, guarantee your website is always accessible with satisfying speed, provide scalability to grow and expand your website as well as offer excellent customer supports. Depending on your Web hosting requirement, you can take advantage of our site, Web hosting review http://www.lowest-price-web-hosting.com/ . Cheap Web hosting Review to find the recommended Web hosting services that can match the three major criteria above. Good luck to your search.

About the Author:
Andrew Loh is the owner of Web hosting services http://www.lowest-price-web-hosting.com/

11 Powerful Marketing Tips

2006-11-27T15:07:00.000-08:00

Tip 1: Your customers buy your product or service to feel a certain way after their purchase. Keep this in mind as you develop your ads, web pages and other sales tools. Use vivid word pictures to dramatize the pleasant feelings your customers experience when they use what you are selling. It intensifies their desire to have it and motivates them to buy now.

Tip 2: Continually test new advertising and marketing methods ..and old methods you never tried before. A good guideline to follow is to allocate 80 percent of your budget to proven promotions and 20 percent to testing new things. Most businesses using this formula keep growing regardless of changing market conditions and intense competition.

Tip 3: Reduce the size of your ads so you can run more ads for the same cost. Don't be surprised if your short ads generate a higher response than long ads - giving you a bigger return for your expense. One of the most effective ads I ever used was only 11 words.

Tip 4: Print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market. People read postcards when the message is brief. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your web site and generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost.

Tip 5: Active, stimulating words and phrases keep prospects interested in reading your sales copy. Look for dull passive words and phrases and replace them with active ones. For example, change a phrase like ...it's practical and inexpensive to ...it's fast, easy and you save $99.

Tip 6: After telling prospects what they gain when they buy your product or service, tell them what they lose if they do not buy it. Most people fear loss more than they desire gain. Customers want your product or service so they can enjoy the benefits it provides. But they will want it even more if you remind them of what they lose by not buying it.

Tip 7: You can eliminate any last minute hesitation prospective customers may have by announcing a pleasant surprise near the end of every selling procedure. For example, add an unexpected bonus to each transaction immediately before the final action that completes the sale.

Tip 8: You can boost your total sales volume and your average size sale at the same time by combining 2 or more related products or services into a Special Combination Package. Set the price lower than the cost of buying each item separately. This special deal will motivate both procrastinators and bargain hunters to buy now.

Tip 9: You always need to find new customers. But don't overlook the sales you can easily get from your existing customers. It's easier to get more business from them than it is to get any business from new prospects. Follow up with your existing customers to get more sales of the same product or to offer them additional products and services.

Tip 10: How would you react if you got a personal thank you from a business several days after you spent money with them? You'd feel good and probably want to do more business with them. Give that same feeling to your customers. They will reward you with more business - and a flood of referrals.

Tip 11: Convert your customers into publicity agents. Develop an incentive for them to tell associates and friends about the value of your products or services. An endorsement from them can produce sales you would never get with any amount of advertising.

How many of these 11 marketing tactics are you using? How many have you overlooked? You are losing sales if you don't use all of them.

About The Author:
Bob Leduc spent 20 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales. He just released a New Edition of his manual, How To Build Your Small Business Fast With Simple Postcards ...and launched *BizTips from Bob*, a newsletter to help small businesses grow and prosper. You'll find his low-cost marketing methods at: http://BobLeduc.com or call: 702-658-1707 After 10 AM Pacific Time/Las Vegas, NV.

3 Ways To Jumpstart Your Home-based Business

2006-11-26T16:07:00.000-08:00

When you put the total number of entrepreneurs together, they count as the biggest financial contributors to our nation’s wealth. If only politicians would give grants to finance small business start-ups, the economy’s growth could be hastened.

Knowing the obvious financial rewards and the important role to society of business owners, many individuals aspire to be entrepreneurs. The fact remains, however, that several business start-ups fail and never take-off from the ground because of one thing : the lack of adequate and sufficient knowledge on how to start a profitable business. In this article, I will attempt to give practical strategies on how to run a successful business start-up.

First: find opportunities in your own backyard. Look at the demand side by observing your neighborhood. It is good to assess the close-to-home demand for starters. Aside from familiarity with the area, familiarity with the customer will be an enormous advantage.

Your neighborhood is not strictly your home address. It can be any area that you may be familiar with. It can be the university vicinity. After all, a student spends more time in school vis-a-vis his home. Familiarity with the demand in the area will reveal these business opportunities.

Therefore, an aspiring entrepreneur would simply continue this statement:

” How I wish something like this was available in school while I was a student! And this is…”

Similarly, one could say about home:

” How I wish that something like this were available near the place where I stay! And this is….”

To cite an example: you are into baking cakes. Why not check if there is an opportunity to supply your local diners with your baked products? Find out if the neighborhood needs another supplier of baked goods. If there is no such demand in your familiar area, look for another area where your supply has its demand.

Statements like these indicate a desire for something that is not yet available in the area. This approach is based on one’s familiarity with the demand.

Secondly, choose an opportunity that brings out the best in you. Do not choose an opportunity purely because of its income potential. Income is a natural consequence of the entrepreneur’s passion as expressed in the enterprise set-up.

Nevertheless, before choosing the opportunity, spend sometime defining your personal vision, mission, and values. This is a key foundation of great entrepreneurs. They know what they want for themselves, (personal vision).

They know what they live for (personal mission). They know what they live by (personal values). These three items constitute the foundation of passion.

Equally important is doing a personal assessment. What are you good at? What are you not good at? In other words, you must know thyself. Great entrepreneurs know themselves very well.

Only when these are satisfactorily answered can you decide which opportunities are to be seized. It is noteworthy, however, that when opportunity-seeking is made, it is not pre-screened by personal wants and capabilities. Do not screen out opportunities just because you do not have the capability to do it. Seek and identify the opportunities that are present/available in your area. Thereafter, screen them against your personal vision, mission, and values. These screened opportunities are those that you can be passionate about. You will be passionate about it because it will serve as a vehicle for you to achieve your personal vision, mission and values.

After having decided which opportunity to pursue, seize it. Seize it very quickly since the windows of opportunity are open and but can close just as fast. Keep in mind that you are not the only person who is looking for opportunities to seize. Remember that there are others who have eyes, ears, and other senses to identify opportunities. Entrepreneurs seize with swiftness of the wind.

Lastly, use your personal assessment to guide you in determining how this opportunity can be seized quickly. If you have the capabilities to do it by yourself, then do not wait any further. Implement it at once. Additionally, if you do not have all the necessary capabilities to do, immediately identify, source, and mobilize them right away. Implement at once. Do not be big right away. Start small, relative to your resources and capabilities. When your business model works, there will be plenty of people willing to lend money to you. Implement at once.
People who wait for some body else to successfully operate the business before proceeding on their own are not entrepreneurs. They are investors and are not necessarily entrepreneurs.

Real entrepreneurs do not wait for somebody else to start moving. Real entrepreneurs are pioneering. They are entrepioneers.

About The Author:

Greg Montenegro is a 15 year veteran in international marketing. His firm has been exporting computer parts to Asia since 1992. For more information on how to start your online business: http://www.12homebasedbusiness.com

5 Steps To Successful Joint Ventures

2006-11-25T16:29:00.000-08:00

Most Internet Marketing related ezines have carried at least one article on Joint Ventures; probably many.

JV's are THE MOST preferred and fastest way to increase sales and cash flows.

It's no longer a secret!

Everyone knows a good JV is the master key to online success.

But... why many people are failing to use this master key? Why so many website owners are not able to make use of this powerful strategy?

Here are some reasons:-

1) Other marketers are NOT WAITING for your JV offer. Before sending your JV offer, make sure to address the question What's in it for the JV Partner?. Unless you give a compelling reason, most partners are not looking forward to your offer. No, it won't work that way...like, you offer one of your products for free and your partner will gladly endorse it to her list. No, it won't.

It takes time to craft an irresistible offer. The offer should be beneficial to your potential partner and her customers/subscribers.

Take it from me... I told you it takes time... but it's definitely possible.

2) Many JV offers are passed onto the recycle bin with even being read (I told you... they are NOT waiting)

Some leading marketers get about 200 JV proposals every week! May be more. Most of these JV offers doesn't catch the attention of the busy marketer.

Some are lost due to SPAM email filters.

Solution?

Follow-up is the key. If you consistently follow-up, your chances of getting the attention of your potential JV partner is very high. Usually a second email will get the response.

A mixed-mode follow-up is sure to get higher success rates. An initial email followed by another email reminder and a phone call should normally get you going.

3) Another strong de-motivating factor is NOT sending personalized JV offers. If your proposal does not speak directly to your partner, it's chances of succeeding are very thin.

That's why I told you earlier, it takes time to create your JV proposal. You need to visit your partner's website, subscribe to their newsletter, study their online content and read their publications and articles before you attempt to draft your proposal.

Your JV proposal should address your potential partner directly, using their name. Mentioning a few things about their website, products, ezines or articles in your offer will surely catch their attention.

4) JV partners are not your affiliates. Differentiate your resellers with your strategic JV partner. To drastically raise the success rate of your proposal, offer a higher commission than your affiliates.

For example, if you are offering a 50% commission for your affiliates, your JV partner should be offered 60% or more.

5) Targeting a large corporation for your JV is a surefire way to failure. First, try and do several JV's with businesses similar or smaller than your own and build a track record. Then you can approach bigger businesses with a record of your successes.

Large businesses have large problems everyday to tackle. They have struggled hard to build their enterprise. They have their own range of products to sell and keep their customers happy.

However, if you have a compelling story to tell, along with factual proof of your claims, it will definitely bring you windfall profits.

I'm not discouraging you to keep away from these giants. I'm just telling you the right way to approach.

You see friend, I've revealed to you some key tips on Joint Ventures. Now, it's up to you. Follow these rules and create a compelling offer and I'm sure you will succeed in making highly profitable Joint Ventures.

About The Author:
Copyright (C) 2004 Raam Anand With Raam's Joint Venture Manager, you could make 10.. 20.. even 30-times more money! Click to learn more about JV Manager: http://www.infoYOGIS.com/track.cgi?1

7 Keys to Running a Successful Business

2006-11-25T15:11:00.000-08:00

I have been in the dental industry for over 20 years and can proudly say I do have a highly successful business, also known as a practice. Over the years, I have learned many things that work in running a business and even more that do not. It is with this in mind that I share the following 7 keys to running a successful business. Regardless of your industry they can apply.

1. Have a vision

One of the most important aspects of running any business is to have a clear vision of what you want that business to be like. What do you want to be known for in the marketplace? What kind of clients do you desire? What level of service do you want to provide? Do you want to be “one among many” or do you want to be considered a leader in your industry?

By answering these and many other similar type questions, you will gain insight into the direction you can, and should, take your business.

2. Develop a plan that ties into the vision

Once you gain clarity on your vision, you must be willing to develop a plan. Far too often people have an idea of where they want their organization to be, but they fail to put together a usable plan. Take time to map out what needs to be done to achieve your outcomes.

3. Know your market

One of the most important aspects of running any type of business is to know whom your market is. You can’t be all things to all people. Contrary to what some would like to believe, not everyone is his or her market. There is a very astute saying in marketing, “If everyone is your market, then no one is your market.”

The clearer you are on who you are targeting the easier it will be to focus your efforts on reaching those individuals and/or companies.

4. Gain visibility within your market

Take a very focused approach to reaching your market. Just because you have determined who your market it, doesn’t mean you are done. You must now be willing to have a very focused approach to targeting your market. Whether that be through direct mail, advertising, newsletters, informational seminars or any number of methods, you have to be willing to keep your name in front of your market.

5. Get your team on board

This is probably one of the most crucial and yet, often most overlooked aspects of running a business. You have to make sure your team knows what is going on. Holding regular staff meetings as a means to keep people informed is a great way to gain the buy in of your team. Additionally, be open to ideas that may come from your team members.

It will be very difficult to achieve your long-term goals if your team members either don’t understand your vision or haven’t bought into it. When you hire people, make sure they understand what you are trying to achieve. Whether you are dealing with new members of the team or seasoned folks, everyone must be willing to be a part of the plan. When they are, you will have a much greater chance for success.

6. Be consistent

Running and marketing a business is an ongoing process. The greatest mistake people make in virtually any industry is they try something once and expect instant results. You must be in this for the long haul. Sure, with some of your marketing strategies you will get instant, or direct, response. However, with most approaches, it is more like the tortoise and the heir. In the short-term it looks like the heir is in the lead, but the reality is he is burning himself out and ends up losing to the tortoise who had a consistent and long-term vision.

7. Realize – you change lives

One of the things I most love about dentistry is I know I change lives. I recognize this beyond a shadow of a doubt. When my patients are able to obtain the smile they once only dreamed of because of what I did for them, I know I am doing my life’s work.

With most people, regardless of the industry you are in, in some way you do change lives. If you know that, your job is very rewarding.

Think about the end user of your product or service. What is it about what you provide that makes a difference for them? If you don’t know, ask your customers. You may be pleasantly surprised. It is in the answers you can become clearer and clearer as to your vision and the benefits you bring to others through the services you provide.

Copyright: © 2004 by Dr. Scott Kiser

Publishing Guidelines: You may publish my article in your newsletter, on your web site, or in your print publication provided you include the resource box at the end. Notification would be appreciated but is not required.

About The Author:
Dr. Scott Kiser has been practicing general dentistry in Salt Lake City, Utah for over 20 years. Dr. Kiser has used only mercury-free substances in his treatments since the mid 90’s and concentrates his practice in the areas of sedation dentistry and complete smile makeovers. Consumer Research Council of America selected him as Utah’s Top Cosmetic Dentist of 2003 - 04. Visit www.greatsmilesutah.com to sign up for a FREE monthly online newsletter or for more information on Dr. Kiser and all of his services.

Skiserdds@aol.com

7 Steps To Start Internet Bussiness

2006-11-24T22:18:00.000-08:00

First, I want to ask you a few questions. Would you like to have more free time by not working 40 hours a week? Are you looking to make good money using the Internet? Do you want to be financially independent?

If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions, then you are in for a treat. I am about to share with you the seven steps below.

Step One: Decide on one product or service to sell.

The people who have tried to make money on the Internet and failed have made at least one critical mistake – they started spending money on web sites, web hosts, software, etc. BEFORE they had a real product or service to sell.

The temptation of the Internet is that there is so much to choose from that you get confused and try too many things at once. I know because I went into business on the Internet with only a general idea of what I wanted to sell. I did not do my homework before investing any money; in about six weeks I had spent over $4,000 and thought I would be "raking in the cash". Boy was I wrong! What happened? I did not make a wise decision of what to sell.

So, how do you decide what is the best product or service for you to sell? (Notice I said "for you to sell"?) Not every person can do well selling any product they choose. If you want to get off to a good start, you need to apply the following rules.

Rule #1 – Choose a product or service that you already have some knowledge of. You don’t have to be an expert, but if you know something about your product or service, you can save yourself a lot of trouble. If you are knowledgeable about a product or service, you’re off to a good start because it enables you to make informed decisions about what software you need, methods of payment you should accept, how to design your web site, who is your target market, etc.

Rule #2 – Don’t choose your product or service because someone else tells you how great it is. Some people will tell you anything to get your money. I’m still waiting on a $49 refund for the book I ordered in April of 1998. Do your homework - check out the company. Do they give references? Do they have a guarantee? Do they really sell an actual product or service, or do they sell the idea of selling? Save your money by choosing a product based on your research, not a stranger’s claim.

Rule #3 – Choose your product because people want or need it, not because you like it. If you sell something that meets a need or solves a problem for people, you are well on your way to making money and realizing your dream! Marketing is a whole lot easier when people want what you have to sell. There are a lot of free and "low cost" opportunities out there, but very few of them meet a need or solve a problem. Always fit a product to a market; do not try to make a market for a product.

Rule #4 – Do the money math. You should have a markup of 3 to 5 times the actual cost of the product. You’ll have expenses to cover --such as web hosting, Internet access fees, credit card processing fees, phone bills, and more-- so you need to know if your sales will earn you enough to pay your bills and make a profit. Also included in the math is figuring your "break even" point. That is how many sales you need to make just to pay your expenses. If your monthly expenses are $300 and you make $30 profit per sale, then you need to make ten sales in a month just to pay your expenses or "break even". Every sale after that is money for you. (Here’s a tip – do not waste your time trying to make money selling a product for $5 - $10. You would have to make 15 to 20 sales A DAY just to make a living. That means you would have to have around 30,000 visitors a month to your web site!)

If you apply those four rules when choosing your product or service, you will be well on your way to being successful on the Internet.

Step Two: Determine your target market.

After choosing a product or service to offer, the next step is to determine your target market. Your target market is made up of those people who want or need your product or service.

Why is it important to know who your target market is? Because not everyone on the planet wants or needs what you are selling. It would be great if they all would buy just one of what you are selling; you’d be set for life! But, that isn’t going happen. So we have to make some plans so that the people who want or need what we’ve got can buy it from us.

Remember Rule #3 of Choosing Your Product of Service? It doesn’t matter how well you market it if no one wants or needs it. You need to ask yourself a few questions to get started in determining your target market.

First, who needs what you’re selling? Is it for men, women, or both? What age group will it appeal to most? What is their income level? Does their marital status matter?

Second, why do they need what you’re selling? Will it make them feel better physically or emotionally? Can your product or service improve their life in some way?

There are many more questions you can ask yourself to help determine your target market. You can also do your own survey by asking 12 - 15 of your friends or family to give you reasons why they would or would not buy what you have chosen to sell.

Another way to determine your target market is to look at similar products and services. Where are they advertising? What magazines, TV and radio stations or web sites do they advertise on? Are they all forms of media that are seen or heard by a certain age group or income level?

There is one more way to determine your target market if you are already making sales – take a survey of your customers. If you already have a customer base, you can design a short survey to give them. There is a bonus for you in this method because you can offer them a discount on their next purchase if they answer your survey. You get the information you need and make some extra sales while your customer gets your product or service at a discount! (Keep this idea in mind for use any time you need to fine tune your marketing or generate some extra income).

Step Three: Set up your website.

Now that you have chosen a product or service that is needed and you know who needs or wants what you are selling it’s time to design your web site.

If you only learn one thing from this section, I hope it’s this: Design your whole web site with the sales process in mind! (Did you get that? I’ll say it again.) Design your whole web site with the sales process in mind. Internet marketing is highly competitive. You have got to grab hold of that visitor and lead them through the buying process before they "click away".

How can you do this? Use the old advertising formula of AIDA+C.

Attention

Interest

Desire

Action

Close

I know it may sound too simple, but one way to spend too much money on your Internet business is by getting too fancy. You don’t need a 200 page web site with animations, video and sound to sell on the Internet. A very successful Internet marketing web site, The SUCCESS Arsenal!ä , has a simple design; what makes it so successful is that it follows the AIDA+C formula. (I encourage you to check it out to see what I mean).

Let me explain the AIDA+C formula and how to use it to your benefit.

Attention. You MUST get your visitor’s attention. You only have about 10 seconds to grab their attention. When someone visits your site, you don’t know where he or she came from or why. They may have found your site in a search engine, they could have clicked on a link from some other site, maybe it was a classified ad you placed or an e-mail you sent. You don’t know exactly what caused them to visit your site, but you should know this: they have at least a tiny bit of interest in what your site is about or they wouldn’t have clicked to go there. The point is that you only have a few seconds to get their attention before they "click away" and may never return. So get their attention.

Interest. Once you’ve got them to stick around a few seconds longer, you need to build interest. Tell them about the common problem you can solve or the need they have that your web site can meet; but don’t offer the solution yet. You want to let them know that you understand their problem or need and that you’ve been there too. Identify with their feelings and emotions. You want them to know that you care about these things because you experience them as well. That builds interest because they say to themselves, "This person really knows where I’m at and they care. Maybe they can help me".

Desire. Now that you have them staying for a while to look at your site, you want to turn their interest into desire. They know they have a need or a want, a problem to be solved. It’s up to you to create in them the desire for your product or service that meets their need or solves their problem. You do that by showing them the benefits of what you offer. Don’t tell them about all the features of your product or service; tell them how those features enhance their life. For example, most cars have anti-lock brakes as a feature. So why would you buy a car just because their ad tells you the car has anti-lock brakes? Instead, the ad tells you about how safe your family will be while traveling in the car because it has anti-lock brakes. They sell the benefit, not the feature, of anti-lock brakes. (Do you see how important this part of the process is?) Sell the benefits not the features of your product or service.

Action. It is decision time in the sales process. You have grabbed their attention, built interest and then created desire for your product or service. Now its time for them to take action. You need them to take an action for this whole process to work; otherwise, you’ve just wasted your time and money. If you have followed the first three parts of the AIDA+C formula and applied them correctly, your visitor is ready to become a customer. You must tell them what to do. Don’t ever take it for granted that they know what to do next; tell them. Make it easy by providing a link that says, "Click here to order" or a button with directions on it. Be sure to make it "fool-proof" so you don’t miss any sales because of confusion. It is important that you take your visitor by the hand and lead them through the sales process in an easy to understand way so they know what to do when the time comes to make the purchase.

Close. The close is where you take away all the objections they have so they buy your product. A great way to do this is by offering a guarantee. Take away all the risk for them to buy. People think they can’t give a guarantee, especially a money-back guarantee, because they will lose money. The truth is you can’t afford not to offer a money-back guarantee. All but one of the products I now sell offer a money-back guarantee (one even offers a triple–your-money-back guarantee). Another tactic is to "sweeten the deal" with bonuses. You must create so much value in your offer that the price is a bargain. Give them a free book or report. Give them extra service for acting now. You also must ask for the sale again and again.

Here are a few more tips for designing your web site.

Do your best to make your pages load quickly. Keep the graphics to a minimum. Only include pictures that are necessary or at least make them small. Have you ever surfed to a page and clicked away because it loaded too slowly? It happens all the time. Don’t let it happen to you.

Keep the navigation simple. Make it easy for your visitors to find your information. You want them to stay around a while and you want them to come back. If you make it easy to navigate your site, your visitors will find what you have to tell them.

Make good use of colors. Pay attention to your background colors and text color combinations. Don’t pick them because they impress you; pick color combinations that make it easy on the eyes to read. You want your visitors to know what you offer.

Keep it organized. It’s not a good idea to try to put everything on the first page. Create pages for different products or services so your customers don’t get confused. Remember they don’t know all your stuff as well as you.

Offer substance. Put useful material on your site. Offer free information or helpful tips about the use of your products or services. You build trust when you give good free advice. Building trust turns visitors into customers.

Lead them through the buying decision. You must write so that you take your visitor by the hand and "walk" them through the thought process. Tell them how your product will help them, how it will improve their life, solve their problem. If you do not, you will not make money.

Step Four: Determine your budget.

If you’re going to succeed in any business, you’ve got to watch your money! The reason most new businesses fail is not because they aren’t making any sales, it’s because they spent more than they took in. So, how can you avoid failing in your first year? Read on.

There are two commandments you must follow if you want to become successful.

Commandment #1 – Thou shall only purchase what is absolutely necessary to conduct your business.

You don’t need all the fancy software that’s available or the $50 a month marketing course. The computer you have works fine. Your kitchen table can serve as your desk. You need to make the commitment to yourself that you will only purchase what is needed only after checking prices.

Commandment #2 – Thou shall establish a cash reserve. Promise me that you’ll put 10% of what you make into a savings account for your business. If you do this, you can ride out the lean times in your business.

I know this from personal experience. The first business I started in 1988 (and is still going today) deals with material that costs around $2000 per order. It would have been foolish to think that we would never have a down year. So we put money aside, at times the amount grew to where we could pay nice Christmas bonuses at the end of the year, and there have been, and will be, other times that the money was needed. If the money had not been set aside my first business would be "out of business".

Another area of watching your money is advertising. You must weigh the cost against how many people you can reach. You will pay more for highly targeted advertising verses general ads; however, the better you are at targeting your ads, the better your sales will be.

The last area to consider is how much you will pay yourself. There are very few people who have been able to start a business and pay themselves enough to live on as soon as they started in business. It just doesn’t work that way. Pay the business first so you can build up that cash reserve and avoid financial difficulty; then you can begin to pay yourself.

I can’t tell you exact amounts or percentages you should use. Those figures will vary from business to business. You need to sit down and figure up what your product costs, what are your monthly expenses including web hosting, phone, ISP service, banking fees, credit card fees, etc. Don’t leave anything out. You will need these figures for the next step.

Step Five: Develop your marketing strategy.

Here’s information that will help you get to where you want to be. It always helps to know where you are going before you start the trip. That is what I’m about to share with you.

If you did your math from rule #4 of Section 1 (If you didn’t, shame on you. Go back and do your homework if you want to succeed.), you know how many sales you need to make from your web site to break even. For example, let’s say you make $30 per sale and your monthly expenses are $300. On top of that, you want to make $2400 a month for your salary. That means you need to bring in $2700 every month to reach your goal ($300 + $2400 = $2700).

In order to make that $2700, you need to make 90 sales each month ($2700 ¸ $30 = 90). Are you with me so far? If you don’t grasp this, you will find it very hard to make a living from the Internet, much less make a fortune.

Here’s where the science of marketing plugs in. Follow along closely. Take your time, because this will make or break you.

You need 90 sales to make your $2700. If 1 out of every 100 people that visit your web site purchase your product, then you need to generate 9000 visits every month. Now 9000 visits a month comes out to only 300 a day (on average). The catch is that not everyone who reads your ad or sees your banner clicks through to your web site.

Different forms of promotion generate different percentages of traffic. Banners usually generate a 2% click through if they are good. Some people claim to have click-through rates as high as 12%. If your banner gets 2% of the people who see it to visit your site, then you need to get your banner displayed 15,000 times a day. That’s quite a few banner impressions every day. You will have to find a few high traffic sites to purchase banner ads on. That will cost you quite a bit of money.

Another form of advertising is e-zines. There are a large number of e-mail newsletters that you can purchase ads in. They are highly targeted and produce quite well. You can sponsor an issue, which will put your ad at the top or even allow you a private mailing to the entire list of subscribers. For about $30 you can place your ad in a newsletter with a subscriber list of 100,000 or more! I have seen some that will mail your sales letter to their entire list for $100. You can reach 100,000 prospects for very little money. If you study and apply yourself, you can write a sales letter that generates a 10% response rate. That will get you 10,000 visitors to your site and, if 1 out of every 100 visitors buy, then you can make 100 sales. That’s 10 more than you needed to make your goal of $2700.

Be aware that no one can promise results. You will have to do like other successful marketers and test, test, TEST. Try different ads, sales letters, headlines, price points, guarantees, etc. Recently I ran a test with a sales letter I wrote to promote one of my web sites. I e-mailed it to 978 people on one of my lists. I had ten people sign-up as Affiliates. (One . . . made a purchase) That’s only a 1% response rate – not as good as I had hoped. I will continue to make changes in my sales letter to see if I can increase the response rate. A little later, I’ll share with you how you can learn to generate the traffic to reach your income goals.

Step Six: Take action.

Here’s where most Internet marketers fail. They buy the courses and the software. They subscribe to the opt-in lists. But they never do a thing with it! Oh, they may start trying to make money, but then they get tired and frustrated. They throw up their hands and quit and tell everyone that you can’t make money on the Internet. The truth is they could have made money if they had taken action with the right tools and knowledge.

Step Seven: Stick to your plan.

You have heard the saying, "Plan your work and work your plan" (if not you have now). If you want to make a living, you need to have a plan to follow. Sometimes it’s not telling people what to do that helps them, but telling them what not to do. Do not keep switching products every few weeks. Choose one that has a market, create a web site that leads visitors through the buying process and market it! That may be oversimplifying the process a little, but you get the picture.

Here’s what I do. I keep a binder where I write ideas for products or sales promotions, etc. I read through it regularly to keep me motivated and to keep my creative thinking going. I tend to forget things (maybe you don’t, but I do); by writing them down, I have them all together to remind me. A binder or notebook is a great place to do your math so you know how many visitors you need to make your financial goals.

Make a plan and stick to it. There may be times it needs to be changed a little. Not everything works; so you make adjustments as you go. Don’t think you can lay it all out on paper and it will work perfect.

Ultimate Online Succes

2006-11-24T19:27:00.000-08:00

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that! No I’m not crazy. I have just been around the block a few times and I know what works and what doesn’t.

If you are of the opinion that spending a lifetime trying to get a good search engine ranking is the only way to achieve a high level of success on the Internet.

If you are tired reading about “revolutionary” or “secret” techniques that have been nothing but a colossal waste of your time, energy and money.

This isn’t manual by any stretch of the imagination. And although I may point you to various resources that will be helpful in your quest for online succes.

Let’s get started!

Step #1 AWARENESS

OK. We all know thet the Internet is a big place and growing at an alarming rate day by day. The number one problem facing any business (online and off) is awareness.

Awareness in the Internet world means getting people to your site or generating “hits”. The more people (visitors) you get to your site the more you are going to sell and the more succesful you are going to be.

OK. So enough about what you alredy know. How exactly then, in such a vast community does the little guy create awareness?

Well, the short answer is that there are a literally thousands of ways you can try and create awareness but as someone who as a tried just about every trick in the book there are only a few that actually work. Not only do they work, they work amazingly well.

Writing For Others

If you want to create a stampede of visitors to your website then writing for other people has got to be one of the best, if not the top method of doing just that.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of ezines and newsletters out there servicing millions of subscribers. Some good, some not so good. However, there is one thing all of them have in common.

They all need regular content!

When you write articles for ezines you can attach what’s known as a resource box to the bottom of the article. The resource box usually has a bit about the author (you) an a link to your websit. Now if you produce an article that people like – you can guarantee they are going to come to your website to check out what you have an offer!

Providing you write with a sincere desire to teach or inform you will have no problem getiing your articles accepted into hundreds if not thousands of ezines.

An example of a resource box:

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Gavin Fawcett is the author of three best selling titles:

Power Newsletter – A complete Guide, 12 Steps to Winning Press Releases that Get Results and, Breakthrough Strategies to Power Promote Your Website.

He is also the mastermind behind the eKitBook:

http://www.ekitbook.com

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Now you might be thinking, I’ve never written in my life or I don’t know my superlatives from my adjectives – frankly none of the matters. Writing for ezines is quite different from writing a book or an article for a print magazine.

Writing for ezines and newsletters is easy. If you have a subject that you are interested in or you can comment on, then you can write an ezine article about it. Of course, the article has to have some merits before it is accepted.

Writing an Ebook

Ever heard of viral marketing? Well its all about multiplying your marketing efforts by doing little or nothing on your part. Ebooks are the number one example of viral marketing.

Here’s how it works. You put together an ebook filled with useful information with a desire to inform and teach others. Your ebook is packed with helpful tips, easy to read articles, useful resources and a bit about yourself and your website somewhere along the way.

Writing Press Releases

Before you start thinking that press releases (or news releases as they are sometimes known as) are a pointless way creating awareness, let me tell you from experience they are not!

It’s true that over 99% of press releases get rejected, but a little known fact is that they are rejected simply because they are either poorly put together or just not “newsworthy’.

Writing effective press releases thet get noticed by editors and journalist is a skill and a skill that, with a little effort and knowledge, can be learned.

Step #2 BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS

What has all this to do with building realtionships I hear you ask?Well, if you are wanting to succed online you have to know how to “pull” sales rather than “push” sales. In order to do that effectively you have to build real and solid relationship with your prospects.

There is one way which all and I mean ALL the big successes on the Internet build solid relationships with their prospects. It’s target, cost virtually nothing, and if done correctly can turn thousands of prospects into your next customers without having to entertain hard (push) selling.

So how does this help you succed online? Well, it’s all about pulling people into what you have to offer. If you provide the right information to the right people and you build relationships people will buy from you, guaranteed.

People ALWAYS buy from those they trust and like and seldom buy from those who claim that they are “the best” or “the biggest” or those who just won’t stop push, push, pushin’ for a sale.

Step #3 USING EMAIL

The only way you can utilize email marketing – rather than SPAM – is through permission based marketing. That is to stay emailing to people who have specially agreed or “opted-in” to receive information from you.

But how to you put together an effective email marketing campaign? Well, let’s look at what makes a good email.

The subject Line (Headline)

The fact is, the subject line is the single most important part of your email. It is the part of the email that will either get opened or trashed. You want to get your audience to open your emails every time and to do that you need to create first class subject lines.

Body (main part of your email)

When your email is opened, the first paragraph must get to the point right away. Even though they have opened your email, they are still hovering over the delete button! Keep your paragraphs short and to the point and use simple, clear language. You may have heard it before, but talk benefits not features. Your reader will always be asking what’s in it for me? Give them that and they will do as you ask – which leads us to the closing part of the email.

A Call for Action

The mistake many amateurs make is to just sign off and maybe attach a link to their website at the end of the email.

You’ve got to know what you want the reader to do! What are you hoping to achieve or what do you want from the reader. If you want them to come to your website to find out more about your offer then say that! Just come out with it.

“For further information on how to take advantage on these and many other discounted offers visit http://www.yourname.com/today!”

A call for action is simply asking your reader to do something.

Email is the biggest, fastest, easiest, cheapest way to reach thousands of prospects. Just remember the three points above and make sure your emails are formatted correctly.

Step #4 AUTOMATION

Anyone who is familiar with sales will know that in order to get the sale, you have to follow up, follow up, follow up and follow up again. The only trouble – in the off-line world at least, it takes entire sales teams to do this effectively! For those of us doing business online budgets are some what less flexible.

So what is an autoresponder?

Simply they are a means of getting information to a prospect (or anyone for that matter)automatically. It is prewritten email that is sent out automatically to sender.

For example say your autoresponder address was freeinfo@yourname.com. If you sent an email to that address the autoresponder would sent an email to that address the autoresponder would sent you the pre written email back to you in a matter of seconds – rather like a fax on demand system!

To follow up with prospects you would use a sequential autoresponder. All this means is that instead of just sending one pre-written piece of information to the sender, the autoresponder will send out a number of emails over the course of 2, 3, 4 or however many days you stipulate.

Essentially this means you can follow up with an unlimited number of potential customers until they eventually buy from you! Leaving you to concentrate on marketing and building your business!

There are satcks of places that offer autoresponder services – you may even have the facility with your webhost to send auotresponders. Here are a few recommended services you can check out in any event.

http://www.freeautoresponders.net/

http://www.aweber.com

http://www.getresponse.com/

http://www.autobots.net/

http://www.autoresponders.com/

http://www.myreply.com/

http://www.autocontacter.com/

http://www.databack.com/

http://www.followupexpress.com/

http://www.ultimateexpress.com/

Step #5 KNOWING WHAT WORKS

This last step isn’t about technique or strategy, it is about experience. Only with experience and experimenting will you be able to see for yourself what works and what doesn’t. So many will give up at the first hurdle or beat something to death when it clearly isn’t working. Keep experimenting, and if something isn’t working for goodness sake STOP and try something else. Do that and will guarantee success online and you will reach your goals much, much quicker.

Some methods you should consider:

To be popular:

If you don’t already know, obsessing about meta tags and the like are not going to get you high rankings in the search engines alone. They are an important part of helping to at least get your website indexed, but they won’t get you the number one spot.

Most of the major search engines (if not all of them) will base your ranking on how “popular” your website appears to be. This is usuallly determined by how many links are coming into your site.

Remember – the more links you have coming into your site the higher your search engine ranking.

Affiliate programs

Starting your own affiliate program is probably one of the few (and rare) methods that can increase your sales many times over, without you hardly having to lift a finger! The idea is that you offer all visitors the opportunity to sign up to your free affiliate program. Once they sign upthey are given a unique url (a link to your website) that they can use to refer other people to your website.

Those who click on the unique url will be taken to your website – you will know that visitor was referred by one of your affiliates and you pay the affiliate a percentage of any sales that are generated.

About the Author:

Gavin Fawcett has just created some products that will help other Internet Marketers to be success. Check it out at: http://www.ekitbox.com