Blaine561's Internet Marketing Information Center

The best way to boost your affiliate sales is to create something original and let people know about it–break out of the “me, too” crowd and do something different.

There is a common misconception among affiliates that they are “stuck” with the marketing materials the product owners provide, and unable to do anything of their own.

This is, by and large, not true. If you’re not sure, ask. Most affiliate managers will okay outside materials if they can see them first.

Your first step is to create a free report. This sounds like a monumental task, but my own free report, “Ahead of the Pack,” available at my web site, shows you how easy it is.

The easiest way to write a report is to compile a list of 5 or 7 tips, and write a few sentences on each one. If I were an affiliate for a book on resumes, I might write “5 Tips for a better resume.” Then I’d use the report to lead to my web site selling the resume book.

The next step is to set up a way to capture email addresses–either by offering the report as an autoresponder series or by requiring signup to your newsletter to download the report. Tips reports work very well as autoresponder series, and you can follow up periodically.

Finally, let people know about your report using a press release. My free report “Power Press Releases” makes this super simple.

Basically, you need to write Who (the person who benefits, not you), what (the free report), when (available now), where (at your web site), why (why this report is available) and how (how it provides the benefit).

I realize time is scarce, and people who don’t write for a living often think it’s much harder than I do. But I can almost guarantee that if you sit down and write a quick report and publicize it with a release distributed by the top free distribution services, you will make more affiliate sales and it will more than make up for the time you invest.

For those who blog, or write in online journals, keeping track of visitors can be a great way to see who visits a particular blog. There are many ways to keep track of blog readers when you blog. Blog hit counters; visitor tracking, referrers and keywords all can help you know if someone has visited your blog.

When you set up your blog, you will probably have already decided on the type of blog you will keep. Some web blog hosting sites will offer there service for free, but have a minimum of features. Other blog sites might cost, but will offer bloggers services to keep track of visitors. There are many reasons to track the visitors that read your blog. Understanding who visits you blog will help you know what your readers are looking for. Successful blogging starts with interested writing and will appeal to your readers. Another reason you might want to keep track of the visitors that come to your site is to increase traffic. This is especially important for blogs that are for companies. Companies can use their blog for inexpensive advertising. Knowing who visits the blog site will help a company understand if they are reaching their target audience for their services or products.

A blog hit counter is one way to keep track of the amount of visitors that read your blog. Blog hit counters are usually small boxes at the very end of a web page that updates a number every time your site is hit. Some blog hit counters can give site owners site statistics, reports and graphs to illustrate blog activity. These counters can also show you where your readers are finding your site. If your blog hosting site does not offer a blog hit counter feature, one can easily be downloaded or added to your page from another site. There are many free sites that offer counters for blog pages. Blog writers can register on the hit counter site, download and install directly into the blog template. This will give an accurate count of how many visitors you have to your blog. If you are not worried about keywords or details information about your readers, then a blog hit counter is the easiest way to track your readership.

If you want more advanced blog features, then you can add tracking options to your blog. There are several ways you can track your readers. One is by keywords and the other is a visitor tracker. Keyword trackers are ideal for those who need to know what keywords people are using to locate a blog. This could be important for businesses that need to reach potential consumers. A good keyword tracker can also help you organize your blog site to determine which keywords are most popular with readers. It can also help get your site listed on search engines. Keyword trackers can be downloaded for free in many cases. If your site relies heavily on readers, then a keyword tracker could be a good choice.

A visitor tracker works much the same way as a keyword tracker. The difference, however, is that a visitor tracker will provide you with information statistics about your blog visitors. Usually, this information is given in easy to understand graphs and tables. If you need to see where your visitors are coming from, then a visitor tracker can be quite beneficial. It is a little more sophisticated than a hit counter, but works about the same way. When a visitor enters your blog site, their information is saved onto the visitor tracker. When you are ready, you can log in and see exactly who your visitors are. Many times not only are you able to see the statistics on your readers, but you can also see reports for current visitors and those that have visited the site in the past.

One other way that a blog writer can keep track of their readers is to include a comment section at the end of your blog page. Not all visitors will want to leave a comment, but this is a good way to gain feedback about your site. You will better understand the type of readers that frequent your site, but also understand the kind of content that they want to read.

So, you have been out on the Internet and hear people talking about blogs. Weblogs (Blogs for short) are web-based publications consisting of information of all sorts. Some people have personal blogs. Others are using blogs to market a product or service. I use one of my blog as a complimentary informational site to my home based business. It allows me to easily and quickly publish information about my home-based business. It is also a portal for my team to keep abreast of business related information.

The first thing you need to decide what type of blog you want. Having decided, go to www.blogger.com (there are other, but for the purpose of this article, I will discuss www.blogger.com.) to setup an account.

Once your account is setup, you will want to login into the dashboard. At this point, I would send some time reading the tutorials and looking at some of the other blogs. By looking at other”s blogs, you can get an idea of how you want your to look and function. Blogger provides a help group (forum) where you can communicate with other members.

First, you will want to create your blog. You do this by using the “Create A Blog” button. This will bring you to page asking you a few questions. At this point, you have two options: simple setup or advanced setup. If you are new and have no knowledge of setting up a website and ftping, stay with the simple setup. But if you are familiar with setting up website and ftping, I suggest the advance setup. The advance setup would allow you more flexibility, but requires more of a learning curve. For our discussion, we will stick with the simple setup.

For the simple setup, chose a title and address (URL) for your blog. Select a title that reflection your intention for the site. Selecting a good title is an important consideration, especially if you are using it to market a product or providing information to your audience. Put in the word verification number and hit “Continue”.

Secondly, you will want to select a template from the ones provided on this page. Make your selection based on how it will coordinate with product or service. Also, the template should have an aesthetic affect on your targeted traffic. In other words, if you are using this to promote a home-based business, use a color scheme that is not loud and boisterous.

Lastly, hit the “Continue” button. Your blog has been setup. You will now want to start publishing to your blog. You are back at the dashboard, so select your blog link.

Under the “Publish” tab, select the “Create” tab. You will have a blank editor box to enter your new information to be published. If you are familiar with HTML tags, you can add it into your text. (i.e.: This is my new text will produce This is my new text.). There are some edit buttons within the editor that you can use also. Once finished entering your new information, hit the “Publish Post” button.

As a side note, once you have published to your site, you will want to draw traffic to your new blog. You can use two sites that will send out your post so others can see them. They are www.pingoat.com and www.pingomatic.com. Every time you make a new post, use these two sites.

Whether you are just wanting expound your personal views, market a product or service, or provide a portal for additional information about your home based business, blogs are great. They can be setup easily and quickly be published. You do not have to worry about web hosting and programming if you are a newbie. Just start typing in your thoughts on a daily basis to keep your content fresh.

Every day was the same. Wake up, go to work, come home, eat, go to bed, wake up, go to work, come home, eat, go to bed, wake up….. You get the picture. This is how it was for Jeremy Palmer in 2003 but now he earns over a million dollars through affiliate schemes.

Bored and underpaid in his day job as a Web Developer he lived form pay-day to pay-day and dreamed of a better way to make a living. Not content with just dreaming he made several attempts to set up his own business. He ran his own e-commerce site and built websites for local businesses but never saw the breakthrough he yearned for.

Then one day at work he discovered affiliate marketing. The company he worked for had set up an affiliate scheme as part of their internet marketing strategy. Intrigued, but not fully understanding how it worked, he kept an eye on how the scheme progressed. A few months later he noticed that some of the company’s affiliates were earning thousands of dollars through the affiliate program. Astonished at their success and even more so when he realised that all they were doing was referring visitors from their website to his company’s website and being paid a commission when a purchase was made. He decided to find out more.

What he discovered changed his life.

He found that there were thousands of online merchants, including big names like Wal-Mart, Dell and Amazon that had an affiliate program. The affiliates didn’t have to buy anything, make anything, deliver anything, deal with customers or secure the transaction and merchants were paying the affiliates millions of dollars every month in commissions. This discovery persuaded him to try affiliate marketing for himself and within two months he was making more money from his affiliate websites than he was in his day job. Within six months he was making twice as much so he decided to quit his job and focus entirely on his affiliate business.

Within two years he was a millionaire!

He now runs over 100 affiliate websites promoting several advertisers in various different categories. He’s recognised in the affiliate marketing industry as a leader and advocate receiving accolades from Commission Junction including their 2005 award for innovation.

“Every day” has changed forever.

Anyone seriously wishing to enter the affiliate marketing business would do well to learn from him and indeed you can. He has written a 140 page guide which is immediately available at www.ebiz-info.co.uk.

When it comes to finding a particular product or service, there are many individuals who start searching online. The internet is a great way to find whatever you are looking for, but there are also a number of disadvantages to doing so. For instance, it is often difficult to determine the quality of a product or service online. If you are a business owner who needs affiliate tracking software for your affiliate program, you will need to find and purchase affiliate tracking software. While you can do this online, there are a number of important factors that you will want to keep in mind.

As previously mentioned, it is often difficult to determine the quality of a particular product or service, including affiliate tracking software, online. This is because it is difficult to tell whether or not an individual or company is being honest with you. This means that although you may find an affiliate tracking software program that claims to be the best, it may not actually be. To determine whether or not the claims of a software seller are legitimate, you will have to do a little bit of research.

The first step in finding a reputable affiliate tracking software program or service is to familiarize yourself with all of your available options. This can easily be done by performing a standard internet search. You may want to perform that search using the words affiliate tracking software. Your search should provide with the names and website addresses of a number of different software services or programs. You will want to quickly examine each of these products and eliminate the ones that do not offer what you need. This should leave you with a smaller list of software programs or services. Those are the software programs and services that you will want to further examine.

You can easily determine whether or not the affiliate tracking software of your choice is reputable or not by finding a product review website. These websites can also be found by performing an internet search. If you have the names of numerous software programs, it is likely that a number of them will be reviewed. You are advised to closely examine those reviews and weed out any that have negative marks or complaints. While most affiliate tracking programs are reviewed, you may find a few that are not. For your own safety, you are advised to treat these programs as if they have a negative review. This is because you will not want to pay for affiliate tracking software if you don’t know how well performing it is.

You should also be able to determine whether or not an affiliate tracking software program is reputable by performing a standard internet search on each program. For instance, you will want to perform an internet search with the name of that particular software. It is likely that your search will connect you to web pages in which that affiliate tracking software was discussed. You are advised to read through these discussions to determine if current, or even past, customers were satisfied with what they received.

When searching for reputable affiliate tracking software, it is important to remember that very few products will have a perfect review. There will always be someone who thinks that something should have been different. A few negative comments or reviews does not mean that the affiliate tracking software in question is not reputable. However, you should be leery of software that has a large number of negative reviews or comments. That software may not only be not worth your time, but also not worth your money.

If you have been longing to start a home business online you may be coming across terms you’ve never heard before. You may also have found the opportunities available are overwhelming. Where do you begin?

AFFILIATE PROGRAMS – EASY START

Affiliate programs may be the easiest online home business to start running. Why?

With any online home business you must have a product or service to sell. First you must create this product or service and then you must be able to fill orders.

Selling your own product or service also means creating a website, learning how to write ad copy, setting up a marketing plan, being able to accept payments online and obviously doing the work. If you’re selling a physical product then you will need to make or buy the item, package it and pay for shipping costs. If you provide a service than you will likely have to start by doing free jobs to build your credibility and then when you are charging for your service you are still limited by how much work you can actually handle.

THE MAGIC OF AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

Affiliate programs are a great way to get started in an online home business. In fact there are even some ‘Super Affiliates’ who are making fabulous incomes from affiliate programs. So, what ARE affiliate programs?

Affiliate programs allow you to sell another company’s service or product and make a commission on every sale or lead. You do not even need to build a website or handle the transaction. Your job is to drive traffic (customers) to your affiliate link.

An affiliate link is a special URL code that will identify customers coming to the company’s site from your advertising. It will likely be the website address with a code attached to the end.

Some affiliate programs also have tiers. That means if someone who is interested in SELLING the product comes through your link and signs up you will also get a small percentage of THEIR earnings.

HOW DO I CHOOSE A PROGRAM?

You should research the popularity of some of your interests. Try to determine if people are buying that product or service online. There are many sources for finding that information including free ones such as the Overture keyword tool.

When you have found an area that is popular then type the subject along with ‘affiliate program’ into your search engine and see which programs have services or products for that area. You can also use an affiliate program directory.

When you have found a program that looks interesting you should read the terms of the program. Make sure that payouts are not based on a high commission earning or you may never see your money. Also try to choose programs with high commission rates. Often you will find ebooks and downloadable software has the highest rates as there is no physical product to make or ship. If you are satisfied with the terms then you need to sign up – usually a simple process.

START MARKETING

The reason affiliate programs are so great for beginners is that you only need to focus on marketing – not making – your product.

Many affiliate programs have information on how to market and give you tools such as banners, product feeds and more. You can also look for other information on marketing including writing articles, creating pay-per-click campaigns, commenting in online forums etc. As you gain experience marketing you will make adjustments to your selling and start creating a wonderful income!

Because I’m a journalist and copywriter who also reads and writes blogs, people who don’t use the Internet as much as I do have started to ask me some searching questions of late. Some of them sound worried.

They have heard a lot about blogging and the impact it could have on traditional marketing.

One person even asked me (perhaps a little concerned) if PR teams will be replaced with bloggers. I don’t see it, I reassured them.

PR is also about managing people and that will always be important. The mainstream media isn’t about to disappear, and the majority of the population probably couldn’t care less about blogs. For all the hype, blogging should be seen as a potential addition to a marketing portfolio.

The place blogging may have its biggest impact is on areas of the trade press.

There is a revolution in publishing taking place, sparked by the new forms of advertising such as Google ad sense. This has made it possible for someone running a blog site, with a staff of one and overheads of almost nothing, to start earning a living from their publishing.

If the blogger can get readers, then Google places the ads (relevant to the content) – and you have a publishing business. This gives a lot of people an incentive to provide great content – so that they get more readers, and more money from ads.

It’s just like the traditional press, but without the need for offices, advertising sales teams, HR departments etc.

This works best in niche areas. Soon, there may not be much need for magazines about new gadgets, or mobile phones, or ride-on-lawn mowers or whatever. Because the blogs have it covered, providing more up-to-date information and readers who are ready to buy – and can simply click on the advert.

The everyday bloggers have a new-found power and are not about to go away. Some blogs now get millions, even tens of millions of readers a day. They are rivalling the mainstream media – and if the US government can’t control them, what chance does a small company or even a big enterprise have?

Companies and blogs

It’s still pretty early days for companies using blogs, and the whole thing is evolving. It will probably settle down into one more piece in the jigsaw, another communication channel that companies can use.

The style used in company blogs needs to be less “written by committee” and more personal and spontaneous.

Companies that try to use too much subterfuge in the blogging world are exposing themselves to a potential backlash. There’s a great emphasis on honesty in the blogging world – for example bloggers will often end a post with a “disclosure” note which mentions any conflict of interest.

At a simple level, blogging can be seen as simply another way of publishing information on the Internet. It’s useful because it is so fast and it’s easy to get a range of people involved quite quickly.

However, there are real skills involved to good blogging. Not only does the writing have to be engaging, colourful, funny, informative etc, but the writer also needs to take account of search engine optimisation techniques – which basically means using the right keywords to ensure the blog shows up in the search engines.

At it’s most sophisticated, blogging is being used to create “viral marketing” campaigns – to create a “buzz” around a product as though this were coming from ordinary people. This is a whole new field of marketing / advertising…

Day Job Killer’s author Chris McNeeny, kills himself by launching this ridiculous DJK Assassin and ditches mud to his reputation!

First of all, the title wasn’t even there to attract your attention just to show you an honest report and recommending Google Assassin in the end, because I hate it.

To begin with, Google Assassin is not even an original product. Google assassin is just a re – launch of the affiliate – den that has already been out for a while. And I don’t even think it was his own product. It was formally owned by Andrew Fox and it’s a piece of Andrew’s CB Affiliate Formula. It’s totally not a new product and not up-to-date tools either.

I’m not against “Black Hat” marketing as long as it’s moral and legal. I personally own Chris’s previous upstanding products like Adwords Miracle, Affiliate Project X, and Day Job Killer. All these products contained few exclusive marketing tips and strategies, and they are definitely worth its price tag. Only after reading Day job killer ( DJK ), that I realized that it’s possible to truly make decent money with the combination of the Amazon affiliate program and PPC.

DJK Assassin is good-for-nothing, meaningless, BS – CRAP. And Chris, who was considered a genius marketer after Adwords Miracle, is now a mumbo jumbo scammer! And this is what exactly happens, when a marketer completely gets obsessed with money.

In his sales letter, Chris shows you his $169K payday. Now listen to me carefully… He hasn’t made that much of money by selling affiliated products. He made the money by selling his own product ” Day Job Killer! “

On the sales letter, it promised to ” auto create websites in 2 minutes “. I didn’t find one piece of software that automatically generated any type of website or landing page. It also said you get the ” DJK Blueprint Series “… Well after I paid my $67 a month payment, I then realize that I have to pay another $47 a month to get the DJK Blueprint series which was already promised on the sales letter.

Now let me get to the main issue. What is this Google Assassin?

Basically, you are getting membership to a site called AffilitesDen. com ( Later I heard that this membership site is a part of Andrew Fox’s CB Affiliate Formula – but I’m not sure ) This site contains some useful information about market research and creating PPC campaigns. It also has a funny tool called ” Adwords Ad Generator. ” To check this tool’s functionality, I entered ” Xbox ” in the field to get an ad suggestion. I got following result!

Loooking for xbox?

” Xbox Exposed “

NO MORE XBOX

xbox Scam?

XBOX?

WOW! That’s funny – if you go with these suggestions; you are guaranteed to lose everything in PPC drainage!

Okay, now let me talk about other tools. Basically, you’ll get four Desktop softwares;

The Daddy

Adwords Micro Nicher

The Campaigner

And Article spotter.

Don’t use any of these tools even if you get it for free!

Well, it took me couple of weeks to actually grasp what these tools are supposed to achieve and how they work!

To shorten the length of this review I’m providing very short details for these tools.

Tool 1 – The Daddy Keywords Extractor ( or Daddy ):

This tool will help you to find highly profitable keywords for any given niche ( keyword ). It works by finding search volume and number of advertisers; Furthermore, give you assessment of profitable keywords. With this tool you can also locate most targeted adwords ad for the given keyword – so that you can copy it!

Normally this tools triggers spam results. For example if I search ” credit cards ” I get result for ” diet pills ” etc!

Tool 2 – Adwords Micro Nicher:

This is good for adwords content network targeting. This tool will aid you to locate ” content pages ” for any keywords in organic search results, which also contains prominent Adsense ads. You pay a lot less when you target content pages as the opposed search networks. Although this idea sounds good, the software has lots of bugs. I think manual research will give you more productive results.

Tool 3 – Campaign Kidnap Tool ( The Campaigner )

This is the hot tool of the year 2007. Currently there is close to a dozen tools related to ” Competition spy. ” The Campaign Kidnap allows you to find your competitor’s ads and keywords for their Google Adwords campaigns. You can even see which ads are running with which keywords. This allows you to either ” swipe ” the campaign with very few changes – or you can use it for competitive intelligence.

The downside of this tool is obviously, you can’t figure out if the campaign is really profitable. We don’t know if the campaign is running profitably for many days. To check if it’s a profitable campaign you have to save today’s result and check back after 2 – 3 days; if it’s still running you can assume that it’s profitable.

Tool 4 – Article Spotter

The Article Spotter tool uses other people’s article marketing efforts as a backdoor research strategy to help you find winning keywords to target.

Well, I can just find that out by searching my keyword in Google also. Takes 10 seconds to do it manually for FREE. I haven’t found any value in this tool… So let’s forget about it.

That’s the story about Google Assassin. I also got a bonus course for creating and marketing HOT info products. That’s a nice course… Chris definitely knows how to create BLAZING product and market with hyped sales letter and so!

Overall, IMO, it’s not worth $67 a month. There are plenty of tools that do the SAME exact thing for FREE. Not only that, but I believe it’s dishonest to promise something on the sales letter, and not deliver it… just another over hyped rehashed product. Spyfu. com is a great FREE tool that does more than affiliateden by itself.

I would recommend you Wealthy Affiliate University.

Wealthy Affiliate is an interactive marketing community that can help you become a success online. They have all the tools and resources necessary to turn you into a successful Internet marketer. The Wealthy Affiliate tools include case studies, guides, tutorials, keyword lists, turnkey websites, and many more.

The best part about joining the Wealthy Affiliate program is that you become an active part of a growing community, where you will be provided with advice from those people who have made Internet marketing their life.

Since you can only get their wise input by becoming a member of the Wealthy Affiliate community, you should know you’ll have to pay a monthly fee in the amount of $29.99 a month, but this is nothing compared to what you can earn during the first month after having registered with Wealthy Affiliate.

You have finally decided that the 9-5 day job isn’t for you. Your tired of your work being undervalues and underappreciated. You would like to work when you feel you are most productive, not when some boss or manager feels it is so. You are also tired of working hard with no incentive or reward scheme in place.

Affiliate marketing is a great opportunity for those who want to venture out on their own. The minimal risk and zero start up costs make it an attractive option to many. Affiliate marketing programs are perfect for those people who are motivated and self starters. They are also great for those who want to set their own working hours.

The internet has helped up change so many aspects of our lives. We can study and work from home with the help of a computer and high speed internet access. However, there are unfortunately lots of scammers out there ready to take either your money or your work to use for their benefit. Many of these email scam programs and work at home schemes have little hope of amounting to any kind of living.

Unfortunately, these scammers have made their way into the world of affiliate marketing as well. There are some excellent affiliate marketing programs to get involved with; the trick is how to spot the scammers.

The face and manner of the internet and affiliate marketing is constantly changing. This makes it very difficult to produce a definitive list of do’s and don’ts. However, there are some signs that one can look for. If your company displays any of these signs it does not mean for sure that they are con artists. However, it should warrant further investigation.

An affiliate marketing program should always provide you with some support. This can include an agent that you can contact with questions or problems. A legitimate company should want you to do well. The better you do the better they do. It should at very least contain a toll free phone number, email address and fixed street address. If your company is an online affiliate marketing program, the lack of an email or web page should definitely raise some red flags. Other things such as no phone or address do not mean necessarily that they are trying to scam you. However, you need to investigate them with a fine tooth comb.

A good test is to send the company an email with some basic questions. If it takes them weeks to get back to you then you need to give this venture careful consideration. Again, they may not be out to con you but if they are poor at communication, this could be a sign of other internal problems.

If the company has no website then you should consider something else. Legitimate affiliate marketing programs generally have a detailed website with all the information you need. One should be suspicious of companies that operate only by email. A website is fairly easy to create so why hasn’t this company invested the time to do so? Also, a website leaves a bit more of a trail to a company. If they do end up scamming you, the chances of tracing the people via a website are much better then tracing them through masses of email addresses.

Many of us would love the opportunity to work for ourselves. We would love to chuck in the day job and start our own businesses. However, the costs of starting a business combined with the risk involved stop most of us before we even get started. Affiliate marketing is a great way to make some money by working for yourself. The costs are none and the risk minimal. One needs to use some caution when signing onto a program. Make sure there is adequate support available to you. Make sure the company is contactable and that they answer queries in a timely fashion. Be incredibly cautious of companies that have no website. These factors do not always mean that the company is out to scam you; however they should be looked at carefully.

Cast your mind back several years, when the term ‘multiple-streams of income’ became an established part of the online marketing vocabulary and web-entrepreneurs began launching networks of mini-sites to sell affiliate products.

Fast-forward to today and the concept of developing a number of income sources is still very relevant. Good website businesses constantly innovate, looking for new ways to make money. However setting up networks of mini-sites can be an expensive and time consuming process, so why not consider buying a single generic domain name and set up a virtual network of mini-sites using sub-folders?

Setting Up Your Virtual Network

Developing your virtual network is very easy. Once you have bought a generic domain name, you simply create a series of sub-folders for each of your affiliate programs. If one of your mini-sites is going to be used to sell insurance products, name the folder ‘insurance’. Then create your insurance web page and save it in the insurance folder as ‘index.htm’ or ‘index.html’. When you launch your insurance mini-sites, the address will be www.genericdomain/insurance.

Choosing Your Generic Name

Choosing your generic domain name can be difficult. Ideally you will want a short and simple name that does not align the website to any specific market or product. Unfortunately most of the short, single word domain names are already taken, so you might want to make up a name or use a mixture of words and numbers, such as ‘genericname888.com’.

Advantages of Sub-Folders

There are many advantages to using sub-folders:

Lower Cost

Using a single domain name will significantly reduce hosting and domain registration costs, especially if you are building a network of 20 or more mini-sites to sell your products. If you decide to use the same page design across your virtual network, it will also be possible to reduce development costs.

Marketing Advantages

Launching a new website on a shoestring is a tough business nowadays. Pay-per-click advertising can be prohibitive to small businesses and the Google Sandbox will prevent new websites from obtaining search engine rankings that will deliver sufficient amounts of traffic.

However, launching a new mini-site on your virtual network will be much easier as the page will be part of an established website and you will be able to avoid the sandbox. Building links to each of your virtual mini-sites will not only help that particular page receive more traffic, but also help improve the overall visibility of your whole site.

Lack of Suitable Domain Names

Domain names are a scarce resource and it will become increasingly difficult to keep finding suitably memorable and descriptive domains for each mini-site. With sub-folders, it is possible to choose any name you like for your mini-sites, although it helps if the generic domain name you choose is relatively short.

Drawbacks of Sub-Folders

Off course, there are some disadvantages to using sub-folders. Offering a diverse range of products from one website may confuse your target audience and you are less likely to innovate with different designs for each of your mini-sites. If a certain affiliate product really takes off, you may want to launch a new website to specifically sell more of that product; however the use of sub-folders still remains the most cost effective way to develop multiple-streams of income.