What If You Made a Web Page and Nobody Came To Visit

By: Michael Dappert

What a problem. You spend all your spare time for months creating a web page. Staying up late into the night even when you have to get up and go to work the next morning. Your wife or kids or friends wonder what happened to you and start to believe you do not care about them anymore.

Finally, the web site is ready. You have an account with a hosting company and you get your files uploaded and low and behold there it is. Your own public part of the internet. You could go anywhere in the world and get online and look at your website. Its got your name on it and your sweat and your heart went into making it like no other site around.

So after telling your mom and sister and friends you get a few emails congratulating you on the "really cool looking site." Mom wants to know how you can make money off of that and Dad wants to know how much it cost to have it there. Some friends leave little messages on the forum part of the site and things are looking good.

Sister says she is going to sue if you do not remove the paragraph about her and Billy in the garage in your family stories part of the site. Your wife thinks you should remove the pics of you bare-chested out in the back yard. Your best buddy says you should not have a direct link to your email address on the site at all, but what the heck does he know.

The web hosting company where you have your site hosted provides some statistics about the visitors to your site. You can see how much traffic there was to the site, what web browser they were using, what part of the world they were from, and what site may have referred them to your site. There are other stats that maybe you will examine more in depth later.

So a few days after going live your email account seems to have a lot more offers for prescription drugs and loan application acceptance notices. There are emails from someone named XTC and various other people who you do not know. In a week the email traffic doubles and then it quadruples. So you remove the direct link to your email address from the site.

Back to the web stats. You are not supposed to spend time at work messing around on the internet but a couple of times a day will not hurt anything. And before you shut down your computer at home each night it is the last thing you look at. Even over the folk's house for Mom's birthday you found yourself using their slow slow dial-up service to look at your web traffic stats.

The stats identify the googlebot crawling your site and inktomi and the msnbot, and others all out there indexing and recording the web for their search engines. They show up every once in a while. Getting in those search engines will certainly bring traffic once they get your keywords all in a row.

And you know your keywords will do the job. There must be millions of searches for millionaire and hunk and genius and top gun. Once people get to the site they will most surely come back because it says right at the top, visit us again, soon. So once the traffic starts coming then you can start generating some ad revenue and once the ad revenues starts to build you can think about telling the boss to forget it because you have a web site that is making more each week than you are getting out of this place.

So after a couple of months of watching the traffic on the site you can see those web bots and the random hit from locations that cannot be resolved into any ip address. Hmm, wonder why that is? But, alas, not much is happening. So it is time to find out how to get traffic to your site. A couple of searches and there it is, Voila! Marketing your website by writing articles for free. Easy. Get to work.

Article Source: http://yesezine.com

Michael Dappert is a co-founder of Winco, Inc., a provider of wireless internet access to small communities in West Central Illinois. He also administers the web site Musicgig.us and discusses a wide range of topics at Flyoverfolks.com.

Affiliate Programs -- The Beginners' Explanation Of Affiliate Programs

by Sami Fab

So you want to know about affiliate programs and affiliate marketing?

Let me ask you to think about something for a moment. Why is it that a bunch of people are much more successful working together rather than working as individuals, be it a football team or an army or a commercial company!

The answer you may be thinking of is "teamwork". What makes a team? A group of people with *complementary* skills that work towards a common goal or objective. Now teamwork becomes a really powerful concept when you think about it that way.

**The online version of this concept is known as an affiliate program**

By the way, other names for affiliate programs are associate programs and referral programs.

Basically the idea is, you as a marketer become an affiliate for a product vendor known as an affiliate merchant or merchant for short. This means you promote the merchant's product or products and for every sale, the merchant pays you a commission.

It is critical that you carefully study any merchant's terms and conditions before you start promoting their products. Firstly there are certain promotions that the merchant does not allow and secondly you need to know about your commissions and how you get paid.

Some merchants pay for every sale to a customer that you refer others pay you for every referral even if the customer doesn't buy anything immediately. The latter is not as common as the former but does happen in very competitive markets.

Now you may be a business or product owner yourself. Then it is extremely important that you set up your own affiliate program - and don't worry that does not mean you have to do anything technical like write computer programs. There are plenty of 'point and click' systems that help you get set up very quickly and easily.

The important factor for you is that your affiliate program will attract many affiliates to promote your products. These affiliates will in turn refer many thousands or often tens of thousands more people to your products and services that you would never have come across. Just one promotion by one of the affiliates can significantly boost your website visitors, sales and profits.

I want you to note something. Affiliates continuously build up a "following" on the Internet. You should do this because building a relationship with your followers gives you major influence and therefore the ability to generate sales by recommending products that you have researched and believe in.

This following can be a healthy number of regular (and increasing) visitors to your websites or most often a highly productive mailing list to keep you in touch with your followers, known as subscribers.

Let me tell you, this use of affiliates is one of the top 3 secrets of the world's most successful online vendors. So whether you become an affiliate or a merchant, affiliate programs are critical to your success.

I hope you're beginning to see how this relationship between the affiliates and merchants works for both parties. But this also works extremely well for the customers too. The reason is, the customers get to find out about products that they'd never have discovered by themselves. More importantly, the customers see useful analysis of a pre-vetted product from a professional (the affiliate) that the customer may not be equipped to do, even if they had the time!

Even if you're just starting out as an affiliate, within days you can surpass the knowledge of your subscribers in your chosen field and you can therefore be classed as a professional compared to your subscribers. This is because most subscribers don't have the time to focus on the subject. But this scenario actually makes the relationship work very well. They look to you to save them time and effort by distilling and filtering out poor products and sending them information about relevant and useful products. You look to them to give you a nice (commission) income for your efforts, as long as you put their interests first.

Naturally, the affiliates have to be genuine with their recommendations or they'll lose the trust of their subscribers very quickly indeed. Being honest with their subscribers and looking after their interests sometimes means recommending better products that offer smaller commissions. Such affiliates build a large and very responsive list of eager subscribers. The affiliates will therefore have the opportunity for many repeat sales over the long term. The profits per customer with this approach are significantly larger than a one-off large commission if they betray the trust of the subscriber.

So you see, affiliate programs provide a partnership between the affiliates, affiliate merchants and customers that help everyone win in a very efficient way. Make sure you learn more about affiliate marketing either as an affiliate or an affiliate merchant or both to profit from your online presence.

Dr Sami Fab has been an IT professional since 1982. He has more valuable information for you free at the address below.

Learn more with Affiliate Marketing - Tips For Beginners.

If you found this article useful please do pass it on, completely unaltered and with this message attached.


Article Source: Yes Ezine Directory - Free Content - Article Submission

How You Can Become A Super Affiliate.

By: Jason Oickle

It's a shame that only 1 of 5% of all affiliates reach the level of earning a five figure monthly income. This elite stage is achieved by the so-called super affiliates.

Let's think for a minute, is being a super affiliate only exclusive to a chosen few people? Or does anyone have the ability to be one? These are probably some of the questions you are asking whenever you hear that someone else made it big in this industry.

The truth is, anyone can become a super affiliate. But it take's hard work, dedication and a good sense of commitment to achieve that kind of success. Super affiliates are all these with three qualities: patience, persistence and a continuous hunger for knowledge.

Once you gain all the qualities, all you have to do is learn some strategies that are vital in becoming a super affiliate.

Super affiliates have a target niche market.

One of the common mistakes that most affiliate marketers make is they try to market everything they find and think will sell. They don't put much focus on a target niche market.

Super affiliates on the other hand, research what people need the most. Then they focus all their time and efforts into marketing that niche. Make sure you don't scatter your attention, you will end up losing more than gaining.

It is best to try and find out what's the latest and most searched after products or services that consumers are buying.

Super affiliates know their product and target market.

Take the time to get more information about the product or service you are promoting, this will build your credibility. Credibilty is very important since it will earn you peoples' trust. If customers do not believe in you and trust you, they will avoid what you are offering them.

Research and test the product yourself. It is near impossible to successfuly promote something you don't know anything about. You will notice your sales increase dramatically if you are an expert on the product or service.

Super affiliates market with search engines.

This is the best way to promote products and services online. Once you have your affiliate program set up, you can promote it with different search engines. There are many tools available, pay per click is a good example.

However, you have to make sure you know the tools you are using if you don't want to fall flat on your face. Pick the one you feel you will gain the most from. Don't go along with all the hype and the popular ones other people are using. Choose one that will be more effective.

Super affiliates have more than one merchant.

It's best to try and promote different products from different merchants. Different merchants have different tools and payment options available. The number of honest merchants out there is equal to the ones who only want to make the most out of you.

If you're having problems with one merchant, you can always choose another. Be cautious of exclusive agreements. Remember, this is your business and you want to make sure all your efforts are rewarded properly. You can actually find multiple merchants for almost any specific niche market.

Super affiliates are always hungry for knowledge and they welcome change.

With an online business, what works today may not always work in the comming days or months. That's why it's so important to always be continually educating yourself to have leverage against other affiliates.

To be a super affiliate, you have to take the time to educate yourself. Set aside time for reading, learning and taking in the constant changes that are happening with online marketing.

Super affiliates never give up.

For newbies, the trend seems to be to give up easily when they encounter bumps along the road. I guarentee you that all super affiliates have undergone the same bumps, but the difference with them is they never gave up and they came out triumphant.

Don't give up, instead check your status. Make the necessary changes to the things that are not working and concentrate on what is working. Test everything and push hard to continue what you started.

Success will not come overnight. To become a super affiliate, you have to learn to use all these strategies and combine them with patience, determination and knowledge. Before you know it, you will be earning more profits than you ever dreamed possible.

Article Source: http://yesezine.com

Jason Oickle enjoys teaching people how to be successful online. Get proven tips, techniques and resources at Jason Oickle's Internet Marketing Blog