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Becoming an affiliate is one of the most popular career moves of the decade. People are learning to use the internet as their tool by making money off of websites, a job that doesn’t even require leaving the house.

So what exactly is an affiliate? Basically, an affiliate owns a website and refers visitors to other websites, called “merchants.” When these visitors make purchases, the other websites pay the affiliate a commission, which is determined by internet tracking devices that keep track of web users’ purchases.

If you decide to be an affiliate, you need to make careful choices about which websites to refer your visitors to. First, they need to be websites that you’re sure will be around a long time. Look at records to make sure they’ve been consistently successful – in other words, make sure they won’t go bankrupt after you put your time and energy into seeking out customers for the product.

Secondly, choose the websites based on what they offer, and think of the product long-term. For instance, an online library membership is something you can sell to a person one time, but people go back to the same places to buy clothes they like. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t link to an online library, you just need to be aware of its differences from the clothes company. Take into account the fact that libraries may be more popular than one clothing site among thousands. If you can, research the company’s records to see how much money they’ve made.

You also want to choose websites based on what your website is about. Think of what kind of people come to your site, and then imagine what type of sites they would want links to. If your site is about American history, it would be better to advertise a website that sells history books or American paraphernalia than a website offering contact lenses.

Something many affiliates don’t think about at first are consumer tracking methods. Some companies use the cookie method – putting a cookie on the customer’s computer. This isn’t as reliable as the site putting your affiliate information in the database along with the customer’s record. The cookie method is popular and may be completely safe, but it doesn’t have the successful track record of the other method, so choose only after you’re well-informed.

To advertise the product on the other website, write a recommendation. Research the product and test it out. If it’s purchase-worthy, write a few lines explaining why. Think of who would be most interested in the product and try to target them. For instance, if you’re advertising a face wash and you think women would be most likely to buy it, talk about how clean and fresh it leaves your skin feeling and smelling, and how your spouse loves how soft it leaves your face.

A direct advertisement is a teaser. This gives people an idea of the product and entices them to click through for a closer look. Remember, if you’re advertising for a large website, it most likely has other affiliates, so make your teaser stand out from the rest to get more customers and thus more commission. Creatively target the product’s market.

Becoming an affiliate is a great way to make money, but it does require work. However, if you put in time and effort, you can make money from the comfort of your own home.

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Technorati Tags: Business, ecommerce, internet, Internet Marketing, landing page

So you’ve decided to have an online business. Before you start having those big cash flow dreams, stop and get some tips for having an online business. There are many internet information resources for doing this sort of thing. However, the basic tips for an online business are very close to those of a traditional business. Here are some basics:

• Write a business plan and revise that plan periodically. Your business plan should be thought of as a living document. As with any business, you will initially find out what works and what does not work and will have to change your plan accordingly.

• Be very careful about buying webspace and pre-packaged website templates for your business (the “we will build your website” people). You’ll find that down the road it will be difficult to change the site plus get source code to it. You are better off outsourcing the web design with a freelancer and purchasing your own domain and installing the site yourself.

• Make sure you follow all security measures when running a site that accepts credit cards for purchases.

• If you expect to receive a lot of phone calls, you may want to consider hiring an answering service.

• Run your online business like a business. You will need to discipline yourself with working hours to take care of all offsite matters because you will have them. A lot of people make the mistake of treating their internet business merely as a website, which can be very detrimental because running an online business requires an approach that you would have with an offline business.

• Your marketing plan needs to include search engine optimization (SEO). This is important because you want your site to rank in the top 10 of search engine query results. You would be wise to study SEO techniques or hire the services of a SEO consultant.

• Some other marketing ideas include posting your web address on the back windshield of your vehicle or coordinating with other websites to include a backlink to your site. Word of mouth is always one of the best tools for advertising your site. With the advent of Google Adword, Overture and other similar advertising, it is possible to drive targeted traffic to your site by finding keywords that have very low bids. You will be able to measure your conversion ratio of such traffic with sales in realtime.

Customer service is even more critical as customers do not “see” you and building trust with them is a little harder. Performance builds trust.

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Technorati Tags: Answering Service, Business, Business Plan, Cash Flow, Credit Cards, ecommerce, Freelancer, internet, Internet Business, Internet Information Resources, Internet Marketing, landing page, Marketing Ideas, Marketing Plan, Offline Business, Optimization Seo, Packaged Website Templates, Query Results, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Query, Security Measures, Seo Techniques, Source Code, Traditional Business, Windshield

The sheer size of the Internet can be intimidating… especially for someone who wants to develop an online business, but has limited experience in knowing exactly how to do it.

What if you don’t have a product or service? How can you create something that has a reasonable chance for success? And, even if you already have the product or service, how do you know it will sell as an online business?

Achieving long-term success with Internet (online) marketing is not much different than accomplishing the same thing offline. Notice I said “long-term” success.

Your offering must be believable and clearly presented.

The perceived value of your offering must be greater than your asking price.

You need to develop an ongoing relationship with your client base.

You must guarantee complete satisfaction and maintain a refund policy.

You should over deliver by providing more than is expected.

Here’s a simple way you can begin to develop your own online business and potentially generate some respectable extra income.

Pick some subjects in which you have strong interest. For example, health and fitness, poker, mountain biking, computer games, etc. It doesn’t make any difference as long as you really enjoy talking about and participating in the subject.

You can include your regular business activity. For example, let’s say you’re a stock broker. Or, you have a carpet cleaning business and really know your stuff about cleaning carpets. Or, you’re a seamstress for a garment manufacturer and the quality of your work is as good as it comes.

Next, go to: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and type in the word or phrase to describe your strong interest category. For example, “carpet cleaning”.

When this article was written the Overture Inventory data for September 2005 was used and it indicated 99,572 searches were performed during that particular month. In other words, people were searching for information online about carpet cleaning to the tune of over three thousand each day.

Now “carpet cleaning” is pretty generic and not particularly quantifiable. But look down the long list of other carpet cleaning searches. For example, dry carpet cleaning or carpet cleaning solutions or carpet cleaning chemical. And, notice the exceptional number of carpet cleaning “cities” that appear.

If you know a lot about carpet cleaning, you can create a manual (40 – 100 pages) with tons of important information about carpet cleaning. You could make subtle changes to the information and adapt titles to specifically relate to different cities.

For example, “10 Great Ideas Boston Homeowners Can Use To Get Their Carpets Immaculately Cleaned”. Then, “10 Great Ideas Los Angeles Homeowners Can Use To Get Their Carpets Immaculately Cleaned”.

The point is that the subject matter “carpet cleaning” appears to draw significant search engine traffic. Creating a manual (produced in e-book format) should not be difficult provided you have genuine interest and enthusiasm to do so.

Once you know your subject of interest draws traffic it’s easy to begin research and compile your notes into a downloadable e-book. Then, you create a mini-website composed of your sales letter and thank you page.

The sales letter mini-site explains your offer and provides a clickable link to a third party money collector like PayPal. Once the money has been collected your reader is taken automatically to your thank you page that provides the download link to get your e-book.

There are free software tools available to help you. For instance, your e-book can be prepared in PDF format, which is the best for the largest audience.

To help your product look more professional free software is available to create an attractive cover. Even though your e-book isn’t going to be “hard” printed, nevertheless, you want to make it look like it could be a hardcover.

You don’t need to have your own merchant account to process credit cards. PayPal can handle this for a small transaction fee.

There are numerous aspects to making your online business successful not the least of which is getting your mini-site in front of as many people as possible.

But the first step is to get you off dead center. So, perhaps you now understand it isn’t difficult to take your favorite subject or hobby and turn it into a profit center.

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Technorati Tags: Business, ecommerce, internet, Internet Marketing, landing page

In a tight economy, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage money. However, everyone can save, as long as they are willing to invest time and energy. In order to make your dollars stretch as far as they can possibly go, one must be open to innovative money-savings ideas. One amazing way to save money is to stop going to your local mall. Instead, choose to sit in the comfort of your own home and log on to the World Wide Web.

Online shopping, or virtual shopping, is not only a time-saver, but a money saver as well. In order to successfully online shop, you will need access to a credit or debit card. Alternatively, some websites do allow customers to pay via automatic bank account deductions. A word to the wise: make sure that you have money in your account! If you have insufficient funds, you may be liable for monetary penalties from both your bank and the retail facility.

After establishing a reliable mode of payment, you will need to identify your budget and shopping goals. Please note that online shopping exists in nearly every facet of the consumer market. Virtual shops enable customers to purchase groceries, clothing, electronics, office supplies, luxury items and even cars with the click of a button!

When you know what you want to buy, you will be ready to immerse yourself in the world of online shopping. A great place to begin your virtual shopping is to look at the web pages of your favorite shops. Countless retail companies have embraced the virtual market. Those businesses offer accompanying websites.

When you have located a suitable shopping outlet, you should verify its legitimacy. Be careful and overly cautious. Check for seals of approval from the Better Business Bureau. Alternatively, check the accuracy of trademark logos.

Retailers may offer discounts on their websites. Oftentimes, these savings are only accessible online. Savings may be identified through store prompts or coupon codes. In fact, the next time you shop in a physical store, you should scrutinize your receipt. Sometimes, companies post surveys on the receipt. When you complete the online survey, you may earn a ‘thank you coupon.’ Old Navy frequently utilizes this marketing strategy in order to obtain customer feedback.

When shopping at your favorite brick and mortar stores, sign up for their mailing list. Check if these stores offer online savings. This tip also applies to luxury item stores.

Jewelers such as Zales and Helzberg occasionally offer secret sales to their cleitele. High-end jewelry items such as diamonds, pearls and estate jewelry may be found with discounts between 20-45% off the traditional retail price.

Online savings do exist. It is simply up to the customer to look for these savings and take advantage of retail opportunities.

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Technorati Tags: Better Business Bureau, Business, Click Of A Button, ecommerce, Electronics Office, Facet, Groceries, Insufficient Funds, internet, Internet Marketing, landing page, Legitimacy, Local Mall, Luxury Items, Monetary Penalties, Money Saver, Money Savings, Retail Companies, Retail Facility, Tight Economy, Time Saver, Trademark Logos, Virtual Market, Virtual Shopping, Virtual Shops

Ten years ago the internet was in its infancy. Computer science was hardly a proper, or prudent, choice of career for the serious person. Those who tended to enrol themselves in such courses were expected to end up with jobs as computer technicians and nothing more than that. Such careers had no particular gravitas – but all that has changed.

The modern world is a global village and this is thanks to the internet above all else. Markets have been made available that would hitherto have been hidden – and the field is rife with potential for success. Companies are slowly catching up to this latent hegemony – and the power that lies beneath the fingertips is being recognised internationally from governments downwards.

Small and large companies alike are vying for pole position in attempting to capture the imagination of the huge international markets. Such demographics have enormous spending power as is evidenced by the success of firms such as Ebay and Amazon. With costs kept so low compared to more conventional brick and mortar businesses, there is little wonder as to why so many companies have ‘gone online’. Even the humble webmaster working from his garage or bedroom can make millions, most recently the school student Alex Tew made his first million by selling pixel adverts! He sold one million pixels in half a year!

Competition is tough however – everyone wants a slice of the advertising potential of the internet. Markets can be powerful yet fickle and attempts to capitalise on these new areas can be fraught with danger for the inexperienced.

Great emphasis is now placed on the visible branding of a company. Web designers and developers convey specific messages to their audiences – working as both artists and public relations officers in their quest to secure leads for their clients by producing enticing and practical designs and structures.

The humble computer graduate has never been so eagerly sought after. A whole new breed of web developers has sprung up. There is now a work force of eager, attentive, enthusiastic and energetic freelancers available to the savvy employer. Vitally, these individuals tend to opt for this type of work not out of a need for profit, or a lack of choice, but because they actively enjoy web design and development. You cannot pay for such devotion in most other fields of work.

It’s the win-win situation to beat all others. There has never been a better time to hire freelance web designers and developers – and it has never been such a good time to be one! Many have noted the irony that has befallen the career of the computer science expert – now the most coveted of all professions.

Powerful Tools: Outsourcing and Hiring Freelancers

Knowing your limitations is the subtle art to being a webmaster. Knowing when to do the work yourself and when your time is better spent on other things is a skill in itself! Investing in the expertise of a freelancer can save you money and time. But where do you find them? Fortunately there are sites that do the hard work for you – where freelancers meet to fight for the privilege to work for you!

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Technorati Tags: Business, ecommerce, internet, Internet Marketing, landing page

You can earn a steady income from the Internet running an online business, as long as you’re willing and able to put the time, effort, and money that is required.

You have seen all the hype in regards to easy riches, fast money don’t be fooled. Yet these get rich schemes are hard to ignore. But to be successful in starting a profitable online business you must remember “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is”

Let’s look at some of the disadvantages you may encounter when starting an online business. First as we mentioned there are a large amounts of hype and get rich schemes you need to sort out and avoid. An online business has risk involved just like any other business.

You will work long hours starting an online business. To find what will work or what won’t and what opportunity may be real takes a large amount of time. Then the fact that many people start an online business and continue with their present occupation it can lead to some very long hours.

Starting an online business you will find that it will constantly change. What you are doing well today may not work for you the next day. You have to constantly study and learn. This is another time consuming and sometimes frustrating process. Finding the right people to attract is a never ending process.

When starting an online business you should be somewhat stubborn. Don’t give up easily and try another online business. You have a lot to learn and starting over does not change that you just end up at square one again.

Starting an online business may not be as easy as some want to portray it as but it is not impossible. Many people every day start an online business that goes on to be profitable and fun.

The advantages of starting an online business are many. It gives the regular person a chance to be a business owner with a minimum of start up costs. These costs are normally just a couple hundred dollars.

It offers you more flexibility, since you do work at your computer you can pick the times you work. This could eventually lead to more free time since you may be able to automate a lot of your tasks.

You have a product idea for your online business or want to see what your competition is doing? You can do so for little or no money on the Internet. Go to message boards and post your idea to get reactions, search the Internet for others who are doing the same thing. See what they may be doing correctly or for that matter incorrectly so you don’t do the same mistakes.

By starting an online business you have potential customers everywhere since the Internet is world wide. It is always growing as everyday more people are getting online for the first time. You have the ability to provide many different products or services to reach the diverse audience. This will lead to an exciting time if you are one who excels in a changing environment.

Starting an online business can be profitable. Some turn profit within a few months while it may take others longer as they experiment and test to find out exactly what will work for them and provide the income that they are interested in making. All this from the comfort of your home, it is easy to see why many have started an online business as a source of income.

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Technorati Tags: Business, ecommerce, Internet Marketing, landing page

Today the Internet is much more than a simple document storage/retrieval system. It is a great vehicle for anyone who wants to setup an online business with little or no money and a want-it-now attitude.

I have a programming background but it was not my technical know-how that allowed me succeed in this area but my trials and errors as an online business owner.

I have tried many opportunities and techniques but it was through my failures I’ve learnt and consolidated a simple technique to succeed as an online business owner.

I can assure you that, although you will need to acquire some basic technical skills, your success will depend not on your programming or typing skills but more on what you have between your ears.

Below is my list of what you’ll need and have to do, to succeed as an online business owner.

1. Have a dream and persistence. If you haven’t got a dream and the persistence to follow it through then you will fail, guarantied.

2. Have a mentor. Find someone who has gained the experience in this field. Beg, crawl, wash their car, do whatever takes to become their student. Listen to their advice and learn from their failures and successes. You’ll save yourself a lot of time, effort and money not to mention heartache and disappointment.

3. Find a hobby, a ‘pet’ project, something you are interested in and would do without payment or rewards. If it gets you excited, keeps you awake at nights thinking about it, it will provide you with opportunities to make money from it too. For example, once you have a project/activity that you live for, be it surfing, stamp collection, video games, mobile phones, you could start a local club. Once the club is established you can start a club website. Once the website is up and running you can introduce products to promote the club and your project/activity. You get the picture? You probably have seen the film ‘Pay it forward’. Well, you can use the same principle in establishing an online business. Give something valuable first and then you’ll get your opportunities to reap your rewards.

4. Promote and automate your project website. Once you completed step 3 above and your site is up and running you want to be able to promote your club site to ‘outsiders’. You don’t have to get technical and bogged down in programming or writing strings of HTML code. There are brilliant software out there to do a lot of ’skilled’ tasks with the push of a button (both free and commercial products). Learn to use them well! Promoting your website should be your priority from now on. Get as many people to come to the site as you can and automate this activity. Start a newsletter to keep in touch with your members and provide them with free advice, tips and news on the subject of your project/activity. And again, automate this too. Get software to automatically distribute your newsletters and automatically sort any emails you get in reply to your posts. Set up autoresponders signup new members and to respond to email queries; automate, automate, automate…

5. Once you have enough members and you have an established, loyal group of followers, you can introduce your promotional products and other services that you now want to sell and make money from as a business. You’ll have to be gentle and do this bit by bit. You may also find it useful to have another, separate, commercial site for this purpose and simply direct your members there from your ’signature files’ or ‘letterheads’ you send out as part of your club newsletter. By now you should have enough experience in setting up and running a website from step 3 above. If you did have a separate commercial site you run a smaller risk of offending ‘purist’ club members.

6. Review the operation of your site, experiment and test the effect of site layout, content, headlines etc. Review and look for opportunities to further automate anything that you can to make your site ’self-sustaining’. If you do this you should be able to get yourself more free time to actually enjoy your hobby/project and to go out and look for more new material (advice, tips and news) that you can send out to you members. Once you have a website running and are making money out of it, it is very easy to forget that without new content and looking after your members your business will not survive. So make sure that the time you have freed up by automating your processes, you put back into searching for and providing fresh content and keep on provide a service to your members and keep in mind that they are members because they share your enthusiasm for the hobby and not for your business. Find a gentle balance between that hobby and your commercial interests.

Wishing you success in your new adventure,

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Technorati Tags: Beginners Guide, Business, Business Today, Disappointment, Document Storage, Ears, ecommerce, Heartache, internet, Internet Marketing, landing page, Local Club, Mentor, Mobile Phones, Online Business Owner, Pay It Forward, Persistence, Pet Project, Principle, Programming Background, Rewards, starting an online business, Storage Retrieval System, Successes, Time Effort

My name is Brandy Gleeson. Over the last few years I’ve tried everything from Amway to Ebay. As an Amway distributor, I contacted plenty of prospects. I bought the products and sales literature. I even paid to attend the sales conventions and seminars. In the end I realized I was spending far more than I was making, and the people above me, who had been doing it longer than I had, weren’t making a profit either. Eventually, I started seeking other opportunities.

I’d heard plenty of stories about people striking it rich on Ebay, so I thought I’d try it. First of all, the Ebay system takes a lot of work to figure out. You can spend days reading the help files and when you finally get something posted, it looks so unprofessional, no one wants to buy. Most people who get good sales on Ebay have spend many hours making their ads look professional. That can take a lot of time, especially when you have multiple products and single items to sell. Secondly, you have to have plenty of resources. You have to have a digital camera and a scanner, because no one will buy items that aren’t listed with pictures. Also, you have to sink a lot of money into your business to keep inventory on hand. Studying buying patterns to see what people are buying and what makes them buy can take years and a lot of money spent.

Throughout the process I began to realize how much work was involved in all the business opportunities, with little or no return. For awhile I gave up. At the time, I was making minimum wage and taking care of my two boys and my brother’s daughter, after he robbed a gas station and went to jail. My sister in-law was in treatment for drugs and alcohol so she couldn’t take care of her daughter. I was a month behind on the rent every month, and had to use payday loans all the time just to keep up.

Things were going like that for quite awhile. Two months ago I ran into an old classmate from high school. He was wearing a suit and drove a Lexus. I told him things weren’t going too well, and he admitted he felt bad for me. He told me he might know of an opportunity I might be interested in, but he would tell me more that night over dinner. I accepted his invitation.

The next part is going to sound like something from TV. It’s going to sound really corny, but it’s true. Over dinner, he told me all about Google Cash Machine by Sebastian Foss. Over the last few months he had researched practically every single business opportunity out there. Then he found Google Cash Machine. He said over the last two months he watched his profit grow from $50 a day to $250 a day with an automated cash making system that practically anyone could learn and do. He said Sebastian Foss gave him all the information he needed to make substantial profit from a business that he only had to maintain 15 minutes a day. Of course, that got my attention, and I signed up.

There’s a lot of marketing claims that say you’ll be making cash within 15 minutes. That’s a big exaggeration. It takes about a day or two days to set everything up, but now over the last two months my profit has grown to 125 dollars a day. That’s 3750 per month! Now, I’m able to buy my kids the clothes they want, eat good food, and pay the rent on time. Next, I’m going to start saving up for a house.

I’m not going to lie. If I sign people up I get a commission from each sale, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, because if you sign up you’ll have the same opportunities to make a steady income, payoff debts, buy the things you need and want, and live the lifestyle you want to live.

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Technorati Tags: Business, ecommerce, internet, Internet Marketing, landing page

It’s almost a given that at any time in the United States and around the world some form of Law and Order can be seen on television. The show’s creators have done a tremendous job of franchising this brand. So what can we, as entrepreneurs and small business owners, learn from this example? Once we establish ourselves in the marketplace for our first line of business, we should not be afraid of branching out.

Just look at the Law and Order model. The creators waited until they were a mainstay in viewers’ weekly television fix. Once they were established they brought out SVU. Then of course came Criminal Intent, the now defunct Trial By Jury and the latest installment Conviction.

Let’s see how this could apply in the real world. I’ll use my business as an example because I’m very familiar with it! My main focus is on my virtual assistant business. I have spent a lot of time promoting it, tweaking my website, writing articles such as this one, joining virtual assistant associations and hanging out in various small business forums. Now, I have had very excellent results and seen nice profits and growth.

However, I am now at a point where promotion of that site is not a full time endeavor. So having the type A personality, being a bit obsessed with work like most small business owners I know, I was looking for additional places to invest my time and effort. The first step for me was to think of ways to use what I’m already doing to further grow my empire(well, maybe not quite, but I like to think big!)

My first new venture or as I like to call it my SVU, was starting my own article directory. It was a very natural lateral move for me as article marketing is one of my main marketing tools. I understand how important article marketing is to many online entrepreneurs. After all it’s a free way to get your name out there, highlight your talent and build incoming links. So, I did a lot of research and decided that it was something I would be able to do successfully. I set to work and within a few weeks had my site up and running. I’m not going to lie to you; I’m not running to the bank with thousands in extra income from it. I am, however, making a nice little supplemental income via Adsense and other advertising throughout the site.

So that was a few months ago and so here I am again. I am by no means spending my time solely on the promotion of my virtual assistant site and the article directory. I have been quite busy with my virtual assistant duties, but I still have that need to always be cultivating new things.

I recently began thinking of what I could do next. I’ll be honest here. I read all the same articles, websites and all the hype of building site after site just disgustingly loaded with keywords to generate Adsense income. I seriously considered these options. Now, I am not an expert on these matters, so that very well may work for some people. It’s just not something that I could get excited about. I felt like I needed to find something that I really enjoyed.

I did go ahead and use Wordtracker and other keyword research tools. I started brainstorming. What do I want to do? What do I like doing? And wouldn’t you know that one of the top keywords on all those lists fit the bill! Horses. I was so excited to see that word there. I have been riding horses since the time I could walk and am constantly reading anything new about riding, showing, training, horse care, etc.

Enter my new horse information site or in keeping with my premise, my Criminal Intent. Now I know this doesn’t exactly follow the Law and Order doctrine but bear with me. The success of most online business is based on ability, talent, salesmanship, promotion AND passion. In any business, we must be passionate about what we’re doing, or we will quickly burn out. In my case, I’ve taken my hobby and put it to work for me. And although the site is young, it’s quickly proving to be another nice supplemental income.

All of us need to be prepared for some of our ventures to fail, case in point, Trial By Jury. Although I’ve yet to have my own Trial By Jury, I have many ideas of future projects and am realistic. I know that not everything will work, but the main thing is to keep going.

I really believe that in business we must look at those who have been successful, in any field, and learn and apply what we can from their technique. There is a lot to learn from simply being observant of our environment, even watching TV! So thank you very much to Dick Wolf and all those that have modeled the Law and Order principles so well.

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Technorati Tags: Business, ecommerce, Internet Marketing, landing page

There are thousands and thousands of message boards on the internet. That’s a lot of potential people who may be interested in your products or services. It also serves as a quick and easy way to get a lot of links pointing back at your site and can help get your pages spidered faster by the search engines.

I use a free tool, Board Tracker (http://www.boardtracker.com/), to help monitor posts on over 25,000 forums.

You can set up a free account there and then set up alerts. You can set it to alert you to any posts containing any keyword or phrases you like. Some examples would be, your board nicknames, your domain names, affiliate programs you work with, or whatever else you’re interested in..

When someone makes a post and one of your alert keywords is found, you are emailed a link to the thread which you can follow and make a post. So as not to be a blatant board spammer, it is recommended that you register and make an introduction post on that board before responding to the thread. When responding, you should make your post helpful to the person in regards to answering any question they had without spamming your site/program, you are relying on your signature file here to draw their attention.

To make this task easier, I suggest utilizing Roboform (http://www.roboform.com/). Roboform makes it easy to handle all of your registering and logins.

Now, let’s find some forums in which we can participate. Everyone has some knowledge or interest in something. Perhaps it is cars, interior design or something else. Whatever it is, you can be certain there are forums for that particular niche.

You can use your favorite search engine and search for…
forums
“message board”

or specifically for…
car message boards
interior design message boards

or search by the different types of forum software like…
“powered by PHPBB”
“powered by vbulletin”

Before registering with any message boards I would suggest that you setup a yahoo or gmail account just for this purpose. It would also be a good idea to use this email for your boardtracker alerts as well.

Now you are ready to begin registering. I have created a new identity in Roboform to handle the registration for me. This includes my signature file as well. Before posting, make sure that you read the board rules so you are able to comply with those.

Once registered, make your introduction post. Basically you are just announcing your arrival and maybe saying a little something about yourself (roboform can do that too!), be sure to set your introduction thread to notify you of new posts so that you are able to respond as others welcome you.

Some things to keep in mind…

Who is your target audience and where will you find them? Are stay home moms likely to be found in Family & Parenting forums? Who is most likely to be participating at a car forum? A pet owners forum? etc..

Once you’ve located your target audience, target your signature to meet the needs of that audience. For example, if you were involved in a Family & Parenting forum, a signature aimed towards the mom who would like to earn money while being home for her children may be in order. If it were a Car or Electronics forum, maybe a signature promoting Free Satellite Dishes (these pay $50-$100 per install btw) would be more appropriate. The idea is to determine what the needs of any particular audience would be and finding a way to appeal to that.

Also, notice that the majority of forums offer a place for people to place advertising, usually under a category labeled something like, “opportunities”, “recommendations”, “spam allowed”, etc.. Look for these and make use of those as well. Each of those is a free targeted link to your site or product.

Make sure that you are paying attention to your anchor text. Anchor text, in case you don’t know, is the actual text that is linked. Choose good keywords for your anchor text that you would like to do well for in the search engines. Never link text such as “click here”.

The most important thing is to make this a part of your daily schedule. Do it each and every day and shortly you will have thousands of free advertising links all over the internet!

Disclaimer: I am in no way endorsing blatant spamming! The method I’ve outlined above is more of a suggestion for yet another avenue of free marketing that should be used in a responsible and productive manner which will benefit the board owners, other board members as well as yourself.

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