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News & Politics
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
DOTCOMOLOGY 
BY: STONE EVANS, THE HOME BIZ GUY 
Click Here To Discover 3 Easy Steps To Make Money Online!
 
INTRODUCTION ................................................................. 9 
EMPTY YOUR CUP! ................................................................ 13 
DON’T LISTEN TO THE “SO-CALLED” EXPERTS…............................... 14 
DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE AN E-ENTREPRENEUR?................. 16 
THE INTERNET — YOUR BUSINESS TOOL...................................... 17 
THE RIGHT PRODUCT SELLS ITSELF............................................ 18 
THE ETERNAL, CHANGING BUSINESS PLAN ................................... 20 
1. GETTING STARTED....................................................... 23 
1.1 MAKING YOUR WEBSITE ATTRACTIVE, INTERESTING, ENGAGING AND 
INTERACTIVE ............................................................................ 23 
1.2 NAVIGATION................................................................. 26 
1.3 DEFINING A USABLE SITE.................................................. 31 
1.3.1 Good Content is Critical ......................................... 31 
1.3.2 Ease of Access to Information................................. 32 
1.3.3 Quick Access to Information ................................... 32 
1.3.4 Cleanly Designed Pages ......................................... 33 
1.3.5 Download Status .................................................. 33 
1.3.6 Usability Problems ................................................ 34 
1.4 BUILDING INTERACTIVITY AND PERSONALIZATION ...................... 35 
1.5 GRAPHICS.................................................................... 37 
1.6 WEB COPY ................................................................... 37 
1.7 CHOOSING A DOMAIN NAME............................................... 41 
1.7.1 Using Expired Domains to Skyrocket Your Traffic....... 44 
1.8 THE HOST ................................................................... 45 
 
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1.9 TESTING AND PERFORMANCE .............................................. 47 
1.9.1 Monitoring and Tracking ........................................ 49 
1.9.2 Tracking Your Sales............................................... 54 
1.10 BUILDING CREDIBILITY AND MAINTAINING IT.......................... 55 
2. INTERNET BUSINESS IDEAS ........................................ 58 
2.1 LEVERAGE THE ADVANTAGES OF THE NET ................................ 58 
2.2 WHAT BUSINESSES ARE SUCCEEDING ON THE NET? ................... 59 
2.3 SHOULD YOU BE SELLING A PRODUCT OR A SERVICE?................... 61 
2.4 IMPORTANCE OF BACK-END SELLING ..................................... 63 
2.5 CROSS-SELLING ............................................................ 65 
3. SECRETS OF WINNING TRAFFIC THROUGH SEARCH 
ENGINES ................................................................................ 67 
3.1 HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK ............................................ 69 
3.2 TOP SEARCH ENGINES ..................................................... 72 
3.3 SEARCH ENGINE PAGE-RANKING ALGORITHMS.......................... 76 
3.4 KEYWORDS — OPTIMIZING YOUR SITE TO GET TOP BILLING AT SEARCH 
ENGINES................................................................................. 82 
3.5 WEB COPY FOR SEO ....................................................... 86 
3.6 SUBMITTING TO SEARCH ENGINES........................................ 87 
3.7 SEARCH DIRECTORIES – THE BENEFITS OF BROWSING ................ 88 
3.7.1 Submitting to Search Directories............................. 89 
3.8 PAY-PER-CLICK — BUYING STATUS...................................... 89 
3.8.1 Show Me the Money! ............................................. 91 
3.8.2 Submitting to Pay-Per-Clicks .................................. 92 
3.8.3 Google AdWords ................................................... 93 
3.9 LINK POPULARITY AND LINK ANALYSIS ................................... 95 
3.9.1 Reciprocal Links and Partner Sites ........................... 97 
3.9.2 Picking Your Partner .............................................. 98 
 
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3.9.3 Inward Link Analysis ........................................... 100 
3.10 OPTIMIZING YOUR WEBSITE ........................................... 101 
3.11 MONITORING YOUR PROGRESS ........................................ 103 
3.12 THREE WORDS ABOUT SPAM .......................................... 105 
4.  BUYING ADVERTISING AND KEEPING CUSTOMERS!.. 107 
4.1 BANNERS................................................................... 107 
4.1.1 Banner Glossary ................................................. 108 
4.1.2 Banner Economics............................................... 110 
4.2 TEXT LINKS................................................................ 112 
4.3 CLASSIFIED ADS .......................................................... 114 
4.4 CULTIVATING NEW CUSTOMERS......................................... 115 
4.5 CREATING EFFECTIVE ADS ............................................... 117 
4.6 ADVANCED AD TRACKING................................................ 120 
5. GETTING RICH FROM AFFILIATE PROGRAMS ............. 126 
5.1 JOINING AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM ....................................... 127 
5.2 LAUNCHING YOUR OWN AFFILIATE PROGRAM ......................... 130 
5.3 COOKING OFF THE SPAM................................................. 132 
5.4 MANAGING AND TRACKING YOUR AFFILIATE PROGRAMS ............. 133 
5.5 EVALUATING YOUR WEBSITE’S PERFORMANCE ........................ 138 
5.6 HOW TO ATTRACT AFFILIATES........................................... 140 
5.6.1 Classifying Affiliates for Better Management ........... 141 
5.6.2 A Few Avoidable Errors ........................................ 146 
5.7 LINKSHARE – AFFILIATE NETWORK THAT WORKS..................... 149 
5.8 THE LEADING DIGITAL PRODUCTS AFFILIATE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM – 
CLICKBANK............................................................................ 150 
6. 
EXPLODING YOUR PROFITS THROUGH EMAIL 
MARKETING.......................................................................... 152 
6.1 COLLECTING OPT-IN EMAIL ADDRESSES............................... 152 
 
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6.2 DOUBLE OPT-IN........................................................... 154 
6.3 INTELLIGENT TARGETING THROUGH TAILOR MADE RESEARCH....... 156 
6.4 RENTING OR BUYING LISTS.............................................. 158 
6.5 CREATING UNBLOCKABLE DHTML POP-UPS .......................... 161 
6.6 EMAIL MARKETING TACTICS ............................................. 164 
6.6.1 Writing Headlines That Grab Your Customers and Sell 
Your Goods!...................................................................... 165 
6.6.2 Tips for Building Your Email Lists........................... 172 
6.6.3 Email Content – Text vs. HTML ............................. 176 
6.7 MANAGING EMAIL CAMPAIGNS........................................... 178 
6.7.1 Personalization in Email Marketing......................... 178 
6.7.2 Creative Segmentation ........................................ 181 
6.7.3 How Often And When to Mail?............................... 182 
6.7.4 Refrain from Spamming....................................... 185 
6.8 ANALYSIS OF EMAIL CAMPAIGNS ........................................ 187 
6.8.1 Tracking Performance - Measuring Useful Metrics .... 187 
6.8.2 Enhancing Email Response ................................... 191 
6.8.3 Should the message trick the reader or be honest?.. 194 
6.9 AUTORESPONDERS ........................................................ 195 
6.10 CALL TO ACTION — CLOSING THE DEAL.............................. 200 
6.11 SAMPLE MARKETING EMAIL ............................................ 204 
7. CREATING NEWSLETTERS THAT SELL AS WELL AS 
INFORM................................................................................ 208 
7.1 ADVANTAGES OF NEWSLETTERS AS A MARKETING TOOL ............. 210 
7.2 CREATING AN EFFECTIVE NEWSLETTER ................................. 212 
7.3 STEPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL NEWSLETTER CAMPAIGN .................. 218 
7.4 GETTING SUBSCRIBERS FOR YOUR NEWSLETTER...................... 221 
7.5 ADVERTISING IN NEWSLETTERS ......................................... 224 
7.6 PROMOTING AFFILIATE PROGRAMS THROUGH NEWSLETTERS ........ 225 
 
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7.7 BLOGS...................................................................... 227 
7.8 PLANNING YOUR CONTENT............................................... 232 
7.9 EZINE JOINT VENTURES .................................................. 233 
7.10 MANAGING YOUR LIST.................................................. 234 
8. JOINT VENTURES — PARTNERING FOR SUCCESS ....... 236 
8.1 CHOOSE YOUR PARTNERS................................................ 236 
8.2 JOINT SUBSCRIPTIONS ................................................... 238 
8.3 EXIT POP-UPS ............................................................. 239 
8.4 PLUG YOUR PALS.......................................................... 239 
8.5 STRENGTHENING YOUR JOINT VENTURES .............................. 240 
8.6 TRACK YOUR JOINT VENTURES .......................................... 241 
8.7 KEEPING YOUR CUSTOMERS ............................................. 242 
9.  SELLING INFORMATION PRODUCTS ONLINE ............ 245 
9.1 FINDING A WRITER ....................................................... 246 
9.2 WHAT CAN YOU WRITE ABOUT? ........................................ 248 
9.2.1 Pleasure Books ................................................... 248 
9.2.2 Inspirational Books ............................................. 248 
9.2.3 Study Books....................................................... 248 
9.2.4 How-To Books .................................................... 249 
9.2.5 Choosing the Right Topic ..................................... 251 
10. CREATING A HOT SOFTWARE PRODUCT WITH NO 
PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE ............................................... 257 
10.1 BUILDING AN OUTLINE ................................................. 258 
10.1.1 Feature List ...................................................... 258 
10.1.2 User Stories ..................................................... 259 
10.1.3 Data Directory .................................................. 260 
10.2 STUDY COMPETITION ................................................... 260 
10.3 DETERMINE PRICING.................................................... 261 
 
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10.4 CHOOSING A PROGRAMMER ............................................ 263 
10.5 DEVELOPING FUNCTIONALITY .......................................... 266 
10.6 CREATING A WORK AGREEMENT....................................... 267 
10.7 PACKAGING YOUR PRODUCT ........................................... 269 
10.8 CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUPPORT ................................... 270 
11. PRESS RELEASES ..................................................... 274 
11.1 WRITING AN EFFECTIVE PRESS RELEASE OR NEWS ARTICLE......... 275 
11.2 PRESS RELEASE DISTRIBUTION........................................ 280 
11.3 WHEN SHOULD YOU DISTRIBUTE PRESS RELEASES? ................. 282 
12. VIRAL MARKETING .................................................. 284 
12.1 VIRAL MARKETING THROUGH EBOOKS................................ 285 
12.2 VIRAL MARKETING THROUGH EMAILS ................................. 292 
12.3 VIRAL MARKETING WITH AFFILIATE PROGRAMS...................... 296 
12.4 VIRAL MARKETING ON THE WEB....................................... 300 
12.5 WORD-OF-MOUTH VIRAL MARKETING ................................ 302 
12.6 MEASURING VIRAL EFFECT AND PERFORMANCE...................... 303 
13. MANAGING YOUR LIFE WHEN YOU WORK FROM HOME
............................................................................................. 305 
13.1 BALANCING YOUR BUSINESS AND FAMILY ............................ 307 
13.2 KNOW HOW TO SAY “NO” ............................................. 307 
13.3 TAKE A DAY OFF FROM WORK AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH........... 308 
13.4 LEARN HOW TO COMPROMISE ......................................... 308 
13.5 MAINTAINING A POSITIVE ATTITUDE IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS .... 309 
CONCLUSION:  ALL YOU NEED TO SKYROCKET YOUR WEB 
PROFITS............................................................................... 312 
SOME WARNINGS .............................................................. 314 
A PERSONAL INVITATION FROM STONE EVANS ............................. 317 
 
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30+ FREE TOOLS AND SOFTWARE PROGRAMS TO HELP YOU SUCCEED . 320 
  
 
 
 
 
Instead of only reading about making money online, why don’t 
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Introduction 
Hello, my name is Stone Evans. A few years ago, I was a 
restaurant owner. Actually, you could say the restaurant owned me. I 
worked long hours being what is popularly called the chief cook and 
bottle washer — that just means I did everything from paying the bills 
to washing the dishes. At the end of the day, I earned barely enough 
money to get by and I never had the opportunity to take a vacation. 
The fact is, my financial life was pretty difficult at that time. 
However, I was optimistic and always searching for ways to achieve 
true financial freedom. One day, I picked up a book called “Multiple 
Streams of Income” by best selling author, Robert Allen… and I didn’t 
put it down until I was finished reading it cover to cover.  
That book changed my life. 
It taught me, in very simple terms, that having money is a good 
thing and that not having money is a bad thing. It illustrated the point 
that it is essential to develop multiple streams of income. One job is 
not enough, one investment is not enough, one business is not 
enough. If you are only relying on one stream of income, you are 
setting yourself up to be broke one day and the fact is that 85% of the 
 
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world’s population grows old and dies financially broke. That’s because 
most people do not have multiple streams of income. 
Knowing that one stream of income is not enough, I got busy 
finding ways to make more money through avenues other than my 
“day job”. In the “Multiple Streams of Income” book, Robert Allen 
discusses different “Money Mountains” including the “Real Estate 
Money Mountain”, the “Investment Money Mountain” and the 
“Marketing Money Mountain”. The one that appealed to me most was 
marketing — specifically Internet marketing. 
In the book, Robert went on to explain that ordinary people were 
getting on the Internet and starting small businesses that made big 
money from the comfort of their own homes using nothing more than 
a personal computer and an Internet connection. I was intrigued by 
this idea. Just the thought of being able to make a living using nothing 
more than a laptop computer and the Internet sent chills down my 
spine. I got started immediately. 
After work and after my family went to sleep at night, I’d brew a 
big pot of coffee and get online for a few hours (usually between 
midnight and 3 AM) trying to learn how to make money online. I knew 
other people were doing it. I just had to figure out how to do it myself. 
I’ll be honest… It wasn’t easy. 
 
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Everywhere I turned, somebody was promising to make me rich if 
I joined their business opportunity or membership site or bought their 
latest ebook. Before long, I had racked up thousands of dollars in 
credit card debt and cluttered my computer with various ebooks, 
membership site passwords, affiliate program welcome letters and 
Internet marketing guru newsletters. My head was spinning with ideas 
and information, but the only people making any money that I saw 
were the people whose stuff I was buying — or so it seemed. 
However, with time things began to make more sense. I started 
making a little bit of money using some of the online marketing 
strategies I was experimenting with and gradually that little bit of 
money I was making grew into a full-time income. 
My dream of making a living from home has come true. 
The purpose of this book, “Dotcomology – The Science of Making 
Money Online”, is to share the information that has helped me create a 
successful online business so that other people who are hopeful of 
making money online will have a fighting chance for success. 
See, you have to be careful when you get online with hopes of 
making money because there are literally thousands of scams and 
scam artists waiting behind the veil with sophisticated and highly 
tuned strategies for ripping you off. One of the reasons I give this 
 
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huge 300+ page content-rich ebook away for free, is because I want 
to help as many people as possible avoid the scams and learn the 
truth about what it actually takes to make money online. With the 
facts in hand, you can decide for yourself whether or not you’ve got 
what it takes to succeed in the Internet marketing industry. 
TIP: If you want to get started quickly, I can help you get your 
first website set up within 24 hours, so that you can start applying 
what you learn in this book to the real world. I believe that my service 
is the fastest and easiest way to start making money on the Internet.  
Click here to learn more about it. 
 
 
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Empty your cup! 
There’s an old Zen story that goes like this: A young man had 
read all the books he could find about Zen. He heard about a great 
Zen master and requested and appointment with him to ask for 
teachings. When they were seated, the young man proceeded to tell 
the master everything he had understood from his reading, saying that 
Zen is about this and Zen is about that, on and on… 
After some time, the master suggested that they have tea. He 
performed the traditional tea ceremony while the student sat at 
attention, bowing when served, saying nothing. The master began to 
pour tea into the student’s cup. He poured until it was full, and kept 
pouring. The tea ran over the edge of the cup and onto the table. The 
master kept pouring as the tea ran off the table and onto the floor. 
Finally, the student couldn’t contain himself any longer. He shouted, 
“Stop! Stop pouring! The cup is full — no more will go in!” 
The master stopped pouring and said, “Just like this cup, your 
mind is full of your own opinions and preconceptions. How can you 
learn anything unless you first empty your cup?” 
And so it is with you now — if you’re going to benefit from this 
book and all of the knowledge I reveal within the pages ahead, you 
must first empty your mind so that you can actually learn something. 
 
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Don’t listen to the “so-called” experts… 
 In this book, I’m not going to give you some airy-fairy theory 
about what should work if everything clicks the way I think it should. 
That’s the kind of rubbish you can read in any one of a thousand 
marketing books sitting on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. The fact 
is, most of those authors have never sold anything online except 
copies of their book on Amazon. 
Here’s my first piece of advice: don’t listen to advice from 
someone who hasn’t been there and done it themselves! 
This is absolutely crucial. If you look around the web or in your 
local bookstore you’re going to find a ton of hype about how you can 
become a millionaire with nothing more than a keyboard and a mouse. 
There are people out there who will say you can get rich with no effort, 
no work and no investment. There are even some who will try to sell 
you pyramid schemes, get-rich-quick plans and every other kind of 
scam you can imagine. And people actually buy them. At the first sign 
of a chance to pick up fast cash, people whip out their wallets and give 
away their life savings. You’re smarter than that, right?  
But it’s not just the straightforward frauds you have to watch out 
for. The Internet changes almost every day. Unless someone is 
actually earning their living online day in and day out, by the time 
 
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they’ve finished explaining how to make money on the Internet, 
chances are, their advice is out of date.  
Like I said, it wasn’t easy when I was first getting started. But like 
any successful businessman, I ditched what didn’t work and did more 
of what did. If I saw something that I thought would bring in extra 
cash, I gave it a try. 
The fact that it’s so easy to create an online business was what 
really did it for me. If I wanted to take advantage of an opportunity, it 
cost me next to nothing to try and I lost little if it failed. 
It wasn’t long before I knew exactly how to find the right products 
and bring them to the right customers.  
That’s what I’m going to show you in this book. I’m not going to 
give you any strange theories or fancy ideas. I’m just going to tell you 
exactly what I did — and what I’m still doing! — so that you can do 
the exact same thing yourself if you want to. 
Of course, I can’t guarantee that you’ll have the exact same 
results as me. Heck, I bet if I were starting from scratch today I’d 
have different results too. I might even have better results. All I can 
do is reveal the information and tools that work for me. Once you have 
this, I’m confident that you can make this business work for you too. 
 
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Do you have what it takes to be an e-entrepreneur? 
Before you even turn on your computer, the first question you 
have to ask yourself is whether you’re cut out for this kind of work. 
The fact is, building a home-based business isn’t for everyone. 
Some people like the commute. They really do enjoy having a boss 
who tells them what to do, and they like the routine of working nine-
to-five for an ordinary salary that can barely pay the mortgage. 
Personally, I think they’re nuts.  
More reasonably, there are people who are concerned about the 
risk of starting up their own business. They’re not sure it’s worth the 
investment of time and money, and they’re scared of the responsibility 
that comes with running their own company. They wonder if there is 
another way to escape the rat race. 
I’m sure there is. You could win the lottery or wait for your Aunt 
Sue to keel over and leave you her condo. Or maybe you could sit 
down with a pen and paper and draw the blueprint for The Next Big 
Thing. Anything can happen…  
For me, what happened was creating a successful, self-running 
Internet marketing system. It didn’t happen without effort. It didn’t 
happen without at least some initial investment of both time and 
 
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money. Of course, it doesn’t happen now without me making sure that 
the taxes are filed and the paperwork is done. But it happened. I’m my 
own boss. I work from home according to my own schedule and I get 
to pocket all the cash my business makes. If you’re prepared to give 
an e-business the time, the work and the money it needs to get 
started and get growing, it can happen for you too. 
The Internet — Your Business Tool 
In effect, my system for making money online is built on three 
foundations: the Internet, marketing and the product.  
In this book, we are going to look closely at each one of those. In 
particular, we’ll spend a lot of time talking about marketing because 
that is really how you make money online. 
Let’s begin by taking a quick glance at why the Internet is the 
greatest business opportunity since the railroad. 
The Internet actually started in 1969 as the ARPANET, a Defense 
Department system designed to let survivors share files after a nuclear 
attack. From a handful of top secret computers, it’s grown to fill more 
than 10 million hosts and millions of domain names.  
And it’s still growing. According to a recent survey, the volume of 
Internet traffic is expected to double annually over the next five years. 
 
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Consumers are expected to account for 60 percent of all Internet 
traffic over that period with the rest of the market made up of 
business users. 
What does that mean for you? 
It means customers — millions of them.  
No other business tool can put the products you sell to so many 
people so easily. Nothing even comes close.  
We’re talking about a potential market of hundreds of  millions of 
people around the world who can buy your products 24 hours a day, 
365 days a year. If you opened a store in your city, how many people 
would walk past your window each month? If you live in Manhattan, 
maybe a few thousand. If you live in Los Olivos, California, maybe a 
few hundred. On the Internet, there’s virtually no limit to the number 
of people you can bring through your store front wherever you live. 
That’s the power of the Internet. That’s why my online business is 
bringing in thousands of dollars every day. I attract a lot of customers 
for my service and I sell a lot of goods.  
The Right Product Sells Itself 
In fact, for some of my websites, my customers are my goods. 
When you join an affiliate program, you buy traffic from other sites 
 
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and pass them onto your partners for a profit. In this book you’ll learn 
all about affiliate programs. I’ll show you how to build them, how to 
select your partners and how to turn your traffic into cash. 
But traffic is just one kind of product on the web. Information 
products are some of the greatest money-makers currently churning 
up dollars on the Net. And anyone can create an information product. 
Imagine you know how to build a bookcase from scratch. That 
already makes you a lot more knowledgeable than me. The only thing 
I know about wood is that it looks great in my fireplace! Maybe one 
person in a thousand will want to know how to build the kind of 
bookcase you know how to build. If you’re not a well-known carpenter, 
no publishing company is going to touch you. It’s just not worth the 
effort. On the Internet, one person in a thousand gives you a potential 
market of approximately 340,000 customers (and that number is 
growing all the time). If you write a book and sell it online for just $10 
per copy you could make as much as $3,400,000. All you have to do is 
tell people what you know and tell them it’s out there. And that costs 
next to nothing. Information sells like crazy online. In fact, I sell a $47 
ebook all day long. The profits from that single ebook could provide a 
comfortable living for me and my family all by itself. But who wants to 
stop at one profit stream when you can create multiple streams of 
 
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automated income on the Internet? Not me. Click here to discover 
the system I use to earn multiple streams of income on the Internet. 
The Eternal, Changing Business Plan 
Of course, it’s communication that’s the key. The more people you 
can bring to your websites the more money you’re going to make.  
You can have the greatest products in the world sold on the most 
beautifully designed website online, but if no-one knows where it is, 
you’re just going to be wasting the twenty bucks or so that you’re 
spending each month for your website hosting service. 
There are a dozen different ways to bring people to your website. 
This book will discuss the ones that are most effective. I’m sure there 
are other ways too. I’m sure you’ll find people who will tell you that 
this site is great or that method gave them results. Maybe they’re 
right, and you’re welcome to try them. What I can tell you is that I’ve 
tried a lot of different marketing techniques and this book will reveal 
all the ones that work best for me and should work for you too. 
That doesn’t necessarily mean that they will work for you. If 
there’s one piece of advice regarding online marketing that you learn 
from this book, it’s that marketing has to be flexible. Like I said, I tried 
dozens of different methods. If I hadn’t kept a constant watch on how 
 
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those methods were working, if I hadn’t dropped those that weren’t 
worth the effort and repeated my success with those that brought in 
cash, I’d still be making sandwiches and washing dishes for a living. 
I’ll tell you about the methods that I found consistently effective. 
If they don’t work for your product, give it a little time then switch the 
methods around. Remember, flexibility is the key. 
In the first chapter of this book, I’m going to explain exactly what 
you have to do to build a website from selecting a host to creating the 
design. Once you’ve got your site up, you have to bring traffic, and 
that’s what we’ll discuss next. I’ll reveal the secrets of successful 
search engine optimization, how to buy advertising that pays, and how 
to make the most of the millions of affiliate programs that will pay real 
dollars for your website visitors you’ve never met and never will. 
I’ll also examine the various kinds of products you can create and 
sell online, and finally, I’ll show you how to put everything together to 
create a truly integrated business system that brings in real cash, hour 
after hour, day after day! 
Making a fortune online is easy if you know what you’re doing. 
Read this book and apply the information within. I know it can work 
for you because it works for me. Whether you choose to succeed or 
not using the information revealed in this book, is entirely up to you. 
 
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start earning multiple streams of income within the next 24 hours. 
 
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Allen Says 
Click Here to Sign Up and Start Making Money Today!
 
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1. Getting Started 
The first step towards creating an online 
business is building a website. Now, that isn’t as 
complicated as it sounds. When I built my first 
website, I thought Java was a type of coffee and 
HTML the name of a robot in Star Wars. That’s why I didn’t do it. I 
paid someone else to do it for me. It cost me just a few hundred 
bucks, but I earned it back soon enough. This chapter discusses how 
to begin the process of creating your first website, and where you can 
find someone to build your site if you don’t want to do it yourself. 
1.1 Making Your Website Attractive, Interesting, Engaging 
and Interactive 
To succeed at your online business (whether you are selling your 
own product/service or are selling for other merchants as an affiliate), 
you need a website created just for that - a simple, focused site. Your 
website should be easy to build, maintenance-free, low cost, credible, 
and a powerful traffic-builder and customer-converter.  
Having the right tool and the right product alone won’t ensure the 
success of your website. There are many factors to be considered 
while designing a site. Unfortunately, most of these are often ignored 
by Internet business owners.  
 
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; Build It for Speed - It's a fact of modern life - people are in 
a hurry. This means that you have between 10 and 30 
seconds to capture your potential customer's attention. To 
minimize your load time, keep graphics small. Compress 
them where possible. Use flashy technology (JavaScript, 
Flash, Streaming Audio/Video, animation) sparingly and 
only if it is important to your presentation.  
; Target your Market - Know who your market is and make 
certain that your site caters to their needs. It is critical that 
your site reflect the values of your potential customers. Is 
your market mostly business professionals? If so, the site 
must be clean and professional. Is your product aimed 
mostly a teenagers and young adults? Then your site could 
be more informal and relaxed. The key here is to know your 
market and build the site to their preferences.  
; Focus the Site - Make certain your website is focused on a 
primary goal: selling your product or service. A site offering 
many unrelated products is not necessarily unfocused, but 
this is often the case. If your business does offer many 
products, dedicate a unique page for each instead of trying 
to sell them all from one page.  
 
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; Credibility Is Crucial - The most professionally designed 
website won't sell if your customers don't believe in you. A 
clear privacy statement is one way to build your credibility. 
Provide a prominent link to your privacy statement from 
every page on the site as well as from any location that you 
are asking your visitors for personal information. Provide 
legitimate contact information online.  
; Navigation should be simple - Make site navigation easy and 
intuitive. Simple and smooth navigation adds to the 
convenience of the visitors. Add powerful search and catalog 
features. Visitors usually don’t have the patience to navigate 
through the whole website to find what they are looking for.  
; Consistency is the key - Make sure the site is consistent in 
look, feel and design. Nothing is more jarring and disturbing 
to a customer than feeling as if they have just gone to 
another site. Keep colors and themes constant throughout 
your website.  
; Make your website interactive and personalized – Add 
feedback forms as well as email forms that allow your 
prospective customers to ask you any questions they might 
have pertaining to a product. Personalization of your 
 
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website is another key element that can build your visitor’s 
trust and increase your sales. Personalization technology 
provides you the analytic tools to facilitate cross-selling and 
up-selling when the customer is buying online. It would give 
you an idea of what products to cross-sell and up-sell. For 
example, when a person buys a CD player, a disc cleaner 
can also be offered. 
; Content is King - Good content sells a product. Ask yourself 
the following questions. Does your copy convey the 
message you wish to get across to your visitors? Is it 
compelling? Does it lead your visitor through the sales 
process? Have others review, critique and edit your copy to 
insure it is delivering the intended message. Always double 
check your spelling and grammar.  
1.2 Navigation 
The aim of a website's navigation is simply to allow users to get to 
the content they require. For sites that have a large number of 
sections and web pages (and information sites can be one of these) 
the navigation plan has to be properly researched and designed. You 
have to consider different types of visitors and simulate the most 
common steps they would take to find what they want on your site, 
 
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and the navigation plan has to optimize this movement. For example, 
the steps required from searching a catalog of items, selecting from 
the catalog, adding them to a shopping cart, proceeding to check out, 
to entering the payment particulars is a specific sequence that should 
be facilitated by the navigation system. If the sequence is haphazard, 
it could lead to frustration or the user may miss an important step and 
you would have an aborted sale.  
To find their way about, users need to know two things: 
- Where they are now   
- How to go elsewhere   
Navigation does not exist in isolation; good site organization is a 
prerequisite for a coherent navigation system. 
Objectives of a Navigation System 
Navigation can be broken into two primary types: Location 
Indicators and Navigation Controls. 
Location Indicators 
Location indicators let users know where they are in the site at 
the moment. You need to keep in mind that users coming from outside 
 
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your site can enter at any page, not necessarily on a main page. They 
need to be able to orientate themselves quickly.  
Equally, it is important that users navigating around your site 
have a clear idea of where they are both in absolute terms and in 
relation to other content. 
Location information should appear on every page of the site, in 
the same place and in the same style. Location indicators should tell 
the user precisely where they are and this should be clear even to a 
user who has entered the site at an internal page. The location 
indicator should be identifiable for what it is and make sense in the 
context of other navigation.  
In simple sites a page banner - text or graphic - naming the page 
will be sufficient. For this to work the page name should also appear in 
the main navigation so that it is relevant within the overall structure of 
the site. 
Color can be used. For example a different color background, 
contrast color or sidebar in each part of the site. To be really effective 
the color change should be reflected in the navigation. 
Using “breadcrumbs” on every page is a good idea. Breadcrumbs 
show you a series of hierarchical links that you have used to go from 
 
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page to page within a section. Using breadcrumbs is like leaving a trail 
of the path you have followed. The breadcrumbs appear at the top of 
the content section, just below the main navigation template. Each 
element in the breadcrumb is a link to that section or subsection. This 
helps in avoiding a series of back buttons allowing the user to directly 
go back to the main section page or another sub section. More 
importantly, it always shows the context of the page that is being 
viewed and how it belongs to a section or sub-section.  
Navigation Controls 
Navigation controls are the main navigation links; they allow 
users to move around the site. Whether they comprise images or text 
they should be predictably located in the same place, and with the 
same appearance, on each page. 
These have several purposes 
; To allow users to move about within the site  
; To tell users what information is available at the link  
; To work with location indicators to orientate users  
A good navigation control: 
; Is clear: it looks like navigation  
 
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; Leads to obvious content - users have a good idea what 
they will find if they click  
; Is consistent with other navigation controls  
; Is predictable in its style and location on the page  
There is no mystery to usability. It simply involves creating a site, 
which is accessible to the majority of people, is easy to use and get 
around and delivers on its promises. You can have a site that meets 
the most important standards of usability by planning it well and 
always keeping the end user in mind. Remember that websites should 
not be designed for their owners - they should be designed for their 
users. 
Problems with usability could be said to stem from just two 
sources: the site itself and the user. In fact, the site is always at fault 
if a visitor (however experienced or inexperienced) has problems 
navigating, getting information or understanding the site.  
While websites have become far more complex, web users have 
become less experienced because more and more new people go 
online every day. It is a mistake to think that the majority of users will 
be web or even computer savvy and will understand subtle clues about 
content. Many won’t, so make your site as easy to use as possible.  
 
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1.3 Defining a Usable Site 
A usable site will: 
; Help users achieve a goal, usually to find something, such 
as information, or obtain something, such as a book.  
; Make it easy for them to achieve that goal  
; Make it possible to achieve the goal quickly  
; Make achieving that goal a pleasant experience  
A site will be generally usable if: 
; The content is good and relevant  
; The content is easy to find  
; The content can be found quickly  
; The page is pleasant to look at and cleanly designed  
1.3.1 Good Content is Critical 
A site with good content, regardless of its subject, is one that 
provides products or information that is useful or beneficial to users. A 
good usable site will make it clear what information or content is 
available and at what price AND what is not available. A good usable 
site should define clearly all subscription packages offered.  
 
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1.3.2 Ease of Access to Information 
Good navigation, precise 
location 
indicators, 
secondary 
navigation, clear linked text and a well-organized structure all 
contribute to making information easy to find for a wide range of 
different users.  
Bearing in mind that many users are inexperienced, it may be 
necessary to include explanations of things you consider self-
explanatory. For example, an inexperienced user may need an 
explanation of how to use a drop down menu. Remember, make it as 
easy as possible for people to use your website. 
1.3.3 Quick Access to Information 
This is the aim of the majority of web users. It can be broken into 
two important aspects: 
Speed of Page Loading  
This requires, in particular, attention to images to ensure they are 
properly optimized and do not excessively delay load time. It may also 
mean breaking up long articles and ensuring that important content is 
at the top of the page where it will load first. 
 
 
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Speed of Access to Content 
This is where the 3-click rule comes in - no important content 
should be more than 3 clicks from the home page.  Some standards 
even say that it should be no more than two clicks.  
One helpful way to speed access to content is to consider each 
type of user, select the content that they are most likely to be 
interested in and create links from the home page to one piece of 
content for each group. This will get them quickly to the appropriate 
part of the site. 
1.3.4 Cleanly Designed Pages 
Cleanly designed pages are pleasant to look at and easy to read. 
It is almost impossible to make a site with an image shown as a tiled 
background usable - the whole thing is too distracting and confusing. 
It takes no great design skills to create clean pages; it just requires 
thought and adherence to the principle that when it comes to design, 
less usually is more. 
1.3.5 Download Status 
Most paid membership websites are limited to online access and 
information download rather than selling products. There should be 
clear download instructions provided. Your website should also state 
 
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the size of the file in kilobytes and the estimated time of download for 
a user having a 56K modem, DSL, Cable and so on.  
1.3.6 Usability Problems 
While for large commercial sites investment in full-scale usability 
studies may be essential, few small sites can afford such luxuries.  
However, identifying problems with usability for your site need be 
no more complicated than asking a few (honest) friends to act as 
guinea pigs on your site and, if possible, watching them silently as 
they do this. Watching users try to find information at your site can be 
both instructive and quite surprising. 
Remember that if at any stage you feel the urge to intervene and 
explain, then you have identified a usability problem. 
List of the Most Common Usability Problems  
; The site does not state its purpose clearly  
; Java applets, huge images, banner ads or flashy elements 
slow down loading; 10 seconds is about as long as the 
average user will wait for a page.   
 
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; The site requires specific software to be used. Have you 
ever actually changed browsers or downloaded a piece of 
software just to see a site?  
; Poor navigation, too little navigation, too much navigation 
and, not uncommonly, no navigation at all  
; Bad design leading to poor readability  
; Discomfort due to ugly design or inconsistent design. Almost 
always because a designer overestimated their skills.  
; Irrelevance of content - for example the business site that 
includes biographies and photos of each of the board 
members. Happy egos on the board; bored website visitors!  
; Complexity or excessive originality of design, which requires 
users to learn how it works in order to use it.  
; Inaccessibility because the site cannot be used by browsers 
for people with disabilities.  
1.4 Building Interactivity and Personalization 
Make your website interactive. Add feedback forms as well as 
email forms that allow your prospective customers to ask you any 
questions they might have pertaining to a product. Personalization of 
 
- 35 - 
 
 
your website is another key element that can build a visitor’s trust and 
increase your sales. Personalization technology provides you the 
analytic tools to facilitate cross-selling and up-selling when the 
customer is buying online.  
Personalization tries to restore to the online business the magic of 
personalized attention which is one of the chief reasons why many 
people still prefer in-store purchase. You can use personalization to 
match your customer with the right products through either rules-
based or customer analytics-based processing. Thus as your software 
stores customer information and preferences, it can help categorize 
them into groups. At the same time, observations over time can 
suggest products to cross-sell and up-sell. Thus when a person buys a 
subscription to a fitness site, exercise equipment is also offered. 
Amazon pioneered personalization on the net – when you a buy a 
book, it shows you other books in the similar genre saying “people 
who bought this book also bought these”, inducing you to buy more.  
A consumer survey from the Personalization Consortium found 
that 56 percent of respondents say they are more likely to purchase 
from a site that allows personalization, and 63 percent are more likely 
to register at a site that allows it.  
 
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1.5 Graphics 
Your site has to be aesthetically attractive with visually appealing 
organization and enticing images. Fashions change fast on the 
Internet, so when you come to choose a designer, make sure you take 
a good look at their portfolio. You want the user to just glance at your 
homepage and understand immediately who you are and what you can 
do for them. 
1.6 Web Copy 
Your website content should convince visitors that your service is 
either unique or superior to that of your competitors in terms of 
quality, and is competitively priced. It should show your potential 
clients that you can provide the solution they are seeking. Your 
product or service will solve their problems, answer a dream, enrich 
their lives, and/or improve their businesses. You are the dependable 
expert that they want and need! 
Your website copy plays a major role in establishing and growing 
your customer base. Website copy creates the “voice” of a company, 
just as the look and feel of a site put a “face” on the company and on 
otherwise intangible products and services. On an ecommerce site, the 
copy plays a key role in closing sales as well as in up-selling and cross-
selling products and services. Good website copy delights first-time 
 
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visitors, encourages return visits and propels both customer 
acquisition and retention.  
People read a web page differently than they do a brochure or a 
newspaper. They scan, scroll, click, hit the back button, and hit the 
forward button. “Reading” is about moving around and being in 
control. You have one chance to make a first impression – to quickly 
convey the benefit of staying on your website. I can’t overstate the 
importance of first impressions, which in web-time are measured in 
milliseconds. The layout, functionality, message and overall look and 
feel of your web page determine who stays – and who clicks away.  
Your story should be clear and to the point. The goal of any web 
page should be to get the visitor to DO something: to move on to the 
next step in a purchase sequence or to click for more information 
about a product or service. Without readable, compelling copy and 
clearly organized hypertext links, visitors are much less likely to 
complete a transaction – and return to your site again.  
Writing for your web page should always start from your visitor’s 
perspective. What is your website visitor looking for? Why is she here? 
How can you make her visit as quick and efficient and positive as 
possible? You should take the time to clarify the goal of each page 
before starting to write. If the page is part of a transaction sequence, 
 
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identify what may be hindering the buying process. Be sure 
instructions are clear and easy to read.  
If you are selling a service on your website, your Unique Selling 
Proposition (USP) 
is your service’s most powerful benefit, in 
combination with a strong, unique feature of your business. It answers 
that most difficult question: 
Why should someone do business with you? 
Tell your customers what service you are selling and explain what 
your service provides. What is the key benefit(s) to your customers? 
What pain does it cure, what solution does it provide? Compare your 
service with that of your competitors and highlight what makes you 
stand out from the competition? Keep working on this until you can 
clearly separate yourself from the field. As stated earlier there must be 
a convincing reason for doing business with you, instead of your 
competitor. 
Summarize the above into one tight, powerful, motivating phrase 
that will persuade your customer to do business with you and to trade 
their money for the benefits delivered by your service. 
As you start to work through the above four steps, you may find 
this to be a lot harder than it looks. Don’t blow it off and give up! You 
 
- 39 - 
 
 
must have a USP. If it was easy, everyone would have a great USP! 
Come up with a tight, sharp USP that sells your service to your 
customer. 
Write tight, get right to the point, be keenly aware of the 
audience for the page, and don’t use a three-syllable word when a one 
or two-syllable word will do. Use call-to-action language and be 
interesting. The page should be so clearly organized that, in seconds, 
visitors can understand and get convinced to buy your product and be 
able to anticipate where a hypertext link – or a “Continue” button – 
will take them. Studies show that “ease of use” is the winning factor 
on an ecommerce site. 
If you’re going to promote your service and expand your customer 
base using your website, potential clients have to be able to trust you.  
Their confidence in you and your products has to be boosted. 
Endorsements on your website from a valued friend or colleague, or a 
referral from a strategic partner are the types of “leads” that boost 
your credibility.  You and your service must be perceived as being 
trust-worthy before your visitor will be confident enough to contact 
you or even buy your product. 
Show prospects that you have their best interests at heart and 
that you can adapt or customize your service to meet their individual 
 
- 40 - 
 
 
needs. Foster an ongoing relationship that steadily increases their trust 
levels and cements a view that you are an “authority” in your field. 
Another important aspect of convincing prospective customers is 
to keep abreast of recent developments in your field. Check on what 
your competitors are writing about, and watch for new trends. This will 
keep your website current, razor-sharp and unique. By keeping your 
eyes open, you will be able to grab an angle or niche that hasn’t been 
well covered yet by your competitors. Portray this angle or niche on 
your website.  
Finally, be wary of broadening the theme of your site too much. 
Try not to dilute your product or service’s targeted niche simply to 
expand your base of merchant partners. Remember; focus on your 
selling your service. That’s where the “meat and potatoes” of your 
business will come from. 
1.7 Choosing a Domain Name 
In the physical world, you can distinguish a business because of 
its structure, window displays, or signs. You can tell that a bank is a 
bank, or a clothing store is indeed a clothing store.  
In the Internet, however, it is an entirely different story 
altogether. Your domain name is the only clue to your online business. 
 
- 41 - 
 
 
You do not have visual clues: no location, no look, and no store 
design. Instead, users have to type in a word or a set of words to 
reach your site. Your prospective visitor has no way of knowing what 
your site is all about until she finds it and reads its contents. Who can 
ever tell that Amazon.com sells books? Or that Excite is a search 
engine?  
Your domain name can spell your success on the Internet. A good 
domain name is the best asset you can ever have. It can make your 
business stand out in the crowd, or just float aimlessly in space.  
The need to provide immediate clues to an online business led to 
the prevalence of generic domain names. Generic names instantly 
provide the user with an idea of what a business is all about, what to 
expect and look for in a site. For instance, Etoys.com is a toy store.  
The temptation of the generic name has been so powerful; that 
some companies even paid ridiculously high prices to get the name 
they want. The domains Loans.com and Wines.com were both bought 
for $3 million each. Telephone.com was acquired for $1.75 million, 
while Bingo.com sold for $1.1 million. 
However, generic names do not necessarily create the “buzz” that 
you’d like surrounding your website. Branding has always been about 
proper names: McDonald's did not name their store Hamburger. Hertz 
 
- 42 - 
 
 
is not called Car Rental. FedEx is not Mail Carrier. Kodak is not 
Photographs. Google is not Search Engine. Microsoft is not Computer 
Software. 
For better branding results, your domain name should stand out 
and be easy to remember. Consider the following tips when creating a 
domain name: 
; The domain name should be short 
; The domain name should be simple 
; It should be suggestive of your business category 
; It should be unique 
; It should be easy to interpret and pronounce 
; It should be personalized 
; It should not be difficult to spell  
; It should not be difficult to remember 
Domain names can be registered through many different 
companies (known as "registrars") - a listing of these companies is 
available at ICANN.org. You can register for domain names from 1 to 
10 years in advance and prices can vary anywhere from $8 to $30 per 
 
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year for each registered domain. Most website hosting companies, as 
explained later, will handle the registration process for you, but make 
sure that you are properly listed as the owner of the domain when it is 
registered. If you have registered a domain name for a specific period, 
make sure you renew it in time. You’d be surprised at the number of 
cases, where website owners have lost their domain name to a 
competitor by not renewing it in time.  
1.7.1 Using Expired Domains to Skyrocket Your Traffic 
Domain names provide a great opportunity to make easy money.  
I’m not talking about Internet real estate, where you buy up good 
names and sell them on for a profit. If you didn’t get positioned in that 
market early on, you can forget about it. The bottom’s fallen out of the 
market and the best domains are long gone. 
I’m talking about expiring domains. 
Thousands of webmasters invest time, effort and money to 
promote their site and build up traffic. Many of them then lose interest 
and move on, leaving their site active. That means that although they 
still own the domain, they’re not actively promoting it. But they don’t 
need to. All the automatic marketing systems they’ve put in place are 
still bringing in traffic. The site runs itself. 
 
- 44 - 
 
 
Now, at some point the ownership of those domains is going to 
expire. If you snap up those domains once they come back onto the 
market, you’ve got a pre-built stream of customers. You can either 
rebuild the site, or redirect the traffic to your domain. 
It’s that easy. In fact, websites like DeletedDomains.com 
actually do all the legwork and let you reap all the rewards.   
Do be careful when using other sites though. There are some 
swindlers out there that will sell you subscriptions, provide you with 
outdated lists, take your money and keep the good domains for 
themselves.  It happens, and there’s little point in taking a risk with 
other companies when DeletedDomains.com does such a great job. 
1.8 The Host  
Let’s start where the Internet starts: with a host. A host is a 
server that provides a home for your website on the World Wide Web. 
Just as your computer contains all your files, so a host contains all the 
files needed to run your website. Why can’t you just keep all those 
files on your own computer? Because that would mean visitors would 
have to connect directly to your computer to see your website and 
that’s not a good idea. It wouldn’t be secure and it would make your 
machine run like a tired snail. With a host, you can simply upload 
everything you need to the server and your users can then connect 
 
- 45 - 
 
 
there to see your site. It lets the site run faster and allows it to have 
all the security and extras it needs.  
Selecting a host is the first important step towards building your 
Internet business.   
Hosting services and companies vary from totally free, shared 
servers to large-scale dedicated machines. You’ll have to decide which 
is right for you and your business.  
Your choice of server will depend on how much money you have 
available at the beginning and how much you plan to grow in the 
future. In my opinion, for commercial sites, free hosting is a waste of 
time. Your users are going to get blasted with annoying pop-ups every 
time they surf to your page, it’s going to be impossible to get a decent 
position in a search engine, and you don’t even get a real business 
URL. No one’s going to remember your web address if they have to 
type: FreeWebsiteHosting.com/my_site.  However, it is possible to 
choose a cheaper host at the beginning and move up as your business 
begins to bring in money. 
NOTE: One of the most important factors in choosing a website 
host is the customer service you receive once you’ve signed up. 
There are many technical issues that can come up once you have your 
own website, and if you don’t have a truly dedicated hosting company 
 
- 46 - 
 
 
to support you and help you resolve these issues when necessary, you 
could, quite simply, lose your business. Trust me, I’ve seen many 
thriving online businesses fall apart because they chose the wrong 
hosting company. When hosting is cheap, there is a reason for it. 
With website hosting, you get exactly what you pay for and you should 
never compromise when it comes to who to host your website with. 
Click here to learn about my service and the website hosting 
company I highly recommend to everyone who does business online. 
1.9 Testing and Performance 
You have designed a very usable website, you have hosted it 
using a very reliable web hosting company, and you have integrated a 
safe and trusted payment processing system with your website. 
However, all these can prove to be useless until you know your site is 
actually working and accessible. If you want to create an accessible 
website, you will need to test, test and test again.  
A recent Forrester Research report reported that failure to ensure 
website quality will cost the average small or mid-size company 
thousands of dollars in wasted expenditures on website redesigns, 
forfeited revenue, and lost customers. Testing a website is a long and 
tedious task, but it's perhaps the most important task of all. There are 
 
- 47 - 
 
 
numerous stages to testing, all of which are very important. Ranging 
from browser testing to content testing, none should be excluded. 
Visual Acceptance Testing 
Visual Acceptance Testing is the first port-of-call for all 
webmasters. This type of testing generally ensures that the site looks 
as it is intended to. This includes checking the graphic integration, and 
simply confirming that the site looks good. In this stage you should 
assess every page carefully to ensure that each looks the same. The 
site should be tested under different screen resolutions and color 
depths.  
Functionality Testing 
Functionality testing is perhaps the most vital area of testing, and 
one which should never be missed. Functionality testing involves an 
assessment of every aspect of the site where scripting or code is 
involved, from searching for dead links, to testing forms and scripts.  
You should also test your payment processing system completely 
and thoroughly. After all, you wouldn’t want a potential customer to 
get stuck at the last stage and eventually leave the site just because 
there is something wrong with payment processing. 
 
 
- 48 - 
 
 
Content Proofing 
This stage of testing removes any errors in your content, and 
ensures that your site has a professional appearance. In this phase, 
you should reread each page on your site, and check for spelling and 
grammatical errors.  
System and Browser Compatibility Testing 
This test phase is completed in order to ensure that your website 
renders correctly on a user's screen. To begin with, you should test 
several pages from your site on different browsers such as Internet 
Explorer 4, 5, 6, Netscape 4 and 6, and Opera. This can be extremely 
important - if your site does not work properly with the Netscape 
browser, Netscape users will end up annoyed, and they'll go 
elsewhere. 
1.9.1 Monitoring and Tracking 
Understanding what your visitors do on your site is crucial 
information, not to mention interesting. If a large majority of your 
visitors who proceed to purchase a product leave the site when they 
get to a specific page in the order process, you need to know about it. 
It could be that the page in question is confusing or hard to use. Fixing 
it could increase your sales exponentially. In fact, it is not uncommon 
 
- 49 - 
 
 
for small website changes in headlines and order processes to result in 
a 200%-300% increase in sales. This is just an example; there are 
many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of your site visitors. 
Most website hosting services offer a stats package that you can 
study. If you're not sure where this is, call up your hosting service and 
ask them. Statistics are a vital part of tracking your marketing 
progress. If you don't have access to website statistics get a package 
that can help you in this area. Do not get a counter that just shows 
how many visitors you've had. You'll be missing out on vital 
information that can help strengthen weaknesses in your site. 
A good website hosting service would offer traffic logs that 
provide an invaluable insight into the traffic being referred to a web 
site from various sources such as search engines, directories and other 
links.  
Unfortunately, traffic tracking provided by web hosting services is 
often in the form of raw traffic log files or other hard-to-comprehend, 
cryptic formats. These log files are basically text files that describe 
actions on the site. It is literally impossible to use the raw log files to 
understand what your visitors are doing. If you do not have the 
patience to go through these huge traffic logs, opting for a traffic-
logging package would be a good idea.  
 
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Basically two options are available to you and these are: using a 
log analysis package or subscribing to a remotely hosted traffic-
logging service. A remotely hosted traffic logging service may be easy 
to use and is generally the cheaper option of the two. In fact, you can 
get a powerful free tracking tool at: StatCounter.com. Other reliable 
tracking programs include WebTrends.com and HitsLink.com. 
These services do not use your log files. Typically a small section 
of code is placed on any page you want to track. When the page is 
viewed, information is stored on the remote server and available in 
real time to view in charts and tables form. 
A good traffic logging service provides detailed statistics 
pertaining to the following:  
; How many people visit your site?  
; Where are they from?  
; How are visitors finding your site?  
; What traffic is coming from search engines, links from other 
sites, and other sources?  
; What keyword search phrases are they using to find your 
site?  
 
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; What pages are frequented the most - what information are 
visitors most interested in?  
; How do visitors navigate within your web site?  
Knowing the answers to these and other fundamental questions is 
essential for making informed decisions that maximize the return on 
investment (ROI) of your website investment. 
The most important aspect of tracking visitors to your website is 
analyzing all the statistics you get from your tracking software. The 
three main statistics that will show your overall progress are hits, 
visitors and page views. Hits are tracked when any picture or page 
loads from your server on to a visitor’s browser. Hits, however, can be 
very misleading. It is quite an irrelevant statistic for your website. 
The statistic that is probably the most important for a website is 
Page Views/Visitors. This gives you a good indication of two things. 
First, how many people are coming to your site, and secondly how 
long are they staying on your site. If you have 250 visitors and 300 
page views you can figure that most visitors view one page on your 
site and then leave. Generally, if you're not getting 2 page views per 
visitor then you should consider upgrading your site's content so your 
visitors will stay around longer.  
 
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If you see the number of visitors you have increasing as well as 
the number of page views per visitor increasing then keep up the good 
work! Always look for this stat as an overall barometer of how your 
site design is going and if your marketing campaigns are taking hold. 
Also, a good stat to look for is unique visitors. Once a person 
visits your site they will not be added to the unique visitors category if 
they visit again. This is a good way to track new visitors to your 
website. 
Page views are a good indication of how "sticky" your website is. 
A good statistic to keep is Page Views divided by the number of 
Visitors you have. This statistic will give you a good idea if your 
content is interesting and if your visitors are staying on your site for a 
long time and surfing. 
Some people are intimidated by web traffic statistics (mostly 
because of the sheer volume of data available), but they shouldn't be. 
While there are many highly specialized statistics that can be used for 
more in-depth web traffic analysis, the above areas alone can provide 
invaluable information on your visitors and your website performance. 
Remember, this data is available for a reason. It's up to you to use it. 
 
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1.9.2 Tracking Your Sales 
Like any business, it is absolutely vital to track and maintain your 
sales records. You should have a clear understanding of your income 
and expenditures. 
There are many ways to keep track of your sales. Using orthodox 
methods such as keeping a paper journal is time consuming. Simple 
spreadsheet programs as well as basic accounting software are 
available at minimum or no cost. However, it is advisable to install 
advanced accounting software such as QuickBooks, Quicken, or 
Microsoft Money to keep track of your accounting. 
Such advanced programs save you time by sorting your register 
transactions by date, transaction amount, document number (e.g. 
check number), order entered, or cleared status. The tracking feature 
included in such software tracks, by user, changes made to each 
transaction. Daily, weekly, monthly as well as yearly sales reports can 
be generated with a few clicks. These reports help you analyze the 
sales of each and every product. Logs and reports can be generated to 
keep track of all your customers. 
NOTE: Affiliate marketing solves many of the aforementioned 
tracking problems for you automatically. When you become an affiliate 
and resell other company’s products for a profit, the company you are 
 
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affiliated with keeps track of your traffic and sales automatically and 
presents all this information to you in easy to read charts and graphs. 
Click here to learn about a turn-key affiliate marketing system that 
you can use to earn multiple streams of income on the Internet. 
1.10 Building Credibility and Maintaining it 
Finally, make sure that you build trust and credibility for your 
business. We discussed earlier the importance of credibility. Credibility 
is a key ingredient for any successful business venture. Building and 
enhancing the credibility of the products and services you offer is an 
ongoing and full-time effort.  
Why not make sure the website you use works as hard as you do 
to establish credibility? Let's look at elements that can be built into a 
well-designed website to enhance credibility in the eyes of your 
potential customers. 
Offer a Guarantee 
Nothing beats a solid, believable guarantee for building credibility 
online. It may be hard to believe, but buying via the Internet is still 
unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory for many people. It is up to 
you, the business owner, to put their minds at ease. One way to do 
this would be to offer an unconditional, 100% money back guarantee. 
 
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By assuming all of the risk, you will earn instant credibility points with 
most potential customers.  
Provide Contact Information 
Even the best guarantee won't help establish credibility if the 
potential customer cannot contact you. Post accurate contact 
information on your website and make it easy to find. Provide as many 
methods of contact as possible; do not simply post a link to an email 
address. For maximum credibility, post the complete mailing address, 
phone number (preferably a toll free number), and email addresses for 
customers to use if they feel the need to contact you.  
Provide a Brief Bio 
Familiarity is one of the most effective tools for building credibility 
on the Internet. How do you establish familiarity in a faceless, 
impersonal medium like the Internet? Simple, tell people about 
yourself. Post a page that provides a thumbnail sketch that describes 
who you are. Be sure to include personal data as well as professional 
credentials. Place your photo on the page so people can put a face 
with your name. Creating familiarity will impart another level of 
credibility for you and, by extension, for the product you represent.  
In this chapter, we looked at how to build your website and 
explained many of the elements your website must contain to be 
effective. We discussed web hosting and domain names and even 
 
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talked about how to use expiring domain names to get free traffic 
flowing to your website. And we’re only getting started! In the next 
chapter, we’re going to look more closely at some of the more popular 
and successful Internet business ideas. 
NOTE: Would you like an easy way to start making money online? 
I’ve created a simple, turn-key, 3-step system that you can use to 
launch your very own money-making website on the Internet within 
the next 24 hours. Click here to learn more about it and enroll today. 
 
 
 
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2. Internet Business Ideas 
2.1 Leverage the Advantages of the Net 
The Internet is a vehicle that has been used to 
enable higher levels of communication between 
people, companies and countries throughout the world. It means your 
online business does not just have to concentrate on local markets – 
and almost no place is out of reach! If your business has a website, 
this in itself means it is accessible by the global market, and it is vital 
that your business take advantage of this.  
Internet selling is on the rise. There are many research studies 
and statistics that support this statement. A study conducted by the 
Ipsos Reid market research firm in February 2003 concludes that in 
the year 1999 only 28% of worldwide Internet users purchased a 
product or service online, whereas this figure rose to 62% in the year 
2002 and about 70% in the year 2005. And these numbers continue to 
climb. Nielsen/NetRatings supports this finding with its own research.   
The Internet is a huge marketplace that has attracted businesses 
with its potential for big-time revenues. Dizzying success stories of 
ventures started in a basement that grew to become stock market 
darlings are constantly celebrated in the media. Small businesses 
 
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came to the Internet, tentative at first, and then in droves - eager to 
sell everything from fake jewelry to handcrafted tapestries.  
You can sell just about anything from soup to nuts, as long as you 
have a product that has a market. 
2.2 What Businesses Are Succeeding on the Net? 
After the settling down of the dot-com bubble, sanity checks have 
brought realistic expectations to the fore. Initially, a backlash was 
seen, forecasting the doom of the Internet. Finally, merits have made 
the Internet gain its rightful place.  In breakthroughs that show the 
promise of ecommerce wasn't all smoke and mirrors, many dot-coms 
including eBay Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Expedia Inc., 
FindWhat.com Inc., E-Trade Group Inc., Google Inc. and others have 
successfully re-defined the landscape of Wall Street. 
There is a growing tendency amongst Internet users to pay for 
valuable content along with quality products and services offered 
online. Hundreds of paid content and product-oriented websites have 
already proven this unmistakable trend. The discerning buyer values 
her time and is willing to pay for access to quality information and the 
convenience of purchasing products and services online. 
 
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However, not all products can be sold on the Internet. Some 
products may be better suited for online sales than others; others 
simply will not work online. According to an Ernst and Young study, 
the most popular online purchases are computer related products 
(40%), books (20%), travel (16%), clothing (10%), recorded music 
(6%), subscriptions (6%), gifts (5%) and investments (4%).  
Businesses offering paid services have also prospered 
enormously. The top three categories (Business Content/Investment, 
Entertainment/Lifestyles and Personals/Dating) consistently account 
for 62% of all paid content revenue. One statistic indicates that 85% 
of all money spent by U.S. Consumers for online content goes to the 
top 50 sites in most categories. 
In terms of “stickiness” of different categories, Business sites - 
especially finance and investment rank the highest. In other words, 
users are more likely to spend more time surfing through a business 
website compared to other categories as illustrated below. 
Category 
Time per person 
(hr:min:sec) 
Audience 
Business – Finance and Investment 
0:21:33 
51,586 
General News 
0:15:47 
64,822 
Entertainment 
0:14:32 
45,922 
Source: Nielsen/NetRatings 
 
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According to the above figures a person spends about 22 minutes 
on a finance website on average. 
Do statistics bore you? Click here to start using a proven 
Internet money making system that has already been “figured out”. 
No thinking… Just follow the 3 steps and launch your e-business today.  
2.3 Should you be selling a product or a service? 
The Internet is primarily used to communicate, entertain, educate 
and research. It is thus no wonder that nonperishable, information-
intensive products - including computers and software, books, travel, 
consumer electronics, magazine subscriptions - are the most popular 
online products at present. Content-rich sites, subscription-based sites 
to advertiser-supported sites focusing on a wide range of topics, have 
been sprouting up all over the Internet. 
Services such as hotel reservation, air travel and investments 
have successfully transitioned themselves to the Internet. Unique 
services such as online driving schools have been prospering too. In 
fact, many states in the US have already set up online payment sites 
for Government services. Residents can now get online to pay most of 
their bills and other expenses including parking tickets to local courts.  
 
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However, all kinds of services cannot be run entirely on the 
Internet. The Internet is less effective when face-to-face selling is 
needed to close a deal. The Internet can give lots of preliminary 
information that's useful in setting the scene for the closing. But the 
actual closing takes place offline - i.e., not on the Internet.  
Products can also be marketed and sold successfully on the 
Internet. The kinds of products and services that sell best on the 
Internet are those that take advantage of the convenience of the Net. 
Remember that convenience is the primary reason consumers flock to 
the Internet in the first place. People can shop at any hour of the day 
at most sites. They can avoid crowded stores, irritating sales clerks, 
and even avoid pickpockets. 
Offbeat or unusual products and services often attract online 
attention and sell strongly. You would generally not try to sell items 
people can get at the corner store. Thus, few toothbrushes are sold on 
the Net; the same thing with daily food and beverage purchases. But 
special cheeses, rare cigars, Turkish plates, long-aged wines, even 
diamonds, can and do sell well on the Internet. 
Most products sold by catalog and mail order also sell well on the 
Net. However, people tend to buy only those products that can be 
shipped at a reasonable price. Higher shipping costs diminish the price 
 
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competitiveness of online products and turns-off a lot of potential 
buyers. In fact, high shipping costs is the primary factor that 
discourages some people from buying online more than any other 
given reason. An Ernst and Young report shows that 53 percent of 
online shoppers are concerned with shipping costs that are too high, 
compared to only 19 percent who are concerned with credit card 
information being stolen. 
As an online merchant, you have to work out the advantages as 
well as disadvantages of selling either products or services online. If 
you choose to sell a product or service online, you must evaluate your 
offering to ensure that the total costs of the product or service 
including shipping are not much higher than what is offered elsewhere. 
2.4 Importance of Back-end Selling 
Considerable effort is required to get customers for your products. 
You might design stunning web pages, work hard for high search 
engine rankings (or pay for them), submit classified ads, etc. but still 
not manage to sell enough to make the kind of profits you desire. This 
is where the concept of back-end sales is useful.  
Most marketers are successful because they apply back-end 
selling into their marketing efforts. Back-end selling is when you sell 
 
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other products or services to your existing customers after they have 
purchased an initial product. 
It is always easier to sell products or services to your existing 
customers because you have developed a relationship with them when 
you sold your first product or service to them. You will find it less 
expensive to sell to old customers as compared to selling to new 
customers. 
Your conversion ratio will be dramatically higher with existing 
customers. In fact, to increase your online profits dramatically, you 
should continually locate or create new back-end products and services 
to recommend (sell) to your existing customers. 
Many businesses sell their front-end products (initial products) at 
almost zero profit in order to generate back-end profits. These 
businesses do not care even if they lose money on the front-end 
products or services; they want the back-end profits. 
How do you make backend sales? There are several ways. When 
you order a product from a mail-order company, they'll send you a 
catalog along with your order, or put you on a mailing list and send 
you new catalogs from time to time. They might also send you a sales 
letter for another product. This may be related to the first product in 
some way. Many companies implement such a strategy.  
 
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To implement this technique online, you can put the sales pitch 
for your backend item in the email to the customer that confirms their 
order. If you have an online catalog, you could include a link to it, or 
even include a coupon or special offer "for all valued customers". 
For a faster response, you should put the backend offer on the 
"Thank You" page that is generated by a credit-card sale. The 
customer just bought something from you and has a credit card in his 
or her hot little hand! Why not ask for another purchase while they are 
in the mood to buy. In case you do not sell more than one product or 
service, affiliate programs might come in handy. 
Back-end selling can also be integrated with “Up-Selling” wherein 
you introduce more expensive products or services to your existing 
customers in similar ways as those mentioned above. This will almost 
instantly raise your sales and profits. 
TIP: With the Plug-In Profit Site service, you get an automated 
back-end sales campaign built directly into the website I build for you. 
Click here to learn all about it and start earning back-end sales today. 
2.5 Cross-Selling 
Another successful strategy similar to the ones discussed above is 
cross-selling. One of the best examples of cross-selling via the web is 
 
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on Amazon.com. If you search for a book on the Amazon site, a 
message will appear on the same page, saying “Customers who 
bought this book also bought…” and will list half-dozen other books for 
your consideration. This is an excellent way to cross-sell additional 
services or content to your members.  
You can also direct visitors to other parts of the site to consider 
products and services that they hadn't previously considered. 
Successful cross-selling is the result of recognizing a customer need 
and meeting that need with a useful product or service. Customers 
benefit from needs-based cross-selling efforts because they receive 
the services they need and want. 
Cross-selling can help your business realize its objectives: 
providing useful services, retaining customers, attracting new 
customers, and staying competitive with other websites. 
In conclusion, you can offer a range of products and services on 
the Internet. The key is proper research and a great marketing plan. 
We’ll be talking about marketing strategies for your product or service 
in the upcoming chapters. In fact, in the next chapter, we will discuss 
one of the most important Internet marketing strategies – search 
engine optimization.   
 
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3. Secrets of Winning Traffic through Search Engines  
It doesn’t matter how great your website is, if 
no one sees it, you’re not going to make a penny. 
You can spend days producing the perfect design, 
weeks tweaking the copy, and months writing the 
code and uploading the pages, but if no one 
knows where you are, how are they going to know 
they should buy from you? 
When I first started selling online, the first major problem I ran 
into was bringing customers to my door. I put banner ads on other 
sites, organized reciprocal links and joined web rings. Those methods 
all worked to some extent, but what really did it for me, what turned 
my business from a small earner into a major money-grabber, was 
figuring out how to use search engines.  
Sure, I’d submitted my sites to the major search engines as soon 
as I’d finished building them, but I didn’t really pay them much 
attention. After all, I figured search engines are just for people who 
are looking for information; they’re not really good for commercial 
sites. 
Boy, was I wrong! 
 
- 67 - 
 
 
One day, I sat down and checked out which sites were popping up 
first in the categories that suited my businesses. I found that all the 
top-ranked sites were my biggest competitors. And when I say 
biggest, I mean these guys were in a whole other league. They had 
incomes that were ten or twenty times the size of mine. No wonder 
they had top billing at Yahoo! and Google! And then it clicked. Search 
engines don’t list sites by size, they list them by relevance. These sites 
weren’t listed first because they were big; they were big because they 
were listed first! 
That was when I began to optimize my pages and think about 
meta-tags and keywords. As my sites rose through the listings, my 
traffic went through the roof. And not just any old traffic! The people 
that came to my sites from search engines hadn’t just clicked on a 
banner by accident or followed a link from curiosity, they’d actually 
been looking for a site like mine. My sales ratio went up like a rocket. 
I’d created my own big break. 
In this chapter, we are going to discuss all proven strategies of 
search engine optimization. We will discuss how to optimize your site, 
submit your pages and pick up the targeted traffic you need to make 
cash. This chapter is one of the most important chapters in the whole 
book. It’s crucial that you read it carefully. 
 
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Let’s start with search engines. 
3.1 How Search Engines Work 
Internet search engines are special sites on the Internet that are 
designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There 
are differences in the ways various search engines work, but they all 
perform three basic tasks:  
; They search the Internet -- or select pieces of the Internet -
- based on important words.  
; They keep an index of the words they find, and where they 
find them.  
; They allow users to look for words or combinations of words 
found in that index.  
Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand 
pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand 
inquiries each day. Today, a top search engine will index hundreds of 
millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day. 
Spidering 
Before a search engine can tell you where a file or document is, it 
must be found. To find information on the hundreds of millions of web 
 
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pages that exist, a search engine employs special software robots, 
called spiders, to build lists of the words found on websites.  
When a spider is building its lists, the process is called crawling. 
In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a search 
engine's spiders have to look at a lot of pages. How does any spider 
start its travels over the web? The usual starting points are lists of 
heavily used servers and very popular pages. The spider will begin 
with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following 
every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system 
quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used 
portions of the web.  
Indexing 
Once the spiders have completed the task of finding information 
on web pages, the search engine must store the information in a way 
that makes it useful. There are two key components involved in 
making the gathered data accessible to users:  
; The information stored with the data  
; The method by which the information is indexed  
 
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In the simplest case, a search engine could just store the word 
and the URL where it was found. In reality, this would make for an 
engine of limited use, since there would be no way of telling whether 
the word was used in an important or a trivial way on the page, 
whether the word was used once or many times or whether the page 
contained links to other pages containing the word. In other words, 
there would be no way of building the ranking list that tries to present 
the most useful pages at the top of the list of search results.  
To make for more useful results, most search engines store more 
than just the word and URL. An engine might store the number of 
times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a 
weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they 
appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the 
meta tags or in the title of the page. Each commercial search engine 
has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. 
This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different 
search engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in 
different orders.  
An index has a single purpose: It allows information to be found 
as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for an index to be 
built, but one of the most effective ways is to build a hash table. In 
 
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hashing, a formula is applied to attach a numerical value to each word. 
The formula is designed to evenly distribute the entries across a 
predetermined number of divisions. This numerical distribution is 
different from the distribution of words across the alphabet, and that is 
the key to a hash table's effectiveness.  
The Search Engine Program 
The search engine software or program is the final part. When a 
person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the search engine 
software searches the index for relevant information. The software 
then provides a report back to the searcher with the most relevant 
web pages listed first. 
3.2 Top Search Engines 
I’ve studied how search engines work. An integral part of any 
Internet marketing or search engine optimization campaign is to know 
exactly which search engines to target. This section discusses some of 
the top search engines today. 
Google 
Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several years. 
They went from beta testing to becoming the Internet's largest index 
of web pages in a very short time. Their spider, affectionately named 
 
- 72 - 
 
 
"Googlebot", crawls the web and provides updates to Google's index 
about once a month. 
Google.com began as an academic search engine. Google, by far, 
has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returned from a result, 
probably one of the main reasons it has become so popular over the 
years. Google has several methods which determine page rank in 
returned searches. 
Yahoo! 
Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and portals on the 
Internet today, and the site went live in August of 1994. 
Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators around, as far 
as web directories and search engines go. Unfortunately, however, it is 
also one of the most difficult to get listed in, unless of course you pay 
to submit your site. Even if you pay it doesn't guarantee you will get 
listed. 
Either way, if you suggest a URL, it is "reviewed" by a Yahoo! 
editor and, if approved, it will appear in the next index update. 
AltaVista 
Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spider 
named “scooter” accessing their pages. Scooter used to be AltaVista's 
 
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robot. However, since the Feb 2001 site update, a newer form of 
Scooter is now crawling the web. 
It will usually take several months for AltaVista to index your 
entire site. Unlike Google, AltaVista will only crawl and index 1 link 
deep, so it can take a long time to index your entire site, depending on 
how large your site is.  
Inktomi 
Inktomi's popularity grew years ago as they powered the 
secondary search database that had driven Yahoo. Their spiders are 
named "Slurp", and different versions of Slurp crawls the web many 
different times throughout the month, as Inktomi powers many sites’ 
search results. There isn't much more to Inktomi than that. Slurp puts 
heavy weight on title and description tags, and will rarely deep-crawl a 
site. Slurp usually only spiders pages that are submitted to its index. 
Inktomi provides results to a number of sites. Some of these are 
America Online, MSN, Hotbot, Looksmart, About, Goto, CNet, 
Geocities, NBCi, ICQ and many more. 
Lycos 
Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the Internet today, 
next to Altavista and Yahoo. Their spider, named "T-Rex", crawls the 
 
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web and provides updates to the Lycos index from time to time. The 
FAST crawler provides results for Lycos in addition to its own 
database. 
The Lycos crawler does not weigh META tags too heavily. Instead, 
it relies on its own ranking algorithm to rank pages returned in results. 
The URL, META title, text headings, and word frequency are just a few 
of the methods Lycos uses to rank pages. Lycos does support pages 
with Frame content. However, any page that isn't at least 75 words in 
content is not indexed. 
Excite 
Excite has been around the web for many years now. Much more 
of a portal than just simply a search engine, Excite used to be a fairly 
popular search engine, until companies such as Google started 
dominating the search engine market. As of recently, Excite no longer 
accepts submissions of URL's, and appears to no longer spider. To get 
into the Excite search results, you need to be either listed with Yahoo! 
or Inktomi. 
 
 
 
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Looksmart 
Getting listed with Looksmart could mean getting a good amount 
of traffic to your site. Looksmart's results appear in many search 
engines, including AltaVista, MSN, CNN, and many others. 
Looksmart has two options to submit your site. If your site is 
generally non-business related, you can submit your site to Zeal 
(Looksmart's sister site), or if you are a business, you can pay a fee to 
have your site listed. Either method will get you listed in Looksmart 
and its partner sites if you are approved. 
Once your site is submitted and approved, it will take up to about 
7 days for your site to be listed on Looksmart and its partner sites. 
3.3 Search Engine Page-Ranking Algorithms 
A search engine's main job is to provide results which most satisfy 
a user's query. If they present a result that the user visits and doesn't 
agree that the document is about their query, there is a very good 
chance that the user may not use that search engine again. Most 
search engines pay no attention at all to the Meta description tags. 
Meta description and keyword tags are hidden attributes that you can 
add to the front of your document which are supposed to annotate and 
describe the document. Since the users will never see this information, 
 
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they will be disappointed if you stick in invalid keywords or fail to keep 
the description in line with the document's contents which usually is 
the case.  
Most Search Engine page-ranking algorithms rank pages based on 
the following aspects: 
; Content of the website 
; Representation of content, keywords, and links on websites 
; Location and number of inward and outward links on 
websites 
; Relevancy of search terms as compared to the websites 
Given below is a brief description of the page-ranking algorithms 
of some of the most popular search engines. 
Google 
You can submit your website to Google at the following URL: 
www.google.com/addurl.html. Submitting your site will only make 
Google aware that your page exists; it is quite possible that your 
pages may get crawled even if you have not submitted. It is advisable 
to submit the home page and some inside pages. Inside pages are 
added to the submission, just in case the home page is found too slow 
 
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to load or crawl. The pages that are submitted should link to the rest 
of the pages. Google indexes the full text that is visible on any page 
that it crawls. It generally does not index the metatags – keywords or 
descriptions.  
When Google lists your page in the search results, the description 
that is displayed is the extract of text that is around the first line 
where the search word appears on the page. It may thus be a good 
idea to write a good description of the page and build it around the 
most likely search term(s) and place that near the top of your page. 
You should remember that one sure way of getting your site listed and 
indexed is if there are several links that point to your site and such 
links appear on web pages that in turn have several other links 
pointing to them. The term “link popularity” is used for this. It 
analyzes links of the pages that it has visited and this “link analysis” 
helps to determine the ranking of the page.  
Google uses a proprietary PageRank algorithm for determining 
relevance and ranking of pages in the search results. Location and 
frequency of the search term on your web page are no doubt factors in 
ranking; however, off-the-page factors such as link analysis are more 
important. Generally, Google provides search results based on 
relevancy, meaning that it returns a list of pages ranked by the 
 
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number of other web pages linking to each page, as well as other 
mathematical algorithms 
Yahoo! 
Yahoo! offers a human-powered directory and offers its results to 
visitors. The directory is supplemented by a web page index created 
by crawling. The directory is an important channel in the area of 
search engine marketing. It is popular and is used extensively by 
people to locate sources of information. Moreover, the directory is a 
valuable boost to your site for crawling and ranking in other search 
engines, as the directory provides a high-quality link to your website.  
When a visitor is looking for information on relevant sites, she 
could either browse through the hierarchy of directories and sub-
directories or search for an appropriate directory through a search 
interface. As your site can be listed in just one category, generally, the 
choice of category is an important step. Choose the top category that 
your target visitor who is making a search may select out of the 
different categories offered to him/her.  
Select your target keywords and find out which categories relate 
to those keywords. For submission of non-commercial sites, the 
Yahoo! Express submission is recommended rather than the Standard 
submission option. 
 
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The results page in your chosen category will list your site in two 
possible sections (for most categories).  One section is called "Most 
Popular Sites" and this is on top, while the second section contains the 
remaining listings in Alphabetical order.  
Yahoo! does not reveal how it includes certain sites in the “Most 
Popular Sites” list. However, link analysis and click-throughs are likely 
to be factors. You cannot pay to be included in this section. Certain 
sites with sunglasses shown next to their name or an “@” symbol 
shown at the end of the name reflect that Yahoo! considers those sites 
to be excellent.  
Inktomi (MSN Search, AOL Search, Hotbot) 
Inktomi is a search engine that does not offer its search services 
through its own site, but through Partner sites – prominent ones being 
MSN Search, AOL Search, HotBot and others. 
Inktomi, through its crawler, creates three different indexes. “Best 
of the Web” index has around 110 million pages that it indexes on the 
web and considers high in link analysis. The next set of around 390 
million pages is indexed as “Rest of the Web”, considered as lower in 
link analysis. The third index is of paid inclusion. It also offers 
specialized regional indexes as well as targeted news, multimedia and 
directory indexes. It avoids duplication of the same page in more than 
 
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one index. Link crawling and paid inclusion are the two most effective 
ways to get covered by crawling. For bulk submissions to its paid 
program, it offers IndexConnect (for 1000 or more pages). Again, 
there is a cost-per-click basis with a monthly minimum.  
Ranking at Inktomi is determined by a combination of factors 
including HTML links, keywords and description tags near the top of 
the page or in the title tag. If the search string matches with what is 
found at these places on the page, the ranking is higher. Link analysis 
and analysis of clickthroughs are other important criteria that it 
adopts. 
AltaVista 
AltaVista will accept free listings through its “addurl” link, but it 
also has paid inclusion features. Generally, their crawler may visit 
every four weeks. Paid inclusion may be desirable if you have a new 
website or web pages or if you alter your web pages frequently, and 
you do not wish to wait until the next cycle of crawling. There is an 
“Express Paid” inclusion service of self-service type for up to 500 
pages at a time. This service will enable weekly crawling. Their bulk 
program called “Trusted Feed” will enable the pages to be directly 
linked to their index. Pricing for “Trusted Feed” is on a cost-per-click 
model with a monthly minimum. In this program you can submit the 
 
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