STEP 1 ARTICLES

Affiliate Marketing and Consumer Ethics

Have you heard of cloaking or masking of URL? Or URL Redirection? Certain website hosts offer these services. You click on example.com and you are taken to anothersite.com, but in your address bar, you still see example.com . This is an example of masking and redirecting.

There are many reasons why people resort to such measures. One reason is that people are mean. Or perhaps they are simply afraid of being cheated. Let me illustrate this through a concrete example. You have probably heard of affiliate marketing. I go to clickbank which is a sort of online store for electronic goods (meaning, in this case, anything that can be directly downloaded to your computer after purchase). I choose other people's products to promote. I become an affiliate of a merchant offering product A. If anyone buys product A because of my promotion, I get a commission. I am given a hop link to promote product A. Typically, a hop link looks like http://myusername.merchantname.hop.clickbank.net/

Hemorrhoidmiracle, for example, is a clickbank product. If I were to promote it my hop link would be something like http://kapush.hemor.hop.clickbank.net/ . Now I put up advertisements for this product and embed my hop link in them. You are interested and you click on my link. You are brought to the product page. If you buy the product I get a commission. For example, if the commission is 50% and the price is $50, I get $25 if you make a purchase. The commission does not come from your pocket. The merchant pays me. He pays me because I have helped him to sell his product. The hop link tells him that the sell has come from my efforts. Actually the transaction is carried out by clickbank, but ultimately it is the merchant paying me, not you, the consumer.

To summarize the situation, then, I help you to find a product that you like. You buy the product. The merchant makes money out of my effort. He naturally pays me a commission on the sales. You pay as much as you would have paid even if you had gone and made the purchase on your own, if you had stumbled upon the merchant's site. Sounds like a win win situation for all. Right? Wrong. People are intimidated when they see the hop link in their address bar. They prefer something like http://hemorrhoidmiracle.com .When they see that someone has referred them to the site, they do not make a purchase. Instead, if they really like the product, they find out what the merchant's site is named, and go there directly to make the purchase. They feel better now, because they have outsmarted the affiliate, in this case, me. Somehow, people feel that they are being cheated and manipulated when they realize that someone else is making some money by helping them find products that they like. They suddenly feel that they have been brainwashed into liking the product when in fact they had clicked on the affiliate's link out of curiosity.

Let us examine now what happens to me, the poor affiliate. I make efforts to advertise a product. You, the consumer, like what you see in my advertisement. You follow my hop link to the product page. You read all about it and decide to buy it. You navigate away from my hop link page. You find the original product page and make the purchase. The merchant has no way of knowing that you found out about his product from my efforts. Therefore he pays me nothing. You have, in effect, successfully given my well deserved money to the merchant, since he has saved $25 (my commission). You have paid the full price of $50. You have not received any discount. You have your product. The merchant has his money. I am the loser. I have nothing to show for my efforts. You have successfully cheated me of my income. What did you gain by doing this? In all probability a smug satisfaction that you have outwitted me, the cunning affiliate.

This is why many affiliates purchase domain names. One domain name per product that they are promoting. The domain name in case of the product in question would be something like hemorrhoid-miracle.com. The hyphen makes it a legitimate domain name similar to the original hemorrhoidmiracle.com. The hop links are masked, and when the consumer clicks upon the advertisement, he is redirected without his knowledge to hemorrhoid-miracle.com which is really, say, http://kapush.hemor.hop.clickbank.net/. The customer is happy that there is no middleman involved and that he has reached the authentic site. He makes the purchase if he likes the product. There is no one here cheating him into buying the product. In this case, of course, I have outwitted you. The affiliate has outwitted the consumer. It is very strange that such games have to be played in order to carry out what would otherwise be perfectly legitimate and ethical business. This reminds me of the lines from Earl of Rochester's Satire Against Mankind where the poet of speaks of human nature,

For fear he arms, and is of arms afraid,
By fear to fear successively betrayed...

I have no idea why this attitude among consumers is so prevalent. Perhaps it has something to do with the abundance of spam. The many money making scams doing the rounds all over the net probably is another reason. Whatever it might be, the fact is that this ridiculous distrust has given rise to further subversive maneuvering and hard sell tactics on the affiliate marketer's part, and the resulting deception has unfortunately added to the distrust in a vicious cycle. One can only hope that someday the lines I quoted give way to the almost forgotten dictum of Live and Let Live. Amen to that. 

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9ine Steps to Your Own Online Money Making Scam!

STEP 2 ARTICLES    

Traffic Generation: the FREE way

Your ads are no good if no one sees them. You have a free website, you have free hosting of that site. You have the necessary content. You are, in effect, all set to go. The first step now is to ensure that people actually come to your site.

Directory Listing for Free

List your site with both Google and Yahoo. List it with other directories as well. Here are a few. The search engines will pick up your site name pretty soon. Make sure you have put in all the relevant keywords and meta tags. This is a good site to get all the relevant information.

Sign up at the Traffic Exchange Sites

The basic sign up is usually free, and the basic will be all that will need to begin with. If you wish you can always buy credits later. You must NEVER choose sites that have an autosurf feature. Let me explain: in Traffic Exchange sites, you surf other people's sites for, say, 15 to 30 seconds, and you earn credits for your surfing (there are other ways to earn credit, but this will do for now). Using those credits, you can advertise your own site. That is, now other surfers will see your site for 15 to 30 seconds. If there is an autosurf feature, then you can just leave your computer on and the pages will be surfed automatically. You will be earning credits without ever actually requiring to view a single site. Then when you use your credits to advertise your site, what will stop others from NOT viewing your site? They could also put their computer on autosurf. Your site stats will explode, but no one will ever know your content. That is just plain silly.

You might be wondering what good it is when others are surfing only to gain credits, and that too, for such a short duration. Actually, it does you a lot of good. It does gain you exposure, and very often, if you have presented your material in the proper manner, a surfer will stop to actually view your page and click your links. Keeping the short duration of viewing in mind, make sure you present your material in a striking enough way so that it grabs attention. Just put the headlines in the page that you are advertising, so that when it is viewed, it arouses curiosity and interest. Traffic Swarm is a good place to start.

Article Marketing

Once again, you have free and paid accounts. Go for the free to begin with. Write an article- on absolutely anything - cats, flowers, e-business, the world in general - whatever subject you are comfortable with. Make sure it has substance. Make sure it is an article that people will find interesting. Also make sure that it is not simply an advertisement for your site or services. You will have the 'About the Author' box for that. Just put in your website address and a brief intro about yourself in the box. Your article will be reviewd and published to numerous sites on the net. Each time, on each site that it appears, your site link will also be present. This is called backlinking. In the worst case scenerio, no one will ever click on your site address because none of the readers ever liked your article. You would still have your backlink. However, it is virtually impossible that no one will ever like your article. You liked Your article, didnt you? And the sites that published it did. What possible reason could prevent others from liking it too?

Article writing requires knowledge of some simple rules. You can download this zip file from HERE. It has a cheat sheet and an .exe file that will show you exactly how to do it. You can even register and submit your article to Articlemarketer website at one go with this executable.

Get Yourself a Blog

A blog is short for 'weblog'. You can write about anything you care for in a blog. You can also use it to do business by posting your affiliate links there or simply advertising for products. You can view an example of a blog by clicking BLOG on the bar at the top / bottom of this site or HERE . This is my blog. You will notice that it has my personal articles in the main section and ads on the right hand column. The added advantage of getting a blog is that a blog usually has its own traffic boosting system. You can have traffic by simply being part of a huge network.

Your Free Site and Free Hosting

My first business site was a subdomain of 110mb.com. It is not only free, but if I were to get my own domain like the present one, without any experience, I would be left all alone . Instead, I had an established server with regular traffic backing me, not to mention a thriving forum full of helpful people. It is always advisable to begin your ventures with a free site. There are a number of opportunities you can avail of at almost every free hosting site to get yourself that much needed traffic. You can get yourself a free 110mb website hosting here. For details regarding other free hosting sites, please check out this article. (article coming up :p)

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