Computer & Internet Articles. http://program.cgwebstudio.com Software preview - Opensorce - Freeware - Shareware - Internet Article & Tutorials. Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:55:47 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.2.2 en Surveys: Scam Or Success? http://program.cgwebstudio.com/Surveys:-Scam-Or-Success?/ http://program.cgwebstudio.com/Surveys:-Scam-Or-Success?/#comments Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:55:47 +0000 admin Surveys: Scam Or Success?

By: DA Whitmore

Believe it or not, there are people making money taking surveys on the internet. The honest truth of the matter is that 99% of the material advertising paid surveys aren’t paid surveys. Paid surveys consist of a study done by a marketing and research company to get feedback and gather information about various products and advertising campaigns that the big corporations use. It’s basically a way of seeing if they are getting the most bang for their buck. These major corporations easily spend billions a year on marketing and advertising. The corporations hire these market research companies to get this information. There are many ways to conduct a survey. The most popular ones involve telemarketing (phone surveys), mystery shoppers, or testing a company’s products or services.

This is the perfect example:

A large cable company has a new channel they want to market to men between the ages of 26-34 who are married and live in a big city. They want to know the likes and dislikes of these men. How much they pay for this service, and what advertisements catch their eye.

The cable company would hire a market research company to gather the information they needed. Each company refers to its online panel. They may ask for 10,000 men who fit the demographics the cable company is trying to reach. The company then sends an email inviting participants to join the study. The participant fills out a questionnaire to see if they are a match. If they match, they are given an invite and the offer of $10-25 to take the online survey. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

But before you pack your suitcase and head to Bermuda, let me warn you. The problem lies in that there are literally thousands of ads popping up on the internet that go something like this “Taco Bell vs McDonalds take this survey and receive a free Xbox.” Once you give them your e-mail address they make you try to sign with other companies like Blockbuster and Home Depot, etc…. This is not a paid survey, let me repeat THIS IS NOT A PAID SURVEY. These are the ones commonly referred to as scams that everyone mistakes with “paid surveys”.

They also trick non-suspecting customers to shell out $50 to get a list of paid survey directories. Some think by paying this, they will soon be taking tons of surveys and laughing all the way to the bank. This is not entirely so. After shelling out your hard earned dough to these sites, they make you sign for each panel one by one.

I don’t see why anyone would pay for “paid survey directories”. There are several websites that give this information free. These paid sites are getting over on the fact that the average person doesn’t know this. Go to msn.com and search free “free paid survey directories”. Just like that!

To make real bread from the survey business you’d have to be registered to as many panels as you could handle at one time. To run with the big dogs, I suggest joining the TOP 20 paid survey panels. These are the most popular and more importantly, the most “busy”. You are guaranteed at least a survey a day in the Big Leagues. Taking the time to sign up with the big guys could only make you or make you bigger.

Bottom line, you won’t get rich taking surveys but you can make a few thousand dollars extra income to supplement whatever you want. To go PRO, you would need to register with every paid survey panel known to man. Not a bad living for something you can do in your underwear, with no investment and no strings attached-all in your time.

Article Source:
http://www.articlecity.com/articles/computers_and_internet/article_3897.shtml
]]> http://program.cgwebstudio.com/Surveys:-Scam-Or-Success?/feed/ Avoiding the Money Pits in a Computer Home Business http://program.cgwebstudio.com/avoiding-the-money-pits-in-a-computer-home-business/ http://program.cgwebstudio.com/avoiding-the-money-pits-in-a-computer-home-business/#comments Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:15:27 +0000 admin http://program.cgwebstudio.com/avoiding-the-money-pits-in-a-computer-home-business/ Author: Darrell Howell

Copyright (c) 2008 Darrell Howell

If you are like a lot of people, you are having a hard time with your computer home business. The biggest question you may have is, how do I promote my business? One thing to remember is to stay away from the money pits. Junk Promotions are money pits. FFA, or Free For All pages are usually a bust. You might think you are getting submitted to thousands of search engines. But according to the Open Directory website, they only have 1403 search engines in their database. This means there aren’t that many directories to add your site to.

You may sink your money into classifieds to promote you computer home business. The problem with some classified sites, is no one is looking at them. If no one sees your ad, then you have wasted your money. Some people are able to utilize these methods very productively, while others are destined to drop thier money into the bottomless pit of failed interenet promotions.

Passive promotions are those promotions that can continue to provide results for you long after you have invested the work to make them available to the Internet community.

Examples of passive promotions include: Link Exchanges, Articles, Ebooks, Content Exchanges and Writing Testimonials for others.

Let’s look at articles as a solid example of my point.

You are reading an article that I have written to promote my own computer home business. This article is timeless and therefore could have been written five years ago and still have been as valuable as it is today.

Due to the fact that the article is timeless, it can and will be placed in newsletters/ezines and their accompanying online archives, on websites and in ebooks for many more years to come.

As a result, this article will continue to serve me well beyond the time in which I wrote it and submitted it to publishers and webmasters for public consumption and publication.

This is the best example I can give you of an excellent passive promotional method.

AVOID THE MONEY PITS

Many try and even fewer succeed to conquer the Internet and to produce their dreams of online wealth.

My hope is that you will be one of the people who conquer the challenges before you and to make a nice living while working online. It will take drive, determination, study plus trial and error, but you can make it work for you.

Please continue to educate yourself so that you can avoid the money pits - instead, strive to find the money barrels. It can be done.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/avoiding-the-money-pits-in-a-computer-home-business-546492.html

Dear Louise

When we spoke last, you asked me to write about how I am making money online.

As you know I have been doing this for some time and although I think I know a bit, that is not to say I know everything (yeah really!).

OK. Here’s some basics to start with.

Starting an internet business needs to be treated with the same discipline and respect you would give any new business venture. I am aware the best part of your working day is already spent using a computer, but you are going to spend a lot more time doing this when you are working at home.

You will have to designate what hours you intend to work and include weekends. You are unlikely to succeed if you don’t spend some weekends doing this. Having allotted the hours and allowing for recreational time, you then must stick with it. Remember, it won’t always be this way. There will come a time when you will be able to quit your job. And even a time when you may only have to spend 3 or 4 hours online.

Sometimes working from home may bring tension into your domestic life. Your family may find it difficult to understand what it is that you are doing. I know that you will explain it fully but even so, they may not fully comprehend. Try to involve them as much as you can. If necessary, show them this letter. Explain to them that it could take several months before you start seeing some return. Most ‘normal’ businesses make a loss in their first year and some still haven’t made a profit after 2 years.

Do impress upon them that this is a business, your business, and you would appreciate them giving it the same respect you are. When you are at your computer or just reading the printed material, they need to understand that you are working. They have to respect your time. Interruptions should only be made for emergencies.

When you start out to make money from home, you need to set up your workspace. I know that this could be difficult, as you have limited space. Do the best you can. This is a ‘do not disturb’ space, which is essential.

You will be learning about many new things. Web sites, html, search engines optimization, keywords, affiliate marketing, article writing, blogging, auto responders, sales letters, lead capture pages, traffic and tracking, to name a few. I can help you with this or in some cases provide you with a link where you can gain better information.

You will need filing space and several 4-ring binders to keep your downloaded printed information. You may prefer to download to disk. I’m old fashioned and like the printed word.

You’ll need to store emails in appropriate files. You’ll get that many you won’t be able to deal with them all straight away. That’s OK - just file them to read later.

And then there is the need for a daily ‘to do’ list. You can keep this electronically or in hard copy. This discipline is another essential, as there will be constant competition for your time. How you shape your business so that you will eventually be making money online full time will be down to you. But I can tell you this.

Once you have settled on your path - be myopic in your focus. You will be inundated with offers and many won’t be worth your time and money. I can also help you with this but you may prefer your own counsel. There are some basic things to look out for, which I will outline in another letter. Ideally, you should concentrate on getting one thing right before chasing after another. At the most, you should have 2 major projects on the go at one time.

I know that you understand the concept of residual income, also called passive income. This should be your main focus as it is the key to real wealth.

However, there are ways to trade hours for dollars using the internet to make money at home. You might need some instant cash flow so just let me know if that becomes a necessity. But your focus should be on passive income. Remember your goal is making money online. The internet operates 24/7 and you eventually need to have it working for you all the time.

Louise, I know you have great determination but please be patient. Be warned - there are no genuine get rich quick schemes. But with hard work and perseverance you can make an immense income. I will help you all I can.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/making-money-online-a-letter-to-louise-546448.html

Because of the many cool tools available to you today, building a home business is easier than it used to be. In this article let’s talk about how to build your work at home business opportunity by taking advantage of a few marketing tools that will really simplify your life.

1. Start a blog. Blogging is quickly becoming a way of life on the Internet for successful home business owners. It’s very easy to work from home and blog because you can start a blog for free and then use it to create visitors and sales for your product.

For example, you can go to Blogger.com and easily set up a blog in a couple of minutes or less. They are owned by Google and provide an excellent opportunity for you to post your thoughts about working at home and owning a home business.

This also gives you an opportunity to work in the information about your opportunity in a passive way, by including links to it in the articles that you post. You can get repeat visitors, which eventually can lead to more sales for you, if you provide interesting information.

2. Use an autoresponder for follow-up and lead capture. Because many people require several exposures to an opportunity, before they will join, smart Internet marketers use auto responders to capture name and e-mail addresses, and then follow up with them.

This is easy to do and you can join an auto responder program for under $20 a month. By placing a sign-up form on your website or blog people can request more information from you that you are more than happy to provide to them.

The nice thing about using an autoresponder is you can set up a series of prewritten messages that automatically reply back to your subscribers. You can also send e-mails whenever you feel is necessary and the larger your list becomes the more opportunities you have to make sales to it.

3. Using article submissions software and services makes building your business much easier than in the old days. Writing and submitting articles has been a popular way to create traffic and sales now for several years.

In the old days you used to have to manually submit your articles to various article directories, which was time-consuming and tough to do if you had a full-time job as well as your Internet business.

Today there is various article submission software and service providers that can speed the process up. You write an article and then you let them submit your article to tens and tens of directories all over the world wide web.

This is one of the coolest tools available for a work from home business opportunity because it allows you to create links back to your website very quickly for a small amount of work.

In summary, these cool tools make building a work from home business opportunity much easier than it used to be years ago.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/cool-tools-for-todays-work-from-home-business-opportunity-546437.html

Forums are by far the best way to discover the best internet home business for you. I absolutely love this method because you can truly get a feel for the vitality of an internet home business as well as optimize your chances of making the right decision. You can also get the chance to choose the best sponsor available by reading their posts and even interviewing them.

Choose about 3 or 4 forums. You can easily find them by doing a search for “home business forums” or some other configuration of those words. The best forums will be heavily trafficked and you can see that they are by the number of posts and how many people are online at any given time. The heavily trafficked forums are indexed by the search engines fairly quickly due to the constant influx of new content and you will find them right away. The heavy hitters tend to gravitate towards those forums as well. Narrow down your list and start your research.

Start with the most popular threads. You will know this by how many people are posting as well the number of views. These stats are often given as part of a thread. Take notice of the last date someone posted as well. Often times a thread will be started by someone motivated by a program and when they don’t find success, the thread will dry up. Take note of things like this because you can begin to weed programs out this way. If an internet home business is going strong and people are finding success then you will be able to feel the vibes coming from that thread. You just know it. Do you know what I mean? Your instincts should take over and use that to follow threads that give you “that feeling”.”

Now that you have potentially found the best internet home business for you, it’s time to start asking questions. What do you really want to know? I probably wouldn’t go for how much are you making right away but a good start may be asking about the support system within the program. Is there a team effort or do most people work alone? Is there help for people who are new to marketing? Just think about what is important to you.

Now its time to choose the right person to contact on the forum. It is easy to see who are the leaders on the thread. They are the most vocal and informative. These are the people who you want to contact. You can send that person a private message and ask for more information and let them know you are interested in their business. You may ask for more specific details in a private message as well.

Not all leaders are created equal though and take notice of how they respond. It is essential to find someone who is helpful, genuine and seems to truly care about helping you out. You will find that not all people will have these qualities and make sure you feel comfortable with the responses that person gives. If the person is the right one then you will know it.

Now you are potentially ready to go. Use forums to do your research to find the best internet home business for you and take all the steps to ensure your success on your home business journey.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/find-the-best-internet-home-business-by-using-forums-546421.html

Having been around the network marketing industry for 10 years, I have been able to identify 5 main areas that can be roadblocks for many people in the industry. Those challenges are as follows:

1- Leads. The biggest problem that people face in the industry is generating leads. Finding new people on a consistent basis that you can expose your business to is crucial. Most people do not expose their business to enough quality people on a daily basis to get the results that they need.
2-Follow up is the next problem area. When the home business owner does expose his/her business to people, they do not always follow up effectively. They either do not follow up at all, or they don’t follow up consistently enough to get results.
3- Duplication and training. Once the networker begins to enroll people into his/her business, the next problem that comes is getting their new partners trained effectively in order to duplicate what they have done and what others have done to be successful.
4- Marketing tools. Everyone needs effective marketing tools to help them leverage their time by doing presentations for them. In this day and age, a web presence is essential. You need to have cutting edge online marketing tools at your disposal. The company that you represent usually provides a website or websites, but they are typically very ineffective marketing tools.
5- The final problem facing network marketers is credibility. Most don’t have any. Especially if you are new and haven’t earned any money yet. Most people end up chasing their prospects to try to get them to look at their business, when you really need to have posture and have prospects, interested prospects, chasing you.

So when building an MLM business, how do you solve the challenges listed above? When it comes to lead generation, there are a plethora of ideas and information out there on ways to generate leads. There’s your warm market, referrals, buying leads, the 3 foot rule, advertising in periodicals and newspapers, drop cards, cold calling, and various online methods.

In order to have the success you want, you need to incorporate more than one of the available methods of prospecting. But it is imperative you have a system that can automatically help you generate free qulaity leads. Marketing is the key here. For years, this industry has not been about true marketing. The old methods of prospecting your warm market, referral marketing and approaching strangers, do actually still work, but not like they used to and not for the majority of people. So you need to have cutting edge tools at your disposal to be able to market in 21st Century MLM.

You must also be able to follow up effectively with all the leads that you will be generating, so the best way to do that the most efficiently is with an autoresponder. You need to have a series of emails that will follow up automatically for you endlessly until the prospect joins you or opts out.

Once prospects join your business, you have to have an effective way to train them and get them to duplicate the success of others. If you have to be the one to train all of the new people you are signing up into your business, then you have less time to prospect. So it’s important to have a system of training to plug people into to teach them the basics and enable them to be able to do the same thing for their new team members. This is how you can automate the training process to get the duplication you need. The information needs to be the same for everyone, so they are getting a full dose of the right information and not a watered down version.

Finally, in order to attract prospects and get them to chase you and want to join your business, you need to be perceived as an expert. You do this by providing valuable information to help and educate others without asking for anything in return. The prospects will see you as a giver, a person of knowledge and expertise, a leader, and they will want to work and associate with you.

The key solution to all of these problems is to have a system that comprises all of these components together to assist you to build your business. It should allow you to leverage your time, while you concentrate on the most importing thing in building your businessmarketing!

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/5-problems-facing-network-marketers-how-to-solve-them-546203.html

Article marketing is an effective and cheap way to bring targeted traffic to your website. If done right, it can lead to a steady increase of traffic for some time to come. Beginners to article marketing should follow these steps to get started.

Article Marketing For Beginners Step 1

Choose your keywords and subject. Search for keywords that will at least attract some visitors from the search engines. Incorporate those keywords in your title and throughout the article. 3-5% keyword density is a good rule of thumb.

Don’t worry about being too picky with the keywords. If you want the traffic to continuously rise, you will need to write articles every week. You’ll need to use plenty of different keywords to maximize the traffic you get from the search engines.

Article Marketing For Beginners Step 2

Write an article between 400-700 words long. Any longer will tire the reader. Any shorter and it will not provide enough insight or information.

If you know the subject well enough you probably won’t need to search for any information to start writing. Otherwise, start your search at the various article directories and/or just type in your keywords in a search engines and see what kind of information you get.

Once you find an article all you have to do is put it into your own words. Completely change the title, include an intro, three or four main body paragraphs, a conclusion, and a resource box.

Article Marketing For Beginners Step 3

Add the article to your blog or create a new page for it. Bold and italic some of the keywords in the article and add any hyper links if applicable. If you add the article to your blog, you need to social bookmark the post right away.

Article Marketing For Beginners Step 4

Wait a few days and then start submitting the article to the directories. If you take your article and make some slight changes, you will get better results in terms of traffic. Make a change to your title, intro, and 10 or so random sentences throughout your article. Leave your keywords intact. Your looking for three versions of the same article to submit to the directories. This will ensure that the search engines index all of your articles.

That’s basically all there is to it. Rinse and repeat from step 1 about twice a week or eight times a month. It may seem like a tough task at first, but once you start and get that first article out of the way it becomes much easier.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/article-marketing-for-the-beginner-546136.html

Submitting articles at an optimal rate is a bit of a balancing act - if you go overboard and submit too many articles in a short span of time, publishers aren’t going to be too happy with you. If you submit too few, then you won’t see much payoff for your efforts in Google.

The trick is to find that middle ground - an optimal article submission rate that allows you to stay in the good graces of the publishers, but also gives you powerful bang for your buck SEO-wise.

What is a healthy article submission rate?

I recommend submitting between 1 and 8 articles a month. This submission schedule is both doable and maximizes your potential results.

For a lot of people though, even submitting 1 to 8 articles a month may sound like too many - how can you develop the habit of writing that many quality articles a month?

Here are 3 pointers to help you stay motivated and develop an article submission schedule that’ll give you the most payoff:

1) Set monthly article writing goals.

Did you know that people who set specific goals for themselves tend to be more successful than those who just coast through life taking things day by day?

A goal is like a target that we aim for that helps us focus our daily efforts and get to where we want to go.

I encourage you to use goal setting with your article marketing - decide how many articles you want to submit each month, and then schedule time on your calendar when you’ll write those articles.

I have a writing schedule that I stick to that takes the guesswork out of my writing time. When I sit down at my desk, I look at my schedule and see, “Ahh, I’m writing an article today” and then I hop to it!

This makes it so that I don’t end up at the end of the month feeling guilty and trying to scramble to crank out several articles at once.

2) Write in the early morning.

If you’ll take a look at the writing habits of professional non-fiction writers, you’ll notice that a lot of them are early morning writers.

Why is this?

Here are a few excellent reasons why the early morning is a super-productive time for writers:

a. Early morning is usually the quietest time of the day. If you wake up before the rest of your household (maybe even as early as 4am), you can generally hear a pin drop, which is great for your concentration.

b. Your mind is more clear and fresh, as the trials of the day haven’t started yet. Some people speculate that creativity is at its peak when we first wake up. At least for myself, by the afternoon my mind is mush, and I’m much less likely to create a strong article.

c. It just plain feels good to get your writing out of way for the day first thing - and we don’t use up any brain power procrastinating!

3) “Time box” your writing sessions.

One of the reasons why folks procrastinate with their writing is that they dread that it will go on and on, taking up bunches of time from their day with an uncertain result.

I use a productivity technique called “time boxing” to remedy this. Time boxing is simply setting a pre-determined block of time to accomplish a task (such as writing an article) and then committing to stopping when the time is up.

It’s interesting that by setting a time limit on your writing, it makes you more efficient. When your brain realizes it only has a limited amount of time to accomplish a task, it goes into overdrive!

The amount of time you pick is up to you - you might go with a 1-hour time box to start with, and then if you’re not finished with your article, do a time box of 30 minutes the following day to finish things up.

Also, psychologically time boxing helps keep us motivated because we can see a light at the end of the tunnel - we know we’re sitting down to write for a limited amount of time, and that’s a relief!

Put these suggestions to the test and see if you notice a difference! These 3 tips can make a huge impact on your ability to stick to a healthy article submission schedule.

With article marketing, consistency is key. If you set goals, write at a time when your mind is freshest and has the least distractions, and then put boundaries on your writing time, then writing 1-8 articles a month will be absolutely feasible, and you’ll get optimum results for your article writing efforts!

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/3-tips-for-developing-healthy-article-submission-habits-545745.html

The “Should I park my domain name and monetize it that way or should I develop a website?” is a pretty old debate among domainers. And I believe it’s proof that laziness will always win over sensibility.

There are a variety of ways to monetize a domain name. Most domainers who deal with a lot of domain names like to park their domains at Sedo, GoDaddy, or other services that help them monetize the name.

Others build made-for-adsense websites that have little real value, intending to get visitors to click the adsense ads. This is not much different from parking the domain names.

Very few domain name sellers or speculators develop real websites or blogs on their domain names. Why?

Even though they intend to sell their domain names, they know that this usually takes a lot of time. Finding a buyer isn’t an overnight process in most cases. Most domains that are finally sold have been owned by the speculator for years.

Parking those domain names is the way they try to cover their costs of registering the names year after year. Most of their domain names will never sell because they want way more than they are worth. Most domain speculators are hoping for that one big sale, kind of like playing the lottery.

During all that time they are holding onto their domain names, they could be building websites, doing affiliate marketing, blogging, and more. The problem is that those things require work. And we all know how much people like work.

Most people who join MLM programs, get involved in domain speculation, or fall for get rich quick schemes do not want to work. They are hoping to fall into thousands of dollars without having to do any real work.

This article won’t win me any popularity contests among domainers. But if the truth hurts, too bad. It is not ALL domainers who are lazy. There are many who work very hard at their profession. They learn to master the traffic their domain name brings in and make a business out of it.

This article is more about those who just go out and register a bunch of domain names they believe are creative, hoping that someone is going to come along someday and give them a bunch of money for what they consider to be creativity.

For some it is their second job or hobby. For others it is a habit. I’ve known domainers who mortgaged their house to buy a lot of domain names they will likely never sell for enough to cover the loan.

In my opinion, the smart move is to develop those domain names into real online businesses. If you own one-word generic domain names that have type-in traffic, this doesn’t apply to you. But if you are like most domainers and you own a bunch of made up domain names, two and three word domain names, etc., then you should think about developing those domain names into a business.

A domain name’s real value is in the traffic it generates and what that traffic may or may not buy based on the keywords that helped them find that domain or website in the first place.

Let me rephrase it again. Your domain name is not worth anything more than you registered it for when you first register the name. Once you analyze the traffic that domain gets, it may or may not increase in value.

If just parking the domain name gets very few clickthrus for the ads placed on it, then your domain name is not worth but a few pennies over the price of registration.

All it proves is that a few people who end up on that domain name will click an adsense ad. To a business, that means nothing. It doesn’t even prove that any of the traffic generated by that domain name will actually buy something.

However, if you create a business plan that matches the domain name, and you develop a website based on that business plan, and people do actually buy products, services, subscribe, join, or click through to your affiliates, you show that the domain name you own has business potential.

A business owner is much more likely to buy your domain name if it has a proven profit potential than if they just think you have a cute catchy short domain name.

It can be as easy as installing free wordpress software and picking a free theme for your blog and writing to it daily with original content.

The bonus is that it may also rank well for your keywords if you do it right and know a little about seo and social bookmarking.

If you develop a business model that is just moderately successful and you add that it has a good ranking for some key phrases, the value of your domain name is quantifiable and much more appealing to anyone that may consider buying it from you.

My opinion is based on having developed hundreds of websites and blogs and having bought and sold over 500 domain names.

There are a few people around who have bought and sold more than I have.
There are domainers who have made a lot more money than I have by monetizing their domain names or by directing the traffic from their domain names directly to websites that are owned by businesses.

But, again, they have the right domains and tools to do that with. Making up domain names or owning a bunch of 2-3 word domain names does not mean you will be one of these. You won’t be. Those I referred to in this article should begin thinking about developing their domain names if they want them to have any actual value.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/domain-parking-vs-domain-development-545726.html