To download your complimentary ebook please go here: http://www.supertips.com/sales.php?offer=bekat1&pid=14 Perks of the Trade Volume 1 Issue 8 November, 2004 =========================================================== This is a by-subscription only newsletter. Your information will never be shared, rented, or sold. Unsubscribe information may be found at the bottom of this page. =========================================================== Contents =========================================================== Quote Of The Month: Thomas Edison Editorial: Glenn Beach Guest Article: "Get More Visitors to Your Website Using Free Traffic Exchanges" by Suzanne Morrison Humor Feature Article: "Ensuring a Good Return on Your Traffic Exchange Campaign" by Glenn Beach Additional Articles: "Your Internet Business Up and Running Today for Free" by Kathryn Beach Internet Marketing News Tips Q & A Advertisements General & Unsubscribe Info =========================================================== Quote of the Month =========================================================== I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. --- Thomas Edison =========================================================== Editorial =========================================================== I used to read a magazine that had a section called "Things That Work". That section was always the first part of the magazine I read, every single issue. Why? Because it featured new ideas and the magazine team had tested them and given them their endorsement. The magazine was about alternative energy, and the staff all lived with solar, wind, and water power in their everyday lives. They knew what they were talking about, they walked their talk. This issue of Perks of the Trade is dedicated to some tools that I have found that work. I'm a champion of the little guy. As far as entrepreneurs go, that means those of you that are just starting out, maybe not only because you want to work for yourself, but because of the financial stress that is going to drive you crazy if you don't deal with it. If you've ever felt discouraged and demoralized by your escalating debts and stagnant paycheck, read on. Many people starting out with little or no money in this internet marketing business are told that the only ways to begin for free are online classified ads or traffic exchanges, and that both can be extreme wastes of time unless you do them right. I'm going to focus on traffic exchanges this month, because they are working for me. I've switched things about a bit, because the article by Suzanne Morrison needs to be read first. It's a great introduction to the basics of traffic exchanges. My article goes into some detail about how to pick a good one out of the thousands available. And my wife Kathryn explains a detailed system for using them that works for her. She read Suzanne's article and thought another perspective with different examples would help demonstrate the overall concepts. So pour a cup of coffee, put your feet up, and enjoy a good read. Glenn . =========================================================== Guest Article: "Get More Visitors to Your Website Using Free Traffic Exchanges" by Suzanne Morrison =========================================================== Trying to get traffic to your new website or to your gateway pages for an affiliate program can be difficult if you are just starting out and have little or no advertising budget. This article will explain how you can use traffic exchanges to get a steady stream of visitors to your website, without having break your budget or spend hours on end clicking away to get credits. In simple terms, a traffic exchange is a place that you can join and view other members web pages in exchange for having your own web page viewed. Every time you view another member’s web page for a period of time (e.g. 20 seconds) your balance of credits increases. Every time a member views your web page for the same period of time your credit balance decreases. There are two main types of traffic exchanges – manual exchanges and auto exchanges. A manual exchange requires a real human being to view the web page and click on a link to proceed to the next web page, whereas an auto exchange can be left running in your web browser and will automatically refresh to a new web page. Although both of these methods will bring hits to your website, the use of a manual exchange is far more likely to bring a visitor who will actually read what is on your web page. The auto exchange user who leaves their computer on all night, surfing web pages while they sleep is unlikely to buy your product! It is for this reason that I have not ventured down the path of using auto exchanges. So how do you go about choosing which traffic exchange(s) to use? First let’s take a look at the most common features of a traffic exchange, so you can differentiate between the competition. 1. Credit Surfing: all traffic exchanges allow you to earn credit in return for viewing other member’s web pages. Also look out for bonus credits. Many exchanges will give you bonus credits for signing up, for surfing a certain number of pages, or for winning competitions or sweepstakes. 2. Minimum Time Limit: when surfing for credits, most traffic exchanges require you to view a site for a minimum amount of time before you earn a credit. This is normally somewhere between 10 and 30 seconds. 3. Anti Cheat Mechanisms: to ensure that a real person is viewing your web site most traffic exchanges employ anti cheating mechanisms. This usually means that instead of clicking a "Next Site" button you have to click on a specific graphic such as a number, letter, picture or colored icon from a selection of a few, to proceed to the next site. Repeated failure to do this correctly means suspension or termination of your account. 4. Referring Others: this is the fastest way to build up your credits. Most traffic exchanges provide you with referral pages and banners. You can use these to recruit yourself a downline. When someone signs up from your promotional web page or banner they are placed in your downline. This can earn you an immediate bonus plus a percentage of your downline’s credits e.g. 1 credit for every 10 sites surfed. 5. Paid/Pro Memberships: most traffic exchanges offer paid memberships as well as free memberships. Normally a paid membership earns you privileges such as an allocation of credits per month plus an increased number of credits for your own surfing and the surfing of your downline. Most exchanges also allow you to purchase extra credits. I don’t recommend going for a paid membership or buying credits until you have tried out the traffic exchange for free first. A quick search on Google, using the keywords "traffic exchange" will reveal almost 200,000 results, including hundreds of differently themed traffic exchange websites. Within minutes you can sign up for an account, submit your URL and start surfing for credits. Easy? Yes, but how do you know if this traffic exchange will give you results? How do you choose between the hundreds of different traffic exchanges? I use a report from a company called Traffic Hoopla to decide which traffic exchanges to sign up with. This report is updated weekly with the top 50 traffic exchanges and the top 10 new traffic exchanges. You can find out from this report who delivers the highest unique percentage of visitors and who will deliver traffic to your website in a timely manner. Armed with this information you can sign up for only the best traffic exchanges and get the biggest reward for your efforts. Once you have signed up for some of the top traffic exchanges, you now need to earn some credits. There are three ways to do this: 1. Personally surf for credits 2. Purchase Credits 3. Build a downline In the beginning you may want to set aside a few hours each week to personally surf for some credits; in fact some traffic exchanges require you to surf a certain number of sites to activate your account. However, the best way to be successful with traffic exchanges is to build your own downline. This way you can keep the credits flowing in by letting your downline do all the clicking for you. You can do this by using the referral web pages of each of the traffic exchanges that you have signed up with or you can sign up with Traffic Hoopla and advertise the 50 best traffic exchanges in one go. I chose the latter method and after signing up for the top 10 traffic exchanges I had over 60 people signed up under me in the various programs after the first week. I can’t quite put my feet up and stop surfing yet, but every week I can spend less time clicking on traffic exchanges and more time deciding how to use all my credits. ----------------------------------------------------------- About the Author Suzanne Morrison is the owner of http://www.homebiz-direct.com Visit her site or subscribe to her newsletter at homebiz-direct@getresponse.com to find out how you can start up your own successful home business. ----------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================== Humor =========================================================== An unemployed man goes to apply for a job with Microsoft as a janitor. The manager there arranges for him to take an aptitude test. After the test, the manager says, "You will be employed at minimum wage, $5.15 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address, so that I can send you a form to complete and tell you where to report for work on your first day." Taken aback, the man protests that he has neither a computer nor an e-mail address. To this the MS manager replies, "Well, then, that means that you virtually don't exist and can therefore hardly expect to be employed." Stunned, the man leaves. Not knowing where to turn and having only $10 in his wallet, he decides to buy a 25 lb flat of tomatoes at the supermarket. Within less than 2 hours, he sells all the tomatoes individually at 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 before going to sleep that night. And thus it dawns on him that he could quite easily make a living selling tomatoes. Getting up early every day and going to bed late, he multiplies his profits quickly. After a short time he acquires a cart to transport several dozen boxes of tomatoes, only to have to trade it in again so that he can buy a pick-up truck to support his expanding business. By the end of the second year, he is the owner of a fleet of pick-up trucks and manages a staff of a hundred former unemployed people, all selling tomatoes. Planning for the future of his wife and children, he decides to buy some life insurance. Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. At the end of the telephone conversation, the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order to send the final documents electronically. When the man replies that he has no e-mail, the adviser is stunned, "What, you don't have e-mail? How on earth have you managed to amass such wealth without the Internet, e-mail and e-commerce? Just imagine where you would be now, if you had been connected to the internet from the very start!" After a moment of thought, the tomato millionaire replied, "Why, of course! I would be a floor cleaner at Microsoft!" Moral of this story: 1. The Internet, e-mail and e-commerce do not need to rule your life. 2. If you don't have e-mail, but work hard, you can still become a millionaire. 3. Seeing that you got this story via e-mail, you're probably closer to becoming a janitor than you are to becoming a millionaire. 4. If you do have a computer and e-mail, you have already been taken to the cleaners by Microsoft. =========================================================== Feature Article: Ensuring a Good Return on Your Traffic Exchange Campaign by Glenn Beach =========================================================== Most webmasters use traffic exchanges not only to get hits to their websites, but also to make sales. Like you, most people who use these programs are not necessarily interested in buying anything. However, there are ways to use their visits to generate future purchases. By choosing your traffic exchanges wisely, advertising a well-designed webpage, and asking yourself a few questions as you evaluate your exchanges' performances, you can ensure a healthy return on your free traffic. Here's a few tips on choosing a traffic exchange wisely: 1. Note and compare the ratio of clicks to hits received. 2. Make sure there are anti-cheat functions available. If surfers "don't need to be present to click", they will be tempted to use auto surfer programs, and obviously they won't bring quality traffic to your site. 3. Look for those exchanges that allow you to target your site to visitors with a specific interest. 4. Most exchanges give you free credits for signing up. Click anyways. It's important to get a feel for a site, also to notice whether the program will load the same site several times over. This happens occasionally on several sites, but take note if it is excessive. What is optimum is an exchange that will deliver your page one time per user per day. You can remedy this problem by setting up your urls in a rotator that will deliver a different website each time. 5. Notice the balance between the length of the timer and the time it takes pages to load. As you surf you may like sites that only require 10 seconds before you can surf again, but this does not benefit pages that load slowly. So observe not only from the surfer perspective but also from the "surfee" point of view. 6. Once you have surfed an exchange for a length of time, take note of how many credits you have earned. Log into your account in 24 hours and see how many credits have been used, or not. One exchange may have a lower click to visit ratio but uses only half the credits in a day's time. Another may use the credits as fast as you can generate them. Now that you've decided on a few traffic exchanges, you need to have a well-designed webpage to post. A well-designed ‘teaser’ or 'splash' page will create interest in your product without pushing visitors to purchase anything. It should rely heavily on graphics that get attention and don't require the visitor to scroll down. There should be only a few pieces of information that either capture the visitor's email address or make it irresistable to click to another page, possibly your main website where you can either capture the email address or make a sale. Most traffic exchanges encourage you to build a downline, either to earn a % of all the traffic they in turn generate, earn a % of the money paid for Pro memberships, or both. By using a couple techniques, you can build a downline quickly. Let's say you've signed up for 10 traffic exchanges. Copy/paste your referral links to the 10 programs onto a blank page. Do the same with your surfing links, (sometimes known as startpage links), and make sure you DON`T confuse the two. You need to connect each traffic exchange to the next, in essence creating a circle. When you sign up for program #1, copy/paste the referral link of program #2 when asked what url you intend to promote. Program #2 gets the referral url of program #3, and so on, until you've completed the circle by putting the referral link of program #1 into program #10. Click away at all 10 of them vigorously, at least one hour per day, for maybe a month. This should start building your downlines in the various exchanges. If it doesn`t work at first, keep trying until it does. The key here is to never give up. Once you have a good enough downline (and only you can decide what 'good enough' is), and your downlines are creating traffic for you, log back into the programs, change the website link or add additional links to whichever online income program or programs it is you REALLY want to promote. At this point, you can upgrade your memberships in some traffic exchanges. Your criteria will include those that offer the best bonuses to Pro members, and those in which you have the largest downline. Once you achieve 500 pageviews per day thanks to your downlines (which times ten exchanges equals 5000 pageviews a day), you won't need to click much yourself any more. With a solid advertising campaign in place, you now can focus on promoting those programs that will bring you residual and leveraged income well into your retirement years. ----------------------------------------------------------- Glenn Beach, author and editor, offers quality products to buy and sell at: http://www.work-at-home-business-opportunity-canada.com ----------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================== Guest Article:How to Be in Business on the Internet Today , for F*ree by Kathryn Beach =========================================================== With no money invested, you can be on the internet with moneymaking websites by the time the sun goes down today. If you've got time but no money to invest, then this will get you going. You need to sign up for or download a few programs, newsletters, and marketing tools. I will mention the ones I use, because I know they work. Feel free to substitute whatever you are already signed up with or feel most comfortable with. 1. SFI 2. Empowerism 3. Profit Rally 4. Hit Exchange News 5. finitesite.com 6. Mozilla browser Profit Rally is the hub of my system. She's a new kid on the block, but she's powerful. This is where I can promote all my internet income programs and traffic exchanges and build all my downlines at once. There are splash pages, email tools, and much more. Besides the traffic exchanges supported from within Profit Rally, I can import others I join after consulting the Hit Exchange News (this newsletter was recommended to me by my upline, who knows the editor personally). Mozilla is my click exchange browser of choice, because of the security features as well as the ability to sort my traffic exchanges into separate folders and view the contents of a folder in one tabbed window. Very cool. I have a few exchanges that are important enough to include in each folder, then the rest are attributed weight by how well they are performing for me, and included accordingly. I have 5 folders, and use each one for at least 2 hours a day, one day a week. I treat each page I view as I would like my page to be treated. I give it a quick glance, and if it piques my interest, I take a longer look. I've learned alot about what grabs a visitor's eye and what prompts her to read and click by paying attention to my own reactions. But what am I promoting? Both SFI and Empowerism not only deliver excellent internet income training products [Empowerism focuses on email marketing; SFI offers valuable advice and tools for both online and offline marketing] but also gateway websites that are what you promote through using the traffic exchanges. So as you can see, a good income program provides you with support, websites, and tools for free. Shop around. Find what works for you. At the heart of any traffic exchange system is a splash page. If you look at any good website, it has a lot going on. Graphics, lots of information, links, resources...on and on. A splash page is heavy on the eyecatching graphics, light on text, loads in a flash and is just enough to get the visitor to read and click. Remember, the average visitor spends from 10-30 seconds looking at your page. If it's a mini-novel, your visitor will keep on going right by you. Gateway websites typically can't be added to or changed. This is where your f*ree website hosted by finitesite.com comes in. You get f*ree hosting with a subdomain (which means your url will look like http://www.finitesite.com/your_id) and this is where you place your splash pages. Here is one I have there, my Profit Rally upline gave this one to me. [ http://www.finitesite.com/bekat] The neat thing about finitesite is that they never stick any ads on your page. Never. No banners, nothing, never, and it's f*ree. Empowerism gives you splash pages to use but I made my own [ http://www.7affiliatecentralcom/empowerism.html]. I made my own SFI splash page [ http://www.7affiliatecentral.com/sfi.html] with some of the marketing aids the company provides; namely, desktop wallpaper as a background and text from a flier. Once you've studied all that these programs have to offer and are established, comfortable and making progress under the guidance of a mentor, you can begin to consider investing and upgrading. So there it is, a business in a nutshell. Although I highly recommend these programs and tools, there are many good ones out there. Don't let the scams scare you away. Armed with knowledge about what a good program looks like, and with the help of an active, knowledgeable upline sponsor, anyone can succeed with perseverance. Anyone can succeed. But anyone can fail, too. What you add are the most important ingredients: focus, dedication, persistance and patience. Apply these qualities to the above strategies, and you too can be an internet income success story, starting right now. ------------------------------------------------------------ Kathryn Beach loves what she does, most importantly that she is building her own business by helping others to succeed. You can contact her through her website: http://www.7affiliatecentral.com ------------------------------------------------------------ =========================================================== Internet Marketing News =========================================================== AOL Partners with Microsoft, Earthlink And Yahoo For Spam Lawsuits HostReview.com Monday, November 1, 2004; 01:57 PM America Online, Inc. (www.corp.aol.com) announced it was stepping up its fight against purveyors of unwanted, junk computer messages by filing two new lawsuits in Federal Court. The round of lawsuits announced today by AOL, Microsoft, Earthlink and Yahoo! is the second time junk email-related enforcement actions have been filed by the Anti-Spam Alliance, which was founded in April 2003 and is chiefly led by the four companies. ------------------------------------------------------------ Kanoodle Seeing Rapid Growth in PPC Biz 2 Nov 2004 Buffalo Business First: 'Kanoodling' gaining favor among companies A local paper reviews the progress of cost per click search network Kanoodle. Founder and CEO Kent Keating answered criticisms that the network's second tier keyword traffic is anemic by saying that the firms current growth rate will solve that issue without anything needing to be done. Kanoodle expects revenues to top $30 million in 2004. http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2004/11/02/kanoodle_see ing_rapid_growth_in_ppc_biz/ =========================================================== Tips =========================================================== 1. Don't be shy. Ask for action. Tell the reader to phone, write, contact his sales rep, request technical literature or place an order. 2. Offer a free gift. Put your offer of a free booklet, report, product sample, consultation, analysis, recommendation, study, cost estimate, computer printout, or whatever, in your headline. Talk about the value and benefits of your free offer. The more you stress the offer, the better your response. =========================================================== Q & A =========================================================== Q: What are the 2 top internet promotion tools, and why? A: 1. Search Engines are the most common way people will find sites that interest them on the Internet. Your own website. To get listed for free you can either submit your site directly or let yourself be discovered by the search engines `robot`. It won't find you on it's own, you need to be linked from a site that is already listed. And affiliate sites can't be alterred, so you can't add links to other sites. 2. After you have your own site the second most profitable traffic will come from your own list. It takes time to build a list, and to build trust with your list. Your own newsletter is the best way to achieve both of these. Your list can come from many, many sources. The best list you can have is previous buyers, and after that it is people who have signed up (opted in) to join your list. =========================================================== Classified Ads =========================================================== Be sure to check out the Ultimate Mega-Commi$$ion Club - NoBSzone.com! They do the research, you profit! And, they're unique "Matrix Shuffle" system ensures EVERYONE has the chance to earn! http://bekat.nobszone.com =========================================================== General & Unsubscribe Info =========================================================== Perks of the Trade © Copyright 2004 Glenn Beach, except where indicated otherwise. All rights reserved worldwide. Reprint only with permission from copyright holder(s). All trademarks are property of their respective owners. All contents provided as is. No express or implied income claims made herein. Your business success is dependent on many factors, including your own abilities. Advertisers are solely responsible for ad content. To contact us with feedback, questions or praise, email mailto:begle@work-at-home-business-opportunity-canada.com To subscribe, please email with "subscribeme" in the subject mailto:begle@work-at-home-business-opportunity-canada.com To unsubscribe, please email with "unsubscribe" in the subject mailto:begle@work-at-home-business-opportunity-canada.com Please feel free to share this newsletter in its entirety including the link to our website: http://www.work-at-home-business-opportunity-canada.com Back issues available upon request. I bet you can guess the email address... =========================================================== Sincerely, Glenn Beach Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia Perks of the Trade is an opt-in ezine available by subscription only. We neither use nor endorse the use of spam. Thank you!