December 10, 2007
Hi there, welcome to this gain4you information center!
My wife Margaret and me with our first kid
This is Aubrey – click here to read about me through our wedding page – remember to click the BACK button to come back here.
We all know that to be good at anything requires skills that are developed or learned through relatively long period of time. I post here only information that works for me since starting online business in 2000.
So, browse the categories or search for a particular key word phrase for the info you are looking for. Comment on articles that you are interested in – comment form is available at the end of each article. If you would like to contact me directly via email, click the contact link on the top menu. Enjoy!
Popularity: 8% [?]
Posted in Announcements 
No Comments »
December 10, 2007
The quickest and easiest way to start an online business is to promote other people’s products and services as an affiliate.
No, I am not talking about MLM (Multi-Level Marketing or simply Network Marketing) – you should avoid this when you start. MLM focuses more on growing the downlines rather than selling the real products. Still not sure? Read Ann Sieg’s “The 7 Great Lies Of Network Marketing” free ebook first before you pick this route – you will fail miserably if you did not take her advice.
I’m talking about the one- or two-tier affiliate program.
This type of high percent commission (sometimes as high as 75%) reward program makes you focus more on promoting the products rather than on expanding your marketing network. Your clients are happy because they can enjoy the products they are searching for – and you get the reward for the referral right away. Here are the benefits of most affiliate programs out there:
- No need to create a production or handle inventory;
- No need to worry about product distribution and e-commerce;
- No need to support the customers after sales – the vendor does it
- The sign-up is free – no cost in the front;
- No need to have your own website – all vendors offering an affiliate program will provide you an affiliate link when you can use;
- Some vendors offer services free, such as click tracking, multiple products, second-tier affiliate sign-ups through your link and even email follow-ups, all for your gain without you lifting a finger.
Click to get the ebook
If you want to learn further about affiliate programs and affiliate marketing, please read David McKenzie’s “Make Money with Affiliate Programs” – it is an easy read ebook that should help you understand how an affiliate program really works. Inside this ebook, you will find…
- What to look for in an affiliate program to maximize your income.
- Inside tips for converting more people into buyers, which equals more cash in your pocket!
- Hidden ways you can put your efforts on auto-pilot and make money while you sleep!
- A powerful method to attract hundreds of visitors to your affiliate sites without spending a single penny.
- Exactly how to design your web site to increase affiliate profits.
- Most affiliate links (the link you promote that tracks all your sales) are long, ugly, and impossible to remember: Discover how you can make them short and pretty, and still get credited with every sale you make.
As usual, please leave your opinions and comment on this topic using the form below. Thank you!
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted in Sell Others Products No Comments »
December 10, 2007
Obtaining an internet merchant account to be used for accepting online payments is more difficult than obtaining a ‘regular’ merchant account because the card is not present nor is a signature obtained.
Also, a merchant account is expensive and most of the times you have to pay a monthly fee even though your business is extremely slow in a particular month. Only medium to large volume online businesses would benefit from their own merchant accounts.
Fortunately there are several reliable third-party credit card processing companies who will take payments on your behalf and send the money to you. Here we recommend several of them to you.
- PayPal – A Personal Account allows you to receive and send money using your email address without paying a fee. However, you can apply for a Business Account that allows you to accept online credit card payments or even check payments (for US account holders). The starting service charge is only 1.9% + $ 0.30 for receiving funds. Free to use its Shopping Cart for one-time payments. Receiving recurring payments or donations are also possible. Free to open a Business Account. More info…
- 2Checkout – The service charge is 5.5% + $0.45 for each transaction. Money can be sent to you by check or deposited directly into your account (no fees for ACH deposits to US or participating Canadian bank accounts). Free Shopping Cart. Accept both recurring and one-time payments. One-time $49 setup fee. More info…
- ClickBank – This company charges a slightly higher service fee, $1 + 7.5%, because it has a built-in affiliate program. Their hop link referral system allows virtually all members in their network to be your potential affiliates. No Shopping Cart and one-time $49.95 fee applies. Not a good choice for sale of physical goods or recurring billing. The same ClickBank account can be used to sell your own products – if you have one or more to sell. That means the same account can make you both a vendor (for your own products) and affiliate (for all other ClickBank vendors). More info…
- Click2Sell – This relatively new one is a ClickBank alternative, just better. In stead of charging a percentage of your total sales, they charge a simple flat fee according to three levels of total sales: (1) $1 if sales is $19.99 or less; (2) $2 if sales is between $20.00 and $39.99 and (3) $3 if sales amount is $40 or more. Unlike ClickBank which allows you to sell only digital products, they allow you to sell physical products as well as subscription-based services and memberships. You can set any price for your product – no maximum. You can sell your own products or promote other products as an affiliate using only one account. You can contact your affiliates and vice versa. You can receive funds instantly – no more waiting for payments for weeks. Click here to learn all Click2Sell features that ClickBank does not have.
As usual, please leave your opinions and comment on this topic using the form below. Thank you!
Popularity: 7% [?]
Posted in Sell Your Own Products 1 Comment »
December 10, 2007
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. Besides ASCII text and links to images, sounds, videos, etc., it uses markup tags (so that they won’t show up on your screen) to tell a brower how to present these things for you.
A HTML document is basically a text file. It can be transmitted throughout the internet without being corrupted. Also, because of the markup tags, codes which are not ASCII, such as different coding characters for various human languages, can also be transmitted and presented to the end viewer — as long as the end viewer has the right system.
Note: A good place to learn HTML from scratch is HTMLGoodies.com. Joe Burns, a professor of HTML, makes it very easy to learn HTML using everyday English. He also has many online tutorials, showing you how to do simple things using good examples. He is funny, too 
OK, now the basics for HTML and handling of HTML files so that they display well on the internet and save a huge amount of time in the long run.
- Use correct path to image files – The most common error for a web page is that the images do not show up at all after being uploaded to a web server. This is an indication that you prepared the web page using a WYSIWYG editor such as Microsoft’s FrontPage Express, Netscape’s Composer, Dreamweaver, Ace HTML, etc. These and other similar editors sometime link to the image using a local computer path, e.g.
<img src="C:\My Documents\mysite\images\1.jpg">rather than a correct relative path such as one of these (assuming you uploaded your image files into a folder called “images” in the document root):<img src="images/1.jpg">The following is a list of other incorrect paths to images:
<img src="public_html/images/1.jpg"><img src="www/images/1.jpg">
Another possibility is that the path is correct but some images’ filenames ends with .JPG rather than .jpg (remember that names on unix server are CasEsenSiTive?)
- Make your file or folder names all in small letters. Some browsers or search engines may convert every letter to a lower case. Yes, it is strange.
- Always upload your HTML files in ASCII mode and image files in BINARY mode. Your images may not display properly if ASCII mode was used during uploading.
- Define character set if certain pages are not written in English. Use this tag within the <HEAD></HEAD> section of your HTML files to do the job:<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">This single line alone saves your site visitors’ effort to guess and manually adjust the language settings of their browsers.
- Avoid using frames if you can, as frames are still considered search-engine-unfriendly. Besides, some people still think frames are annoying.
- Avoid using Javascript to open a page in a new window. Use this simple attribute within the hyperlink <A> tag to do the job nicely and quickly: target="_blank" OR target="_new"A javascript for this task can slow down the window opening program tremendously, sometimes freezing up your visitor’s browser
As usual, please leave your opinions and comment on this topic using the form below. Thank you!
Popularity: 7% [?]
Posted in Webmaster Tips No Comments »
December 10, 2007
Just learned that a company in Canada has manufactured a device that could split water molecules into oxygen-hydrogen gas (Brown’s gas) and feed it into existing car engines to make gasoline or diesel burn more efficiently. They claim the savings on gas or diesel can be anywhere between 25% and 50%, especially for old models!
They have done tests on various vehicles, from small cars to trucks, even on oil rigs, heavy machinery, RVs and on-site electricity generators. The test results are amazing – check it out!
http://clicklinkto.com/at/savefuel/
If you do not want to buy their ready-to-use device, you can consider building one yourself. There is a home-made kit you can replicate easily. Check this website for more info:
http://www.autofuelsaving.com
As usual, please leave your opinions and comment on this topic using the form below. Thank you! If you have used the same or a similar device, let us know how it works. Any feedback is appreciated.
Popularity: 10% [?]
Posted in Announcements No Comments »
December 10, 2007
Camtasia Studio is an extremely popular software program that allows you to make video presentations. It captures and records whatever you have on your screen, not still images but actual actual videos that can be played or uploaded to websites. The current version is 5.0 but you can download this 3.12 version which is free – don’t know how long they can allow this version free:
http://clicklinkto.com/at/camtasia
Hope you like it just as I do
As usual, please leave your opinions and comment on this topic using the form below. Thank you!
Update on April 8, 2009: Camtasia Studio is a Windows program. If you are looking for a similar program for Linux or Ubuntu, you can try Instanbul Desktop Session Recorder.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Posted in Handy Offline Tools No Comments »
December 10, 2007
ClickBank (CB) allows anyone to sell his or her own products – you can also use the same CB nickname to refer to other people’s products. However, if you use CB to as a third-party processor to accept credits on your website, you will know that you can only sell one product or service using one CB account. In other words, if you need to sell more than one products, you have to apply for more than one account and you need to pay a certain fee to activate each vendor account.
For this reason, Adrian Ling wrote a very handy script called easyClickMate which allows you to sell unlimited products or services from a single CB vendor account. Better than that, it allows you to sell them from different websites of your own. No license restrictions to use it on one website. You can use it on as many websites as you want and for as many products as you can produce. Check it out for yourself:
http://clicklinkto.com/at/eclickmate/
Please leave your mark and comment on this topic using the form below. Thank you!
Popularity: 9% [?]
Posted in Handy Online Tools No Comments »
December 10, 2007
OK, let’s review the traditional way to selling ad space on your website. It is this… directly dealing with advertisers out there. This way is hard because…
- You need to have a busy website to attract advertisement opportunities – getting a lot of steady traffic to your website is not something you can do overnight.
- Even you have a busy website, you need to install a script to automate the ad submission and displaying process.
- You need to manage the ads and payments regularly – at lot of work even you have automated the whole thing.
So what is the quick and easy way to sell parts of your website space for ads? The answer is, join an online advertising network and just copy and paste a few lines of javascript codes on your website, then they will pay you to do that.
There are several ways they pay you for doing that, to list a few, pay per click (PPC), pay per impression (PPM), pay per play (PPP), etc.
The most popular one is Google’s Adsense program which uses the PPC model for serving ads related to your website content. However you get paid only when the ad link is actually clicked by your website visitors. No click, no pay – as simple as that.
Just recently a new PPP ad program starts to get popular. It uses the PPP – pay per play – platform to deliver audio ads on your website. It displays only once when a certain page containing the program codes loads so it is not that annoying. Better still, since it is PPP they pay you every time the ad is played. In other words, you get paid on 100% of your website traffic with NO CLICKS REQUIRED.
This is truly a Google Adsense alternative program with no clicks needed. It allows any webmaster to make money on every single visitor to their website with NO ACTION required from the visitor.
The closest example is TV advertising where big companies pay huge amount of money to show just a few seconds of a TV ad. The only difference is that the computer speaker of your site’s visitors is the ad display platform. Right now they are doing audio ads only. I am sure they will include video ads in their service lines.
This PPP ad program in now backed by one of the Top 5 major search engines. They even have a free built-in 2-tier affiliate program that everyone can join and get paid both ways: (1) displaying audio ads on your website and (2) referring others to its program and earning parts of the referrals ad displays. Click the following link to check for more information:
http://clicklinkto.com/at/ppp_ads/
Note that they are currently in pre-launch and their services will be available in a few weeks. So it is good to check it out and join early before the launch – what you heard the moment you came to this very page are just some sample audio ads. When they launch shortly, they will be replaced with real audio ads.
They say they will open the pre-launch for free signup for a limited time. When a certain numbers of accounts are filled up, they will close the door and you have to pay to get in. So join while it is still free!
Please leave your mark and comment on this using the form below. Thank you!
Popularity: 10% [?]
Posted in Sell Ads on Your Site No Comments »
I am a father of three kids with my dear wife Margaret. I started internet marketing since 2000 and now have gained enough experience and technical know-hows to share with you. Enjoy!
