Ventureripe

How the Amazon Affiliate Program Works

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Launched in 1996, Associates is Amazon.com's affiliate marketing program. By linking to Amazon products and services you can add compelling content for your site visitors enjoyment and receive up to 10% in referral fees for doing so.As one of the first online affiliate marketing programs, Associates has a 10-year track record of developing solutions to help website owners, Web developers, and Amazon sellers make money. Our latest innovations include aStore, Omakase™ Links, and Product Previews. Current participants in the Amazon Associates program include large, well-known sites, niche content sites and blogs, comparison shopping engines, search engine marketers, and everything in between. Visit our Current Associates page to see how some of these members are using our solutions.

What is aStore?
aStore is a new Associates product that gives you the power to create a professional online store, in minutes and without the need for programming skills, that can be embedded within or linked to from your website.
Feature Amazon Products

* Create a dedicated shopping area on your website in minutes.
* Keep visitors on your site longer as they shop
* Select the Amazon products to feature
* Include all Amazon products, or display only the categories you choose
* Customize your store's look and feel
* Offer a Shopping Cart Gain the trust of your visitors with a professional online store, without ever writing any code
* Offer a shopping cart for multiple item purchases
* Checkout is completed on Amazon.com, the most trusted store online Show Product Details Excite and inform your customers with robust product details, reviews and information

from Amazon.com

* Informative product descriptions
* Amazon Editor product reviews
* Recommended products
* Up-to-date product information
* Listmania, themed product lists from Amazon.com customers

How Much Does It Cost, and How Do I Get Paid?
All Associates have access to aStore, and there are no fees associated with building stores for your sites. Referral fees are handled the same as with other Associates links.
Linking to Amazon.com
We provide you with a variety of linking options from which you can choose. Whether your goal is to maximize conversion, delight your site visitors with a unique presentation of Amazon content, or both, you decide how much control you want over the products displayed in each set of links.You can allow Amazon to recommend products to your site visitors (Omakase Links), you can select categories and/or keywords (Recommended Product Links) or hand-pick the individual products and Amazon.com pages to which to link (Product and Text Links). We recommend reviewing all of our linking options before deciding which ones will work best for you. Below are some examples of the link types offered. Product Links Product Links display and link to a specific item from our catalog. These links provide you with the flexibility to choose exactly which products you wish to promote to your visitors based on their interest. We can serve these links to automatically display the product image, title, current pricing, and a convenient "Buy from Amazon.com" button. While these have proven to have a higher conversion rate, we also provide Associates the option to host individual links themselves.Omakase™ Links - Leave it up to us!Omakase links uniquely combine information on each site visitor's taste, the site's content, and historical trends to dynamically generate relevant ads that Amazon serves to your site. With simple, yet powerful, customization options, Omakase lets you automatically provide personalized product ads to your site visitors that complement your site design. Omakase - Leave it up to us!Product Previews - Enhance. Hover.Expand.Product Previews let visitors to your site view valuable product information without having to click through to Amazon.com. When visitors hover over a Product Previewenhanced text or image link, a small window appears that contains the product image, new and used prices, average customer review and availability. Visitors can either add the item directly to their Amazon.com shopping carts or click through to product details on Amazon from the product window. Product Previews allow you to offer your visitors a convenient, seamless option for adding products to their shopping cart while enjoying the content of your site. Product Previews - Enhance. Hover. Expand.Recommended Product Links Recommended Product Links are dynamic links in which Amazon automatically selects and serves the content. You enter the type of products you want displayed, and we will update them with the bestselling products based on your criteria. Since Amazon automatically updates these links with fresh content, there is less work on your part to keep your links and banners updated. For convenience and flexibility, you can build Recommended Product Links in two different ways--by category and by keyword--each in multiple sizes. And by changing their background color, text color, and link color, you can customize these links to best fit the design and layout of your site.
How the Program Works
Associates drive internet traffic to Amazon.com through specially formatted links that allow us to track sales and other activity. Associates earn up to 10% in referral fees on all qualifying revenue made through their links. We send monthly payments to Associates. Once you join the program, we will give you ccess to Associates Central, our extranet exclusive to our Associates. This is the place where you will build your links, view your traffic and earnings reports, and read about the latest news and opportunities ailable to you through the program.Participation is Easy and Free Complete the online application. Create & post your links to Amazon.com using our Build Links tool in ssociates Central. Begin tracking your traffic and earnings reports online. Reports are updated daily. Amazon Associates Program Amazon’s Associate Program is perhaps one of the most popular ones for bloggers because it is pretty simple to use and has such a wide range of products in their system ranging from books, to electronics, to jewelry, to CDs and DVDs etc. It’s also great because there are many tools that can be used to integrate it into your blog including WordPress Plug ins. Some bloggers even integrate Amazon stores into their blogs (something I need to get set up). Another beauty of the Amazon program is the variety of ways that they give you to link to their products. Even using just their basic tools on the Associates page you have the option to link to products using text links, pictures, buttons and a variety of keyword triggered echniques. I personally use Amazon’s program quite a bit on some of my blogs and find it quite effective. While my earnings from Amazon are far less than my Adsense income it’s a nice bonus each quarter (they pay every three months). This quarter (just over half way) my total is just over $900 (USD). Amazon’s affiliate program pays out in either gift vouchers (to be spent in the store), cheque (check) or direct deposit (if you’re in the US).
Amazon Associates Program Pros:

* massive array of products to choose from
* reliable payment system
* options for different payment types
* reasonably easy to use
* variety of linking tools
* Amazon are fairly well regarded and trusted by consumers
* Amazon Associates Program Cons:
* only quarterly payments (many other programs are monthly)
* commissions can be lower than some other programs (although they have an incentive/bonus program that increases the % when you sell certain targets)
* incentive program can be a little complicated to understand
* some of their buttons and link methods are a little dated
* not great on some products internationally (ie while Amazon will send books and some products internationally some of the bigger ticket items will not be sent overseas. So if you have a non US readership you might have to also sign up for other Amazon affiliate programs (ie they also have a UK, Canadian, Japanese one etc this can get a little messy)).I’ll share more tips to help maximize Amazon earnings later in this series - but in the mean time I’m sure others have a variety of experiences with Amazon and can shed some light on it as a program for us. Share your thoughts on the Amazon Affiliate program in comments below.

How Does an Affiliate Program Work?
As you are probably aware, what is called an "affiliate program" or "associate program" is a relationship n which a merchant pays you (the "affiliate") for links from your site to his site. Usually, the affiliate is paid only when an actual sale is made by the merchant as a result of your link. This kind of advertising (and it IS advertising) is called Pay Per Action (PPA), since the affiliate isn't paid for carrying the merchant's dvertising link or graphic on his site, but only when a visitor performs a certain action (visits, fills out a form, makes a purchase). An Example from Amazon.com The Affiliate Program method was pioneered by Amazon.com. To give you an idea of how this works in ction, I'll describe Amazon.com's program briefly. You sign up as an affiliate on their site ) and are assigned an Associate's ID. Mine happens to be "wilsoninternetse". But Let's say I have a review of a hot new book on my site, such as The E-Commerce Book: Building the E-Empire by Steffano Korper and uanita Ellis (ISBN 0-12-421160-7). I would link the title so it takes my visitor directly to the book's scription on Amazon.com's site. Here is what a URL to The E-Commerce Book looks like Notice the lements: My Associate's ID is last in the URL. Just before it you find the ASIN (Amazon Standard Item umber), which in the case of books is the same as the ISBN (International Standard Book Number, a nique number assigned to every book and book edition published). When the visitor clicks on this link, the mazon.com webserver is programmed so that the visitor will be sent to the webpage for the book with that ISBN number. At the same time my Associate's ID will be recorded with the visitor's session ID (an rbitrary number assigned to each visitor every time he enters the site), so that if the visitor makes any purchases on that session, I will be credited with their purchase. While every merchant chooses their his payment system, this is how Amazon.com currently works (subject to change):
• If my visitor purchases the exact book I have linked to, I receive 15% of the sales price of the book.
• If my visitor gets to the Amazon.com site, begins to browse around, and ends up buying another book, then I get 5% of the sales price.
• Payments are made quarterly, so long as the total commission due that quarter is more than a minimum amount. Today The E-Commerce Book, regularly $39.95, is on sale for 30% off or $27.97. If you purchased it from my link I would make 15% of $27.97 or $4.20. If you purchased the book after coming through another link from my site, I would make 5% of $27.97 or $1.40.Win-Win One of the reasons affiliate programs are so popular is that that offer a win-win situation for both erchant nd affiliate. Merchant Advantage. The merchant's cost for advertising a particular product is limited (largely) to the percentage paid to an affiliate, and the merchant only has to pay when a purchase is actually made. This s much better than banner advertising, where the merchant pays whether or not any purchase occurs. In act, the amount paid to an affiliate for a purchase through an affiliate link is probably only 10% to 20% of the cost of that sale through banner advertising (which charges in cost per 1000 banner views, M).What's more, if your visitor likes Amazon.com, he is likely to go directly there the next time he wants to purchase a book, and Amazon.com has potentially gained a customer for life. (Of course, if the same visitor uses another link on your site to purchase another book, you'll get credit for that purchase also.) You can learn more about affiliate programs from a merchant's standpoint in Web Commerce Today newsletter, Issue 8, "A Merchant's Primer of Affiliate (h/i), where I explain how to set up such a program. Site owner Advantage. The site owner stands to make some money, so long as enough visitors click on the affiliate links and make purchases. You don't have to go to the trouble of setting up e-commerce functions, take credit cards, or ship products; you just join some affiliate programs and let someone else do the "dirty work." Caveats
If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. To be realistic, you need to see affiliate program income as a nice bonus to your main source of revenue, not the main source itself. To generate ubstantial income you need:
(1) a lot of traffic, (2) merchants with generous payout policies, and (3) products well-targeted towards the visitors who come to your site. The truth is that few sites generate enough traffic to make a lot ofmoney with affiliate programs.
How E-commerce Works:
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, you have probably heard about e- commerce. And you have heard about it from several different angles. You may have:
• heard about all of the companies that offer e-commerce because you have been bombarded by their TV and radio ads
• read all of the news stories about the shift to e-commerce and the hype that has developed around e-commerce companies
• seen the huge valuations that Web companies get in the stock market, even when they don't make a profit
• purchased something on the Web, so you have direct personal experience with ecommerce

Affiliate Programs:
A big part of today's e-commerce landscape is the affiliate program (also known as associate programs). This area was pioneered by Amazon. Amazon allows anyone to set up a specialty book store. When people buy books from the specialty store, the person who owns the specialty bookstore gets a commission (up to 10 percent of the book's list price) from Amazon. The affiliate program gives Amazon great exposure because it now has over 1,000,000 specialty bookstores all over the Web [ref]. Therefore this model is now copied by thousands of e-commerce sites. If you are setting up an e-commerce site you will want to consider an affiliate program as one way to get exposure. Link Share is a company that helps e-commerce sites set up affiliate programs. Another twist on affiliate programs is the CPC Link (CPC=Cost Per Click), also known as affiliate links or click-thru links. You put a link on your site and the company pays you when someone clicks on the link. A typical payment ranges from 5 cents to 20 cents per click. Affiliate links represent the middle ground between banner ads and commissionbased affiliate programs. With banner ads, the advertiser takes all the risk -- if no one clicks on the banner then the advertiser wastes money. Commission-based affiliate programs place all the risk on the Web site. If the Web site sends a bunch of people to the affiliate e-commerce site but no one buys anything, then it has no value for the Web site. In CPC links, both sides share risks and rewards equally. You may want to consider setting up this sort of affiliate program to gain exposure for your e-commerce site.
How does the Fulfillment by Amazon Program work?
You may express an interest in the Fulfillment by Amazon program by going to http://www.amazonservices.com/fulfillment/, clicking on the Request Info button and filling out the Contact Us form.
• After you have accepted our online Agreement, you must register products and unit quantities in advance to be fulfilled.
• You prepare and label your products and boxes for shipping.
• You ship your products to us.
• We receive and store your product units in our fulfillment centers.
• We will ship your orders directly from our fulfillment centers to your customers.All fulfillment centers in the Amazon fulfillment network are modern, secure controlled facilities with highly automated pick, pack and ship processes to facilitate the safe and timely processing of merchant orders. Features include the following: 24-hour security staff in fulfillment center Fully automated wireless and computer-networked order tracking throughout the facility High-value secure cage storage

The fees for Fulfillment by Amazon:
Fees depend, among other things, on whether the product was sold through the Amazon.com Web site or not. The fees are set forth in the Fee Schedule.
About Amazon Services & Amazon Fulfillment Services:
Amazon Services, LLC is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) that offers the technical platform, operational capabilities and e-commerce expertise that power Amazon.com to other businesses seeking to create a world-class, cost-effective ecommerce offering for their customers. Amazon Enterprise Solutions and Amazon Business Solutions are Amazon Services groups. Amazon Enterprise Solutions works with large retailers such as Target, Bebe, and Marks & Spencer (UK) and the Amazon Business Solutions works with small to medium-sized businesses. Amazon Fulfillment Services, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. that operates U.S.-based fulfillment and customer service networks for Amazon.com and the businesses that leverage fulfillment or customer service as part of their offering from Amazon Enterprise Solutions or Amazon Business Solutions.

How to Compensate Users

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

The Web has been growing exponentially in the last decade and one of the driving forces behind this growth has been active user involvement. There are many sites, which simply wouldn’t have existed, if they didn’t have users to contribute to them. Although i t is mainly Web 2.0 sites l ike social bookmarking sites and other kinds of onl ine networks and communities, which are heavily dependent on user articipation, there are many other sites – like gaming sites,review sites or simply online agazines, which also rely mainly on user contributions.The fact that the existence of many sites depends on user contribution inevitably means that if site owners want to stay in business they must find a way to keep their users active. While many sites manage to get an active users base for free, an increasing number of sites are offering various types of compensation to their users for the efforts they make.The types of user compensation for contribution vary largely among sites and to a great extent it depends on the type of users and the genre of the site. Many kinds of rewards, which work for some site genres (i.e. free ad space to contributing authors) do not work that well (or do not work at all) for a different type of site with socially different user base. The type of user compensation also varies for short-term and longterm involvement. And this does not include salary-type compensation. Users are strictly users, not employees or subcontractors of the company. One of the many examples of such long-term involvement are paid bloggers, who are not related organizationally to the company, which owns the site but they have an arrangement to get paid for a particular amount of posts – daily, weekly, monthly. Paid bloggers are somehow a marginal case because they are still users (in the sense of not being employees) but they have an agreement with the company to contribute content.After we have made these necessary general clarifications on thetopic of compensation of contributing users, we can move to the history of user compensation.

History of User Compensation:
Compensating users for content submission is a relatively new trend but as more and more sites adopt it, this practice is becoming popular. Paying users for their actions is not something new – Browse and Get Paid campaigns have existed for years. Paid submissions also have a long history with online and offline magazines, so to some extent it was expected that sooner or later users will get paid not only for browsing but for more pro-active actions like posting articles, submitting short posts, commenting on other people’s posts, submitting links, photos and videos, etc.The process of user compensation for actions and submitting of content flourished with the advent of social bookmarking sites. One of the characteristics of social bookmarking sites is that their content is almost 100% user submitted. This is a major difference with many other sites (not only Web 2.0) and it is part of the explanation why one of the first, widely publicized and documented cases of paying users for their submissions involved a social bookmarking site. When in 2006 Jason Calacanis of Netscape suggested that users might be paid for their efforts to submit content, this caused a splash in the social bookmarking world. Representatives of many other social bookmarking sites just laughed at the idea but now – less than a year later, many leading social bookmarking sites do pay their top users.It is stretching the truth to say that Netscape was the first company to offer monetary compensation to its most active users. Yahoo! Answers and review sites like Epinions have used monetary compensation for answering questions and writing reviews, respectively for a couple of years.These are just a few of the many examples of monetary compensation major sites use to pay their users for the efforts they make to keep the site rolling. And having in mind that monetary compensation is not the only type of compensation for contribution, as described in the next section, it is true to say that sites do make efforts to reward their users .

Types of Compensation:
As already mentioned, there are various types of compensation site owners use to reward their users – or at least the most active part of them. Sometimes sites use more than one of the compensation types listed below, or they give users the chance to choose what kind of reward they prefer to get.

Moral Reward:
Originally this was the main reward users received for submitting content. Seeing your name published on a top site is still a great reward for many people. Noticing the avalanche of comments and votes for your stories is still among the major factors that motivate users to submit content and perform other actions. For many people the recognition and approval of others are more valuable than a paycheck. On the other hand, it can be argued if giving moral rewards to users is a way to compensate them but since many sites have rankings for top posters, top submitters, etc., it is a safe bet that site owners regard moral reward as a way to compensate users for their activity.

Ad Space:
Providing ad space (or barter advertising) is a bit more tangible reward than the moral reward but at the same time it a less universal reward. While most users are happy to see their name in the top submitters list, not so many of them are happy to get an ad box,because an ad box is hardly of any use for them.
Providing ad space in return for user participation is good reward for companies, consultants, freelancers, journalists – i.e. everybody who needs new cl ients - but free ad space is not a candy for the MySpace generation, for example.For contributors, free ad space really works, especially when it is accompanies by a short byline (a paragraph or two, which allows contributors to describe themselves and include links to their sites or portfolio) and is published on a high-traffic sites ith good reputation.For instance, a freelance writer who published her articles on seochat.com a couple of years ago, is still getting responses from readers, as well as offers for writing articles and for performing SEO services. However, a similar byline published at some other, less popular sites, brings either traffic, nor customers.Therefore, if you want ad space to work as a form of compensation, you need to have the right user base and be a popular site.

Traffic:
As with moral reward, traffic is usually not a type of compensation that you get per your contract with the site. Getting traffic is an indirect reward, a by-product of being popular on a particular site.Let’s take social bookmarking sites for example – their management doesn’t compensate you by sending traffic to your site but actually one of the benefits of being an active contributor is that the stories you submit go to the front page and as a result of this you get lots of traffic to your site, which later translates as increased income from ads. Sometimes the traffic a site gets from a social bookmarking site in a day exceeds the traffic a well-optimized site gets from Google for a month! So, for Web masters and site owners, the traffic they get from a top social bookmarking site is worth more than the meager $20, $50 or even $100 they might receive as a monetary compensation for being a contributor.

Goodies:
This group of user compensation techniques is really vast and diverse. It is not a lie to say that probably only drugs,weapons and similar illegal stuff is excluded from the assortment of goodies different sites offer to their users to compensate them for their contribution efforts.If there is a rule regarding the assortment of the goods, goodies and services, which are offered, it is – quite logically – that the stuff, which is offered is thought to be of interest to the user base. For instance, the Free Software Magazine used to compensate its contributors by giving them free computer books, some of which are worth up to $100. (Note: Now the FSM pays $35 per 1,000 words AND gives a compl imentary copy of a book from its catalogue). Books, CD/DVDs, free licenses (or upgrades), magazine issues are common rewards for contributing users. In some cases all contributing users (for instance everybody, who submits an article) gets the candy, while in others only top submitters are rewarded.Sometimes there are different eligibi l ity criteria (such as location being limited to the US or Canada only) that filter the users further.Eligibi lity criteria might be imposed by the advertisers, who provide the rewards but they can also be imposed by more practical issues, such as shipping costs, which are much higher for international deliveries than for domestic shipments.Other common goods and services that are offered to regular contributors include vouchers, coupons, trips and vacations, gift certificates and free roducts/samples. Again, the type of the site and its user base are the major factor for the type of candy offered. If the site is about a particular group of products (i.e. beauty products), then users are compensated by getting a product (i.e. a nail pol ish) for free. Usually the value of the products given is under $100 and the idea is that users will value this type of compensation more than its monetary equivalent.Lotteries are also used to stimulate user participation but generally lotteries are for more expensive products, which only one (or a few) users will win.Some of the most expensive goodies, which are offered as compensation for user contribution, are goods that the submitter has reviewed. This group of products includes,books, CD/DVDs,hardware, software, dining, etc. The deal is the following: the site obtains the goods (or covers the bill, as in the case of dining reviews), sends the goods to the reviewer, he or she writes the review and keeps the oodies. Very often this is the only reward for the reviewer but it is no exception that reviewers get monetary compensation as well – it all depends on the site, its popularity andits financial health.

Profit Sharing:
Profit sharing is one of the trendiest approaches to rewarding users. It comes in two flavors: payment of royalties and a flat fee + royalties. When a flat fee is paid, usually the royalties percentage is lower compared to the case when only royalties are paid. Profit sharing is applicable to products like articles, ebooks, software,music etc.One of the most common types of profit sharing is Adsense revenue sharing. Since Google introduced this possibil ity some time ago, many site owners took advantage of its potential and started sharing their Adsense revenue with users. Of course, even before Adsense offered profit sharing capabilities, ads revenue sharing was commonly used by site owners but the difference is that with Adsense the process is considerably simplified – the site owner does not have to take care of calculating shares and sending checks because all this is done automatically by Google. The site owner provides the ad space where Google publishes its ads, users provide their Adsense code to the site owner, and when somebody clicks on a particular ad,a percentage of the click is calculated for the user. When the user reaches a particular payment amount, Google processes the payment and sends him or her the check.Several article directories, forums and ezines are using the Adsense profit sharing approach. Practices and percentages vary but generally about 50-75% of the ad income (generated by the pages the user has contributed, not by the income from the whole site) goes to the contributing user. In some cases the percentage is 100% (i.e. the social bookmarking site Simpy) but usually this is rare and sites are that generous only when they have a venture capital fund behind their back and they can afford to pay for boosting traffic.

Monetary Compensation:
Finally, the last but not least type of compensation sites offer to contributing users is outright payment. As already mentioned, some sites offer monetary compensation in addition to other stimuli (like goodies), while others use it as a single way of compensation. Monetary compensation is a controversial issue. On one hand, it is not fair when users spend 2-3 hours a day submitting content on a site and making profit for the site owner. So, in this aspect it is much fairer to compensate users for their time and effort and the easiest way to do it is to offer them money. Money is a universal reward and unlike the other types of compensation, you don’t have to think if the user will like the particular goody or not .On the other hand, being paid for submitting content makes users less picky and they start submitting in bulk. This inevitably increases the spam content. Additionally, the idea of Web 2.0 (user content driven sites) is not that users post what they get paid for but what they l ike (which is not the same!). Other users feel cheated because they feel that the stuff they read was written/submitted for money and this decreases the level of trust users have in that particular site.Probably due to these image concerns, many sites, which pay their users are reluctant to announce it publicly. There is a lot of speculation that forums and blogs might secretly use paid posters but are unwilling to admit it because this wil l make them less reputable. However, it is a matter of fact that many freelance sites are full of paid blogger bid requests, so it can safely be presumed that astatistically significant portion of forums and blogs resort to the services of paid posters.The paid posters group is an interesting case. They are neither employees, or users. They can be regarded as subcontractors but this is only when they are hired on a contract basis, which is not the typical case. The compensation paid posters/bloggers receive varies from as low as .10 a post to over $100 per article.The case of paid link submitters is somehow different. Here payment per submitted link is hardly applicable. A more common practice of compensating their efforts is profit sharing or paying a small fee. Also, usually only top submitters get paid, while the majority (i.e. 99%) of submitters are not paid. Social bookmarking sites that pay their users are still more an exception than a norm and generally users get from $25 to $500 (in very rare cases) a month for their efforts. On average, paid link submitters get no more than $100-200 a month, which is not much –
i .e. it is useless to submit links in order to make a living – but it is still a decent amount of pocket money (especially for the Third World countries in South East Asia and to less extent for Eastern Europe and Latin America).In addition to image and credibility problems, monetary compensation has some more practical problems. In many countries, especially in Europe the beaurocracy of issuing and receiving small amounts of money to people who are not employees is incredible. All the paperwork might be a way to prevent money laundering and tax avoidance but when one has to fill in tens of documents for giving/receiving $10, then the reward de facto becomes a penalty. But all these negative aspects of using money – the universal compensator – do not stop sites from paying their users. There are many examples of such sites, as discussed next.

Paying Sites:
Sites, which pay their users for their contribution, exist in all genres – starting from software development sites, to well-established onl ine magazines, to review and social bookmarking sites, to forums and article directories. Probably the type of sites that are leaders in payment are review sites and survey sites. Surveys have a long history of being paid and this goes back to the methodology of market research, so it is not something new. Focus groups, opinion polls and surveys in general can pay up to $100-150 on average per user. Usually it is sites that deal with FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) or electronics that pay their users for their opinion. As already mentioned, Epinions is one of the first sites to introduce payment in exchange for writing an opinion. Income Share is a profit sharing scheme that allows users to make money by writing opinions. There is no flat fee per opinion and users are paid based on the usefulness (as determined by other users) of their positive or negative review.Ciao, the European competitor of Epinions, also pays its users for the reviews they write. Forums are another group of sites on the profit-sharing wagon. One of the most popular examples of a profit sharing forum is Digital Point. Digital Point is a leading forum for Web masters and it gets millions of hits a day. Users receive percentage of the Adsense income for each of the topics they participate in. The amounts for active participants are usually in the $30-50 range a month, which is certainly not much but having in mind that forums are notorious for their low CTR, this amount is probably the maximum that can be obtained.Article directories use a similar profit sharing approach. The amount a user gets depends on the number of articles he or she has submitted and on the income these articles generate. Generally more popular articles generate higher income but this is not always true because some topics (i.e. computer-related) are known for cheap cl icks and low CTR, while others (health and finance) can generate more revenue with less popular articles. Social bookmarking sites also adopt either a profit sharing, or a flat fee approach to compensate their users. For instance, Raw Sugar is paying its top twenty users between $25 and $500 per month.However, most of the other major sites are going on the Adsense profit sharing route, which usually translates from as low as $5 a month (or even less) for contributors of not so popular content, to about $50-100 for contributors of top stories. Netscape has already been mentioned as one of the first sites to offer payment to its contributors.Another group of sites, which pays for opinions, are expert sites like Yahoo!Answers or LawSure. Unlike Epinions, information about payment rates for answering questions is not easily discovered but generally i t is believed that rates start from as low as $2 per answer. Online magazines are more generous. For instance, ITMJ relies solely on user contributions for its Hey Boss and Manager’s Choice features.Each of them pays $50. Hey Boss is a way for a user to voice his or her opinion out a former boss (without mentioning them, of course) and tell them the things that were impossible to tell while being their subordinate. Manager’s Choice is another feature that relies mainly on user input but this time the purpose is to recommend a product or a service, which will be useful to fellow IT managers. Both features have existed for many years, so for ITMJ this model of user compensation is working.Another company, which pays its users for their contribution, is the Mozilla Foundation. Their program to pay $500 per a severe bug started a couple of years ago and from time to time, when a really severe bug in Firefox is reported from a user, he or she gets the cash. Probably other software vendors are also doing it but general ly it takes a lot of courage (and few bugs, which is not the case with manypopular software products) to offer a reward for finding a bug.

Conclusion:
User contribution is a valuable asset for any site. Some sites are lucky to get it for free, while others have to pay in order to stay in business. Some sites take their users’ efforts for granted and see no reason to compensate them, while other sites adopt the more honest approach to compensating their users for their time and effort. It is difficult to predict which of the two tendencies will prevail in the future but it is certain that all being equal, the number of paying sites will continue to rise. However, this does not mean that the amounts of money sites are paying will rise as well. Probably the mainstream trend will be that more and more sites pay their users “pocket money”, which is not a motivation for a user to contribute for
money but is a fair compensation if he or she is inclined to contributing even if there is no payment.

Linkbaiting And Social Power Linking

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

LINKBAITING AND SOCIAL POWER LINKING

Linkbait: Creating unique, interesting, and/or controversial content (any media form)
that other people will link to. Made for the main purpose of getting links.
The term “linkbait” is used to describe content on a website which is designed to generate incoming links from other sites. Some people disagree with the use of this term, since it sounds pejorative, implying that all linkbaiting is bad, while other people think that the term is perfectly accurate, even with the negative connotations associated with the word “bait.” Almost every website participates in linkbaiting. Most people design websites with the intention of attracting readers, and as a result they try to generate material which is picked up and linked by other sites. However, there are varying degrees of linkbaiting, ranging from writing a useful guide to something to deliberately baiting the owner of another site by launching a personal attack on him or her. Some people who support the concept of creating linkbait frown on more aggressive tactics. In addition to typically immediately increasing traffic to a website, linkbaiting also drives a site up in search engine rankings, as most search engines look at how many links a site and uses these links to assess the value of a site. Therefore, a piece of linkbait can also benefit a site in the long term, by moving it up in the ranks so that it will appear when people search for related terms. Webmasters must be cautious when trying to increase their links, however, as some search engines look at the authority of the site issuing the link and factor that into a search result; in other words, not all links are good. There are two basic categories of linkbait: positive linkbait, such as a resource which other web users may appreciate, and negative linkbait, like attacks on other sites. Positive linkbait can come in a variety of flavors; it could involve something new and interesting, it could provide an incentive for visitors like a contest, or it could simply be insightful or intriguing. Many web developers, for example, write applications which serve as linkbait, because other web users link to these applications and their developers by extension. Negative linkbait, on the other hand, is focused on controversial or contentious material, and it can be highly effective, although some people find it distasteful. Some people believe that effective linkbaiting is a great search engine optimization (SEO) tool. This idea has become so widespread that some SEO firms offer linkbaiting services, along with tips and tricks to increase links and traffic to the websites of their clients. Many bloggers especially also work hard to create linkbait in the hopes of aking their sites profitable. The term linkbaiting doesn’t necessarily reflect this aspect of organic growth on the Web; Linkbaiting is about gaining reputation, finding your niche, writing useful and creative content. The linkbaiting refers to Content, Videos, images or anything on the web that is created with the intention of increasing Links to a website. Linkbait is essentially a piece of content placed on a web page. “Linkbait describes a variety of practices - all of which seek to generate incoming links to a website or blog from other sites.” Linkbait is not manipulation. Linkbaiting follows the scheme a) Linkbait Launch, b) The Long Tail of Links, c) Residual Traffic, d) Search Engine Rankings.
Profound Rules of Linkbaiting:
Create original, unique, creative content. Choose topics that other people wouldn’t like to touch and do it wisely. If you are making a claim or a counter-claim then back it up with substantiated data. “The Cambrian House decided to buy 1000 pizzas to feed the Googlers. They video taped their process and placed it on the web. This video resulted in over 400 links and thousands of visitors in a period of days.” Create useful content. “When Aaron Wall released his SEO Firefox tool it brought in over 2000 links as well as thousands of visitors in just a few days. Because so many people linked to the tool with the word “SEO” in the anchor text, the SEO for Firefox web page is now ranked on Google for the term SEO.” Make your content universally valuable, memorable and compelling. “The higher quality the content you create and the more targeted you make it, the better your chances for keeping a percentage of the traffic you initially attract and getting a higher number of links from your effort.” Don’t sell products. Offer useful content. “Useful content gets linked. Products don’t. Publishing your posts, consider, why people should link to you.” Don’t spam. Understanding what content, features, and subjects are “in” is essential. Understand your audience. “Normally, you’re building content targeted to your site’s visitors—people who want your products, services or content. But for linkbait, you need to also appeal to an entirely different audience—one that can help your site achieve mass appeal in the niche that you select. I advise reviewing the coverage you see for other links in your area; using delicious tags and blog archives can help with this process.” Keep connected to your readers. Appreciate their feedback. “At least once per year, ask your visitors what do they think about your website’s content. What would they want to read more? What new facilities should you offer them?” Writing-related Principles of Successful Linkbaiting:
Be appealing. “Creating some room for controversy or discussion can inspire more links.”Encourage your visitors to link to you. “Encourage readers to submit your posts to Digg and Del.icio.us, or more specific link sites depending on your subject matter. Make people think. “Posts that force you to think and that tickle your intellectual buds get linked to a lot.” Cover topics that need attention.Link ntelligently. Use striking images. The image of the post can help to visualize the topic you’re writing about and give an article a vivid, fresh look. Write efficiently. Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative. Never have only 4 rules.” Make it easier to link to you. In every post provide a short, precise description and/or summary of the article. Help your content travel.
Tactics and Strategies of Linkbaiting:
Define your strategy and tactics wisely. Have a concrete plan for your blogging activities. Write down everything, breakdown your ideas, evaluate content, mix and match your content with your strategy and your concept list. Gain a reputation. “Linkbait is difficult to launch the first few times if no one on the Web has heard of your brand. Once you’ve spent some time in the blogosphere and social media space, you may find that a lot of your content goes viral without any effort on your part. Thus, creating a reputation is an important part of making linkbait successful.” “A strong profile at the social media profiles can make a huge difference.” First gain respect, then advertise. “Whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising.” Maintain your good name. Share your knowledge. Reveal as much as possible. Post regularly. Consider the best times and locations to launch your idea. Select best timing for your post. Analyzing the preferences and habits of your visitors, you can time your submission for maximum exposure. “Post on weekdays (especially Monday in the morning), because there are more readers. Post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts.” Create your networks. Make friends. Ask people to quote you. Respond to comments.
Linkbaiting Hooks:
Humor Hook. People love to laugh, especially at people in their industry or niche. Giveaway Hook. Offer your users something they can take with them - e.g. free wallpapers, icon sets, themes, pdfs, templates, layouts. Research/Statistic Hook. Sometimes just compiled numbers, or any kind of scientific survey, will get a lot of link love, especially in an under-studied area. The incentive hook. “If you give people a motive to talk about you they likely will. Contests have worked for ages.” The interviews hook. Interview people who are well-known in your field of interests. News Hook. “Fast, up to date news on breaking topics with expert commentary on the topic. Selecting topics, use niches to write about.” [Linkbaiting Hooks]. The ews hook is when you are the first to scoop a story; everyone who carries the story will then (theoretically) link to you as the original source. Use hooks for unique and useful content. “Content is only crowned as king when it has focus. A hook can help you keep this content focused and tight, and to fulfill the promise you made in the title. The hook has the potential to be the burning sensation that makes he article “write itself”.

No Porn, Poker, Or Pop-ups

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Simple Effective Ways to Make Money on the Web Today Introduction:
Making money is one of the prime purposes of life although there could be arguments about making money for the sake of it, or to fulfil other meaningful purposes in life. Nevertheless whatever the motive, it remains a fact that the main purpose of all business and commercial activities is to make money. The innovations and improvements in communications and networking technologies have greatly improved the potential to make money and the advent of the internet is one of the greatest revolutions which have opened new vistas for business and commerce.

Web and Money:
As described in the previous section, the web has opened immense opportunities to make money but then all may be fair in love and war, but not everything is fair on the internet. Some of the easy methods to make money on the web include things such as pornography, gambling and pop-up ads. But then most of them may not be safe, so to speak either in the legal or the moral sense. Gambling is banned in many countries and so is pornography. Moreover not everyone has got the inclination to make money by resorting to pornography or gambling, which is the same as in real material life. So does it mean to say that there are no simple effective ways to make money on the net? Well, wait before you call it quits, for there do exist other practical, simple and honourable ways to make money on the net as well. The subsequent section lists few of such ways.

Simple Effective Ways:
In this section the various ways will be dealt with in a list format with brief explanations/comments.
Freelance Writing
Writing is an art and you need not be the writer of world class to earn money on the net. Of course the better writer you are; the better prospects of earning money by writing. There are several websites where you can register as a freelance writer and write news clips, blogs, medical & technical writing and so forth.
Education/Tutoring
Today is the age of knowledge and information, and no doubt it is one of the most effective ways to make money as well. Of course it depends on your abilities, qualifications and experience that how much can you earn. You can register with many websites such as Guru.com, Elance.com, Kasamba.com etc and sell your services. Similarly you can also tutor other people through many websites via video chatting.

Graphic Designing:
This is very similar to what you would do as a graphic designer in a studio, but from the comfort of your own living/study room. Again there are several websites which specialize in providing services in this field, and one can benefit by registering with those companies.

Fortune Telling:
I don’t know whether fortune telling is an exact science or simply guesswork, but despite of this the fact remains that fortune telling is a big business both in the material world as well as the cyber world. If you are skilled in this art, you can surely make your own fortune even if you can’t change the fortune of others to a great extent. There are a variety of websites like powerfortunes.com, tarot.com, pyschicreadings.org.uk etc where you can register in your special category and earn money. Just one word of caution for those interested in making a fortune through fortune telling – only delve into this area if you really have some supernatural gift or excellent knowledge in this field otherwise no use cheating others as that wont pay in the long run.

Virtual Assistant:
Life is becoming very fast these days and people want quick solutions to various problems be it related to anything under the sun. This requirement when combined with the reach of the internet gives rise to tremendous business opportunities. For example one can open a website wherein he/she can take online orders for say supplying household items like eatables to nearly localities within normal physical reach. You don’t need to be a chef to do this, but just act as a middleman and earn some commission. Of course there is no limit to what virtual assistants can do and is only limited by your imagination and creative capabilities.

Data Entry:
Not everyone may be having the capabilities of writing, designing or fortune telling but this should not make one sad. There are many jobs which can be compared to unskilled labour in the real world. For example data entry jobs where you don’t get paid as much as you can through the previously mentioned methods, but can surely make your both ends meet. But just beware of choosing the proper website for doing such jobs.

Buying/Selling:
You can also use the internet for doing what you would normally use a corner shop i.e. buying and selling goods. Of course the only difference is that you have a much wider customer base and can send goods to various parts of the globe by taking online order for your products. You need to register with companies such as E-bay for this and start doing the transactions.

Stock Trading:
Literally everyone has heard of stocks, shares, mutual funds and so forth. It is a different thing whether each of them fully understands the intricacies of securities. But if you spend a little time educating yourself about it, you can surely earn sufficient amount of money by buying and selling of different kinds of securities on the net. You need to register with an official broker and use some kind of software to make the sale/purchase. Of course this trading is very strictly controlled by the governments of various countries as compared to the other services relatively speaking.

Summary & Conclusion:
In this report we saw various ways of making money online which are clean, legal, and effective and yet are quite simple. Some of these require you to have some sort of specialized knowledge while others require simply patience and the capacity to work long hours. Whatever be your qualification and experience, one thing is for certain, that the cyber world does offer a lot of opportunities for people to earn money online without having to get hooked with either gambling or pornography. As the internet continues to penetrate even deeper into the citizens of the real world, the increasing number of netizens will surely provide lucrative opportunities for the cyber-worker. Last but not least just remember one golden rule if you want to make money on the internet. It is not a new rule but just an extension of what has been said about the real world as well – Do not believe everything and everyone that comes your way, and whenever something sounds too good to be true, just beware. Follow this simple rule of the thumb and you will not get trapped into a net and loose money instead of earning a few bucks.

Non-Profits And The Web

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Non-Profits and the Web
Raising Money and Awareness
Introduction
Human beings are selfish creatures generally speaking and most of activities carried out by the human race are somewhat related to gaining some sort of benefit be it material gains like money or non-material gains such as name and fame. But that does not mean to say that being selfish is bad, rather most of the times it is this instinct which motivates one to perform beyond normal limits. Not all human beings are bad or it can be said that not all human beings are so selfish at all times, rather there is also an equally good instinct to do certain activities not with a motive to gain anything but just to help others in some way or the other selflessly. This forms the basis of non-profit organisations as discussed further in the subsequent sections, and the ways to raise monies for them using cyberspace.
Non-Profit Organisations
The instinct of selfless service as described in the introductory section gives rise to institutions and organisations which are non-profit in nature. As the name itself suggests, a non-profit organisation does not exist or carry out its functions for material gains or commercial purposes, rather for the purpose of overall public and social good. The range of activities carried out by such organisations could be literally only limited by your imagination, and these could be anything from helping poor children by supplying food to carrying out relief activity in say earthquake hit areas.
Financial Requirements
All such charitable and non-profit works require substantial amount of funds and this is where the main problem comes for the organisation. It is one of the most difficult yet equally important tasks to make people aware of the existence, purpose and requirements of an organisation. Mostly funds are in short supply for short for non-profit organisations, which means that they cannot afford the luxury of using different advertisement media for requesting donations. Of course even if an organisation could afford to carry out big advertisement campaigns similar to big commercial companies, it would in fact defeat the very purpose of its existence, since the same funds could have been used for the charitable work for which the organisation exists. Hence we see that it is a very crucial task for a non-profit organisation to device and implement ways and means to raise funds via donation. It is here that the current technology comes into the picture. We know that apart from the material world, there exists an almost parallel world which is also known as the cyber world. This virtual space could be immensely useful for the organisation willing to raise funds from the people existing in the material world.
Use of Cyber Space
As discussed earlier the cyber world can be very useful medium for spreading awareness about an organisation. This is the first step in donation gathering since when one is convinced about the genuine intentions of an organisation, he/she can donate with an open heart and from the deeper corners of their pockets. Of course there exist several reasons and advantages for using the web as a medium in place of traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television and these have been listed as follows. The advantages of online media include

    * It is more economical to develop a website as compared to opening a branch office for donation collection
    * The demographic and geographical reach is unlimited in case of the internet whilst the same does not hold true for other forms of media
    * People could be more motivated to donate if they can do so with a few clicks of their mouse sitting in the comfort of their own room, rather than have to travel all the way to do payment formalities.

The drawbacks of online media include

    * Most people may not be aware of the existence of the website
    * Some people might mistake the website to be a fraudulent one
    * Some technical snag might keep the website offline for a long duration

Some Useful Tips:

Of course the list of benefits and drawbacks given in the previous section is not complete by any means, rather it serves to act as a guide for non-profit organisations and a few tips can be used to gain maximum possible benefit of the web media which include the following.

    * Have a properly developed and maintained website which is always updated on time with regards to information and links
    * Spread awareness about the organisation by using appropriate online advertisements
    * Provide space on the website for advertisement which acts as additional funding source
    * Have a secure payment method which accepts maximum possible number of payment alternatives such as say debit cards, credit cards, Paypal and so forth
    * Mention the genuine help and charitable works that have been carried out in the past if possible with the help of images, videos etc.
    * Display statistics about the type of help required. This is to say for example of you want people to donate for the education of poor children in Africa, the website could mention stats about the poverty and illiteracy in the region amongst the children

Summary and Conclusion:
In this discussion we saw that the web can be used as a potential medium for spreading the message of a non-profit organisation, as well as to raise funds for its sustenance and growth. Various drawbacks as well as advantages of using cyber space have been discussed followed by some useful tips for online donation gathering. The discussion can be concluded by stating that technology has provided us with a very useful tool which if used efficiently, can make the website of a non-profit organisation a really useful extension of the enterprise helping to make people aware about the goal of the enterprise and making effective appeals for fund raising.

Social Networking For The Sake Of It?

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Introduction:
The great French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau stated that “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains”. Of course these chains do not directly refer to any metal or iron chunks which are heavily laden across the person (even this was a probability in earlier days when slavery was common and legal), but to the different types of relations , responsibilities and such invisible threads within the society which keep a person tied throughout life. Even otherwise it is very difficult for an individual to live isolated from the society unless of course you plan to be some monk.If the previous paragraph didn’t go over your head, then you are prepared for further reading and at this stage we can define the concept of social networking which refers to the structure made up of individuals and organizations and linked in a specific manner based upon some kind of a common behaviour or trait. Hence we can see that the concept of social networking is not limited to the scope of the internet, although the latter has surely given a huge platform for the same.

Web & Social Networking:
Technology has made the world a global village and the internet is one of the greatest boons and tools which have been given to mankind, matched perhaps only by the invention of the wheel in the pre-historic times. This huge platform has been successfully deployed to launch the web of social networking wherein users and individuals from different parts of the globe can connect together and share their details, views, ideas and so forth. Of course this concept has been hugely successful and websites like Myspace.com have been making waves with the general public. Of course the list is very long and cannot be fully revealed in this relatively short discussion. But of late it has been observed that a change in trend towards social networking is resulting which has been discussed in more detail in the subsequent sections.

Standard Vs Affinity Networks:
In the beginning social networks used to be standard or generic in nature which means to say that people became members of a network just for the sake of it without bothering much about the type of other members of their quality. This obviously continued for some time and still many standard social networking sites are hugely popular but as far as I think it is mainly because of the sheer human population. As new people are introduced to the arena of social networking they usually start with a generic network and only to find towards the end when they “mature” that they need some specific networks, which is where the concept of an affinity network steps in.As opposed to a standard network, an affinity network means that network where people have a more focused approach toward some issue. This common factor could range from anything between a hobby, profession or inclination. This obviously has certain advantages over the generic networks. Firstly just as in social life, one feels more comfortable with friends and acquaintances that are more in tune with the person; similarly in social networking a person soon feels out of place in a standard network and begins to search for some unique networks which match his/her exact needs and traits. Another advantage of affinity based networks is for advertisers who have more relevant audience since their task of selective screening is made a lot easier by affinity networks. Just to take a simple hypothetical example, a network where people interact for finding people in similar profession for some advice, it would not be much use to advertise say matrimonial ads.

Conclusion and Summary:
The article can be concluded by stating that although social networking is on the rise, the internal trends are changing somewhat and people like more to be attached to a particular network towards which they feel more affinity on account of some specific feature, rather than ending up in a social network just for the sake of it. Of course this trend acts in a similar manner as it would act in any normal offline social situation and is even more useful for individuals searching for contacts and advertisers searching for target audience.

The Basics Of Google Adsense

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Google's Adsense program allows approved websites to dynamically serve Google's pay-perclick Adword results. This has become a popular alternative and an effective revenue sharing program for webmasters. Google's spider parses the adserving website and serves ads that relate to the website's content.

While the Google's Adsense program still has some issues, they are making effort to improve it. The website maintenance related to Adsense is very easy and requires very little effort. Webmasters need only to insert JavaScript into the webpage or website template. The JavaScript calls the ad from Google and will ensure that ads are served each time a visitor goes to the webpage. If the visitor clicks one of the Adsense ads served to the website, the website owner is credited for the referral.

The implementation, while simple, has its drawbacks. Google dictates the format of the ads that webmasters can select from a handful of preformatted text boxes which lack creativity. A recent improvement allows webmasters to modify the ad boxes to resemble the website's color scheme. Still, a far cry from some of the creative ads webmasters are accustom to.

The implementation, while simple, has its drawbacks. Google dictates the format of the ads. Webmasters can select from a handful of preformatted text boxes that lack creativity. A recent improvement allows webmasters to modify the ad boxes to resemble the website's color scheme. Still, a far cry from some of the creative ads webmasters are accustom to.

Google determines the content of the ads that are shown. Sometimes the ads are poorly targeted, and of no interest to the website visitors. It’s basically Google’s way of displaying their “Adwords Ads” on other websites (your websites) across the internet. When a visitor clicks on one of those ads, the owner of the website gets paid a small percentage of the cost that the advertiser is paying Google for each click.

How To Build A Website For Google Adsense Revenues:

There's plenty of competition on the net, and you have to corner your market to turn a profit. Google AdSense has created an easy way to generate revenue on your website. Unlike other forms of advertising, Google AdSense does not require the same investment before you start seeing a profit. If you want to build a website to earn Google AdSense advertising revenue, just follow these four basic steps for joining the Google AdSense program:

1) Choose a topic for content on your website. It can be anything at all because Google AdSense has relevant ads for a multitude of categories or topics. You can choose something you are interested in or have experience with. If you are an expert in a specific area, you can provide advice on your chosen topic. Google AdSense is intuitive and will provide you with numerous ads that are relevant to your content. Should Google AdSense provide you with an undesirable ad, you have the power to filter it out! Have no fear, Google AdSense is flexible and will change to suit your website's needs.

2) If you are a pro at website development, go ahead and build your own. If you feel HTML impaired, find a free professional template for a site you like and add your own graphics, pictures, and fonts to give it a personal touch. Google AdSense gives you the ability to customize the ads to match the look of your site. Don't settle for anything you don't like because Google AdSense ads can be adjusted until they are just right. Once your website is constructed, register a domain name and find a hosting provider. You are just about ready to see some income from Google AdSense.

3) Sign up for inclusion in the Google AdSense program. The Google AdSense site has a simple online application that you can complete quickly. It might take a couple days for the Google AdSense team to review and approve your site. Once Google AdSense accepts your application, you can learn how to generate Google AdSense coding to insert in your website's HTML. Then you'll be ready to receive Google AdSense revenue through your site traffic. If Google AdSense rejects your website, they will give you a detailed reason for the rejection. Fix your problem areas and reapply for the Google AdSense program.

4) This is the most important step for generating Google AdSense revenue. To profit from Google AdSense, you need to heavy site traffic. You want visitors to click on the Google AdSense. The more traffic you have, the more likely you are to get some income from Google AdSense.

Here are some tips for driving more traffic to your site:

As consumers, the majority of us use Google to search for information, products, and services, because Google finds exactly what we are looking for. If you are a business owner and want people in need of your products or services to find your website, paying Google for one its advertising services, such as Google AdWords, is a surefire way to increase web traffic. The issue is not whether Google can help, because they have garnered proven results. The question is only how much they can help and at what cost. The Google AdWords program has more than doubled some of its customers' monthly traffic by placing relevant ads along the right-hand side of its organic search listings. If you have ever used Google's search engine, you have seen AdWords advertisements listed under "Sponsored Links." If you sign up for Google AdWords, your ads will only appear to people who enter keyphrases that are relevant to your company's offerings.

To further increase traffic, Google pays companies for displaying AdWords advertisements on their websites. If, for example, your company specializes in discounted furniture, you would pay Google for advertising space on all searches for "discounted furniture." Google would not only display the AdWords ad on its own site, but also display the ad on informational sites dedicated to discounted furniture of all kinds.

Google AdWords should not, of course, be the entirety of a marketing campaign, but it is often an excellent addition to an overall strategy. Google AdWords is a pay-per-click service, meaning you only pay when the advertising results in traffic. Before you start using Google AdWords, I highly recommend watching the Getting Started With Google Adwords video at which is available after you log into your account. Read all of the Google support guides before you start bidding. You can spend a lot of money if you don't know what you're doing.

User Compensation Report

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

User Compensation Report
User Compensation Report ............................................................................................ 1
History of User Compensation ................................................................................... 2
Types of Compensation .............................................................................................. 3
Moral Reward ......................................................................................................... 3
Ad Space .................................................................................................................. 3
Traffic ...................................................................................................................... 4
Goodies .................................................................................................................... 4
Profit Sharing .......................................................................................................... 5
Monetary Compensation ........................................................................................ 6
Paying Sites ................................................................................................................. 7
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 9
The Web has been growing exponentially in the last decade and one of the driving forces behind this growth has been active user involvement. There are many sites, which simply wouldn’t have existed, i f they didn’t have users to contribute to them. Although i t is mainly Web 2.0 sites l ike social bookmarking sites and other kinds of onl ine networks and communities, which are heavily dependent on user participation , there are many other sites – like gaming sites, review sites or simply online magazines, which also rely mainly on user contributions .The fact that the existence of many sites depends on user contribution inevitably means that if site owners want to stay in business they must find a way to keep their users active. While many sites manage to get an active users base for free, an increasing number of sites are offering various types of compensation to their users for the efforts they make.The types of user compensation for contribution vary largely among sites and to a great extent it depends on the type of users and the genre of the site. Many kinds of rewards, which work for some site genres (i.e. free ad space to contributing authors) do not work that well (or do not work at all) for a different type of site with socially different user base.
The type of user compensation also varies for short-term and longterm involvement. And this does not include salary-type compensation. Users are strictly users, not employees or subcontractors of the company. One of the many examples of such long-term involvement are paid bloggers, who are not related organizationally to the company, which owns the site but they have an arrangement to get paid for a particular amount of posts – daily, weekly, monthly. Paid bloggers are somehow a marginal case because they are still users (in the sense of not being employees) but they have an agreement with the company to contribute content.After we have made these necessary general clarifications on the topic of compensation of contributing users, we can move to the history of user compensation.
History of User Compensation
Compensating users for content submission is a relatively new trend but as more and more sites adopt it, this practice is becoming popular. Paying users for their actions is not something new – Browse and Get Paid campaigns have existed for years. Paid submissions also have a long history with online and offline magazines, so to some extent it was expected that sooner or later users will get paid not only for browsing but for more pro-active actions like posting articles, submitting short posts, commenting on other people’s posts, submitting links, photos and videos, etc.The process of user compensation for actions and submitting of content flourished with the advent of social bookmarking sites. One of the characteristics of social bookmarking sites is that their content is almost 100% user submitted. This is a major difference with many other sites (not only Web 2.0) and it is part of the explanation why one of the first, widely publicized and documented cases of paying
users for their submissions involved a social bookmarking site. When in 2006 Jason Calacanis of Netscape suggested that users might be paid for their efforts to submit content, this caused a splash in the social bookmarking world. Representatives of many other social bookmarking sites just laughed at the idea but now – less than a year later, many leading social bookmarking sites do pay their top users.
It is stretching the truth to say that Netscape was the first company to offer monetary compensation to its most active users. Yahoo! Answers and review sites like Epinions have used monetary compensation for answering questions and writing reviews, respectively for a couple of years.These are just a few of the many examples of monetary compensation major sites use to pay their users for the efforts they make to keep the site rolling. And having in mind that monetary compensation is not the only type of compensation for contribution, as described in the next section, it is true to say that sites do make efforts to reward their users .
Types of Compensation
As already mentioned, there are various types of compensation site owners use to reward their users – or at least the most active part of them. Sometimes sites use more than one of the compensation types listed below, or they give users the chance to choose what kind of reward they prefer to get.
Moral Reward
Originally this was the main reward users received for submitting content. Seeing your name published on a top site is still a great reward for many people. Noticing the avalanche of comments and votes for your stories is still among the major factors that motivate users to submit content and perform other actions. For many people the recognition and approval of others are more valuable than a paycheck. On the other hand, it can be argued if giving moral rewards to users is a way to compensate them but since many sites have rankings for top posters, top submitters, etc., it is a safe bet that site owners regard moral reward as a way to compensate users for their activity.
Ad Space
Providing ad space (or barter advertising) is a bit more tangible reward than the moral reward but at the same time it a less universal reward. While most users are happy to see their name in the top submitters list, not so many of them are happy to get an ad box, because an ad box is hardly of any use for them.Providing ad space in return for user participation is good reward for companies, consultants, freelancers, journalists – i.e. everybody who needs new cl ients - but free ad space is not a candy for the MySpace generation, for example.
For contributors, free ad space really works, especially when it is accompanies by a short byline (a paragraph or two, which allows contributors to describe themselves and include links to their sites or portfolio) and is published on a high-traffic sites with goodreputation. For instance, a freelance writer who published her articles on seochat.com a couple of years ago, is still getting responses from readers, as well as offers for writing articles and for performing SEO services. However, a similar byline published at some other, less popular sites, brings neither traffic, nor customers. Therefore, if you want ad space to work as a form of compensation,you need to have the right user base and be a popular site.
Traffic
As with moral reward, traffic is usually not a type of compensation that you get per your contract with the site. Getting traffic is an indirect reward, a by-product of being popular on a particular site. Let’s take social bookmarking sites for example – their management doesn’t compensate you by sending traffic to your site but actually one of the benefits of being an active contributor is that the stories
you submit go to the front page and as a result of this you get lots of traffic to your site, which later translates as increased income from ads. Sometimes the traffic a site gets from a social bookmarking site in a day exceeds the traffic a well-optimized site gets from Google for a month! So, for Web masters and site owners, the traffic they get from a top social bookmarking site is worth more than the meager $20, $50 or even $100 they might receive as a monetary compensation for being a contributor.
Goodies
This group of user compensation techniques is really vast and diverse. It is not a lie to say that probably only drugs, weapons and similar illegal stuff is excluded from the assortment of goodies different sites offer to their users to compensate them for their contribution efforts.
If there is a rule regarding the assortment of the goods, goodies and services, which are offered, it is – quite logically – that the stuff, which is offered is thought to be of interest to the user base. For instance, the Free Software Magazine used to compensate its contributors by giving them free computer books, some of which are worth up to $100. (Note: Now the FSM pays $35 per 1,000 words AND gives a compl imentary copy of a book from its catalogue).Books, CD/DVDs, free licenses (or upgrades), magazine issues are common rewards for contributing users. In some cases all contributing users (for instance everybody, who submits an article) gets the candy, while in others only top submitters are rewarded. Sometimes there are different eligibi l ity criteria (such as location being limited to the US or Canada only) that filter the users further. Eligibi lity criteria might be imposed by the advertisers, who provide the rewards but they can also be imposed by more practical issues, such as shipping costs, which are much higher for international deliveries than for domestic shipments.
Other common goods and services that are offered to regular contributors include vouchers, coupons, trips and vacations, gift certificates and free products/samples. Again, the type of the site and its user base are the major factor for the type of candy offered. If the site is about a particular group of products (i.e. beauty products), then users are compensated by getting a product (i.e. a nail pol ish) for free. Usually the value of the products given is under $100 and the idea is that users will value this type of compensation more than its monetary equivalent.Lotteries are also used to stimulate user participation but generally lotteries are for more expensive products, which only one (or a few) users will win.Some of the most expensive goodies, which are offered as compensation for user contribution, are goods that the submitter has reviewed. This group of products includes, books, CD/DVDs, hardware, software, dining, etc. The deal is the following: the site obtains the goods (or covers the bill, as in the case of dining reviews), sends the goods to the reviewer, he or she writes the review and keeps the goodies. Very often this is the only reward for the reviewer but it is no exception that reviewers get monetary compensation as well – it all depends on the site, its popularity and its financial health.
Profit Sharing
Profit sharing is one of the trendiest approaches to rewarding users. It comes in two flavors: payment of royalties and a flat fee + royalties. When a flat fee is paid, usually the royalties percentage is lower compared to the case when only royalties are paid. Profit sharing is applicable to products like articles, ebooks, software,music etc.One of the most common types of profit sharing is Adsense revenue sharing. Since Google introduced this possibil ity some time ago, many site owners took advantage of its potential and started sharing their Adsense revenue with users. Of course, even before Adsense offered profit sharing capabilities, ads revenue sharing was
commonly used by site owners but the difference is that with Adsense the process is considerably simplified – the site owner does not have to take care of calculating shares and sending checks because all this is done automatically by Google. The site owner provides the ad space where Google publishes its ads, users provide their Adsense code to the site owner, and when somebody clicks on a particular ad, a percentage of the click is calculated for the user. When the user reaches a particular payment amount, Google processes the payment and sends him or her the check.Several article directories, forums and ezines are using the Adsense profit sharing approach. Practices and percentages vary but generally about 50-75% of the ad income (generated by the pages the user has contributed, not by the income from the whole site) goes to the contributing user. In some cases the percentage is 100% (i.e. the social bookmarking site Simpy) but usually this is rare and sites are that generous only when they have a venture capital fund behind their back and they can afford to pay for boosting traffic.
Monetary Compensation
Finally, the last but not least type of compensation sites offer to contributing users is outright payment. As already mentioned, some sites offer monetary compensation in addition to other stimuli (like goodies), while others use it as a single way of compensation.Monetary compensation is a controversial issue. On one hand, it is not fair when users spend 2-3 hours a day submitting content on a site and making profit for the site owner. So, in this aspect it is much fairer to compensate users for their time and effort and the easiest way to do it is to offer them money. Money is a universal reward and unlike the other types of compensation, you don’t have to think if the user will like the particular goody or not .On the other hand, being paid for submitting content makes users less picky and they start submitting in bulk. This inevitably increases the spam content. Additionally, the idea of Web 2.0 (user content driven sites) is not that users post what they get paid for but what they l ike (which is not the same!). Other users feel cheated because they feel that the stuff they read was written/submitted for money and this decreases the level of trust users have in that particular site.Probably due to these image concerns, many sites, which pay their users are reluctant to announce it publicly. There is a lot of speculation that forums and blogs might secretly use paid posters but are unwilling to admit it because this wil l make them less reputable. However, it is a matter of fact that many freelance sites are full of paid blogger bid requests, so it can safely be presumed that a statistically significant portion of forums and blogs resort to the services of paid posters.The paid posters group is an interesting case. They are neither employees, or users. They can be regarded as subcontractors but this is only when they are hired on a contract basis, which is not the typical case. The compensation paid posters/bloggers receive varies from as low as .10 a post to over $100 per article.The case of paid link submitters is somehow different. Here payment per submitted link is hardly applicable. A more common practice of compensating their efforts is profit sharing or paying a small fee. Also, usually only top submitters get paid, while the majority (i.e. 99%) of submitters are not paid.Social bookmarking sites that pay their users are still more an exception than a norm and generally users get from $25 to $500 (in very rare cases) a month for their efforts. On average, paid link submitters get no more than $100-200 a month, which is not much – i .e. it is useless to submit links in order to make a living – but it is still a decent amount of pocket money (especially for the Third World countries in South East Asia and to less extent for Eastern Europe and Latin America).In addition to image and credibility problems, monetary compensation has some more practical problems. In many countries, especially in Europe the beaurocracy of issuing and receiving small amounts of money to people who are not employees is incredible. All the paperwork might be a way to prevent money laundering and tax avoidance but when one has to fill in tens of documents for giving/receiving $10, then the reward de facto becomes a penalty.But all these negative aspects of using money – the universal compensator – do not stop sites from paying their users. There are many examples of such sites, as discussed next.
Paying Sites
Sites, which pay their users for their contribution, exist in all genres – starting from software development sites, to well-established onl ine magazines, to review and social bookmarking sites, to forums and article directories.
Probably the type of sites that are leaders in payment are review sites and survey sites. Surveys have a long history of being paid and this goes back to the methodology of market research, so it is not something new. Focus groups, opinion polls and surveys in general can pay up to $100-150 on average per user. Usually it is sites that deal with FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) or electronics that pay their users for their opinion. As already mentioned, Epinions is one of the first sites to introduce payment in exchange for writing an opinion. Income Share is a profit sharing scheme that allows users to make money by writing opinions. There is no flat fee per opinion and users are paid based on the usefulness (as determined by other users) of their positive or negative review.
Ciao, the European competitor of Epinions, also pays its users for the reviews they write.Forums are another group of sites on the profit-sharing wagon. One of the most popular examples of a profit sharing forum is Digital Point. Digital Point is a leading forum for Web masters and it gets millions of hits a day. Users receive percentage of the Adsense income for each of the topics they participate in. The amounts for
active participants are usually in the $30-50 range a month, which is certainly not much but having in mind that forums are notorious for their low CTR, this amount is probably the maximum that can be obtained.Article directories use a similar profit sharing approach. The amount a user gets depends on the number of articles he or she has submitted and on the income these articles generate. Generally more popular articles generate higher income but this is not always true because some topics (i.e. computer-related) are known for cheap cl icks and low CTR, while others (health and finance) can generate more revenue with less popular articles.Social bookmarking sites also adopt either a profit sharing, or a flat fee approach to compensate their users. For instance, Raw Sugar is paying its top twenty users between $25 and $500 per month. However, most of the other major sites are going on the Adsense profit sharing route, which usually translates from as low as $5 a month (or even less) for contributors of not so popular content, to about $50-100 for contributors of top stories. Netscape has already been mentioned as one of the first sites to offer payment to its contributors.Another group of sites, which pays for opinions, are expert sites like Yahoo! Answers or LawSure. Unlike Epinions, information about payment rates for answering questions is not easily discovered but generally i t is believed that rates start from as low as $2 per answer.Online magazines are more generous. For instance, ITMJ relies solely on user contributions for its Hey Boss and Manager’s Choice features. Each of them pays $50. Hey Boss is a way for a user to voice his or her opinion about a former boss (without mentioning them, of course) and tell them the things that were impossible to tell while being their subordinate. Manager’s Choice is another feature that relies mainly on user input but this time the purpose is to recommend a product or a service, which will be useful to fellow IT managers. Both features have existed for many years, so for ITMJ this model of user compensation is working.Another company, which pays its users for their contribution, is the Mozilla Foundation. Their program to pay $500 per a severe bug started a couple of years ago and from time to time, when a really severe bug in Firefox is reported from a user, he or she gets the cash. Probably other software vendors are also doing it but general ly it takes a lot of courage (and few bugs, which is not the case with many popular software products) to offer a reward for finding a bug.
Conclusion
User contribution is a valuable asset for any site. Some sites are lucky to get it for free, while others have to pay in order to stay in business. Some sites take their users’ efforts for granted and see no reason to compensate them, while other sites adopt the more honest approach to compensating their users for their time and effort.It is difficult to predict which of the two tendencies will prevail in the future but it is certain that all being equal, the number of paying sites will continue to rise. However, this does not mean that the amounts of money sites are paying will rise as well. Probably the mainstream trend will be that more and more sites pay their users “pocket money”, which is not a motivation for a user to contribute for money but is a fair compensation if he or she is inclined to contributing even if there is no payment.

What is AJAX

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

AJAX - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is not a new programming language or a new script, but it is a new way of writing the scripts utilizing the full power XML.It is a group of inter-related web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications. A primary characteristic is the increased responsiveness and interactivity of web pages achieved by exchanging small amounts of data with the server "behind the scenes" so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user performs an action.

This is intended to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability. AJAX is asynchronous in that the data is requested from the server only once and loaded in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. All further data requests are accomplished by utilizing the local copy of the data. JavaScript is the scripting language in which AJAX function calls are usually made.

Data is retrieved using the XML HttpRequest object that is available to scripting languages run in modern browsers, or alternatively Remote Scripting in browsers that do not support XML HttpRequest. AJAX is a cross-platform technique usable on many different operating systems, computer architectures, and web browsers as it is based on open standards such as JavaScript and the DOM. There are free and open source implementations of suitable frameworks and libraries.

Examples of Sites that use AJAX Google Suggest:
Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/
Amazon Search Engine: http://www.a9.com/
Instant Domain Search: http://instantdomainsearch.com/
NetFlix Top 100 Movie search: http://www.netflix.com/Top100
Delicious - Communal bookmarks engine: http://del.icio.us/
Wikimapia - http://www.wikimapia.org/
LiveMarks - http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/livemarks/
Back Base: http://www.backbase.com/
Gollum Browser: http://gollum.easycp.de/en/0,,00.html
Kiko: http://www.kiko.com/
Examples of Open Source Frameworks:
ItsNat - http://www.itsnat.org
ThinWire - http://www.thinwire.com/
Sajax - http://www.modernmethod.com/sajax/
ZK - http://zk1.sourceforge.net/
AjaxAC - http://ajax.zervaas.com.au/

Examples of Open Source Libraries:
Ajax.Net - http://ajax.asp.net/
Ajaxian – http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-agent-open-source-ajax-toolkit
AjaxTags 1.3 - http://ajaxtags.sourceforge.net/
PHPLiveX - http://phplivex.sourceforge.net
XAJAX - www.boxxet.com

A few important links to get more info about AJAX related topics:
http://www.nickbouton.com/archives/2007/12/11/comparing-open-source-ajaxframeworks/
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/07/31/31FEajax_2.html
http://www.freeprogrammingresources.com/ajax-tutorial-libraries.html

Companies & Transparency- The Cyber World Perspective

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Introduction:
It is a well established and commonly acknowledged fact in the business circles that transparency and accountability are two of the most important pillars upon which a successful and reliable economy can be built. Of course this is not only true for the business world but for the non-commercial world as well including governments and so forth. Since we know that the cyber world is an extension of the material world, it would not be surprising to note that transparency plays and equally important role in the online world as well. Nevertheless this simple statement does need to be backed up by facts and logic in order to convince the reader that it is indeed actually so.

Transparency: The Feared Ghost
We all know that ghosts are transparent which means that they are not visible since light passes through them (forgive me if you don’t like this absurd theory of mine), but jokes apart there is a strong similarity between such a ghost and transparency. Ghosts are feared by most people and so is transparency although it involves nothing more than see-through mechanism which makes it possible for other to see and scrutinize the actions of the insiders. Another closely related concept with transparency is accountability which refers to the liability of the company in perspective of its commitments and goals to various stakeholders and customers alike. These two are considered very important for the smooth and un-corrupted functioning of any enterprise. Any company or organization for that matter tends to become lethargic, unresponsive and stagnant, in the absence of appropriate checks and balances which are held in place by the concepts of transparency and accountability.

Is it a Necessary Evil?
We have seen that transparency is a ghost which is feared by most companies yet like friction, it tends to be a necessary evil. Of course it might not be fully fair to brand it as an evil from the outsiders’ point of view, though the insiders might think so from a selfish viewpoint so to speak. The problem is that investors usually steer clear of companies with do not follow much transparent policies and tend to be within closed walls as this creates an atmosphere of distrust in general.
History has shown several times that whenever the management of a company tries to hide bad news inside a cover of complicated business language and statements, the results are very unpleasant in the long run similar to Enron and Tyco, the stories which do not need much introduction in the negative sense of the word. It may not be always the case that companies which follow opaque policies are cooking something behind the doors, but it does give a negative psychological impression on the stakeholders and people from whom the information is being withheld or supplied inadequately.

The Web Perspective:
The above mentioned description about transparency, its fears and possible outcomes have been stated in a generic manner. In today’s world the cyber space is playing an increasingly important role in all aspects of individual, organizational and governmental matters, and a corollary of this also holds true about the commercial activities carried out by these companies on the web. The online world is hardly different from the offline commercial and business environment, in fact it is much more susceptible (if that’s the right word) to errors being getting caught and flashed across the cyber world in the blink of an eyelid. It is very easy for stakeholders and the general public to gather as much information as possible about any company from its websites, reviews, government information in public domain such as financial statements, tax matters etc with the use of the internet. Also people can get together by sharing their views and experiences in a matter of seconds even if they are located poles apart in the geographical sense.

What all can go wrong?
This vulnerability or over-sensitivity of the web makes the companies even more prone to negative publicity if they try to hide any information but it gets out in the public domain through one or the other way and is shared with the world. Moreover the increased awareness amongst the general public with the rise of education and the spread of the internet also makes companies more alert towards their social responsibilities. Take a simple example where an imaginary company has outsourced its work from say a developed region like US into a developing region like say China, but it is not catering or caring for the genuine needs of its workers like proper health standards, safety standards or wage standards. The company might produce a very healthy balance sheet or financial statements at the end of the year by being opaque about its worker conditions, yet the moment this news gets leaked out in the public domain, there would be lots of public noises, NGO voices and probable litigations which would make the company to suffer lot more economic losses than it would have by spending on the basic needs of the workers. Of course this is but a minor example of what all can go wrong if companies try to hide information and not be transparent about their policies and procedures.

What can be done?
It is very easy to criticize or analyze a situation and make noise about the shortcomings and faults in a scenario, but it is only worth its salt if constructive criticism is done with efforts to improve the situation further. This is fully applicable to this situation also and one could only get away with pointing out the deficiencies of lack of transparency if some concrete and practical ways to tackle this problem are also suggested. Here is a list of few possible steps which might be taken in general to improve the online transparency of companies in order to avoid pitfalls which await a company that does not stick to a well defined transparency policy.The methods which should be employed to increase online company transparency could fall within two categories of self governed actions and policies and external policies imposed upon by appropriate authorities such as local governments and/or other governing agencies. Given below is a brief description of a mixture of such methods.
Disclosure Regulations:
Governments and other governing agencies should ensure by making appropriate guidelines that all information related to the general public, society and environment should be disclosed and it should be mandatory for the companies to complete this process within a stipulated time frame such as financial year end or something similar.

Incentives & Penalties:
There should a carrot and stick policy which sets out strict penalties to be imposed on the defaulting companies, whilst at the same time allowing to adequate and hearty appreciation of those companies which adhere to these regulations and cooperate whole heartedly in making them a success.

Increase in Awareness:
Ignorance might be bliss in certain circumstances but certainly in such issues, ignorance is fraught with dangers. Hence the general public should be made aware of their rights to information and knowledge especially with the activities of the companies which affect them in a direct or indirect manner. For example of a company has set up a manufacturing/processing unit in a remote village where the by-products are dangerous effluents, the company surely will be forced to share such information via their website if the public is aware of the dangers to their lives and the succeeding generations.

Self Motivation:
The best way out would be if the companies follow a policy of transparency just for the sake of it without even having to get bogged down by public pressure, government regulations and so forth. The companies should consider that they are a part and parcel of the human society where they exist and carry out their business activities, hence any lack of disclosure on their part would breach the trust which society puts on them, leading to problems in the long run. There are several ways of doing this in the online world

    * Discuss such issues in company website blogs
    * Give information about such matters on appropriate website sections
    * Accept responsibility/mistakes and try not to repeat them consciously in future
    * Give adequate compensation to affected parties in case of any mishap instead of trying to hide it

Conclusion:
The report can be concluded by saying that transparency is very important for an organization to survive and grow in the cyber world which is highly competitive, sensitive and loaded with information and information collection/spreading tools. Hence it would be in the best interest of companies to be transparent about their policies, procedures and activities to gain public confidence and grow in the future.

Top 15 Ways to Generate Traffic For Your Site

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

1) A good simple way to generate traffic is by leaving comments on high traffic blogs, as these will be viewed by lots of people. What you have to try to do is leave comments that people would be interested in, such as contributory information that they may have skipped, or are unaware of.

2) Including a link to your webpage is also a very good idea, to generate more traffic to you site.

3) Another good method is to use the Yahoo! answer portal, which is very easy to use and at the same time is effective.

4) But what you have to try to do is avoid making people think that you are trying to lure them to your website on purpose, what you have to do is provide them with reliable concise information that will catch their attention.

5) A good way to do this is by submitting your blog to important blog directories, and although it could take some time, it is definitely worth it in the long term.

6) What you could also do to generate traffic, is by submitting a detailed Press Release to PRWeb.com.

7) As well as this you could create a viral report, in which you most definitely should include your link in the text.

8) t is all about writing compelling articles that you should post in article directories, as they are viewed by many people, who are interested in the topic.

9) Another effective way to gain viewers is by asking for your viewers` email address, and then begin to build your list of contacts, who could be very important to you in the future.

10) As well as this you could simply ask viewers to bookmark your website, because that way you can provide them with important information, thus further promoting your site.

11) But if everything else fails, that should not happen; you could buy ads from Craigslist.com, which often reaches 100 million visits each month.

12) Buying Ad credits from Pay Per Clicks could also boost your traffic, but it depends on the key words you use to gain viewers.

13) You could also ask for recommendations from other site owners. It is a good idea to get listed on “recommended resources pages.” If you get recommended by the target market, you could attract more traffic to your site.

14) Affiliating programs is another great way to generate traffic. You could increase sales by offering commission on your products and services. Gaining profit from traffic is a great way to increase the value of your site.

15) Media exposure is a good way to attract visitors to your site. There are a number of ways in which publicity can help you increase traffic at a rapid pace, and you will surely benefit from this.

How To Create Great Content To Promote Your Site

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

If you want to promote your website effectively, you need to have great content on a daily basis. You should design your site so that it is easy to navigate, and so that it is interactive for users, who can feel very comfortable once they are in your site. This has to be done effectively, but then it is all about the content, that has to draw viewers in, in order to gain their loyalty, so that they come back, and hopefully visit the site very often, even on a daily basis.

It is very important for the content of your site to be original, so that it is new, innovative, and different to other sites viewers might have come across. If you succeed in doing this, visitors will be excited about visiting you site, and may even bookmark it for future reference. This will definitely be a bonus for the success of your site, because viewers are everything. These viewers could also tell friends about it (word of mouth), or even add its link in forums, or other sites. This will most definitely increase the popularity of your site, and will make your dedication worthwhile.

In order to achieve greater results, you have to include a great title, and make sure you are very descriptive, when writing what the site is all about. You should also make your site have a combination of graphics (not too many) and text, as the quality and the legibility of the homepage is absolutely vital. Your site has to be clear, consistent, and legible, and it should be updated on a daily basis.

If it isn’t viewers will check out other sites, and may not return to yours ever again. The content of your site is very important, and it is important to include attractive headlines, and consistent information.

If it is difficult for you to update information regularly, it is a very good idea to use RSS Feeds, so your site is automatically updated, with good concise information from some of the best suppliers.

Writing A Pitch

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

The biggest mistake people make when crafting an elevator pitch is trying to make it too broad. Remember, you have about 30 seconds to get your idea across so every word counts.

Here is a little exercise:
“Company A is a platform that enables professional and social groups of all types and sizes to create Capsules. Capsules empower groups to share, communicate and network without loosing control of their brand, privacy or members. They combine the best features of discussion forums, email lists, calendars and social networks…”

After over 50 words of text it is still difficult to visualize what Company A does. It has something to do with groups, I think. Even this is only a very tame example. Many other tech companies have pitches so loaded with web jargon that they read more like exercises in marketing satire than anything else.
A better way to describe a site that creates groups to help organize companies and businesses is to just say that:

“Company A is a product that allows professionals to create private, branded groups that combine all the best features of forums and online communities.”
Even this is only a rough solution. Still, in half the words of the original, this version manages to provide almost as much value to the reader. In fact I would say it’s better, as it’s easier to get a feeling for what Company A actually does.

Closing Thoughts:
When writing a pitch, discussing your start-up or communicating in general remember that brevity and clarity are worth a thousand words.

Save Money With Section 179

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Section 179 allows businesses to expense up to $112,000 of certain capital assets in the year they are purchased rather than depreciating them over their useful life. If you know that you are going to make a larger infrastructure purchase, this could be an invaluable way to lower your tax obligation. There are a two things to keep in mind when thinking about this kind of exemption:

You still need to spend the money in order to write it off. Section 179 only applies to certain capital expenditures.

Take a trip over to the IRS` website to learn more about the tax code.

Top 10 Free Tools for Ranking Your Website

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

1. Google Ranking Tools: The Google ranking tool is one of the best on the net, as it is very effective. It includes a number of different tools, and allows you to monitor the progress of clients, who are visiting websites. The advanced Google Search Methods tool is a very useful resource for search optimization, especially when doing key word searches. The Google Datacenter Watch Tool, the Google Rank Position, and Google Rankings are all very effective in checking the ranking of web pages.

2. Yahoo Ranking Tools: Yahoo Search Engines is a free tool that checks the position of your website in the Yahoo search engine. It is a very effective SEO tool. This shows the Yahoo rank position, and the number of entries indexed. When you enter a URL/Keyword, it searches for the first 1000 entries.

3. Alexa Page Ranking: Another great tool that can help you rank website traffic is the Alexa Ranking Tool. This is one of the most recommended ranking tools, and it is available at no charge. Alexa offers a number of different options, such as Alexa Page Ranking, Alexa Ranking, and Alexa Rank check.

4. Page Rank Tool: This tool will query and return your search on Google. It checks for any changes in the page ranking positions. It includes many options, like a page rank grid calculator, page rank search, page rank calculator, and page rank lookup.

5. Future Page Rank Tool: It will query Google’s many data centers, and you can get a good idea of upcoming changes. This SEO tool will query Google’s various data-centers, for changes of in any page rank values, for whichever URL you provide.

6. Datacenter Quick Check: This tool allows you to check all Google data centers for BackLinks, and PR and ranking of Keyword.

7. iBusinessPromoter: This tool helps you get top 10 rankings on Google and Yahoo! and other search engines, and can be very handy to boost results, and increase revenues.

8. The McDar Key Word Analysis Tool: This was voted the best ranking tool last year, and is a great way to help you promote your site. It provides you with show pages, BL, PR, unique domains, and tracks ranking movement very effectively, reaching 1000 keywords for Google. It also displays backlinks, and the pages from the top 10.

9. Alexa Related Rank Check: This tool allows you to check several Alexa rating at the same time, and is very useful when you want to check out the rankings of your competition. It lets you input up to ten domains, and the results are always very impressive.

10. Dogpile Search Comparison: This tool gives you the top results from search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and AskJeeves. It combines search results from these search engines, and shows the top 100 in Yahoo and Google. It lets you compare 6 different Search Engine Results with each other.