Foreword By The Editor

In this article by Nigel Canham, the area of affiliate marketing from the perspective of the merchant, is covered in some detail. There can be no doubt that affiliate marketing can be very profitable for merchants due to the fact that, in effect, it is a form of outsourcing. Nigel emphasizes that training and incentives are the keys to finding and motivating affiliates.
Mike Alexander
Author of ‘Internet Traps, Ripoffs And Pitfalls‘

Coaching, Tools And Support

For an affiliate marketing merchant, it is fair to say that success or otherwise hinges to an enormous extent upon the volume of traffic your affiliates manage to entice to your website and the subsequent sales you may achieve. Affiliate marketing programs have invariably been (and will carry on being) one of the most effective ways to produce traffic, accomplish better market share and so boost profits, but they must be used correctly. The primary requirement is a good understanding of just what motivates someone to become an affiliate marketer because, with this knowledge, you are going to be much better placed to make available a captivating package of coaching, tools and support. Done properly, this will quickly put your site at the cutting edge of whichever market you’re targeting.

It ought to be remembered that your affiliates will characterize your business’s presence online. To hire an affiliate who will not present your organization and its merchandise in the very best light possible is akin to throwing money away. A bad affiliate is actually not likely to affect your financial well-being, nor be a strain upon any essential resources, simply because they only earn money from the things they sell. Nevertheless, you could lose out on some important revenue streams by possibly not incorporating a few tried and tested techniques that could result in the merchant/affiliate relationship being a lot more mutually profitable.

What Affiliates Want

So what exactly is it that draws the would-be online marketer to becoming an affiliate to begin with? The reasons are numerous and varied but a few of the most immediately apparent are detailed below.

• The affiliate marketer is answerable to no-one other than themselves and the principal merchant; they are their own personal supervisor and there are no deadlines to meet.
• They will tend not to need to employ people or, if they do, it would usually be in the form of an outsourcing arrangement with free-lancers.
• Truth be told there is often no need to lease premises or retain an office. An Internet business may be run effectively whether seated at a PC workstation at home or relaxing with a laptop at the beach.
• If set up correctly, this form of e-commerce can often be operated with minimum attention for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
• There is no need to commute. The whole of their business is no further away than their personal computer.
• A good affiliate program may generate an extremely comfortable income through a quality product backed by high online commissions (over 50%).

These are only some of the good reasons people consider affiliate marketing. Being a merchant, you ought to endeavour to enter into the way of thinking of your affiliates and provide a support package which will both excite them and offer beneficial training, support and assistance. The probability is that you already acknowledge this need. Numerous affiliate merchants have previously trodden the path of the marketer. Should you be one of those, you likely have a good idea of what your affiliates need. The newbie affiliate will quickly find their initial foray into the realm of marketing quite daunting. It is a tough environment to negotiate without having some form of direction, which is why training can be so important.

Personal Characteristics

To become productive, affiliates have to possess certain qualities of character that can help them drive their business forward. Qualities like determination (the drive to never give up even if things appear to be going nowhere); willingness to learn inside an ever-evolving online scene; self-motivation (simply put, not being distracted by domestic or other non-work related pressures); self-discipline (the ability to work within a pre-defined time each day or until the day’s aims have been achieved); a positive attitude (needed to counter any negativity that arises from within themselves and/or from others).

Certainly, as an affiliate merchant, it is definitely not your task to instill these factors in your affiliates but you may help encourage them by adopting an optimistic attitude. By and large, a tiny amount of encouragement can sometimes uncover qualities that lie hidden just below the surface of the would-be marketer. This can be accomplished with a minimum of effort by putting in place a high quality system of training and assistance which will allow them to have the confidence to drive their business, and therefore yours, forward. This is a win-all state of affairs and one which can generate a good income for you as well your affiliate marketers.

The principle emphasis must be on the need for training and encouragement for your affiliates to try and do the most effective job they can to create traffic and market your products to the fullest extent possible. After a little thought and energy you might soon have large numbers of affiliates offering your products right across the World Wide Web for 365 days a year, using synchronised and well-planned campaigns which will leave you and them more than adequately rewarded.

About The Author

You can learn how to set up your affiliate program the right way by visiting http://www.virtualaffiliatetrainer.com/membership/go.php?r=29&i=l0 and watching a no-cost two hour seminar by a five figure a day marketer. No charge, catch or clause. Just two hours of quality content. Or visit my blogs for more info. http://www.virtualaffiliatetutorial.blogspot.com or http://www.virtualaffiliatetutorial.wordpress.com

Foreword By The Editor

Find which Internet security software 2011 will give you the best protection.

Norton Internet Security 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Norton Internet Security 2011 protects your computer, network and personal identity in today’s rapids fire attacks. It prevents viruses, spyware, trojans and hackers so you can make banking, shopping and browsing secure and convenient.

Pros: Easy to use, professional antispam filter, Pulse updates use mini updates every 15 min, firewall with proactive scans, parental control with detailed reports, System Insight (a PC tune-up feature).

Cons: Somewhat slow system performance, pricey.

Summary

Norton Internet Security 2011 includes advances protections tools such as antivirus, firewall and parental control. Norton Internet Security will consume larger amount of system resources due to the Pulse update feature that works every 15 minutes, pricey. Overall it’s a great protection solution.

BitDefender Internet Security 2011

BitDefender Internet Security 2011 keeps your Internet-connected family safe, without slowing down their PCs. It locks out viruses, hackers & spam, while providing parental control and firewall protection .

Pros: Extremely fast (30% fester than the previous version), uses less resources, affordable price, adaptive interface allows the product to cater to the novice, intermediate, and expert users, firewall that oversees all operations in the computer, State mode laptop and gaming mode.

Cons: Average anti-spam, average parental controls, average browser anti-phishing.

Summary

BitDefender Internet Security 2011 is a streamlined, solid, and powerful (and don’t forget reasonably priced) Internet security suite. The unique combination of features and impressive utility make it one of the most versatile and powerful security solutions. For most users, BitDefender Internet Security 2011 should provide more than enough security while maintaining complete usability. Overall, it is a perfect solution that will keep your computer clean and secure without significantly sacrificing performance.

 ESET Smart Security 4

Image by zrqx008 via Flickr

ESET Smart Security 4 keeps your PC safe with smart proactive detection that blocks most known and undiscovered threats hours or days faster than other Internet security technologies. Smart Security enhances your Internet experience without getting in the way.

Pros: Minimal performance impact. Anti-spam filters all e-mail account types, Bootable Sys-Rescue Disk/USB. User interface hides complexity.

Cons: Real-time protection finds some threats over and over. Firewall offers no program control by default. Limited user control

functions.

Summary

ESET Smart Security 4.0 contains only the most essential suite elements, which partially explains its minimal impact on system performance. But it’s not the best at malware cleanup and blocking, its firewall is limited and it costs more than suites that offer a lot more.

ZoneAlarm Security Suite 2011

ZoneAlarm Internet Security 2011 expands security with enhancements such as Early Boot Protection, which guards the computer during system start-up where other security products leave systems vulnerable, and Rootkit Protection in the OSFirewall, which blocks attacks targeting processes deep in the operating system.

Pros:  Antivirus updates often and is quite thorough. Easy to use, strong anti-spyware engine, many options for customizability, award winning firewall, blocks third party cookies, Web bugs and several other things.

Cons: Uses significant amount of resources, average antivirus, has too many firewall/program control alerts.

Summary

ZoneAlarm Security Suite 2011 is strong on defense. It has a tough firewall and keeps malware totally out of a clean system but it is less effective in cleaning up entrenched malware and some of its features are antiquated. ZoneAlarm is a fine choice, if you are willing to sacrifice resources.The products on Anti-Virus4U.com are under the highest standards, and tested by trusted names such: VB100, PC Magazine, West Coast Labs, and more…

 Kaspersky Internet Security 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 stops your PC being slowed down by cybercriminals and delivers unsurpassed online safety whilst protecting your files, music and photos from hackers.

Pros: Improved interface. “Safe Run” virtual environment protects against unwanted changes. Intelligent Application Control. Hardened against malware attacks. Improved spam filtering. Blocks exploits and leaks.

Cons:  Malware cleanup left behind many traces.  Slowed system performance somewhat. Anti-phishing module less effective.  Rudimentary parental controls, uses significant amount of resources, expensive.

Summary

Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 has everything you expect from a security suite and more. Its firewall is smart, and its “Safe Run” sandbox protects your system. It has a somewhat slow system performance. Pricey.

From http://www.anti-virus4u.com and http://www.bestantivirus2010.com

Article from articlesbase.com

Foreword By The Editor

The following article by Alex Finn brings into focus the somewhat blurry issues of trademark law as it relates to domain names and the use of keywords associated with domain names. If you want further information, be sure to follow the links in the last paragraph (headed About The Author).
Mike Alexander
For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

Domain Names

Discussions about trademark laws for the Internet invariably leads to the requirement (or otherwise) of trademarks for domain names. This is quite critical because the domain name you have conveys your identity and might also signify the services you offer customers.

A domain name that has been trademarked not only enables you to prosecute people who infringe your mark by using it as their own but also protects you from being looked upon as the owner of their website that might be making use of a deceptively similar domain name as yours.

You have to do a thorough search for almost identical domain names in cyberspace before registering your trademark, in order to prevent any infringements. The search must involve a detailed look at marks that are quite similar in spelling, sound or even meaning to the domain name you have chosen for your website. It is vital to register a domain only after properly checking that it does not infringe upon such trademarks.

Advice

For attaining this, it is preferable to engage the services of a cyber-law attorney, who can advise you in cyber-related trademark issues. This will not only enable you to avoid infringement claims but also save you from future conflicts.

It is essential to note in this regard that a domain name can be registered as a trademark only if it serves as a quick identifier of the products or services of your business, and not just as an address that brings web users to your site.

Keywords

Besides domain names and their possible infringement, infringement of keywords is a new menace in cyberspace, whereby genuine trademarks are lifted and used as keywords in advertisements put up through Yahoo, Google, and MSN, with the obvious purpose of creating a misunderstanding and confusion among customers.

Using such a keyword is not tantamount to a violation if the promotional ads lead to higher sales of the products or services behind the genuine trademark, but it is an infringement if the promoter starts using it as a tool for competing against the trademark owner.

About The Author

Uncover more about trademarks Singapore and industrial design protection. You are welcome to reprint this article – but get your own unique content version here.

Foreword By The Editor

This article by Pieter Paasklanst answers some age-old questions (at least in terms of the time online affiliate marketing has existed) that crop up time and again in the world of Internet marketing. Why not have a look at his brief bio at the end of the article and learn more about him.
Mike Alexander
For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

Basic Tactics

These are tactics that have worked before with online marketing and they are continuing to work in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these marketing tips, you should be able to able to increase your sales and survive in affiliate marketing online.

Fresh Material

Always try to write a minimum of 2 articles a week, with between 300 and 600 words. By continuously writing and updating these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site every day.

Unique Pages

Use unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Product Reviews

Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding of what the product can do. Also include testimonials from users who have already tried the product. Be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

Submissions

That done, it is time to submit the affiliate program to directories that list affiliate programs. These directories are means to attract people into joining your affiliate program. A sure way of promoting the affiliate program. There are lots of resources to sort out. Ads, banners, button ads and sample recommendations to give out because the marketer knows that this is one way of ensuring more sales. Best to stay visible and accessible too.

Customer Support

The professional affiliate marketer also remembers that there are always questions to answer from visitors and prospects, and they have to be answered quickly. Nothing can turn off a customer more than an unanswered email.

Summary

There are many things to be learned and it is a continuous process. Sharing tips and advice is a good way of showing support. There may be others out there wanting to join and they may be enticed by the discussion that is going on. There is no harm in anticipating the opportunities ahead.

About the Author

Foreword By The Author

The World Wide Web (WWW), unbeknown to many, was actually a European innovation. It was invented by an Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee, and was created in 1990 while he was working as a scientist for CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Some people, short on knowledge about how ‘cyberspace’ developed, think he invented the Internet itself, which of course, he definitely did not. The Internet was already in existence (and thriving) and had grown out of ARPAnet, a research network founded (and funded) by the U.S. military. But Internet protocols (the ‘rules’ governing how data is to be transmitted and received) were defined by obscure prefixes such as ‘gopher://’, ‘wais://’, ‘ftp://’, etc. These, and others, are still in use but, because of the WWW, no longer dominate as they once did. Usenet (‘news://’) is still popular though, as is SMTP, one of the original protocols for the most popular (and still fastest growing) of all information dissemination systems, the ever ubiquitous ‘email’.
Mike Alexander
For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

The Original Internet

Prior to the WWW, the Internet consisted mainly of thousands of sets of individual files and text-based messages transmitted by the various transport protocols mentioned above. Most were categorized and stored in databases on computers housed in universities across the USA and around the world. They were accessible only by those who understood the protocols and the intimidatory command systems necessary for their operation.

The Birth of the Web

What Tim Berners-Lee introduced to the Internet, and named the World Wide Web, was the ability to ‘link’ data together, whether that data was located in files on the same server or on servers half a world away. He did this by bringing together three main elements: HTTP—the WWW protocol; HTML—the ‘language’ of the web; and the URL system—for ‘addressing’ websites anywhere in the world (a website being simply an area of disk space on a computer). The use of these three elements would transform the Internet into what he called “a single, global information space”. It would allow, for the first time, transmission and retrieval of ‘pages’ that could each consist of many files. These might be graphics files, text files, sound files, or indeed any other type of file, since the only restriction would be in the application that could interpret the language and present the results as viewable pages (these applications came to be known as ‘browsers’). Thus rich, interactive, multimedia documents, each capable of being linked to any other file on the Internet, suddenly became accessible to everyone.

The Vision

His vision of the web was, in his own words, “about anything being potentially connected with anything. It is a vision that provides us with new freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarchical classification systems into which we (formerly) bound ourselves. It leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many. It leaves our previous fears for the future as one set among many. And it brings the workings of society closer to the workings of our minds.” *

One of the analogies he used to explain what he meant was how a strong smell of coffee could trigger a response in his mind and instantly transport him back to a small room over a corner coffeehouse in Oxford, England, where he once studied. The brain, and therefore the human mind, works by using a web-like structure of connections, or links, he reasoned, and therefore the nearer his ‘global information space’ could come to using a similar structure, the more viable—and versatile—it would be. It would also, like the mind, be the ultimate expression of freedom, with no governing body or stultifying bureaucracy to restrict its development.

The Commercial Web

He foresaw the rise of commercialism on the Internet but welcomed it as inevitable anyway. The anti-commercial bias evident among some academics, particularly those who had used the Internet prior to the introduction of the World Wide Web, was not something he subscribed to.

He was nevertheless wary of the potential for predatory behavior by some parts of the business sector and his work as head of the WWW Consortium, the body set up to lead the web to its full potential, must inevitably have involved pressure being applied to his philosophy from time to time. But his vision was clear and incorruptible. He never considered using his ownership of such unique intellectual property for personal commercial gain. As it turned out though, even he was surprised by the speed and scope of entrepreneurial exploitation of the web. Its potential as a new marketing medium was taken up with almost evangelical fervor and it became firmly established almost overnight.

Newcomers immediately started to get exasperated by the seeming lack of structure they found as they tried to cope with this new non-hierarchical entity. “Who’s in charge of this thing?” marketers asked, and “Where’s the directory of participants?”. This led to the establishment of a whole new industry in its own right, as attempts were frantically made to categorize and map the web.

Search Engines and Portals

Search engines and directories (or portals, as they have come to be known) swiftly came into being and those that gained dominance soon started marketing their services as being indispensable to the ‘surfing’ public. (The irony is that the very term ‘surfing’ sprang from the fact that hopping from one site to another via their links was analogous to the way surfers hopped on a wave not knowing where it would take them but simply to enjoy the ride.) If they were even remotely as reliable as telephone directories, these claims to indispensability might have some justification. But they’re not, and never will be. Both large and small portals and search engines can sometimes be extremely useful tools, of course, but that’s basically all they are, helpful tools, among many other helpful tools. One reason is that the web is growing and evolving at such a phenomenal pace that it’s impossible to keep up with developments. The major search engines and search directories that most people use when trying to find things don’t even come close to categorizing and recording everything. Nor do they, as things are now, have a hope of ever doing so.

Which is one of the reasons why website developers who recognize these facts devote special pages of links to other sites. They understand the non-hierarchical structure of the web, where any data can be linked to any other. So they provide links to other information that their visitors might find useful, thereby enhancing the usefulness of their own site.

The Way Forward

The World Wide Web, precisely as its creator Tim Berners-Lee predicted, has become such a vast and rapidly growing network of sites that practically every topic and subject under the sun is represented on it somewhere.

The fact that there is no official map of what data is available and where it can be found, is sometimes a source of great frustration though, both for users of the Internet, and those who wish to present information for them to find. The surest way to improve the situation for everyone is for website authors and managers to recognize the validity of Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision and to respond to link exchange requests in as positive a way as possible. Even the big search engines and portals are at last beginning to recognize the wisdom of doing so. I predict that the number of incoming and outgoing links a site has will soon become a major factor that they will consider when ‘ranking’ it in their search results.

© Mike Alexander 2002

For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

* Weaving The Web by Tim Berners-Lee 1999. ISBN 0 75282 090 7

Foreword By The Author

What are ValuePaks? It’s the term we coined to describe a collection of software and/or ebooks focused on a particular theme or market segment and specially put together to sell at extreme bargain rates. There are currently six of them but more will be added as time goes by so as to widen the field and to keep the selection fresh for our affiliate sales force. Come back often to see the latest additions.
Mike Alexander
For all your content needs go to ClipCopy Content Solutions

Bronze ValuePaks

The first in this collection is called the Motivation And Inspiration ValuePak, which is centered around the theme the title describes and consists of fifty valuable ebooks covering the subject from a variety of angles. The second is the Self Improvement For Success ValuePak, which is a similar concept and, once again, the title is descriptive of its content. This is also made up of fifty ebooks. Bronze ValuePaks sell at the amazing price of only $7.00 each.

Silver ValuePaks

The third is called Webmaster Tools (The Ultimate Collection) ValuePak, which almost exclusively consists of software, much of which is extremely useful, while the fourth in the series is called the Foreign Language Phrase Books ValuePak, which is made up entirely of ebooks. These two Silver ValuePaks sell for just $14.00 each.

Gold ValuePaks

The Web Advertising And Promotion ValuePak comes next, followed by Great Kitchen Recipes, both of which are Gold ValuePaks which are fantastic bargains at only $21.00 apiece.

Every one of these special collections was created exclusively for 101 Internet Answers and can only be bought through an appointed affiliate. Every one of them also represents extreme value such as you are very unlikely to find elsewhere.

Reviews

We shall be reviewing them individually in future articles so that you can get a greater appreciation of their value but if you have a particular current interest in any one (or more) of them, just click on its link below to get more information.

• Foreign Language Phrase Books
  
• Great Kitchen Recipes
  
• Motivation And Inspiration
  
• Self Improvement For Success
  
• Web Advertising And Promotion
  
• Webmaster Tools