In a recent article I talked about Google AdSense placement based on eye-tracking research. However, research by The Poynter Institute, Eyetools and the Estlow Center for Journalism and New Media has a lot to say about more than where to put an AdSense block.
Designing an eCommerce site is more than making it pretty. You have certain desired actions you're looking for from your visitors. You have specific things you want to be sure they see and hopefully act on. Now, there's some research that can guide your design. Certainly you want your site to look professional, but you want it to do its job as effectively as possible too.
People are surprisingly alike in some of their basic visual behavior. It's been argued that our evolution as hunter-gatherers has shaped much of our ingrained visual patterns. Whether you buy that particular argument or not there are still important commonalities.
Typical behavior on initially viewing a site is to do a fast scan of the entire visible screen with short focusing periods around the areas that attract attention. First pass tends to include headlines, the page logo, photo captions, subheads, links and menu items. And the big hot spot is the upper left corner of the screen. I haven't seen any definitive research on whether these patterns also hold for users with native languages that read any way except left to right, but I'm assuming most of you are building sites for left-to-right readers.
The clear message is that your most important real estate is in that upper left area and that the lower right (particularly if it's below the fold) is the least likely to receive much attention.
How you use your words in a headline, paragraph or link can make a huge difference in your success at capturing a visitor's attention. The concept is called frontloading. Wherever you can make sure your critical terms appear at the very beginning of headlines, links and other text. It's still got to make sense, but the first few words are far more likely to be at least scanned then the middle or end of a headline or link or the inside of a paragraph.
The exact same words can have drastically different capture rates depending on their order. You want to maximize the probability that the visitor will read a whole headline or link and then act on it. So put the most significant, enticing words first - the ones that are the best grabbers and convey the subject immediately.
You don't have a lot of time to mess about. It's been reported that a typical surfer may be off your page in well under 14 seconds unless something grabs his or her attention fast. Remember the upper-left? You want to do an especially good job with headlines, link and text in that area.
Dropcaps (where the first capitalized letter in a line is in a different, often unusual, font and extends below the normal text base-line), bolding, font changes and color changes can also serve as strong eye-attractors. If you try these techniques you need to be careful that you don't overuse them (your page will look like a mess), and it's extremely important that you test whether or not they're actually doing what you want. Annoying as it may be, running tests is the only way to make sure it's an improvement.
Do you use lists? Have you made sure that they're in-line and as close to the left margin as possible? Don't ever use an outline format with multiple indents. People scan down, not across and they tend to scan close to the left margin. Indent too much and it might as well be invisible.
An interesting testing result that I read somewhere said that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of site visitors don't even see centered headlines. Sure they look nice and a lot of sites use them, but if they're totally missed by even 3 percent of your visitors, you're paying a major price to look good. Suggestion? Put those headlines up against your left margin.
This also applies to links. Put those links up against the left margin, not inside a paragraph, centered or off to the right. And if you want any clicks on a link, never put it in that nearly unseen lower right area. Might as well just leave it off your page.
How about indented paragraphs? Now there's a great way to start an argument. Some argue that it attracts the eye, it's different, few sites use it so you stand out. Others insist that you're far better off staying left justified and frontloading each paragraph. There's only one way to resolve it for yourself, yeah, run some tests and see what works with your visitors on your site.
The bottom line is that once you get beyond the basics of placement, frontloading, and left-justified links and headlines, you need to test if you want to fully maximize the effectiveness of your website design. I wish there were a simpler answer too, but in the end only testing will tell you what works best for your site.
Showing posts with label e-Commerce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label e-Commerce. Show all posts
Saturday, 18 July 2009
Friday, 17 July 2009
Producing profitable web sites without spending ages writing
This is all about
content.
I've written it as a response to some criticism in my forum this week. A couple
of people said that I don't produce enough original content. Right now that's
true. I'm not writing a lot.
But I'll tell you what. I'm doing what works.
The sites I've been building for the past few months are producing results. Big
results.
My sites, whether they're mini sites or big sites, work. And they bring in a
huge income every week from Google Adsense, Searchfeed, and affiliate programs.
So should I care what people are saying?
Yes I should.
Not just because I've been criticized, which is never nice, but because I still
believe that the key to long term success is running on-topic content which is
unique to your own web site.
I don't believe the sites I've built over the past few months are going to keep
producing an income for years, where the original content sites I've got will
keep working for years.
But I'm making hay while the sun shines and you should too.
Here's how I'm doing it:
Many of the sites that people were talking about were created with Traffic
Equalizer and heavily modified with templates, and by changing things with
search and replace, to add individuality. Just one of these sites makes more
every week than I used to earn working full time in my old newspaper job.
(interestingly this site now gets more traffic from the new Yahoo search engine
than it does from Google, where just a few months ago it was nearly all from
Google).
I hardly write anything on these sites, just an article on the index pages of
each folder/sub directory.
In case you don't know, Traffic Equalizer is, in essence, an automated directory
builder taking search engine results from your keyword list and building pages
around them. Lots of big name marketers are using it to make a lot of money.
I run Google Adsense on the pages, and also put at least one affiliate program
on a page. Very often it will be an ebook sold through Clickbank.
On some sites I put a number of Searchfeed links but I'm a bit worried about using
Searchfeed and Adsense together so I don't do it often, but Searchfeed still
send me a check for a $1000 plus each month - which is a nice little side
income.
My main concern with Traffic Equalizer has always been that someone else
building a page on the same search term could have an almost identical page to
mine. Search engines don't like this.
But the good news is that Traffic Equalizer has just been improved. A few weeks
ago Jeff Alderson, the programmer, asked me if I had any ideas on how to make it
better, and I suggested he try and find a way of getting the site content from
more sources and then randomizing the output. This would make it less of a
chance that two users would build identical pages. Well he's a fast worker and
the new improved version came out a couple of days ago, and though I haven't had
a chance to try it yet, I'm sure it's going to work. At least short term to mid
term.
The bad news is that I'm not certain of the long term viability of the sites.
They do well for a few months, but if you can't continue getting high quality
links to them they tend to drop down the rankings. Also I'm sure that Google
won't want the search results to be totally clogged with sites built with
Traffic Equalizer, and will eventually change their algorithms to make the pages
rank a lot lower than they currently do. If they did this by targeting pages
with lots of outbound links but few inbound links it would be damaging to the TE
pages.
Having said that, these sites DO work. And Google allow their Adsense Ads to be
run on them.
Some people don't like the idea of building writes using Traffic Equalizer
because it somehow seems wrong to them. They don't like the "quality" of the
sites it produces. But the search engines LOVE the sites. Many of the pages they
produce rank very high, and unlike the quite short lived fad of building
"smartpages" they don't do anything against the search engines rules. They don't
redirect, they don't mislead people. They just build simple directories.
I'm not going to name anyone, but some REALLY famous people in the internet
marketing world are doing very well with TE. These people consistently make a
huge income year after year by doing what works at the moment. In other words
they use the tools which bring them an income.
You should be doing it too.
Just one thing to mentally make a note of.
You have to be patient. Unless you already have a few high Pagerank sites you
can link to them from, these sites take a few months to take off. During those
months you need to keep build new sites. If you get despondent because the sites
look like they not going to do well you'll stop building them, and then curse
yourself a few months down the track when you realize you could have had 20 more
sites steadily coming online. In other words you don't see instant results, but
you have to keep building sites and pages. There is no easy option, no quick
work around. You work hard at building these sites and success will come.
_________________________________
So - seeing I think Traffic EQ sites won't keep working for years - what about
long term sites?
Well contrary to what a few people said in my forum I do still build sites full
of articles that I write or pay someone to write.
Right now I'm building a network of travel sites which will be full of articles
and photographs of places I've visited. They're going to be mini sites of
between 5 and 12 pages, though perhaps as high as 20 pages on some of them
because the photographs are going to take up quite a bit of space.
This week Kate has spent most of her time writing touristy type, personal
experience articles on London and York. Next week she's moving on to write about
Japan. After that it's going to be France. Then she's doing Malaysia, before
working on a big site about Australia. We'll be using photographs that I've shot
in the past few years in each of these places. And I'll also put together a site
on Bangkok in Thailand, which I visited recently.
All the content, both photographs and articles, will be totally unique to the
sites we build. They'll be keyword rich and the sites properly structured to
please the search engines. I haven't yet decided if I'll build the sites with
Traffic Equalizer. If I use TE I'll just use it to provide the structure of the site - pages, linking structure - then remove
most or all of the outbound links and replacing them with the articles and
photos.
Rather than just putting all the content up on one domain I've registered a
whole bunch of domain names and I'm hosting them in the countries the site is
about ( except Japan because I can't find a low cost Japanese web host ). The
sites will then be interlinked to help improve their search rankings - as
detailed in Michael Campbell's Revenge of the Mininet
I'm going to the trouble of finding hosts in
each country because I think it just might improve the web ranking chances a
little. Though I'm not certain on this. I'm quite certain, however, that if
they're linked together the way Michael describes they need to be on different
web hosts in a different IP range.
Here's what's involved ( so you can see why I take the easy option sometimes and
just do sites built with TE.
* First of all I had to do the traveling and suffer all that jetlag.
* Carry a pile of heavy camera gear around everywhere.
* Spend hours at the computer editing the pictures.
* Research the keywords so that I can build pages around search terms that
people are actually looking for ( I use Wordtracker to do this )
* Pay Kate to write most of the articles, and get my weary brain into action to
write some myself for the places for Bangkok which she hasn't yet visited.
* Decide on whether to run with Adsense, or an affiliate program or both. (I've
yet to find a travel affiliate program I'm happy with, but some pages might
carry affiliate ads for luggage or books)
* Choose domain names and find web hosts.
* Build the sites and link them together as in Mininet
* Upload them to the hosts by FTP
* List them with Google and Yahoo ( I don't bother about the rest, AOL, MSN and
the others will quickly find you from Google.)
______________________________________
By the way I'll probably use Traffic Equalizer on different domains to build
pages to direct traffic to my travel network sites. The same way I now use
Traffic Equalizer to send traffic to my other mini sites.
______________________________________
So what do you do if you want to build content sites like my travel sites but
you can't write and don't have an employee who can quickly churn out words?
I think the best way is to sub contract.
There's a lot of talk in the media about how people are losing their jobs
because a lot of American companies, as well as many in England and Australia,
are outsourcing jobs to India.
Have you thought of joining them and outsourcing your web content to India?
I've just taken my first steps to doing it. But unlike big companies I'm not
putting anyone out of a job, just helping create jobs.
Wages are very low in India, a country which has some of the best educated
English speaking people in the world. And to us Westerners people work for
peanuts in India. According to an article in Computerworld magazine
a programmer in India earns around US$7500 a year. ( A programmer in China
earns around 20 to 30% less, but it's hard to outsource content creation to
China because, unlike India, few people write English well enough)
I'm not the first to think of using people in India to write my web content.
While I was researching this piece I found that the giant builder.com has
started offshoring authoring of many of its articles to India
So how do you find people in these countries? The easiest way is to use an
outsourcing web site.
Do a search on them for "search engine optimised web content ", "content
writing" or just "web content". When I looked on elance last week I saw bids as
low $5 per page, but the lowest I saw today was $10 a page. This is still
incredibly cheap.
Here's the $10 a page bid - "Thanks for the opportunity to bid on your project!
My quote is based on a rate of $10 per article (350-500 words). I'm a marketing
professional with over 10 years of experience."
_____________________________
Another possible way to use these sites is to hire people to create new products
for you. At the time of writing this letter there are 5 bids for writing a
recipe ebook. The lowest bidder is willing to do the whole project for just
US$400. In fact the highest bid is just $450. Someone else is willing to write a
50 page ebook on stopping headaches for $8 a page, which also adds up to $400.
Here's another for an ebook about looking after your skin.
Wanted: A ghostwriter for an Informational eBook entitled ""Perfect Skin:
Cleansing, Nourishing, Prot ..."
And again someone is willing to write it for just $8 per page "Our bid is based
on US$8 per page (250-300 words) with minimum billing of 50 pages (additional
pages will be billed at the rate of US$8 per pages) and includes all necessary
research and revisions. You will own full copyrights. Completion Time: 16
working days."
content.
I've written it as a response to some criticism in my forum this week. A couple
of people said that I don't produce enough original content. Right now that's
true. I'm not writing a lot.
But I'll tell you what. I'm doing what works.
The sites I've been building for the past few months are producing results. Big
results.
My sites, whether they're mini sites or big sites, work. And they bring in a
huge income every week from Google Adsense, Searchfeed, and affiliate programs.
So should I care what people are saying?
Yes I should.
Not just because I've been criticized, which is never nice, but because I still
believe that the key to long term success is running on-topic content which is
unique to your own web site.
I don't believe the sites I've built over the past few months are going to keep
producing an income for years, where the original content sites I've got will
keep working for years.
But I'm making hay while the sun shines and you should too.
Here's how I'm doing it:
Many of the sites that people were talking about were created with Traffic
Equalizer and heavily modified with templates, and by changing things with
search and replace, to add individuality. Just one of these sites makes more
every week than I used to earn working full time in my old newspaper job.
(interestingly this site now gets more traffic from the new Yahoo search engine
than it does from Google, where just a few months ago it was nearly all from
Google).
I hardly write anything on these sites, just an article on the index pages of
each folder/sub directory.
In case you don't know, Traffic Equalizer is, in essence, an automated directory
builder taking search engine results from your keyword list and building pages
around them. Lots of big name marketers are using it to make a lot of money.
I run Google Adsense on the pages, and also put at least one affiliate program
on a page. Very often it will be an ebook sold through Clickbank.
On some sites I put a number of Searchfeed links but I'm a bit worried about using
Searchfeed and Adsense together so I don't do it often, but Searchfeed still
send me a check for a $1000 plus each month - which is a nice little side
income.
My main concern with Traffic Equalizer has always been that someone else
building a page on the same search term could have an almost identical page to
mine. Search engines don't like this.
But the good news is that Traffic Equalizer has just been improved. A few weeks
ago Jeff Alderson, the programmer, asked me if I had any ideas on how to make it
better, and I suggested he try and find a way of getting the site content from
more sources and then randomizing the output. This would make it less of a
chance that two users would build identical pages. Well he's a fast worker and
the new improved version came out a couple of days ago, and though I haven't had
a chance to try it yet, I'm sure it's going to work. At least short term to mid
term.
The bad news is that I'm not certain of the long term viability of the sites.
They do well for a few months, but if you can't continue getting high quality
links to them they tend to drop down the rankings. Also I'm sure that Google
won't want the search results to be totally clogged with sites built with
Traffic Equalizer, and will eventually change their algorithms to make the pages
rank a lot lower than they currently do. If they did this by targeting pages
with lots of outbound links but few inbound links it would be damaging to the TE
pages.
Having said that, these sites DO work. And Google allow their Adsense Ads to be
run on them.
Some people don't like the idea of building writes using Traffic Equalizer
because it somehow seems wrong to them. They don't like the "quality" of the
sites it produces. But the search engines LOVE the sites. Many of the pages they
produce rank very high, and unlike the quite short lived fad of building
"smartpages" they don't do anything against the search engines rules. They don't
redirect, they don't mislead people. They just build simple directories.
I'm not going to name anyone, but some REALLY famous people in the internet
marketing world are doing very well with TE. These people consistently make a
huge income year after year by doing what works at the moment. In other words
they use the tools which bring them an income.
You should be doing it too.
Just one thing to mentally make a note of.
You have to be patient. Unless you already have a few high Pagerank sites you
can link to them from, these sites take a few months to take off. During those
months you need to keep build new sites. If you get despondent because the sites
look like they not going to do well you'll stop building them, and then curse
yourself a few months down the track when you realize you could have had 20 more
sites steadily coming online. In other words you don't see instant results, but
you have to keep building sites and pages. There is no easy option, no quick
work around. You work hard at building these sites and success will come.
_________________________________
So - seeing I think Traffic EQ sites won't keep working for years - what about
long term sites?
Well contrary to what a few people said in my forum I do still build sites full
of articles that I write or pay someone to write.
Right now I'm building a network of travel sites which will be full of articles
and photographs of places I've visited. They're going to be mini sites of
between 5 and 12 pages, though perhaps as high as 20 pages on some of them
because the photographs are going to take up quite a bit of space.
This week Kate has spent most of her time writing touristy type, personal
experience articles on London and York. Next week she's moving on to write about
Japan. After that it's going to be France. Then she's doing Malaysia, before
working on a big site about Australia. We'll be using photographs that I've shot
in the past few years in each of these places. And I'll also put together a site
on Bangkok in Thailand, which I visited recently.
All the content, both photographs and articles, will be totally unique to the
sites we build. They'll be keyword rich and the sites properly structured to
please the search engines. I haven't yet decided if I'll build the sites with
Traffic Equalizer. If I use TE I'll just use it to provide the structure of the site - pages, linking structure - then remove
most or all of the outbound links and replacing them with the articles and
photos.
Rather than just putting all the content up on one domain I've registered a
whole bunch of domain names and I'm hosting them in the countries the site is
about ( except Japan because I can't find a low cost Japanese web host ). The
sites will then be interlinked to help improve their search rankings - as
detailed in Michael Campbell's Revenge of the Mininet
I'm going to the trouble of finding hosts in
each country because I think it just might improve the web ranking chances a
little. Though I'm not certain on this. I'm quite certain, however, that if
they're linked together the way Michael describes they need to be on different
web hosts in a different IP range.
Here's what's involved ( so you can see why I take the easy option sometimes and
just do sites built with TE.
* First of all I had to do the traveling and suffer all that jetlag.
* Carry a pile of heavy camera gear around everywhere.
* Spend hours at the computer editing the pictures.
* Research the keywords so that I can build pages around search terms that
people are actually looking for ( I use Wordtracker to do this )
* Pay Kate to write most of the articles, and get my weary brain into action to
write some myself for the places for Bangkok which she hasn't yet visited.
* Decide on whether to run with Adsense, or an affiliate program or both. (I've
yet to find a travel affiliate program I'm happy with, but some pages might
carry affiliate ads for luggage or books)
* Choose domain names and find web hosts.
* Build the sites and link them together as in Mininet
* Upload them to the hosts by FTP
* List them with Google and Yahoo ( I don't bother about the rest, AOL, MSN and
the others will quickly find you from Google.)
______________________________________
By the way I'll probably use Traffic Equalizer on different domains to build
pages to direct traffic to my travel network sites. The same way I now use
Traffic Equalizer to send traffic to my other mini sites.
______________________________________
So what do you do if you want to build content sites like my travel sites but
you can't write and don't have an employee who can quickly churn out words?
I think the best way is to sub contract.
There's a lot of talk in the media about how people are losing their jobs
because a lot of American companies, as well as many in England and Australia,
are outsourcing jobs to India.
Have you thought of joining them and outsourcing your web content to India?
I've just taken my first steps to doing it. But unlike big companies I'm not
putting anyone out of a job, just helping create jobs.
Wages are very low in India, a country which has some of the best educated
English speaking people in the world. And to us Westerners people work for
peanuts in India. According to an article in Computerworld magazine
a programmer in India earns around US$7500 a year. ( A programmer in China
earns around 20 to 30% less, but it's hard to outsource content creation to
China because, unlike India, few people write English well enough)
I'm not the first to think of using people in India to write my web content.
While I was researching this piece I found that the giant builder.com has
started offshoring authoring of many of its articles to India
So how do you find people in these countries? The easiest way is to use an
outsourcing web site.
Do a search on them for "search engine optimised web content ", "content
writing" or just "web content". When I looked on elance last week I saw bids as
low $5 per page, but the lowest I saw today was $10 a page. This is still
incredibly cheap.
Here's the $10 a page bid - "Thanks for the opportunity to bid on your project!
My quote is based on a rate of $10 per article (350-500 words). I'm a marketing
professional with over 10 years of experience."
_____________________________
Another possible way to use these sites is to hire people to create new products
for you. At the time of writing this letter there are 5 bids for writing a
recipe ebook. The lowest bidder is willing to do the whole project for just
US$400. In fact the highest bid is just $450. Someone else is willing to write a
50 page ebook on stopping headaches for $8 a page, which also adds up to $400.
Here's another for an ebook about looking after your skin.
Wanted: A ghostwriter for an Informational eBook entitled ""Perfect Skin:
Cleansing, Nourishing, Prot ..."
And again someone is willing to write it for just $8 per page "Our bid is based
on US$8 per page (250-300 words) with minimum billing of 50 pages (additional
pages will be billed at the rate of US$8 per pages) and includes all necessary
research and revisions. You will own full copyrights. Completion Time: 16
working days."
My Top 7 Favorite Ecommerce Tools
When you make your living on the Internet, you sometimes forget that the resources you use every day (and take for granted) might rate an incredible discovery to anyone who doesn't already know they exist.
Whether they help you make money, save time, save money, or avoid frustration, these ecommerce tools and services rate my highest recommendation for anyone who conducts any form of ecommerce online.
ClickBank.com -
If you sell a downloadable product such as an ebook, report, or software, you can't beat ClickBank for processing credit card payments. Not only do they take the payments and send you a check twice a month, they also plug your product into an existing network with tens-of-thousands of affiliates who can sell it for you. Also, unlike a traditional merchant credit card processing account, ClickBank assumes all the fraud risk and prevents many of the "horror" stories you hear in connection with online credit card processing.
MySiteSales.com -
Since ClickBank only allows the sale of downloadable products, MySiteSales.com comes to the rescue for anyone selling a physical product or service. Offering a suite of integrated product catalogs, follow up autoresponders, advertising tracking, a secure server, and even limited-time coupon offers, this tool rates a "must have" for setting up and integrating a professional ecommerce solution on virtually any size website.
Aweber.com -
If you need an unlimited number of follow up autoresponders and the ability to send an email "broadcast" to all your contacts at one time, Aweber offers an excellent managed solution. Specializing in helping small to medium-sized Web businesses implement an effective email follow-up strategy without complicated software, Aweber gets our highest marks for service and dependability.
GoDaddy.com -
Cheap, reliable, easy-to-use domain name registrar that only charges $8.95 per year for each domain name you register. Godaddy rates cheaper and just as, if not more, reliable than any other domain registrar. They also offer a "private registration" option that allows you to keep your identity as the domain owner a secret from unscrupulous people who exploit domain name records to compile mailing lists, spam databases or worse.
FrontierPowerHosting.com -
Any successful ecommerce endeavor begins with a solid website hosting service. Nothing shuts you down faster than an unreliable web host because, the second they go offline, your business goes offline. I host one of my servers at FrontierPowerHosting.com because of great customer service and guaranteed up-time.
ClipArt.com -
Ever pulled your hair out searching for that perfect image, photo, or piece of clipart for your website? Once you exhaust the Microsoft collection on your computer, the next stop (if you want to find something fast) is Clipart.com. With thousands of images searchable by keyword, you can always find the perfect image in less time and without the worries of copyright infringement if you just pull something off the Web.
Google.com/Adsense/ -
Website got traffic but no making much money? Open a free account with Google AdSense and earn a commission any time someone clicks on any of the targeted ads. An excellent way to earn extra cash on virtually any website.
Whether they help you make money, save time, save money, or avoid frustration, these ecommerce tools and services rate my highest recommendation for anyone who conducts any form of ecommerce online.
ClickBank.com -
If you sell a downloadable product such as an ebook, report, or software, you can't beat ClickBank for processing credit card payments. Not only do they take the payments and send you a check twice a month, they also plug your product into an existing network with tens-of-thousands of affiliates who can sell it for you. Also, unlike a traditional merchant credit card processing account, ClickBank assumes all the fraud risk and prevents many of the "horror" stories you hear in connection with online credit card processing.
MySiteSales.com -
Since ClickBank only allows the sale of downloadable products, MySiteSales.com comes to the rescue for anyone selling a physical product or service. Offering a suite of integrated product catalogs, follow up autoresponders, advertising tracking, a secure server, and even limited-time coupon offers, this tool rates a "must have" for setting up and integrating a professional ecommerce solution on virtually any size website.
Aweber.com -
If you need an unlimited number of follow up autoresponders and the ability to send an email "broadcast" to all your contacts at one time, Aweber offers an excellent managed solution. Specializing in helping small to medium-sized Web businesses implement an effective email follow-up strategy without complicated software, Aweber gets our highest marks for service and dependability.
GoDaddy.com -
Cheap, reliable, easy-to-use domain name registrar that only charges $8.95 per year for each domain name you register. Godaddy rates cheaper and just as, if not more, reliable than any other domain registrar. They also offer a "private registration" option that allows you to keep your identity as the domain owner a secret from unscrupulous people who exploit domain name records to compile mailing lists, spam databases or worse.
FrontierPowerHosting.com -
Any successful ecommerce endeavor begins with a solid website hosting service. Nothing shuts you down faster than an unreliable web host because, the second they go offline, your business goes offline. I host one of my servers at FrontierPowerHosting.com because of great customer service and guaranteed up-time.
ClipArt.com -
Ever pulled your hair out searching for that perfect image, photo, or piece of clipart for your website? Once you exhaust the Microsoft collection on your computer, the next stop (if you want to find something fast) is Clipart.com. With thousands of images searchable by keyword, you can always find the perfect image in less time and without the worries of copyright infringement if you just pull something off the Web.
Google.com/Adsense/ -
Website got traffic but no making much money? Open a free account with Google AdSense and earn a commission any time someone clicks on any of the targeted ads. An excellent way to earn extra cash on virtually any website.
Friday, 26 June 2009
The ClickBank E-Commerce Solution
ClickBank.com can offer you multiple solutions for your e-commerce business. Here are some of the advantages of using ClickBank.
1. Accept Credit Cards Without a Merchant Account
If your product is downloadable (such as electronic books or software), ClickBank may be an excellent solution for you. For a $49.95 initial fee, you can process credit cards and on-line cheques for $1.00 per transaction plus 7.5% of sales.
2. Start Your Own Affiliate Program
With ClickBank, you have your own built-in affiliate program. You decide what commission (from 1% to 75%) you would like to pay your affiliates.
Learn more about ClickBank.com.
3. Receive Free Advertising
4. Obtain Referral Commissions
Even without applying for ClickBank credit card processing, you can earn referral commissions on thousands of ClickBank Marketplace products.
5. Eliminate Sales Tax Problems
Are you registered for Value Added Tax (VAT) for online transactions for European Union (EU) countries since July 1, 2003?
Are you collecting the appropriate state or provincial sales taxes?
If you are a Canadian, are you aware of your obligation to collect Goods and Services Tax (G.S.T.) and Harmonized Sales Tax (H.S.T.) on Internet transactions?
Again, ClickBank may be your solution. ClickBank is registered for EU purposes and adds the appropriate VAT to each transaction.
As well, to deal with ClickBank, you must agree to sell your product to them. ClickBank then resells your product to their customers. Thus, ClickBank becomes the retailer responsible for collecting sales taxes -- not you. Obviously, ClickBank will not be subject to sales taxes in most jurisdictions.
Since ClickBank is located in the United States and can only sell or use the products it sells from there, it would appear that Canadian G.S.T. and H.S.T. would not be applicable to them.
Of course, this is not legal advice. To determine your liability for sales and similar taxes, consult your lawyer and accountant.
Considering its many advantages, ClickBank may well be your e-commerce solution!
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