Message boards are essentially online meeting places. In general most message boards are focused on a particular niche subject and encourage those who share an interest in this particular subject to get together to discuss relevant issues, ask questions, provide advice and even just socialize. Message boards can focus on any subject imaginable they may focus on a particular baseball team or just the sport of baseball in general. Message boards can focus on subjects such as politics, television shows, bands, current events, jobs, hobbies or any subject imaginable. Savvy Internet marketers can take advantage of these message boards to reach a target audience without investing a great deal of money.

Consider a business in which the focus of the business is to assist people in finding jobs which offer telecommute options. The concept of working from home is becoming increasingly popular and there are many websites which focus on this subject. Likewise there are also many message boards devoted to the topic of working from home. Here those with an interest in the subject meet to discuss issues such as finding employment where working from home is an option, working around the schedule of your children, setting up a home office, dealing with friends or family members who don’t respect your working hours and paying taxes on freelance assignments. A business owner who actively participates in this message board can take the opportunity to post a link to his website when it is relevant and offers something of value to the conversation. This is worthwhile because the message board features a high concentration of your target audience members.

When using message boards to promote your business, it is important to ensure you are following the rules associated with the message boards. Message boards may have restrictions regarding the posting of links and failure to abide by these restrictions may result in you being banned from the message board. For this reason it is important for anyone who is interested in using message boards for promotion of their business to carefully read the user agreement to ensure they are not violating any of the rules. It is also important to simply use common sense when promoting your business on a message board. Just because the rules do not restrict posting links, does not mean you should spam the board with your link. Take care to only include y our link when it is relevant. This will prevent message board users from assuming your link is just worthless spam.

Finally, when using message boards to promote your business it is important to be courteous to other message board users and to keep all posts professional. This is important because you and your business are much more likely to be taken seriously if you act professionally and responsibly. You should maintain this degree of professionalism even in posts which do not include your business link. This is important because other message board participants will remember you by your user name and will not be likely to take you seriously if you have previously made posts which were offensive, mean spirited or inaccurate. For this reason it is important to act as a representative from your company at all times.

But there are alternatives to Paypal, and choice is a good thing where customers are concerned. For starters Paypal is still not available everywhere in the world, and some people still won’t use it even where it is. Offering an alternative payment option will obviously allow many more of your potential customers to buy from you when Paypal isn’t an option.

So what are the alternative payment choices?

Obviously you could get your own merchant account and process credit and debit cards for yourself, this would involve contacting a bank, and arranging the services with them, as long as your software can integrate with their systems. Another alternative for accepting payments is 2Checkout (http://www.2checkout.com ) they do charge a fee up front to join, but 2checkout is widely supported in shopping cart software. With 2 checkout you can accept cheques, credit and debit cards, and in addition they now offer affiliate facilities so you can sell your products and services through an affiliate network.

Another widely used online payment option is Clickbank, who accept payments from many different sources on your behalf. Again there is a small fee to set up a vendor account at Clickbank, and there are limits on maximum prices (you can request higher maximum limits, and they are quick to respond to requests). Another plus for Clickbank, is that they have lots of affiliates using their system, and if you offer a good quality product many of them may begin promoting it for the commissions you set when you add your product. A negative on Clickbank’s scoresheet, is that you can only sell one product from the account without using a script to redirect to others, although there are scripts available to do this and Clickbank does allow quite a lot of products on an account but only one salespage.

There is another alternative payment option which we just discovered, and which may help you to make more sales with an innovative way of giving everyone a win win deal. It’s called TrialPay and it’s ingenious in the way it works. As a merchant you can now offer your products for free, but still get paid. As a customer, your purchasers now needn’t spend money they don’t want to on your products, but still get them. TrialPay uses a system whereby their partners are offering incentives to gain customers or even visitors to their sites. Trialpay offers to pay you some of that money (up to the value of your products or sometimes even more) when you send your customers to sign up for free offers in return for receiving your products for free.

In simple terms, you get paid, TrialPay get their clients some extra visitors or signups, and your customer gets the product they wanted without paying anything for it. As a payment option TrialPay is truly win win win for everybody. We are currently trying it out at http://www.thediscountebookstore.com on several of our top selling products to see how it works out, see the TrialPay buttons for these products Niche Marketing Profits and Follow-Up Email Creator Pro and try it out to get those products for free from us and TrialPay.

Then checkout if Trial Pay can work for you as a payment option by using the button below to sign up for your free merchant account

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image — normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.

On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

1) Do not use splash pages as your entry page.

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page. A splash page can be used as a lead generator for collecting email addresses for your newsletter.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

How can you determine if a blog will actually benefit your business?  You need to know why people start blogs in the first place.  You also need to know how to find the right topic for you and how to find tools that will help your become an efficient, successful
blogger.

Articles and content are important for attracting and maintaining your client list.  This content can be provided in a variety of forms, and blog is one of the most popular today.  You can use your blog to connect your business to your readers in hopes of drawing potential customers to your site.

You need to decide how you want to approach your blog.  While it can be fun and therapeutic to talk about your life, it will not necessarily attract many readers unless you are a celebrity.  Most people these days want people to give them advice on how to become successful or they want information on a certain product or area of interest.  most  readers do not want to read an advertisement that is wrapped up in uninteresting content.  Instead, they need to see how the site owner can relate the product to real life.

Before you start a blog you should ask yourself a few questions.  Do you really have something to say?  Do you have the time to devote to updating your blog regularly?  Can you provide information that would be relevant and important to someone else?  How
will you use the blog to attract new visitors to your site?

One of the most important of those questions is whether you will have the time to write in your blog regularly.  You should be able to add something almost every day, with a minimum of five times a week.  Most of the blogs that show up in search engines actually
have multiple posts a day.  You can read other blogs on similar topics and post a response to those blogs.  It is actually a common practice among bloggers.  Cross-blog discussions give new readers a reason to check out your blog if you post about a blog they read regularly.

Besides that, you should consider the amount of website traffic you generally get.  If you
have very little traffic, it will take more work to get your blog up and going and successful.  However, if you already have a lot of visitors to your site, then your blog will
be more likely to catch on quickly.  Just realize that you may not become an overnight success, but hard work will pay off in the end.

Your main goal with a commercial website is to gain profit.  The way to do that is to attract as many people as possible to your website and to maintain that client list by enticing them to come back again and again.  A blog is not for everyone or for every business, but it may be exactly what you need!

The Adsense Code begins with the basics which anyone just starting out with Adsense will find useful as a quick reference to get them up and running. As someone who has been using Adsense for a while I found this section could be skimmed, although there are some tips you may still find useful even if you have used Adsense on your sites for a while. Some of the stuff in the first few chapters will jog your memory and remind you of somethings you already know but forget to use.

After the initial setup Joel gets right on with the stuff you bought the book for, the correct way to implement Adsense for maximum profits. His tips are all backed with his real life testing and tuning, but even so he is ready to admit that there is no one size fits all when it comes to ad placement and colour usage in the adblocks, think blending in the Adsense blocks to not look like ads and you are getting close. He also reveals what Adsense blocks work best and where, as well as caveats when this advice doesn’t quite work out to be true.

After the initial setting up, and placement, The Adsense Code goes further into testing and tracking to get the maximum CTR (Click Through Rate) for your Adsense blocks. Joel mentions some of the tools he uses for tracking and gives you a more in depth knowledge of how to use the tracking Google has already given to Adsense publishers with the “Channels” you can use to track your Adsense effectiveness with. This is a useful read for anyone who wants to make the most of every block of Adsense ads.

The other parts of the book briefly (sometimes it seems a little too briefly) cover the topics of content sites, search engine optimisation and using your website stats to help you increase your traffic. The section on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) could have been a little more in depth, although this is a huge subject which deservedly has more than enough books and ebooks written about it, it could have had a little more than the 8 pages devoted to it, but then this book isn’t about getting traffic, it’s about making the most from what you already get.

In summing up, The Adsense Code by Joel Comm is an ideal book for the beginner to intermediate Adsense publisher, and will help improve their Adsense earnings. If you are already earning a living from Adsense this will offer only a little backup reference information for you. The Adsense Code covers the core subject for which it was written in great detail, in an easy to understand way without being patronising. My advice is if you are earning less than a few hundred dollars a month from Adsense but would like to do better then this is the book to buy, and keep referring back to as you improve your earnings.

The Adsense Code By Joel Comm which you can buy for yourself at http://www.cashinonline.info/recommends/theadsensecode.php

1. What rights do you have with the templates?

As with any piece of work, designers can give you a multitude of rights, allowing you various levels of freedom to use the templates you buy or download. It’s important to read the terms, and / or clarify your rights with the supplier of the template. Some will allow you to change the template as much as you like and may include source files for any graphics so you can customise those too, while others will limit you to using the template as is, and only changing the text to your own. There are many levels in between too, you may be allowed to change the copyright notice at the bottom, or may be required to keep it there pointing back to the suppliers website, or there maybe some other small link back required for you to use the template. So check your rights.

2. Where can the template be used?

You need to check this as well as part of your rights. Some templates you download, and even some you buy will restrict you to non commercial use. This would mean you can’t use the template on a business site. Using a non commercial template as a basis for an Adsense site could be a legal grey area, as you are creating a site purely to make money, so it could be construed as commercial use. Other restrictions may mean you can only use the template on one site, or domain, and you’d need a license for each site you use the template on. Check the usage policy before you buy or use a template.

3. Experience level.

What is your own experience level of web design? You are going to need to know enough to edit the templates main areas to add your content. This may involve a little tweak here and there to make it fit your template, so you will need to ensure your knowledge covers the technologies the template uses. It’s not all HTML either. Your chosen template may include CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), Javascript functions, Area Maps for navigation, and any number of other additional components. Find out first what you will need to know, and decide if you know it already, are willing to learn or are going to need to pay extra to get it modified by someone else.

4. Do you have the right tools to edit the template?

If a template has any special code, or tricks included, will your editor of choice be able to cope with them? Not all editors are created equal, and some will mess up code they don’t recognise, and stop the site from working altogether. You may not always find this out until after you have uploaded it. Obviously if you are using a text editor like notepad, and doing it yourself you should understand what you are doing before changing anything. If you are using a wysiwyg html editor, like Frontpage, Dreamweaver or any of the free utilities like NVU then you need to make sure it won’t mess up the underlying code as you add your content, and personalise the template for your site. Checking up front that you have the required tools may save you extra wasted time and money later.

5. Room for expansion.

Right now you have an idea for a site you want to create, and the template you use is perfect, but what about the future. If you want to add extra sections, pages or content, will it be able to expand to compensate for it? You need to take into account navigation links, if you will need to add extra links to new sections, can you personally add them (see experience and tools above) and do you have room for them especially if an image is used with an area map as navigation. It’s not going to be easy as you never know what the future holds, but believe me when I say your website is very likely to expand and grow, in fact it will need to if it’s to do you any long term good.

6. What will it be used for?

Do you intend to use a template for a straight html website, Wordpress blog, forum, or any other kind of site? A straight html template will need a lot of work to convert it for use on a wordpress blog, as they use tags to build the site as they go, unlike a static html website. They also require the template to be broken down into header, footer and display elements with the necessary code for menus etc. in the right place. It’s not easy, and forums use the same methods. It’s easier to get a template (called themes on interactive sites like blogs and forums) which is designed for the purpose, than adapt one, unless you are experienced in PHP and html and most likely CSS too!

These are just some things you may wish to consider before using a template for your first (or next) website. It could save you a lot of wasted time in the long run for a few minutes checking beforehand. Templates are a great shortcut to a professional looking site and now you know what to look for to make sure you don’t regret it later.