Disclaimer:

 The author is not responsible for the use or misuse of the information contained within.  The information contained in the book is for informational and entertainment purposes only.  It is not intended as professional advice or a recommendation to act.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informational storage or retrieval system without express written, dated and signed permission from the author.

Contents
Internet Marketing is the Real Deal
Steps for building an awesome website
Deciding on a Domain Name
Getting a Web Server
Web Design
Web Space
Search Engine Optimization
Two-fold purpose of a website
Website - explore its earning potential
Home Business Lifestyle
Can you really make a living from home?
The Absolute Truth…
BYOB (Be Your Own Boss)
Online Business Ventures
Create a Profitable Simple Product
Auction Buying and Selling
Service Provider and Serve Others
Affiliate Marketing
Referral Programs
Get Paid for Your Opinions
Read Emails and Earn Cash
Paid to Surf the Net
Click and Earn Huge Checks
Merchant Accounts
Job Exchange Sites
Become a Mystery Shopper
Eat and Earn
Posting for Profits
Simple Ways to Create Sales and Earnings
Pay per Lead
Lifetime commission
Pay per Sales
Resale Rights
Others
Content Development
Data Entry and Data Conversion
Precautions
Conclusion

Internet Marketing is the Real Deal
Internet era has brought a sea change in the concept of marketing as well as has widened the horizon for individuals/ companies to sell their products/ concepts/ services to the world almost instantaneously.  This has simultaneously given a scope to the enterprising individuals to earn the extra buck to enhance glory to their lifestyle. The key advantage is that one gets potential clients all over the world and one can communicate his ideas to the furthest corner of the world almost without any time delay. We will discuss some of the key areas how an individual as well as a company benefits. In one word, a systematic approach of marketing over the Internet is called Internet Marketing.

If we want to go back to the age-old marketing concepts we will notice marketing through advertisement in Newspapers/ television/ Radio. Sometimes by putting up hoarding/ banners/ festoons at prominent locations depending upon the product and the target sector. Like a coaching center Advertisement should be placed in front of the schools/ colleges/ clubs. Another very prominent way had been sending mailers to corporate/ individuals/ prospective buyers for selling/ awareness of your products. However in today’s Internet era has given you the scope of publishing your products/ Advertisements in cyberspace, where one will get billions of visitors everyday. The technology marvels have given you the flexibility of changing the advertisement at a much lesser time and cost. Mailing is just by a few mouse clicks - email instead of postal services easily achieving the same objective. Study says that 35% students browse Internet even in the developing nations.

How do these really occur?

Baby Steps Towards Successful Internet Marketing

Here we want to discuss how one should get prepared for Internet marketing in a systematic approach.
•	Build a web site
•	Submit it to the different search engines
•	Popularize the website through different search optimization techniques
•	Market your ideas/ Products
•	Use email for direct communication

The first and foremost thing, which one should plan is to build a website for himself and find a proper domain name that signifies his selling objects like products, concepts or services. 

Steps for building an awesome website
•	Find an available domain name of your choice and get it registered
•	Find a good host and hire the web space (even your PC can also become a host)
•	Design and Develop the website 
•	Host it.

The popularity and ease of availability of Internet has cast its spell directly onto website designing and related activities. The humane desire of publishing personal charismas on the web has gained immense popularity. By the rule of nature popularity comes hand in glove with frauds. Web design is therefore no way an exception. Being lured by the attraction of money people and organizations sometimes come up even with some unrealistic commitments just to take advantages of your ignorance. As the intellectual conspiracies become much more dangerous and adverse you fail to resist yourself from the attractive terminologies which are used by them. So, we do feel that literacy can enlighten people around preventing them from this type of fraudulency. Our continuous efforts to make you more knowledgeable have led to this series of articles, which we believe to be highly beneficial for all people at large.

Deciding on a Domain Name
Let us try to understand the entire web design scenario through a systematic approach. First of all, you must know, that you need a unique identifier in the cyberspace just like your postal address. This is called the Domain Name. You select a name of your choice, check the availability and book the domain. If somebody has already occupied your desired domain you need to modify it a bit in order to keep it unique keeping the vision/ ideology in tact. There are several extensions and restrictions, which we shall discuss later. 

Let us assume your domain is mydomain and anybody can view your pages as http://www.mydomain.com from remote corners of the world. However, once you have selected a domain name, you need to confirm the availability of the same. Looking at http://whois.com one can check this. There are several registrar companies, who facilitate the domain booking services.

Certain extensions are available to all like .net, .org and .com. There are certain extensions that are used for some very specific purpose like .gov or .edu. Generally .gov domain is applicable for public houses and government departments; on the other hand .edu is applicable to the research & education segment only. The growing demand of Internet and domain names have further created more country specific extensions like .us or .in, where .us stands for United States and .in stands for India. 

There are people, who book some common domains and wait for the prospective clients who ask for domains. So, even if you don’t find your most wanted domain, you can rummage around to see who the owner of that particular domain name is and it is also possible that the person may be willing to sell you his domain at very premium prices.

The advantage is that there are various companies, who allow you to create a domain name under their domains and start working. Geocities of Yahoo, freewebhosting are some of them, and they literally don’t need to pay anything for them. So, your domain name may look like geocities.mydomain.com. The obvious question remains as to why do they then allow one to create domains free of cost. The answer being very simple they want to display banners and advertisement of themselves or the sponsors to earn. That’s why you can find so many advertisements in the geocities series.

Nevertheless today you can book a domain name (off course if the subject is available) at a price of $10 to $15 per annum.

Getting a Web Server
Once you book the domain, you need some web space where your web pages will reside and at which the domain name will point to. This is something like staying in a particular place on the earth and communicating with another place for attention. This space in the cyber world is called the Server space. The obvious question comes up, whether you can host your website in your own Computer. Definitely yes, but can you guarantee a 24x7 uptime of your Computer? Remember your website may be visited by people from any corner of the world as per their convenient time zone. In reality there are many companies, which allow you to share their hard disk space on a rental basis. Even there are sites like Yahoo Geocities, who provide hosting free of cost. The vendors offer you generally two types of hosting services namely dedicated and shared, which will be explored later. Nevertheless, the business ethics ensure privacy of your files and contents in the hosted server.

Web Design
You have got hundreds of options for designing your Web Pages. It can be simple pages designed by you or you can even take help of various web designing templates available both free and paid over the Internet. You can use simple tools like FrontPage or Dream Weaver to build your website. The selection of the right tool depends upon your own objective and the presentation style you are looking for. You can also hire a professional group, but it all depends upon your taste and requirement. Do you know that you can even generate web pages from MS Word or MS Excel?

Once you have completed the formalities for domain name booking, its your turn to build your website. Now let us understand the basic purpose of building a web site. Why do you need a web site? You want to propagate your portfolio to the world through the web site. A teacher may like to highlight his teaching experience or some useful notes for the common students whereas a company highlights its products & services, Quality and the Client list proclaiming its branding in the market. The challenge is to present your profile to the world in a crisp manner. Remember an average surfer will focus on your page for about 8 to 10 seconds within which one need to convince him.

The advantage is you can express your unique ideas or your experimented knowledge to the world from a space that only you own. So the chances of stealing your ideas to become their owner is nullified as you own the copy write for your website contents. You retain your pioneership. Your unique innovations remain your rights forever. There are sites, like http://copyscape.com, which will detect and let you know, if anybody else tries to copy your thoughts/ ideas and the cyber world is more active than ever before with strict laws for the wrong doers.

The world goes ahead by copying and it has grounded its root in our mind and soul. How can we ignore the fact that it might be Mc Dowell or Amway who have transformed it? How should we proceed? We can copy if only we know how to sell someone else’s concept or original work with our own innovative expression. Lets take an example. Suppose you are teaching Windows Basics to somebody, which others are also doing. Especially Microsoft web site is showing the features in significant details. We can always try to sell the same Windows Basics through our innovative approach to make it palatable and present it to the readers to build our own brand.

The only point worth a note is that Website is a continuously evolving process. Never treat it as a project that has got a definite starting and end point. Building your website once is not the end of the road but you need to continuously change it while keeping it up and running. Obviously web sites will consume substantial time and effort on your part.

But every cloud has a silver lining!

Website building is no more a Himalayan task. Rather the innovation and technology marvels have made it easier than ever.  You need not even know html or any graphical packages to build your own website. There are hundreds of downloadable templates (both free and charged) available over the Internet, which you can use to build your website. You will find several sites where various Java scripts are available to set your website alight. Your job is more of assembling everything and presenting it in a descent manner. Nevertheless, there are plenty of freelancers and web design companies existing on the web itself whom you can easily hire to build the website as per your choice and host it for you. The cost is very affordable and economical too!

But don’t delay! Your chosen domain name may become unavailable tomorrow!

Web host are the companies that house your domain. On cyber space a computer server becomes the host. A server can be of different types based on the operating system, like Unix/Linux server or Windows server. Each of them has got their unique advantages. However, the fact of life remains that a Web host will own a server in which he will allocate some space for you to host the website you create. It becomes the responsibility of the host to make your website live on the internet/online community as well as to maintain it properly to keep it up for 24x7 hours. It’s the unwritten business ethics of the host to intimate you, if for any reason server becomes non-functioning for a certain period, but is should never exceed a couple of hours.

You need to do a quiet a lot of research work before choosing the right host and server. A bad host or server can create mayhem to your business.

Now let us discuss some options that come to you free. A lot of sites offer you free space for hosting your site. Mostly these sites display their own advertisements or sponsors’ ads to earn.

Once you have built your web pages, you need to upload them to the specific server, so that people can view your vision/ mission/objectives/goals in an elaborate manner. Once you book the domain name, the agent or the service provider gives you a user-friendly, wizard based Control Panel for managing your domain.  As the Control Panel gives one the real control over his domain it deserves a very high level of security and can be only accessed through the right combination of a valid username and password. You cannot only transfer or park your domain from the Control Panel but also manage various services like Changing of A-Records or MS Records, URL Forwarding etc. 

If you book the domain name and server space from the same service provider, then managing your entire hosting activities become a cake walk, but if two are from two different vendors, then all these jargons come into the picture, but don’t worry! The technology marvels have made it a much simpler task for you. Let us site an example, if you change the A-Record of your domain to another valid IP address, your domain will search for the pages in the changed IP Address instead of the default one.

There is hardly any problem if you treat your own PC as the hosting server. You need to ensure that it is up for literally 24 hrs a day and all 7 days a week. The formula of 24x7 has got importance because your website will be visited by different people located at different parts of the world. Just imagine the working hours at United States are the wee hours for the Indians. You may fall asleep, but your web server CANNOT.

Control Panel allows you to create email-ids of your choice and the number of such email-ids depends upon the package or contract that you have purchased. Most importantly, it provides you the username and password for FTP (File Transfer Protocol). FTP is a must to upload or download files to or fro the server. They have got many wizard based FTP tools readily available whose list starts with WS Ftp, Cute Ftp, ACE Ftp, and Smart Ftp. The options are really varied. You can also accomplish the same job just from the command prompt of your Windows operating system. However, once you complete the entire process, then only people can browse your site, the way you are browsing this article right now.

Web Space
People have got very peculiar ideas about the web space they require. People feel that 10MB or 20 MB are bare minimum for hosting. Practically a complete web site can be hosted even within 2MB while 10 web pages may require even less than 2 MB space. One needs to calculate the requirement accordingly and decide upon the space. Perhaps the easiest way is to put all your pages/ images/ scripts in your local folder and calculate the space. Keeping a buffer of 30% on the pre-calculated size for future enhancements, you may go ahead with the booking of space. This space may be utilized for highlighting some more products/ services at a later stage. Experts have noticed that in due course the people only add on pages to the server instead of removing the earlier redundant ones, thus occupying more and more of the server space. So, we advise you to maintain it properly and remove the redundant/ unused pages/ images on a regular basis to keep clutter from amassing your favorite blog or website.

Search Engine Optimization
Once you build your website and upload it, you want billions of people to visit your website in order to fulfill your business or personal objectives. However proper marketing techniques ought to be applied so that the browsers become aware about the existence and realize the utility of your website. Perhaps the first step towards submitting your site to all major search engines. Remember to look at the 15th or 20th site, displayed by any search engine when you search based on any keyword. So, the most profound method is to get a higher rank in the search engines. Now the obvious question as to how does one get a good ranking in the Search Engines?

A list of search engines are furnished in the Appendix

Constant endeavors towards the goal of a proper search engine ranking have evolved the term SEO - the buzzword of today’s Internet era.  There are some key SEO techniques.

It is learned that the site that has got a higher number of inbound and outbound links gets a higher ranking in all the search engines. This is called Link building or Traffic Exchange.

Traffic Exchange systems have been identified as one of the primary method that has found itself at the zenith of its popularity among various SEO techniques. So, in other words, we can say that Traffic Exchange is one of the most popular methodologies that can be adhered to regulate traffic towards your website.

Now lets try to find out what does Traffic Exchange mean? Exchange means exchanging your website link with others. Research and innovation have established the fact that the ranking of your site depends greatly on, “from how many sites, your site can be visited or linked to”, or in other words, how many sites provide a link to your website. The obvious question comes to the fore ‘why should somebody allow you to paste your website link in his coveted area?’ The simple answer being that your counterpart also wants to promote his website using the same approach and in exchange for which he too will demand a reciprocal link to your website. 

What are the options open for you? The most commonly used methods are Auto Surf, Paid to Click Surf, Manual Surf and Paid Surf.  What is the role of your website? It is to become a valuable resource for your visitors either for free or to earn substantial revenue. Never forget the statutory warning, “you must popularize your website first before looking towards utilizing it as an revenue earning machine!”

A Properly managed traffic exchange system can yield you phenomenal growth in the number of visitors that enables you immensely in propagating your brand name or increasing your regular earning potential through advertisements and sponsorship.

Once you are convinced about the traffic exchange system methodology for enhancing your hit count and decide to “give it a go”, you need to further delve into its nitty-gritty. If you just carry out a search with the key word “Traffic Exchange” in any of the popular search engines like Google / Yahoo / MSN, you will find billions of listings. On the one hand this establishes the profoundness of the Traffic Exchange Methodology, while on the other the overwhelming popularity also should caution you from frauds and scams. Please remember even the commoners may smell the fraudulent practices involved. Most of the search engines have their own auto crawler to provide the requisite protection. After all one cannot befool a smart crawler behind which a lot of expert robotic and human brains have been constantly at work. Just ask yourself; “can a school for kid web site provide a link to a porno site?” In such a case of paradoxical links, even if by the esteemed and popular providers like Adsense, then the content of your site demands your “Immediate and Urgent” attention.

Here you must remember the ever-cherished traditional concept, “Rome was not built in a day”.  Traffic Exchange system is never one-time jobs that you can just set up and forget about. You need to continuously monitor and upgrade the links. This job also involves extensive research for finding out relevant links and other obsolete links.
 
What does a relevant site mean? A site that is cohesive or can become co-efficient in nature to your website is a relevant site. How do you find one such site? Find out sites, which have got similar business goals or objectives. How many similar matching products and services they both offer. Like a website for school kids can link to the relevant links that link to sites on various books/ articles/ magazines/ publishers, higher schools or universities for further studies, various tuition sites, vocational studies, fun and entertainment sites for kids, games and sports’ sites etc.

If you have found out the relevant sites, where you are looking for a Link building or traffic exchange, then you need filtering. What are the parameters? One such parameter may be a PR Checker. You must try to negotiate with sites that have got higher PR rankings. You can instantly search the PR of any website or any particular page of a website from the URL <http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php>. 
 
Once you find a host of sites as an outcome of your extensive research get down to short-listing them. Now, start sending mails to their webmasters requesting a link exchange. Once they confirm you can start placing their links at your websites. Even this process can result in some advertising for you. So forge right ahead and give it a try? However if the traffic exchange is agreed upon then you need to also monitor whether your link has been pasted at your counterpart’s site. Please remember that this is a continuous process, where you need to watch the sites at regular intervals to ensure the existence of your link in the other sites. 

Webmasters continuously update their sites that may result in an unnoticed or unwilling removal of your link from their site. In this case you need to immediately draw the attention of the Webmaster for that site. You might also find some deliberate exclusion of your site links from some of your smart counterparts, who do not have any basic business morale. In such cases, we suggest that you remove their links immediately. 

With Internet becoming immensely popular a lot of websites have mushroomed but without proper maintenance and nurture they cease to exist leading to the premature death of the links that these websites provide to others. So, you should ensure the existence and up running for all sites among who traffic exchange system technique has been applied. 

“So don’t be lured by the gimmicks like ‘Guaranteed Visitors’ or ‘Million Visitors in 7 days’ or ‘thousand traffic exchanges daily’”. It may be noted that they may or may not be frauds. However, prevention is almost always better than cure and a constant watch must be kept. Remember that the popularity of your site depends largely on how many web sites in cyberspace link to your site and this becomes the major criterion for search engines to determine the rank of your site.  So, never treat traffic exchange as a child’s play; rather it is serious business.  A proper systematic approach may lead to an explosion in the number of visitors to your site while improper utilization may also blacklist it. 

Cultivate patience as you deal with Traffic Exchange as the famous adage goes “Slow but steady wins the race.”

Please note that a website, which remains unchanged over a period of time looses its ranking with the search engine. Search engine also demands dynamism like today’s life style!

There are several other ways of popularizing your website. Like when you submit your site to different sites publish the banner Advertisements or links at other sites. Please note that auto surf sites and pay-on-click sites can significantly add value to your website in terms of popularity.

Two-fold purpose of a website
On one hand a website provides you the unique opportunity to market and sell your products/ services as well as to establish your credential all the world over while on the other hand the website itself can become your key earning tool.

The first and foremost way is to earn money from your website is through procuring sponsorship and advertisements.  As your website grows in popularity, major players will start choosing your site for publishing their advertisements, perhaps in the same way, you had started popularizing your website at the initial stages. Big companies and banks, Insurance Companies, Placement agents want to publish their advertisements to amass their popularity among the visitors. They prefer the websites, which have got more visitors and page view rates.

One such starter’s kit is Google Adsense. Google publishes various shaped advertisements at your site for sponsorship while Adsense promotes this. Perhaps this has reached the peak today for the beginners as the Internet World and Google have proved to be cohesive. Even you can find the other Internet giants like Yahoo and others have started following up the same technique. 

The registration technique is fairly simple. Just go to the Adsense site, get yourself registered. Google will display several options including types and colours to choose from. Once you have selected the style/ colour/ size etc, Google will build the code for you, which you need to simply copy and paste in your web pages. It is sometimes forecast that Google Adsense gives your website a higher rank in the Google search engine which is yet to be proved.

Now this is hightime for us to discuss a bit about Google Adsense. The key parameter of Adsense is the content. The content may be of any type starting from the educational content and ending up with a backgammon website. Google searches the keywords from the content of each page and displays advertisements that suit them the most. 

Just for an example a donate car site will have Advertisements of car donation related activities and sites like Charity Donation, Car Donation, Charitable Donation, California Donate Car, Top 10 Donate a Car sites. Advertisement varies over a period of time, because Google displays Ads dynamically until and unless some advertiser expresses his willingness to publish his advertisements on a particular web page. An education page should contain the advertisements Critical thinking, the teaching company, online training system, faculty jobs, eLearnig etc.

So, one must appreciate the importance of high-quality, focused content, by which the right advertising punch lines take place in your web page. The problem comes up when one page tries to focus on too many products or parameters. This is again a common scenario in the Home Page; where you want to highlight your all salient products and services. It is the challenge of the content developer to write the quality content for you without distorting your focal content. If Google finds miscellaneous types of content, generally it displays the advertisement of the generic service providers of the locality. The advertisement may be for airfare or big hotels of that locality, which ultimately defeats your purpose.  Again we want to reiterate, Google goes by theme based content of the web page, for advertising sponsors.

Nevertheless, the monthly revenue from Advertisements and sponsors can be a solid income from your website. However one needs to also put up continuous efforts to keep the website higher in ranking and maintain its popularity.

There are sites, which pay you if you simply view them

Website - explore its earning potential
When we set out to discuss the potential additional income that can be generated from a website, the first thing that comes up in our mind is home business. The concept of home business is nothing new to the world as it has spread over for long, but Internet has not only added glitters to it but has also converted it to a prime source of income from the comforts of your home. So, now home business is not treated as an additional income only but true income for individuals.

Home Business Lifestyle
Can you really make a living from home?
Home Business has become a buzzword in today’s Internet era. History has witnessed the emergence of frauds with the growing popularity of any business/ ideas. Today you will find millions of self-defined gurus, who attract you by false commitments and dreams. Some of them even provide one with the dream of becoming a billionaire almost overnight and a lot of people are lured by them to draw a blank in a shorter span, as a normal rule of life. 

Then what is the way out?
The Absolute Truth…
Constant quest for innovation and intensive research on the Internet can only lead you to the right path. Before going for this venture you need to be prepared for the hard way of spending hours on the web.  You will find that there are companies and individuals, who really want to value your efforts and time and are ready to send dollars to your bank accounts (real or virtual). Once again, you can only open the gateway for youself by continuous efforts that will set the right track for you. 

There are a lot of the merchants, who allow free enrollment but guarantees to pay you the sum for using their services.

Again it cannot be a lucrative 6-figure income unlike most of the Home Business web sites. Rather we must say that earning the hard way will be when income is directly proportionate to the time, quality and efforts you can afford to put in.

The fact of life is nothing comes for free or without any efforts in today’s competitive world. So, again be prepared for the devotion. Most of the sites need your time and energy for which they are eager pay you.

BYOB (Be Your Own Boss)
Many professionals get themselves engaged in various part-time jobs to earn money. The additional amount earned from a second job entails your time, effort, traveling and a lot more stipulations. Home business not only provides you the opportunity for earning additional dollars the key advantage being that you can earn from the cool comfort of your home. People, who always feel that the boss only dictates without any matured thought process, never leave the opportunity of becoming their own boss. 

People frequently question as to how much can be earned? We must say that only you can define the limit. It depends on some key factors like how much time do you want to put in? How much effort do you put in? What is your skill level mainly when it comes to functional expertise like marketing (in case of pay per sales) or technical (programming in case of IT Programming solution)? It also depends upon one’s communication skill. Remember, the client is always in the driver’s seat and if you want repetitive business, then the Word of Mouth is of primary importance. If you can provide quality jobs, then you can even get reference from your existing clients.

The key of any success lies in 3Ds, namely
•	Determination
•	Dedication and
•	Devotion

What’s the problem if you keep on signing up a free newsletter? You will get continuous updates on the ways and add-ons to your web site, as the web world is continually being updated. 

Online Business Ventures

Here we are going to find out several avenues for making genuine money to take the fullest advantage of Internet and its most vital role in this advertisement bound age.

Create a Profitable Simple Product
If you are a product creator then your website is the best media to sell your product. You may sell your various products starting from electronics goods and ending up with soft toy. You can sell any or all of your products through the Internet.

Auction Buying and Selling
The emancipation of the cherished tradition of auction through action houses in the Internet era has given birth to an innovative way of auctioning over Internet. One can sell or buy by bidding at various sites through auction. One such most popular auction site is http://ebay.com. Rediff and Yahoo who also offer other auctioning facilities.

Actually the old method of auctioning used to be called as brick and mortar auction, has somehow reduced in the recent past, until it has found its resurgence today due to the Internet era. The prime advantage is that one can start looking for auction from the home comfort leaving the chaotic auction houses where the people used to reach after a lot of traveling. However the rule and charm of the auction remains the same. The seller displays his product and sells it to the highest bidder. Today one can start bidding even by $1. Another significant difference is auction was the stronghold of the rich people only but today it has been opened up even for the most ordinary ones.

The reach of Internet has put online auctioning on today’s in-thing list just like online share trading. One can find many people are just sitting at home and fiddling with the computer on any online share site according to their whims.

So, today you can get the scope of selling your unutilized car which perhaps occupies your valuable space, as you can pick and choose items as per your requirements. The funniest part is that even air tickets are sometimes placed on auction.

Service Provider and Serve Others
You can sell you or your company as a service provider over the Internet. This service is generally categorized as online services. This means you should sell your services that may be done online. Like you may write website content, or design a program in C/ C++, or send a database solution online to the buyers. Design jobs are one such salient example, where physical presence hardly becomes a parameter for service. Article and content writing has reached a platform of popularity as has the concept of SEO been changed and people have started realizing the need of SEO of which content is an inseparable part.

Affiliate Marketing
This is the origin of chain marketing. Affiliated programs remind us the cherished tradition of affiliation. Mostly you recommend people to the company’s web sites and dollars start accumulating against your name.  Suppose you are referring your friend to some company’s website, you get an instant commission. Again, when your friend starts earning, you get the affiliation commission. It’s based more on the concept of chain marketing and perhaps McDowell is the best example.

The payments and mode of payments vary from company to company. Some will pay you by cash or other tangible modes facilitating building a web site to refer to your affiliates. Some may offer you some official email-id for you to work while the advantage is that you don’t even need to achieve success in such affiliated programs.

You are free to use the advantage of emails to your known and unknown sources for building your chain, keeping in mind the restricted email addresses. As soon as the reader of the mail clicks on the link provided by you for the affiliation, you score. Even if the person clicks by mistake, then also you get the reward!

Referral Programs
Before delving into it lets look at the very basic philosophy, for which the companies/ agents/ Market Research Companies/ Individuals pay you. The simplest logic is through referral programs. The people, who browse your site glance the other sites too, whose links/ banners are located at your site. When they visit the sponsor's site from your site, then you are entitled to a payment. Google Adsense is one such typical referral program, but then it is just one basic step.

Now in some cases, they make it a point that the money will be paid to you, if and only if the visitor purchases goods or services from their sites. Then in such a situation the amount paid is also higher. 

The world of chain marketing has increased the true value of referrals, where you can get even life time benefits, once you refer the sponsors to some buyer and you keep on getting paid for each occurrence of purchase either by your referred customers or anybody under that hierarchy.

There are various ways of referrals. Some are like Survey and Earn, where companies pay to take the survey; Read email and Earn, where companies pay to read e-mails; Surf and Earn, where companies pay to surf the Internet
Get Paid for Your Opinions
Major Corporate giants prefer to test the viability of their products through market research. You must have noticed various beta versions being launched by several companies including Microsoft. Even if the test of acceptability is a continuous endeavor. Might be, today people are using Ariel as their prime detergent but who can guarantee that whether or not another new detergent will pave its way to the consumers and the popularity of Ariel will gradually recede. Remember, in this competitive world new brands are emerging everyday to challenge the brands who are holding their sway in the market. So, the companies want to research directly from the consumers to test their mindset. A continuous research only may reveal the level of acceptability and viability of their products and services. Generally filling out forms in the Web does it.  Forms are sent either by email or to the website.

The popularity of Internet has also changed the process of the Market Research companies, who prefer to do their Research online instead of sending employees to call on the consumers at home or the market place. Moreover these surveys have found their ground, as they are impartial, accurate and cost-effective. Online research to find opinions of the consumers at large have found his sanctity more because it can work irrespective of geographical differences as well as the results are sent back in much lesser time. Now as per the golden rule that nobody wants to spend his time free of cost, the direct companies as well as the MR companies share their money with common people. So, they pay you for your opinion. There are some companies, who also announce prizes for the best slogan or opinion. Nevertheless, online survey is a good way of making money for the common people as well as the most cost-effective Research & Analysis for the corporate giants.

If you want to treat this as a home business, you only need a PC and Internet, wherein your investment is really negligible. Again one needs to be cautious of the websites that promise you an exceptional huge amount like  $25 to $100 for every hour of service.  Again and again one needs to be cautious of short cuts to becoming rich offers. So, be careful don’t be lured into this world of allurement.

Read Emails and Earn Cash
We have discussed that marketing strategy is ever changing.  One such real innovative way of marketing the products and services is marketing through emails. One may call it-reformed mailers, which used to reach the consumers through the postal media. Many renowned companies have started using this methodology for branding their promotions. If you are a member of yahoo or MSN or Rediff email services, you must have been receiving plenty of mails everyday. It may be the financial products or Computer printers. They always come up with some promotional or discount offers. Companies are also using emails for collecting information on the competitor’s products. 

Companies want that their emails must be read properly and to ensure the proper usage of their emails they pay to you to read the emails. The emails are some usual promotional advertisements or even may be for gathering information on their competitors. Most of the emails you will find is encapsulated with a link to the original company’s site. This link will open the advertisement. In this way they ensure the visit to their website and some of them force you to leave the ad open for a mere 30 seconds when they focus on their key features.

Paid to Surf the Net
If you remember we had been discussing about Paid to Surf methodology to make your website popular. Now some other companies want to popularize the website by paying the visitors for visiting. Some of them will require you visit their web site and spend a reasonable amount of time. There are various auto surf sites that advertise their sponsors through rotation. What happens if you just stick to the original web site, you will find the sites rotating in turn. Each of them may be displayed for 30 seconds. The sponsored sites may be displayed either in a separate frame or even in separate windows. They must be visible to you, like the Advertisements on Television. The only difference is that while surfing their sites, you can continue working, but in case of TV, you can watch only one channel at a time.
 
There are also several web companies that give you tools to display on your browser while you open it. Some of the tools are really useful like pop-up blockers or default search engine facilities. Some of them also pop up some virus or memory usage warning in your browser. Some of them are really scams, be careful.

Please note that there are a few search engines, which also pay you for searching your requisite keywords/ phrases through that search engine. So, just imagine, you search on the Internet and even for that you are paid!

As the auto surf sites are primarily to display Advertisements, some search engines also pay for using their services just to make it popular by increasing the hit count. Now again, you may also plan to submit your website in some auto surf site to gain popularity. But how do you select? The first and foremost question is that you need to find out the payout rates. You ought to be skeptical about the exemplary high payouts. One must also find out where your payment is coming from? Is it from the advertisers or is it truly from the visitors?

Click and Earn Huge Checks
One of the most ultra modern way of marketing products and services is Pay per click or Click and Earn. Advertisers ensure visitors to their web sites by paying you for each click in their links/ banners. A simplistic look of Google Adsense also pays you per click basis. Pay per click is a program that earns money for you when visitors to your web site click on a banner or link of the merchant's site. This click will usually take them to your merchant partner's web site or opens up the promotional offer of your advertiser. You are paid by the merchant partner for directing crowd to the display of the advertisers' products and services.

The objective of the merchant partner obviously remains to sell the visitors, diverted from your site, some services or products of their own. But you get paid even if they don’t succeed in selling, because your job ends at dragging customers for them but NOT sales. One of the most recent examples are the Contera Advertisements. If you register with Contera, they supply you the requisite code, which you need to copy and paste in your website. Contera Advertisements are slightly different in nature. They find the matching keywords in your site and hyperlinks the keywords. When a visitor drags the mouse to those links, it displays the sponsor's Advertisements in a small decent box. If the visitor clicks on them, you earn.

Just imagine! You get paid only for drawing visitors.

You can also make money in referral or affiliate program by recruiting others to join the program. 

Merchant Accounts
We all are accustomed with the names like savings or current account and the presence of physical banks like Citibank, Bank of America, and HSBC as a part of our daily life. There is a very special type of account for online payment processing called Merchant Account. Generally these accounts facilitate online payments and also they work as virtual banks working with multiple currencies. There are many such merchant accounts available today. To facilitate online payments you need at least one such type of accounts. These banks work under the stipulations of world finance and the respective government financial headquarters. So, never worry of the red eyes of the government officials or excise/ customs officers for usage of these merchants’ accounts. The affiliate masters handle them.

Today most of the banks offer online transactions as a part of popularization of online and real time processing. These also enable you today to keep track of your performance/ payment/ transaction just within a few clicks of the mouse. Net banking has become a common phenomena for most of the banks/ Insurance companies/ other financial institutions. Once you are selecting any merchant accounts, ensure that your merchant account offers the same facility, which means an immediate processing of your financial transactions. Now any financial transaction should be done through secured payment gateways, because online customers may like to pay by Credit card, which has to be authenticated and processed online. SWIFT or EFT may complete the payment. The customer becomes also aware of the acceptance/ rejection of their credit card or transaction result without any delay.

Today, You will find some online banks, which takes the onus of authorizing the payment processing and immediately authorize you to download the ebook or other digital products.

Some of them are listed below
•	Paypal
•	Zoom
•	ClickBank
•	EGold
•	2Checkout

We advise you to keep on watching Internet everyday, because many new such merchant accounts are appearing everyday.

Job Exchange Sites
Today’s highly competitive world has taught us to maintain a standard in terms of quality in all jobs that we deliver to our customer. The ever-cherished tradition of ‘quality delivery on time’ is the key to survive when the competitors are breath down our necks. Professional companies and individuals have also accepted that the complete in-house solution may lead to an unwanted financial and management burden. The globalization and Internet era has made every professional very close. So, the concept of outsourcing has also found its zenith in today’s professional world. 

The outsourcing is primarily to focus in the line function of their key business arena and outsource the staff functions to somebody whose line function matches with your required staff functions. The fact of life is that a medium software company is less proficient in graphics design and on the other hand a graphics design company is less exposed to programming solution.

Let us take a simple example. Tally is financial software, which is used by many people around the world. The people have felt the need of using such software and reducing the monthly overhead cost of the accounts department. This may also be noted that the competition has started bringing down the sale price like anything. It starts with a computer and ends up with a ball pen. Now how to keep the sale price low? It’s not possible to keep on bleeding for years together, and then the company is bound to shut down. The most scientific way is to cut down on the internal cost. How to accomplish it? 

The significant result of such a phenomenal change has resulted in the emergence of companies like Elance, IT Match online, Get A Freelancer, Write a Lancer and so many. Their primary job is to liaison between vendors and a prospective buyer. You will find hundreds of jobs getting posted on any of these sites and there are lists of prospective vendors or freelancers, who get these projects by bidding. So, there is a job exchange at every point of time, where by the buyer has the option for choosing the best vendor, the vendor has got the option of earning from a job of his expertise or choice, and the freelancer companies earn their commission. So, everybody benefits.

One might be thinking, whether it is his cup of tea. The wide variety of jobs includes Programming, Designing, legal advise, real estate solution, Writing for Blogs & forum posting and even data entry. So one may find the job as per his profile, expertise and likings.

Become a Mystery Shopper
The quality conscious system demands the right feedback from the users. It has been noticed in the past that brands have been diluted because of ill treatment of their employees / staff members with the customers. So many retail business or service companies have felt the urge to know how their employees are behaving with the visitors/ customers. Obviously a snobby or unwilling reply from the counter is bound to distract customers in the long run. It has become more pertinent in today’s world when one will find almost everything that he needs in online shopping. Perhaps all online shopping malls have got the option of feedback and query resolution methodologies. Most of the online shoppers have got the chat system, where the buyer can directly interact with the vendor before his purchase. 

Mystery shoppers the most common profound methodology for research and analysis on the acceptability of their products and services, moreover the customer handling capabilities of their own people. This becomes the key data for future improvisations and designing newer products or marketing strategies.

Big corporations generally outsource these research jobs to reputed market research companies to do this third-party research for them. The market research companies hire common people to report unbiased observations. The MR companies finally do the data analysis jobs and send the detailed report with their suggestions to the parent company.

How to get these leads? Generally you are just to sign up with the companies and they will start sending assignments for you. You have always got your options open to be choosy about the products and services. The most significant advantage is that generally these jobs are a bit lenient in formulating deadlines so that you can do the research at your own comfort pace.

If you search the Internet with the keywords like “Mystery Shoppers” or “get paid to Shop”, you will find many such sites.  Be cautions about their authenticity.

Eat and Earn
Just imagine, people are paying you to eat.  This is also based on the same methodology of feedback for which the merchants/ companies are willing to pay you.  It’s their way of doing research on their service or food. As food is even more sensible because of its taste and quality, companies do very frequent research on these, which means one can earn a handsome money from this type of market research.

Most renowned restaurants/ Food outlets hire Eat and Earn market research companies to do this research work for them and again the MR companies can’t find a better person than you to find its taste. This had started a way back when big giants had started franchising their food products, mainly the recipe formula in exchange of a mere commission for enhancing their brands. The formula is low cost products that find its feasibility when the quantity is multiplied by unit cost that becomes possible only when the brand has got adequate number of outlets to sell. Today you will find franchise outlets of the most renowned food brands just next to your doorstep.

Posting for Profits
We have already discussed the need of a dynamic web site in terms of content. But the scope becomes highly limited, because most of the companies hardly change their mission/ vision or their key products. Facts and Figures may be useful to some extent, but that’s not all. 

A good way of keeping the web site dynamic is to invite opinion/ comments of different people in terms of Blogs/ Articles/ forum. Let us take a typical example. A site on mesothelioma is inviting comments from common people. So, people from different segments will share their experience and developments in that forum or Blog. Even people may write small articles to share the updates. So, your web site is being stuffed with the keyword mesothelioma, which is again a most wanted keyword for today’s search engines. So, this results in automatic dynamism for the site.

How does a website get so many people who are willing to write for them? These people invite people/ users from the world, who will be ready to keep on posting comments/ reviews or sending articles to their sites on a daily basis. This may be simple one liner, or comments of 3 to 4 lines or even articles of 250 words. The web site owner hires such people, who will be interested in doing research work on the net and keep on posting it everyday.

This job requires primarily research on the Internet and patience for building their comments/ blogs/ articles.

Simple Ways to Create Sales and Earnings

Pay per Lead
Pay Per Lead is a very profound marketing technique. In this method you refer sales lead to a merchant by some means like referral through your website or by sending mails to users describing the salient features of the merchant’s products. The objective is to send a potential customer to the merchant's web site. For your effort in sending this sales lead, the merchant pays you commission. This technology marvels have given scope to find visitors whether its from your own website or from the emails sent by you. Here your job is limited to sending leads only, NOT sales. 

Most importantly pay per lead is a pre- sale. The customer does not have to buy any product or service for him to be paid. The customer needs to visit only; prominently he has to show interest. Pay per Lead generally is done either by clicking links like Google Adsense or filling out forms showing the interest level of the customers, where the forms are to be submitted online. On receiving the form, the merchant starts applying his marketing techniques through various modes of interaction to convert the lead to a sale.

Let us take an example of Paypal (http://www.paypal.com), the virtual bank. Paypal pays you a sum of $5, when some referrals of yours sign up with paypal.

The most profound logic for the most renowned marketing giants is when an enquiry shows interest in your product or services and then half the marketing is accomplished. This based on the notion that an uninterested person will hardly waste his time is making a phone call or submitting the form for a product.

Lifetime commission
These are very special affiliate programs where the merchant commits to pay you for a longer duration. Say, you have generated a lead, which has been buying products or services in several occasions; the merchant also pays you for each sale. So, it becomes a lifetime earning for you for every sale made by the merchant to the customer/ consumer, you refer. You recommend just once and then money comes to you automatically for his every purchase. You hardly need any further effort or time to facilitate this lifetime earning. The merchant pays you a percentage of the money paid by the referrals for purchasing their goods or services. Your bank account gets flattened because the commission accumulates. 

You might compare them with Amway or Pioneer eBizz. 

Pay per Sales
This is categorically targeted at the marketing people. Unlike pay per lead, here one earns money if and only if the lead is truly converted to sales, which means he is to buy something from the merchant to make you eligible for payment. Here the merchant pays a direct commission, which is significantly more than pay per lead. 

If a company can sell his products or services through referrals without the establishment cost of a lucrative shopping mall, why should he mind to pay a huge commission? After all, his headache for overhead and staff management is getting reduced. In reality the equation does not read so simple. Generally renowned shopping malls or brands also sell through pay per sale for stock clearance or a sales boost. These are also called pay per action.

Now to generate pay per sales kind of issues, one needs to learn the very professional way of writing content and emails. You may watch the Advertisements all over, how they present their ideas in a most concise manner. The follow-up emails should be highly professional. So, you may opt for reading articles or for learning the art of writing emails. One may find not only plenty of books but also a major number of websites and articles that are talking on writing utility based emails.  You will find enormous books on Internet marketing like “Internet Marketing Basics 101”, “Internet Marketing Secrets”, some of which also come up with tutorials through a video, CD or demonstration.
 
Resale Rights
This is again for a hardcore sales person to prove his potential without any target given by your boss.

As a rule of law, the merchants send products to the dealers, from where the products reach the small outlets of your area. They also get commission for each sale and you can also start earning commission for each sale. What do you need to do? You sell products that were developed by other people or company. You get the resale rights and the after sales service also becomes your responsibility. Generally the warranty / guarantee is executed by the original manufacturer.

How should you go ahead? Essentially, you will buy the right to sell these products. Don’t get confused with licensing, because this is more than licensing. After purchasing the rights, you are even entitled to keep the entire amount. There are a few who retain a minimum percentage. If the original merchant is to provide the service, then the royalty percentage becomes much higher.

The product range varies from software to software or even an education portal. So, you can again select as per your contacts and target sectors. The significant advantage is you can excel without any interference from anybody and that too from the cozy comfort of your home.

Others
The day has come, when the advertisers leave no stone unturned for selling their products. In the old days, it had started with hoarding/ banners while today one can find the tabloids and other new methods. Can you even imagine that somebody will pay you just for driving your car carrying the advertiser’s logo/ banners/ hoarding? Reality however conforms to that. The most important part is that one can find such advertisements of ‘Get paid to Drive’ on the Internet itself. Never worry, the companies NOT only pay the petrol expenses, but also for insurance and obviously of your car.

Discount shopping is very favorable marketing strategy. Look for the merchant and start negotiating bulk rates with him and accordingly offer discount on your own website. You earn the money without any further efforts or payment.

Another such innovative way is Free Gifts. Perhaps this is meant for offering heartiest thanks with a personal touch for spending your valuable time upon visiting my web site. Anything that comes free is always welcome. Isn’t it? But some of them are really costly that can even change your lifestyle. So, Don’t delay! You may miss the bus.

Content Development
Before delving into Content Development, we must say that this a very specialized skill, which human beings acquire over a period of time. The Journalism and Mass Communication Courses can form the basis, but one needs to nurture a lot to gain expertise in this area.

The phenomenal growth of websites has made content development much more pertinent in today’s Internet era, when most of the website designers are looking for the right content. At one point of time, the Advertising agencies used to generate Advertisements for the companies, where they had got professional advisors/ experts to find out the right slogan and also to write the communication message on behalf of the companies. As web sites have become the primary marketing and communication toll in today’s world, so they need much more than some mere communication statements or slogans.

In today’s world the importance of content has increased in diversifying areas. Its required in eBooks, articles & Blogs and website content. Even a simple travel story may attract thousands of visitors to the website just for its excellent content.

If one delves into history, he will find the cherished tradition of mankind is to try utmost to grow up mentally since its inception. People leave no stone unturned for acquiring more knowledge and wisdom. In the story, we find, Adam and Eve had swallowed the forbidden fruit, but Alas! In reality we don’t have any such forbidden fruit gifted from God procured from the Garden of Eden. We need to take the hard way of gathering knowledge through education, discussions and endless studies. It hardly matters whether it’s a business achievement of personal goal – articles and blogs increase the knowledge base of individuals and in this complicated world, it has become a must, where people have become restless for abandoned money to get the best in the world.

How to write good content? We will try to brief a few points

1)	You must focus on your key objective
2)	It must be concise in manner
3)	It must bring some real life examples with cited reference to establish its sanctity
4)	Palatable presentation
5)	Hints about relevant references

Data Entry and Data Conversion
Financial institutions like banks, Insurance companies, Land & Revenue Offices, Courts and Judiciaries, publishers and other various companies have undergone computerization in the recent past. All of them have a wide collection of old records, which are still on papers and fill the record rooms. The problem is that the volume in such books and records are so huge that it is very difficult to convert them into computerized forms or records. Compatibility is a must and for that they ought to convert all old documents into the computerized data. So, as a first step, they scan the data and then outsource the scanned pages to the people for either online data entry to their databases or convert it to MS word or any such compatible format so that they can upload the entire document onto Net. This is where the home business is very useful. You get money either on a per page basis or per record basis.

As the documents, which are converted to the .doc or such other formats the objective is to convert the entire document to web pages they give some instructions like Header must be Arial Bold 16 or paragraph should begin with an Indent of 5. The reason is when finally they will be converted to web pages, they will use an engine, which has been programmed like those instructions. So, no manual interference is required at the time of running the engine. If one makes mistakes, then the engine will generate unprecedented results.

In case of Data Entry they either send you the software including the database, where data is to be entered or they send you the username and password for online access to their database. 

However in both such cases, a question of upfront payment have emerged in the market. We caution you against paying such huge up fronts to any unknown or unauthenticated person(s). The advantage of this job is that you don’t need much technical knowledge to accomplish a job successfully and to earn on a regular basis, as the volume of such a job generally becomes significant.
Precautions
We have said that it is the irony of fate when any business/ opportunity reaches the zenith of its popularity a lot of companies/ individuals mushroom around, who are being lured by its glitter but appear only to make some quick money by cheating people. Internet era is no way an exception. As home business has also reached its peak and moreover people have started taking home business/ Internet marketing as their key earning tool, the numbers of frauds have been drastically increased. The problem of globalization is that one is hardly aware of the physical existence of the other parties as both communicate mainly through email.  There is hardly any way to verify the physical existence of the office/ residence of the other party, when you have become truly global. 

So, we want to reiterate, whenever somebody intends to treat Internet Marketing as his additional or primary income, he needs to take enough precautions. We have listed some of the generic steps for online business, which needs to be strictly followed to avoid stepping into fraudulent traps.

•	About the company: You must try to acquire as much information as possible about the company and the site launched by them. There are some companies, who are new to the market but you will find many companies who are a group or subsidiary of some renowned group of companies. These companies are launched as a stepping-stone towards diversification of their business. In such a case, they clearly state the name of the parent company in their Home page or About Us section. Try to arrive at the physical location of the company. Calling them on the provided Toll free numbers etc may test their physical location. The physical address may be verified by sending postal documents to the address mentioned in their Contact Us page. Every virtual company has to have to some real existence. The most authentic way is to find out about their bank accounts because every virtual company must surely have a physical bank account.

•	Payouts: Try to ensure the site transactions through secured payment methods like Credit Cards, Paypal, eGold, Wire Transfer etc. This will also give you some kind of authenticity because all these verify the existence of the postal address and the company/ individual in their own way. Try to choose sites, which offer multiple currency payouts. Try to look at the payout rates. Most of the sites will advertise their payout frequencies and some of them will even display the list of names, who have become successful through their sites, in their Profile section..

•	Small Risk: We suggest you to start with a smaller amount, in case of down payment or security deposit, as the risk is quiet high.

•	Software: Try to find out the kind of software they are using. You need to check the security mechanism of the site. A small check can be done at your end only. Try to go to View Source in your IE and find out whether the username/ password is visible at your end. An authentic site uses encrypted software. If the site uses 128- bit encrypted software, you may be assured. You may find the logo of Verisign, the internationally recognized symbol of security to be embedded in their sites. You can do a cross check by visiting the Verisign.

•	Know the Terms & Conditions: You must take enough time to clearly understand the terms and conditions stipulated at the site. Don’t hesitate to give it time. If any doubts arise, clarify over mail or telephone. Please note that email is a valid communication in the eyes of cyber law. Whenever you are taking a new project, it is your obligation to go through the rules for that project very seriously.

•	Awareness: Try to always keep yourself updated through the news and events of various online Internet Marketing websites. We must say again, the best method is continuous research on the Internet. There are sites that constantly update one regarding the scams and frauds. Many people also post messages to different forums, when they come across cheating. So keep your eyes open.

•	Commission Calculation: This is something on which you need to do a lot of groundwork. There are many companies who commit commission on chain basis. Like if you sell something, then the commission goes to all the people above you on the ladder. The same thing holds good for any sale by the people in the lower rung of the ladder. What you need to calculate the total commission paid considering different payouts at different stages. If you find the sum exceeds the original cost of the item or turns to zero value for the parent company, you need to be highly skeptical about them. We have not come across any company, who pays commission above a certain limit.

•	Infrastructure: As you need to work online, then an Internet connection is very important. Some of the jobs even demand high-speed Internet connectivity. You must ensure a running machine, a good anti-virus and uninterrupted Internet connection at your end.

Conclusion

Home business and Internet marketing complement each other in this era. Why should one shy away? One needs to be desperate enough for arriving at factual data. Innate research strength has added fuel to fire. As we have been cautioning you through out against the frauds, so your challenge is to plug the loopholes and to be on the right track for earning the additional income, which will be an immense help to enhance your present lifestyle. Don’t be frustrated. We agree you have got genuine reasons for becoming frustrated by looking at several tempting advertisements at the home-based business sites.  

Why don’t you take a chance of building a website which will cater to information on Internet Marketing? Perhaps we can guarantee visitors keeping in mind the popularity of home-based business in today’s competitive world.

However we wind up with the famous adage that every cloud has a silver lining!