Every web surfer has encountered the dreaded 404 page not found error message. The generic error page is horrible to look at and it does not encourage web visitors to explore more of your site.

Imagine being able to setup a custom error message page that looked good, told the visitor what had gone wrong and then suggested some alteative links to other locations on your site, such as the home page, sitemap or even a search page.

If the visitor wanted to, they could then visit other parts of your site.

It is very easy to setup a custom 404 error page (The 404 error is the error number retued when a page or directory is not found on your site).

The easiest way to redirect visitors that encounter a 404 is to either send them to your sites home page or to your sitemap page

We do this by placing a one line of code in your websites .htaccess file

ErrorDocument 404 /sitemap.html

This would redirect all 404 error messages to the sitemap page.

The path to the page you want to display, must already exist on your web server, otherwise the web server will tie itself up in a never ending loop. The full path to the error page must be specified and it must be relative to the root path of that account (remember, placing a / at the front of a file name or directory specifies that it�s relative to the root directory).

To make a custom error page, simply create a page using your favorite webpage editor such as MS FrontPage or DreamWeaver. The page can contain anything you wish, such as images, links etc. Save the file as something easy to remember (such as 404errors.html)

I would then suggest you make a directory directly off your /public_html/ folder and call it �error� and place your error files in here.

This would now mean that your .htaccess command line would now look like: ErrorDocument 404 /error/404errors.html

Now whenever a 404 error was generated on your site, your custom error page will be displayed, and keep your web visitors happy.

In the upcoming article, I will expand on this idea, and show you how to you can receive an email notification that a 404 error has occurred on your site. It will tell you what caused the error, and the offending page. Allowing you to try and fix all broken links leading to your site.

Bruce Hearder owns and run http://www.WebsiteSecrets101.com. A site with tips and tricks to getting the most out of your existing website. Signup for the WebSiteSecrets101 newsletter, and lea the tricks webmasters use on their sites.

I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that online businesses -- just like brick and mortar businesses -- have a very high failure rate for startups. Ever wonder why that is? There are several business consultants, success gurus, and motivational experts who can tell you. The problem is: Most of us don�t listen.

How many times have we heard the "success secrets" of the multimillion-dollar pros? Countless times we have all been preached to about setting goals, having a defined plan, giving it all we�ve got, and aiming high. Yet still, take a look around. The statistics of small business failures have not changed. In the first five years of starting a new business, the odds say that you�ll fail.

Ready for the good news? There is one thing I can tell you -- from personal experience, and from the experience of well-known, successful online business owners that I know. More important than setting goals, more than following a plan, more than shooting for the moon, is your mindset. Ask people who have succeeded online how they did it, and they are sure to tell you that they had to. That�s right -- they HAD to. Why? Because failure is not an option.

When you set your sights on something as grand as starting your own business, you simply have to have the mindset that, regardless of what happens, you will not allow yourself to fail.

When difficulties come, the "failure is not an option" attitude will drive you to overcome them. When things aren�t going as you originally planned (and many times they won�t), "failure is not an option" will keep you from folding. When everybody else tells you that you can�t make it, you will be able to tell them you can because "failure is not an option."

Those whose thinking allows them an "out," those who begin a business with the idea that if it doesn�t work out -- "oh well," are the ones who will most likely falter. However, on the other hand, those who have no choice but to succeed will do exactly that.

Are you considering starting a new business? Do you have a business that isn�t performing the way it should? Take a look at your attitude. Yes, it is important to set goals and follow through with them. It is vital that you have the knowledge and funds to operate a business the right way. However, those things won�t carry you very far if you allow yourself to think that it�s OK to fail.

Take some time this week to double-check your thinking. Are you "hoping" your company will make it? Do you "wonder" if everything will work out all right? When you eliminate the option of failure, you open up the flow of creativity, you boost your level of willpower, and you energize your thinking so that only those things that lead to success can control your mind. Once you accomplish that, the only viable alteative is to make it, and make it big!

Copyright 2004 Diane Hughes

About The Author

Diane C. Hughes * ProBizTips.com

FREE Report: Amazingly Simple (Yet Super Powerful)

Ways To Skyrocket Your Sales And Build Your Business

Into A Tower of Profits! ==>> http://madmarketer.com/diane

With the surge of instant messaging - whether through AOL, Yahoo or one road runner giving a letter to another - there is now the need for good away messages. An away message is similar to an answering machine, telling a friend, relative or stalker of one's absence and then kindly asking for a response. In order to help society - since we all know that's my general goal in life - I have been thinking for the past four minutes of possible away messages for general worldwide usage. But then I realized that there was no universal language, except for the music of Ruben Studdard, so I will instead resort to providing tips�

Quotes seem to be a popular part of away messages. People tend to quote famous people, or those whose opinions matter, because it tends to be easier to use someone else's words than to use your own. Something tells me, though, that if people like John Lennon and John F. Kennedy knew that their words were being used in away messages, they would die. And that's a big deal considering they are already dead. So I suggest that people start quoting those whom no one knows or cares about. You know, someone like me. I have 400 columns you can borrow from, or to save you time, go ahead and use this: "I don't really like scrambled eggs. The shells always cut my tongue."

Aside from using an obscure quote, it also seems necessary to make it seem like you are busy. You know, so busy that you couldn't even exit your messaging program but somehow weren't too busy to type an away message. Go figure. Telling people you are busy just won't cut it, however, because we all know that people lie, except for me when I made that scrambled eggs comment. Thus, being more subtle about one's busy schedule is key, ie: "I really don't like scrambled eggs. The shells always cut my tongue." This may seem like a previous example, but look closely: I reversed two of the words for effect...

My final tip for away messages will likely revolutionize the way we all look at life. I really don't like that Mikey character; I still don't think he enjoyed the cereal� Oh, I'm sorry, wrong life...

At any rate, my final tip is that since people try so hard to be unique with their messages and make comments that make sense, why not just list a bunch of random words that you think people may want to use in conversation? I would suggest "mouse pad" and "boomerang" as starters. Or maybe just use a semi-colon as an away message because people need to start appreciating those more. The same goes for telemarketers, minus the appreciation part...

When all else fails, realize that an away message can simply state "I am not here. Leave a message." Just keep in mind that no one will talk to you� ever� again. But I guess that's fine. You're too busy anyway�

But I digress.

Greg Gagliardi is a teacher and writer. His stream-of-consciousness weekly humor column, "Progressive Revelations," has been ongoing since 1998. (http://www.ProgressiveRevelations.com)

Do you think anyone has declared moving type to be the end of civilization in the same way people said typewriters were killing letter writing, telephones were isolating people, and television and the Inteet were isolating young folk from other people? Did anyone rouse the mob to drive out that wicked Johannes Gutenberg and his dreadful machine? Certainly the people who said that telephone was killing the art of letter writing have yet to suggest that email is bringing back that same historic art.

Obviously, few emails are works of art, and you can�t write and email in a graceful flowing hand on beautiful soft cr�me paper with an intense and delightful color of ink. But then, most people can�t write in a graceful flowing handwriting, and never could, even with the right pen, right ink and right paper. On the other hand, what people CAN put in an email is steadily expanding. We already have the option of colored text, delightful fonts, pictures, and even animated pictures in the email. The fanciest handwriting on the most expensive paper never managed moving images. A friend of mine has picked an appealing color and an attractive �handwriting� script and used them for her name in her �sig� file. This is so every message she sends can be �signed in a graceful flowing hand.� When you email people you can send all of your friends an interesting article or photos of your newbo baby without delay and without sending photocopies of the original.

Clearly we have all the tools to revive the art of letter writing. Do we also have the patience and the artistry? Are we willing to expend that artistry and time on emails? Or, are emails doomed by their humble and colorless beginnings to forever being the brief notes of the electronic world, while �the artistry� is poured into blogs and web pages with their larger readership and longer life?

By Allan T. Price http://www.m6.net Allan T. Price is a creative writer whose emails are artistically worded, but never artistic looking. He doesn�t have a blog beyond this, but he may just start one now. Allan T. Price is a creative writer working at M6.Net: �The web-hosting company for humans.� M6.Net is working hard to help humanity experience the power and freedom to develop their own part of the Inteet, to share their information and connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

The Inteet is bridging the gap between between today and tomorrow with it's rapid acceptance as an universal platform for conducting business. It is responsible for allowing businesses to cross geographical barriers and making the world a much smaller place.

Business Opportunities abound on the net and an understanding of the essence of e-business can mean the difference between e-success and e-failure. The e-business equation can be formulated as:

((N+P+W+E+L+Tr)+T+R+K+M+O)) = E-Business Success

Now, let's take the mystery out of e-business. Experienced and successful inteet marketers will quickly realise that all the success they have had is engulfed in these variables. The key to e-business is "Niche Research" (N) followed by "Product Selection" (P). Niche Research involves identifying the target market for doing business and Product Selection is geared towards the selection of an offering for that target market. Product Selection could mean one's own product, a private label rights (PLR) product converted as one's own product, a product from an affiliate program or a product with re-sale rights.

The third variable is "Website Setup" (W) which involves the domain registration, obtaining hosting space and defining the contents and copy for the business website. "Ezine Creation" (E) is the prelude to "List Building" (L) and can go a long way in building the necessary relationship with your subscribers in your target market. The money is in the "list", they say and not without reason as your list is a database of subscribers tuned towards your target market segment.

The sixth variable is "Traffic Generation" (Tr) and it takes only common sense to realise that there can be no profits with no traffic.

These six variables make up the process and all it takes now is to integrate the process with the necessary collection of "Tools" (T), information on "Resources"(R), gathering of "Knowledge" (K) and inculcation of "Motivation" (M) to take e-success to a new level and the way one integrates the first six variables with the last four will separate the men from the boys.

The "Other Variables" (O) is the human factor which determines the extent of e-success between different inteet entrepreneurs. The newbies in e-business should not forget that achievers in the e-business arena do not have "more inteet" than the newbies themselves. It is just the way they integrate the variables along with the recognition of the fact that action and not in-action leads to de-mystifying the mystery of e-business success. Business opportunities and online profits are not as far off as one thinks provided the variables goveing it are understood and implemented.

Jayadeep Rath is the founder of http://www.My-Business-Opportunity.com and also runs a manual traffic exchange by the name of http://www.EatSleepTraffic.com He has a newsletter to share various resources, opportunities and strategies relating to E-Business with subscribers at http://www.My-Business-Opportunity.com

This article may be published if no changes are made to the article as well as the resource box and all links are kept live.

There are many ways to bring your income to the next level, and it all relies on just a little work that you can take anytime. So what do you need to take action on for your online business venture?

Here are a few ways you can create a greater stream of income through your own Inteet Marketing:

1. Publish an e-zine
Have you started publishing your own e-zines yet? E-zines are newsletters that you send out every few days for your subscribers so that they can read and gain information from.

E-zines can also help you improve the relationship between you and your subscribers, sell your products, and promote any affiliated programs. As many gurus have mentioned, �the gold�s in the list�.

2. Publish testimonials
Testimonials can greatly increase your sales as it works like a proof � that the products you sell works. No one wants to buy junk, people are skeptical with anything that includes money.

So clear off the doubt in your visitors and show them the proof, testimonials from your customers, and that will greatly increase trust which eventually leads to profit.

3. Write articles
When is the last time you have written articles to be published in article directories? These articles you�ve written and submitted will be seen by thousands and thousands of people, and sometimes if your articles are good they�ll be used and published on websites.

This way, you can drive tons and tons of traffic to your site without cost at all, and every visitor are potential buyers.

4. Tracking your advertising
It is important that you track your advertising. If you have involved in Pay-Per-Click advertising like Google Adwords or Overture, you can clear off the ineffective keywords, and only bid on more profitable keywords that brings you profit.

5. Offering a guarantee
This is extremely important. 70% of people who sees no guarantee will leave the sales page just because they�re not convinced! If your product delivers well, why won�t you offer a guarantee?

You must ea your visitor�s trust, only then will they be comfortable in investing their money for your product.

6. Promote your own affiliate program
Whenever you have the chance to do so, execute the plan. Many times people will not have the urge to take action until they are asked to do so. Try to emphasize the benefits over and over again about affiliating your product, provide sufficient tools, and you�ll be receiving a whole lot more in your profits.

7. Publish an affiliate newsletter
Once you have gotten your affiliates, you can�t let them do it all by themselves. Provide them an affiliate newsletter, share affiliate tips and strategies with them so that they can successfully promote your product.

If you haven�t included these steps in your online business venture, make sure you�ll grab hold of it right now and execute them right away to multiply your revenues.

To your success,

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com

Seth Chong is the owner of IMViral, one of the largest, biggest viral Inteet Marketing Newsletter which is being spread around the world, you can sign up for the Newsletter(worths $197) for Free at www.IMViral.com

You're about to discover something that I honestly believe can CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

This is a concept that drives my marketing. This concept continues to make me a small fortune. Today I want to share this concept with you.

"Crap can make you rich."

Don't laugh. Let me explain.

The beautiful thing about marketing online is that we can achieve RESULTS for anything LIGHTNING FAST.

We can put up some Google AdWords, drive some traffic, and starting getting results in a matter of MINUTES.

I can essentially write a sales letter, include an opt-in form, and create a little infoproduct to sell, all in less than ONE HOUR and have it getting results.

Okay, so the product may completely STINK. i.e. it's CRAP. The sales letter may be nothing but CRAP too. And even if someone DOES order, they'll be getting that product which is CRAP and most likely will request a refund. Heck, after all, I only spent an hour on the entire thing.

But none of that matters. The GOLD is not in the crap itself, the gold is in the RESULTS.

Everything in marketing has a "Cause and Effect" -- everything.

If you put up the WORST CRAP EVER right now on a web site, something WILL happen. And those results are what eventually drives a few hundred dollars a month in profit, and eventually produces several thousand dollars a month, and can eventually create a small fortune.

Okay, so maybe your conversion rate will initially be 1 out of 1,000. That's okay. With enough data that 1 out of 1,000 will become a solid average and that site will CONSISTENTLY produce 1 sale out of 1,000 visitors.

Hey, welcome to a CRAP conversion rate. :-)

Hehe, but seriously...

The point is this. There is tremendous value in a 1 out of 1,000 visitor conversion rate -- no matter what the price of the product is. No matter what the offer is. Why? Because it's GUARANTEED that you can IMPROVE upon it. You can make it better. You CAN get MORE people to buy.

All you have to do is improve your marketing. Test small changes. Try a few little tweaks. Improve it little by little.

Get better and better RESULTS.

Here is something I want you to engrave deep into your brain...

You will NEVER, that's right, NEVER, launch a site or any marketing that will be even 10% of "perfect". You're never going to launch a site that starts pulling a 10% conversion ratio, let alone 100%.

(And before you email me and tell me that a site you launched pulled a 10%+ conversion rate, I'm not talking about the results of a strong endorsement someone did for you. I'm talking about an AVERAGE conversion rate from ALL the traffic sources you point at your site.)

So why are you spending SO MUCH TIME to get that latest project launched? What the heck are you waiting for?

Know this... everyday that goes by without you launching your latest project is a day that you could be using to test and IMPROVE upon what that project produces.

Yes, that means make you more money.

Your project will never be perfect. You could have always made it better. You could have always done this or done that.

WRITE THIS DOWN...

"The biggest piece of crap ever created and launched online makes more money than an almost-perfect project that was never launched."

Is my point getting through to you?

The biggest mistake we entrepreneurs make is trying to make our little projects PERFECT before we are willing to launch them and see what they will do.

This can be the "kiss of death" for our businesses. Because until we launch projects we don't get any RESULTS.

What you need to realize is that RESULTS are the biggest ASSET to your online business. Even the CRAPPY RESULTS.

Because the results are what tells us what is working and what isn't. And believe me, I've probably made MORE MONEY from the results I discovered about things that weren't working, so don't just think it's all about what works.

So lea to produce projects on an ACCELERATED launch schedule. Just get the sucker to the quickest version that will allow you to launch it and start getting ANY results at all. Then spend your time IMPROVING on the results.

Let's face it. Many of our projects FLOP. It just happens. People just won't buy enough of something to make it profitable. So we must move on and work on another project. Get it out there and see if that one starts making money. Repeating the process again and again.

But think about what I just said and realize something. If you KNOW the reality that many of your projects will fail, why the heck are you taking so long to find out?

It's probably the same reason *I've* often delayed things... FEAR.

I'm AFRAID to see my "baby", my special project, fail. But since we've already come to realize that the reality of business is that some projects WILL FAIL, we just need to GET OVER IT.

Put that CRAP together and launch it! Unpolished. Unperfected. Ugly. Yes, I say let the crap fly! (no, not that crap.)

So get your projects launched absolutely, without a doubt, as quickly as possible. Get SOME results. Any results. THEN work on improving whatever those results are to increase your profits.

If you are planning on doing JVs with people for your new product, or rolling out an affiliate program for it, the "JOHN REESE CRAP METHOD" (as I will call it) still definitely works.

Here's how you use it...

You put together your web site and product as quickly as possible. Go jump on Google and buy some AdWords traffic to point at the site. Start tracking the results -- no matter what they are. Make changes and TEST them. Continuously work to improve the results of the site.

When you're able to get the site to a satisfactory conversion level, then and only then proceed with putting together JV deals and really rolling out the product.

You know, the biggest kiss of death for an online marketer can be to launch a product with JV partners WITHOUT having first tested and improved a site's conversion. Do you think your JV partners are going to promote your next project if the initial one completely FLOPS and doesn't make them any money? Absolutely not.

SO USE THE "JOHN REESE CRAP METHOD" AND PROFIT!

1. Create and launch crap. 2. Test that crap. 3. Improve that crap. 4. Make money with crap that eventually becomes non-crap.

Seriously. Don't laugh. This process works. Again and again. It has made me rich.

Lea it. Live it. Love it. Let crap make YOU rich.

-----------------------------------------
John Reese is an Inteet Marketing pioneer that has been actively marketing online since 1990. John has sold millions of dollars worth of products and services online and his network of Web Sites have received over 1.4 BILLION Web Site visitors since their inception. You can lea more about John, his home study courses, and subscribe to his free ezine by visiting:

http://www.marketingsecrets.com

(c)2003 MarketingSecrets.com. All rights reserved.

Before you send an email to your leads, just think about all the garbage you get in your Inbox each day. Is your email going to add to that garbage or is it bringing something of value? Are you cultivating your contacts or are you just filling up their Inbox with junk they'll delete before reading? The answers to those questions will determine your success in this business, so proceed with caution!

As of January 7, 2004, these are the Anti-Spam Guidelines you MUST follow to stay legal:

(1) The new CAN-SPAM Act requires that all commercial emails sent must include a "valid physical postal address of the sender." I interpret that to mean P.O. boxes are acceptable. Any messages you send MUST include YOUR OWN postal address. No exceptions!

I recommend that you include your address at the end of your email, where you sign your name. For example:

Sincerely,

Joe Smith 123 Elm Street, Anytown, Califoia 90200

(2) The new CAN-SPAM Act prohibits the sending of a commercial email where the subject heading of the message "would be likely to mislead a recipient, acting reasonably under the circumstances, about a material fact regarding the contents or subject matter of the message."

In English, this means you cannot, for example, send an email with the subject line of "Your Account Info" when your message is clearly an advertisement for a business opportunity.

(3) The content of your emails should not include anything that is illegal or in any way related to adult content. If your email is adult-material related, by law it must be clearly identified in the subject line.

(4) You should not covertly add subscribers to your mailing list (without their permission).

(5) You should not include any 'spam disclaimer' in your email that is not in compliance with this Spam policy.

In addition to an Unsubscribe link, you should include any one of the following disclaimers. You may change a word or two to fit the correct circumstances:

"In the last few weeks, you expressed interest in receiving information from one of our partner websites by supplying your name, email, contact information, and IP address. If you are no longer interested, please use the permanent removal link below."

"To comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, I have offered my contact information below, included a working permanent removal link, and can provide your opt-in details upon request."

"You are currently receiving a series of letters from me. To be removed please use the permanent unsubscribe link below."

"You recently received training materials from me and have chosen to remain on my mailing list. Should you wish to be removed at any time, please use the permanent unsubscribe link below."

"You recently received my Email Marketing Course and have chosen to remain on my mailing list. Should you wish to be removed at any time, please use the permanent removal link below."

"I hope you are enjoying my Email Marketing Course! I'm sending you this email in hopes that we can continue our business relationship."

"I hope you enjoyed my Email Marketing Course! Here is something else you may be interested in as well."

If you include anything that looks like the following paragraph, you will probably be reported for spamming:

"Under Bill S1618 TITLE III, passed by the 105th US Congress, this message cannot be considered SPAM as long as there is a way to be removed, paragraph (a) (c) of S. 1618."

Why is this so important? If you've read the CAN-SPAM Act, you will see that companies and individuals are liable for up to $2,000,000.00 (two million dollars) in damages for violating ANY part of the CAN-SPAM Act.

For more information on the CAN-SPAM Act, visit:
http://www.spamlaws.com
http://www.isipp.com

SPECIAL NOTE: To comply with the CAN-SPAM Act and to increase email deliverability, some leading autoresponder services now have an option for you to enter a postal address within the autoresponder settings. This postal address will then automatically appear in the footer of your emails... ensuring your messages are CAN-SPAM compliant.

If your autoresponder service has yet to implement this feature, just make sure you include your postal address within the "Unsubscribe or Signature Message" settings to ensure you are abiding by the new law.

I wish you safe and successful emailing!

Derek Jones is the owner of Mirage Home Business Systems, a service that's geared to helping people start a profitable Home-Based Business online. For more details on starting a Work at Home Inteet Business and to join our Free Home Business Tips Newsletter, visit: http://www.HomeBusinessCreation.com

For Inteet business starters, people intend to get wrong impression that it is easy and quick to ea money from online advertising. They are easily got ripped off by a lot of hypes online. Here are a few advice for people who want to run a successful business online.

If you ever searched Inteet business model or marketing tools, you might already found that there are so many resources and tools online. Nearly everyone claimed that they have "magic keys" to help you reach financial freedom. You may tend to do the following: [DO NOT list]

1. Subscribe a tons of newsletters

2. Spend huge amount of time to read through every emails which claims to help you success online

3. Subscribe some services who claims to submit your ads. to over 1 million people

4. Submit your site to some service who can sumbit to over 1000 search engines

5. Do not want to spend time to dig deeper to lea real knowledge of online business since it takes time

6. Let other people build your website, not realize that you actually help other people to get more business. Yourself only get small benefit.

7. Being attracted by some "magic keys": like getting 1000 subscribers over 1 week. Yes, you can get those subscribers, but how about the quality of your subscribers? Do they respond your offers? If you simply buy a bulk of leads from some service, you do not know what those people are looking for. If subcribers are un-targetted, you should not feel bad if they do not buy your service or products since now you know the reasons.

8. Feel being ripped off by a lot of bad service...

......

You may feel dizzy that which ones are good and really can help you. You may just simply do not open any emails from those resources. Your mood will vary from very excited at very beginning to very disapointed after a few months' trial. Then simply give it up.

If you are among the situation which I describered above, I encourage you to take a deep breath now. You should not think that you do not have good luck for Online business. You do have the ability to get there by following step-by-stey right road maps.

There are a lot of people who run Inteet business successfully online. Their background are not better than yours. Among those successful people, there are road construction workers, restraunt workers, office clerks, air traffic controllers, retirees, college students, teenages, or company CEOs, financial advisors, medical doctors...What I am saying is that they are all normal people as you. They ever went through a lot of failures before they reach success. How they finally succeeded? Because they are not afraid failure, they just accept them, then trial next steps. I admit they are hard workers spending days and nights to dig out the real truth about Inteet business -- business opportunities and maketing tools.

So what are the right tools and right ways to run Online business? [DO list]

1. Prepare to work hard, set up your goal and make a plan

2. Find a good leader or mentor who can really help you

3. Take advantage of free resources -- free does not mean worthless. There are a lot of good education sites run by volunteers or webmasters who simply want to educate people and help people. There are a lot of online forums where you can post your questions and you will get honest answers

4. Keep leaing and leaing, make notes for every findings

5. Take actions - no matter how small it is. You will lea from what you do. Understand what works and what does not work

6. Do not be afraid of temporary failures. Once you keep doing it in the "RIGHT WAY", you will succeed eventually. Like building a house, if you keep building it daily, your house will be finished eventually. So does your online business.

Of course, there is a steep leaing curve at very beginning. But if you have the right attitude about Inteet business, you will lea it very fast. Plus, if you have a good mentor, you will shorten your course significantly.

Take your time to do the following: [DO list]

1. Build your own websites even your online business gives you the gateways with your ID - you need your UNIQUE identity Online

2. Write good articles by sharing your knowledge so more people can benefit, in the meantime, you will get high visibility online - which means you will get free visitors to your site.

3. Swap links to other good sites -- not your competitors, but those sites which can support your sites. You should not link to anyone who wants to link to you. You need check their quality first. Otherwise, your reputation will get damaged if you put bad sites on your site.

4. Write newsletters with good contents. Get your own subscribers

5. Promote your site by pay-per-click search engines.

......

There are a lot of right ways to run your inteet business. If you are really serious to get more advice for online business, website design or online business marketing, you are very welcome to visit us.

If you do not do those actions which listed in the "DO NOT" list no matter how attractive they are, and take those actions which listed in the "DO" list no matter how hard you feel at the beginning, you will succeed online and make real income in the future.

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Julia Tang publishes Smart Online Business Tips, a fresh and informative newsletter dedicated to supporting people like you! To find out the best online business opportunities, and to discover hundreds more proven and practical inteet marketing secrets, plus FREE inteet marketing products worth over $200, visit: http://www.best-inteet-businesses.com

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Note: Feel free to use it and publish it in your ezines or on your website with the resource box and content unchanged

Where would you site a restaurant?

The group was asked to suggest the most important deciding point when choosing the site for a new restaurant. Most answered: Location. Perhaps they had been eating too often at those glittering centres. No, the questioner said, the most important factor is a starving crowd.

It is important to recognize the starving crowd if you want to be successful in business. (It's also important not simply to follow the herd blindly.)

Where is the starving crowd for your home-based Inteet business? According to Peter Drucker, writer, management consultant and professor, it is in the information business. More precisely, in the education business.

Most were manual workers

Well into the 20th century, most workers were manual workers, he wrote in a Forbes Magazine article. Today, only about 20% of workers in developed countries do manual labor. Some 40% are knowledge workers. Workers, he says, have always had to gain skills, but skills change slowly. The work of a printer, the trade of his Dutch ancestors, changed little from the early 1500s to the early 1700s. No new skills needed to be leaed, and that was the same in most industries.

For most of human history, Drucker says, skilled workers leaed what they needed to know as apprentices by the time they were 18 or 19.

For the mode knowledge-based worker - the lawyer, the doctor, people in the various disciplines to do with computers - life is far different. Continuing education is the norm. Society and the workplace change much more rapidly today.

Jobs change rapidly, too. You may have been victimized by at least one layoff so far in your life. You certainly know people who have been. New jobs require new knowledge. In fact, even before finding a new job becomes a necessity, workers today are constantly retraining and preparing themselves for the eventuality they know will come several times in their lives. Gone are the days of getting work and remaining with the same company for 40 or 50 years.

Knowledge from the Inteet

In increasing numbers, those people are tuing to the Inteet to advance their knowledge. No longer do they have to fight traffic and drag work-tired bodies off to night school. A few steps and a few clicks away, their personal computer gives them access to most of the world's knowledge and opinion. Schools have recognized that adult education can be taught far more effectively through computer access than inside bricks and mortar.

The use of computers means that education can have more of a one-on-one feel, because the student can go back over whatever he or she does not understand the first time. Study can be carried out at a pace appropriate to the individual.

Drucker, who has a reputation for detecting signs of future trends long before they happen, says education on the Web is a global market that is potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The demand for webucation is huge

But this demand for education does not simply come from doctors, lawyers, accountants, other professionals and their associations. It exists at every level, and it is not restricted to knowledge that is work-related. Hobbyists, homemakers, gardeners, decorators, writers, almost every type of person you can think of is interested in leaing more than they already know. For some, non-work related leaing is simply a mental stimulation, for others it's a passionate interest, and for others, curiosity.

Whatever their reason, they create an opportunity for you and me to make money on the Inteet from the comfort of our own homes. Each one of us is knowledgeable about something. We may not be experts, but we know more than the average person about something that others want to find out about.

Write an e-book about whatever it is you are passionate about. Start a newsletter. Or represent as an affiliate a company that deals in some way with your special interest. Find a way to be involved. If you believe you can do it, you are right. Join the Web education movement. It is a movement whose time is now.

Matthew Eigbe has over 25 years experience in consumer marketing and now focuses on network marketing using the inteet. He is webmaster at http://www.mattlinks.ws, a site that explains how you can gain Financial Freedom by inviting people to have their own domain name.

Online or off, a time tested method of succeeding in business is to focus on an unexploited area. You are probably wondering how. Here is your answer.

Finding Your Nook and Cranny

When we talk about a nook, we are simply identified a very focused area of business. There are a zillion sites selling movies, but very few selling French movies from the 1960s. If there is sufficient interest in such movies, you could build a business around selling such classic movies. This concept applies to any business area regardless of whether you are selling products or offering services.

You need to do some daydreaming. Most people make the mistake of focusing on a subject that they think will make a ton of money. Problems can occur with this approach because if you have no inherent interest in the area besides money, you will eventually grow disillusioned with it. If you are going to start a business, you want it be enjoyable. If it is just another job, you have made a bad mistake. This brings us back to daydreaming.

You need to give serious thought to your interests, and not just your interests today. What have you always been interested in? Don�t worry about how you will make money, just focus on the subject matter. Remember the clich� � find something you love and the money will follow. This is exactly what you want to do. Once you have an idea, it is time to figure out how to make money off of it.

For a web business, you want to focus on something known as keyword research. Keyword research is crucial because you can type in a phrase and see the exact phrases people have used to search on Google, Yahoo and MSN that incorporate the world. Even better, you can see how many people use the phrase each day. Doing keyword research lets you determine if there is enough interest in your area and the exact phrases your prospects are using to find things in the area. It doesn�t get much better than that!

There are a variety of tools you can use. Overture offers a free tool that will give you a general idea, but is not the most accurate. Wordtracker is much better, but will set you back a few bucks. Keyword Discovery is similar, but runs a few more dollars yet. Regardless of your choice, make sure to use one of these for keyword research.

Once you identify the phrases used by your prospects, you can determine if there is enough interest in your nook. You can also identify the exact phrases they are using and tailor your site and marketing to those phrases.

Halstatt Pires is with MarketingTitan.com - providing inteet marketing services. Visit us to read more inteet marketing articles.

You know it�s funny. I�m making so much money online that I can�t believe it�s true. These inteet gurus out there who sell all those money making programs are right. I�m about to quit my job because of them and spend most of my time at the gym and on the beach this summer. I might even cruise down to some of the islands�maybe even take a stroll through Hawaii. My Paypal account is about ready to explode. What a great life!

Now really. If you believe the last paragraph, I have some good swamp land that I want to sell you. And I can give it to you for a tad less than three thousand per acre. Come on folks! Take it from me. I spent about six months or more researching just about everything out there on building home-based businesses, inteet marketing, website publishing�you name it. I�ve written three eBooks, two of which are educational and one of which is self-help. I belong to several so called �hot� affiliate programs. I�ve tried CPC advertising, website advertising, article writing, web hits purchases...let me see, what else? Hmmm. I have to think for a minute, there�s so much I�ve done. Yet all told, I�ve probably made less than ten dollars so far. And if you count my expenses, I�m in the red a few hundred. I don�t think I can stop working just yet.

Now either I�m very dumb or very naive or both. I would be happy if I could just make some money, considering that I�ve written what I consider some helpful ebooks. For this reason, I feel it would be nice if I could gaer some of the fruits of all my hard labor and be able to defray some of my ordinary living expenses by making some money from my website and my writings. Yet very little seems to trickle in. The sad part is that I would love to help educate some really poor children in underdeveloped countries by donating portions of my ebook sales but alas no revenue is coming in. How sad.

So those of you who are reading this beware before you start plopping down your money to buy that next hot inteet marketing program. Remember. The ones who are quitting their jobs are the ones who are sucker-ing enough of us into buying their worthless programs. Caveat emptor.

Joe is a prolific writer of self-help and educational material and an award-winning former teacher of both college and high school mathematics. Under the penname, JC Page, Joe authored Arithmetic Magic. As a result of this publication, Joe was invited to be a guest on the television show the Book Authority. Joe is also author of the charmingly pithy and popular ebook, Making a Good Impression Every Time: The Secret to Instant Popularity; the seminal collection of verse, Poems for the Mathematically Insecure, and the creator and scriptwriter of an upcoming DVD series that is both visionary and highly educational. The diverse genre of his writings (novel, short story, essay, script, and poetry)�particularly in regard to its educational flavor� continues to captivate readers and to ea him recognition.

Joe propagates his teaching philosophy through his articles and books and is dedicated to helping educate children living in impoverished countries. Toward this end, he donates a portion of the proceeds from the sale of every ebook. For more information go to http://www.mathbyjoe.com

In the world of search engines, Google is easily the 800-lb. gorilla.

According to SearchEngineWatch.com, in November 2005 Google captured 46.3 percent of all searches. Yahoo came in second, with 23.4 percent, less than half of Google�s share. And MSN came in third with a paltry 11.4 percent.

This is an interesting patte. In many markets, the dominant competitor holds about a 50 percent market share, the number two competitor manages to squeeze out 25 percent of the market, and all the other competitors fight over the remaining 25 percent.

This patte repeats itself in so many markets it�s almost as dependable as the law of gravity. Even more important is the fact that almost all of the industry� profits go to the top competitors. That�s why Jack Welch�s now infamous strategy at GE of becoming the number one or number two competitor or else exiting the market has proven to be so powerful.

Given these basic laws, the question then becomes, can anybody beat out Google, or even Yahoo, in the Inteet search business? The chart shows eight other competitors in addition to the top two, and there are probably a multitude in the category of �Others.� Some of the competitors like AOL, Netscape, and Earthlink have probably missed their shot at the top rungs on the ladder. But what about the newer competitors My Way, Dogpile and iWon? Do any of them have a realistic shot at ascending to the throne?

Woof, Woof

The most interesting of these relatively new entrants is Dogpile.com. Owned by InfoSpace, Dogpile bills itself as �all of the best search engines piled into one.� A metasearch engine (meaning a more comprehensive search engine), Dogpile includes results from Google, Yahoo, MSN search and Ask Jeeves. A single search query retus the top results from all four of these popular search engines.

Dogpile is clearly a superior product that produces superior search results. More important, it leverages off the simple fact that only three percent of first-page results are shared by Google, Yahoo and MSN. As a result, searchers get almost no overlap of the very best search results from the most popular search engines. In order to get the same �best of the best,� you would need to do three searches on the three separate leading search engines, which is exactly what happens at Dogpile.

This begs an obvious question -- does anybody really need the results from four search engines?

The answer is yes, if you want the most through and complete search on a topic that matters to you. Plus, Dogpile search results are infinitely more usable. Instead of page after page of links of somewhat questionable value, Dogpile retus 10 to 100 links that are extremely relevant and dead-on accurate. Of all the top search engines, Dogpile clearly offers �best of breed� search results (pun intended). After five or six searches, you�ll never go back to your old method of searching.

Little Dog Versus Big Dog

Can Dogpile beat out Google for the top search engine spot?

According to mindshare branding experts Ries and Trout, Dogpile doesn�t stand a chance of displacing the competitors in the category of Inteet search. In their book the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Law # 1 (Leadership) states: �It�s always better to be first to market rather than waiting to get to market with a better product.� There is always a significant first-mover advantage in business, but this is particularly true in marketing. It�s much easier to get into the mind first than convince a prospect that you have a better product than the one that got there first.

The reasons for this are twofold. One, people naturally tend to stick with what they already have. This says that most people will just keep using Google out of habit. Two, the first brand to market generally has an opportunity to become a generic term for that product category, making it even harder for competitors to gain a foothold. When you hear somebody say, �I Googled it,� you know exactly what they mean. I have yet to hear anyone say, �I Dogpiled it.� Or even, �I Yahooed it.� Clearly, Google has become the generic term for the category of �search engine.�

Yet, there is hope for Dogpile. Ries and Trout�s Law # 2 (The Category) states: If it�s impossible to be first in a category, invent a new category you can be first to the market in.� Dogpile can own the subcategory �metasearch engine,� which even sounds bigger and better.

Dogpile might not be able to beat Google or Yahoo at their own game. But if they play their cards right, they can own their own subcategory -- metasearch engine -- and achieve market leadership over the long-term.

Get your free whitepaper: The 10 Biggest Technology Marketing Mistakes... and How to Avoid Them

Rod Whitson serves Townsend as President and Chief Brand Strategist. Townsend is expert at helping organizations with innovative products and services develop differentiated, compelling value propositions. Townsend is the largest integrated marketing agency in Southe Califoia. Rod has personally led recent branding engagements with Intel, BAE Systems, Merck, DowPharma, Marsh & McLennan, and the University of Califoia system. He has also worked with a host of successful and not so successful early stage technology and life sciences companies. Since Townsend�s founding in 1993, it has helped clients create market valuation in excess of $80 billion.

Visit Rod's blog, Branding the Complex

� 2006 Rod Whitson - All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Oh, we all know that we can download a load of free stuff from the Inteet easily. But the best downloads are the ones that DON�T come with �extra� features like viruses, worms, adwares, spywares, whathaveyounots. It�s the truth. When you download something free on the Inteet, they sometimes come with some kind of a program that will either give you a headache or give your computer a sickness.

You see, downloads are free on the surface. But whenever you download something from the Inteet, they want something in retu, such as our personal information which is sometimes harmless.

The better way to download things online is to get a download program to help you download things off the Inteet. For instance, http://www.amazesoft.com provides FlashGet which is a program that can help you download large files like mp3, programs, songs, videos off the Inteet in an organized way.

And another wonderfully amazing software for downloads is the GetRight download manager which can be downloaded at http://www.getright.com. This software not only speeds up the download process but it also allows you to download different files from different servers easily and organize it in such a way that you will be able to find the files that you have downloaded very easily. You can download multiple files at the same time without slowing down the speed of download. If the download is interrupted or connection is severed, you can continue the download process from where you left off without having to start the download all over again. GetRight also works with many different types of Inteet browsers, i.e., Inteet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, AOL, MSN, etc. Whenever you download stuff from the Inteet using this software, you can get the download without downloading the spywares and adwares that comes with some of these downloads.

Not to be left behind, SpeedBit also provides the same kind of service that GetRight and FlashGet provides, with the speedbit software that is downloadable at http://www.speedbit.com, you can download files from the Inteet at 500% faster than the usual speed, broadband or not. The focus on SpeedBit is to make the technology of Download Accelarator Plis (DAP) more accessible to anyone in the world. There are tens of millions of people who are currently using SpeedBit to download stuff from the Inteet. SpeedBit also helps you sift out the adwares and spywares that comes with most downloadable stuff on the Inteet.

Of course, the faster your Inteet connection, the faster you will be able to download programs and files from the Inteet. Hence, it will make a significant difference whether you�re using a Broadband inteet connection or a dial-up. Dial-ups are definitely much slower than Broadband. If you�re using Broadband and downloading real media files, it may take anywhere between 15 minutes to 45 minutes. However, if you�re downloading files from the Inteet using dial-up connection, you may have to wait around 30 minutes to 180 minutes to download one single media file.

Therefore, if you�re using Broadband and combine with one of these downloading softwares, you�ll have a far more pleasant experience than those without such privileges.

Dakota Caudilla, joualist, and website builder
Dakota Caudilla lives in Texas. He is the owner and co-editor of http://your-free-downloads.com on which you will find a longer, more detailed version of this article.

A book is worth whatever the buyer is willing to pay. But you can get a good idea of what this amount will be by doing a few minutes of research.

When you are dealing with general stock worth modest amounts -� and there are several copies listed online under $15 �- there is no need to spend much time mulling pricing strategies. Supply and demand rules. If you price your copy much higher than competing offers, odds are you'll wait a long time for a sale.

If you think the market price is fair, match the lowest price but don�t go under. The only thing lowballing accomplishes is leaving money on the table.

But what if there are no used copies listed on Amazon? In this case it's worth your time to do some research to see what the prices are outside Amazon. Search the title on AddALL, at www.addall.com, which indexes all the major book listing sites. A similar site on which to research prices is FetchBook.Info, at www.FetchBook.info. Another favorite with online book-sellers but with somewhat slow performance is BookFinder.com, at www.BookFinder.com.

If your search tus up several listings for your title, you can get a good idea of its value by throwing out the top and bottom prices and averaging the rest. Price your copy at the top of the range.

See a real-time list of the most highly sought after used and collectible books.

Read more free articles on selling used books profitably online: http://www.weberbooks.com/selling/selling.htm

Steve Weber is author of "The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site" (ISBN 0977240606). Got a question for Steve? Send to: steve_weber@yahoo.com

It's worthwhile to examine Google's definition of Google AdSense and Click Fraud , before delving deeper into �AdSense Fraud� .

Google AdSense fraud is one of the diseases that plague the Ad Words advertisers. The AdSense program essentially allows website publishers/owners to sign up with Google, enabling them to display Google Ads on their sites. These publishers essentially act as �Google Partners�. The ads chosen by the Google bot for display are contextual and the ads are related to the contents of the publisher's website, more specifically that particular web page. The intent for Google is to capitalize on the traffic to these (in practice) niche sites and provide highly direct targeted traffic to the advertiser. A subset of the users of the Google Partner website, click on those ads and Google charges the advertiser per click. Google shares the booty with the website publisher but the revenue sharing ratio falls under Google's �undisclosed �criteria. While the exact amount can be reverse engineered, the take home lesson is that the final amount is proportional to Google's income from that click.

In theory it's a match made in heaven. The advertiser gets good ROI through targeted traffic, the publisher gets to monetize the traffic on their website and the web browser gets to buy that classic CD that he couldn't live without. Not to mention that Google gets a wad of cash. The gods of lucre smile beneficently on all.

Unfortunately, this happy fa�ade hides blemishes. Severe ones. For all Google AdSense Publishers are not created equal. While (we daresay) many advertisers have a genuine website, providing a valuable or interesting service to the world wide community, there is a significant number of unscrupulous operators who are out there to prey on the advertisers. These creatures of the night (and we will explain later why we use that term), make websites for the express purpose of milking AdSense revenue.

This category of fraudsters deserves a taxonomy of its own, which we have developed (the other categories, click fraud and impression fraud are even bigger problems in some industries). In the interest of not being gender biased, we have alteated between genders. We hope that our lighthearted tone does not mask the revulsion that we feel towards these cheats.

Regressive Fraudster ( aka ClickMonkey ):

This guy is at the bottom of the food chain. Inspired by the riches of his neighbor Ms. Jones, who has been making more than ten grand a month in AdSense revenue, he plans a course of action. He �invests� in a clickbot software( a simple google search reveals many) and gets a list of anonymous proxy addresses. He then goes to register a few domains and hires someone off of elance to create a �network of sites�and � click bot � . He hopes that the interlinked sites will provide each some �link popularity� and increase his page rank. If only it were that simple! He then proceeds to use the 30 dollar clickbot to start clicking on the sites. Or he could click on them himself manually using the proxies. We don't call him click monkey for nothing. He clicks and clicks all the way to see his account getting banned. No banana for this monkey! His calls of despair to google fall on deaf ears. This person is likely to quit, but sometimes retries to get up the food chain, the Wanna -Be-Fraudster.

Wanna -Be Fraudster ( aka BOZO):

This girl searches for high paying keywords like �home loan equity� (current ad words rate: 45 dollar), or �web hosting� (ad words costing 20 dollar). She correctly guesses that the AdSense payout is proportional to what Google eas and therefore homes in on such words. Her strategy is to make a page with contents that are appropriate for the targeted high payout keyword. She moves ahead by clicking on the link multiple times and recruits friends and family to give them a click. Or ten!

Little does she know that Google has a 45 day inspection period before she get her nubby little fingers on that cash. With little to no knowledge of Click through Ratio , her greed couples with her ignorance. Seeing her ill-gotten paper wealth multiplying in her AdSense interface, she increases the clicks. Google however inspects the CTR and throws a fit when they see a CTR exceeding 20%. Furthermore, Google notices clicks mostly originating from a few IP addresses and that essentially seals her fate (or rather docks her eaings). That virtual cash is now just some deleted bytes on a hard disk on Google's servers. She moans, nay she rail against the cruelty of Google's policy. Some of these people wisely cease and desist such activities, perhaps philosophizing about the NFL (no free lunch) theorem. Others however see it as ground school for the next stage of nefarious behavior. The Almost-There Fraudster.

Almost-There Fraudster ( aka SmartAlec ):

The archetypical ATF is supremely confident in his ability to fool Google. Like the BOZO, he looks for high paying keywords and makes appropriate website(s). Let's assume that he is in a third world country, just to make the case more interesting. The case described here is 1 year old news. He has read this article and taken the leat the subsequent lesson . He knows that that the clicks from the IP Addresses of USA, UK & Canada are worth much more than the clicks from the IP Addresses from the third world countries. He therefore seeks to befriend people from such IP addresses by logging onto messenger services.

This way, he gets the unique, unrelated IP clicks and (he hopes) that Google is fooled. Remember �creature of the night�. Well, these people typically are more than a few time zone removed from the US or Canada and therefore are up at odd hours whenever they feel that their targets are most likely to be active. Plus they sometimes have to deal with �inconveniences� like a day job.

AT fraud thinks that the clicks he obtained by trolling on these sites is a job well done. He has got clicks from the IP address of his choice .. An interesting factoid is that for AdSense, state also matters. Clicks from Washington and New York State have the highest payout for AdSense Fraud.

He has just one problem. His tragic flaw. While he worked so hard to get the unique IP and high eaings, he is not able to maintain a good CTR. He is likely to cross the limit of 30-40% of daily CTR and 10-20% of overall CTR. He ends up in the same purgatory as the BOZO. The account is banned, and he gets the abominated email. Yes, the �AdSense account closure�. Almost-There is never good enough in this nether world of AdSense gaming. Although it is possible that he would have made a few thousand dollars before the punishment catches up to his crime. Crime doesn't quite pay, now does it? Well, gentle reader, unfortunately crime _is_ paying to the next category. Fraudster Maestro ( aka Satan's Spawn).

Fraudster Maestro ( aka Satan's Spawn):

This category of fraudsters is the most sophisticated and rarely gets caught by google . She has researched the high paying keywords as well as the CTR issues well. She has the smoothest lines in the business of soliciting clicks. She can flirt online, and ask to click the �link� for her picture. Or she may claim that clicking the link causes the hungry child to be fed in Ethiopia . Let's follow a typical �simple� chat session:

US User : hello

FM Fraud: what are your coordinates, handsome?

US User : NY , NY

FM Fraud: Oh! Wish I could be there. Can you help out a damsel in distress?

US User : sure

AT Fraud: I have made a site and want to see if all the links on this page are working or not. Can you please click on the links and see if the other page loads?

US User: Sure. Link?

FM Fraud:www.fraudstersite.com/high-value-keyword-page.html

US User : wait! Yes I checked all the links and they are working fine.

FM Fraud:
Thanks

US User : so can we talk about you now? ( Message Not Delivered as the fraudster has blocked the User and is busy looking for a new victim)

And she has lots of tricks up her repertoire besides chatting up strangers. She knows about opt in lists, usenet and blogs where she can snare the victims. Technically savvy and able to empathize with her victims she doesn't let arrogance get in her way to success. Since she is very mindful of the CTR issues she has a secret weapon. She has optimized her site for some low paying keywords which are really not competitive. She organically gets lots of traffic (but for things unrelated to those competitive high paying keywords). In her website, she may be giving away free greeting cards Or free screensavers. End result is a fabulous impression count. The second step for her is to makes unrelated pages on the same site and these pages pertain to the high paying keywords. These keywords are used to attract the victims of chat sessions. The process of getting the clicks is different but the results due to CTR are very lucrative.

So, how does all this geek talk affect the PPC advertiser? It's a 5 billion dollar+ dollar market(for exact projections onto the future, please check out our FAQ, and with a 20% + fraud rate, we are talking about a 1 BILLION dollars fraud per year. Even Dr. Evil may be impressed by such a number. It's greater than the cumulative GNP of a few banana republics. And a fair chunk is ending up in the coffers of these fraudsters. We know from anecdotal evidence, how people are clearing up to 20 grand a month. All, courtesy of the hapless PPC advertiser.
We want to emphasize that there are lots of authentic sites serving genuine content. But unfortunately the existence of these people (as discussed above) reduces the ROI of many advertisers to the extent that they rethink their interest in PPC. In the word of one of our organic SEO customers, with PPC �you always get a little less back than you put in�. It needn't be that way, if you watch carefully where your ad words traffic is coming from and take some steps (such as traffic analysis or at the very least a log file analysis) to protect arm yourself. Look for pattes, some of which are obvious(such as large traffic spikes from India). Unfortunately other pattes may require a doctorate in artificial intelligence. Still the keyword is to stay nimble. Convincing search engines to refund money is a lot tougher and a lot more work than proactively watching for problem visitors and taking steps that you deem appropriate. Before the situation goes out of hand. Remember, an ounce of prevention�

We want to emphasize that there are lots of authentic sites serving genuine content. But unfortunately the existence of these people (as discussed above) reduces the ROI of many advertisers to the extent that they rethink their interest in PPC. In the word of one of our organic SEO customers, with PPC �you always get a little less back than you put in�. It needn't be that way, if you stay nimble. Convincing search engines to refund money is a lot tougher and a lot more work than proactively watching for problem visitors and taking steps that you deem appropriate.

Some things you can do to stay ahead of the game. This is by NO means an exhaustive list, but it's a start. It's sorted by the level of protection in ascending that you may need.

1> Let your visitors know that you are tracking them and know quite a bit about them. For instance, if you visit www.sofizar.com , you will see information about yourself. You can display this information to all your visitors, or only to some of them. It can be in-your-face or subtle, but it will remind at least some of the fraudsters that they are being watched. Sofizar provides free sample code and connection to its database allowing you to display �premium� information(like City, ISP, ISP contact number).

2> Invest in a serious visitor tracking software. Set alarms based on the number of times a person clicks on your site in a certain time period(hourly, weekly, monthly). Display the same information to someone who is definitely PPCing your budget to death, as a custom message box. Something harsh, if the patte keeps up. �We are logging the usage, and we are noticing that you keep clicking on our site through PPC. If you don't cease, we would be forced to call your local ISP at +91-23-344-5678�(if you see the information that we can glean about visitors, you will know we can get even more specific). This will weed some of the casual fraudsters.

3> Start checking for things that we have discussed earlier, by investing in an industrial strength data collection package. Based on your data collection, one strategy is to score each visitor, deducting(or adding points), based on the following (non exhaustive) list.

a. Visitor conversion/past conversion history.

b. Visit Depth Analysis.

c. Visit Time Analysis(time spent on each page, and time of day the visit happens).

d. Cookies/Javascript/�Unknown OS�

e. Keyword Cost analysis.

f. Anonymous Proxy Server

g. Is part of �Fraudster list�.

h. Country/Localization analysis(are you really targeting people in Sao Paolo , Brazil for your French Restaurant in New York ?).

4> Do patte matching. See what your top 20% of your customers do as part of a �macro patte� and match the visitor against that patte.

Keep in mind that you will get a few �false positives� and vice versa. A few innocent people may get tagged unfairly as �fraudsters� while a few �fraudsters� may well give you the slip. It's not an exact science, but over a period of time you can get fairly close. If you decide to take up your case with Google, you have to make a very convincing case. All based on meticulous data, instead of (what may be considered by them as) paranoia.

Over the long term, as the threat evolves and the fraudsters improve, you have to keep adapting your strategy using your friends, diligent data collection, statistics and patte matching.

If you have any further question, comments or want us to give you a free evaluation if your PPC campaign is a likely magnet for fraudsters, please email to: art@sofizar.com .
For more information about adsense fraud visit: http://www.sofizar.com/adsense-fraud.php

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com

Ron Arthur is a Search Engine Marketer working for Carlsbad, CA based web-metrics company Sofizar. He is a member of the team developing a click fraud detection software, ZarTective. While not writing expose�s on the darker side of the web, he plays with his cat �Mano� and watches �Rocky Horror Picture Show� for the 17th time. Or maybe 117th.

The key to running a successful and efficient online business is to automate as much of your work as possible:

Automate your order-taking process...

Automate your payment methods (credit card/Paypal etc)...

Automate as much of your delivery process as possible - eg. automatic printing of shipping labels and invoice/order details...

Automate your subscriber list sign-up...

Automate your 'help' and 'faq' systems - use email 'autoresponders' to answer common queries...

Automate EVERYTHING you possibly can...

If there isn't a software program available to do a certain task, get someone to write it - this is not as expensive as you might think. I recently hired a programmer to write a simple script to automate part of my credit card processing routine. It was a custom script and the cost was just $45.00! Check out sites such as like www.elance.com and www.scriptlance.com if you need help finding a programmer.

The more of your tasks that are dealt with automatically, the more time you will have.

And what should you be doing with that time?

Well, its up to you, but my advice is spend it developing new products and websites - it is much better to have 5 websites bringing in $500 a month each, than one site bringing in $2500. With more sites, your risk is spread so if for any reason sales dry up on one site, it is not the end of the world (however, if that is your only site, it may well be!)

How many other industries allow you to build a business and then leave 70% or even 90% of that business running on 'autopilot'?

I know what I am talking about - my online businesses bring in over six figures a year, yet I can deal with the maintenance of all of my sites in less than an hour a day and this is simply because most tasks are automated. The only time I need to 'get involved' in a transaction is if something goes wrong - and hey, it's a computer so this does happen from time to time :-)

Now, despite the above, I actually work anything from 10 - 15 hours a day, most days and 90% of that time is spent developing new products and websites.

Let me share a simple formula for online success with you:

1. Develop product

2. Develop website

3. Automate as much as possible

4. Market website/product

5. Maintain website and go back to step 1 and repeat

It takes time and it is hard work, but the rewards are excellent. The Inteet is probably the only chance you will have to run multiple businesses at once and still be able to take huge chunks of time 'off' whenever you want.

Don't fall into the trap of starting to do the day to day tasks manually - you might be able to handle the workload with 100 visitors to your website each day, but when the hits start rising you will have problems. It is much easier to automate everything from the start than to try and implement systems on a website that is up and running (and generating several hours of work each day).

And of course, there is nothing like waking up in the moing to find that your website has generated sales while you were sleeping - this is a reality and happens everyday to millions of online entrepreneurs around the world - why not you?

Copyright 2004 Richard Grady

About The Author

Richard Grady has been helping people ea online since 1998. Find out more about Richard at: http://www.thetraderonline.com Free wholesale search engines: UK- http://www.wholesale118.co.uk and US http://www.thewholesaletrader.com.

The unsolicited junk or bulk email that you receive is known as Spam. Spam is a very serious problem the people have to deal with daily. Sometimes the junk emails exceed the regular email messages that we receive in our email account. Spam filter can be a solution for you to get freedom from Spam mails. There are different types of software to keep out the Spam emails from your inbox. Spam filters can monitor the emails that come in your inbox and prevent any Spam mail from entering in to your inbox.

The Spam email that you receive is due to the inappropriate usage of mailing list. The mailing list consists of email ids of different people and all of them can be flooded with bulk or junk emails. Many companies send out the Spam email massages to a large number of people who do not ask for such massages. Spamming is considered to be very bad netiquette as it amounts in violating a person's privacy. Netiquette demand that no email id can be used without the user's permission.

Many Spam filters are designed to help people who are constantly bombarded with junk or bulk mails. Spam filters make use of filtering technology to filter the contents of the incoming emails. Spam filters can effectively help a person by sorting out these types of incoming emails.

Different types of Spam filters can be helpful for controlling spam. Content based Spam filter is one type that can be used by you. The filter scans the content of the email, and searches for tell tale signs for Spam in the message. Content based Spam filters have however not been very effective in controlling the bulk or the junk messages. The main reason for this being that the spammers had devised ways and means by which they can communicate their message despite the presence of such filters.

Spam filters that are prepared these days are designed to give advanced protection against unsolicited emails and spammers. Bayesian filter technology is another effective way of controlling these mails. Bayesian technology is not like other filtering methods that search for Spam identifying words in the header and the subject line. The Bayesian filter uses the entire perspective of an email when it looks for characters or words for identifying a Spam. Another feature of Bayesian Spam filter is that the more it analyzes the incoming mails, the more it leas to identify Spam mails.

Spam mails can sometimes bombard you in such a manner that you may end up receiving more Spam than the regular emails. Most email service providers have Spam filter software enabled in their sites. All you need to do is select the options of setting the Spam filter for your emails according to your liking. You can mark the sites from which you want to receive or not receive mails in your inbox. Setting the options for blocking the bulk or the junk mails is entirely your prerogative.

Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com

Author – MattGarrett www.free-spam-blockers.com

www.allwatchers.com and www.allreaders.com are web sites in the sense that a file is downloaded to the user's browser when he or she surfs to these addresses. But that's where the similarity ends. These web pages are front-ends, gates to underlying databases. The databases contain records regarding the plots, themes, characters and other features of, respectively, movies and books. Every user-query generates a unique web page whose contents are determined by the query parameters. The number of singular pages thus capable of being generated is mind boggling. Search engines operate on the same principle - vary the search parameters slightly and totally new pages are generated. It is a dynamic, user-responsive and chimerical sort of web.

These are good examples of what www.brightplanet.com call the "Deep Web" (previously inaccurately described as the "Unknown or Invisible Inteet"). They believe that the Deep Web is 500 times the size of the "Surface Inteet" (a portion of which is spidered by traditional search engines). This translates to c. 7500 TERAbytes of data (versus 19 terabytes in the whole known web, excluding the databases of the search engines themselves) - or 550 billion documents organized in 100,000 deep web sites. By comparison, Google, the most comprehensive search engine ever, stores 1.4 billion documents in its immense caches at www.google.com. The natural inclination to dismiss these pages of data as mere re-arrangements of the same information is wrong. Actually, this underground ocean of covert intelligence is often more valuable than the information freely available or easily accessible on the surface. Hence the ability of c. 5% of these databases to charge their users subscription and membership fees. The average deep web site receives 50% more traffic than a typical surface site and is much more linked to by other sites. Yet it is transparent to classic search engines and little known to the surfing public.

It was only a question of time before someone came up with a search technology to tap these depths (www.completeplanet.com).

LexiBot, in the words of its inventors, is...

"...the first and only search technology capable of identifying, retrieving, qualifying, classifying and organizing "deep" and "surface" content from the World Wide Web. The LexiBot allows searchers to dive deep and explore hidden data from multiple sources simultaneously using directed queries. Businesses, researchers and consumers now have access to the most valuable and hard-to-find information on the Web and can retrieve it with pinpoint accuracy."

It places dozens of queries, in dozens of threads simultaneously and spiders the results (rather as a "first generation" search engine would do). This could prove very useful with massive databases such as the human genome, weather pattes, simulations of nuclear explosions, thematic, multi-featured databases, intelligent agents (e.g., shopping bots) and third generation search engines. It could also have implications on the wireless inteet (for instance, in analysing and generating location-specific advertising) and on e-commerce (which amounts to the dynamic serving of web documents).

This transition from the static to the dynamic, from the given to the generated, from the one-dimensionally linked to the multi-dimensionally hyperlinked, from the deterministic content to the contingent, heuristically-created and uncertain content - is the real revolution and the future of the web. Search engines have lost their efficacy as gateways. Portals have taken over but most people now use inteal links (within the same web site) to get from one place to another. This is where the deep web comes in. Databases are about inteal links. Hitherto they existed in splendid isolation, universes closed but to the most persistent and knowledgeable. This may be about to change. The flood of quality relevant information this will unleash will dramatically dwarf anything that preceded it.

About The Author

Sam Vaknin is the author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited" and "After the Rain - How the West Lost the East". He is a columnist in "Central Europe Review", United Press Inteational (UPI) and ebookweb.org and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com. Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Govement of Macedonia.

His web site: http://samvak.tripod.com

There are more than 5 billion web pages with millions of businesses trying to do business online. But only a few have succeeded while the rest are mere billboards on the inteet superhighway.

These few have succeeded in overcoming the value hurdles by constant innovation.

Constant and never ending innovation is the key to creating value in business more so when your business is totally web based and online. Why is it more important in online business than traditional brick and mortar businesses?

Let us look at a few key components of value creation in traditional vs. online business

Human Presence in Enhancing Value

Traditional business has one major advantage. It is the ability to communicate one to one and personally with the customer. While communicating directly with the customer by a sales person, the owner or the resource person, the personality of the person is added to the overall value of the goods or services.

A smile, witty presentation, on the spot analysis of the need and matching the product benefits to the need of the customer, a feel for the product and services enhances the value of the product for the customer.

Online business has very little scope to add value by physical presence either of the product or the person promoting it. To make up for the personal charisma and interaction, online business content has to be highly conversational, witty with personalized writing styles or audio/video to get the same effect and results.

Technology as Value

Traditional business is able to get the attention of the customer by projecting a vision of the technology and its possibilities through personal contact. Even a moderate technical improvement is made more visible to visiting customers

Online business is heavily dependent on technology. But technology has the disadvantage of becoming a commodity as everyone catches up and the differentiation vanishes. Enhancing value through technology requires constant innovation to stay ahead of the pack. Technology as a commodity may be overcome only though a human face. You may have the ability through autoresponders to send thousands of emails in an instant but few online businesses can write an intelligent, witty, one to one personalized communication to effectively leverage the autoresponder..

Knowledge as value

While inteet is a huge repository of knowledge and could act as the major tool for value enhancement, the volume of information or knowledge available can also become its major disadvantage. Everyone online knows that there is a huge amount of knowledge that one has to assimilate quickly. The person therefore scans the information online mechanically and quickly, not comprehending fully the information he is scanning on the monitor screen.

Another disadvantage is knowledge cannot be applied selectively to the online customer. All knowledge can be made available online but it is the discretion of the customer to recognize, choose and use it for value enhancement. Therefore it is a highly perishable commodity online achieving very fast obsolescence.

Offline business has the advantage of communicating knowledge and information in a form that is relevant. The availability and access to knowledge, though limited, is used selectively and tailored to customer requirement.

Change and innovation as value

Change and innovation are better perceived offline in real life situations than online. Any innovation or change takes time and effort on the part of the online businesses to reach to the customer in spite of technology as customers may choose not visit the web pages or emails may be filtered out.

A change from a staircase to an escalator, automatic doors, a facelift to a building or storefront, a better billing system are all far more appreciated than online innovations.

An online business has to constantly innovate in terms of sticky online content to keep the customers coming back. The web content has to be designed and written very intelligently to achieve the same impact as a simple handshake in offline business.

Is it the reason why more online businesses fail?

R.G. Srinivasan is a Certified Trainer, Writer and Author with more than two decades of managerial experience. Check out his home-business resources blog at http://www.home-businessresources.blogspot.com for interesting home business resources and opportunities.

Joint ventures are a very powerful way to build your business quickly. This article will help you in generating ideas for joint ventures that you can use in your business.

1. Find someone in your target market that either publishes an ezine or has a website. Ask them if they would like to join your affiliate program and promote your offers in their ezine, or on their site. In retu, you'll give them the product at no charge, and if you have an ezine or website, offer to promote something for them. Remember to make it an irresistible offer for them!

2. Use your own visitors and subscribers. Give them something free that has some sort of small advertisement of yours on or in it. It doesn't have to be a flashing sign. Just a subtle ad with your URL or subscribe email placed somewhere visible. By using this method you could have your little ad all over your entire market! It takes a snowflake to start a snowball! Your visitors and subscribers will be happy to get something for free, and they'll be even happier that it doesn't have ads ALL over it. DON'T get greedy. Give a little and get a lot! Find someone else in your market that does the same thing. Offer to give their �give aways� out if in retu they give your �give aways� out.

3. If you can't beat 'em� Join 'em! Round up several others in your market who you think there would be a mutual benefit to partner with. Have a "Joint Venture team". Your team could pool your resources and beat the "big guys" in your market. Those in your "Joint Venture team" could cross promote each other�s products, services, and/or programs also!

4. Find 5, 10 or however many ezine publishers who are in your target market. Offer them all discounts to their subscribers on your offer. Give them your product for free also. Let them know that you are partnering with other ezine publishers for your discounted offer, and that you will give the ezine publisher who produces the most result a bonus. Just make sure your bonus is GOOD! Make it something unique and semi-personal. I've always thought when rewarding someone I do business with that I shouldn't give them a "business gift". Try giving a semi-personal personal gift. You may not really know that person, but there are sites online that will tell you the gifts women like and the gifts men like. Use those sites to find semi-personal gifts. (*Please note that this does say semi-personal. Business is business, so make sure your gift/bonus is appropriate.)

5. I saw a site the other day at: ThankYouAds.com This is a WONDERFUL idea. The basics of the concept are placing other people's ads on your Thank You page. What a great time to send your customer off to your most trusted JV partner while the customer still has their credit card out! You'll want to be careful when doing this though. Make sure you've already sold that customer all that you can before passing them to your Joint Venture partner.

6. Contests are a WONDERFUL way to market, and you can conduct them for any type of market. Contact an ezine publisher or website owner in your market. Offer to hold a contest giving away an item or items you are offering. In retu for this, ask that they run your ad, or place your ad on their website. If it's a really good contest, ask that they run your solo ad, or put your ad in a very prominent spot on their site. Another way to use contests is by doing a �contest swap�. Let them know you�ll promote their contest if they promote yours. If they don�t have one offer to come up with one for them. Explain the benefits behind having a contest. Offer to have one for them. Let them know you�ll donate the prize (it doesn�t have to be anything really expensive) if they would like, and show them how to set it up. This is relationship building at its best. The next time you approach that person with a JV they will trust you because you were willing to go out of your way to help them.

7. We all know that article writing is one of the best ways to market. You show people that you know something about the topic you are writing on, you are automatically giving them something (your article), and it's a viral way of marketing. Your article could go all OVER the place. Online and offline. If you know an ezine publisher or website owner who publishes articles on your market topic, ask if they would like to swap articles. You promote their article, and they will in tu promote your article. The best thing about this idea is you can do it with many people, and you can do it over and over by writing new articles.

8. Another writing idea would be for you to write a column on your market and offer it to an ezine publisher or website owner. I would suggest that you write unique content for each ezine publisher or website owner if you are wanting them to advertise you or for you. I know ezine publishers and website owners would go for this idea because as an ezine owner and website owner, I am currently seeking several people to write original content for my many sites and ezines in exchange for free advertising.

9. Swap business cards with others in your market. Your hand out your joint venture partners business cards and they hand out yours. This is just like word of mouth advertising, which is the best kind around. Business cards are a wonderful way to put your advertisement in someone's hands. Putting it in their hands in one of the keys to selling.

10. If publishing and ebook, you could offer part of your ebook for free. Offer one chapter to potential customers, so that they can �test� your ebook. Find other ebook publishers in your market and ask if they could do the same with their ebooks. If they agree you could advertiser their free chapter, and ask that they advertise your free chapter in retu. This can also be done with membership sites. Offer a 3-day free trial. Find others in your market that offers memberships to their sites. You advertise their free trial, and ask that they advertise yours.

What about software? Many people offer free trials for software. If you offer a free trial to your software, go to www.download.com. Search for software related to your market. When you find software that isn�t in competition with yours, but that would compliment the other person�s software, contact them and ask to do a JV where you promote their software and they promote yours! I�m sure you can think of a way to do this with your product or service.

11. Survey swap? You bet! Surveys are hot right now. Sometimes you have to offer your visitor or subscriber a little bit of an incentive to do it, but the information you will get is well worth it. Find others in your market that asks their visitors or subscribers to take surveys. Let them know that you also ask your visitors or subscribers to do take surveys. Ask if they would put a link to your survey on their site, and in retu you could do the same thing. If you are asking for personal information on your survey be sure not to share that with the other website owner. If you do, make sure that it is noted in your privacy policy or you could lose visitors or subscribers!

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Liz Tomey has been involved in Direct Mail Advertising since 1998. She runs a network of over 25 sites related to Direct Mail Advertising. Her newest business TomeyMarketing.com is related to unorthodox advertising methods. She�s currently developing unorthodox advertising methods exclusively for online marketers. Her latest work is at: JointVentureSeeker.com Teaching marketers the POWER of joint ventures!

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There are certain characteristics and actions that are common to successful entrepreneurs (entrepreneurs or business owners on the inteet). Leaing them will also make it easier and more likely for you to succeed than it would be without a knowledge of them. There are many factors indeed that we can attribute their success to. I will cover ten of them here.

1. They set goals. You have dreams, things you want to achieve. You set a goal when you fix a time for realizing your dream. Setting goals and writing them down will drive you to succeed. A Harvard Business School study revealed that only 3% of the population studied wrote down their goals and that they were eaing 10 times as much as the 83% that never set goals. The leaing here is that you should write down your goals, breaking them into bits consisting of activities that will lead you to realize your dreams.
2. They are organized. Being organized is a habit that can be leat. It would appear that some find this easier than others. A lot of productive time is lost to lack of organization. Are you organized? Answer this question to find out: Are you able to find things when you need them? Keeping proper records and adopting a simple logical filing system will help you a great deal.
3. They develop themselves. There is no perfect human being. There are often weaknesses, gaps and deficiencies here and there. The successful inteet business owners improve themselves by reading and attending seminars. They are perpetual students. They know that leaders are readers.
4. They pay attention to detail. At a certain stage taking care of little things lead towards perfection. In tuing out an e-mail, an ezine or designing a web site effort must be made to ensure that good impression is made on the receiver or visitor. The Japanese principle of "kaizen", continuous improvement, is worth embracing.
5. They use time well. I don't want to say that they manage time well because the time available is fixed, 24 hours in a day and so on. What you can do is arrange your activities to get the most out the available fixed time. There should be a balance amongst business, family and self. The front runners do this.

They use the right tools. This is the computer age and automation is the word. As your business grows it will be very helpful to take advantage of the various tools now at our disposal to enable you work smarter. The big eaers put a large chunk of their business operations on autopilot.

6. They stay motivated. Motivation comes from within, driving you to continue your work with a high energy level. It helps a great deal if you love what you are doing. This is why it is important to consider your area of interest, apart from monetary issues, in the choice of a business.
7. They are self-disciplined. It's necessary to be focused and methodical in your approach to work. If you work at home it's doubly so. Set working hours and let all know that you would rather not be distracted. This practice would enhance your productivity.
8. They have and display positive attitude. The top dogs are not easily discouraged. They don't tu tail when they encounter obstacles. Neither should you. Thomas Edison, the inventor of the electric bulb, did 1200 experiments before he succeeded.
9. They are patient. Particularly at the beginning. They do not go after get-rich-quick schemes that do not last but collapse in no time like a house built on sand. They stake out their plot and invest their energy and ingenuity on it until it blossoms. You should take a long-term view as well.

Without sacrificing your individuality and originality, we should model success because, by and large, different attitudes and actions lead to different results.

Matthew Eigbe has over 25 years experience in consumer marketing and now focuses on network marketing using the inteet. He is webmaster at http://www.mattlinks.ws, a site that explains how you can gain Financial Freedom by inviting people to have their own domain name.