Previously, we’ve seen some advice on how you can maintain a good amount of privacy when doing business online. There are many ways that you can avoid sharing unnecessary personal information with the companies that you do business with by using ways such as registering a business name, using a private mail box and using a separate phone number for your online business activities. But there are also some other things that you need to be aware of when you do business online: how to keep your online business safe from threats such as hacking and fraud. Here are some methods that you can include in your regular activities that will make doing business online safer for you:

• Research your business partners (companies and individuals) carefully

Whether it’s joining a new affiliate network, signing up for a payment processor so you can make sales online, or hiring someone to develop a website or Facebook app for you, doing your due diligence can go a long way. Do some research on the person or company that you’re going to be dealing with. This can be as simple as doing a Google search to see if you can uncover anything about them online that would be negative, such as past disputes. When dealing with businesses, be careful of start ups and new companies. While they may grow and become a valuable business partner for you in the future, they could also go out of business unexpectedly. There are numerous complaints in webmaster and online marketing forums about affiliate programs that have shut down and left hundreds of people without any payment. This is why you should give priority to partners that have already built up a solid reputation online and who have shown they’re doing well for at least a few months.

• Don’t re-use the same log in information for every online account that you use

When you do business online, chances are you will have a few dozen logins to keep track of, such as email services, hosting services, affiliate network accounts, payment processor accounts, etc. The smart thing to do is to avoid using the same user name and password for every single account that you use at different websites. The reason behind this is quite simple. Let’s say the database of an affiliate network is hacked and all the log in information is posted on public websites by the hackers. If you used the same log in information everywhere, there is a much bigger chance that hackers could access your other accounts and cause more damage. Therefore, your login credentials should be unique for every site that you use, even if this means that your password on each site is only slightly different by a few characters from those that you use on other websites. You should also avoid writing down passwords or even worse, creating a text file on your computer with all the user names, passwords and site names written in plain text.

Finally Some Other Ways to Promote Your Membership Site

We have seen that you can use forums, email, social media, as well as your own members to promote your membership site. But there are still a few other ways that you can attract members. Here they are:

• Create an affiliate program

In the online marketing world, many products have affiliate programs which pay a commission to the affiliate for each new sale. If you would like your site to be more successful, you could create an affiliate program for it and pay your affiliates around 50% of the monthly fee that you would make from members. You can promote this affiliate program on online marketing forums, just like you would promote the site itself. It is also possible for you to join an affiliate network. ClickBank is the most popular one out there, as they deal with digital products such as ebooks and membership sites.

• Use offline marketing

Even though your product is based on the internet and deals with internet marketing, it doesn’t mean that you can’t use any offline methods to promote it. Some ideas of offline methods include distributing fliers promoting your site or putting up ads in print media like newspapers and magazines. Some membership site owners have even created TV and radio commercials, but obviously these are quite expensive when compared to other advertising methods.

• Use pay per click ads

Pay per click ad networks such as the ones on the Google and Bing search engines are an excellent marketing tool and can be used to promote IM products. However, you would need to carefulyl plan, manage and optimize your campaigns in order to be successful. You would also need to have a decent budget, as the whole internet marketing niche is very competitive.

• Use media buying

Media buying simply means buying advertising space on another site. You can sometimes buy text ads, banner ads or even video ads. The payment model depends on the site where you buy the ad space from and could by a flat rate per week or month, a CPC (cost per click) or a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model. You could deal either with an advertising network or make a private deal with a webmaster to advertise your membership site on their website.

All of these are excellent methods that you can make use of to promote your site and get some new members. However, the best way to generate revenue from your membership site is to keep your existing members, rather than constantly try to sign up new ones. This is actually much easier as you don’t need to do any advertising to retain your current members. All you need to do is to keep them interested in your site by adding new content on a regular basis, as well as listen to any feedback that they may have regarding the content of your site or how it runs.

If you have just started out and decided to build an online business, you may feel a bit overwhelmed by all of the opportunities out there. Indeed there are many opportunities to earn online, so choosing the right one is important to your success. Here is an overview of some of the most common ways to make money on the internet and get your new business going.

CPA Networks

CPA – or Cost Per Action networks are a form of affiliate program that are very popular with a lot of internet marketers. There are various reasons for their popularity and we will explore them as we take a look at how exactly a CPA network operates.

CPA networks basically regroup various merchants which are seeking individual affiliates to promote their products or services online. This is due to the fact that managing hundreds of affiliates “in house” can be quite demanding on a business and require the creation of specific departments to do just that. For this reason, many companies both big and small, opt to outsource all of that work to CPA networks. The network will be responsible for recruiting and verifying affiliates, tracking results (such as number of clicks, conversion rates, transactions, etc), and issuing payments to affiliates after the merchant has sent them payment.

What differentiates a CPA network from any other type of affiliate network is the type of offers they have for you to promote. Most affiliate networks require you to actually sell something to the visitors that you refer. However, CPA networks have many different types of offers, most of which do not require the visitor to buy anything in order for you to get credit for the action. Here are some examples of things that could earn you a commission, depending on the offer being promoted:

*Submitting their email address

*Submitting their cell phone number

*Registering for free on a membership site

*Filling out a survey

*Filling out a quote form

*Etc.

The amount that you will get paid for the action will vary according to what is required from the customer and on the offer that you are running. On the lower end, an offer which only requires the visitor to enter their email address will pay you anywhere from $0.75 to $2. But an offer that requires them to complete a four page questionnaire with their personal info, like an insurance quote request, could pay you anywhere from $10 to $50.

The reasons merchants can afford to pay for actions which are not immediate sales is because they know a certain percentage of these actions will result in the customer actually signing up for a paying service, or making a purchase at their site. There are also a few offers which pay you a fixed amount or a percentage of a sale if the visitor needs to buy something. However, they are the exception, rather than the norm, when it comes to CPA campaigns.

The famous “BANS” (buildanichestore.com) is up for sale on flippa.com as the owners have decided to move onto new challenges after several years developing their product which allows users to build a website that is affiliated with the Ebay affiliate program.  Similar to our website builder programme that uses the Amazon associates affiliate network.

In their hey day they were turning over $30,000 a month in subscribers joining upto their site to use their product.  But after several months they got bad feedback from some users, but this was mainly due to the fact that the users weren’t probably setting up their sites very well which caused their sites to get penilised in Google causing a tidle wave effect.  The owners saw this as a problem and completly changed their sales pitch on their home page so they could rebuild their reputation and grow as a well established brand which i think they have done today with the invention on their new partner website N1Way.com

Build a niche store currently has 10,000 members since their launch back in 2006 where they first started out selling a custom ebay script on Digitalpoint.com to webmasters.  This is where they found their niche and built on the product and created their own website and started selling their product on clickbank.com

They are currently looking for $500,000 for their business and looking for a team of developers to take over the business and grow it into a very large network of affiliate marketing related websites

Their website currently gets 1,000 unique visitors a day with on average 4 visitors signing up to buy their product the BANS website.  The product is $97 via clickbank and 50% commission goes to their affiliates promoting their product which is a great way to market their business for free and drive alot of traffic to their website.  Their user forum has over 100,000 forum posts with 20,000 threads.  They also have 1,400,000 referrences in Google pointing to their website with a Google page rank 5

I wish these guys good luck with their future projects and hope the sale goes well.  I only wish i had the cash to buy their business as it would go great with my Websites For Sale World Website Builder program.