A New Kind of Email

I don't know about you, but I get entirely too many emails. On an average day, I probably receive over 250 emails from my various email accounts. I actually had over 600 in a day once. Now keep in mind that I am probably on the Internet more than most people (about 6 hours per day) and I have more websites that the average person (currently 38). Each of those sites can produce a few emails everyday. Of course probably 75% of the emails I get are unsolicated, but that still leaves a lot to go through.

A while back, I found an entirely new kind of email service. It's called NewNetMail. It is really neat how it works. There is never a chance of getting any unsolicated or junk emails. You only receive messages from those people that you have given permission to. It is also impossible to get an email with an attached virus or anything else that could harm your computer.

Now here is the best part. You can actually make residual income by referring other people to this email service. Is that great or what. If you would like to find out more about this new messaging service, here is a link that will give you more details.

http://blreeves.newnetmail.com/keeping_the_enemy_out.asp

Best Regards,
Barry Reeves
http://abswebtech.freestoreclub.com

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs have been around for many years. Joining good affiliate programs is a very easy way to start selling on the Internet. First off, you are selling someone else's product or service. That way you don't have to come up with a product of your own yet. Also, with every affiliate program I have been involved with, the mechanics of running the program are in place and in most cases run by a third party such as Commission Junction (http://www.cj.com). This way you don't have to worry about getting paid.

There are many good affiliate programs out there. Some will even provide a website for you to use in marketing their products or services. Most however, will require you to have your own website. To participate in an affiliate program is usually accomplished by placing a link or banner on your site that links to the affiliate site. The link would contain a unique ID that will identify you to the affiliate program so that you will get credit for any resulting sales.

Making money with affiliate programs is really just a matter of driving traffic from your site to the affiliate program site. Again it is all a numbers game. Everything on the Internet comes down to traffic. If you can't get people to come to your site, you will never make any money. It is just that simple.

I have tried dozens of affiliate programs over the years. I have had varying degrees of success with each one. The Amazon affiliate program (http://www.amazon.com) is very good and can be customized to compliment almost any website. Ebay (http://affiliates.ebay.com) also has a very good affiliate program that is managed by Commission Junction. Once you join Ebay's affiliate program, they will provide you access to several marketing tools so that you can create the HTML code to display Ebay auction items directly on your website. Then when a visitor to your website clicks on one of the items and subsequently wins the auction, you will collect a commission on the sale.

Probably one of the most successful affiliate programs around today is the Google AdSense program. It is free to join and very easy to set up on your website. The really neat thing about Google AdSense is that the links displayed on your site are relative to the content of your web page. Google evaluates each of the web pages that you have an AdSense ad on and customizes the links it displays based on your page's content. That way you are providing targeted traffic to the owner of the advertisement. They are willing to pay Google for this targeted traffic and Google is just sharing a portion of their advertising fee with you.

I have Google AdSense ads on about 15 of my sites. One of them is making me about $7 per day on average. I am seeing a slow but steady growth of income from these sites. I have been experimenting with various techniques to increase the traffic to my sites and have seen a good deal of improvement over the last couple of months.

Good Luck,
Barry Reeves
http://abswebtech.freestoreclub.com

Buying and Selling Domain Names

I purchased my first domain name in 1997. It was for a personal genealogy site that I still own and run (http://www.reevesregistry.com). It was nearly a year before I bought another name. The next few were primarily for personal use although I used one for my computer consulting business.

About three or four years ago, I started buying domain names for investment purposes. I have tried to limit my purchases to .com names as they are still the most valuable of any of the top-level domains. I have a few .net and .org domains and one or two of the other top-levels, but unless it really has a catchy name or has a website already developed for it, I stick to the .com names.

Most of the domains I own were names I thought of myself and registered if I found them available. I have purchased perhaps a dozen domain names on Ebay that were originally registered by someone else. Currently I own about 150 domain names and believe that many of them are very good and potentially valuable names. I have never had any of my names appraised, but based on what I have seen other similar names sell for on Ebay (http://www.ebay.com) or Great Domains (http://www.greatdomains.com), I think most of them would bring a good price.

I have only sold five domain names since I started buying them. I got between $30 and $50 for four of them and the last one I sold (http://www.impulselogic.com) brought $750. Not bad for a $6.95 investment.

One of the most important things I did early on was to obtain an enom (http://www.enom.com) reseller account. This allowed me to purchase domains at $6.95 each per year. The account also provided a means of organizing my domains and keeping track of when they are about to expire. I also have a reseller account with GoDaddy (http://www.godaddy.com) and a few others, but my enom account is my primary reseller account and I eventually transfer domains I have at other registrars over to my enom account just before they are about to renew. I find that I can keep better track of them when they are all in one place.

Until next time,
Barry Reeves
http://abswebtech.freestoreclub.com

Ebay - Off to a slow start

I have been selling items on eBay since 2002. I have actually bought much more than I have sold, but I do sell more now than I did in the beginning. When I started out, I did what most people do I guess. I went through the house looking for things I didn't use anymore that I thought someone else might get some use out of.

I sold some outdated computer hardware and software, a few books and even some old clothes. I had a box full of old cassette tapes from the eighties and nineties that sold pretty quick. But all these things were just one shot sales. I knew I had to find something that I could sell over and over again. The answer was information. This is nothing new to the old pros out there, but it took me a while to come to that conclusion.

Ebooks were what I was looking for. I could sell them over and over again. I could deliver them by email or download so I didn't have to worry about shipping. Once the market got saturated with a particular ebook, you just moved on to another one.

Ebooks were in great abundance and you could find one for just about any subject that you could imagine. And even if you couldn't find one on a particular subject, you could always write one yourself. As an example, I have been selling a particular ebook on Google AdSense over the past few months and have sold about 50 copies ranging in price from $1.99 to $9.99 each. I know this is not a lot, but this is just one ebook. There are literally tens of thousands of different ebooks that you can obtain resale rights to and sell on eBay or your own website. If you get four or five ebooks and keep them posted to eBay on a regular basis, you can make a small but steady income. It is all a numbers game.

Some people find it really difficult to decide what to sell on eBay, but I believe that information products are the way to go. Information products can take several forms. They can be ebooks, websites, graphic images, software or even databases of specialized information. Finding these information products to sell can be difficult at times, but there are plenty of people on eBay selling these types of products with resale rights.

One of the most recent trends lately has been for someone to sell the master resale rights and rebrand rights to a whole collection of software and ebooks. I have purchased several of these in the last few months and have easily made my money back in a very short period of time. The key is to find products that you can rebrand with your own name and website address so that you can establish your own identity. You really need to set up your own website and brand your products with your own information.

One of the most important things you can do is to create your own mailing list of customers and prospects. On your webpage, you should have a means of collecting your visitors name and email address. An easy way to do this is to offer them something for free in exchange for their contact information. You can give them an ebook or a free membership to your site or something like that. Most people don't mind giving you their name and email if they get something in return. Once you have their contact information, you should add it to your autoresponder. If you don't know what an autoresponder is, there are lots of places to read about them on the web.

An autoresponder is basically a script that runs on a website that sends follow up emails to a list of people on a regular basis. The script can run on your own website or you can subscribe to any of the autoresponder services out there. Many of them are free. The purpose of the autoresponder is to provide a means for you to stay in contact with your customers and prospects. Timing is everything. Someone may not be ready to buy something from you today, but they might be next week or next month. If you capture their contact information, you can follow up with them days or weeks later at a time when they may be ready to buy. If you don't get their contact information now, you may have lost them forever.

Well I guess that's enough for now. More to come.