I.C.C. provides free information on how to profit via the Internet with NO CASH INVESTMENT.
Everything, including membership, is free.
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Comprehensive Internet Marketing Resource for the Work at Home Community I.C.C. provides free information on how to profit via the Internet with NO CASH INVESTMENT. Everything, including membership, is free. |
Getting Started
Written by Ed Gowland
I am constantly asked by friends how they
can make money on the internet too. I created I.C.C. to help them.
This is NOT a "Make over 10,000 dollars per month working just 4 hours
per week at home" scam site.
This guide is about how to build substantial extra income with no
investment except time. It's not a prefect or ultimate tutorial. It's just my
humble "How I dood it" page.
DON'T PANIC !
Don't know anything about building a web site? No problem, just bear with my
ramblings and keep reading.
The Quick Help Paragraph
My "in a nut shell advice" on making a lot of money with referral
programs is: Build a ton of small sites, each one tastefully sprinkled with
referral programs. Use a free stats service for each one. www.hitbox.com
is good. Watch the traffic & referral sign ups. Build more sites like the
ones that are paying off. Replace the sites aren't with new ones you think
might. Build as many sites as time allows. Be organized so you don't waste time.
Download a program like WS_FTP from Tucows
to handle the ftp end and save the profiles of each website host. Build a start
page that you launch from your hard drive that has all your work links &
passwords. Keep light of heart, but keep at it. That's it! Need more
detail? Onto the verbose version ...
My Philosophy
I follow the "It takes many potatoes to fill the sack" theory.
There is no single idea, program or method that makes up my Internet income. I
use a collection programs & website ideas. The result adds up to a happy
face each time I review my monthly income.
Skills / Building your Website
If you already know how to build Web sites, skip this part. If you don't
know how, you can still create a website. Everything you need is listed
under the "Free Webmaster Resources" section on the I.C.C.
homepage. Many free web site hosts walk you step by step on building a web
page with little "wizards". How's THAT for simple?
To start building Web sites on your computer, down free web design software from a free software resource such as Tucows. Free software is typically limited in features & design capabilities, but it will get you started. To get one from Tucows, visit the website and look under HTML Editors. I recommend that you learn to use "professional" (some cost here) web design software at some point. "Good" Web Design software is matter of personal preference. Personally, I use Front Page 2000 most of the time. Some folks swear by it, and others swear at it. Some friends just plain old write html in notepad. I do not endorse any particular way or software.
Signing up for the Referral Programs
Signing up generates a lot of important information such as usernames and
passwords. Do yourself a favor and get organized right off the bat. Otherwise
you'll waste time looking for information. Keep the info in a handy place.
I'm lazy, so I do things the easiest way I can find. I surf with a simple word
processor like note pad & my e-mail program open. I copy the usernames &
pass codes of programs as I get them. If they are sent via e-mail, I check my
mail and cut & paste the info to the note pad as it comes in. I print the
info later, pop 3 holes in the pages and put it in a loose leaf binder. I also
save it to disk. However you do it get organized right off the bat.
How I started
Being a web site designer and Internet marketing researcher by trade, I
obviously had Internet access and did my share of surfing. One day one lunch
break I tripped across a paid to surf program called All
Advantage I figured "what the heck?" I signed up and
download their "view bar" & ran it while I worked on the internet.
My first check was for about $20 dollars. I wanted to try to make more, but for
the moment it was offsetting the cost of my Internet service.
Surfing with a Purpose
Once I found some spare time, I decided to try my hand at promoting the
program. With my view bar running, I went surfing to see how other people
were promoting referral programs. I found most people were putting the all
advantage banner on how to make money at home sites. So I did the same. Also, at
the same time, I had put the All Advantage banner on my existing humor
site. My humor "site" was a one page deal featuring a simple (by
today's standards) interactive program and a character I called Carl the
Magic Gnome. To my amazement, I was getting 3 times the referrals from my Carl
the Magic Gnome site than from my make money at home site!
What I learned from Carl the
Magic Gnome
I came to two conclusions about why the Carl site was so successful in terms
of sign ups,
First, the site was visited by casual surfers. People in a good mood, looking
for humor. The idea of getting paid to surf hit them with slight surprise.
On the other hand, people who visited my work at home site were looking for the
"pot of gold". They were researching the Internet with a purpose.
Money. Specifically, BIG Money. They were drawn to the "make 5,000 dollars
per week in your spare time" rip off sites (my opinion) and my offerings of
earning some extra money with get paid to surf programs was "small
potatoes" to them.
The second conclusion I drew about Carl's success was that the site gave people something to do. A review of the stats showed people stayed for longer than I ever thought they would. It also showed they came back. I assume they were having fun asking Carl every question they could think of, and enjoying the oddball answers. All the time they stayed on my humor site the All Advantage banner was telling them they could get paid for surfing.
What I learned from my "Make money
at home" site
Before I built the site, I knew there were countless others. But I went
ahead & copied "the formula". I signed up for the referral
programs, inserted ton's of banners and created a slow loading, run of the
mill "banner farm" site. I just listed all of the programs, submitted
the site, and waited for the money to roll in. The bottom line a simple one page
humor site beat it hands down.
Now at this point, you might be thinking .."But Ed, This very site is a how to make money at home deal". Well, yes and no. Remember... I built I.C.C. as a reference center for family & friends. I know from experience this type of site will not generate the amount of sign ups that I (or you) want. So...what should you do then? Well, for what it's worth, here's what I do...
How to Start
Build sites that people enjoy & want to book mark. Pick a topic that you
have knowledge about or find interesting. It will make web site work and site
maintenance a pleasant one. Your enthusiasm will be reflected in your site.
Can't think of a topic for a web site? Ask friends, family & people at work.
Listen as they talk about subjects that interest them. Ask yourself what people
find interesting.
You have a topic for a Web site ..now
what about the referral programs?
Avoid the temptation to jam every program you
belong to onto every site you build. Place just one or two of your referral
program banners on each site. Place a short blurb (plug) next to each one. My
daughter's family site follows my formula of low key use of the referral
programs. You can visit it by clicking
here. Admittedly, her site needs to be split into four sites, and will
be soon. Why? You'll understand as you read on.
Here's another example of a site that uses a great concept for shopping coupled with low key use (yet very productive) of a referral program. This site owner runs several sites. She rotates the referral programs between the example I've linked to and her other sites.Check out www.ishop4charity.net to see what I mean.
I'll side step for a minute with a plea
:
For God's sake, whatever you do, DON'T waste your time building another
"make easy money in your spare time" site.
Your chances of getting traffic let alone sign ups on your referral programs
will be slim to none. In some cases even getting listed in some directories will
be hard. THIS site, for example, is gets tossed in all the others as just
another get rich over night web site scam every time it's submitted. It has
gotten so bad, that if you are reading this and not a friend I personally
steered here or a current user of I.C.C., it's almost by sheer luck that you
found us.
Now in case you don't believe what I'm saying about make money at home sites, run this test.... 1.Build a web page (don't waste time building a web site) on how to make money on the internet. 2.Use an auto submitter to send it to all the search engines and the FFA sites. I GUARANTEE two things will happen. First off, your e-mail will be flooded with more junk than you could ever hope to read. And it will all be coming from get rich over night sites trying to sell you something. The second thing will be your search engine listing will place somewhere around the 2,406,942 mark. Trust me, there are easier, more productive & fun ways to utilize referral programs. Ok, 'nuff said. I'll get back on track now.
Key Points covered
1. Make quality sites that give people a reason for visiting and book marking
your site.
2.Avoid the temptation of placing too many referral programs on one site
Websites in Depth
Lot's of Little sites
Make many small sites as opposed to one large "mega" site. Each small
site is focused on one subject. Maybe YOU like both Drag Racing and Garden
Ornaments. But people searching for Garden Ornaments are not interested in your
Web site section about 67 Novas big block Chevy engines. Build two small
separate sites. One about Garden Ornaments & another about Drag Racing. Keep
the content of your site focused. If your Garden Ornaments site generates
referrals, build another small site on the History of Garden Ornaments. &
another & another &, well, you get the idea.
With luck you may be able to match a referral or affiliate program to the theme of your site. For example if your website is about music, look for programs on shopping or a paid to listen to music program. Put e-mail or get paid to read referral programs on story sites. Most of the time you can't match the programs to content, but when you can, it's a nice touch.
Mega Site
There are a number of problems with large sites. I once had a site that was over
400 pages. It was a nightmare to update, upload, analyze traffic, streamline
navigation, and give an occasional facelift. Surfers were either overwhelmed or
just plain old lost within the site. But the worst problem of all was I only had
ONE site to submit to search engines and advertise.
On the other hand, you can make a super large link list page of other humor sites. Initially you make an investment in time building it. After that, you just check for dead links or add new links as you wish. You can even get surfers to help by including an e-mail link for reporting dead links or suggesting sites to be added. Now you can boast over 160 jokes, regular updates and thousands of humor links to get people bookmark your site. Each time a surfer who has book marked your site uses it to get to the links, there are your new jokes and your referral banner!
One the other hand, if you build 15 small sites each one covering a specific topic you can submit each one and draw people in from of varying interests. Hence my "It takes many potatoes to fill the sack theory" So...what's my idea of a small site? About 5 to 20 pages.
Your first site built the wrong way...
You're anxious to get started. So you quickly build a general humor one page
site. It lists 25 jokes scattered between 20 of your paid to surf program
banners. Result? A "Banner Farm" disaster. People will view it as a
site just out to make a buck. Not the humor site you profess it to be. They will
be disappointed, if not angry and they certainly will ignore your banners no
matter how many pleas you've included to "please keep this site free
by joining one or all of these great programs". Surfers remember, and
they won't bookmark your site for future visits. On top of that, the humor web
rings may reject your submission for lack of content.
Correcting the example above
What would I do to correct the above example? I'd make it a ten page
site. The home page, seven humor pages, a links page, and an archive page.
The home or "splash" page has the intro, my best effort at design and
I would boast updates added weekly. The menu or navigation bar would list seven
humor topics, a links page and an archives page. I would pick my top five
paid to surf programs from the 20 originally listed on the above example site. I
would use each of the five program banners twice throughout the site, one on
each page, including the splash page.
Now for the content. Let's say my 7 joke categories are: computers, work, dinning, dating, driving, travel and In-Laws. I would gather 20 jokes on each subject and make the pages. I would also stick 20 jokes in the archive page to give it a jump start. My links page would include many links to other humor related sites. Each page would have an e-mail link for submitting jokes. I would encourage surfers to send in their jokes and post the joke with the initials, nickname or handle of the person who submitted it when I updated the site.
Our finished site now has 160 jokes, the
promise of updates, an archive and a good number of links to other humor
sites.
It also has interaction between you & the surfer by asking for joke
submissions. A surfer now has more reason to book your site. Maybe they didn't
sign up for one of your referral programs at first. But if they book mark your
site and keep coming back, your chances increase. The surfer is happy and you
have satisfaction knowing you have a site people enjoy.
One key point... Do NOT miss your update! If you promised it, do it.
Missing updates one or two times and your return traffic will drop
sharply. So ,how do you take a vacation or time off? No problem , just post a
notice.. "I'll be unable to update the site until 6/14. Thanks for stopping
by & hope you come back then.
More Humor sites? Surely you Jest!
So ...what about the other 15 paid to surf programs left over from our original
poor humor site example? I would build three more humor sites based on the
same format as above, maybe with different joke subjects. I now have four sites
to submit utilizing all 20 of my paid to surf programs. On the links page of
each site I've included a link between my four sites. (at the top of the list of
course) In the case of submission to the humor rings and the links you
included between each site, your four sites now have at several avenues to cross
traffic.
It might seem that if a humor site with 160 jokes is better then one with 25 ,then a site with over 15,000 jokes would be great! Well, With a Mega joke site you don't have the cross traffic like you do between the four small one. Plus you're going split hairs dreaming up categories to list the jokes under to keep each category a manageable size or have each category be pages upon pages deep. Each week you have to add the new jokes to each category and archive the old. I mentioned before I used to build Mega sites. I did it because people will surly bookmark that puppy! Then, one week while doing a marketing survey for a client I learned something about the habits of surfers who bookmark sites.
Book Marking
People usually bookmark sites for two reasons. 1.Because the site updates
frequently. 2. Because the site has a huge link list. It's really the huge
LINK LIST not the actual site content. Your site just happens to be the way they
get to the link lists. There are exceptions to this and I know there are some
that will flat out disagree with me. All I know is what I've learned from
marketing research and in my own spare time. Marketing has a lot of parallels to
gambling. You can do it with blind luck or play the odds. I'm a stats nut and
always play the odds.
Key Points covered ...
1. Make quality sites that give people a reason for visiting and book marking
your site.
2.Avoid the temptation of placing too many
referral programs on one site
3. Several small sites are better than one
large "Mega" site.
Ratios / Content vs. Banners
The ratio of referral programs to site content should be about 10/90 to
30/70. There is no solid ratio written in stone. Play with it and see what works
best for you. What is written in stone is giving the surfer what they expected.
Quality & Content. In the above example it's a collection of jokes. It gives
them a reason to bookmark your site. If your site claims to update regularly, do
it without fail.
Ratios / You vs. Competitors
When it comes to the Internet, there a ton of sites on any subject under the
sun. Given that fact, it may seem that you stand just as good a chance to have
sign ups from a "make money at home site" as from a "yet still
another gardening site". Not true. Here's another simple test. 1.Grab any
old search engine and type in "work at home" To get a good cross
section, visit 40 of the sites that resulted from your search. How many
"get paid to surf " banners did you count? 2. Now search for
"gardening" and visit 40 resulting sites. How many "get paid to
surf" banners did you count? Do you get my drift? A tree in the forest is
hard to notice, but put it in a field and it really stands out. And 20 trees
still stand out in a field. Personally, I have yet to build mini sites on
gardening yet, but I've been thinking about it.....
Links vs. Search Engines.
No doubt about it, a good listing in a search engine will send you traffic.
But so will a well cultivated links page. Build your links page & get a link
back from each site you list. Build your link list page then e-mail or visit the
sites you listed for return links. always put a link to them in place before
contacting them. They like that. Now, if your link list gets to be in thousands,
imagine the potential. This type of traffic is high quality traffic. In the case
of our humor site, people who arrived at your site via a link from another humor
site or humor web ring are looking for a site like yours.
Some links will do better than others. Maybe the link from "Charlie's Chuckle Page" only sends 10 hits per day, but you have thousands of links like his on your site. Over time, you can drop out the links that do not send traffic or place them down the list. Give the sites that send you high traffic a special spot within your links page. Let them know. Maybe they will do the same for you. Ask any seasoned webmaster, and he or she will tell you a links page can pay off in quality traffic.
On A funny note, a person once suggested to me that link lists are bad because it encourages the surfer to leave! What a laugh! If a surfer wants to go, color them gone! Until someone comes up with a way to control right wrist movement of humans, the surfer is ALWAYS in control. Which brings up a point : Some web masters try to "trap" surfers with blind links and other "tricks". Sites like that just irritate people and they leave anyway. You are far better off to work on giving people a reason to come back
Site Submission
I'd do the usual search engine submission, but more importantly, I would submit
my site to as many of the humor web rings that would have me. They require
reciprocal links, but that's not a problem. In fact, you want it. The search
engine submission is made easy with an auto submitter service. There is one
listed on the I.C.C. home page that I think is the best one going. The other
type of traffic generation comes from linking up with similar sites and web
rings. After you get your site up, e-mail other sites you want to link to, or
visit their site and see if they have a submission form or web masters link.
These types of links take a lot of time, but can really pay off in high quality
traffic.
More on Site Submission
I mentioned before that you can use the auto submitter service to
submit your website to the search engines. I would be remiss if I didn't point
out that I use it myself, but with a twist. I always submit my sites to the tope
search engines by hand. as great as auto submitters are, some search engines
don't seem to take their submissions, so I "hand submit to the largest ones
myself. In the case of the search engine submitter I've listed on the I.C.C.
homepage, you can choose what search engines it submits to be group. A handy
feature, since if you submit a web site too many times in a row to a search
engine they consider it spamming and won't list you at all!
Yet still more on Site Submission
A great way to promote your site is to make some multiple submission pages.
For example, if your site sold candles and the items needed to make them, you
could make a page about candle molds and submit that one separately from your
site about candles. There is a fine line between spamming a search engine
and making an honest effort to promote. Personally, I don't feel this is
crossing the line as there might be people just interested in candle molds, and
by submitting a page about the molds, they are more likely to come up what they
were searching for.
Spamming
When you do enter your meta tags, please don't "Spam" the meta
tags with every word under the sun. Use words that honestly relate to your site.
Using words like sex, xxx, and all the other over used words in an effort to get
high traffic does two things. First, it dilutes the usefulness of search engines
and perhaps more importantly to you, it just makes surfers angry. You can learn
all about meta tags by following one of the links on the I.C.C. home page. If
you know some great ones not listed, please drop me a line.
Work, Work, Work
Does the above example seems like a lot of work? It's not really. There are
a ton of tools that make it easier. There are many sites listed on the home page
of this site that can help you. Everything from automatic site submission tools
to links to in depth articles on the topics I've covered. For me, 80% of
web site work is the concept & design. Maintenance is much less time
consuming. For example, let's look at our example humor sites. You can rotate
the jokes between the four humor sites before dumping them into the archives.
You have surfers helping you with updates by sending you jokes & reporting
dead links. The basic layout of all four sites is similar so changes are easy.
The link huge links page could be the same on all four sites, with the exception
of your own links between them.. As you get used to doing it, you'll find
you get things done quicker. So much quicker in fact, where once you had no time
left, you now have time to work on that new site ideas you have.
Key Points covered...
1. Make quality sites that give people a reason for visiting and book marking
your site.
2.Avoid the temptation of placing too many
referral programs on one site
3. Many small sites of different interests
are better than one large "Mega" site.
4. Large link lists on your site can generate significant traffic.
Finally... The End and some closing babble
I'll add more topics as time allows. If you happen to live in the OBX area,
I can talk about the Internet & the wealth of opportunities it offers for
hours over a cold one. Or I could bore you to death with the story of how a
Northern Great Lakes man wound up living in OBX. Otherwise, there is always e-mail
I hope you've found the information useful.
Later... Ed
Update 5.15.00
We have just added a message board and redesigned the site. It is our hope
users find the changes beneficial.
A pic of Carl, Ed's cyber
friend.