Important Facts Related to An Expired Domain Name

by Hightide

by John Khu

An expired domain name could be a wonderful opportunity for you to make money by using its hidden advantages and benefits. It is a boon to those people, who make it a point to study and understand its essential principles and meaning. Here are some salient points and issues that make up an expired domain name:
a) Most people buy an expired domain name either to build a web site over it or to sell it at a higher price. Of late, trading or reselling in expire domain names is a cherished industry for many people.

b) With it, you can make money from the traffic arriving at that domain during the time tenure that you own and manage it. If you feel that you have a good amount of targeted traffic that comes to your site, then you are probably sitting on a gold mine.

c) Expired domain market is a busy place, where people buy and sell hundreds of domain names everyday. Though most of the domain names are available at cheaper prices, some of them are quite costly and premium.

d) All expired domains in the market are unique in their own respect. No two names are similar! However, there may be some names that may carry similar meaning and syntax, just to confuse site visitors.

e) When you buy one, there will be general costs attached to it, apart from the ones that you need to pay to the reseller. Costs involved are registration fees and penalty fees, if you are buying those domain names that are on hold and redemption.

f) Maintaining it will also involve some costs like an annual maintenance fee to be payable to the registrars.

g) Expire domain names are very liquid in nature and highly volatile in their behavior. You may need to keep your domains for a log time before you can expect them to sell to others.

h) Once you buy it, you must ensure that you are not keeping it inactive at any time; it must either produce a substantial amount of traffic or sell at a higher price. Otherwise, it will have a zero value.

i) An expired domain market could be a busy and bustling place with many players vying for a breathing place. There are many conflicting and contradictory scenes that make up a domain market.

j) If you are intending to sell it, you may need to incur some costs as well, like paying a fee towards auctioning or a commission payable to a reseller.

k) It is always very difficult to know and fix an exact cost of a particular expired domain name. The real value of them may vary at large and from time to time.

l) Right now, the available data on the expired domain names and their volume of trade is very scanty and rare, as most of the inferior domain names are still unsold.

m) The price for a particular expired domain name is always uncertain and unsure, as the price is always negotiable between the buyer and seller at the point of transaction.

n) Dealing in domain names could be a risky venture, as wrong expired domain names could spell a big trouble to you.

As of now, effective and profitable trading in expired domain name depends directly on your knowledge and skills in choosing the best and most practical names and later registering them for either reselling or to develop a web site over it.

About the Author:
John Khu is an author and also a seasoned professional with vast experience in expired domain name business. He is the owner of the path breaking web site called http://www.expireddomainsecret.com which provides complete and up-to-date information on expired domains and their eternal secrets.

A Colorful Computer Desk You’re Going to Love

by Hightide

Cool Green DeskLove it. Starbucks on a rainy day love it. Starbucks on a rainy day when someone else pays love it.

The Computer Desk – Kool Kolor KK206 is as cool as the underside of a penguin’s pillow and he knows it. I have to admit, the knock out color attracted me to it in the first place, but then I flipped for the style. The compact design makes it ideal for tight places, when your ideas exceed your space.

Specifications:

  • Finish: Lime Green
  • Desk Size: 30″Hx31.5″Wx24.5″D
  • Weight: . 34 lbs.
  • Cube: . 1.58

    • But, back to the color for just a minute. Not only is it a spectacular shade of lime green – it’s glossy! A glossy spectacular shade of lime green. If, for some reason, that’s not floating your boat, this hot desk is also available in orange and black. And, yes, they’re sporting the high gloss finish, too. See the other colors and learn more by clicking the link: Computer Desk – Kool Kolor KK206

    The Essence of Affiliate Marketing

    by Hightide

    If you have a product that you want to sell, whether it’s an e-book, audio or video, it’s usually a very wise idea to create an affiliate program around it.
    If you have an affiliate program for your product, you will get a ton of traffic that you would not normally have received.

    The reason is because a lot of people will promote your product for you when you’re paying them a commission to do it!

    Would you rather have 100 people buy your product from you? Or would you rather have 100 affiliates when each has a hundred people buying your product from them?

    It’s a no-brainer when there can be a better way to boost your income by leveraging on the combined efforts of hundreds of affiliates to sell for you. This demand for a better way creates a market for affiliate management software which makes the whole process of setting up, recording and releasing commissions so much more…well, manageable.

    Without such a software, you would never have been able to get the amount of traffic and sales multiple promoters could give you, compared to achieving it all by yourself. It would have been impossible to ‘promote’ every customer into an affiliate automatically. Talk about missing out on an exponential effect on your financial bottomline!

    Let’s begin with explaining what an affiliate program is.

    An affiliate program is a way to offer partners who are interested in promoting your product or service a share of the profits generated after they make a sale. Your affiliate partners are “commissioned salespeople” who will take your marketing message to their audience, convince them to buy from you, and then get paid a proportion of the profit they create for your business.

    Click here to become a LinkShare Affiliate!

    The advantages of having affiliates (or associates) build your business and help you with marketing is that you have no upfront expense to cover. Apart from setting up an infrastructure to manage affiliates and create marketing material for them to use, you pay nothing until after a sale has been made. Contrast this with conventional advertising where you pay first, and then hope you make enough sales to make back your investment. Another benefit is you can reach an audience through your affiliates which you otherwise wouldn’t be able to by yourself. This multiplies your reach and can explode your sales and profits.

    Unfortunately, despite the benefits, running an affiliate program is not as easy as it seems because the symbiosis or synergistic relationship between affiliates and merchants is not always and fully understood. The most successful programs are based on mutual respect, open dialogue, and proper recognition and reward for success.

    The affiliate management software can only go so far with proper reporting of up-to-date statistics like number of impressions, click-throughs, leads, sales, 2nd-tier affiliates and others on a monthly and daily basis. But of course it wouldn’t be called an affiliate management software if it can’t process these data, so there are features that affiliate managers must look out for and diligently evaluate before they prepares to invest in a software. Affiliates would want to know what statistics are available so that they can determine how well they are succeeding.

    On the managers’ part, they are obliged to provide all the sales tools and material affiliates need to sell their products as effectively as possible. This is not easily done because:

    1) they become lazy :)

    2) they presume affiliates know what to do.

    Affiliates must feel they are well equipped to sell the merchants’ products because even if they have not reviewed the products themselves, only the merchants know their stuff best and how to present them to the audience in the best possible light.

    Besides the standard affiliate link, the tools for online promotion include banner graphics, e-mail messages, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, a giveaway viral report, a review article, PLR articles, testimonials, one-time offer (OTO) page, forum signatures, press releases, popup HTML codings and other affiliate marketing suggestions affiliates can take up.

    The truly successful affiliate managers are the ones who can respond and better still, pre-empt the kind of help affiliates typically ask for, thus providing an optimal level of support affiliates require, leading to every possible sales conversion whenever the opportunity arises.

    Successful affiliate programs have dedicated personnel that work with the affiliates to ensure that they have the tools that they need, the reporting that is required, and to ensure that they are compensated fairly and in a timely fashion. Again these services are either provided to the affiliates by an individual or team that works directly for the merchant, or by an independent affiliate management company. Either solution is acceptable to affiliates providing that they receive the level of support that they require.

    Providing that the affiliates are successful in delivering prospects to a merchant-customers that convert into paying customers-and they earn money, they will continue to promote them, and the more that they earn, the better the promotion is likely to be. Online affiliates have a set amount of “real estate” on their sites for promotion-they of course have to provide content to their visitors-and this is allocated to those merchants from whom they earn the best return. In return, the manager can reward better-performing affiliates according to the results they have achieved.

    But bear in mind the reality is that 80%-90% of your affiliates will be inactive under normal circumstances. The Pareto principle also applies that 20% of your affiliates are likely to be responsible for 80% of the total sales.

    To keep affiliates motivated, merchants should work with them to create incentive programs and special events that will provide them with opportunities for increased recognition and revenue; for example, increase affiliate commission for a certain time period. They should also take the time to communicate with them whenever possible to help them with their promotions. One method is to publish regular affiliates-only newsletters that contain their statistics for the week/month, affiliate marketing tips, product and promotion updates, interviews with successful affiliates etc. Your affiliates will never forget they joined your program.

    About the Author:
    Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at Internet Mastery Center.

    LinkShare Referral Prg

    You’re One Click Away From Bigger Checks from Google!

    by Hightide

    Adsense Code: What Google Never Told You about Making Money with Adsense

    If you’re serious about making money online, Adsense Code: What Google Never Told You about Making Money with Adsense should be the next book you purchase online. The author, Joel Comm, gives tested, tried, and true advice and tips on getting the most from you google ads.

    If you want to see your Google checks increase (and who doesn’t?!), don’t hesitate a minute before clicking through and buying this very informative book.

    From the publisher:
    Hidden on the Internet, scattered among billions of Web pages, are the clues to an incredible secret.For those who know the secret, the result is untold wealth. Each month, a small group of people an elite club who have uncovered the mysteries of The AdSense Code put their knowledge to use and receive checks for tens of thousands of dollars from Google. And untold numbers of additional site owners are regularly generating supplemental income via AdSense while they play, sleep and eat. The AdSense Code is concise and very focused on the objective of revealing the proven online strategies to creating passive income with Google AdSense.The AdSense Code reveals hands-on solutions to many of the concerns and challenges faced by content publishers in their quest to attract targeted traffic, improve content relevance and increase responsiveness to AdSense ads using easy and legitimate techniques that have worked for those who know the secrets. Google AdSense expert, Joel Comm, provides you with the keys you need to crack The AdSense Code and unlock the secrets to making money online.

    Getting a Buzz On with Viral Marketing

    by Hightide

    by Chris Henry

    Viral marketing has matured a bit over the years. There seems to have been a shift to the web not just being seen by agencies and brands as another tick box for any ad campaign, which is significant enough, but now being the medium where a campaign is launched to create a buzz before it hits TV and print. Even before a movie is released which used to be seen as the pre-launch buzz-generation activity. Big business “gets it”

    Buzz works! It can work for small and start-up businesses, as well. The planning stage of a viral campaign will set out objectives and develop the viral theme for a buzz. There are three core components to any viral campaign and businesses of any size can use them. They are:

    1. The creative material: the viral agent that embodies the message you want to spread in a digital format (image, video, text, etc). The trick is to put together material that people will be eager to share with their family and friends and people are much more eager to share “advertainment” and advertisement.

    2. Seeding: distributing and placing the agent online in places that provide the greatest potential spread. Direct viral material downloads or links on specialist viral third-party web sites in order to create awareness and spread before users get to the campaign destination site.

    3. Tracking: Measuring the spread of the campaign to provide accountability and prove success. It is absolutely vital that you know what is or is not working. The only way to get that information is to track the results of your seeding.

    Lessons have been learned, trends have been developed and there is definitely some science involved in creating a buzz successfully. The buzz technique is here to stay and, if used strategically, it can make a difference to the success of your e-business.

    Learn this and more at The Millionaires League. Get a review here: http://reviewsonthemillionairesleague.blogspot.com

    About the Author:

    Chris Henry is a strong supporter of The Millionaires League and the awesome ways this program shows people how to make money. To visit site click here http://www.newproduct.ws to learn more strategies on how to make money with The Millionaires League.

    Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization

    by Hightide

    Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web’s population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.

    Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

    You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

    If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image — normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.

    On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

    About the Author:
    BR Web Marketing www.bosandkvist.com

    Two Factors That Determine Your Affiliate Income

    by Hightide

    by Tim Ng

    Affiliate marketing is simply a business model where You, the affiliate, recommend OTHER people’s products for a cut of the profits…without having to create any of your own products!

    Let me share with you 2 factors That will determine the amount of affiliate income you will get from your affiliate business.

    No matter in what the business is, the main reason of that business is to increase or maximize their profits. If this is not the main reason of a business, then it is not a business. Today, there are a lot of businesses out there on the net, and affiliate program works great. Many people joined affiliate programs, but they don’t know how to increase their affiliate income. If you want to increase your affiliate income, then you will need to know what are the factors that determine it. In affiliate marketing, there are only 2 factors that determine your affiliate income, they are:

    1. Traffic volume, that you drive to your merchants’ sites.

    2. Conversion rate, the percentage of sales or leads.

    These are the only 2 factors that are going to determine your affiliate income. So all you need to do is just to concentrate in these 2 things.

    Learn how to use Pay-Per-Click ads to drive traffic. Learn more about Short-Term and Long-Term traffic strategies. Learn how to use unconventional traffic strategies that put you at an advantage over your competitors.

    A lot of affiliates trying to figure out how to increase traffic to their sites, but they do not care about the conversion rate. What if you’ve got 5,000 visitors a day, but only 1 of them actually buys your products? This means that 4,999 of the visitors come to your site, and leave without a trace! What a waste.

    Therefore, take some time off to brush up your copywriting skills. For a start, I do advise that you save on your expenditure by learning to do some of the stuff on your own instead of engaging a third party’s help. Instead, your investment should be spent on coaching programmes that will help you grow in value as an affiliate marketer. Build up your website creation skills as well. A great website is definitely a good conversion tool. Don’t fret over the technical HTML stuff. Believe me, with current website creation tools such as Kompozer, NVU or Frontpage, creating a webpage has never been easier.

    Make More Money So what you should do is to focus in improving both of these factors! Don’t do just one, do both together. Why? Simply because your affiliate profits is the multiply of your traffic volume with conversion rate, not addition! You will find your affiliate income will increase drastically if you do both of them. If you want to make more money in affiliate programs, you definitely need to follow this rule. Therefore, stop wasting time on other fields, just concentrate in these two will make you a Millionaire.

    Thus, now you know how you can make more money in affiliate marketing. In fact, affiliate marketing or internet marketing is about marketing your products and services. Nothing special, it is the same as the usual marketing you’ve always heard of in your life. You can learn more about affiliate marketing with me.

    About the Author:
    Tim Ng is a seasoned affiliate marketer and a student of Ewen Chia – “the World’s Top Affiliate Marketer”. Tim frequently guides people in internet marketing forums on how to make money through affiliate marketing. For more information, do refer to http://www.wealthtreasure.com

    The Pillars Behind an Accessible creative Business Web Site Design

    by Hightide

    by Joanna Gadel

    User friendliness, good look & feel and fast & easy communication are some of the features of any successful and cheap website design to target the prospects.

    Only pretty images would not satisfy their quests. A site that is not visually appealing can drive a user away before he completes his task. Certain other things are also necessary here to make the website usable.

    Creative Design, Usability, Accessibility and some Basic Browser Design guidelines are of great importance to decide the fate of any website to look visually appealing and stunning as well.

    Creative website design:

    The design of any visually appealing website is such that the prospects would find the site to be interesting to stay long in the website and get the required info perfectly. Provided, the website has to be easy to read and easy to navigate also.

    Just by following some basic design standards this creative standard can be established easily.

    Colors: The true cross-platform color palette is 216 colors.
    Fonts: Just try using the common user fonts so that he site would open in any computer. In this regard, it is necessary to point that some usual fonts can make this happen. Times New Roman, Arial, and Helvetica are the most commonly used fonts. These fonts are easy to read on a computer screen.

    Screen Resolutions: a resolution of 1024×768 is the most prevalent in the web design industry. The second most common is 800×600 designs. It is wise to make a liquid layout that fits automatically in any computer without any break-up of images and info. Rigid layout, in this case, would obviously upset a user who is seeing a 1024×768 layout in his 800×600 compatible screen. Which resolution used must be carefully considered.

    Images: Nearly every website uses images. Images are of great use for selling products and for displaying company branding. Unnecessary use of images here would have no purpose at all, but those are used to please the viewers. This would unnecessarily make the page size bigger. Using ALT tags with images for accessibility are of high note.

    Brower Compatibility

    There is more than one browser that is used on the web. Designing one such site for a specific browser would simply lose the real purpose of the website. It is better to test them all. The most popular are Internet Explorer (5-7), Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape 7/8.

    Usability:

    “Put usability first. Practice simplicity”. Jakob Nielsen, usability Design Expert, “Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity”

    Not only for completing the information architecture for a site, but also for the creative design usability of any large or small professional website design matters largely. The users should not face any difficulty in finding what they want actually.

    Following are some of the basic rules of usability:

    • The same basic style should prevail in all pages on the site.
    • Other than having a basic style maintained with rest of the pages, the Home Page should have a different design from the rest of the site.
    • The brand (logo) and/or company name must generally be placed in the upper left-hand corner (sometimes it is located elsewhere for the Home Page and is larger).
    • Only 20% of a page should be occupied for the navigation, though for home page it is something different. It actually varies from site to site as per the reach of the topics.
    • Generally, the top horizontal of the page and the left-hand vertical of the page are two most common locations for navigation.
    • Please do not display the same links in the footer as you do in the main level navigation. Footers usually contain links namely, Help, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Feedback, etc…
    • You can have the printer friendly options if the site content displayed is suitable for printing.
    • For any site that has a lot of content, consider creating ‘sub sites’. Breaking the site down into sections (similar to chapters in a book) with each section having its own landing page would simply make the site look orderly. Often the users can easily remember what specific info they want to see in which sub site.
    • Please use percentages (%) instead of pixels to define widths on table definitions and backgrounds/borders for the sake of Resolution Independent Design. the users screen resolution can get an unaffected display quality using percentage (%). This can be a long process and requires testing the site in different screen resolutions, but it would pay off in the long run.

    Accessibility:

    Thinking about the disable users as well while making any website is the best option. If it is not for the humanity, then at least for the chance of not missing any such possible prospect that can be disable, the accessible website design issues should be dealt in with care and concern. Those persons use different technologies to browse the web (such as screen readers). Colors, fonts, use of certain development technologies, images; all these things need to be carefully selected for a web site to be accessible.

    Also the W3C has defined Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is not expected that all the sites should follow that rules, but the web design professionals can at least review them and decide what can be done to make the site accessible.

    About the Author:
    Joanna Gadel is from an Australian website design (http://www.websites4u.com.au) company which creates cheap Sydney web site design(http://www.vnsinfo.com.au/). His writings on web design principles and issues are of great importance to the budding web designers.

    Essential Tools for a Great Website

    by Hightide

    by Timothy Tye

    One of the things I love to do first thing every morning is to check the Internet, to find out how much money I made over the night. Like a fisherman checking on his trap, I am thrilled to see money accumulating in my account while I sleep. The beauty of earning an income from the Internet is that my websites continue make money for me from all parts of the world. I can actually know where the money come from, and how much, and test the pages to continue improving them. Wouldn’t you want that too?

    Before you get the wrong idea, let me clear the air about how I make money from the web. HappyJoblessGuy is NOT about earning money from some online pyramid schemes. It is not about Multi-Level Marketing (even though I have no issue about people earning through MLM). It is not about online forex trading. I am going to show you an honest way of generating income from the web but it’s going to involve a degree of hard work from you. For sure, nothing comes easy, and that includes building a machine that makes money online.

    Do not have your website hosted by PBase, Tripod, Blogger, even though it can be done an hour. If you intend to earn serious, long-time income, that is not the way to do it. You want something that is 100% your own. Once you have your own website (not an account with Blogger, PBase, etc.), you will realise the amount of freedom in your hands.

    If you were to ask me, what are the tools you need to build a great website, I can count them with the fingers of one hand. You can hire a web programmer to build a whole website for you, bypassing the need to be acquainted with any tool. But to own a really great website, I would urge you to do it yourself. You can’t be the captain of your own ship if you can’t tell stern from starboard. I have received emails from people asking to give them personal coaching. I am sorry, but I do not have time to do that, even if you’re willing to pay me money.

    In the next five pages of this chapter, I will go through each essential tool one by one. At the end of this chapter I will recap what we have learned. You will realise, if you haven’t yet, that earning a living without holding a job requires you to learn skills that you may not have learned before. On the other hand, you may have built many websites, and are wondering what’s new that I want to share. Once again, I urge you to be patient as the topics are developed.

    Now, without further ado, let’s look at the 5 Essential Tools:

    The first tool you need to build a great website is a HTML Editor.

    A HTML Editor is a software application to write web pages. There are several brands in the market, including Microsoft Frontpage, Adobe Dreamweaver and so on. Personally I would encourage you not to use Microsoft Frontpage, as it tends to add proprietary codes to your pages, making it difficult to be edited with a different HTML Editor. The one I use is called Homesite, also from Adobe. I learned to write webpages with Homesite. With a HTML Editor, you write the content of your pages by keying in the HTML Codes, and then checking it with the Preview function. If you do not have a HTML Editor presently installed in your computer, I strongly suggest you get one immediately and start fiddling with it. Get used to all the functions. Learn what to click to make the text bold, italics, underlined, etc., how to hyperlink, how to insert picture, and so on. A good HTML Editor does a lot of work for you, so that you can concentrate on putting together a great website. It doesn’t matter which one you use, as long as you get familiar with it. The second Essential Tool you need is knowledge of HTML Codes.

    As mentioned in the previous page, you need to learn coding. To be exact, HTML Codes. HTML Codes are instructions you tell the Internet how you want to format your webpages. The basic HTML codes you need to know are: Title, Body, Head, Html, Headers (H1, H2, H3, etc.), Bold, Italic, Underline, Hyperlink, and Table.

    In addition to the above, it would do you good to learn how to format size and colour of your font, background, border. More advanced features such as CSS would be helpful too, but are still all together very easy, that even a dummy could learn it (so if you have to, find a book for dummies and learn all about it).

    The third Essential Tool is a Domain Name.

    The domain name, also called the hostname or sitename, is the basic name of your website. For example, www.happyjoblessguy.com. As you probably have known, the domain name has an ending such as .com, .net, .org, etc. To use it to earn an income, I would suggest you go for .com. It is the most popular, hence, the most difficult to get. Nonetheless, you should try to get domain names with .com.

    You probably will not get the first domain name of your choice, and will need to try a few times before landing on one that is still available. This is a very important exercise, so take all the time you need.

    Registering and keeping a domain name will cost you approximately US$10 per year or even lower. That is peanuts if you can earn the amount back. For now, look for the domain name but don’t register it yet. Instead go to Essential Tool #4 to read about Web hosting.

    The fourth Essential Tool is Web hosting.

    To get web hosting means you rent space on a server that will host your website. You do not need to purchase a server – you don’t even need to know how a server works. All you need to know is that you need to host your website on it. The Webhost provides you the space and the interface for you to manage your website.

    Think of web hosting as a safe deposit box, and the domain name as the safe deposit box number. When you register for web hosting, you are buying space in a safe deposit box. The amount you pay should determine the amount of space you need. For that reason, the web hosting fee is directly related to the amount of space you purchase. The safe deposit box number remains the same, regardless the amount of space you use. In a similar sense, the fee for domain name is fixed regardless the amount of content you have on the web.

    When you start your website, the amount of space you need will most likely be pretty low, less than 1GB, so do not pay for a lot of space that you are not going to use. You can always buy more space as your needs grow. If you pay for 5GB per year, and throughout the course of that year, you never use more than 1GB, then the balance 4GB is money wasted.

    The fifth and final Essential Tool you need to build a great website is an FTP Software.

    An FTP Software is an application that enables you to transfer data from your computer to your website on the Internet, and vice versa. There are many other ways to do it, including using an online interface provided by your webhost, but usually, using an FTP Software is the swiftest way.

    The FTP Software allows you to upload new pages to your website as well as update existing pages. The FTP Software that I use is called WS FTP, which stands for WinSock File Transfer Protocol. To download it, google “Free FTP Download” to see what comes up.

    In the next chapter, we will look at Building a Profit-Making Website. As of now, I want you to be familiar with the five Essential Tools in this chapter. Please go ahead and register your web hosting and obtain your domain name, but once again, let me urge you to give the domain name a good thinking through before decided which. If you choose a wrong one at the beginning stage, fine, it only costs another US$10 or so to register another. But you need to make sure it is a domain name you want to own for years and years to come. Who knows, one day you may even sell that domain and the whole web business for $1 million? So, choose carefully.

    For more topics on how to earn a living without holding a job, go to http://www.happyjoblessguy.com

    About the Author:
    Timothy Tye began earning an income from the web when he launched his first website four years ago. Since then, he has started several successful websites that allow him to earn an income without holding a job. He believes that anybody can do it and shares useful tips and knowledge in his website, http://www.happyjoblessguy.com.


    Go Daddy $1.99 Domains

    Tracking and Testing – the Solution to Attracting More Visitors

    by Hightide

    by Jim Edwards

    Every serious online business owner eats, sleeps and breaths targeted traffic to their website. They spend the most money and time trying to attract first-time visitors to their sites in hopes of generating new sales and subscribers. But, believe it or not, it’s easier to increase your income by simply selling more of the visitors you already get than trying to chase down more traffic.

    The solution? Tracking & testing! Probably the most overlooked and underutilized, but certainly the most powerful strategy for increasing sales and opt-in subscriptions. If you spend any time or money on advertising, you must start testing and tracking. Simply put, “tracking” means you measure the effectiveness of each individual advertising source you use to promote your business.

    For example, if you advertise in email newsletters, you should know how effective each newsletter ad rates compared to all the others in terms of sales and subscribers generated. This enables you to know whether an ad makes or loses money. Testing means you constantly look for ways to improve your ads in small, incremental amounts that add up over time.

    The most common (and effective) tests you can run are A-B split tests, which pit two variables against each other to determine which converts more lookers into buyers. Split testing headlines, price points, and guarantee periods make, from my experience, the best places to start testing.

    The reason testing and tracking can double your profits (or more) lies in the power of small, incremental improvements. Lets say, for example, you decide to do a series of split tests on a website that currently converts 1 in every 100 visitors (1% conversion). You test, headline, price, guarantee and a payment plan. If each of the 4 tests yields a .25% increase in conversion, you would not see an increase in sales to 2% (4x.25%), but actually an increase to almost 2.5% since each improvement builds on the last!

    The most basic tool in testing and tracking revolves around the use of advertising link tracker software. These tools measure the number of clicks on individual advertisements (text links, banners, pay-per-click ads, etc) and then measure sales or subscriptions generated as a result.

    You get two choices with link trackers: a hosted service or software you install on your own server. A hosted service offers the advantage of easy setup and use. Most of the time you just sign up for the service, enter the link you want to track, get your tracking code, and you’re off to the races.

    The disadvantage of a hosted service is that, if it gets abused, using the URL of the service in your links can get your emails blocked or your pages banned by search engines. The advantage of hosting the software on your own server is that you maintain a higher degree of technical control and can avoid the banning issues. The main disadvantage of hosting it yourself involves the fact that you really don’t have anyone to call for help if something goes wrong.

    One of the most popular hosted link trackers online is HyperTracker.com, though I’ve not used the service. My favorite link tracker is actually part of an integrated e-commerce system at http://www.MysiteSales.com. This service enables you to track your sales and subscriptions made through the shopping cart.

    Two options for software you install on your own server are Dynatracker.com and ProAnalyzer.com. Both provide decent link tracking, though no system I’ve tested provides 100% accurate results. But, with that said, failure to test means you’re leaving money on the table by wasting visitors you could otherwise convert to buyers with basic effort at improving your sales messages.

    Check out this One-Stop Ads, Visitors, Clicks, Actions & Sales Conversion Tracking / Split Testing Solution at: http://GoTo-Pro.com/silver/4539

    Copyright 2007 Jim Edwards

    About the Author:
    Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the co-creator of an amazing course that will teach you step-by-step and click-by-click how to get your own money-making videos posted online… “Finally! A Quick and Easy Way For YOU To Painlessly Create, Post and PROFIT From Your Own Money-Making Online Videos… Without Being a Computer Geek or Paying Outrageous Fees To A Webmaster!” => http://www.WebsiteVideoSecrets.com


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