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.

Many internet marketers make their money by dealing with affiliate programs or with CPA networks that have various kinds of offers they can push in order to make money. Most of these companies are legitimate and will pay you the earnings that you have made on time, every single time. But there are a couple of bad players in the industry. Here are some ways to spot and avoid them:

• Do some research first

Before even signing up for a network simply doing a Google search for their name can bring you a lot of information about the company. You will often find blog posts, forum posts and articles that mention them. Read these. See what other internet marketers are saying about them and look at whether the general opinion is positive or negative.

• Be wary around “start ups” and smaller networks

If a company has not yet established their reputation in the industry, remember that things can go in two ways with them. Either they will grow to become a productive and successful network or they will fold. If it’s the second thing that happens, things are not likely to be pretty. There have been several cases of networks going under and skipping out on tens of thousands of dollars of payments to affiliates. The large majority involved CPA networks which were operating for less than a year.

• Be careful around networks who seem to approve everyone

While there are some notable exceptions to this, such as Commission Junction and ClickBank, which are very reputable networks, as a general rule you should be quite wary around a network that seems to approve every publisher that applies without giving them a phone call or emailing them to ask them about their marketing methods. While you may think it is convenient, this can cause problems down the road, if large amounts of fraudsters manage to sign up and merchants start dropping the network.

• Carefully check the terms of any offers that you run and ask questions if necessary

This is especially the case for “trial” or “membership” offers. While you may be offered a good amount for every sign up, some merchants have been known to use underhanded tactics if not enough of the sign ups that you refer have converted to full members on their end. Some may falsely accuse you of sending fraudulent leads or deliberately using bad quality traffic and refuse to pay you. For this reason, it is very important that you check the terms of the offer to see if the merchant has any special requirements with regards to the type of traffic you can send and its productivity.

• Work with multiple networks and run different offers

It is not a good idea to focus all of your marketing efforts for the month on just one offer or on offers from only one network, no matter how profitable they may seem. Spread out your traffic around several different offers in the niche on different networks. That way, if there is any problem with one of them, you will still be getting paid by the others.

When it comes to being a publisher of pay per click ads on your website or blog, everyone knows that Google Adsense is the leader in this field. However, even though they are the largest and most popular company that you can partner up with, they are not the only ones in the game. There are plenty of other advertising networks that you can deal with instead of Adsense.

While it is perfectly fine to seek some alternatives, you should deal with established networks that have a good reputation within the webmaster community and have a positive track record. Sure, even the biggest companies in the internet world such as eBay, Google and Yahoo at some point were little more than start-ups created by bright entrepreneurs. But as a webmaster, your main goal is to make sure that you get paid fairly for the traffic that you send.

Unfortunately, many start-ups in the online world have never gotten too far off the ground before crashing and burning. If this happens, instead of getting paid you can expect to get a “Oops, we’re bankrupt so we have no money to pay you. Sorry “ type of message. Some networks have also been exposed as rogues and have engaged in practices such as deliberately not counting valid clicks, changing their policies frequently when it suits them or constantly finding excuses not to pay their publishers.

Here are some things to look for when choosing a network:

Length of time they were in business.

The longer a company has been active, the less likely it is that they will simply vanish overnight.

Reputation within the webmaster community.

Read forums, blog posts, guides, etc. and see what other webmasters have said about them. Of course, EVERY company will have some detractors or people who have had bad experiences with them. So the idea here is to see what the general opinion about them is. If you see lots of posts from people complaining about not being paid, or the company engaging in shady practices, it is a good sign that you should stay away.

Payment terms.

What is the minimum payment amount? How often do they pay? What payment methods do they offer? Those are all very pertinent questions. After all, you are putting up ads on your site to make money, not because you think online advertising is “cool”. Look this up on their site or in their terms and conditions before signing up. It may avoid you some bad surprises later on.

Any specific terms and conditions that may apply to you.

Do they accept webmasters from your country? Many networks exclude certain countries from joining. This is not because they “hate” you… but due to high amounts of click fraud originating from certain parts of the world. Do they have restrictions on the type of content you can have on your site? Etc. Make sure you read the rules thoroughly and comply with them. You definitely don’t want to give a network an excuse to ban you.

WordPress is great. It really is, you have seen me write about it numerous times on this website, namely because it is the most popular, most accessible, easy to use CMS out there, in my opinion of course (but numbers do not lie). But there are some things that WordPress could do better. It could better integrate different code, or sometimes be easier to code for, but for the most part it is alright.

Sometimes however, there are other things you want your website to do, or you want more customization to your site. Or just maybe, you want to be a bit different and learn a new language and build a site out of something completely new to you. For whatever your reason, there are some great alternatives to WordPress, so check them out below.

Drupal

Drupal is one of the main competitors to WordPress in straight CMS terms. It is much more customizable and hacky, because of the open source nature of itself. Since Drupal is open source (much like WordPress, but in a much more geeky way [in a good way]), it begs a bit more putting together. A Drupal install and WordPress install are much different and Drupal’s takes just a bit more work.

Drupal is a great CMS, but the design and layout of it isn’t as pretty as WordPress. The designs are a bit more boxy out of the gate, and take some real work to get them to look like a typical blog.

With that being said, Drupal is a great CMS, especally for the web tinkerer. If you like putting code together and making something unique and cool, Drupal is definitely for you. With less plugins and themes available, Drupal drives creativity and some very cool projects to create their own way around a problem, or to write some code and fix it.

Drupal is free, so check it out today at http://www.drupal.org

Typepad

Typepad and WordPress have always been a pretty big rivalry, not quite like Apple vs Microsoft, but pretty close.

Typepad is owned by Six Apart, a company that has had some major ups and some major downs. But Typepad has remained and still remains a huge competitor for WordPress.

The difference is the opensource vs proprietary debate. Typepad is only available as a hosted service from Typepad.com.

For true customizers, this may be a huge deterant, but for average users that want an all in one package that isn’t http://www.wordpress.com then Typepad is a great alternative.

Getting people to sign up for your newsletter, subscribe for a service you’re offering, or sign up for your website can be difficult. A lot of people will just choose not to sign up for whatever you’re offering for a simple reason, or no reason at all other than the fact that you didn’t grab their attention. One way to get people to do what you want them to is to offer them some incentive for doing what you want.

Contests

A contest is a great way to get new sign ups for your email list, or your website. Just offer a decent prize to one lucky winner who is a member of your site, Be sure to be clear about the terms of the contest, and spell the rules out clearly. Once you have your contest set up, spend some time and effort promoting it. Once people hear about the contest, they’ll start signing up for you site whether they have a healthy interest in your niche or not. That, unfortunately, is the down side of running a contest. Not every new sign up you get will be a useful, and high quality customer. Some people will sign up even if they have no interest in what you’re offering. and as such, they won’t add any value to your business. Still, a contest is a great way to draw in a lot of new customers.

Gifts

If you offer a gift to new sign ups, even if it’s a small one, it might just be the deciding factor in whether they do what you want them to or not. Even something simple like a coupon might be the final selling point that gets them to do what you’re asking them to. The gift doesn’t have to be fancy, but the better it is, the more of an incentive to do whatever it is you want people to do it will be.

If you want to draw new people to your site, or your mailing list, incentives are a great way to do that. A simple gift, or the chance to win a half decent prize might very well make the difference between getting new customers, and not getting them. People will do things they wouldn’t normally do for a gift, or a prize, so keep that in mind as you offer incentives to your audience.

If you already have a membership site that’s doing fairly well, and an equally successful list to go with it, what’s the next step? Where do you go from there to ensure that your list will keep growing? There are a few things you can do to keep growing your list, even if you’re already done a fair job of growing it.

If you haven’t done so already, integrate your membership site, and your list directly, so that when someone signs up for your site, they’ll be automatically subscribed to your list as well. Most membership site software makes it easy to integrate the two, but if you really get stuck, and you can’t get the two sign ups into one form, put an opt in for your list on your sign up page. It’s also a good idea to put a list opt in on your site’s sidebar. That way, even if someone isn’t a registered user yet, they can still sign up for your list.

You may want to consider using a forced opt in page as well. One of the most effective uses of a forced opt in page is the two step checkout. In a two step checkout, after the customer clicks the “buy” button on your sales letter, or product page, they’ll first be sent to an opt in page that asks for their email address and name. The page should indicate that it is step one of two, so they customer is clear on where they stand in the checkout process. Once they opt into your list, they’ll be redirected to the actual checkout form so they can complete their purchase. If you’re using this method, it’s important to make your opt in page feel like a part of the checkout process. Make sure the opt in page doesn’t look significantly different from the actual checkout form. Customers may become wary of your site if they feel like the forced opt in wasn’t actually part of the checkout process.

Whether your membership site is small, or large, these tips can help you to grow your list in a big way.There are always more ways to encourage your users to opt into your list. Try to incorporate the list into your site as heavily as possible, and you’ll see your list grow quickly.