Will the Online Quiz Make the Old Fashioned Printed Quiz Obsolete? Q. Can you tell me the benefits of publishing an online quiz versus a printed one? A. Well, the first benefit of publishing an online quiz that comes to mind is the fact that it's an outstanding way to drive traffic to your web site. People love quizzes and they take ones that are printed in magazines all of the time. It's reasonable to assume that if these same people knew about the existance of an online quiz that they would beat a path to your home page. Another great feature of offering an online quiz is that you can change the subject regularly. In fact, you could offer a subscription where members sign up to be notified whenever a new online quiz gets posted. An online quiz can also be used as a sales tool. One of the best ways of accomplishing this is to link your quiz questions to affiliate sites where you earn money when people make purchases. Then you can have a "scavenger hunt" online quiz where people have to visit those sites to find the quiz answers. People also like to take an online quiz because they can get instant scoring without having to turn the page upside down, or flip to the end of the magazine, to find out how they did. You can even design your online quiz so that it gives instant feedback after every answer is entered. One last thing to consider is that you can create keyword-rich versions of your online quiz and then post the URLs to search engines. That way you will not only get search traffic from people who like quizzes, but you'll get traffic from people who are searching on the terms that you include in your online quiz! So, while it's not likely that a printed quiz is going to become obsolete any time soon. The Internet has once again forever impacted the way that we communicate. Today's latest example? The online quiz.
You Have to Spend Money to Earn Money It surprises me that many people fail to grasp this concept as they first set out to start their own businesses. Thanks to the power of the Internet, anyone who has a computer and an Internet connection can now START their own online businesses with little investment. However, generally speaking, it is a given that you have to invest money into your business to if you seriously want it to grow. Affiliate marketing is a great way for ordinary people to start making money on the Internet. After finding an affiliate program that offers products you are interested in promoting, you can start an online business with just a website. So your total investment up to this point may simply be registering for a domain name and paying for a web hosting account. But then what? You have to start marketing the products and getting people to your website! A lot of people are turned off when they discover that this is a demanding process that requires a substantial amount of hard work, time, AND money! Let me give you a specific example. As all experienced Internet marketers know, "the money is in the list." Simply put, you want to build a mailing list of people who may be interested in what you have to offer. One of the most effective ways to grow your mailing list is to use a pay-per-lead service where you PAY a company to bring targeted subscribers to you. The company will run an advertising campaign for you and deliver motivated, opt-in subscribers to your list. The cost can vary greatly depending on the information you require. The e-mail lead packages I have been using recently range from $.10 to $.35 per lead. The best lead provider I have used is TrafficOasis. It provides targeted leads that are fresh, NON-SHARED, responsive, and affordable. If you who like to know more, check out its website: http://www.trafficoasis.com/index.php?118787 Other areas where you MAY want to invest money in include: logo design, web design, web promotion, and useful tools such as a graphics editor and a powerful autoresponder. However, there are plenty of free resources on the Internet and I encourage you to seek them out. The saying, "You have to spend money to earn money," generally holds true for ANY business! An Internet-based business is no exception,whether your are promoting your own products or someone else's. It is also important that you re-invest a portion of your profits into your business! That way, not only will your business continue to grow, but its GROWTH RATE will also increase! This in turn brings in MORE profits, which allows you to invest MORE into your business... Do you see a pattern!? The key is to invest money into your business wisely while staying within your budget. If you believe in your business, you are bound to be successful!
Working With Affiliate Programs Everywhere you look you see affiliate program offers for every product or service that you can think of. Some have fully automated systems that sell high volumes of hard products all over the world. In case you don't know, "hard" products are those that you can touch...unlike an ebook or downloadable web template. Many affiliate programs have several thousand affiliates and one or two of the bigger companies have over one million affiliates. What are the advantages of joining an affiliate program? They provide a ready-made business. This is a very big plus for those people who want to earn some kind of living off the Internet but lack the knowledge or inclination to set up a business by themselves. Commissions and rewards are generally good, and the more established programs offer a real chance of advancement to higher and better-paid levels. Other affiliates are usually on hand to offer practical support. What are the limitations? You are restricted in your promotional activities due to the fact that you do not actually own the affiliate site they give you. You won't be able to put such things as banners, images, links, meta tags, etc. onto your page. The URL of your affiliate page is often either too long or contains such awkward things as question marks, which many Search Engines will not index. Any promotional ads or articles have probably already been used by thousands of other people and consequently may have lost its impact, making it more difficult to achieve sales or referrals. If the program you have joined has not yet established itself (or in some cases even if it has), then you may encounter problems with payments owed to you not being honored. You also run the risk of low quality products or sub-standard statistics that do not accurately record how many referrals or sales you have made. You may be required to purchase a minimum quantity of the product on a regular basis before you start to qualify for commissions or even before you can become an affiliate. You may not get the technical or affiliate support you might expect from the company. This may be due to inadequate staffing, or the company's negligence. Other people in your downline do nothing to promote the program. At least four of the above limitations can be overcome with a little time and effort. You could, for example, come up with fresher ads to promote the program (provided this is allowed). If the company supplies the email addresses of people in your downline, then you could offer to help the less active members. Very often these people are passive not because they are lazy or apathetic but merely because they don't know HOW to promote effectively! your guidance could mean the difference between no sales or referrals and healthy downlines and residual incomes. As regards promoting your actual page, here are a couple of little tricks that should overcome a number of restrictions: Cloak your Affiliate URL to stop hijackers Affiliate Masker While this will not help you to get listed on the major Search Engines, it will make your web page easier for prospects to remember and type into their browser's address bar. Go to your affiliate page. Place your mouse pointer anywhere on the page and right click once. In the drop-down box choose "View Source". This will display the HTML for the page. Save this to your hard drive as a HTML document using the "Save As" function. Upload the page to your web site. If you don't have a web site then get some free web space from one of these: http://www.tripod.com/ http://www.fortunecity.com/ http://www.hypermart.net/index.gsp http://www.coolchat.com/ http://www.crosswinds.net/ http://www.htmlpublishing.com/ http://www.freehomepages.com/ http://www.pageproducer.com/ Submit your 'new' page to the Search Engines. You are also now able to place banner codes, links, images, testimonials, in fact anything you want onto these pages, because you are in control of the HTML. A word of caution, though. Don't change the actual HTML of your original affiliate page. Just put the other stuff, like banners etc, around it. Making this "mirror page" of your affiliate page will dramatically improve your advertising options. Contact Email Address: publisher@aboutaffiliates.com Word Count: 689 Category: Affiliate Marketing Copyright Date: 8/16/04 Internet Address: http://aboutaffiliates.com/news/viewarticle.php?id=11 Autoresponder Address: workingaff@aboutaffiliates.com Special Requirements For Reprint: You have permission to publish this article in your ezine or on your web site, free of charge, as long as the byline is included and the article is included in it's entirety. I also ask that you activate any html links found in the article and in the byline. You may not use this article in any publication that is not-optin (spam). A courtesy copy of the publication or link to the website you use my article on would be appreciated.
How to Booost Your Affiliate Commissions by almost 30% Affiliate marketing is one tough business. Everyone online today is looking to make or save money in any way they can. In the good old days when internet marketing was in its infancy, most of the people who clicked on your affiliate links used to purchase without a second thought... but, now as times are getting tougher, and visitors getting more cynical, you'll be amazed at the number who won't! Just one flaw in a system and you will find dozens of unscrupulous people waiting to exploit it. Same goes for affiliate commission tracker systems. People who know how to manipulate the system will replace your affiliate ID with theirs and "hijack" your commissions. Most affiliate links are some form or the other of http://www.thesite.com/?YOURID Where your affiliate id is passed as a parameter. A thief has to simply change the "YOURID" part to "HISID" to put your money in his pocket. In other cases, there are visitors to your site who simply can't stand the thought of you "making money off them" so they bypass you by simply chopping off the end of your affiliate link that contains your ID. Instead of buying from http://www.thesite.com/?YOURID -- the bypasser will simply "chop off" the affiliate ID at the end and simply buy from the plain URL http://www.thesite.com/ --without your affiliate ID attached! Bam! you just got cheated out of your rightful commission. Studies have shown that this phenomenon causes about 30% lost sales. By following some of these simple tips you will be able to, if not all, at least confuse most hijackers and, in many cases, often disarm them completely. You might notice i said most and not all. This is because if the hijacker is well versed at html and javascipt he will be able to eventually get to your affiliate link. However, most hijackers are just opportunists who will only act if they see an easy buck and its this segment that we can beat The simplest way to hide your affiliate links is using a javascript redirect page. This is where you hide your affiliate link in a page on your site using a simple javascript that redirects people to your affiliate link. This way your "naked" affiliate link is not exposed in your actual email messages and ezine ads, but, once people get redirected to the true affiliate link. One possible drawback of this method is that some affiliate programs, like clickbank for example, expose the affiliate link along with your ID in the browser address bar. So if the viewer is eagle-eyed he will notice that hes been redirected through and affiliate link. A safer method to hide your affiliate links is using a zero-frame or "invisible" frame that masks the affiliate link by making it appear you are sending people to a page on your website. In reality, you are actually sending them to your affiliate link. This technique is also used by many domain redirection service sites. Unfortunately is the user views the source of the page. He know whats that youve loaded an affiliate link. The solution is to use javascript encryption to scramble up the page code. Even though there isn't a 100% perfect solution to this problem, if you want to get paid more often through your affiliate links, make sure it's not obvious you're referring people to an affiliate link. If they can't see that its a affiliate link, lower the possibility of you getting stiffed of your commission. If you are looking for a tool that lets you do all this plus earn affiliate commissions even from those folk who dont click your affiliate link then do check out Covert Affiliate Satyajeet Hattangadi is the Owner of Novasoft Inc, a software solutions provider, who specialize in affordable customized software solutions. MORE RESOURCES: RELATED ARTICLES Affiliate Marketing Using Commission Junction Affiliate Marketing is currently one of the most popular and lucrative business opportunities online. It is an agreement between the merchant, or the one with the product to sell, and the website owner or the affiliate, or the one who allows the use of his site to promote the merchant's product or service. Whats LinkShare, And Do I Need To Use It? Online affiliate marketing is one of the most effective, cheapest and fastest ways to promote merchandise. With millions of people getting access to the Internet everyday, there's a great chance for a merchant to introduce his products and services to a wider market, thereby, maximizing his revenue. Why Building Affiliate Websites Are the Way to Go It seems that everybody is into making money online these days. By far, the largest market place in the world is right there in front of you within the cyber world of the internet. Free traffic vs. Extra Revenue - Earning From PPC Search Engines What are the Search Engines?A Search Engine is special database-driven web site designed to index and categorize internet addresses. Search Engines focus to help people to find information stored on the Web. How Joint Ventures Can Catapult You to Success Substantial opportunities for increased sales and profits are missed by not seeking out and implementing joint ventures.Strategic alliances also create value for the customer and save money and build future relationships for the partners. What are the Benefits of Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate marketing is a cooperative effort between merchant and an affiliate's website. It has become popular for Internet sites trying to create some extra income for their site, perhaps changing a hobby to a profitable, self-supporting business. The Prosperous Affiliate Merry-Go-Round In the affiliate world, just as in the rest of the world, what goes around comes around.Here's where I'm coming from . Get the Big Dogs to Affiliate with You Have you ever tried to launch an affiliate program? If you have, then you know that one of the challenges you face is to get people to be your affiliate marketers. After all, if you are new on the block, people who have never heard of you may be reluctant to encourage their list or web traffic to come to your website. Promoting My Affiliate Programs--How? Getting your website up, is really just the first phase of your journey to a career on the Internet. You must promote your website, your product or your service to the world. 3 Powerful Words I should have listened to an internet veteran back in 2000.Learn from my mistake. Affiliate Assets -- Discover the 3 Secrets That Will Turn Your Affiliate Link Into a Business Your affiliate marketing business is just that ? a business. To be successful, you need to treat your business like a business and focus on growth. Affiliate Marketing - Conversions What is a good converting site?Well they say a "good" converting site is one that sells 1 in 100 visitors.Now once you've chosen which affiliate program you want to promote using Google Adwords you may be thinking "well I'll just let it run for 100 clicks and if I don't make a sale I'll give it the flick". Affiliate Web Site Pros, Cons and Getting Traffic With the web these days growing at a substantial rate, just about everywhere you turn on the web, you will see offers to own your own web business. Many of these offers are legitimate businesses with real products and items waiting for you to open one of their affiliate sites and start selling. Two Quick Ways to Make Your Copy of Merchants Data Feed Different From All Other Affiliates Product data feeds are really popular among affiliates because they can help produce thousands of product pages quickly and easily. Such pages can be used to drive highly targeted search engine traffic looking specifically for those products. Affiliate Program As It Should Be Every off- or online business has a target of growing its market share. Under all other equal conditions the percent of the market, occupied by a company, means certain level of recognition, brand, exposure and, therefore, sales and income. Ebook Review: The Super Affiliate Handbook Rosalind Gardner's 270 page ebook "The Super Affiliate Handbook" is the "Holy Bible" of affiliate marketing. It's also surprisingly well written (I've seen some real junk passing as informative writing) and logically steps through each of the 15 chapters, all but the Introduction building on the previous in an easy to understand style. Online Affiliate Programs - 6 Must Read Reasons to Join Them You must have been exposed to the online hype, and the fact is starting an online business is a great way to make an extra income. There are many ways to make money online, one of them, is joining online affiliate programs. Free Affiliate Marketing Page Pays $755 in Commissions From its First 100 Visitors Affiliate marketing is an easy way to get started making money online. You just sign up to be an affiliate, and refer new customers to the sales site(s) with a special, coded affiliate link. How to Evaluate an Affiliate Program There are thousands of affiliate programs offering wide range of benefits to their affiliates. However, many of these programs and the claims they make are not to be trusted. Marketing A Single Affiliate Program is the First Key to Success There are a lot of affiliate marketing programs out there that claim to make you more money than you could possible spend; when in true reality, you've just sign up to be another person that the company can send you emails to buy their products!Have you fallen for that kind of bait? I have before!! Hook, Line, and Sinker!!!Well the First KEY to really making an affiliate program work for you is just by sticking with the one program you've signed up for until you make a profit. It gets quite easy to keep signing up for program after program in hopes that you will finally hit pay-dirt.