Use ClickBank (www.clickbank.com). They take 7.5% per sale. Normally you would pay about 2.5% to Mastercard/Visa and 3% to your affiliate program management company. ClickBank is only 2% additional, but you don't pay huge setup fees or have to hire a programmer to setup your e-commerce or affiliate software. And you don't have to pay employees to do your accounting, cut your affiliate checks, or mail them out. Plus you can use your time for the more important tasks... like marketing. Later, once your business income gets flowing you can always change to other lower percentage companies.

How to save hundreds on Visa/Mastercard account setup fees:

This is easy - just ask and thou shalt receive. Many resellers, also called Independent Service Organizations ("ISOs"), make it their policy to milk new customers for up-front fees, to the tune of $2,000 or more. From leasing terminals to selling PC credit card software, this is money in their pocket.

ISOs receive "recurring revenue" income based on a percentage of your sales, therefore these up-front profits are just icing on the cake.

To save on setup fees, the trick is to shop around. And it's surprisingly easy. Many ISOs will set you up with a Visa/Mastercard merchant account for a just a few hundred bucks, and often free. They know you can easily go to their competitor, so most will waive fees. Start with the list of over 100 ISOs listed on www.Authorize.net. You can also hit the search engines and come up with hundreds of ISOs.

Save Thousands on Visa/Mastercard terminals & printer:

This is easy. Just tell your ISO that you want to process through Authorize.net. Authorize.net has an Internet based "virtual terminal" which allows you to make charges, credits and print reports. It's just like having expensive terminals & printers! What's more, the virtual terminal's reporting capability is superior! UPDATE: It appears that Verisign (www.Verisign.com) now offers a similar virtual terminal.

The quickest way to get started:

Place low cost classifieds ($5 to $10) in the ezines (email newsletters) to get you some immediate traffic to your site. Invest a bit more for "top ads" or "sponsor ads" (which are usually at the very top of the ezine) and you will get even better results. Top ads and sponsor ads usually cost $25-45, or plus/minus depending on the circulation of the ezine.

If you want to set up a quick affiliate program, ClickBank (www.clickbank.com) can get you going in about a day. You can always switch to another more sophisticated affiliate management company later, but for a near zero cost quick start, we suggest ClickBank.

Prerequisites before you can successfully sell your product online:

Before doing anything, you need these two things: A hot product, and a hot market. If you don't have both of these, don't bother wasting your time, energy and money marketing online. Find something else to sell. Or join a good affiliate program where you can profit without having to produce a product, process & ship orders, handle customer service, etc.


Things vital to your sales:

You MUST have a proven sales process, a USP ("Unique Selling Proposition") and an Irresistible Offer.

What your site needs to succeed. If you're missing any, you could be losing money every day:

You should incorporate the following into your site: Selling psychology, professional design, professional sales copy, effective use of headlines, effective subheads, eliminate your prospect's risk with an effective guarantee, offer an easy way to order, lead your prospect into the order form.

Strategies of web marketing, including the one "dog" used by 99% of websites and why you should avoid it:

Here are the seven overall web marketing strategies:
Direct Site Promotion, Promotion of Lead-in Sites, Promotion of an ATG (automatic traffic generator), Promotion of an Intraweb, Promotion of an Affiliate program, Promotion of a Service Facility, Promotion of a Utility Site. 99% of the websites are using "Direct Site promotion" which is the most ineffective! This is because you have to continually work for your traffic, and as you slack so do your results. The others are viral or perpetual in nature, so once they get going they can carry their own momentum.

A quickie which is guaranteed to get you over 200 sales instantly:

Contact ezine editors and set up a JV (joint venture) deal. Often they could do this as soon as a few days or a week. The JV could be a revenue sharing deal, where you you "jack up" their commission to 50%-60% of sales (don't offer anything less). If you have your own mailing list, you could do a cross-endorsement deal, or an ad swap. Or if you have an expensive product or service, you could offer that in exchange for an endorsement mailing.

The best single piece of advice about search engines that is so obvious most people don't even see it:

Here's the advice: Don't battle with competitive keywords! Thousands of sites appear in the search results for competitive keyword phrases like: "sex" "marketing" "free clipart" "computers" and so on. How committed are you? Sure it is **possible** to get on the first screen and beat out the other ten thousand sites, but is this the most effective use of your time and energies? Put your efforts into scores of other marketing tasks which WILL result in traffic. Many people put 90% of their time & effort into trying to get high search results, but never do. Hey, if a search on the term "computer" brings up 20,000 sites, be realistic on whether you can really get into the top 6 results. Also consider outsourcing your search engine positioning to a pro firm, who will not bill you unless you have top positioning.

10 minutes of work that can bring you instant sales:

First, place a few low cost ezine ads. You'll get instant traffic to your site.

How writing one page of text about your industry (in your spare time) can bring loads of business:

Write an article and send it to ezine editors to be included as a feature article in their ezine. End the article with a few sentences about your online business, and with a hotlink to your site. There are tens of thousands of ezines, and if your article gets included in just a handful of ezines you could find your article in front of a few hundred thousand readers!

The secret way to get virtually every website in your industry to WANT to link to yours, and carry your banner:

Create a "Media Hook Lead-In Site". Media Hooks are designed to get the attention of the general public and more importantly, the attention of the press.

Media hooks are extremely powerful in that they can get the attention of the press, resulting in news coverage for your website. And local or national news coverage means visitors to your website, sometimes in hoards.

A book store gets a famous author to do a book signing and presto, instant coverage on the 6 o'clock news all over the country. That's free press for the book store, for the author, and for the book (i.e. for the publishing company). And here's what happens: The bookstore does a killing on sales for the week... not just on the promoted book but on all books. And books stores all over the country benefit from increased sales of the featured book.

You'll have to get creative in coming up with your own media hook. Brainstorm with friends and co-workers. Consider hiring a marketing consultant to assist you in coming up with a really good media hook. Come up with something that will appeal to the masses, or at least to your target audience.

Once you come up with a media hook, decide whether you're going to incorporate it into a lead-in website, or into your main site. Finally, put out a press release announcing your media hook. A good hook will get you some media attention, plus other sites will be eager to link to your site.

A secret to getting instant free publicity from newspapers, magazines, radio stations and even TV. (The secret is NOT simply sending a press release!)

Send a press release based on a MEDIA HOOK. This will increase the chances of getting national media exposure by a factor of ten or more. See above tip for an explanation of what a media hook is all about.

Nowadays, press releases can quickly find their way to the trash cans of editors. There are just too many press releases, and way too many which announce new websites. The editors are looking for something newsworthy to print, something interesting, fresh and different. So give it to them! Get a competitive edge by basing your press release on a media hook. It will get you noticed.

Once you've established your website and sales process and orders begin coming in, you can use one or both of these strategies to double, triple, or quadruple your sales; large companies use them and you can too:

Method 1: Offer multiple language versions of your site. Translate your website using a translation service, low cost software, or a free online service. Register your site in foreign search engines and directories (and since there's a lot less competition so you'll stand out more).

Method 2: Offer multiple language versions of your product.

How to get people "hooked" on your software product or information product, and get easy sales:

Setup a "try-before-buy" system, and offer a free download of a feature-limited version, or a time-limited full version.

BRAND NEW TECHNIQUE... will only work for the first generation of people who seize it! This is a limited limited resource:

"Keyword-Loaded Long Domain Names." The rules have recently changed, and now you can have very long domain names. Why is this good? Because the search engines LOVE to see keywords in domain names. www.tennis-balls-tennis-balls-tennis-balls.com (actually that could go on much longer!) In a world where you are "scored" for things like keyword relevancy, keyword density, and a dozen other things, you now have a one-up. Some search engines will boost your score a lot higher than others, but in general it really helps to have your keywords in your domain name.

Before you run out and drain your checkbook on purchasing lots of long domain names, make sure you really know what you're doing. You may want to consult a search engine expert (go ahead, pay them a few bucks) to give you the skinny for your industry and your keywords, and then to suggest some long keyword-loaded domain names.

Here's how to get your webpage announced to 2,000 different webmasters each and every day of the year.

Implementing this technique is not free (it could cost as much as $39) but hear this:

1. It runs by itself
2. You don't do one single thing! (except grin really big)
3. This is entirely PERMISSION MARKETING meaning the webmasters expect your announcement
4. This has nothing to do with ezines or newsletters or bulk mail or targeted email or email to "safe lists" or anything else related.

The technique is called "Site Submission Thank-You Letter Marketing." In a nutshell, when people submit their site to the search engines, they get back a piece of email that thanks them for submitting, and usually promotes some product or URL. We all know that 99% of all search engine traffic comes from the top 8 search engines. So why do all of those other search engines exist? Simple, so they can use thank-you letter marketing!! You see, they're not concerned with the number of people who use their search engine. Their only concern is getting people to submit to their engine. Many search engines, like hitsgalore.com, offer this type of advertising. Look around a bit and you'll find quite a few. It is easiest to find FFA ("Free For All Links") sites which offer this. There are many sites which maintain lists of hundreds of search engines and FFA sites. Visit those sites and see if they sell space in their submission thank-you emails. If you don't see such a mention on their site (you won't on most sites), contact their webmasters and make them an offer!

New algorithms are used by search engine spiders which makes it even more difficult to get top listings. Use this knowledge to your advantage:

Search engines now put emphasis on something called "link popularity" to determine where you stand in the results listings. The more sites there are which link to you, the higher your popularity score and the better you stand in the search engine results. The trick is to get a lot of other sites to link to you, and then resubmit your site to the search engines. First off, if you own several different websites, try and include as many links as possible between your sites. Next, grab a few free accounts on GeoCities and Xoom.com and create some sites which link to your main sites. Finally, use some of the power tools available to create dozens or even hundreds of sites which link to your main site. You can find these programs/tools in the search engines by searching for "link popularity" and adding the terms "programs" or "tools" to the search.

Here are some great places to promote your webpage for free.

First, join BannerExplode.com. This is the very best of the "perpetual traffic generation" systems. Next get on some other perpetual systems like SpecialReportNetwork.com, trafficmagic.net and megaspinner.com. Next submit your site to the major search engines: lycos.com excite.com altavista.com, infoseek.com, hotbot.com, snap.com, msn.com, northernlight.com, aolnetfind.com, yahoo.com, msn.com.

Now list yourself in some of the directories related to your industry (we can't list them all here, so use any search engine to find the ones related to your industry). If for example you're in the boating industry, you can find many excellent boating-related portals with a VERY targeted audience. Also get listed in some of the free classified sites related to your industry. (using our previous example, the boating-related portals may have a classified ads section)

Next place a few ezine ads. These cost only about $5 per ad! (we'll discuss this further in another section) Finally, if you are running an affiliate program, get listed in associateprograms.com, refer-it.com, and the other affiliate directories.

This technique allows you to send permission email to approx 2,000 new webmasters each and every day of the year. And best of all, it runs on autopilot!

Start your own search engine site, and automate it to use thank-you letter marketing (earlier we explained this concept). Now get in contact with all of the batch submit software programs, search engine submission services, and sites which offer free search engine submissions Request that they add your search engine to their list. Once you get your search engine added to a few of the big ones, you will easily have several thousand submissions/day to your site! And that means several thousand webmasters will be getting your thank-you email (with your sales message for your main site).

This method will help keep your link on top of the FFA sites (while others get bumped down the list and eventually off):

Getting bumped is the nature of the FFA sites. When you add your link, you're at the top of the list of all links. But as other people add their links (to the top) yours gets bumped down. The trick is to keep adding your link. The most basic way of doing this is to bookmark all of the FFA sites you are listed on, then each morning and each evening go to each and resubmit your site. (It only takes a moment to submit). Plan on spending 15 minutes or less each morning and each afternoon or evening.

Now think about automating the entire process. You can write your own CGI program which automatically submits you to the FFA sites once per day, three times per day, or every hour! Many FFA sites limit the number of submissions, so have your program slightly change the email address, and the URL. To change the URL, simply append a unique ad code.

How to dramatically increase your banner click-thru rates:

First off, add the words "click here" to your banner. Studies show that this makes a big difference. Next, create fake drop-down menus (or better yet use real drop-downs if the host site allows html banners). What really works well is banners that appear to be text links! Try this, you'll be amazed at the results. This technique works well but only with certain products/ services/industries: cheesy looking banners. Nobody knows why these tend to pull well. Testing is a MUST. Develop 10 banners and join a free banner network. Check the click through stats for each banner over a two week period. You may want to purchase some additional impressions to speed up your testing (of course you'll benefit by having actual visitors as a result of your test dollars, so they won't be wasted). After two weeks, chose the two or three banners which produced the best. The industry average click through rate is 0.7% to 1%. If you can get a 1.5% to 2% click-through you're doing ok. Better then 2% and you've got a really good banner.