Chicago Animation Inc. is the only United States corporation
that can Guarantee your business web site #1 listing in Google and Yahoo, plus many more search engines world wide.
Search Engine Promotion
Read more about theSearch Engine Specialist
Chicago Online Business
Chicago Online Business is a site dedicated to providing you information on how to start an online business. Brought to you by: Chicago Animation
Online Paid Surveys Can Give You An Extra Income by: Edgar Holm
If you have been on the internet looking for an opportunity to earn money you have probably already heard about paid surveys. Online paid surveys are one of the first things money making opportunities people get to know. For people who have been on the internet for a while, this is well known. This article is for people who are new to paid surveys and if you are one of them you should keep on reading because it might be profitable for you.
In this article I have listed some common questions regarding paid surveys. I have also added answers to those questions based on my own experience as a user of this method for generating extra income. My purpose is to help you to gain a better understanding of the online paid survey process.
What is a survey actually?
Online surveys provide a way by which data about people, services or products are gathered through internet. This way to describe it is pretty good if you want to get an idea what to expect from such a survey. Each survey contain a number of questions on a particular topic. To give you an example, it can be a product satisfaction survey which may consist of various questions designed to get your opinion about different characteristics of the product - if you find it helpful, if it is costly for you or if it has a decent price, how frequently you would buy it, etc.
Which benefits does a company have from collecting answers from surveys?
Surveys are a major and widely used market research tool online as well as off line. They are a reliable and preferred method that many marketing companies use to assemble and filter consumers' opinion that help them improve their marketing activities.
What are some companies willing to pay me to answer such surveys?
In fact, many people would be happy to complete a survey for free. Today we are surrounded with people who want our opinion; in our mail boxes, on our phone and on our doorsteps. Many people are tiered of this and won't bother or will even give cheeky answers. If you are paid for your opinion, you are more likely to increase your engagement and give answers that are in harmony with what you really mean. When you are paid you have the necessary motivation to answer it and if you utilize this option from several companies you can earn extra money using paid surveys. That is why many - especially home mothers and fathers and other people with much leisure time - are attracted towards it. The expense represented by the payout is reasonable for the surveying marketing company - the data is vital for planning their activities thus saving a fortune on possible wrong marketing campaigns.
How can I start receiving online paid surveys and start to make money?
To enter the world of this opportunity to earn extra cash you just need to join some online paid survey programs. As soon as your registration, you will start receiving surveys. The frequency at which you get surveys will depend on your profile and on the survey company type as well as how many survey companies you have signed up for.
How much will I be earning?
The payment varies from each survey which means that each of them will bring you different amount of money. It will vary with the company as well as with the type of survey you answer. Some of them may bring you just $3 while other can add up to $50 and even more to your monthly balance. The total earnings each month depend on the kind of surveys you will be completing and their amount. The amount of surveys you get from one company is difficult to predict so you better do not depend on this income. What you can do though, is to join as many companies as possible. The more companies you the more income your are likely to receive.
How will I get paid?
Each individual company or site has a different payment method. The most common payment options are:
payment with cheque,
payment via Pal Pay (this requires a Paypal account which is free and very easy to get)
payment to your credit card.
Make sure that you have checked the method of payment that you need before taking up the surveys. This will keep you away for a nasty surprise.
Are there some scams I should watch out for?
As with most other online stuff, it is better to watch and be careful to whom you are disclosing your data. Unfortunately there are many more fake sites than the genuine ones and no wonder that you come across the fake ones in the first page of your search engine. If you take this seriously and treat it as a genuine income opportunity, it is mandatory to read the contracts, terms and conditions related to those sites. This will give you a fairly clear idea of how they operate or at least how you might lose your money! Serious paid survey companies will have their contact numbers and address displayed in their website. If this information is lacking you should think twice before investing.
I will recommend that you check out what other people are saying about the companies you consider to join. You can go to appropriate discussion forums and other media and publications which can give you an idea about that company. you can also do a search with the company or website name plus "review" or "testimonial". This will enable you to stay away from the scams and focus on serious paid survey companies.
I base many of my articles and newsletters on my own day to day experiences in the world of Internet marketing. Things that have happened to me. Emails I have received. Interactions I have had with customers, subscribers and other Internet marketers.
The more I work online, the more it becomes apparent to me that some people just don't 'get it'. What don't they get? Well in my experience, many things but the 'thing' that someone didn't 'get' this week was the benefit of marketing an affiliate product which has a recurring income element to it.....
One of my membership websites, SimplyWholesale, has an affiliate program which allows anyone to link to the site and earn 50% of any sales generated by their visitors. Nothing special here - millions of websites offer a similar deal. In addition, because one of the payment options offered by SimplyWholesale is a monthly subscription, my affiliates can also earn 50% of future monthly subscription payments made by a member who they introduce to the site. Again, nothing special here - many membership websites have the same arrangement.
So what's the story?
Well, last week I received an email from an affiliate 'complaining' that he wasn't earning enough money from his customers who were only signing up for the monthly subscription option. (A monthly membership is £4.99 so his earnings would have been £2.50 on each one). Now, this individual had been referring, on average, one new member to the site per day and the vast majority were opting for the monthly membership. The odd one here and there was paying for a yearly membership which generated a higher commission but the majority, as I say, were paying monthly.
So everyday for the past couple of weeks, this guy has earned £2.50 from having a single banner on his website. Assuming this continues for the next two weeks, he will have earned at least £77.50 for the month. Actually it will be more than this due to the annual subscriptions but let's keep things simple :-)
Ok, £77.50 isn't a life-changing sum of money but let's move things forward a month or two (and this is the bit that the guy clearly hadn't thought of when he emailed me with his 'complaint').....
Month two, assuming the level of sales continues, he will earn another £77.50 BUT he will also see an income from the second monthly subscription payments made by the members he referred to the site in month one. It is fair to assume that some members may cancel their subscriptions but to date we have a pretty low cancellation rate. Let's work on the worse case scenario and say that 20% of his members cancel in month two - he will still earn over £60 from the renewals. Add that to the £77.50 from the new members and month two earnings are getting on for £140. Things are starting to look a little more interesting....
This isn't just theory - let me back it up with some 'real-life' figures based on one of my actual affiliates....
This particular individual has one link to the SimplyWholesale site from one of his own sites and in the first month of being an affiliate, he earned £60.
Month two, daily sales continued and with renewal subscriptions, my affiliate earned £230.
Month three (the current month), this particular affiliate is on target to make over £400 in commission.
Each week this affiliate refers roughly the same number of new members to the site but look at how quickly the commission payments are growing each month.
The point of this article isn't to try and persuade you all to sign up as affiliates for SimplyWholesale (although that would be great!) but to get you to think about the potential of small payments either for your own products or as an affiliate.
I have built several businesses around very low pricing structures and it works very well. I am also an affiliate for one or two low price products and some of these schemes have been sending me cheques for years even though I stopped promoting the actual product ages ago (the commissions are earned from customers who I referred years ago who are still using the site or service in question).
With online business costs so low, it doesn't always have to be about the hundred dollar products and in fact, the 'less than a tenner' products can also be extremely lucrative....
Robin Hood And The Work At Home Scam by: Elaine Currie
This little scam has been around for a while. It does not feature in the "Top Ten" work at home scams but it might find its way there in the near future because there has been a sudden surge of activity recently from people imitating this particular online scam.
The scam is quite simple and works as follows.
A self styled work at home scam "investigator" sets up a website with an anti-scam type of name: DontLetThemScamU.com or ScamNoMore.inf or something along those lines. Some even manage to work the word "authority" or "agency" into the site name to add credibility by implying they are part of a government department.
The website home page will have large headlines warning that the Internet is full of work at home scam programs and promises to reveal the truth about them. The page tells us how the author has been scammed repeatedly by work at home scam programs and has lost boatloads of money online. It goes on to describe how the scammers' prey turned into the hunter and is now able to unmask the frauds and unveil the legitimate work at home programs discovered during his crusade.
The details of the story vary a little and sometimes the "chief investigator" has a female sidekick helping with the undercover investigations. One current version of the investigator's story is that this serial scam victim set out on a one man mission to investigate Internet work at home programs and unmask the scammers for the benefit of humanity. After spending five years contacting every home business program owner he could find on the Internet, he is going to share (at no charge) the benefit of his vast experience with us - like a kind of virtual Robin Hood. Let's call our example investigator Robin from now on.
When you visit his website, Robin invites you to subscribe to his email series so that he can explain in detail what work at home scams are to be encountered on the Internet and how to avoid falling for them. Everyone wants to avoid scams, so it seems sensible to subscribe.
When the emails arrive, Robin explains at length how practically every money making online opportunity is a scam. He lumps together all sorts of different online businesses such as real estate investing, stock market investing, HYIP's, affiliate marketing, paid online surveys and data entry programs, declaring them all to be scams. For good measure, he also throws in all books and courses about building an Internet business and declares the authors of all of them to be frauds. In most instances the accusations remain vague and Robin never offers any evidence to substantiate his allegations.
Fortunately, so Robin tells us, he has managed to find treasure in the midst of all the trash and can recommend just three programs as being honest. These three programs get his seal of approval as being legitimate home business opportunities and offering a real chance to make honest money from a home based business. To help you further, Robin tells you to sign up to his selected programs quickly because they are filling up fast and you might miss the chance to join and start earning the money you've always dreamed of.
The truth is that the real scammer is our virtual Robin Hood, our hero is actually a bad guy in disguise. Robin has not really spent five years selflessly researching Internet work at home programs and losing money to scammers for the benefit of his fellow man. He just painted all those other programs black to make his whitewashed offerings look legitimate by comparison.
All sorts of things about Robin's claims raise questions such as: If he was getting scammed and losing money, what did he live on? Can it be true that out of all the thousands of work at home opportunities available, there are only three legitimate ones? Does this mean companies like Avon and Tupperware have turned into scams? Apart from the niggling questions, you should instinctively distrust anyone who attempts to make his choice of work at home program look better by making derogatory comments about all the other available programs. If a work at home program is legitimate, its members will promote it without needing to tarnish the reputation of its competitors.
Why Data Recovery Not Too Late? by: Kanicen Nichathavan
As most of us already know, recovering data that is lost or damaged is known as data recovery. Data recovery can save a majority of your data information, in the form of hard drives, zip disks, CDs, DVDs, and other means of storage. Data recovery is very common these days, as it can help you get back on track after your hard drive crash or other means of destruction to your data.
On the professional side of things, there are a lot of companies out there who excel in data recovery. They have technicians who are experts in recovering your data, and spend a majority of their time working on hard drives. Recovering the information from a hard drive can be a very time consuming process, all depending on just how bad the drive has been damaged. If the hard drive is damaged physical or the sectors have been damaged, some of the data that was stored on it may be lost forever.
If you take immediate action and seek a repair service for your hard drive, you just may be able to save everything. In the result of a crash, virus, accidental deletion, or other disaster, you shouldn’t waste any time at all. You should always look into a company, preferably local, that can help you with your hard drive. The company will first do an evaluation on the hard drive, then contact you and discuss what options you have available with you.
To safely and efficiently recover your data using software, companies have a few choices they can use. Below, you’ll find some software examples that companies use to recover lost data on hard drives.
FIRE recovery
FIRE is a bootable program that can immediately take action with data recovery. It can also assist with virus scans, incident response, and forensic analysis. FIRE is a very common program, widely used by data recovery specialists around the world.
LDE recovery
Known as Linux Disc Editor, the LDE method of recovery was originally created for recovering lost files in Linux. It is an older method of software and data recovery, which proved to be very beneficial to those who used Linux.
NT recovery
The software for NT data recovery provides the proper read access for hard drives that are set up with NTFS in the Windows or MS DOS environment. This software is among the most popular for data recovery technicians, allowing them to copy files from NTFS to FAT volumes.
The above examples are all but a few among the software recovery methods. Software recovery can work with most hard drives, if they aren’t too badly damaged. If the hard drive has been damaged by flood, fire, or other physical damage, it will probably need to be rebuilt. Again, if you don’t waste in time seeking a technician, you may be able to get everything fixed. Rebuilding the hard drive will take quite a bit of time, as the technician will have to go through every inch of the drive and replace the parts that have been damaged.
As important as your data is, it’s always in your best interest to get on the ball and don’t let any time be wasted. Time is always of the essence, especially when it comes to recovering all of your data and information. Time will always prove to be the ultimate and deciding factor with your information - which is why you shouldn’t let one precious second be wasted whenever something happens to your hard drive.
6-Figure Internet Work At Home Moms On The Rise by: Paul Johnson
Can a work at home mom make a greater income than when she was working? The answer might surprise you.
One mom started her internet home business while she still held down a banking job. Then, when she started receiving regular $3,000 lump sums from her home business, it was time to head for the friendly confines of her home and family.
These payments started out slowly at first, then grew until she made $15,000 in one month, $21,000 in the next— and suddenly, she was faced with the prospect of not only having a thriving home based business, but complete financial freedom!
Her story is not unique. In exchange for around $3,995, you receive the rights to market a very powerful home business product, and the internet storefront necessary to sell it.
Once a storefront is set up for you, your only responsibility is generating traffic to it. The ways of doing this run the gamut from referring friends to your website, putting classified ads in the paper, or dropping off flyers, to running a small Google advertising campaign or taking advantage of powerful leads generating software you can manage from home.
And here’s the best part of this home business model. After your first qualifying lead, you get the first sale of everyone who comes in under you. That’s when your income starts to skyrocket.
Don’t confuse this business model with MLM or so-called pyramid schemes. You’re selling a legitimate home business product and a full blown marketing mechanism, including slick videos, audio testimonials—the works.
Think these businesses will take up too much of a mom’s time? Think again. A prospect who visits your home business site and fills in a brief form gets a call from a team leader, not the mom, who may be off quietly rocking her child to sleep.
Her time away from the home business goes unnoticed. She knows about each and every call back request and sale by receiving an email or phone confirmation or by visiting the “back office” of her website. With the rise of internet marketing, work at home moms never had it so good!
How To Start On Your Road To Riches With Google AdWords Today! by: Bruce Seah
How to start on your road to riches with Google AdWords today! Follow these simple steps and be inspired by this article that shows you how to make money online today.
First, find a product you want to promote, something you feel passionate about and that you know people will want it. Start with simple products such as software or ebook, a good place to start is to go to ClickBank.com and do a bit of research on the products you are looking for.
Second, perform a simple keyword research to identify potential target market, you can go to inventory.overture.com to find out what are the more popular keywords people are searching for.
Third, go and register an account at google.com/adwords and follow the simple instruction to put an AdWords advertisement with popular keywords to drive targeted visitors to your landing page or merchant website.
Fourth, it is important to have a landing page or opt in page to build your email list. It is vital to get an autoresponder as soon as possible to build your list.
Fifth, you will get paid whenever a visitor you refer makes a purchase or completes a required "call-to-action".
Before you go through these five steps, you must visualize success and see yourself making money online. You also need to be willing to invest in yourself, to learn as much as possible. You must be teachable and believe that you can do it. You also must identify a team you can work with or find a mentor who is willing to guide you. And most important of all you must enjoy what you are doing and that is why I ask you to find a product you are passionate about or believe wholeheartedly it will help people who need a solution to their problem. And, of course, you must take action and have enough discipline to commit to daily action to work on your computer and start making money online!
I've attended a world-famous personal development program called Money & YOU and one of the popular teachings is "The highest form of leverage is...EDUCATION" How much have you invested in educating yourself on personal development and business? Jay Abraham, the world renowned marketing genius, and my marketing guru, has constantly taught his students that marketing can give you great leverage and returns of thousands of percent!
It is obvious that if you want to be rich, you must do what the rich people are doing! Successful people are willing to share how they achieve their wealth and there are no secrets. There are lots of books written on creating wealth and lots of information is freely available from the Internet. This year I invested over $10,000 to learn more about internet marketing, you must be willing to invest before you can create wealth.
There are no short cuts, you must invest time, money and effort if you are serious about making money online! I happily invested $3,995 to learn from Jay Abraham about marketing at his 3-day billion dollar marketing weekend. And there were over 500 people from China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Singapore attending this special marketing seminar. And many of the participants were millionaires, CEOs, and top executives. This clearly shows that successful people are constantly investing in themselves.
Here's a great marketing tip for you, it is not how much you put into your business, it is how much your return on investment that you should focus on! If every $100 worth of advertisement gives you a $200 profit can you afford to keep on advertising it again and again? Of course, you will want to do it again and again because you have created a positive cashflow of $100 each time you place an advertisement!
There are literally thousands of people worldwide making decent part-time income through AdWords on the Internet, and it is a good start to generate your seed money for creating wealth! Do you believe you can make money from a 25 cent advertisment? Yes, you can if you have the knowledge on how to do it! Again, do not expect to achieve riches in a very short time, it does take time and for a few special ones it may take months and for most people it probably take years! It all depends on your burning desire and your commitment to creating wealth so that you can enjoy a better lifestyle!
Finding Proven Income Opportunities by: Jeff Houdyschell
Choosing the right work at home business to start or join can be a daunting task. However, if you do your homework and thoroughly investigate it, the choice can be much easier.
Finding a good, legitimate work at home opportunity for a newcomer is really easy once you know where to find them. Look for them where all of the successful internet marketers are hanging out! Do a Google search for “internet marketing forum” or “affiliate marketing forum” or “work at home business” or “work at home opportunity”.
When you enter a forum, look for how fresh the content is. If most of the posts are from today or the day before, then you are probably in a good spot. Once you are in the forum, you can try to search the forum for the name of the work at home opportunity you are interested in and read what others are saying about it. If there is nothing about your particular prospect or you do not have one, do not worry. A good, active forum will present you with numerous opportunities.
Resist the urge to join the forum and ask a general question like “how do I make money online”? That question is probably asked daily and may get ignored or answered in general terms or worse. What you are looking for here are the answers to your questions and also the more experienced members that are generally helpful to the newbie. Start out by looking for threads that may have the answers you are looking for.
When reading the posts by more experienced members, look down at the bottom of their post for what is called a signature. This is usually a link to that members’ web site and often a work at home business that you can also join. While at a member’s site, most likely you can join their newsletter or some subscription they offer and, in addition, look for a way to contact them other than the forum.
If their e-mail is listed or even a phone number, then get in touch with them and ask any questions you may have about the program they promote. This should give you a feel for how helpful they will be if you join their program. You may have not only found a good work at home opportunity but also a great mentor.
I cannot stress enough the role a few good forums will play, not only in choosing the right work at home business, but also what they offer in helping you on your way to a good, solid income and reaching your goals.
While a lot of identity theft is through the Internet and affect those who shop or do financial business online, there are still over half of identity theft U.S. residents being victimized by those that they know or have some sort or ongoing relationship with. The thieves could be members of the victim's family, housemates, roommates, coworkers, neighbors and alleged friends. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the affect of identity theft is felt just as often off the Internet as on.
The affect of identity Internet theft, or any identity theft is pervasive, hard to counteract and often devastating.
In identity theft, the perpetrator takes over the identity of a victim by stealing her or his private information - things of a critical nature such as driver's license, social security number, bank account number, or the number of her or his credit cards. How this identity theft, Internet or otherwise has an affect on the victim is to potentially see the ruination of credit as the thief illegally obtains loans that he or she fails to pay or opening credit card or merchant accounts that once again he or she fails to pay. To keep this identity theft fraud going as long as possible the thief also changes the billing addresses for these accounts so the victim is unaware of the unauthorized transactions as long as possible.
What these identity Internet and other thieves often do to affect this address change is to put in a phone change of address at the post office.
To counterbalance the affect of Internet identity theft, or to head it off before it even happens, it's first and foremost important that you give out your social security number sparingly, never record your debit or ATM card pin numbers, shred all important documents before you dispose of them, and at least once a year ask for and carefully study your credit report. You should order and review the reports from all three major credit reporting bureaus - TransUnion, Experian and Equifax.
5 Profitable Elements That You Need To Boost Your Internet Sales by: Alan Quan
Do you want to know what you might be missing when you are marketing your business? If so, include these five elements in you marketing and you can be confident that you will have a more solid sales message presented to your customers.
The technique’s ultimate goal is to motivate your viewers to action so that they will purchase your the product or service. Here are five things to include when selling your product on your site:
With billions of websites competing for you to notice their site, getting attention in the internet is hard work. It may be hard work, but this is the most important ingredient of the 5 elements because if viewers don’t visit; your blood, sweat, and tears that you’ve poured into your site will be completely useless!
A lot of internet marketing gimmicks that are used to catch your attention are flashy banner ads, annoying pop ups that offer you to win a free gadget totally unrelated to the site that they send you to, and SPAM in your email.
Unfortunately, because those annoying techniques are overused to desperately get your attention, a phenomenon called banner blindness is created. This causes most people to simply ignore all that garbage and not click on ANY banners
So what’s the solution to all this madness? You’ve got only a few seconds, so you must grab your prospects by the throat with a gripping headline. Words that give your prospects an emotional charge about the niche they love.
Remember these words have to be relevant to your target audience, not some stupid gimmick unrelated to your topic.
Interest
The next step is to boost your visitor’s curiosity with your product’s benefits, features and advantages. Concentrate on the benefits and advantages instead of the features because it gives your viewers more of an emotional attachment to your product.
For example, let’s say you are selling a camera. You tell your views that this camera has 10 mega pixels. That is a feature. It doesn’t tell how the customer benefits from those features.
A better way is to tell your viewers that this camera gives them the ability produce vivid memories of their daughter’s wedding so that they can look back with tears of joy in their eyes and cherish that momentous occasion forever.
Like Kodak says in their commercial, “It cost this much for the camera, and that much for the shoulder strap. But the joy on your daughter’s face at the happiest moment of her life is priceless!” That is a benefit, and that will keep them more interested!
Desire
Once you got them interested, convince your customer that they absolutely want your goods so badly that they can’t stand to live another moment of their life without it! Make them feel the pain if they don’t order your product.
And tell them how to avoid the pain – your product! Bombard them with benefits stacked on top of testimonials until they are ripping their hair out with excitement.
Action
Next, give SIMPLE action steps for your visitor to purchase. The fewer steps you give your customers, the better. But why is that?
Let’s say your viewer is pumped and ready with his credit to buy NOW! Unfortunately his wife tells him to get his butt down to the kitchen table immediately. Your wimpy viewer stuffs his belly, gets a food coma, and falls asleep.
When your viewer wakes up, he shuts off his computer and rushes to work. Sale lost. Remember the KISS rule…Keep It Simple Stupid! Make it as easy as possible for your customers to give you their money!
Satisfaction
Most importantly, your product has to be a good return on investment. It can’t be a crap product that they want a refund. If your customers love your product so much, they will happily buy from you again AND refer more business to you in the future.
Take a good look at your marketing messages you have right now. If you are missing any these basic five elements, you need to integrate these five elements immediately and watch your sales increase.
Work From Home 24-Hours A Day? How's That Possible? by: Bob Saville
What? What do you mean work at home for 24-hours a day? You can't possibly do that! You barely have enough time to get your regular job done, and then spend a few moments maintaining your fledgling business - and still have a few spare moments for family and friends. It sometimes seems like you have bit off more than you can chew, but I think I might be able to show you how you can work from home 24-hours a day, and not really be working.
It's called passive income. Sure you can work from home and you can put in an 8-hour day, or you can work on one project an hour a day, and have it make you money around the clock. How you ask? Here are three ways you can do it:
1.) Internet sales site - It doesn't matter what you are selling. If there is a market for it, and you have it on the Internet, then all the work from home you have to do is fill orders or make sure that the site is maintained. People all over the world are on the Internet 24-hours a day and that means you have a virtual store that is attracting sales constantly. For just a little bit of time each day, you can easily 'work from home' for 24-hours a day with an Internet sales site.
2.) Downloadable E-book - Find an information niche that needs to be filled and you can make a decent passive income as each book sells! Literally thousands of people have become instant 'authors' with the growth of the e-book industry. You don't have to be Stephen King or Nora Roberts to make a nice side income from an e-book. Yes, this is a work at home business - but all the work you have to do is: find a writer for the book (or write it yourself), build an attractive sales page, and then watch as the sales grow - along with your passive income!
3.) Affiliate Marketing - This is one of the buzz-phrases in work at home projects. This is literally becoming an affiliate store for certain products on the Internet - ranging from major stores like Wal-Mart or Target - to people just like yourself who are trying to build their marketing network.
Affiliate marketing basically works by pointing different web users in the direction they want to go for product - basically a directional sign for the Internet. Once you direct a person to a specific site - if they buy, you collect a percentage of that sale. How easy is that? And they still call it 'work from home'!
So, as you can see, it isn't as difficult to 'work' from home for 24-hours a day as you might have first imagined. It takes a little bit of business sense, and maybe some Internet savvy to get started - but after that, for a few hours of maintenance per week, you can generate income around the clock!
Affiliate Programs – How to Use Commission Junction by: John V. W.Howe
The affiliate program is probably the best return for your effort with the least demand on your time. This has an appeal to the Boomer Entrepreneur since we want to run the business and not have it run us. We want to have time to “kick back and smell the roses”.
The attraction to this model is that it is virtually risk free except for your time. It costs you nothing to sign up as an affiliate. You recommend the product and send your visitors to the website where the product is sold and if the customer purchases the product, you are paid a commission. Amazon.com is credited with being the first businesses on the Net to fully develop the affiliate concept and now all the major companies have affiliate programs.
When you sign up as an affiliate, you will be given an affiliate number, and a special link to use for linking to the affiliate website. This link will send your visitor to the business site and at the same time tell the business that you sent the visitor so you will receive the commission in the case of a sale.
There are companies that do the accounting and act as the coordinator between affiliates and the companies they represent. These are called affiliate program providers (APP’s). One of the major sites for handling affiliate accounting is called Commission Junction. It handles eBay and others. The major site for electronic products is ClickBank. Other sites are BeFree, Linkshare, and Performics. A German APP is Affili.net.
Commission Junction is the largest APP and handles many great companies. To fully explore what is available, you need to sign up at CJ and look for affiliates there. You will be able to see who the companies are and the commission structure of each. You can then join the program right in CJ without having to go to each company and apply.
I suggest that you join CJ and study the many companies that are represented. Take note of a few that you feel might be ones that you would like to represent. Don’t join the affiliate program yet, but go to Google and research the company website. See if they sell themselves well and will support the sales effort that you are going to expend to sell their products or services. Also, from CJ, you can link to the landing page in the company website. Go there and check it out to see if it sells well.
Step by Step Start
The following will lead you through the sign up process as a Commission Junction publisher. This process is longer than most that you have previously completed. Be prepared to complete two pages of information. The second page is long and detailed.
First page: Select your language, country, and currency. Click NEXT.
Second page: After swearing to abide by the rules and regs, you will be asked for information about your newsletter or website (URL). If you have a website, you can enter it. If not, make up a name for the eZine that you may plan to publish. For this application, you must make up a newsletter name if you do not have a website (URL). Be creative!
You will then be asked about your promotional methods. Click the Website/Content and Search Engine Marketing buttons. Next click “NO” on the radio button that asks if you donate any proceeds to charity (unless you want to do so).
Next you will be asked to enter all the information needed for setting up your account. You might have to attempt this page a couple of times since you might not have all the info you might need the first time. A key item you will need is social security number or tax ID if you are registering as a business. If you want to have your payments direct deposited, get a blank check so you will have the info to set up the banking information.
When you finish giving CJ your entire pedigree, click “Accept Terms” and you are on your way. Check your Inbox for an email from CJ with your acceptance message and password.
Sign up for Commission Junction at
https://signup.cj.com/member/publisherSignUp.do
Once you have received your acceptance email from Commission Junction, log in to www.cj.com and use your password to enter. When you are logged in, you will be on your Commission Junction Home Page. It shows your account status and basic accounting info. It also shows the new advertisers on CJ. You might see if any of these look appealing since you can jump right on them and get a head start.
Near the top of the page click on “Account”. This is where you can update the information that you entered on your application.
Now down to business. Click on the “Get Links” tab near the top and you will be presented the page where you can find advertisers. There are several ways to view it: By category, by advertiser name, by Smart Zone, and by relationship which will list all the accounts with which you have an established relationship.
As an example, to find a company with which you are familiar (eBay), select the Category view and in the left column under Commerce, click “Auctions”. The page that is presented will contain various auction sites, but you will recognize most of them as the various eBay sites for the USA and other countries.
To join an affiliate, click on the “View Links” in the box with the affiliate name. You will be presented with the various banner ads and links for the affiliate. Pick one and click on it. If you are not a member of the affiliate program, you will be presented a page describing the program and at the bottom of the page is a button “Join Program”. Click this and see the response. Sometimes you will be accepted immediately and sometimes you will get a message that you will be notified after your application has been reviewed. Go ahead and join eBay USA since you should be accepted immediately by it.
The sequence of “Get Links” and “Join Program” is how you sign up for the affiliate programs that you want to represent. It is all in Commission Junction and it makes it very easy for you to grow an affiliate program as your online job.
Note: Some affiliates require that you have a website when you sign up with them. You can build a website later and reapply if this affiliate program is one you want to pursue as an online job.
A word of caution: Becoming an affiliate does not automatically make you rich. Becoming an affiliate establishes the relationship to let you promote a product and get paid for successful promotion. It is up to you to do the work of driving traffic to the affiliate site. If you do your job well, a percentage of the traffic will purchase from the site and you will be paid a commission for those purchases.
This concludes your education about Commission Junction. It is a powerful website and is a “must join” if you are going to create an affiliate program.
Good luck with your future affiliate programs.
What is the difference between sponsored listing and natural search results? Google and Yahoo both accept advertisers to pay per click and bid on the keywords that the advertisers want to get to the top of the sponsored listing. We circled the sponsored listings using a red pen. Google and Yahoo will charge the advertiser from $3 to $10 or more for each time someone click on the site (depends on how rich your competitors are). The other results you see on the left side is the natural listing search results. Natural search results are free and is very hard to get a #1 position in Yahoo, or Google. You will need a search engine specialist to help you to achieve this very high ranking. We can help you to get a high ranking in Google and Yahoo, plus many more search engines. If you prefer the sponsored listing for your business, we proudly present to you our Pay Per Click management service
Search Engine Specialist What does it mean if I get #1 listing in Google and Yahoo?
"Getting #1 in Google, Yahoo will allow your business top pripority of all incoming leads. The more traffic you get, the more money coming into your pocket." Tom / Search Engine Specialist
General Question Why do I need a high end Flash Animation website?
"Flash Animation is beauty, attractive, and elegance. A high end Flash Animation website has all those features of gorgeousness embedded into it to bring out its purest form of luxury." Tom / Customize Flash Templates
Free Website Ranking Analysis (Fill out the form below)
or Call our corporate office (832) 685-4705 or(832) 613-3689
Sincerely Yours, CEO of Chicago Animation Inc.
(832) 685-4705 (Corporate Office)
(312) 235-2129 (Chicago Local Phone #)
(832) 613-3689 (Houston office line 2) Contact us | Frequently Asked Questions
Chicago Animation Inc. built this site for our client Sean Moynihan. He's the owner of VTL solutions Inc. He's in the business of selling VTL's CNC and Remanufactured VTL machines.Sean Moynihan / CEO / VTL Solutions Inc.
Testimony #2:
"Chicago Animation Inc. did a great job building my website for my business. They are very easy to work with and helped me get noticed with google/yahoo search engines. I would strongly recommend using their services."Nick A. Wallace / CEO / Chicago Paving Contractor / PaveWorks Inc.
Please click here to Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to receive Top of the line Free Marketing Tips.
