The Internet is big business and every day, stories pour in of how people can make a killing off the Net. One way you can cash is through Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate Marketing is a marketing practice in which a business pays for each visitor or customer referred by the affiliate. Affiliate Marketing has four core players: the Merchant, the Network, the Affiliate and the Customer. As affiliate marketing has become more and more dominant as a marketing strategy many companies find it too complex to manage their own affiliate programs and sign up with third parties to manage their program for them. The company that manages an affiliate program is called a Network. An Affiliate Network manages the relationship between businesses and affiliates. Since a Network manages several businesses an affiliate who signs up with a Network gets access to all those businesses.

Affiliate Networks offer various strategies to their affiliates to make money. CPA Networks offers information gathering and lead generation strategies to businesses where the affiliate gets people to fill out forms or complete surveys and gets paid for it. It costs companies much less to get data through these means than hiring staff to go out and get data and the selection of customers is also much wider and often of better quality.

Clickbank gives affiliates generated links which pay the affiliate per click. The affiliate can try many strategies to promote the affiliate program. An easy way is through online classified ad websites. Unfortunately, because most of these ads are free, there are hordes of other affiliates also doing the same thing so unless you can find a way to stand out your conversion percentage is likely to be low. You must also ensure that you track each ad. so that when you get sales you know where they come from and where you should focus your efforts.

If you are can write, then article marketing can supercharge your affiliate program. Well written articles that attract attention and have useful content always get good click through rates (estimated at 7% on an average). Good content alone is no use. The content must be read in the first place which means it must be widely distributed. You should use blogging and social networking tools to help you disseminate content to targeted users.

Google Docs is Google’s multi-lingual SaaS (software as a service) office suite. Google Docs works on most modern operating systems and browsers and allows its users to create and edit documents, spreadsheets, presentations and forms online with real-time collaboration between multiple users. Items are created within the application itself, imported through the web interface, or sent via email and can be saved to computer in a variety of formats such as RTF, TXT, PDF, DOC, ODF, XLS, etc.

Google Docs also offers Autosave and version control features. Google Docs items can have various levels of access, Private, Shared with specified users or Published to the Web. Published items again can have various access levels: they can be viewed only by the user, or by a specified group or by the whole world.

While Google Docs offers users the features of a modern office suite for free there are issues of privacy that worry experts. Though Google has promised to protect the privacy and security of users’ content, certain problems exist. For example, each image included in a document has a public address, even if the document itself is private and the image continues to be publicly available even after the document is deleted.

Recently, Google announced a change in its policy regarding published documents which will allow published docs that are linked to from a public Web site to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results. This is potentially a very exciting change as the published docs will reach a much wider audience of people. Unfortunately, many users who may have linked published documents intended for a limited audience to public Web sites for various reasons of convenience will be now taken unawares by this change in policy.

It is not immediately obvious from the Google Docs master listing which documents are likely to be affected, as there is no easy way to tell if a published document has been linked to by a Web site. For now, users will just have to go through all their documents and “unpublish” all documents that are intended to be private.

Bing, Microsoft’s decision search engine, has been chipping away at the market share of its competitors since its official launch on May 28th this year. On an average, Bing has gained about half a percent a month and an overall 1.3% (9.3% in August, 8.9% in July, 8.4% in June and 8% in May) gain in the three months succeeding its launch. In about the same period Google, the market leader registered a fall of 0.3% to 64.7% while Yahoo came down by the same amount to 19.3% (source: ComScore). In August, Bing grew faster than Google for the first time, with a 31.9 percent annual increase in search queries compared to 21.6 percent growth for Google and 16.8 percent for Yahoo. So the rise in the market share of this Microsoft search engine does seem to be at the expense of the other two.

Some experts consider these early gains in the Bing market share the result of superior technology from its recent acquisitions and better algorithms for seeking the context underlying a search. Many users feel aerial photos available via Bing are more up to date and have better clarity than the corresponding Google photos. The eye-catching design too is bound to have helped Bing made inroads with viewers.

Skeptics, however, contend that this so-called increase in market share is driven by any number of factors such as the curiosity engendered by a new launch, the publicity and media hype that a hundred million dollar marketing drive is likely to generate, the fact that Bing is the default search engine on the latest versions of IE and Microsoft’s cash back offer for Bing users and is highly unlikely to last. Some of the skeptics also are casting doubts on the veracity of the statistics by stigmatizing the sources as unreliable.

A strong competitor to Google in the search market can only be good news for users. Google has for too long been almost a monopoly. The more choices that consumers get the more likely it is that necessity will drive more and more innovations in the search engine market.

OutsourcingFor hundreds of businesses outsourcing work has traditionally been the panacea for the problem of rising overheads; since their business has always been to save on costs for clients, the outsourcing industry have believed themselves recession-proof. But corporations that specialize in accepting outsourced work have seen business fade nevertheless, and are beginning to uncover a few flaws in their belief system. When businesses overseas are faced with unpredictable changes in the economic climate, the knee-jerk response is to quickly shut down a lot of expenses and downsize the workforce before these can affect the bottom line; companies try to focus on efficiency, on getting the most done with less.

The traditional belief that expects outsourcing companies to thrive in a downturn only makes sense for the final stages, when an uptick is widely foreseen. India’s outsourcing giants do not expect these effects to become visible for a few months yet. As it stands today, there is such competition for what little business there is to go around that even customers with one-off jobs are fought over with concessions. The larger accounts find that they suddenly have much more leverage.

An example of the kind of concessions expected of outsourcing service providers is the demand seen for more cost-effective billing methods. Outsourcing projects have traditionally been billed by the job and not by the hour. If an outsourcing firm found a way to deliver results in half the time it still got paid as much as it originally asked for. Outcome-based payment is in favor in today’s recessive environment. This is when companies pay for billable hours, and not for the job itself. While this may not actually save much over the routine month, it gives the buying company more control in an unpredictable environment; if their business happens to plummet from the recession, they will not find themselves locked into paying the outsourcing company overseas a bill for work they no longer need.

While business has picked up for India’s largest outsourcing providers like IBM and Infosys, revenues are not expected to return to former levels soon. The outsourcing economy is seen to be a bellwether for the economy in general. When this picks up everything else will too.

Oops!!Software makers, ones that may be as established as Sun Microsystems or as fresh as a small startup, can tend to frequent the same catalog of mistakes when it comes to running their businesses. Microsoft or Sun, owing to their size, will live to tell the tale; a startup may not. By all accounts software companies direct most of their budget to sales and marketing. And yet there is no real acknowledgment of how important it is to identify an audience, to acquire them and to retain them. Selling to software customers is not what it used to be. Corporate spending on information technology is no longer directed at large upfront purchases; what is favored instead is the ability to make smaller purchases spread over several years. Additionally, smaller vendors are seen today to be able to deliver a great deal of value and customer satisfaction; large software vendors no longer have it all over their little competitors. Why are these changes ignored?

Makers of software are often deeply invested in the concept of the informal business environment. Loosely organized company structures can obviously lead to poor coordination and missed signals from the sales front. An informal hand at the helm can also place the company at risk of being run on one person’s whim or vision. Sun Microsystems was always committed to pushing its own line of poorly received custom hardware to go with its well-received software. This weighed the software side of the company down and caused internal tensions. Small companies sometimes also insist on the custom-made over the generic. Sun Microsystems’ market share in server software has suffered because it is tethered to the fortunes of its hardware platform. The important lesson to learn here is to have the advantages of vision-based leadership, but to make sure that it is tempered with hard-nosed business vision.

Many software vendors large and small have tried to raise their stature or solidify their position in the market with acquisitions. Microsoft famously had its failed takeover of Yahoo recently, and Sun spent $1 billion on acquiring the database software company MySQL. Acquisitions are an important way to inject new blood into a software business; but it is possible to overestimate the benefits from such a move. The basic tendency here too is to base the company’s moves not on sound business principles but on the vision of a founder or stakeholder. It keeps coming back to this: creative types running a business on principles of creativity and personal vision over plain undeniable fact, can be one of the most common problems that can weigh a software business down.

Google fast flipGoogle has unveiled an experimental news reading service called Fast Flip from its lab. Krishna Bharat, the engineer who created Google News, describes it on the Google News blog as follows –

“Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers.” He adds, “As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting.”

Fast Flip is designed to drive traffic and revenue to online news sites, for supporting news publishers facing financial trouble. Some three dozen publishers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and sibling Newsweek, Salon and The Daily Beast have agreed to use their site content with logos and graphical images.

People surfing the corresponding page can flip through content quickly, and move to the original site by clicking on the image. Visitors can sort out news under recent, most viewed, recommended and headlines, and see news under various sections like Politics, Business, Sports, Entertainment etc. Also users can watch news based on sources.

Apart from helping the news industry by driving traffic to their site, Google has also promised to share their revenue from contextual advertising.

Following up on the success of the release of Anova version 3.1.2 which focuses on launch of a user-friendly and search-engine friendly knowledge sharing site, Agriya released the latest updates. This update represents the implementation of features and error fixes based on suggestions from end users.

The new version comes with voting feature for questions and answers. When a user comes across a well written question and thinks the problem is common and going to help someone else searching for it, he can give a thumb up vote to it and make it visible to others. If a question is silly or inappropriate for the community, the user can give a thumbs down vote. Similar action can be carried out with answer to make the best answer familiar among users.

The new release continues to expand the effectiveness of the software, adding option to manage abuse reports and replacing normal file upload with Swf uploader to upload images for questions and answers. In addition, the latest release has fixed design issues and few bugs.

Today, we celebrated yet another birthday at the office and this time round, it’s Mr. Aravind, our CTO. Birthdays are special days that are dedicated solely to you, and are to celebrate one more year of precious life. Nothing beats a birthday celebrated around people you care about. In our own little way, we tried to make this birthday special for our beloved boss, with lots of love, food, wishes and presents!

Before he reached the office, his company’s email inbox was filled with tons of birthday wishes from Ahsanites. After all wishing somebody a very happy birthday shows there are people that love him and truly care a lot about him. It shows he is important to them; it lets him know that the world is beautiful, filled with people who he means so much to. He thanked everyone through mail which also made us feel proud and happy.

His cabin was decorated with colored papers and balloons when he walked in. Most people went into his cabin, to wish him in person.

Let’s not forget, no birthday would be complete without cake! By 6:00 pm, all the Ahsanites assembled on our lovely terrace for the small party. It started off with the birthday song while Mr.Aravind blew out the candles and cut the cake after which everybody enjoyed the snacks. This little party of ours was filled with fun and laughter, and was one that all of us will remember. Take a look at some of the pictures!

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SEoAnyone starting a website to promote their products or services online should optimize it for search engines in order to be listed in their results pages (SERPs) and reach the intended audience. Instead of optimizing a site after launching it, it is better to design a website as per SEO needs.

While crawling, web spiders will look for text on the site that is related to the search query. Hence, provide text relevant to products or services offered. The title tags, meta descriptions and keywords per page have to be unique and relevant. Provide keyword rich site content on relevant topics, as spiders judge your site based on these things.

Specify the site URL ( http://www.example.com/) that you prefer for your site and redirect the rest of relevant website URLs like www.example.com/index.html, http://example.com, example.com/home.asp etc to the preferred site URL by adding the 301 redirect (permanent) to the preferred URL, so that user entering relevant website URLs will be directed to your main site page.

Provide breadcrumb trail which is a navigation aid that shows both search engines and humans where their current location is and how far they are from the destination page.

Use limited number of graphics, and if possible, avoid them. Provide relevant anchor text to the image links, as spiders can crawl only anchor text and not images. Also the site uploading time is directly proportional to number of graphics on site.

A website designed by calling JavaScript and CSS code externally is a good one. Stay away from frames as search engine avoids them, and restrict the usage of flash, QuickTime or other plug-ins on HTML Pages.

On the whole, it is necessary to prepare a site with simple navigation and architecture for assisting search engines to easily find information on your site.

webhostA webhosting company offers space for your web site on their web server to let people all over the world to view your site on the Internet. We have compiled some of the importance points that you should keep in mind while selecting a web hosting company.

1. The storage space and data transfer rate plays a major role in the selection of web hosting company. It depends on the type and size of your site. If your site is expected to grow, go for a company that offers the option to increase your basic package.

2. Go for a company that offers 99.9% of uptime, only then can you make your site available for user access all the time.

3. Most hosting companies offer 24/7 technical support without additional cost. Make sure you check this by sending mails at various times, and checking the response time. A good company should reply within 24 hours.

4. You should get email accounts and FTP access for your domain, for uploading files to your server in future.

5. Check whether a hosting company offers all the software and features that are the prerequisites for your sites.

6. Don’t settle for company that offers services at lowest costs. Many times, they may not be up to the mark. It doesn’t mean however, that you should choose only the costliest service available. Select a company that offers required service at reasonable rates.

7. Once you select a company, make sure you do your research on it and go through various user reviews based on experience.