Anything4you4me - Make Money Online

Choosing the Best Affiliate Programs for Your Website

2007-01-21T05:57:00.000-08:00

Which company has the best affiliate program? How do I choose the best affiliate program? Can you help me pick an affiliate program? I am often asked these questions. And, the answer many people expect is : the program that pays the most. However, the point that many rookie affiliates miss is that just because mortgage, gambling, and credit card programs are paying the most per sale or per lead dosen't mean that you will ever make any money promoting their products. In fact, the overwhelming majority of affiliates never earn a dime. Most are lured in by the promise of easy riches, discover that it's not so easy, shortly thereafter, and then give up before ever earning their first paycheck.

So, how do you earn that first paycheck from an affiliate program?

1. Pick an affiliate program that fits the theme of your site. This is obvious, but as I stated above, many people are lured in by the temptations of quick and easy money from higher paying programs. You should never have to change the content of your website to match your affiliate program, either. Make the programs work for you, not against you.

2. Choose a program that pays per sale over per lead. Some affiliate programs pay a percentage for every sale made and some affiliate programs pay per lead, or a certain action taken by the prospective customer, such as filling out a loan application. The per lead programs seem like they should have the higher conversion rates, but this is just not true. I've repeatedly had more success with pay per sale, rather than per lead. My theory is that people are bombarded with these forms and applications and sales pitches everyday, so they tend to block them out. Time is extremely valuable, especially in today's society. To get credit for a sale with these programs, people must invest time that they simply don't have or don't want to use signing up for these offers. It is much easier just to buy something online, than it is to invest time online doing work. That's why information products sell so well online, despite the fact that many times the information for sale is available free online, if you have the time to spend gathering it.

3. Pick an affiliate program that offers a wide variety of items for sale and preferably, one that offers dynamic content ads. You should always pay attention to what's hot and don't be afraid to rotate items that you promote. Just because something sold well yesterday, dosen't mean it will sell well today or tomorrow. If you run a website that promotes books, for example, you would probably want to rotate into your website ads promoting the current week's bestsellers. Visitors to your site will thank you for the fresh content, even if it is an advertisement. The easiest way to do this is with an affiliate program that delivers dynamically generated ads based on your established criteria.

4. Choose a well-known merchant. Trust is a very important factor in converting sales. More times than not, a customer is going to buy from the merchant that they know and recognize. Many smaller merchants will increase the percentage they offer to affiliates as a way of try and drive more traffic to their site and to promote their brand. Not surprisingly, many of these merchants come and go. It's safer and more profitable to go with the big names. You're also more likely to get paid (and on time!) by these merchants.

5. Pick an affiliate program that sells products that you have tried and like. If you have had a good experience making a purchase from a company, see if they have an affiliate program you can join. It is much easier to promote a product that you like, and your product endorsement will come across as more authentic. And, if the visitor to your site tries and like the product as well, you gain instant credibility and trust, which will lead to future sales.

Hopefully, these tips will help you when deciding which products to promote on your site.

About the Author

Justin Hallman writes for www.publishprofits.com

Seven Ways to Set Yourself Apart From Other Affiliate Marketers

2007-01-21T05:17:00.000-08:00

by DeAnna Spencer

Okay so you've read (fill in the blank with internet gurus name here)'s book and decided that affiliate marketing is the way for you to earn some extra money online. I mean after all, all you have to do is plug in your name and run their ads and collect your commission check and ride off into the sunset, right? Not quite. With so many people promoting the exact same program as you, in the exact same ezines or on the exact same websites, you need some ways to distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack of affiliate marketers. Here are seven ways for you to do this.

1. Host Your Own Website.

I know I sound like a broken record, but it is absolutely essential for you to have your own website. For starters you can have a domain name that is easy to remember. I mean can you remember http://www.areallylongaffiliatemarketersurl.com/?pid=123/r=4(My apologies if that url actually belongs to someone, I just made it up on the spot for an illustration)? I didn't think so.

So if you cant remember it and it's your url, what makes you think your potential customer is going to remember it. Do you know what they are going to do? They are going to just chop off the stuff at the end and type in the main domain name and purchase the product from the main site. However if you have your own url, you could have a url like http://www.yourdomain.com which is much easier to remember and you can just point your visitors to your affiliate page in your website.

2. Write Your Own Ads

Email the owner of your affiliate program and ask if you can write your own ads. Most of the time they will not have a problem with this, but you need to check with them first. A lot of times when I publish my ezine, I have published the same ad two or three times and I wanted to email the advertisers and say if only you had used your own ad. People become immune to ads after a while and if they see the same ads over and over again, they may just skip over it altogether. Your objective is to get people to click on your link and if your wording is different they just might stop and read your ad and be curious enough to click through to your website.

3. Have some products of your own that are only available through your website.

Once you have your website going, it is important to have some products or services that your customers cant find at your affiliate site. You want your customers to keep coming to your site and the best way to do that is to have something on your site that they can't find on the affiliate site.

4. Cultivate your own list.

It's much easier to sell to people that you have already built a relationship with. That's one reason why it is important to build your own list. You may also be able to earn some money from your list in the form of advertising.

5. Buy the product you are marketing.

When you buy the product you are marketing, you can sell it better. You can tell the potential customer what a great experience you had with the product. This will make them interested enough to buy the product. You will also be able to provide support if necessary or write a tutorial on how to use the product that you are marketing.

6. Be totally honest

If you find out that the program you were promoting is a scam, stop promoting it and inform your readers about it. This will help you build credibility with your lists. We all make mistakes and admitting your mistake will boost your readers confidence in you.

7. Dont try to market everything you see.

With services such as clickbank, it is easy to become overwhelmed and try to market everything in the clickbank marketplace. That is not a good idea. Its better to focus on one market and market products that they would want. This is called niche marketing. The last thing you want to do is to bombard your subscribers with pitches for products. That is one surefire way to lose subscribers.

Affiliate marketing is definitely here to stay and it can become a great way to earn extra or even part time income. However, it won't happen overnight. Like everything else in life, youre going to have to put a lot of hard work into it. Good luck to you in your new venture.

DeAnna Spencer is the webmaster for Learn Small Business, a site that teaches how to run a small business for free. Visit today at http://www.learnsmallbusiness.com

About the Author

DeAnna Spencer is the webmaster for Learn Small Business, a site that teaches how to run a small business for free. Visit today at http://www.learnsmallbusiness.com

The Turtle and the Rabbit Do Affiliate Marketing

2007-01-09T14:12:00.000-08:00

by David McCammon

The Turtle and the Rabbit Do Affiliate Marketing

Once upon a time there was a beautiful Island. The weather was wonderful. It usually rained a little early in the morning to freshen the air and bring out all the wonderful smells. Then again it rained a little at night to bring out the lush and beautiful vegetation by morning. But the sun still shown most of the day.

As luck would have it, two descendants of the famous "Tortoise and Hare" lived together on this very same Island!

They were actually pretty good friends, using their laptops to communicate, the rabbit never stayed in one place long enough to hold a normal conversation.

Besides eating and sleeping all they ever did was play against each other in Internet shooting competitions. Surprisingly the speedy rabbit was not the winner as often as you might think.

Tiring of shooting each other in cyberspace they decided to play another game. The Affiliate Marketing Game!

The rules were very simple, join as many or few affiliate programs as they wish and whoever accumulated the most points(measured in money) in 12 months would be declared the winner.

The first few weeks by each was spent learning, they subscribed to ezines, bought books and courses, and participated in forums.

Mr. Turtle started a newsletter based on the things that he learned. He built a simple web page designed to collect email addresses and send out his ezine. He learned and practiced building trusting relationships with his subscribers.

Mr. Rabbit used pay per click search engines like google adwords and overture to send targeted visitors directly to his affiliate pages. He learned about keywords, clickthru and conversion rates. He started making money right away.

Though it took longer, Mr. Turtle soon started getting sales from his ever growing list. The larger his list got and the more his subscribers could trust him to have their best interests at heart, the more money he made.

Mr. Rabbit found that once he had perfected the formula for pay per click success he could duplicate it over a wide range of products and services. His income seemed to be limited only by the time that he had available.

After one year the results were in. Mr. Rabbit had won! Or did he? You would never know it from the size of the grin on Mr. Turtles' face.

As per their original agreement they went back to playing the Internet games that they had played before. The rabbits income quickly ground to a halt.

The turtle still sent an email every week or so to his huge list and soon his actual income surpassed that of his quick friend.

The moral of the story here my Internet marketing friends, is that we should always optimize our marketing strategies for the present and the future.

***********************© 2004 David McCammon.
All rights reserved. Feel fre^e to forward this in its entirety to anyone you wish.
***************************************

David McCammon publishes the Easy Net Jobs, a fresh informative newsletter dedicated fun and profitable online business. If you're looking for the *best rated* home business opportunities that are FUN and Profitable, and helpful HONEST support, come by and grab a F-R-^-E subscription at: http://EasyNetJobs.com
http://googleequalizer.com

About the author:

David McCammon has been marketing successfully for more that 20 years. He has taught hundreds how to work at home AND have fun at the same time. Get the tools and the day to day strategy to make Money the FUN WAY: http://easynetjobs.com
http://googleequalizer.com

Have You Join Moneymakergroup.com?

2007-01-08T17:00:00.000-08:00

Moneymakergroup.com is a big and active forum that has more than 50000 members currently. The forum is a place to discuss all about making money online. You will get a lot of free resources from this forum. You can also find out which programs work and which one is not working by reading members comments, reviews and opinions. Members are continuous posting latest opportunities and online job.

The forum is also a place to gain knowledge and ideas that are helpful to your online business. If you have problem or questions related to online business, you may ask for advice and answers in this forum.

The Seven Steps You NEED to take to make money online with an affiliate program

2007-01-08T16:55:00.000-08:00

Affiliate programs can be one of the best ways to make money online... provided you know how to get the most out of them! If you want to maximize the benefits of YOUR affiliate programs, be sure to follow the seven steps listed below.

They'll help you attract the highest quality affiliates and make it easy for them to make great money promoting your products -- for them as well as you! These seven steps will give you all the information you need to make money online with an affiliate program.

1. Offer a quality product, backed up by fantastic customer service

In order to build a successful affiliate program, your affiliates must be confident that your product or service that gives *great* value, and that you provide fantastic customer service.

The bottom line is, your affiliates HAVE to be able to trust you with their customers! They need to believe you know what you're doing and that you will treat anyone they send your way fairly and honestly.

Because your affiliate program won't last very long if you get a bad reputation.

Remember -- word spreads quickly on the Internet. If you establish yourself as a reputable seller who answers questions promptly, handles transactions quickly and accurately, and offers a guarantee to back up your product, you'll be ahead of the pack.

Your affiliates -- and your customers -- will appreciate the extra effort, and you'll be rewarded with loyalty.

2. Choose your affiliate program software wisely

One of the most important things to remember when you're starting an online business is scalability. You need to plan for future growth, so when it happens, you're ready and not caught off guard.

The affiliate software you choose will play a big part in determining how you set up your program. It's going to influence where you spend your time (on marketing or on administrative trivia)... and it will be a factor which some of your potential affiliates will use to decide whether or not they want to join your program!

Key features to look for in your software are a simple sign-up process; personalized 'admin' pages and a simple-to-use tracking program.

You want your affiliates to have access to:

An easy-to-understand commission structure
The number of visitors they have sent to your site
How many sales they have referred
How many sales their sub-affiliates have made
Which products they are selling the most of
How much commission they have earned from direct sales
How much commission they have earned from sub-affiliate sales
How much total money they have earned
How many sub-affiliates they have recruited

After trying a number of software programs available on the market, we still weren't satisfied with any of them -- and so we invested a ton of time and money in developing our own affiliate tracking software: AssocTRAC.

3. Turn your affiliates into your customers is one of the best ways to make money online with an affiliate program

Your affiliates initially joined your program to earn some money... but you can also sell your products TO them as well!

Think about it: they get a discount through the kickback they receive from their own sale... and it's a great way to actually generate some new customers. Once your affiliates use your products or service, they can then create testimonials of their own experience to increase the effectiveness of their marketing efforts!

Alternatively, if you sell a large volume of product, you can actually get affiliates to sign up with you solely for the purpose of buying your products at a discount! Your affiliate buys your product or service at regular price, but at the end of the month they get a referral fee on their own purchases -- this basically means they get a discount.

There are some affiliate program owners out there who say, "NO, you can't buy through your own affiliate program" and they fight it... Don't be one of them!

They're losing out, because this is a great way to get new customers and new business. Let it happen. Encourage your affiliates not only to sell your product but to buy from you, as well.

And there's another benefit to selling to your affiliates: It generates loyalty. You allow them to save money by buying from you through their affiliate membership, AND they earn money when they sell for you.

4. Pay excellent commissions

There's no doubt about it: If you want to have a successful affiliate program, you HAVE to pay out good affiliate commissions. The higher your profit margin, the more you should be giving to your affiliates. Because there's just one reason they joined your program in the first place... to make money!

The more money you pay your affiliates, the more motivated they will be to market your product or service and the more work they will put in on your behalf.

What it comes down to -- and what many affiliate program owners don't understand -- is that most of your real profit is on the "backend". Don't be afraid to give away a lot of your profit on the "front-end"… it is the customer who is worth the money.

5. Realize backend sales

It takes an average of eight contacts before a "browser" becomes a "buyer" so you need to make the most of your existing customers! Once you have the customer, if you have quality products and services that are great value, you will generate a lifetime customer from whom you can profit for years.

This is why you, as an affiliate program owner, can afford to pay generous affiliate commissions. You're not looking at immediate profits -- but at the potential of repeat sales or potential backend sales.

If you give your customers good value, a lot of them are going to come back and buy and buy again. Remember the 80-20 rule! Eighty percent of your sales will come from 20 percent of your customers. And it costs a lot less to sell to an existing customer than it does to try and win a new one!

So don't look just for the money you can earn today -- look for the money you can make over the next 6 months... or the next year, or even 5 years!

Think of it as a long-term investment. You've got to understand that the purpose of building your affiliate program is not only just to make money today -- it's about getting that customer, holding on to them and turning them into a lifelong loyal buyer.

6. Do business with your competitors

You might be surprised to learn that you may end up doing business with some of your competitors in order to make money online with your affiliate program...

...And that people you originally thought were competitors really aren't!

In fact, your "competitors" may well be someone you can actually do business with -- by partnering up in joint ventures and strategic alliances. This works especially well if your product or service is similar but not in direct competition with theirs -- think "complementary."

This may sound a bit hard to believe, but we do business with our competitors all the time!

Because when it comes down to it, many of the people who purchase our information or software will also purchase our competitors'. So why not work together and both profit from that?

Say, for example, I believe someone offers a good service selling great copywriting skills... and they have a manual on copywriting. I will recommend them to my customers, and in return, they will direct referrals and recommendations back in my direction.

Look closely at the products or services of your perceived "competitors"... if you see a way they would be of value to your own customers, contact these business owners in a professional manner and negotiate a deal.

You can even become a part of their affiliate program!

Think of what you can offer your competitors' customer based on what they would want and on what you both could profit from. Yes, you may find that you actually can be partners with some of your competitors and it can be very interesting. So, be prepared for this to happen.

7. Have a great visitor-to-sale conversion ratio

To run have an effective affiliate program you must have a good visitor to sales conversion ratio. This is one of the things you should invest some work in before ramping up your affiliate program.

You must be able to convert visitors into sales in order to keep your affiliates happy -- if they send thousands of visitors your way but then realize after a month that you're not converting these visitors into sales (thereby earning them a commission), they won't be very pleased!

So test everything on your site! Don't be afraid to change things -- it's the only way to find out what's working -- and what's not.

One of the greatest things about the Internet is that you can test very quickly. So, if you have ad copy that isn't doing very well, or an opt-in offer that isn't collecting very many of your visitors' names and email addresses, you can easily put up a new one and see results in hours or days, depending how much traffic you have.

Test your opt-in offer, your headline, your salescopy -- keep tweaking and testing until you find the combination that generates the best conversion. Just remember -- only test one element of your web site at a time, so you know exactly what was responsible for a spike or dip in sales.

Final thoughts to help you make money online with an affiliate program

Affiliate programs are, hands down, one of the best ways to make money online.

By making sure you offer only top-notch products and customer service, you'll not only increase your business, potential affiliates will be much more likely to trust you with their valuable leads and send their customers your way.

Approach potential affiliates in a professional manner, and they might well become your customer as well! And treat your affiliates well -- pay them generous commissions, and keep them up to date with your products and services. Happy affiliates are productive affiliates!

When choosing affiliate program tracking software, plan wisely and think ahead -- your program will likely grow rapidly, and you don't want to be scrambling to find a scalable software product. The Best Affiliate Tracking Software: AssocTRAC

Consider approaching web sites in your industry that offer complementary products or services to your own, and making a deal to work together. Sometimes two heads are better than one!

And remember -- test, test, test! You need to be continually updating your web site to figure out what's working best, and to keep your visitor-to-sale conversion rate as high as it can be. Your affiliates won't keep sending you customers if your site gets stale!

Making affiliate marketing successful for you

2007-01-08T16:44:00.000-08:00

by Michael Bloch

What is an affiliate program?

With the proliferation of goods and services now available on the Internet, advertisers look to individuals and companies to help sell their products by utilizing webmasters and others to spread the word.

This can be in the form of banner advertising on affiliate sites, text links, reviews written by affiliates, direct email etc. The advertisers compensate webmasters by paying them for displaying the ads, or for click throughs sent to them, or (as is most common these days) a commission on sales resulting as a referral from their web site or email message. For a more detailed look at the getting involved with affiliate programs, view the learning resources and tutorial links at the end of this article.

How can I make money from being an affiliate?

There are many thousands of affiliate programs out there, all claiming to be the best. Some of them will give you the impression that all you have to do is implement their banners and links and wait for the commission checks to start rolling in. This CAN be the case, but this scenario usually only applies to very large sites with massive web traffic that is relevant to product or service on offer. For most of us, being a successful affiliate requires a little more work!

As the range of goods and online services offered via the Internet has grown at an incredible rate over the last few years, therefore so has the competition. Web site visitors need to have a very good reason for clicking on a link or banner.

Choosing the right banners

In most affiliate programs, you are offered a wide variety of banners to place on your site - very few of them will be effective. If you can attain a click through rate of 2%, then you are doing very well. It has been our experience, and this is generally speaking, that graphically rich banners do not perform as successfully as their simpler counterparts. The main reason for this is download time. If a banner is the last thing to load on your page and the banner ad is excessively byte "heavy", by the time it has loaded your visitor may already have scrolled down the page - missing it entirely. Heavy banner ads can also slow down the loading of your pages, or critical elements of your page and you can lose your visitors altogether! A graphically rich banner can also confuse the actual message - the artwork and marketing blurb can be imbalanced. For these reasons, we suggest that banners you implement be no more that 15kb wherever possible.

Banners that have "extreme" animation, such as rapid flashing, are also something to consider very carefully. While these do achieve high clickthrough rates, they are also highly annoying. If you do decide to implement this form of banner advertising, use it very sparingly.

When selecting any form of graphical advertising, try and keep the theme of your site in mind - while graphical ads are meant to stand out and catch a visitors eye, it shouldn't be to the point that everything else on the page is totally ignored. Wherever possible, ensure that all banner ads (and any advertising for that matter) uses a link that opens in a new window. That way, if a visitor does choose to visit one of your advertisers it is easy for them to return to your page and review what they actually came to your site for!

Pop ups and pop unders

Many companies, but mostly agencies representing a number of advertisers, now give their affiliates the options of using pop up and pop under ads. Our opinion - pop ups are evil. They annoy visitors and are usually closed before they even have a chance to load. Go for pop-unders and preferably those that only display once per visit. See below for further articles on this subject.

Using Text Link Ads.

One of the most successful forms of advertising are text link ads. They are bandwidth friendly, don't take up a lot of space and can be easily implemented into most page layouts. Good text links ads don't just scream "buy me!", they also offer some information as to why your web site visitor should investigate the offer. A company should also supply you with very short text links which only state the product or company name. The reason for this is so that you can implement the links directly into the content of related articles and reviews.

Articles and product/service reviews

Now, this is where a bit of hard work comes in. Your regular site visitors will view you as an authority on particular subjects, so why not write a review on a product or service you are advertising? This also supplies excellent content for search engine spiders to latch onto. We have attracted many visitors to our site using what I call "adarticles".

But there's a catch......

If you are going to use the adarticle concept to promote products, you need to believe in what you write. Research the product and company well. Contact the company and let them know what you are doing and ask for further resources and assistance. Once you have created the review, send them the link - you may be surprised at the response you get.

One of our advertisers was so impressed with the effort we put into promoting his company's product that he gave us an extra 15% commission on each sale! This form of web site advertising is a bit time-consuming, so choose your products carefully. The information that you supply to your web site visitors will help them formulate a decision, so be honest in your sales copy. If you are successful in this promotion strategy, over time your reviews won't be seen as hype and bluster, but as a reliable source of information - everybody wins!

Email advertising as an affiliate marketing tool

Direct promotion via email has boomed over recent years, but has brought with it mountains of spam. If you intend on using email as a method of advertising products and services, ensure you stand behind the products you're promoting and make yourself available to answer any questions.

An effective promotion technique we have found is to combine email with the adarticle strategy. In our ezine we occasionally put a summary of a product or service, just enough information to stir the curiosity of our readers. The summary then contains a link to the adarticle on our site. The benefit of this is not only that you have a good opportunity to promote the product or service, but while visitors are on your site they may also look at other sections. The advertiser benefits through having highly targeted potential clients visit their site.

Original marketing strategies

Using the two above strategies combined, you can tailor your own campaign. Visitors sometimes become blind to the advertising resources supplied by companies and your efforts in coming up with something original may spark their (and the company's) interest.

As an example, our hosting company has provided great service to us over the last 18 months, which made us very confident in promoting their hosting solutions - so we approached them and negotiated a great deal for all parties involved. They have increased visibility on our site, we receive fantastic benefits in return, while promoting a service we really believe in! Using this example, you can make many of your alliances and business partnerships more beneficial to all concerned.

Successful affiliate marketing requires patience

If you are certain that your web site can generate fantastic sales for a certain company, contact them to negotiate a tailored arrangement. If they aren't too enthusiastic to begin with, be patient - companies are approached every day by affiliates wanting to cut a "better deal".

The reality of it is that many affiliates cannot deliver what they promise, and the companies are aware of this. Implement their links and banners, go the extra mile with adarticles and other unique strategies, generate some sales and then approach them again. You'll probably find that they'll have a change of heart. Good affiliates are a scarce thing, and if you are performing they'll be very keen to keep you!

Also bear in mind that most forms of advertising take some time to kick into gear. Putting a link up for a couple of days and then pulling it down because it is not generating any interest may not be a reflection on the product, but just in the way that it is being presented to your web site visitors.

If you have run successful campaigns before, try to remember the elements that made it a success. What works for one product may not necessarily for another, but it's worth a try. Again, if you are having problems with promotion, contact the company. They will more than likely have thousands of affiliates and will know what strategies are working. A good advertiser may even go to the trouble of reviewing your site and provide you with some tips and hints based on their observations.

Network Advertising Agencies vs. individual advertisers.

One of the easiest ways to get involved with affiliate programs is through one of the major advertising agencies. They will offer you hundreds or thousands of advertisers to choose from and payment will be consolidated.

It can be quite difficult to keep track of a number of individual advertisers, but this shouldn't turn you away from considering individual companies to represent on your web site. If the company is well known, has a good product, offers excellent affiliate support and commits to regular payments with a low payout threshhold, they can actually perform better than some of your agency associations.

This is particularly the case if the company offers residual income; i.e. that you receive monthly commissions from referred clients to services such as web hosting, magazine subscriptions - for as long as the client is with the company. Affiliation with these individual advertisers, over time, can build a steady stream of income for you.

By the way, be extremely wary of affiliate programs that you have to pay to join - they are really MLM (multi-level-marketing) associations. There are some very successful and respectable MLM offers around, but also many that are scams. Do your research into the company offering the program.

Successful Affiliate Marketing - unplugged.

Be careful of who you advertise for. Many companies set a minimum payout level they know not many will achieve. They greatly benefit from the fact that thousands of affiliates will not make any real money from the association and over time these affiliates will drop off when they can't hit the target - but the company has benefited from the traffic, with minimum outlay.

One sale here, two sales there - it all adds up for them. Consider this - a company launches an affiliate program with a minimum payout level of US$25 (industry standard). They then recruit over 20,000 affiliates. Only the top 1,000 affiliates actually generate enough sales to receive payouts on a regular basis. The remaining 19,000 only average one sale each, lose interest and drop away. These 19,000 affiliates made nothing, but the company still raked in what could run into millions of dollars of sales.

Successful affiliate marketing boils down to survival of the fittest, the fastest, the wisest - but mainly those who put the most effort in. Don't be discouraged if after a couple of months you haven't made enough money to retire - it does take time!

Looking back over our figures, it was approximately 6 months from when we began getting *really* involved with affiliate programs to when it really started to pay off the effort we had put in. The longer you are involved with affiliate marketing, the more savvy you will become as to what will work and won't. Then your effort vs. return will reap greater income in shorter periods of time.

Affiliate marketing can be exciting and frustrating with many highs and lows, but one thing's for sure - it's never boring!

Affiliate marketing - resources

Looking for further affiliate strategies, tutorials and resources? Try our affiliate marketing archives

Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast.net
http://www.tamingthebeast.net
Tutorials, web content, tools and software
Web Marketing, eCommerce & Internet solutions.
____________________________

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Using RSS to Make Money Online

2007-01-06T14:00:00.000-08:00

Most of you have seen those little buttons on websites labeled RSS or XML. If you are wondering what they are, RSS means Really Simple Syndication. Really simple because when you subscribe to a site that has this feature, you keep up-to-date with new information without having to check the site every day. This is really good news because you can use it to get newsfeeds from major news networks, news on new movies, even your favorite musician's tour dates or CD releases.

This new twist to the Internet is very valuable to you as a Internet marketer too. Imagine replacing email marketing with RSS marketing. People actually subscribe meaning they want your information updates, similar to opt-in newsletters. With newsletters you have to write them and your site content. With RSS, when you update your content, all subscribers are notified by their newsreaders.

Newsreaders are special software that read RSS feeds. To get started, download a free RSS reader.

If you use a Windows PC, go to http://www.rssreader.com

For Mac users, see http://ranchero.com/netnewswire

Once you are set up, here's all you or your customers have to do...

Right-click (control-click for Mac users) on any RSS button on a site, blog or news source that interests you. Select Copy Shortcut ("Copy Link to Clipboard" for Mac, "Copy Link Location" for Firefox browsers), and paste that URL into your RSS Reader. And that is it, you are subscribed. Once you get started, your favorite parts of the Web come to you. No need to go out and check for updates all the time. If you do not want to download software, subscribe to your favorite feeds through My Yahoo or My MSN.

So how does any of this make you money?

More traffic means more money. By placing RSS on your website or your blog, anyone can subscribe automatically and know when a new product or service is available. This new breed of Internet shopper is not to be ignored. To take advantage of the traffic you have to make your RSS feed available to website visitors and submit your feed information to RSS, blog and XML type directories.

Here's how you get RSS for your site!

Go to http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss for the best source of RSS and Blog information. There are several file types for RSS and here you learn which is best and why. The easiest and fastest way to learn more about this technology and see it in use is to go to http://rss.sitesell.com where you find all you need to know about RSS, including solid marketing ideas.

There is no need to become a techie, no need to know all the ins and outs of RSS and XML. There is a huge need for you to know enough about this newest technology to use it. Once you do, it becomes easy to see how you make money online with RSS. In the same way newsletters and opt-in email are used for successful marketing, RSS is much easier, faster, and a much less intrusive way to communicate with potential or existing clients and customers.

It's very critical to provide exactly what people want to make money online. How can there be a better way to do that than to allow people to subscribe to their wants and wishes? Start using RSS and XML technologies to make money online now before it too becomes the jungle email marketing is. To add fuel to your marketing fire, use optimized content for frequent updates to your blogs and web pages and deliver it with RSS.

The Internet changes quite quickly. RSS seems to be made to stick around, at least until something bigger and better comes along. It is easy to setup and monetize. Online entrepreneurs should take advantage of this new technology as soon as possible. The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages, so start now to reach a very targeted, eager audience for your opportunities.

"Dotcomology" is The Science of Making Money Online! http://www.Profits-For-You.com/dotcomology.html <=> GET IT FREE! Check out my blog: http://www.Profits-For-You.blogspot.com Not long ago, I didn't know ANYTHING about Internet marketing... However, within just 2 weeks, I launched my own website AND learned how to profit from an opt-in list, pull in sales with ezines, make money with Google Adwords and set up my own BLOG! http://www.Profits-For-You.com <=> Click here to find out how!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kevin_Fairbanks

Make Money Online with Affiliate Programs: Getting Started Guide

2007-01-06T13:55:00.000-08:00

Affiliates make money by referring customers to their merchants. There are many companies and webmasters offer affiliate programs to promote their online sales. When you sign up for an affiliate program, you will be given an affiliate link with an unique affiliate ID which will be used to market the product. When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you make money (earn affiliate commission). Below are the steps to starting an affiliate marketing business:

Step 1 - Join an Affiliate Program
Clickbank.com is one of the best places to find an affiliate program that interests you as there are a ton of sellers looking for people to promote their e-books and info products. Before you join any affiliate programs, do a little research. Find out which products are most popular, the conversion rate of the products and visit the sellers’ websites to see whether their sales letters are convinced enough to generate sales. A conversion rate of 5% is reasonably good. This means that for every 100 visitors to the website, 5 visitors will buy.

Step 2 – Promote an affiliate program through a website
You need to have a website to promote your affiliate programs. Creating a website isn’t difficult nowadays. You can use an easy website builder to create a website with little or no technical knowledge. To learn more about how to set up a site with website builder, you can go to Google and enter the search term 'website builder' to find a site builder that is right for you.

Step 3 – Decide the Content on Your Website
As you are promoting e-books, you can write a review on each e-book with an affiliate link to the sales website of each e-book. If you do not wish to write reviews, you can create a product recommendation list on your website (e.g., ‘Top 5 SEO e-books,’ ‘Top 3 MP3 music download,’ etc.).

Step 4 – Drive Targeted traffic/visitors to Your Website
To earn affiliate commission you need to drive targeted traffic to your website. The more traffic your website gets, the more likely you’ll generate more sales. There are several ways to drive targeted traffic to your site in short period of time (2 to 5 days). Here’s how……

Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
You can get a lot of targeted traffic using PPC advertising. The two most popular and effective PPC advertising programs are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. So how PPC advertising program works? PPC advertising programs allow you to bid for top rankings on the keywords of your choice. When someone enters a search term matches your keyword in the PPC search engine and press the search button, your contextual ad will appear on the sidebar of the search result page. If the visitor clicks through your ad to your website, you’ll be charged base on your bid amount. To learn more about PPC advertising.

Article Marketing
Writing an article related to your affiliate products with a link to your website in the article’s resource box and submitting it to many article directories can bring some free targeted traffic to your site. To get more and continuous targeted traffic, you need to write more articles. Try to publish a new article every week. Doing this for a year can drive truckload of free traffic to your website.

Post Messages on Forums
Another way to get free traffic is by posting messages on community forums with a link to your site on the signature of each message posted by you. Here’s a technique I learned from an affiliate marketer.

1) Run a search on Google to find out forums and message boards that are related to your affiliate products and try to join as many forums as you can.

2) Make sure that each one of your forums profile is edited to include your website link within the signature option.

3) Spend a few hours navigating the pages of the forums. You can ask questions and post informative and helpful replies to other peoples’ questions or messages to build your status. The more people trust you, the more likely they will click your link.

Really Simple Syndication – RSS

2007-01-06T08:15:00.000-08:00

RSS is the newest, hottest technology on the Net. Whoa! Did you pull back just from hearing the word technology? Don’t be concerned about the “how does it work”, but let’s concentrate on what it can do for you.

Let’s discuss Really Simple Syndication. What is syndication? In the off line world, it is associated with comic strips or a particular feature writer in the newspaper such as Ann Landers. The comic or article was developed and for a fee was syndicated to any newspaper that wanted to carry it. It would appear simultaneously in many newspapers across the country.

On the Net, most of the syndication does not cost anything. Most sites or companies that supply “feed” for syndication do so for free because they are looking for the exposure from the information and advertising that is carried in the feed.

When you go to the home page on Yahoo, Google, or MSN, you will see news, weather, sports, etc. displayed on the page. This information is coming through a feed from other websites and will automatically update on the home page without the owner of that page having to do anything.

What do you need to read RSS? Simple answer …… You need an RSS reader. The easiest way to get one is to subscribe to “My Yahoo”. Sign in on your “My Yahoo” page and it contains an RSS reader for you to use. Go to www.yahoo.com and click on the “My Yahoo” icon to sign on or to register.

When get your “My Yahoo” account set up and log in under your user name, look in the top left of the window and click “Add Content”. You will be presented a form to complete for feeds by subject. Don’t bother with this search box. To the right of the search box in small letters is “Add RSS by URL”. Click that link and you will be presented another search page where you can set up the feed from a particular website. There are feeds from Retirement Jobs Online.com and Boomer-eZine if your want to experiment with setting up RSS in your Yahoo reader.

DO NOT CLICK THE FOLLOWING URL. Highlight it and right click on it. Select copy and then paste it into the search box on Yahoo. Then click the “Add” box to the right of the search box. You now have added an RSS feed to your “My Yahoo” page.

http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com/retirement-jobs-online.xml OK you say. What is all the big fuss about RSS? Just stop and think about what this can do for you as a surfer on the Net. If you have particular sites that you check regularly for information, you have to spend time looking through the sites to see if new info has been posted.

If you set up an RSS feed from that site to your “My Yahoo” or any other RSS reader that you choose (and there are hundreds of them) you do not waste time having to look for changes. You are notified when a change takes place by the RSS feed and you can click right to it. As we say in Texas, “That is slicker than cow slobber”. I challenge you to find anything that is slicker than the slobber of a cow.

RSS is used extensively by bloggers to monitor blogs for new posts.

Now, on the flip side, if you have a website or a blog and you publish information, establishing a RSS feed will put your publication on the feeds on the Net so it can be picked up by additional people. These contacts will possibly become subscribers. This is a way to build additional traffic and it is free. Anyone who has a website or a blog or publishes a newsletter should establish an RSS feed for it.

RSS feeds are great tools for expanding your publishing options and I recommend that you set up a feed to help expand your online business.

I wish you the best in adding RSS to your website.

John V. W. Howe is an entrepreneur, author, inventor, patent holder, husband, father, and grandfather. He has been involved in entrepreneurial activities for over 40 years. He founded http://www.boomer-ezine.com and http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com to help Boomers (baby boomers) become entrepreneurs when they retire.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_V._W._Howe

Affiliate Marketing Resources

2007-01-06T07:57:00.000-08:00

Affiliate Marketing Resource
About Affiliates Affiliate Marketing is very popular on the web right now. This site gives information about how to choose affiliate programs, promote them and avoid scams.
FREE Listing Work From Home Opportunities Please take a moment to look at our free listing of Work From Home Jobs, Home Business Opportunities, Affiliate Programs, FREE Marketing Resources and much more!
marketing strategy marketing strategy, marketing consulting and strategic marketing to survive and thrive in today's economy.
Home based Business Tutorials, Marketing and Affiliate strategies Build a profitable online business with honest, reliable information. We can put you on the right path with Home-based business tutorials, ebooks and articles. Plus Website design, advertising and affiliate programs, internet marketing and free newsletter.

Increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign with these simple tips that will keep your emails out of the junk folder...

2007-01-04T23:59:00.000-08:00

Increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign with these simple tips that will keep your emails out of the junk folder...
and get your recipients to open them!

Email marketing has experienced a lot of growing pains over the past few years. In the beginning, it was seen as the perfect marketing tool — cheap, fast, and measurable. Click-through rates were the only numbers that mattered, and everybody was still excited to receive — and open — just about every email in their inbox but now some people are questioning the effectiveness of email marketing.

They suggest that the explosion of spam and the sheer volume of email people receive have ruined the effectiveness of email as a marketing tool. Even perfectly legitimate emails are being trapped by spam filters or deleted, unopened, by wary recipients who are concerned about viruses.

Yet there are still companies that, despite these challenges, manage to generate millions of dollars of profit every year using email marketing.

In fact, here at IMC, email is still very effective! Direct email marketing generated $3.5 million in revenue last year alone And the opportunities keep growing.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, email remains the number one online activity of Americans — ahead of Web surfing and using search engines — and now that more and more people are able to receive e-mail on their cell phones and PDAs, the opportunities for creative email marketing are only continuing to expand.

At the recent MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Summit in Chicago, Barry Stamos of Responsys.com even stated that people now spend more time reading email than watching TV!

All of these developments, combined with the fact that email can be tested and measured for specific results — unlike other promotional methods — means email marketing remains one of the most valuable tools in any marketer's arsenal.

Even though spam and volume issues can hurt the effectiveness of your email campaign, email marketing can still deliver an exceptional return on investment (ROI) because of the massive amount of time people spend online, and the proportion of that time they spend checking their email.

In fact, eMarketer reports that email generates a much higher return on spending than methods such as direct mail and newspaper and radio advertising.

So if anyone tries to tell you that email marketing is dead, don't believe them!

The truth is that spam and volume didn't kill email marketing the way many so-called experts predicted. But they did manage to create a few hoops you now have to jump through to get your emails delivered and opened.

These days, you need to educate yourself on the best ways to collect, manage, and store email addresses, and only send out relevant emails that people will open without hesitation. Do these things right and you'll be able to profit from all of the new opportunities available to email marketers... and continue to enjoy the impressive ROI email marketing provides.

Carefully manage your opt-in list to fully capitalize
on the income-boosting potential of effective email marketing

Okay, so you've written an opt-in offer for your web site and started to collect the names and email addresses of visitors who want to hear from you on a regular basis. These are people who have decided they like what they see on your web site enough to give you their email addresses. They are basically inviting you to sell to them!

Now you need to decide how you will store, manage, and use this information. Many people simply store their opt-in lists in a spreadsheet or text file, but there is also great email marketing software out there to help you manage this information more easily.

The method you choose to look after this information will depend on your own unique situation, but if you are going to get serious about email marketing, then you'll need to get serious about managing your opt-in list — not just building it, but also cleaning and maintaining it to ensure that you always generate the best results and never look like a spammer.

Here are a few things you need to know to effectively manage your opt-ins... and guarantee the highest possible response to any mailout you send:

a. Manage your "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests

One of the most important things you can do to minimize your headaches — and maximize your profits — is to stay on top of your "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests. If you don't have an automated system for managing subscriptions to your opt-in list, this is especially important.

Always treat requests to unsubscribe from your list seriously. People who aren't promptly removed from your list after making an unsubscribe request can accuse you of spamming them, and you can quickly find yourself in trouble with your ISP.

Of course, it's just as important that people who ask to be added to your list are subscribed right away, since you never know which one of those subscription requests is going to end up being your best customer.

If your subscribe and unsubscribe requests aren't handled automatically, you should take care of them right before you send out a mailing. This ensures that your list is as current as possible, and it also means that you don't have to deal with this chore on a daily basis.

b. Remove duplicate addresses

Before you send any mailings, you'll want to make sure that you don't have any duplicate email addresses in your list. There will always be some people — more than you might think — who will opt in to your list, leave your site, and come back a couple of days later to sign up again, forgetting that they've already joined.

Now, people are happy to get one copy of your email, but start sending them multiple copies and just watch how fast they unsubscribe from your list — or worse yet, report you as a spammer!

This kind of spam complaint is relatively easy to clear up, but it is still a hassle, and instead of having a potential customer who was so excited about what you had to offer that they signed up twice, you now have nothing.

c. Clean your list

Keeping your list clean means more than just removing unsubscribes and duplicate addresses. Cleaning your list means sifting through the messages that "bounce back" to you after a mailing, and deciding which ones should be removed from your list completely, and which ones you might want to try mailing again.

"Bounced" messages are those messages that, for whatever reason, were not successfully delivered to the intended recipient. Most bounced messages can be categorized as either "soft" bounces or "hard" bounces.

Soft bounces: These are messages that could not be delivered at the time they were sent, but may be deliverable at some time in the future. These types of bounces are usually caused by the recipient's inbox being full.
Hard bounces: These are messages that can never be delivered. Hard bounces are usually caused by the user typing in an incorrect email address when opting in to your list, or the subscriber no longer using the email address they originally opted in with.

Hard bounces should be deleted immediately. If you leave these addresses in your list, you'll just have to wade through unnecessary bounce messages every time you send a mailing, and that's a waste of your valuable time.

Plus, if you continue to send email to an address that is invalid, you can get into real trouble. This is one of the methods used to identify spammers, and if you are found to be repeatedly sending messages to a "dead" email address, you could have a problem with the ISP receiving the messages.

Emails that are returned as soft bounces, on the other hand, should be dealt with in an entirely different way. Since soft bounces are the result of a temporary problem — a full mailbox, for instance — you'll want to re-send your promotions to all the soft bounce addresses a couple of days after you sent out the initial mailing.

You'll be surprised how many messages get delivered on the second try. And since you've already written the email, there's almost no extra work on your part.

d. Divide your list to conquer more subscribers

Given the mountains of email people receive these days, most only want to see what's relevant. And, unfair as it may seem, anything irrelevant could be considered spam... and reported as such.

If the people on your list know that the message you're sending is something they want, they'll open it!
Using email to target different segments of your audience is one of the single most effective ways to market products or services on the Internet. In fact, email marketers practicing segmentation are currently seeing much better results than those sending undifferentiated mailings.

A 2006 report by MarketingSherpa found that email marketers using segmentation saw click-through rates that are 72% higher than email marketers who are not segmenting their opt-in lists.

The simplest way you can market to different segments of your opt-in list is by targeting them based on whether they are (a) existing customers, or (b) visitors to your site who have simply opted in to receive your free newsletter, eBook, etc.

The message you send to your existing customers, for instance, might focus on selling them an upgrade to a product they already own. Because you've already earned their trust through a previous sale, this promotion should do quite well.

Of course, you'll need to approach your subscribers — those people who haven't made a purchase from you yet — with a slightly different angle. You might try offering them a 25% discount off their first purchase, for example.

There's no end of ways to segment your audience depending on the information you've collected — and email automation makes it not only possible, but simple!

By targeting different segments of your audience with a promotion specific to their current situation, you can just about guarantee that the results of your email marketing efforts will be dramatically improved.

e. Snag your recipients' attention by using their names

If there's a "secret" to getting email recipients' attention, it's this: Personalize the subject line. There is no other single technique that will boost the response rate of your emails as much as personalization.

Have you ever noticed that a great salesperson will find out your name and then use it every so often while they talk to you? It's a way of establishing trust and building rapport. Using someone's name makes them feel as though they have a relationship with you. And the truth of the matter is that nothing gets a person's attention faster than hearing or seeing their own name!

By personalizing your subject lines, you also make your email appear more authentic and safer to open, because recipients will be more likely to view your email as coming from a trusted source.

Unfortunately, typing each individual recipient's name into the subject line of every email you send is just not practical! Once you grow your list to more than 50 or 100 people, it becomes unmanageable! It's way too time consuming...

The good news is that there is great email marketing software available these days that will help you completely personalize your campaigns automatically, and save you tons of time and effort.

Choosing the right email marketing software
will make your life easier!

Luckily, there are some pretty powerful products out there designed to help email marketers develop, manage, segment, and personalize their lists easily, from one user-friendly interface. Choosing the right email marketing software can save you literally hundreds of hours of frustration, and help you to avoid being accused of spamming.

If the software you choose doesn't have the following features, you could be missing out on the full potential of email marketing, and leaving "money on the table." To be effective, your email marketing software must allow you to...

Manage your subscribes and unsubscribes. Top notch email marketing software will automatically add people who fill out your opt-in form to your list, and automatically remove the names of people who have submitted "unsubscribe" requests.
Segment your opt-in list for custom mailouts by collecting information on your opt-ins' preferences, buying habits, location, etc.
Personalize your subject lines automatically to grab your recipients' attention, and make your emails seem more authentic and safer to open.
Protect yourself from bogus "spam" complaints. Every time someone subscribes to your list, the date and time should be recorded so if they accuse you of "spamming," you can prove to your ISP that they have opted in!
Filter undeliverable email automatically. The right email marketing software should automatically determine whether your undeliverable message is a "hard" or a "soft" bounce. If it's a "hard" bounce, the email address should be flagged as "bad" automatically.
Protect yourself from "domain bombing" by automatically removing duplicate addresses from your list — so you never risk mailing the same subscriber twice and being accused of spamming.
Avoid having your messages blocked by ISPs and service providers by accidentally hitting their servers too hard, too fast, with too many messages.

... And that just scratches the surface. If the email marketing software you choose doesn't have these capabilities, you will not be able to fully capitalize on the on the awesome, profit-boosting potential of email marketing. And, your email promotions will be more likely to be considered spam, which can cause big headaches.

Final thoughts on Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing remains a highly effective tool for any business. And the success of your campaigns rests largely on the percentage of your messages that get delivered and opened.

At IMC, we've been using email marketing for 10 years now. We've got it down to a science — and we've even created our own email marketing software that incorporates all the key features we've learned are necessary to run a successful email campaign.

The Best Email Marketing Software Solution

It's a little more of a challenge to make sure your emails get delivered and opened these days, but by keeping your list squeaky clean and sending highly relevant and personalized messages you will not only improve the likelihood of people opening your emails, you'll avoid being labeled a spammer.

Using RSS: When It’s OK to Keep Up with the Jonses

2007-01-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

“Peer pressure has many redeeming qualities. It is the pressure of our peers, after all, that gives us the support to try things we otherwise wouldn't have.” - Bill Treasurer

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds have a feeling of being en vogue. You know, the type of feeling that has you jumping into the river just because your friends are. The kind of thing your mother warned you about.

The truth is RSS feeds are sweeping the Internet community, but for reasons far greater than peer pressure.

Businesses involved in online marketing are fast discovering the value of making their site information RSS compatible. Savvy online business owners are finding that the application of an RSS feed provides a win-win scenario. You win because clients return to your website time after time, your client wins because they receive information from you based on their own set of preferences. In the end it is a relatively hands-free way of building trust with your client.

Building Links

The application of RSS feeds also provides a targeted opportunity to increase link building for your site. The RSS feeds include links you may have on your blog or website and allow your RSS feed subscriber to visit those links that generate traffic for your website or blog.

As web-based businesses work to integrate technologies they are finding that the full implementation of business friendly applications create greater recognition for their website and allow them to grow the business at an accelerated pace.

Unified Pressure

“Rarely do schools acknowledge the power of peer culture in defining standards, and rarely do they take advantage of this power as an engine for quality. When students themselves are in charge of projects that they care about, peer pressure can become a powerful force for high standards.” - R. BERGER, Harvard Education Letter

The School of Hard Knocks has its own set of peer pressure tactics, unfortunately much of the peer pressure results in decreased business when there is a refusal to look into the ‘high standards’ of purposeful advancement.

Many business owners may be intimidated by the new technology or they may simply refuse to learn the new skills. The good news is there are businesses that can assist you in implementing the technology of an RSS feed. There are also businesses that can provide targeted and fully optimized content for your website that has the ability to increase the frequency that your website is utilized, information downloaded and products purchased.

Scott Lindsay is a web developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of HighPowerSites and many other web projects. HighPowerSites is the easiest do-it-yourself website builder on the web. No programming or design skill required. Get your own website online in just 5 minutes with HighPowerSites.com at: http://www.highpowersites.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Scott_Lindsay

The Truth About Evaluating a Trading System

2007-01-02T12:57:00.000-08:00

Here are the guidelines for evaluating a trading system. How many of these principles do you follow with your current approach?

• To validate a system you need at least 50 trades in the test. You also need at least 50 ticks (overall market trades) in a bar to have a valid charting approach.
• Determine the average profit per trade, the average loss, and the percentage of wins and losses.
• The largest winning trade should not exceed 50% of the gross profit or 25% of the net profit. Otherwise the random lucky trade factor will skew your system results.
• What is the Expectancy Ratio of your approach? If it does not exceed 2 to 1 with a 50% probability factor, you will lose money due to variable and fixed costs.
• If the winning percentage is less than 50% but makes money, can you psychologically trade it and take all the losses necessary to follow the system?

• As Van K. Tharp, Mark Douglas, Bill Williams, Bent Steenbarger and the Market Wizards all say, you trade your beliefs about the market. What does your system expose about your trading mentality? Does your system lead to second guessing or confidence?
• Compare your system to other types of investments. Which system has the best Internal Rate of Return with the least risk? You will need at least four times the return of a low risk investment (T-Bills) to make your system worth trading. (This method is similar to the one we used to rate venture capital allocation when we considered multiple deals.)

How do you build a solid trading system? Just like you build anything else! You start with a goal that leads you to the end result you desire. Then you develop a plan to achieve that goal that includes all the risks, rewards, terms and conditions necessary to achieve the goal
The missing element is often the next step: execute the plan, closely monitor the results, and make incremental modifications or changes to the system. The final step is to monitor your emotions and see if you can actually trade these signals, and play the probabilities for gains versus losses as you have laid out your system.
This will be the most difficult part of any trading system. If you cannot trade it, in the final analysis it will not achieve your goals.

Start an eBay Business to Make a Life-changing Income

2007-01-02T12:48:00.000-08:00

If you plan to start a home based or eBay business and make a steady full-time income from the business. The ebay Secrets course is for you. This course was written by two successful e-businessmans Derek Gehl and Brandon Dupsky. The course contains great tips, powerful selling techniques and secrets that can help you get started to make money on ebay and subsequently achieve financial freedom.

The price of the course is $197.00 and they offer a 90 days money back guarantee. Derek also made another promise that if anyone follows the system and techniques mentioned in the course didn't make at least 10 times the investment, he will personally pay an extra $200 besides the refund. The course is expensive but it may help you change your life.

Make Money Online - Paid to Write

2006-12-30T22:37:00.000-08:00

You can make some extra money online without spending any money by writting articles for other websites. Here are some of the websites the you can join and make money contributing your articles.

WiseOrb.com
You can write articles in a vast array of topics for this website and get paid based on the page views of your articles. The more people read your articles the greater your earning. Payment is made via PayPal.

SEOChat.com
When you become a writer of SEOChat.com, your approved articles may be read by hundreds thousands of people and be paid based on the quantity & quality of your articles and frequency of your submission. The article categories include web development and hosting, SEO
and more.

Javahive.com
You will be paid posting messages on Javahive's forum. You earn 1 point for each qualified post and the point can be converted into cash. They are also looking for people to writes articles related Internet business, computer & technology and health & fitness. The writers will be rewarded $1-$10 for each approved articles.

Promoting Affiliate Programs through Personal Recommendations

2006-12-30T04:53:00.000-08:00

by Stephen Kelly

Publishing articles online is a highly effective way to increase affiliate revenue. In the current marketing environment, it is increasingly important to differentiate yourself. Consumers have become savvier and are increasingly suspicious of pure shopping websites that send them to another site to complete product purchase. Furthermore, you may capture a consumer's purchase once, but they are not likely to return to your site. Instead, they will simply return to the retailer you referred them to complete a purchase.

One, highly effective, way to attract new visitors and motivate them to return to your site later is to publish articles related to the product you are trying to promote. For example, if you are trying to promote a new portable MP3 player, you might publish a product review online and include your affiliate links in the article.

These product reviews add value to your website and can dramatically increase consumer confidence in your site. In addition, if you carefully craft your article, you can include targeted keywords which may help you achieve a higher rank in search engines. If your review is useful, users may even link to it from their personal blog, which may also increase your search engine page rank.

You may be thinking, "I am not a writer, so this strategy will not work for me."

However, if you choose affiliate programs carefully and focus your energy on products that you have a genuine interest in it becomes much easier. There are a couple of easy things you can do to increase your affiliate revenue and make your affiliate marketing strategy easier. Write articles that give more than a recommendation. You should talk directly to the consumer about how this product has impacted your life. Speak directly about your experiences with a product, tell a story about using it, ask questions that make the consumer think about how their life would be improved by owning the product.

By writing a product review, consumers will be less likely to be suspicious when you refer them to another site. In the consumers mind, you are simply reviewing the product, but are not involved in selling it directly. If your audience begins to trust your recommendations, you will find that you can sell products to them over and over again.

Now that you have written a compelling, personal article about your product, you have to make sure that other people find your masterpiece. How do you promote this article?

One method of promoting your articles is to publish your own newsletter. Publish an opt-in newsletter that features a teaser paragraph about your article and a link back to your website for the complete article. Be sure to avoid sending your articles out as spam. Be patient as your subscriber list grows and only send people information they have asked for.

If you do not have a mailing list, you still have options. You can publish your article in article databases so that other newsletter publishers will run your article in their newsletter or on their website. Publish your new product review in an article database with a link to your website in the articles credits. Do a search on Google for free content and then learn how to submit your articles.

Finally, you can post your articles or product reviews on related bulletin boards and forums online. It is free and people will be able to interact with you. Of course, if you try posting an affiliate link, people will notice and you will immediately lose credibility. Simply include a link to your website in your signature. If your articles are interesting, people will visit your website where you can use your affiliate links.

In summary, provide your audience interesting, relevant content and they will trust your recommendations. If they trust you, they will buy from you. Promote your affiliate programs with personal recommendations in newsletters on relevant websites and online forums. The visitors will come, but more importantly they will buy.

About the author:

Stephen Kelly founded http://www.ArticleAgents.com and http://www.ReviewAgent.com , two free tools you can use to promote your affiliate accounts by publishing product reviews and articles online. Anyone may reproduce this article, as long as this information and all links remain intact.

Knocking The Mythology Out of Affiliate Network Marketing

2006-12-30T04:46:00.000-08:00

by Isaiah Hull

You may use this article for reprint, as long as it remains unaltered and the resource box and author information are included. - Isaiah Hull

Knocking The Mythology Out of Affiliate Network Marketing

If you have worked as an Internet marketer for any amount of time, you have probably heard repeatedly that affiliate network marketing opportunities are the most lucrative, cleanest, quickest way to make an income on the Internet. And if you have actually tried affiliate network marketing for any amount of time, you more than likely ended up broke or never achieved more than modest, fluctuating success. . .like almost everyone else who goes into the field.

So what prevents you and 97% of all other affiliate marketers from succeeding while 3% continually rakes in 70% of the profits? Are they smarter than you are? Do they work harder and longer than you do? Do they know a bunch of obscure secrets that you do not?--No, but they do have a totally different mindset.

In order to become successful in affiliate network marketing, you must destroy the mythological mindset that most people bring to the business. You must stay firmly grounded in reality if you ever want to succeed.

How many times have you heard about some little old lady that only spends 3 hours a week on her computer and somehow earns $50,000 a month? And how many times have you read an ad that tells you how you can make $10,000 in one month from now if you sign up right away?

We have all seen these ads and we have all responded to them at one time or another. Chances are, if you're in an affiliate program now, you were hooked by a line like that. But what separates the "gurus" from the people who make little or no money is that the gurus understand what this really is: mythology. These stories, while they might be true, promote mythological thinking that tricks people into trying every opportunity that looks good at the moment, rather than focusing on a single opportunity.

These "opportunities" not only prevent you from succeeding, but they have an even nastier byproduct: they promote the mythology that you either succeed on the Internet in 15 minutes or you will never succeed at all.

This is simply not true, yet it is the reason why almost no one succeeds with affiliate marketing: they can never stay with one opportunity more than a couple months. If they do not have instant success, they give up and move on--restarting the same building process they abandoned. They never reap the profit of cumulative efforts. They build a foundation, they leave before starting the actual building--and then they move to another company, start the foundation, and then leave once again.

Without exception, every successful Internet marketer has spent an enormous amount of time both researching and experimenting with online business. Most have failed miserably a number of times and most have spent a significant amount of time working their way to the top and achieving profit. It really is pretty hard to earn an income on the Internet, but it is entirely doable if you are following a proven plan and if you are willing to abandon lofty mythology for a plan rooted in reality.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best places to start making a profit online. In fact, almost every successful Internet marketer I know started her career selling affiliate products. Many of them still do. What made them successful is that they found a legitimate opportunity to make money (whether or not it was the best one available), they found replicable processes that got them visitors and profit, and then they repeated those processes and reinvested those profits until they got to where they are now.

Most people cannot accept that making money with affiliate programs is this simple. I have found that most affiliate marketers who do not earn an income online either a) do not want to do actual work or b) have developed a mythological mindset from reading affiliate program advertisements--and can only think in terms of making money on the Internet through magic, rather than results-oriented action.

In closing, I will summarize and then dispel all of the popular Internet affiliate marketing myths, so you can skip the learning curve and start building your empire today:

Myth #1: There is an affiliate program out there that will do all of the work for you and make you rich without requiring effort on your part.

Truth: You have a much better chance of earning an income on the Internet if you work on the affiliate program you are in currently in (as long as it is a legitimate opportunity) than if you search the entire Internet for a better opportunity. There is definitely a lot to be said for having a responsive, successful upline, but ultimately, your success will depend on your actions. You can sell anything on the Internet; you just have to spend enough time in the building and learning process.

Myth #2: You must spend an exorbitant amount of money on advertising to make money on the Internet.

Truth: Every single successful Internet marketer puts heavy testing, good design, and reliable follow-up over heavy spending. They minimize costs and they make sure what they are actually spending produces empirically-acceptable results.

If you ignore this you will fail. A lot of real life corporations spend thousands of dollars monthly on PPC campaigns and end up making no money at all because they don't start small and test their results. They just throw money at the problem and hope for sales. You don't have thousands of dollars to throw away, so don't do this.

Myth #3: You will succeed or fail on the Internet or on any Internet money-making venture within month.

Truth: Most Internet marketers have spent time building an enormous empire with big mailing lists and regular website visitors. They worked to become successful. You must also.

If you want to find an affiliate program that makes you rich instantly without putting in any work, then continue spending money. Send me an email when you find it because I have personally looked at hundreds--and while some are better than others--none offer success without action.

The Internet is riddled with mythology. If you want to succeed, you must reject this mythology and look for clear, work-for-results solutions. You must create plans and put them into action immediately. You must build and cultivate a base of subscribers and visitors. And above all, you must accept that you can only achieve profit through sweat, not luck.

About the author:

Isaiah Hull is the CEO of an Internet business, a publisher of two business newsletters, PTL of several affiliate programs, and a business trainer for his affiliates. On 11/10/04, he released a brand-new free Internet income course to address the major changes in Internet marketing: http://www.workathomerightnow.net

What Does RSS Have To Do To Reach The Tipping Point?

2006-12-30T04:30:00.000-08:00

Bloggers and online marketers are forever trumpeting the wonders of blogs as a business and marketing tool. But blogs will only be able to live up to the dreams of its disciples if they start being read by average Joe from the mass market. Some work still needs to be done if RSS and blogs are to be pushed over the tipping point and become the widely used marketing machine that everybody believes/hopes they will be.

RSS is going to need a charm offensive before people in the street even know what it is, let alone start using it. You only have to look at the makeup of the top 50 most popular blogs (mainly about gadgets, politics and marketing) to know that the mass market have yet to start reading blogs in their great numbers. Or maybe there is just a huge gap for blogs on paying your mortgage and cutting your credit card bills that nobody has spotted?

At a recent ‘Beers and Innovation’ event in London the future of RSS and blogging was discussed and it was universally declared, as per usual, how fantastic they are. The speakers also all agreed that their growth amongst the non-web savvy would continue to stall until RSS becomes more accessible and easier to use. Hopefully, when Internet Explorer 7 launches later this year it will go some way to correcting this problem.

Even when the hurdle of accessibility is cleared there are still other problems preventing RSS from becoming a business tool that can be effectively managed.

As any marketer will tell you, “You can’t monetise what you can’t measure,” and this is an issue faced by RSS/web feeds. It’s virtually impossible to know exactly how many people are subscribed to your feed, let alone how many are actually reading your posts.

There are so many different aggregators and methods of capturing RSS content that there is currently no way of compiling all your data into a central reporting function, as with email. This makes it tricky for marketers arguing their case for the extra funding needed for this radical new marketing tactic. There is simply currently no way of measuring the ROI of blogging in traditional quantifiable terms (other than organic SEO and increased traffic of course).

RSS will soon be far easier to use, which will help it to start reaching out to the non-web savvy. If you can bookmark a site then you will be able to click on a button to save its feed in your browser. But developing a universal standard of tracking your blog’s subscription and readership - with the level of reporting offered by email - might still hold back its tipping point amongst businesses for a while yet.

Please visit www.thewritewords.me.uk for more information about my business blogging services and the answer to all your web content needs.

Thanks for reading,

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Matt_Ambrose

Ways to Make Money Online

2006-12-30T04:25:00.000-08:00

Make Money Online With A Free Blog
Blog or weblog is simply a website with continuous updates on a particular subject or topic and the latest post will stay on the top. For instance, If your blog is about motorcycle. You can post the latest news and announcements from motorcycle manufacturers, discuss about the latest models of motorcycles and the best components used for producing motorcycles. You can create a blog absolutely free by joing Blogger.com. Creating a blog with Blogger.com is easy as you don't need any technical knowledge and you can have your blog published within an hours.

There are several ways you can make money with a blog:

Place revenue generating Ads on your blog
You can join Google AdSense program and start earning advertising revenue from your blog.

Sell Other People's Stuff
You can promote your affiliate programs by placing the affiliate links and banners on your blog and earn commission whenever someone clicks through an affiliate link or banner to your merchant's website made a purchase.

Sell Your Own Product
Blog can be used to promote and sell your own products too. You can write about your products' features and benefits on the blog.

Sell Products or Services Online
You can set up an online store to sell a wide variety of products. However, it will cost you few thousands dollars to start an e-store. One way to start an online business with minimum capital is deal with drop ship wholesalers. So how drop shipping works?

- A drop ship distributor is a wholesale company that will ship one product directly to your customer.
- You don't need to pay for an item unless it is sold.
- You don't store any inventory.
- You don't package and ship merchandise.
- Your customer pays the retail price for the product to you and you pay the cost of the product to the drop ship distributor. The difference is your profit.

Drop shipping system makes it affordable for anyone to start an online business due to the benefits it offers. EBay is the best place for you to start selling your products with drop shipping system. One strategy you can try is sell the similar items to the one that have attracted several bids in eBay. For instance, say you have opened an account with a cell phone drop ship dealer and ready to sell cell phone on eBay. You found that a Nokia 8810 cell phone have attracted 7 bids, so what you can try to do is list the similar item immediately with lowest price possible. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will make any money with this strategy. There are many more auction selling ideas you can find from the Internet which can help you make a steady income on eBay.

Be a Freelancer
There are many freelance job sites consist of a long list of freelance job contracts. These freelance sites usually offer the following jobs:

1) IT jobs (web-design, Jawa, PHP, script-installation, programming, graphic design and so on)
2) Writing & Editing Jobs
3) Administrative support (Data entry) & accounting services.

You may join several freelance sites for free and start bidding for the projects and contracts that are right for you. You can also make extra money writing articles and essays. There are places and websites where you can sell your articles and essays for a price anywhere between $5 to 25 per article. Furthermore, there are forums and blogs offer to pay anyone who post message and article to their websites.

Be an Affiliate
Affiliate makes money online by selling other people's stuff. An affiliate earns commission whenever someone sent by him/her to his/her merchant's website makes a purchase. Clickbank is one of the best places you can find an affiliate program to join because it is the largest e-book store and contains a ton of merchants looking for people to sell their e-books. The main task of affiliates is promote and advertise their merchants' websites (affiliate links). One method to promote affiliate program is advertise on Google. To advertise on Google you'll first need to open a Google AdWords account. You can start advertise on Google immediately after paying $5 account activation fee. Your cost of advertising is calculated in pay-per-click (PPC) basis. This means that Google will only charge you whenever someone clicks your text ad.

Paid Survey
Taking online paid survey at home is an easy way to make money online as you don't need any special skills and knowledge to complete paid survey job. In order to increase the money you can earn, you need to join as many market research and survey companies as possible. However you can't expect how much money you will make monthly because you have no idea when a paid survey invitation will send to your mail box. Thus it is not an ideal way to make a wage but a great way to make some extra income for paying your monthly bills.

Recruiting Top-Performing "Super Affiliates"

2006-12-30T04:18:00.000-08:00

Starting an affiliate program is a great way to generate extra sales and increase your visibility online... but did you know some affiliates are more valuable than others? It's true, they are called “Super Affiliates”!

When you're promoting your affiliate program, you should focus on recruiting highly targeted "super" affiliates who have direct access to your target market. Your goal should be to recruit quality, not quantity...

... Because it's the super affiliates with the marketing expertise and know-how who will generate most of your sales.

Super affiliates aren't called "super" for nothing. These are the web sites that cater to your target audience, have high levels of traffic, and whose owners possess very well-developed Internet marketing skills.

And this powerful cocktail of attributes can make super affiliates some of the best and most profitable business partners you ever make!

Here's how you can find out where they're hiding online...

Search the Web to identify potential super affiliates

Before you even begin your search for super affiliates, you need to know your target market inside out. This way, you'll be able to identify web sites that cater to the same audience.

You should start off with search engines and online directories to find sites that are aimed at a similar target market to yours.

But when you look for super affiliates, you need to focus on the sites that appear right at, or near, the top of your search results. These sites are the ones most likely to be run by people with the right combination of Web savvy and business experience that mark them out as potential super affiliates.

And their web sites are the ones most likely to attract the high levels of qualified traffic necessary to generate BIG sales.

When you're searching for super affiliates, you need to be looking for quality --NOT quantity. So you need to do some serious detective work to make sure they are suitable candidates.

Dig deeper to find the affiliates who will be your top performers

Once you've located some good prospects, you need to build up as full a picture as possible of their business, the level of traffic their web site gets, and who their target audience is. Basically, you have to make sure that they are targeting the same people as you, and that they have enough traffic to be able to generate good sales.

Of course you can ask them these things, but it's better to do some investigating of your own. You can dig a bit deeper into these web sites using the following tools:

The Google Toolbar
The Alexa Toolba
LinkPopularity.com
Ranking.com

Learn to identify super affiliates
Contacting potential Super Affiliates
Selling potential super affiliates on your affiliate program
Final thoughts on Recruiting Top Affiliates to help Increase your Online Profit

Make Money Online - Start a Make Money Online - Start an online Store with Less Than $100n online Store with Less Than $100

2006-12-30T04:15:00.001-08:00

If you are always thinking to start an online store or shopping mall but worry that you don't have enough initial capital and required knowledge to set up your online business at the beginning, Getestore.com is your solution. Getestore.com can help you open an e-store in short period of time with less than $100.

When you sign up their offer, you get a free online store with over 3,500 items (brand names include Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, JVC, Olympus, Xbox and more) for you to select to resell online.
You don't need to invest in inventory. You only pay to your supplier when someone buy a product from your store. Check out the Getestore.com for more details

15 Reasons to Become an Affiliate Marketer

2006-12-30T04:15:00.000-08:00

© 2004 Rosalind Gardner - All Rights reserved
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

There are HUGE benefits to promoting affiliate programs with your own home-based Internet business, and I've come up with a list of 15 great reasons to become an affiliate marketer.

Let's look at each reason separately:

1. No Production Costs - The cost to develop and produce a new product is prohibitive for almost anyone who wants to start a home-based business. With affiliate programs, production costs aren't an issue. The product has been developed and proven - all on the merchant's nickel.

2. Low Cost Set-up - Compared with building a brick and mortar store, starting a home-based Internet business is relatively cheap. You probably already have a desk, Internet-connected computer and word-processing software, which is all the equipment you may need.

3. No Fees for Joining or Licenses to Buy - I often compare doing business as an affiliate, with distributing a line of products in the real world. The biggest difference is that the distributor must often pay for a license to distribute products within a limited geographic region. Affiliate programs, on the other hand, are usually free to join, and geographic market reach is limited only by the affiliate's ability to promote his web site.

4. Choose From Thousands of Products and Services - What isn't sold online? That list must be shorter than the one describing all that IS sold online. There are thousands and thousands of affiliate programs selling every product under the sun. That makes it easy to find products related to your current or planned web site.

5. No Sales Experience Needed - When I started my affiliate business, I had absolutely no sales experience. That wasn't a problem, however. The companies I affiliated with provided excellent marketing material. Using their sales copy, I was able to get my first affiliate site up in less than a day.

6. No Employees - The largest expense of most businesses is employee salaries. Although there might be times when you need or want someone to work for you as an affiliate, it's doubtful you'll ever have to worry about hiring full or part-time employees. When you have a project you want to hire out, it is easy to find specialists in every computer- related field who can work for you from the comfort of THEIR own homes. You pay only for the project, and never have to worry about ongoing employee-related benefits and deductions.

7. No Expensive Merchant Accounts Needed - Setting up a merchant account for any business is a time-consuming and costly business. It's even more tedious for Internet businesses. However, merchant accounts aren't a concern when you're an affiliate. The merchant bears that cost and handles all processing of payments. You never have to lose sleep over potential chargebacks, fraud or losing your merchant account when you're an affiliate.

8. No Inventory to Carry - Even if you live in a small one- bedroom apartment, as an affiliate you can sell large items without storage concerns.

9. No Order-Processing - Forget the problems associated with collecting and storing names, addresses, credit card numbers, etc. The merchant does all that!

10. No Product Shipping - The cost and hassle to prepare and ship products to customers worldwide could be staggering. Affiliates never have to worry about packaging supplies or postal rates.

11. No Customer Service Concerns - Do you hate the prospect of dealing with nasty people or customer complaints? Don't worry about it! The merchant handles the snivelers.

12. Make Money While You Sleep - What other business allows you as a sole proprietor to keep your doors open and keep making money even when you take breaks or after you go home for the night?

13. The World at Your Doorstep - The Internet is the world's largest marketplace. You can drive more visitors to your online store in a day, than many small-town merchants sees in his or her brick and mortar business in a year.

14. Minimal Risk - The product you chose isn't making money? Dump it. Take down your links and promote another! It's that easy. There are no long-term contracts binding you to products that don't sell.

15. High Income Potential - If you have a job, your salary or hourly wage is probably pre-determined. Maybe there's not much, other than working overtime, that you can do to increase your income. With your own affiliate business on the Internet your income potential is limited only by your desire, effort and imagination.

There you have them - all the good reasons to start your own online affiliate marketing business. Start today and benefit from this incredibly simple, cost-effective business opportunity known as affiliate marketing. The time is right, and the time is now.

-- Article excerpted from Rosalind Gardner's "Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 Last Year Selling Other People's Products Online". Rosalind is the 'Net's most recognized expert on successful online selling as an affiliate marketer.

Visit her site at: Affiliate Business Blueprint

About the author:

Rosalind Gardner is the 'Net's most recognized expert on successful online selling as an affiliate marketer.

It is easy to make money online.

2006-12-30T04:05:00.000-08:00

Especially if you know how to do it. The start up costs are low as well, all you really need is a decent webhost, a domain name, and some time. If you only knew how much successful webmasters makes pr month, you would creating a website right away. People like Michael Cheny, who owns a couple of websites, make more than $19,000 pr month just from AdSense. That's not so bad, considering how much time you have to work when your website is already up and running.

There are several different ways on how you can make money on the internet, I will focus on the two ways where I make most of my money.

The first way is also from my experience the best way. This is the way that requires most work, but once your done, you will have a steady income for the rest of your life. Sign up with a webhost that allows you to host unlimited domains, purchase a couple of domain names and create websites. Not just crappy websites, but quality websites. Spread the word of your new sites around, and your traffic will slowly increase Add Google AdSense to them, and you have a second income for the rest of your life. This may sound like it's too easy as it's just a mechanic formula, but it really works. I own many websites myself, and I dont have to lift a finger when they are up and running. I just watch my bank account grow.

The second way is even easier, especially if you already have done step one. Have you ever heard of affiliate programs before? There are many, and I mean many companies, that will offer you a commision for every customer you lead to them, that leads to a sale. There are several thousands of them, many of them team up with companies like commision junction and clickbank to make it easier for you to find an affiliate program you wish to promote. The great thing about this way is that you dont really need a website (but it helps, as it is much cheaper), you can sign up with Google AdWords and simply advertise your affiliate link. You have to pay every time someone clicks on your ad, but if it cost you $20 to get a sale and your commision is $100, its a done deal.

These are two of the ways that I use to make alot of money on the internet. So much money that I dont have a job anymore. You may ask why everyone dont do this if it is as easy as I say. 1. They are lazy, 2. They are stupid, 3. Who cares?

HYIP As An Opportunity To Invest Abroad?

2006-12-30T03:50:00.000-08:00

If you have an Internet account, you can buy stocks in major stock markets like Japan, China, Australia, the US and London. Many other exchanges also have links to other markets that allow for orders to be routed to the relevant market for execution and entered in the relevant currency.

You could open an Internet trading account like E*Trade Financial with $1000 as the minimum deposit to start with. You have to go through a form, including declaring your foreign status for tax purposes.

Investing directly is for sophisticated and educated investor. Investors can invest offshore themselves but how well do you know the markets? It is a big pond out there. There are thousands of companies listed, thus how do you ensure that you buy the right stock?

The foreign equity funds, which structured as feeder funds and fund of funds, tend to have higher annual management costs. The feeder funds are used by locally-offered foreign funds that feed into a ‘master fund’ that is managed by the offshore fund company.

The fund of funds, which are funds that invest in other funds, are designed to achieve greater diversification than traditional funds. These funds are also charge higher management fees as they include expenses charged by the underlying funds.

The cost of investing in shares is pretty much the same; you’d need to open an account and pay stamp duties, have a trustee, and account for transaction costs and settlement fees. There is also a buy-sell spread in currency conversion. And don’t forget the cost of sending the money abroad; the costs of transmitting funds abroad include cable charges from the remitting bank as well as the receiving bank.

With all the above hassles and high costs, then come HYIP 'the rescuer', who claims can rescue you from all these and help you to do real trading and investing in stocks, bonds, commodities, hedge fund, forex, properties etc in all over the countries and across the continents.

With attractive and consistent daily interest, no fee at all, minimum investment as low as $5, no currency conversion risk, no cost of transmitting money, no tax declaration and so on, hyips lured lots of people who seeking for abroad investment with undelivered promised and insane opportunity.

People are easily fall into hyip scam as they don’t understand what investment is and the process involved. They never read hyip’s prospectus, annual report, interim report, or audited report. They not even know who the ‘traders’ or ‘fund managers’ are. They don’t know what kind of investment strategy that the hyip implements. They don’t know the details of portfolio and investment diversification that the hyip applies. And they don’t know whether the investment strategy suits their risk profile ………. and yet they trust such a program as real and dump huge amounts of money into it. That make some hyips ran away with millions dollar.

So in order to save your money and time, I suggest you to read investing book, journal or article to get the actual idea of investment and the whole process. Get knowledge and involve in your local investment opportunities first. If you have time, consult with the experts. I’ve seen so many financially illiterate people tried to show their ‘smartness’ and it’s so irritating! Be educated before accusing other people liars!

BEST SERVED HOT: A Simple Recipe For Success With Affiliate Programs

2006-12-30T03:49:00.000-08:00

by Gunnar Berglund

Affiliate programs have become very popular because of their potential to generate substantial, and even lavish, income in a relatively short period with little investment cost. Their fame has become so big that they are being credited as one of the main reasons for the resurrection of the online business community after the dotcom bubble burst.

But what are affiliate programs? Simply put, affiliate programs, or associate programs as they are called in some circles, are web merchants who pay other websites a commission for either of two things or both:

When the affiliate website generate traffic for the web merchant;

When the affiliate website helps sell a product offered by the web merchant.

Now, why is such a set-up with affiliate programs a lucrative option? Well, first, all you really need is an online presence, i.e. a website, and some selling skills. You don't have to pay anything at all. Second, there is no limit as to how many affiliate programs you could join, and there is definitely no maximum cap for how much you could earn. Third, when everything is set, a semi-automated process will be in place that would allow you to potentially earn even if you're busy with other things.

But despite all these favorable things that can be said about affiliate programs, not that many people have decided to take the plunge. Their hesitation most probably stem from the customary notion that nothing enormously profitable can be gained with little work. Also, they may be of the belief that affiliated programs are too complicated to understand.

They're wrong on both counts, and you could use this to your advantage by joining affiliate programs while the industry isn't that saturated yet. Hereunder is an overview on how to start a relationship with an affiliate program, and how to make the most out of it. It is presented a la a cookbook recipe to let you know how easy it is to master.

THE 20 MINUTE AFFILIATE PROGRAM RECIPE

INGREDIENTS:

1 or more web merchants who offer good commission schemes
1 or more sellable products
1 or more websites where you could promote your affiliates
1 web builder program (i.e. Frontpage, Dreamweaver, or even MS Word)
1 payment method plan (i.e. Paypal, Stormpay, etc.)
some writing skills

OPTIONAL SEASONINGS

1 software that could convert files to .pdf format
1 or more membership in online forums

DIRECTIONS: Find a good and reliable web merchant who offers products you are impressed with. Remember, you cannot sell, or re-sell to be more exact, a product you don't believe in. You also have to consider if the said goods are sellable. You could determine this by conducting some research on the target market. Here's a tip though: anything is marketable on the web, if you have the time, the patience, and the willingness to seek out potential customers.

Once you have chosen a web merchant, you have to study the terms of the affiliate program he offers. Important things to consider are the modes of payment and the commission percentage. Make sure that the web merchant would be able to pay you through the payment method you have availed of. The commission scheme must likewise be favorable to you. Here's another tip: for sales, do not settle for less than 20% commission.

If all is to your satisfaction, sign up.

You will then be given a link that, when clicked pursuant to a sale or a hit, would inform your web merchant's system that you are eligible for a commission. Do not lose this link, as it would be your bread and butter for affiliate programs.

Now, all you have to do is to strategically place this link on your website. Additionally, you must make a sales pitch to your visitors so that they'll consider clicking on the said link. This can be done by discussing something noteworthy, say for example, a how-to guide on recovering lost data, and in the body of your article, you could suggest your readers to try a certain product like a backup system, whose link is provided therein. Also, you could make a sales page, which is basically a page dedicated to the product you're trying to resell, and which can be accessed from your site.

As an added option, you could also make your own e-book and distribute it for free. The e-book itself should tackle something important, but should contain suggestions about the use of the product you're reselling, with the appropriate link that would garner for you your commission. Also, you could join online forums that are dedicated to the market that the product would be perfect for. Include your link in your signature. This would expose it to the people who would view the threads you participated in.

About the Author

© 2005 Gunnar Berglund

Gunnar Berglund has been a "internet- hardworker" for the last five years He publishes The meonit Gazette http://gazette.meonit.com and runs http://www.meonit.com and http://www.grabinternetprofits.com

Anything4you4me - Make Money Online

Choosing the Best Affiliate Programs for Your Website

Seven Ways to Set Yourself Apart From Other Affiliate Marketers

by DeAnna Spencer

The Turtle and the Rabbit Do Affiliate Marketing

by David McCammon

Have You Join Moneymakergroup.com?

The Seven Steps You *NEED* to take to make money online with an affiliate program

1. Offer a quality product, backed up by fantastic customer service

2. Choose your affiliate program software wisely

3. Turn your affiliates into your customers is one of the best ways to make money online with an affiliate program

4. Pay excellent commissions

5. Realize backend sales

6. Do business with your competitors

7. Have a great visitor-to-sale conversion ratio

Final thoughts to help you make money online with an affiliate program

Making affiliate marketing successful for you

by Michael Bloch

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Make Money Online with Affiliate Programs: Getting Started Guide

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Increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign with these simple tips that will keep your emails out of the junk folder...

Carefully manage your opt-in list to fully capitalize on the income-boosting potential of effective email marketing

a. Manage your "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests

b. Remove duplicate addresses

c. Clean your list

d. Divide your list to conquer more subscribers

e. Snag your recipients' attention by using their names

Choosing the right email marketing software will make your life easier!

Final thoughts on Effective Email Marketing

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Carefully manage your opt-in list to fully capitalize
on the income-boosting potential of effective email marketing

Choosing the right email marketing software
will make your life easier!