Setting up Your Own Affiliate Program (part one)

This week we will start the first of a two part series onstarting your own affiliate program. Joining an affiliate program is a neat way to make money from your users. Butjust as you can join someone else’s affiliate program, soyou can set up your own program and invite webmasters tosign up.

So…what would that bring you? The same as you’re bringingyour affiliate partners: deals. Every time someone sends youa user who gives you money, you give a portion of that moneyto your affiliate. It’s an easy way to generate traffic andearn cash.

And you don’t need to be a programming genius to set up anaffiliate program. There are a whole bunch of companies outthere that offer entire affiliate kits right off the shelf.

Ultimate Affiliate lets you run a fully featured affiliateprogram from your website. It integrates with virtuallyevery payment method, awards down-line commissions, and canhandle high-traffic websites. You can edit the sign-up formto match the "look and feel” of your site as well as deletesome of the optional fields. The administration area allowsyou to edit affiliates and commissions, create printablereports of money due, export the data to a text file, viewthe traffic through your affiliate program, and much more.Your affiliates can log in at any time and see their trafficand commission statistics as well as change theirinformation and get links and banner code.

Once the program is set up you'll only need to log in once amonth to print out a list of the affiliates, theiraddresses, and the money owed. You can do this quarterly ifyou wish. You can export the payments owed to a text file inPayPal's "mass pay" format and then just upload it to yourPayPal account to pay everyone automatically. Or, you cansimply write your own checks. If you have to pay a lot ofcommissions, there is a check printing service calledqchex.com. Upload the file and they’ll print and mail yourchecks for a fee of about 80 cents each.

Alternatively, Locked Area Pro is an advanced member's areamanagement system offering very good security that’s easy tomaintain. The system provides a huge list of useful featuresincluding automated sign-up, user account validation,optional random password generation and an administrationapprove/decline account feature. It also comes with anextremely powerful control panel with an onlineadministration of users, backup, and full customizationfacilities from the browser. A statistics system is also inbuilt in. What more could you want?5.3 Cooking off the Spam

Any time you run a program where your affiliates rely onother signups to generate profits, you will eventually havea problem with spam. One of your affiliates will inevitablyget it into their head to blitz the Web with unwantedgarbage.

When this happens you need to be ready to takeaction—otherwise it will cost you! Your Internet company canboot you off your server and you can find yourselfblacklisted. Not good for business. If you get an email fromsomeone claiming they received spam with your URL, then takeit as an early warning. I am not advising you to immediatelyterminate the affiliate’s account, but be sure to contactthem to follow up on the complaint. Let your affiliate knowyou received a complaint and advise them to remove thisperson from their list.

If you only get one or two complaints, it’s probably notspam—the complainants might simply have signed up for anemail list and forgotten all about it. You will know whenone of your affiliates is spamming, because you will getanywhere from 10 to 100 complaints in the same day allregarding the same URL. The best thing to do in this case isto immediately terminate or disable the account of theaffiliate URL that was spammed.

This concludes the first installment of my two part serieson starting your own affiliate program. Stay tuned formore.

Creating effective Ads

Today’s article deals with a subject that we all need toread, study and understand…how to create an EFFECTIVE ad.
Online advertising on the Internet leaves a lot to bedesired. We have ads that emulate Windows-warning boxes. Wehave pop-ups and pop-unders. All of these are developed withthe intent to make people notice them. However, most of themonly end up irritating them. Advertisers, especially thosewith small budgets, can't afford to waste money onineffective buys. In order to optimize your advertisingbuys, you need to concentrate on improving your creative.
Here are some tips that might help:
Step 1: Define clear goals of your advertising campaign
The most important aspect of any advertising campaign is tohave a clear objective in mind. You may be targeting aspecific group of people, your initial aim may be to targetat least 1000 internet surfers and so on and so forth. Havea well defined, clear purpose.
Step 2: Identify the most effective sites for achieving yourgoals
Sites that are most relevant to your product or servicewill, more than likely, be your best bet; but also considerlarger sites or networks that can target the audience you'retrying to reach. They can be very cost-effective. If youhave multiple products or services that appeal to varioustarget markets, you'll have to consider sites that reach allthose various segments.
Step 3: Craft your message to fit the needs of the audienceyou're targeting
This comes down to understanding the audience of the sitesyou're advertising on. The message you use on a technologysite to appeal to technologically savvy customers won't havethe same appeal for visitors on a small-business site. Focusyour campaign.
Step 4: Content of your Ad
Pay particular attention to the content of the Ad. Thecontent should be such that it clearly distinguishes yourproduct or service from your competitors’. Have a catchyheadline. The headline is probably the most important partof the Ad – It is the customer puller.
Step 5: Formulate the specific promotional messages thatcorrespond to your goals
The promotional messages should concentrate on the majorselling points of your product or service and have a strongcall-to-action.
Step 6: Make the desired action clearly visible
This certainly doesn't mean the desired action shouldnecessarily blink, bounce or do flips, but it should bevisible within an accepted format for the media you'reusing. In the case of the Internet, underlined text links,"click here" text entry boxes, and pull-down menus are allways you can make the desired action clearly visible.
Step 7: Design the ad so it looks like it belongs on thesites where you're advertising
For instance, you may want to use the site's font faces inyour text, color schemes in your background, font colorchoices overall, and emulate images where appropriate. Tryto conform to the environment so potential customersvisiting the site don't gasp in shock when they see your ad.
Step 8: Produce multiple versions of each ad
Create three or four versions of each ad, changing thepromotional message, call-to-action, font faces and colorschemes. This is especially important if you're doing pricetesting or gauging reaction to specific promotions. Bysplitting your advertising buy among the various versions ofyour creative, you can then start to optimize your buy basedon the message that works best.
With these tips, you will not only be able to create an ad,but you will be able to create an effective ad that doeswhat it is supposed to do – sell your products and services.
Talk to you soon!

Advertising in newsletters

We discussed earlier the advantages of having advertising
space in your newsletters. In this article we will discuss
advertising in other companies’ newsletters and how it can
be as equally beneficial.

By advertising in other newsletters, you can reach an
audience which is highly targeted and cost effective.
Moreover, you can never be accused of spamming as all the
recipients have subscribed to the newsletter. There are so
many newsletters out there covering so many different topics
that it's easy to find highly targeted ones to advertise in.
So if you've matched the newsletter to the product you're
selling, you've reached your target audience to a tee.

Almost all newsletters are archived, thousands of people
read these archives, and your ad will be seen by these
people at no extra cost. This can bring in exposure and
extra sales on a long term basis. Besides, newsletter
publishers may have already developed a trust between
themselves and their readers. Just by placing your ad in the
newsletter, it's more likely to be read because it appears
in a publication they like and trust.

Newsletter advertising is not only effective, it's cheap as
well. A 5 line ad in a newsletter that goes to 3000 people
will cost you between $5 and $25 per issue. With so little
risk involved, this is definitely worth it.

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Buying Ads in Other Newsletters
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Just as you can sell advertising, you can also buy
advertising in newsletters. You can use those ads to promote
your business or to invite people who read newsletters to
read your own.

Again, you have to pick your partners carefully. There’s no
point just picking a newsletter with the cheapest rates; you
want to make sure you choose an outlet that appeals to the
same buyers as you. You also need to think about where your
ad is going to be placed. In general, the higher the
position the better. And the more the merrier too. Don’t
expect a huge response from a single ad. It’s always best to
think of advertising in terms of a campaign. You’ll get a
better deal—and better results—if you reserve an advertising
slot for four or five issues than if you buy them one at a
time.

That’s it for today. I hope you found this article
useful. Until next time…take care of yourself.

Top Search Engines

Ok, so you may know how the search engines work and you may
know that you need to be listed by them, but do you know
which engines get you more bang for the buck? In this
week’s installment, we will review the top search engines on
the Internet today.

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Google

Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several
years. They have gone from beta testing, to becoming the
Internet's largest index of web pages in a very short time.
Their spider, affectionately named "Googlebot", crawls the
web and provides updates to Google's index about once a
month.

Google.com began as an academic search engine. Google, by
far, has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returned
from a result, probably one of the main reasons it has
become so popular over the years. Google has several methods
which determine page rank in returned searches.

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Yahoo

Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and portals on
the Internet today, and the site went live in August of
1994. Yahoo! is a 100% human edited directory, and provides
secondary search results using Google.

Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators around,
as far as web directories and search engines go.
Unfortunately, however, it is also one of the most difficult
to get listed in, unless of course you pay to submit your
site. Even if you pay it doesn't guarantee you will get
listed.

Either way, if you suggest a URL, it is "reviewed" by a
Yahoo! editor, and if approved will appear in the next index
update.

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AltaVista

Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spider
named 'scooter' accessing their pages. Scooter used to be
AltaVista's robot. However, since the Feb 2001 site update,
a newer form of Scooter is now crawling the web. Whichever
spider AltaVista uses, it is one of the largest search
engines on the net today, next to Google.

It will usually take several months for AltaVista to index
your entire site, although the past few months scooter
hasn't been deep crawling too well. Unlike Google, AltaVista
will only crawl and index 1 link deep, so it takes a good
amount of time to index your site depending on how large
your site is.

AltaVista gets most of its results from its own index,
however they do pull the top 5 results of each search from
Overture (formerly Goto).

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Inktomi

Inktomi's popularity grew several years ago as they powered
the secondary search database that had driven Yahoo. Since
then, Yahoo as switched to using Google as their secondary
search and backend database, however Inktomi is just as
popular now, as they were several years ago, if not more so.
Their spiders are named "Slurp", and different versions of
Slurp crawls the web many different times throughout the
month, as Inktomi powers many sites search results. There
isn't much more to Inktomi then that. Slurp puts heavy
weight on Title and description tags, and will rarely deep
crawl a site. Slurp usually only spider’s pages that are
submitted to its index.

Inktomi provides results to a number of sites. Some of these
are America Online, MSN, Hotbot, Looksmart, About, Goto,
CNet, Geocities, NBCi, ICQ and many more.

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Lycos

Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the Internet
today, next to Altavista and Yahoo. Their spider, named
"T-Rex", crawls the web and provides updates to the Lycos
index from time to time. The FAST crawler provides results
for Lycos in addition to its own database.

The Lycos crawler does not weigh META tags to heavily,
instead it relies on its own ranking algorithm to rank pages
returned in results. The URL, META title, text headings, and
word frequency are just a few of the methods Lycos uses to
rank pages. Lycos does support pages with Frame content.
However, any page that isn't at least 75 words in content is
not indexed.

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Excite

Excite has been around the web for many years now. Much more
of a portal than just simply a search engine, Excite used to
be a fairly popular search engine, until companies such as
Google seemed to have dominated the search engine market. As
of recently, Excite no longer accepts submissions of URL's,
and appears to no longer spider. To get into the Excite
search results, you need to be either listed with Overture
or Inktomi.

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Looksmart

Getting a listed with Looksmart could mean getting a good
amount of traffic to your site. Looksmart's results appear
in many search engines, including AltaVista, MSN, CNN, and
many others.

Looksmart has two options to submit your site. If your site
is generally non-business related, you can submit your site
to Zeal (Looksmart's sister site ), or if you are a
business, you can pay a fee to have your site listed. Either
method will get you listed in Looksmart and its partner
sites if you are approved.

Once you have submitted your site, and it is approved for
listing it will take up to about 7 days for your site to be
listed on Looksmart and its partner sites.

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AOL Search

America Online signed a multiyear pact with Google for Web
search results and accompanying ad-sponsored links, ending
relationships with pay-for-performance service Overture
Services and Inktomi, its algorithmic search provider of
nearly three years


Take some time to register with these search engines as soon
as possible and watch the traffic grow.

Banners

In this article we will discuss the ins and outs of banner
ads. Are they worth your advertising dollars or are they a
thing of the past?

When the Web first started, banners were all the rage.
Today, they’re pretty much passé. They’re no longer a
novelty and unless they’re super-clever, users pretty much
ignore them. Conversion rates have dropped through the floor
and many advertisers have found other ways to push their
products.

And yet, every website still contains a whopping great
banner ad splashed along the top or running up the side. In
part, that’s because they’ve become more sophisticated with
better targeting and improved graphics. But in practice,
banner ads tend to be used for one of two reasons: as a
method of gaining/ giving users through an affiliate
program; or as a way of generating revenue—or
traffic—through paid advertising.

Both these methods work to some extent, but the key is
always to make sure the economics make sense. We’ll look
closely at the math in this chapter, but before we go on to
talk about the math of banner ads—and how to tell whether
your banner campaign is worthwhile—let’s just take a look at
the terms involved. You’re going to see these words whenever
you join an affiliate program or take part in any other kind
of online marketing scheme. You should definitely be
familiar with them.
Banner Glossary

* Banner Ad — A graphic ad linked to an advertiser’s
website. These usually run across the top of the page but
can also run up the page (“skyscrapers”). Banners are
usually limited by size.
* Banner Views —The number of times a banner is seen by
users. This is usually the same as "page views," but
counts the number of times the banner is actually
downloaded rather than the number of times the page is
downloaded. Some users click away before the banner
finishes loading.
* Clicks/ Click Throughs — Banners are operated by clicking
the cursor over them. Not too surprisingly these responses
are called “clicks” or “click throughs.”
* Click Through Rate (CTR) — The percentage of users who see
the banner and click on it.
* Conversion Rate —The percentage of people who visit your
site and actually give you money. The higher the better!
* Cookies — Small files placed on a user’s computer. They’re
used for all sorts of reasons and by all sorts of sites.
Banner ads use them to make sure the user hasn’t seen the
banner recently, which banner brought them to the
advertiser’s site, and even which adverts they’ve seen
recently.
* CPM — "Cost Per Mille." The amount you pay for every
thousand times a banner is shown—the usual way of charging
for banners.
* Hits — The number of times a server receives a request for
a Web page or an image. Not a great way to measure
interest. One page can have lots of images and get lots of
hits, even if it’s only seen once. Often, people will say
"hits" when they really mean "page views" or
"impressions."
* Page Impressions or Page Views —The number of times a Web
page has been requested by the server. Much more accurate
than hits: each view is a potential customer looking at a
page of your site. But not necessarily a different
customer...
* Unique Users — The people who download a Web page,
counted by IP address. You want to bring lots of users to
your site so that you can create a broad customer base.
The same user clicking on a banner a dozen times could
cost you money without increasing your sales. Most
reputable sites will check the IP address of the person
clicking on a link and only count it once in a 24-hour
period. If a site doesn’t do this, don’t advertise with
them.

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Banner Economics
************************************************************

Business online, like business offline, always boils down to
math: the difference between cost and revenue. If your
banner campaign is costing more than it’s earning, you won’t
be in business for very long. To figure out how your
campaign is doing, you’re going to need to know your Cost
Per Mille, your Click Through Rate and your Conversion Rate.
These are your basic tools. If you don’t know them, find
out!

Let’s say your CPM is $20, your CTR is 1%, and your
Conversion Rate is 4%. (So you’re paying $20 every 1,000
times your banner is shown, it brings you 10 new users, and
you make one sale for every 25 users the ad brings). The
question you need to ask yourself is how much are you
wasting on the 24 users who don’t buy.

Cost per visitor = $20 / 10 = $2 So each visitor costs you
$2, but you need 25 visitors to make one sale, so...

Cost per sale = $2 * 25 = $50 ...if your product is worth
less than $50, you’re making a loss.

That’s pretty simple, and as you can see, there’s not a lot
of room to maneuver here. Margins are tight on banner
advertising and that applies to both the site selling the
advertising space and the webmaster buying it.

Of course, hard cash isn’t the only way to measure the
success of a banner ad, and one reason they’re still popular
is that they’re a pretty effective branding tool. After all,
advertisers spend millions on billboards without expecting
motorists to drive straight through them and make a
purchase! On the Web, those advertisers can even be
reasonably sure that the people who see their ads will be
interested in them. But branding costs money—lots of it—with
no guarantee of results. It’s usually best left to the big
boys.

The banner ads on my sites usually send users to my
affiliate partners, and the banner ads I place on other
people’s sites usually come from my affiliate programs. They
don’t cost me anything and as long I’m making the sales to
pay my affiliate partners, everybody’s happy.

If you do decide to purchase banner advertisements though,
and if you have a very specific market in mind, make sure
they are strategically placed—on sites where the traffic
will most definitely be interested in your product or
service. Find a site that suits exactly your specific
product and you’re going to be appealing directly to your
target market.

That’s it for this week. As you can see, banner ads are not
the guaranteed money making tools that they once were but
they can still be used effectively if targeted properly. Is
banner advertising for you? Only you can determine that.

Optimize Keywords

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Keywords—Optimizing Your Site to Get Top Billing at Search Engines
***********************************************************

This week we will discuss the key to improving your siteslisting in the top Internet search engines.
When a user enters a search term, also known as a ‘keyword,’into a search engine, the engine runs through the billionsof pages in the database and awards each one a ‘relevancyscore.’ The higher your score, the higher your listing. Ifyour site doesn’t contain the keyword used by the searcher,the only score it’s going to get is a big, fat zero. Yourfirst task then is to make sure you know which keywords aremost relevant for each of your sites.
There are three ways to figure out your keywords:

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Ask your competitors
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This is the cheapest way to find many of the most importantkeywords. Simply log on to a search engine (AltaVista isgood, Google is better) and carry out a search for siteslike yours. Open the top site, and once the home page hasdownloaded, click on ‘View’ in your browser, and then‘Source.’ That will reveal all the HTML used to build theWeb page, including all the keywords that have beenspecially inserted.
For example, let’s say one of your websites sold nutritionalsupplements. You could carry out a search for ‘vitamins’ inGoogle. The top site there is called DrugEmporium.com, andthe keywords they list are "The Katz group, Snyders, DrugEmporium, Drug, Drug Store, pharmacy, stores."
Some of those keywords will be relevant to your site.Others, of course, won’t be relevant and there will be lotsof other keywords that aren’t obviously listed—like‘vitamins’ for example. But you can repeat the process onother sites, using different keywords, and build up a prettylong list.

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Ask the pay-per-clicks (PPC)************************************************************

Pay-per-click sites actually let you see how popular akeyword is. They’re not being kind; they’re trying to makemoney. The more webmasters bid on those keywords, the higherthe bids are going to rise—and the more money thepay-per-clicks are going to make. FindWhat, for example, hasa Keyword Center, and Overture a Keyword Suggestion Tool.Both are very handy, but they also require you to open anaccount. That can cost a few bucks, but when you have a lotof sites covering a lot of different areas, it’s usuallyworth the expense.

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Use a specialized tool
************************************************************

Not too surprisingly, a number of companies have popped upto supply specific keyword services for a fee. The best ofthese is WordTracker.com. They’re not bargain basement, butyou get what you pay for. They’ll give you all the keywordsyou need and in my experience, they’re a sound investment.
Googlefight.com is another useful tool to see whether onekeyword is more popular than another. The site compares twokeywords and tells you which is more popular. It’s free andhas a limited use, but it’s fun to play with.
As you make up your list of keywords, bear in mind that it’salso worth looking at key phrases. It’s quite possible thata user looking to buy flowers online might search for ‘redroses’ or ‘cheap bouquets’ as well as just ‘flowers.’ Keyphrases are often overlooked by competitors, so you’ve got apretty good chance of getting a high placement with theright combination.
Don’t worry too much about the competition though. Somepeople will tell you that you’re better off trying to findkeywords that no one else has thought of—as if there wereany!—and others will tell you to throw in keywords that areonly slightly relevant to your businesses.
In my experience, that’s a waste of time. If yourcompetitors are using certain keywords, it’s because theyknow they work. And if you pick up any users usingirrelevant keywords, you’re not going to sell them anything.Don’t try to reinvent the wheel here: just try to figure outthe most popular keywords and the best key phrases to put onyour site.
Whichever of these methods you use—and I tend to use morethan one—you should end up with a pretty comprehensive listof keywords that you can stick into your website. The nextquestion then, is how do you use them? When a search engineassigns relevancy to a site, it looks for the keywords in anumber of specific areas.

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Title Tag
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The title tag is written in the "head" section of the Webpage and after the "title" tags. It’s usually the linelisted in the search results as well. For example, the NewYork Times’ title tag is “The New York Times on the Web:Daily international, national and local news coverage fromthe newspaper, breaking news updates, technology news,sports, reviews, crosswords, classified ad listings.”
That looks long, but the title tag is usually between 50 and80 characters including spaces. Different search engineshave different limits so you want to make sure that yourmost important words are near the beginning of the title.When you look at the New York Times’ site, you only see “TheNew York Times on the Web”.
The rest of the title is made up of keywords and phrases butin fact, you don’t want to put in too many keywords here.Just place one keyword as the second or third word in thetitle. Too many, and your site could be seen as spamming.
You can also list more keywords in the "meta" and "meta" sections of the "head" area, but becausethese areas have been so abused in the past, a number ofsearch engines today will skip right past the title tag andgo straight to the Web copy.

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Web Copy for SEO
************************************************************

The search engines will scan the text on a Web page to seeif your site is relevant to the search term. That means thatin effect, your Web copy is going to have to do two things:to persuade a customer to buy, and persuade a search engineit’s relevant.
When you write your copy aim for about 500 words a page, butthrow in between four and eight keywords. You’ll have to tryto balance a smooth text flow with getting in all thekeywords you need to be listed.
You can also consider adding text-only pages such as how-toarticles, tips or tutorials to your site. Throw in somekeywords and they can turn up in search engines and createopportunities for link exchanges.
So there’s a few ways you can try to improve the position ofyour site in a search engine. More important than where youput the keywords is choosing the right keywords. That’s notreally a huge challenge as your competitors are likely tohave done the job for you.
Of course, even if you do get everything right, it doesn’tmean you’re going to shoot straight to the top of Google.One of the criteria for relevancy is how long you’ve beenonline, so success on the search engines won’t comeovernight. The sooner you start submitting though, thesooner you can start to rise.

Warmly,
Mr. Wisnu

Blogs

In this article we will discuss a relatively new internet
tool – the Blog.

Blog (also known as Weblog) is traditionally a webpage where
pre-surfer or a blogger “logs” all pages he/she finds
interesting. In other words, it is a Web page that contains
brief, chronologically arranged items of information.
Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality
of the author.

Weblogs provide a series of annotated links to items such as
news stories, and often include personal rants. They are
maintained by one person, most commonly someone who is
involved in Web design or some other tech-related field.

A blog is often a mixture of what is happening on a
particular website and what is happening on the Web, a kind
of hybrid diary/guide site, although there are as many
unique types of blogs as there are people. Blogs can be used
to introduce products to potential customers.

People maintained blogs long before the term was coined, but
the trend gained momentum with the introduction of automated
published systems, most notably Blogger at blogger.com.
Thousands of people use services such as Blogger to simplify
and accelerate the publishing process.

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Blog as a marketing tool
************************************************************

Blogs offer huge marketing potential. They are highly
strategic tools that can strengthen relationships, share
knowledge, increase collaboration, and improve branding.
Besides, blogs can represent the real voice of the website.

A weblog can take the form of a diary, a news service (or
summaries of and links to current news items on a topic), a
collection of links to other Web sites, a series of book
reviews or products, reports of activity on a project, the
journal of an expedition, and much more. Businesses can use
this tool to effectively advertise their products or
services.

One of the most interesting ways to use a weblog is by
allowing it to function as a discussion forum for customers
of your products or services. In this case, the webmaster
can give posting rights to other people – visitors and
customers, and their posts may or may not be reviewed before
they are published to the Web page. Customers, in such a way
can post favorable comments about the websites offerings.
Some weblogs are set up in such a way that only the owner or
the owner and certain other people have posting rights, but
anyone else can add comments to the posts.

************************************************************
Weblogs when used with newsletters present immense marketing
opportunities:
************************************************************

* Articles within newsletters can be linked to a blog,
extending life and creating a massive conversation.
* You can offer a bidirectional forum to customers to get
true, personal opinions on your products and services.
* Company experts can start a blog and become industry
experts, helping your company edge out competition and,
through this interactive forum,draw customers into another
exchange of information and thoughts.
* The beauty of this interplay is you can layer your blog
with editorial controls.

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How to create a Weblog?
************************************************************

The majority of weblogs are now created using software or
services designed specifically for this purpose. Some of the
software is free - and some of the organizations that
provide weblog software will also provide free server space
to house a weblog so that it is publicly accessible on the
Internet. There are also commercial versions of some of the
free software; these commercial versions often provide more
features. Some weblog software is available only as
commercial software. Alternatively, bloggers can create and
maintain their weblog using free software or a free weblog
service, but use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to load the
resulting weblog to their own Website.

There are many blogging softwares available easily on the
Internet. One of the most popular weblogger is “Blogger”
which can be downloaded for free at http://www.blogger.com.
Most webloggers simplify the process of Website creation.
However, they do require basic knowledge of FTP, Website
structures and a few technical terms. Besides, creating an
advanced weblog requires knowledge of HTML.

So get out there and start your own Blog…it’s free,easy and
can work seamlessly with the rest of your website or
newsletter. Until next time…

Warmly,
Mr. Wisnu

Choosing a Domain Name

In this article you will learn how to chose an effective and
memorable domain name and learn how you can actually
increase traffic by using an old, expired domain name.

Times wasting so lets get started…



In the physical world, you can distinguish a business
because of its structure, window displays, or signs. You can
tell that a bank is a bank, or a clothing store is indeed a
clothing store.

In the Internet, however, it is an entirely different story
altogether. Your domain name is the only clue to your online
business. You do not have visual clues: no location, no
look, and no store design. Instead, users have to type in a
word or a set of words to reach your site. Your prospective
visitor has no way of knowing what your site is all about
until he/she finds it and reads its contents. Who can ever
tell that Amazon.com sells books? Or that Excite is a search
engine?

Your domain name can spell your success on the Internet. A
good domain name is the best asset you can ever have. It can
make your business stand out in the crowd, or just float
aimlessly in space.

The need to provide immediate clues to an online business
led to the prevalence of generic domain names. Generic names
instantly provide the user with an idea of what a business
is all about, what to expect and look for in a site. For
instance, Etoys.com is a toy store.

The temptation of the generic name has been so powerful;
that some companies even paid ridiculously high prices to
get the name they want. The domains Loans.com and Wines.com
were both bought for $3 million each. Telephone.com was
acquired for $1.75 million, while Bingo.com sold for $1.1
million.

However, generic names do not necessarily create the “buzz”
that you’d like surrounding your website. Branding has
always been about proper names: McDonald's did not name
their store Hamburger. Hertz is not called Car Rental. FedEx
is not Mail Carrier. Kodak is not Photographs. Microsoft is
not Computer Software.

For better branding results, your domain name should be
memorable and easy to remember. Remember the following tips
when creating a domain name.

* The domain name should be short
* The domain name should be simple
* It should be suggestive of your business category
* It should be unique
* It should be easy to interpret and pronounce
* It should be personalized
* It should not be difficult to spell
* It should not be difficult to remember

Domain names can be registered through many different
companies (known as "registrars") - a listing of these
companies is available at ICANN: http://www.icann.org. You
can register for 1 to 10 years - prices can vary anywhere
from $10 to $20 per year. Most web hosting companies, as
explained later, will handle the registration process for
you, but make sure that you are properly listed as the owner
of the domain when it is registered. If you have registered
a domain name for a specific period, make sure you renew it
in time. You can be surprised at the number of cases, where
site owners have let a domain name slip by if they have not
renewed in time.

Using expired domains to skyrocket your traffic


At some point while you’re building your website, you’re
going to have to buy a domain name. This is the address that
users type into their browsers to reach your site. That
takes about five seconds, and depending on the name you want
and whether anyone else owns it, it won’t cost you more than
a few bucks.

But domain names are also a golden opportunity to make some
easy money.

I’m not talking about Internet real estate, where you buy up
good names and sell them on for a profit—if you haven’t got
into that now, forget it. The bottom’s fallen out of the
market and the best domains are long gone.

I’m talking about expiring domains.

Thousands of webmasters invest time, effort and money to
promote their site and build up traffic. Many of them then
lose interest and move on, leaving their site active. That
means that although they still own the domain, they’re not
actively promoting it. But they don’t need to. All the
automatic marketing systems they’ve put in place are still
bringing in traffic. The site runs itself.

Now, at some point the ownership of those domains is going
to expire. If you snap up those domains once they come back
onto the market, you’ve got a pre-built stream of customers.
You can either rebuild the site, or redirect the traffic to
your domain. You could set up an affiliate program get paid
for users someone else paid for.

It’s that easy.

There are tons of options, and lots of easy ways to make
lots of money with very little effort. Opportunities like
these are everywhere.

Websites such as www.expiredtraffic.com or
www.deleteddomains.com actually do all the legwork and let
you reap all the rewards. Expired Traffic even has an
affiliate program and www.snapnames.com allows you to
back-order a specific domain name.

Do be careful when using other sites though. There are some
swindlers out there that will sell you subscriptions,
provide you with outdated lists, take your money and keep
the good domains for themselves. It happens, and there’s
little point in taking a risk when www.deleteddomains.com
does such a great job.


Warmly,
Mr.Wisnu