Not Sold in Stores

Clickbank is a bank.

People who own digital products, who have already built a website to sell from, use Clickbank to process payments from credit cards and Paypal. Clickbank okays the funds and then returns the buyer to a web page where they can download the product they just purchased.

Clickbank provides ready access to a sales force.

Clickbank lists all of their “payment processing” customers (merchants) in the Clickbank Marketplace. They then make that list of customer’s sales pages available to anybody (affiliates) who wants to market them.

Affiliates must register with Clickbank so that income can be paid and taxes can be reported. Clickbank gives them a unique ID (nickname) to use in their link.

Clickbank is a bookkeeper.

1. Clickbank tracks all sales that are processed through them. If an affiliate sends traffic to a merchants sales page, their unique ID is sent along so that if a sale is consummated then the affiliate gets credit for the sale and their commission can be paid.
2. Clickbank issues a check to affiliates twice a month for recorded commissions.
3. Clickbank issues year-end tax forms for reporting income for each affiliate.

In their zest to make a buck, many Internet Marketers make product claims that just aren’t true.Probably the biggest claim states something like “Make $30,000 a month automatically!”. The crucial piece of this statement that is missing is the part that tells how much it cost to “make” the $30,000.

Contextual advertising means to advertise “in context” with the information being presented. The advertisment must somehow be related to the information.A newspaper has both contextual and non-contextual ads. For example:

Contextual Advertising Example

You are reading an article about the new Ford Mustang and on that page there is a parts store promoting a set of floor mats that are specifically designed for that model of Mustang. That ad is highly related to what you’re interested in and the odds of you purchasing new floor mats from that store are much more likely than someone that isn’t interested in Fords and skips the article to read about the Chevrolet Corvette.

Non-Contextual Advertising Example

You are reading that same article about the new Ford Mustang and on that page there is a lingerie store tempting you to buy a new bra. That ad is highly unrelated to what you’re reading (although it probably caught your attention!) and the odds of you purchasing a new bra from that store is much less likely.

Manual Contextual Website Advertising

Many webmasters produce articles about a topic of interest (a “niche”). It may be about cars in general, hybrid cars or even blue Mustangs with 4 cylinder engines - the topic is completely up to the webmaster. The webmaster then may sell a product that is completely relevant to their site topic or they may choose several highly relevant products from several companies and advertise them next to their articles.

Automatic Contextual Website Advertising

This is where Google came into its money. Google engineers attempt to figure out what the meaning of a page of text on a website means to a human, and then they display advertisments on that page that are highly relevant to that page of text. This is all accomplished programmatically.

An example of this is the Google ads that show up on this page. They should be highly related to the information we are discussing. Unfortunately, Google does not have this quite right yet (I’m guessing the ads that are being displayed are related to Ford Mustangs rather than to contextual advertising - which means I will receive no advertising income for this article!) so there are times when you scratch your head wondering what the ads have to do with anything.

Anyway, the way it works is when someone reads this article and decides to click on a Google ad to find out more information from an advertiser, both Google and I get paid. We are “partners” in advertising - although I don’t know what percentage of the deal I get but I don know how much I received from someone choosing to click on an advertisement.

Other search engines, that include Yahoo and MSN, are working at becoming better at targeting the page so that the ads are more related and therefore they can be known for better quality searches and pull market share from Google to them.

Actually, at this point in time, you can choose to either make money or earn money on the Internet.

When I say “earn” money, I mean to provide a valuable product or service to customers. When I say “make” money, I mean any of the multitude of “get rich now” scams that are running on the ‘net.

Over the last few years, I have unknowingly invested my time and money in fads rather than long-term trends that build a business. I guess that was all part of my learning process.

For the sake of arguement, I’ll assume you want to earn money. You want a long term, sustainable business that you feel good about (in my viewpoint, it’s not all about the money). Your choices for building a business are based primarily on how active you want to be in your business.

Active

There is a lot of money to be made if you want to be very active and interact with customers on a daily basis by answering emails and solving complaints and other ongoing problems. If you go this route you might want to try one or more of these types of businesses:

• Create your own product(s) to sell
• Find a source for products to purchase at wholesale and then resell them
• Find collectibles at estate sales, auctions, garage sales, etc and then auction them

Passive

There is time and expense required to make any sort of Internet income. It can become quite stressful to spend all your time and investment in your new venture, only to not see income for quite awhile and at the same time your rent comes due. Holding down a “real” job while building your business can provide a lot of stress relief.

Another advantage to this passive approach is that you don’t communicate with customers since you are receiving a commission on the sale and not doing the actual sales fulfillment itself. You have no employees, no customers and no inventory.

If you like this more passive approach to an Internet business, these are some of the business types you might want to consider:

• Affiliate Marketing Using PPC (Pay Per Click)
• Affiliate Marketing Using Adsense
• Affiliate Marketing Using Viral Marketing Tactics

I don’t recommend you waste your time or money performing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) trying to get ranked in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. The search engines change their search algorithms way too often and there are way too many programmers working to automate SEO so that they can “beat the search engines” for a top ranking. Though the top positions in the search engines provide lots and lots of traffic to your site, you spend so much time and money trying to keep up with changes that you can’t provide valuable products and services to customers!

I don’t understand the entertainment business - and by entertainment I mean actors and athletes. Let’s do a little calculating.

The typical person works from 18 to 65 years of age - a total of 47 years.

There are 2,080 hours of work per year for a full-time worker, or 97,760 hours of work during their working lifetime.

If someone were to earn an average of $20/hour (not a bad wage!), they would earn a little less than 2 million dollars over the course of working a lifetime.

Professional athletes keep saying they are worth more than 2 million a YEAR because they risk getting injured and therefore they can’t keep earning for the rest of their life.

I say “so what?” Working only one year, they have earned more than many people earn during a lifetime. Why do they believe their life is more valuable than the guy who struggles to feed his family by working at the local supermarket?

Same goes for actors who complain about making less than 2 million per film , or half a million per TV episode.These people do not provide any VALUE to the world other than entertainment. And they whine besides!

I had no idea why an American football was called a “pigskin”. I always assumed that it was due to the original American football being made out of pig hide.

In reality, a football is made out of cowhide and there is a rubber bladder inside that holds the air to keep the ball from rupturing when all those beefy athletes pile on top of it.

In the “old days”, the ball was made with cow hide but used a pig bladder to keep the air in!