Site Making Using Google

Businesses that want to sell something in the market need 2 things. The first is the product to be sold which has to be made then distributed to places like the grocery, the mall or the supermarket. The second is marketing which is the vehicle to carry that message across to the consumer so that people are aware of its existence then it is purchased.

The age of the internet has given people the opportunity to make money via the web. There are a lot of websites that offer a person the chance to be seen easily and quickly and one of the best right now is using site maps created by Google.

The benefits of using Google are the following;

· It helps people find ones web page better than other search engines because of better crawl coverage.

· People will be able to search on certain keywords that the person put in place which will directly lead searchers to ones website.

· It allows the person to provide specific information to Google about the web page such as the last time it was modified or how often it is changed.

· Using Google straight will allow ones web page to be seen quickly which is a lot better than other computer companies who promise to do the same thing but can’t deliver in the end.

Now that the benefits have been mentioned, it is now time to go through the step by step process to make a Google site map.

1. The first thing that needs to be done is to do the proper research. The service or product has to fill a need that the customers want right now. It should provide a solution of some kind that will make that will improve the quality of life either at home or at work.

2. Next, one should focus on the product or service that is being offered to the customer must be sold at a decent price. Sometimes, the product one makes is already available in the market. To be competitive, one must figure out a way to convince people as to why this product is better than the other leading brands available. What features does it have that the competitor doesn’t? What makes it unique which is not only about the product on hand but the service that this can give as well?

Just like a normal business where business is done on the phone or in a store, one must acquire the right equipment and machines for the job. These could be merchandise that is either physical or electronic and an online ordering system.

To be successful, one should be sure that the goods that a customer will order can be delivered on time. If there are any problems, a customer support staff or system should be ready to cater to that.

3. If the business is done with a group of people or a single proprietorship, it is best to brainstorm for the best domain name for the business. It should be catchy and will easily be remembered by people. Given that there are probably other people who have been in the business longer and that it is possible that the domain name has already been taken, it is best to think of several names in case it can no longer be used.

4. When a domain name has been selected, one should enter the URL of the website to be created. Google site maker will then crawl the site and create a list of all the links it can find.

5. Next, one should fix the control settings. Doing this will determine how frequent the contents of the site changes which will let Google know how often it should be crawled.

6. If there are certain URL’s that a person does not wish to be included in ones site, Google can be instructed to bypass it so that it will not be crawled and posted on ones site map. One can select what types of files to be bypassed whether these are .zip or .exe files.

7. Also, one has the option of adding the sites FTP information since Google can automatically upload the site map for the person.

Getting Rich from Affiliate Programs

Some times it pays to work with others. In this article we
will discuss how to make money with affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs (also called Referral Programs or
Partnership Programs) are essentially commission-based sales
schemes. You recommend a site to your users and pick up a
percentage of any sales those users generate. You benefit
from the commission and the site benefits from sales it
wouldn’t otherwise have made. If you’ve ever gone to a
website and seen links to Amazon, those were affiliate
links.

You can run an affiliate program from a site you’ve already
set up, or create a site specially to promote a product or
service. As long as it brings in more cash than you spend on
building it and buying traffic, you’re laughing.

Affiliate ads work two ways: you can join them to make
money, or you can run one to attract users.

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Joining An Affiliate Program
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As with any marketing venture, you need to be careful in the
selection of an affiliate program. The benefit of an
affiliate program is that it gives you another way to make
money from your users. Instead of selling them a product
yourself, you send them to a partner and take a cut.

On the downside though, your affiliate ads will take the
place of a different ad that you could have put in that same
spot. You have to make sure that each advertising position
on your site is bringing in the maximum revenue possible. If
you’re not getting the most from your site, you’re tossing
money away.

The key to success is to choose the right program, right
from the beginning.

Now, a lot of commercial sites run affiliate programs.
That’s because they know that they only have to pay a
commission if a sale is actually made; it’s a proven way to
generate revenue without risk. What that means for you is
that when it comes to choosing an affiliate program, you’re
going to have a huge range to choose from. What it all boils
down to though is product and price.

While it might be tempting to go for the program that pays
the highest commissions, the program won’t pay you a penny
if your users won’t go there or won’t buy once they get
there. You have to be certain that the service you’re
promoting is of genuine interest to the kind of users you
buy, whether you’re buying them from search engines or
anywhere else.

Sure, you can work backwards: You find a high-paying
affiliate program and create a small site to send users to
it, but do you know where to buy users for a program like
that? You’re going to have to research the field, check out
the most popular sites, and negotiate banner campaigns and
link exchanges.

That’s fine if you want to invest the time and the effort.
But it’s much easier to find an affiliate program operating
in a field you’re familiar with, and use that program to
earn extra cash.

For example, suppose you had set up a dating site. You might
make bit of money selling subscriptions, but you might make
even more by joining Match.com’s affiliate program and
selling them your users. Unless you’re planning to be the
Internet’s biggest dating site, you’re not going to be able
to compete directly and beat them, but you can join them—and
earn money.

Or rather than sell your users directly to a ‘competitor’,
you can look for services that complement your own. Visitors
to your dating site, for example, might be interested in
buying flowers, books on relationships or tickets on singles
cruises. Instead of selling just one product—membership
subscriptions—you’d be selling a whole range of different
goods to the same people, and increasing the sources of your
income.

Here are some tips to selecting an affiliate program that is
lucrative and right for you:

* Don’t accept less than 25% commission. You can find
affiliate programs with great payment structures and high
percentages of the purchase price in just about every
field.

* Look for comprehensive statistics pages that list the
number of click-throughs, sales and earnings so you can
see
how you’re doing. The information should be broken down
by month.

* Look for programs that offer a wide variety of
promotional tools to put on your Web page, including text
links, banners and graphics.

* Find out how often you will be paid and make sure that
the payment schedule meets your expectations. Some
programs pay
monthly, others quarterly; which is best for you?

* Look for examples of marketing methods that successful
affiliates are using to get the best results.

* Make sure that top level support is given. If they can’t
answer your questions promptly and intelligently, you
don’t want to work with them.

Affiliate programs offer a viable solution to competing
against larger competitors and still make money. As the
saying goes, if you can’t beat them, joint them!
Until next time,

Warmly,
R. Ardyansyah D.

What businesses are succeeding on the Net?

This week we will address the most basic question any
Internet business owner will have to answer at one point or
another…”what should I sell?”.

After the settling down of the dot-com bubble, sanity checks
have brought realistic expectations to the fore. Initially,
a backlash was seen, forecasting the doom of the Internet.
Finally, merits have made the Internet gain its rightful
place. In breakthroughs that show the promise of e-commerce
wasn't all smoke and mirrors, four dot-coms recently
reported their first quarterly profits. The list of the
Internet’s publicly held moneymakers includes eBay Inc.,
Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Overture Services Inc.,
Expedia Inc., FindWhat.com Inc. and E-Trade Group Inc.
Several privately owned dot-coms, including search engines
Google and DealTime, say they have been making money, too.

In 2001, the last full year where numbers are available, the
Department of Commerce broke out e-commerce sales versus
total U.S retail sales which revealed the $3.16 trillion
retail industry saw a total of $37.7 billion in sales take
place online -- comprising 1.2 percent of the total. This
year e-commerce is tracking about the same. Through the
third quarter, the last full quarter where numbers are
available, total retail sales were $856 billion versus $11
billion in e-commerce, about a 1.3 percent share.


There were big gains made in Home and Garden, a 78 percent
increase; Furniture and Appliances, a 75 percent increase;
and Toy shopping online with a 61 percent increase in the
year 2002. There is no doubt that online shopping is
growing.

Nielsen//NetRatings found that more than 35.5 million U.S.
Internet users made shopping trips to virtual department
store sites during the week ending November 3, 2002 - that's
a 20 percent increase from the week ending October 20 and
roughly 14 million more than almost the same time period in
2001.

There is a growing tendency amongst Internet users to pay
for valuable content online. There are many reasons for
this. First, only a few websites operated by big companies
can afford to provide valuable content without being
compensated. The rest of us can't be so generous. And trying
to recapture our expenses by selling advertising on our
websites has failed to pay the bills. Online advertising and
click-through rates are on the decline.

Second, many people are now more than willing to pay to
receive quality services and products even if they were
offered for free earlier. Several paid content websites have
already proven this unmistakable trend. The discerning buyer
values his/her time as also the quality of information or
service and is willing to pay for it.

However, not all products can be sold on the Internet. Some
products may be better suited for online sales than others;
others simply will not work on this new commercial medium.
According to an Ernst and Young study, the most popular
online purchases are computer related products (40%), books
(20%), travel (16%), clothing (10%), recorded music (6%),
subscriptions (6%), gifts (5%) and investments (4%).

Businesses offering paid services have also prospered
enormously. The top three categories (Business
Content/Investment, Entertainment/Lifestyles and
Personals/Dating) accounted for 62% of all paid content
revenues in the first three quarters of 2002. The total
market for paid online content in the U.S. grew to $361.4
million for the quarter, a 14 percent gain over the previous
quarter and a 105.3 percent gain over Q3 2001. An
interesting statistic put forward by this report is that 85%
of money spent by U.S. Consumers for online content goes to
the top 50 sites in most of the categories.

The graph below (Top 3 Content Categories) is indicative of
this change.

In terms of “stickiness” of different categories, Business
sites - especially finance and investment rank the highest.
In other words, users are more likely to spend longer time
surfing through a business website compared to other
categories. This study was conducted by Nielsen//NetRatings.
The table below shows the most addictive web categories for
2002.

Category Time per person(hr:min:sec) Audience
Business – Finance and Investment 0:21:33 51,586
General News 0:15:47 64,822
Entertainment 0:14:32 45,922

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

According to the above figures a person spends about 22
minutes on a finance website on an average.

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Should you be selling a product or a service?
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The Internet is primarily used to communicate, entertain,
educate and research. It is thus no wonder that
nonperishable, information-intensive products - including
computers and software, books, travel, consumer electronics,
magazine subscriptions - are the most popular online
products at present. Content-rich sites, subscription-based
sites to advertiser-supported sites focusing on a wide range
of topics, have been sprouting all over the Internet.

Services such as hotel reservation, air travel and
investments have successfully translated themselves to the
Internet.

Unique services such as Online driving schools have been
prospering. Some states in the US have set up online payment
sites for Government services. Residents of a state can log
on to a common site to pay all bills and other expenses,
such as parking tickets to the local/County courts.

However, all kinds of services cannot be run entirely on the
Internet. The Internet is less effective when face-to-face
selling is needed to close a deal. The Internet can give
lots of preliminary information that's useful in setting the
scene for the closing. But the actual closing takes place
offline - i.e., not on the Internet.

Products can also be marketed and sold successfully on the
Internet. The kinds of products and services that sell best
on the Internet are those that take advantage of the
convenience of the Net. Remember that convenience is the
primary reason why consumers flock to the Internet in the
first place. People can shop any hour of the day at any
site. They can avoid crowded stores, irritating sales
clerks, and even avoid pickpockets.

Offbeat or unusual products and services often attract
online attention and sell strongly. You would generally not
try to sell items people can get at the corner store. Thus,
few toothbrushes are sold on the Net; the same thing with
daily food and beverage purchases. But special cheeses, rare
cigars, Turkish plates, long-aged wines, even diamonds, can
and do sell on the Net.

Most products sold by catalog and mail order also sell well
on the Net. However, people tend to buy only those products
that could be shipped at a reasonable price. Higher shipping
costs diminish the price competitiveness of online products
and turns-off a lot of potential buyers. In fact, high
shipping costs is the primary factor that discourages people
from buying online more than any other single reason. An
Ernst and Young report shows that 53 percent of online
shoppers are concerned with shipping costs that are too
high, compared to only 19 percent who are concerned with
credit cards being stolen.

As an online merchant, you have to work out the advantages
as well as disadvantages of selling either products or
services. However, in the recent past, online services have
known to flourish. Nevertheless, if you chose to sell
products you need to rethink your product offering if the
total costs of the product and the shipping are higher than
what is offered elsewhere.

Take some time to evaluate your products or services. There
is a growing market of potential customers on the Internet,
you just need to offer the products and services they are
looking for.


Warmly,
R. Ardyansyah D.