Archive for December, 2008

For hair relaxing, some useful tools are the flat-ended brush, gloves, hair clips, a cape and a neutralizing shampoo. Discover tools for hair relaxing, and when to use them, with tips from a hair stylist in this free video on hair care and treatments.

Duration : 0:1:42

Read the rest of this entry »

For hair relaxing, some useful tools are the flat-ended brush, gloves, hair clips, a cape and a neutralizing shampoo. Discover tools for hair relaxing, and when to use them, with tips from a hair stylist in this free video on hair care and treatments.

Duration : 0:1:42

Read the rest of this entry »

EBay is a big market where you are able to sell almost all kinds of merchandises. You can go to eBay and browse through all the product categories to have an idea what are the products on sales. However, to sell merchandise on eBay, you will need to know about the characteristic of the product you intent to sell, in particular the product life cycle.

If you intent to sell a fast moving consumer product such as digital camera, PC, handphones, etc, you will need to know about the product life cycle as these products evolve very fast. Typically, the product life cycle behavior as a normal distribution curve or a bell shape curve. It consists of four phases, namely the Launching Phase, Full-Retail Phase, End-of-Life Phase and Liquidation Phase.

In the Launching Phase, this is the time where the product is just introduced into the market. It is new to the market where everybody is very interested about it and wants to get hold of it. As time goes by, the product will go into the Full-Retail Phase where you can find it selling everywhere and at the same price. During this phase, most of the people would have already purchased the product if they intent to have. And the purchased is usually done at retail shops. As times go further, the product will go into the End-of-Life Phase, where the sales and interest of the product start to decline. And finally, the product goes into the Liquidation Phase whereby the interest almost reduced to zero. Usually, at this final phase, a new product will be launched.

So how does these information helps you on the product selection? As can be seen from the behavior, there are two phases during the product life cycle you can exploit. They are the Launching Phase and the Liquidation Phase. In the Launching Phase, this is the time where the interest in high where buyers are looking for something new and hope that they can get a good bargain from eBay. At times, due to the great interest, the buyers do not mind to pay a little more.

Whereas in the Liquidation Phase, the buyer is really looking for some big bargain. They do not mind that the product is a bit out of fashion as long as it can still function. They do not mind the reduced in features as compared to those newly launched. So, you can see, if you are selling consumer products, these are the two phases where making a sales is more likely than the middle two phases. This is because, there are no reasons for the buyer to buy from eBay when they can get the products anywhere and at the same price.

However, this product life cycle may not be applicable to antique or collectibles. For this category of merchandises, there is really no time line tag to it. The buyer will buy as long as they like what you are selling.

So as you can see, knowing the product life cycle and the way how it is being marketed in the market is crucial in your eBay product selection. Choosing the product to sell when they are in the middle two phases may not be desirable whereas choosing the product at the two extreme phases may be the best option. It is reported that buyers are expecting a reduction of between 20% to 50% off the retail price when buying on eBay. You can only give these offers most likely at the Liquidation Phase as you are able to get the product at much lower cost. This is because, the manufacturer or whole seller are trying to dispose whatever stock they have to prepare for the new model.

It was also reported that liquidation product sells for 10% to 20% of cost. This means that, they are making a lost of 80 to 90%. It was also reported that for items that are in the Launching phase, they can sell anywhere from 10 to 100% above the retail price on eBay. This is particular true that during every holiday season, popular items such as toy are typically sold out at department stores and you can generally get it at eBay. This is the time whereby you can fetch a good price for your product.

Understanding the product life cycle will definitely help you in deciding what and when to sell your product in eBay and make profit. Knowing the right time to sell your items in eBay is crucial.

(Note: Figures taken from eBay Strategies by Scot Wingo. Prentice Hall 2005)

Copyright 2005 Benjamin Scott

The term business joint ventures refer to two independent
companies or more who agree to establish a new company. These
companies legally commit themselves to contribute equity for the
new company, as well as share their technology and skills. In
return, they share both profits or losses and control over this
organization. A joint venture can be executed for a limited
period or a continuos period.

Business joint ventures have become the latest and most viable
business model for many online companies because of the
following reasons: Globalization has opened a world of
possibilities, where different languages and cultures are no
longer barriers. Today international travel has become the norm.

The other reason is the internet. The net has leveled the
playing field. It has also made the use of technology have the
winning business edge. These companies see business joint
ventures as the next logical direction their organizations must
take, if they are to remain competitive and profitable.

Do you own a profitable online business? Are you wondering
what’s next? Consider then, the many benefits a business joint
venture can provide you.

First, with a business joint venture, you’ll gain access to
other markets. This will then open additional or bigger streams
of profits for you.

Second – Think of the synergies you create in the business joint
venture. All of the partners benefit from the exchanges of
information, such as access to modern managerial practices and
the brain power of your manpower.

However, you must be diligent in picking the right partners. It
has to be a win-win situation for all of you. Choose partners
who complement your strengths. Partners who’ll share resources
you do not have and can benefit from.

Third – Diversification, which means that by agreeing to a
business joint venture, you’ll be spreading the costs and risks
thereby minimizing negative impacts.

Fourth – By entering a business joint venture, you’ll get better
access to financial resources.

Fifth – By establishing a business joint venture, the partners
stave off competition from other companies, and strengthen their
position in the industry. How are business joint ventures
created? Typically, forging of joint ventures agreements are
determined by the following factors. The nature and the size of
the planned enterprise. The length of commitment – will it be
for a specific period? Or have the life of a corporation?
Another factor, concerns the identities of the participants and
regions in which their business operates. Lastly, the commercial
and financial goals of all the participants and the method in
which this shall settled.

Are there any negatives in establishing a business joint
venture? As long as all the terms and conditions of the venture
are carefully set out, there is no reason for it to fail.

A business joint venture provides you all the benefits of
joining forces with other companies. Yet, you retain full
control over your company. The best of both worlds can be found
in a business joint venture.

Many people and companies have abused the word network marketing in the past years that a lot of people will associate the word with something that is negative. Yet, if you take a look at the nature of network marketing, you will not find anything that is intrinsically bad about this system. Since the first network marketing company was introduced in the United States in the 1940’s, the network marketing strategy of most networking company have been consistent. The strategy is to distribute the products through local channels thereby saving on distribution cost and at the same time providing some alternative income for those people who would like to be an independent distributor of the product. Although there are some variations in the implementation of the network marketing strategy, the basic principles underlying the implementation thereof is still the same.

Distribution through local distributors

Network marketing aims at helping the manufacturers market their products to the end consumers via independent local distributors. By engaging local distributors to market the products of the company, the company is able to generate more income and save on distribution and advertising cost.

Most companies would spend thousands of dollars to promote their products through TV commercials and advertising, billboards and other forms of media. Promoting products and brands could cost the company a lot of money that a good portion of the cost that you pay for a certain product is actually added in to defray the advertising and promotion expenses. In some cases, as much as 20% of the cost of the product you buy goes to advertising and promotions. On the other hand, the distribution cost of the products would eat up to another 30% of the product cost. If you are wondering why a certain product that you buy in the supermarket could cost a lot of money, it is because of the advertising, promotion and distribution cost that is factored into the total product cost.

Since the network marketing strategy will do away the promotion and advertising cost by engaging local distributors to personally promote the products to the their friends, relatives and colleagues, the company will now be able to give the distributors big commissions. In most instances, the network marketing company will give the local distributors direct commissions of up to 30% of the sales generated by a local distributor.

On the other hand, when it comes to expanding the market reach of the product, the network marketing strategy that is employed is the member get member scheme whereby a certain member you is able to recruit a new member will be eligible to earn commissions on the sales generated by the new member that he or she has recruited. The good thing about the member get member scheme is that it does not stop on the person that you have directly recruited. In the event where the person you have recruited will recruit a new member, you will also earn commissions on the sales of that recruit. In most cases, the networking company will allow you to earn commissions up to the 8th level of recruits.

If you are one of the many webmasters today who are trying to make money on the internet by any means possible, then you may have already considered joining the Google AdSense program.

If you haven’t yet made the jump to being an online publisher, let me be the first to tell you that you are definitely missing out of the chance of capitalizing on something that can be very profitable for you!

Google AdSense is the most popular pay-per-click program currently online, they have offered pay per click, in one form or another, longer than any other search engine on the net.

They’ve put a great deal of research and development into their keyword matching to ensure it is a profitable program. Not only have they been around the longest, but they also boast the biggest number of advertisers as well.

Google requires website owners to conform to a number of rules, including:

All pages must have at least one link that leads to it, without concealing pages.

All links must be active and work.

There is a limit of 100 links per page. Creating a hierarchy should keep your navigation clean and well under the link limit.

Tags, especially the ‘title’ and ‘alt’ tags should be explanatory and distinct.

When designing your site, create one that is helpful to a user; don’t design a page for search engines. Make sure you clearly define what your site is about.

Google forbids hidden text. Don’t colorize the text as the same color as your background, or even size the text so small it can’t be read. Google has been known to ban publishers who engage in these so called “black hat” techniques.

Google strongly recommends that you include a site map page.

They also strongly recommend you include a robots.txt file in your root directory. The robots.txt file tells website crawlers, like those that will match the ads with your website, which pages not to crawl. This is especially important if you want ads for some but not all of your content or if you have password protected pages.

Following the website design rules doesn’t make you bullet-proof, though. Even if you follow all of them, you may still be at risk of losing your AdSense account permanently or even temporarily.

If you are indeed banned by Google to display AdSense advertisements on your page, you can file a re-inclusion request. Although not very successful many times, it still gives a publisher a chance to get back into the program.

Here’s what you’ll need to include in your re-inclusion request:

Your account name

Your contact information

A list of changes you’ve made to fix any violations

A guarantee it won’t happen again

Reports and evidence of click bombing, if you have any (more on this below)

You should NOT include any threats to pull your business. Visit www.google.com/support/bin/request.py to contact customer support. Keep your email straightforward. The subject of your email should be “Re-inclusion Request” to make sure it gets to the right desk.

Click Bombing

Click bombing is when someone clicks on one or more of the ads that appear on your webpage repeatedly.

While this seems like a great way to increase your profits, it is against Google’s policy and they are always searching for click bombers. While you can’t prevent malicious click bomb attacks, you can take steps to defend yourself should you be accused of it.

Consider investing in a third party tracking software program that is approved by Google. Look for one that tracks IP addresses.

Run reports often, and keep them stored separately from your Google account. Should you be removed from the AdSense program, you won’t necessarily have access to run reports.

If or when you are removed or fined by Google for AdSense abuse, make sure you send copies of your IP address reports along with your re-inclusion request.

As mentioned before, even if you follow all the rules of appeal and properly request a re-inclusion, you are not guaranteed a reversal. It seems most requests to be reinstated are not acted upon by Google.

Google’s policy has been always one of “protecting the advertiser by any means necessary”. Unfortunately, this may mean kicking a legitimate publisher out of the program needlessly if they’ve been targeted by a malicious person.

Earnings Calculations

So how much money can be made in the AdSense program? Publishers can earn A LOT. From 10 cents a day, to over one hundred thousand dollars a day. Of course this is all dependant on how much traffic your website gets as well as how well you integrate the advertisements. But how does Google calculate per click how much that you, the publisher, gets paid? This is the fuzziest of all gray areas in the AdSense program. Google admittedly doesn’t disclose revenue share or whether the ads appearing on your site are cost-per-impression or cost-per-click. What they do tell you is how many page impressions (ads shown), number of clicks on the ads, page click through rate (CTR) and your earnings. Increase your impressions, number of clicks or CTR, and your earnings will follow.

Alternatives

If you’ve been removed from AdSense or are just looking for another option, there are a few to choose from:

Yahoo! Publisher Network is very similar to AdSense. Experienced webmasters who have used both Google and Yahoo! programs believe Yahoo! is second best, but still a very good, profitable program. As it becomes more popular, more advertisers will jump on board with Yahoo thus creating a PPC race with Google.

Chitika – A pay per click advertising stream. They don’t have as many or such a variety as AdSense or Yahoo!, but are usually less expensive to advertise on.

AdBrite is very similar to Chitika, though slightly smaller.

There you have it in a nutshell, utilizing Google’s AdSense program to increase your own profits truly does make “cents”..and dollars. How much you can earn is dependant on how much targeted traffic you can get to your site as well as how well you can integrate the advertisements in the site design as well. Get on board today and start making money!

For centuries people have used the written word to persuade, communicate and influence others to take action. Techniques have been perfected over the years in the offline market. Direct marketers have mailed long sales letters to convert lookers to buyers. Today Internet marketers have the same advantage used by offline concerns to produce a strong stream of visitors to their websites.

Article marketing continues to provide a robust method of driving interested customers to your site and at the same time provide you with specific advantages over your competitors. Although writing and posting articles routinely can be tedious the results are well worth the effort.

There are several ways to use articles and several more benefits that you will experience. Increased revenue, increased opt-in lists and lead generation are just the tip of the iceberg.

Placing your articles within directories that have a high page rank gives you both exposure to publishers as well as a back link from a search engine respected website. The higher the number of articles you submit increases the rank your site holds and then increases the position in an organic search.

Articles also build your reputation. People are looking for information from an authority on the subject. You build your reputation and credibility by providing accurate, high-quality content. Your article resource box is the place to shine and send the readers back to your website where you have even more content and an opt-in box for your ezine. Now you can stay in contact with your potential customer and reel them in!

Viral marketing is all about building a buzz about a topic, person, event or product. You can build your own buzz by marketing through articles. Make a plan to write two articles a week for your site that are optimized for keywords. As your site grows larger it will perform better in search engine rankings and it will be positioned higher in the organic searches. Research is showing that the majority of people searching the Internet are looking first at the organic searches. If your product or service ranks well you will develop a steady stream of traffic.

Think about the websites that you find interesting and visit often. Most likely they are sites that have content rich articles and information you find important in your life. Your customers are not different. They are looking for high-quality content about their interest. Give it to them!

Marketing on the Internet can be cumbersome and potentially expensive. Placing ads in other ezines, purchasing software for viral marketing or placing pay per click ads requires a source of funding. Article marketing is cheap! You can pen your own articles, use a ghost writer or a private label rights site to provide accurate content. Your costs are very minimal if you do it yourself and then only pay a small hosting fee for your site.

There are several guru marketers who make a consistent living on the Internet using articles as their major traffic generating method. Although it takes consistency and practice it is also rewarding and cheap.

Companies, big and small, have joined the blogosphere. Microsoft is blogging, so are General Motors, Google, IBM and Sun Microsystems. Companies are using blogs to engage customers and employees as well. Written by employees and in some instances by CEOs, blogs adopt a conversational and engaging tone which make them easy reading. Blogging has even empowered employees in more ways than one. A glaring evidence is employee bloggers, in most cases, have shifted the power structure in their favor to establish a higher degree of credibility and influence more than their bosses.

Weblogs or blogs for short are personal journals that serve as sources of commentary, opinion and uncensored sources of information on a multitude of topics. Each new entry called a blog post includes numerous links to other blogs, news articles, photos, commentaries, video and audio files. Most blogs allow readers to leave comments

According to a survey, people are far more likely to trust “average people like me” than to trust people in authority like the CEOs. Employees are now in newfound and enviable positions to either promote or speak against their companies’ products, services, policies and positions on important issues. What is more, people are listening to what these bloggers are saying. Blogs are a trusted communication medium. The word of a blogger holds much value to a consumer far more than traditional marketing and advertising. By far, word of mouth is the most trusted form of advertising. This highlights the significant role that an employee blogger wields either to boost or hinder sales through his blog. This just goes to show that people would rather hear from real people talking with real experiences than listen to marketing talk.

Employee blogs have helped improve the image and reputation of their companies. One classic example is Microsoft. Its hottest and controversial blogger Robert Scoble (recently resigned) had openly criticized Microsoft concerning issues ranging from quality control to sensitive issues. His negative posts on his blogs called Scobleizer about the MSN Spaces product proved to be a blessing in disguise for Microsoft. Readers were all praises that the company’s resident blogger would express an opinion that runs counter to the company. As a result, Microsoft’s reputation as a bully and a great monolith was torn down. People now see a company that is run by actual people who has their best interests in mind. Robert Scoble in defense of his contentious actions emphasized that credibility is of utmost importance. If he will only sing praises about Microsoft it would sound like a press release and he would lose the ability to have an open conversation with his readers.

Robert Scoble’s penchant to criticize his employer was put to the test again when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the company’s decision not to back an anti-discrimination bill against gays and lesbians. Scoble disagreed and publicly chastised Ballmer in his blog. Ballmer later reversed the decision. A few months before his departure from Microsoft, Robert Scoble, again, wrote a harsh critique against his employer for shutting down the controversial blog of Chinese Journalist Zhao Jing. He accused the MSN Spaces team of Microsoft for “being used as a state-run thug”.

Microsoft is not alone. Yahoo blogger Jeremy Zawdony openly scolded his employer in his blog. He complained about the practice of changing users’ home pages during the installation process of Yahoo software. He wrote in his posting that the action was insulting and downright disrespectful.

Companies have also seen their reputations damaged by highly-publicized firings of employee bloggers. Mark Jen was sacked by Google apparently because he wrote about his life at Google including remarks on the company’s financial performance and future projects in his personal blog. Ellen Simonetti, A Delta Air Lines flight attendant was terminated allegedly for posting inappropriate pictures on her blog. The photos showed her in a skirt and blouse sitting atop the airplane seats.

All these incidents bring to the fore the delicate situations corporations that maintain blogs and employees that blog are in. Corporate blogs that criticizes management or its products or services present public relations dilemmas. On the other hand, if a blog contains nothing but good public relations posts, few people will be interested and will even be doubtful of the veracity of the blog articles.

It is a recognized fact that blogs are establishing in the online world much of the value that traditional public relations bring. As the importance of corporate bloggers becomes more evident, so do the corresponding disadvantages. Companies need a clear-cut policy on how blogging can be integrated into their communication and marketing mix. A company needs to set up corporate blogging policies to ensure that blogging thrives in a more controlled and productive manner. In essence, these guidelines will lay down the specific rules about what an employee blogger is allowed to blog about. Employee bloggers have to strictly abide by rules about leaking confidential company information or breaking federal securities disclosure rules. All these are preventive measures to avoid organizational and legal problems such as slander, libel and harassment.

Google has no definitive guidelines but allows employees to blog on the assumption that “they are reasonable people”. One of Sun Microsystems policy states that “it is perfectly ok to talk about your work and have a conversation with the community but it is not ok to publish the recipe for one of our secret sauces.” Hill and Knowlton specified that as a publicly-owned company, bloggers cannot discuss company revenues, future plans.

Despite the controversies and the risks involved in blogging, companies are embracing blogging. Companies are well aware of the potential benefits of blogging. It is a way to connect with customers and partners, strengthens company unity and present a human face to the world-at-large. These companies feel that the benefits far outweigh the risks. Blogs are here to stay and will continue to be a reliable communication and marketing tool. It is and will be a reliable source of information for everybody.

Blogging will definitely change the power structure within any company. With a blog, an employee blogger, whatever his position in the company is can become an influential person for some audiences and customers.

You are working hard creating good and quality content for your Google AdSense web site. You carefully plan a good link building strategy for your Google AdSense web site. Google started to realize, though, that all clicks were not created equal.

In the beginning of Google Adsense when someone clicked on the ads you would earn a percentage of what the people were paying for adwords per click, today the percentage is calculated differently is kept a secret. Google Adsense terms and conditions require that earnings are kept secret.

Everyone dreams of making money online more quickly. There are plenty of Adsense make money videos being peddled all over the World Wide Web. You see it everywhere on the web, people create these ad sites that draw people in and direct them to click on Google ads to make their living. There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites.

This is a basic tip, but many people haven’t figured it out yet. Google Adsense has opened the door for everyone to make money without inventory, employing sales people or selling anything, someone clicks on a ad and you get paid, its that easy. Because the ads look like normal web links, and people are trained to click on these types of links.

Anybody can make money with adsense, but unless you have traffic you will not have enough income to support yourself, you can make extra money but I wouldn’t quit my day job. Having the ads on your sites is a positive thing because you will earn money when the ads get clicked on, you will make a substantial amount of money if you have high traffic or low traffic on many sites.

It can be shown that with all else being equal, the likelihood of a click conversion is proportional to the amount of exposure to a particular ad block. Ensure that your navigation is easy to understand and that the user will intuitively know where to click to get to where he wants. So the webmaster’s game plan is to enable visitors on his site to navigate to the links which webmaster wants the visitor to click on, and not the other way around.

There are many individuals who have created a lot of money and know the ins and outs so most of them have many tips that can be followed to help get into this type of work. Many other people are now putting the code onto their own sites which can help them to pay for hosting and domain renewal costs. Signing up for an Adsense account and copy-pasting some codes into your website’s HTML code is all that is needed to start serving Google Adsense ads and make some money.

Signup is free and all you have to do is put the ads on your site. Many internet webmasters who use Adsense do not believe in free information they feel it has no real value. These webmaster are wrong, many Google Adsense affiliates, have increased their revenue by having free content and giving to everyone for free, so this is a debate that will go for a long time.

Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.
The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.