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When considering a business opportunity, one of wisest things you can do is to ask for referrals. If they are as good as they say they are, they should be able to refer you to lots of satisfied customers. If you were considering getting involved in a franchise or business venture off-line this is how you would check it out. On-line should be no different. If it's a large investment you're thinking of making you'd be crazy not to. Email these references, or better yet, give them a call. There are things you can detect in a person's voice that you can't "hear" in email. Off-line, if at all possible, I would pay them a face-to-face visit.

Another common sense approach to avoid getting ripped off is to simply research site or product that you are considering investing in. It's fairly easy to research an individual or company on internet to see if their own businesses demonstrate that they really know what they are talking about. For instance, is person selling "How To Explode Your Traffic" ebook getting any traffic to his own site?

This can easily be researched by utilizing Alexa Toolbar. The Alexa Toolbar shows how popular a given site is. It isn't foolproof but is a good indicator of how successful a site really is. It shows a sites "ranking." You can learn about and get free Alexa Toolbar at:

Along same lines, research private site that's going to teach you "All secrets of improving your SE ranking" by checking where they are listed in Google and AltaVista. If they are going to teach you this, they certainly should have already attained these results for their sites. Just this little bit of investigating, using search engines, can save you from buying into some theory offered by someone who has NO CLUE what he is talking about.

We all know that there are no internet police. However, many parts of community are self-policing. These are parts of internet community that agree to adhere to certain standards. Members who fail to live up to those standards are investigated, and if they are not adhering to community standards they are not allowed to retain membership. Two such communities that I belong to are The Better Business Bureau Online, and The International Council Of Online Professionals. You have to invest in an annual membership in both of these organizations once you qualify.

Both of above organizations require applications, and you have to demonstrate that you are ethical and meet organization's standards. They actually investigate your website and look at products or services you offer. The Better Business Bureau actually sends someone to your place of business so that they can better understand your whole business operation. If you survive application process, you are given an emblem to place on your website that is hyper-linked to their sites. A visitor can click on emblem to continue investigating you before doing business with you. For more information on I-Cop membership visit:

Membership in BBB Online requires that you be a member of your local Better Business Bureau. That often requires that you have been in business for at least a year, and application process can take several months. In Northwest Florida Division, a committee reviews each membership application. If you're interested in BBB membership, look in your local phone book. Better Business Bureau membership is only available in US and Canada.

Millions of you migrate to internet looking for an opportunity to supplement your income. Far too many spend a lot of time and other resources trying to build a business -- only to be very disappointed. If you apply common sense advice offered above, you GREATLY reduce your chances of becoming one of them.

Reread this article several times, then start applying what it teaches. Reading and knowing something without using it is actually worse than not knowing, since you have no excuse. Many of you already intuitively knew everything in this article. Yet by failing to apply that knowledge, you were still susceptible to being ripped off. Now, hopefully you're not :-)

Also, "conversion rates" (the number of people taking a specific action versus amount of traffic) are rapidly becoming final determinant of building a sustaining relationship between traffic brokering firm and recipient web site. If traffic coverts then recipient typically wants to buy more, if not, they will move on to another source -- this reinforces self-policing aspects of relationship.

So what do you look for if you want to start buying traffic from a web site traffic broker? Price is certainly a large factor in determining what your interest should be; most of us in traffic brokering business typically offer keyword traffic at about a third or half of what you would pay via a trusted feed setup, or Overture or an Ad Words Select program via Google. Expect to pay more for filtered ("automotive, insurance, telecommunications") versus unfiltered ("shopping mall type of traffic") as former has to be carefully filtered for specific keywords or keywords sets so it can be distributed to a larger number of web sites.

Next, make sure you get a 24/7 reporting capability that enables you to analyze your traffic in real time -- this report should show originating keyword traffic (keywords are always embedded in search string). And look carefully at your report; proxy traffic (or cached pages) should be filtered out so that there is no more than 5-10% of total traffic -- you can't get away from having some proxy traffic in this day in age, even AOL is using proxy servers. Finally, look closely at your report. The timelines should have some randomness in sequences; if you see a traffic report with keyword traffic that is spaced very closely in terms of timeline, warning bells should go off.