Summary Learn a way to gather online secrets that can help your succeed in your business.

Article The success of a company usually depends on a collection of secrets that make it run well. These secrets can be anything from a system, a technique, a software program, a method of marketing, to type of personnel company employees.

Like all secrets they will come to you at odd moments or in unusual ways. Sometimes you may remember them and try them out at a later time, but mostly they will simply vanish from your mind.

A true entrepreneur is devoted to success of his/her company. Any secret that can benefit business should be studied seriously and given a try.

The following method is a way to gather secrets that can help you succeed in your business. It is meant to be used when you are online or surfing Net. You can also use it offline as well.

Feel free to adjust any of steps to better suit your own purposes. 1. Purchase a stenobook (the kind that flips up).

2. Write your company name on front cover and number book 1.

3. Use a post-it-note to mark your current place in your stenobook, so it is easy to flip to.

© 2002 Elena Fawkner

Affiliate programs are a brilliant idea. For owner of product, they're a way of recruiting a veritable army of salespeople to promote your product without having to pay them a dime unless and until they generate a sale. For affiliate, they're a great way of earning extra cash from an existing, high-traffic website with virtually zero additional effort.

Only problem is, most affiliates don't HAVE an existing, high-traffic website and they're suckered into thinking that it's a simple matter of signing up for an affiliate program and "driving traffic" to product owner's site using a uniquely-coded URL. Well, it IS that simple. And it isn't.

If you don't already have your own high-traffic website, how do you think you're going to drive traffic to product owner's site in hope of generating a sale?

Well, there are a few ways, actually. And all of them are going to cost you either time or money.

First off, you're going to have to spend money on advertising. How much? Well, consider this. Estimates vary but, roughly, only 2-4% of people who see your ad will actually click on your link. Of that 2-4%, only 1% or so of THEM will go on to buy. In addition, it takes, on average, 7 or 8 exposures to your ad before people will click on it. AND to achieve even these piddly numbers your market must be targeted in first place. This is, as you can see, nothing but a numbers game. Pure and simple.

So what does all this mean to you, advertiser without a website? Well, to start with you're going to want to advertise where a LOT of people are going to see your ad. But not just ANY people. People interested in product you're wanting to sell - your target market. So this cuts out free classifieds and FFAs. And it means you're going to have to spend advertising dollars.

Where do you go to advertise then? The most effective form of advertising is in ezines. Take mine, for example. At time of writing, my subscriber database is around 14,000. Each week I run an ad for my own opportunity (in addition to running ads from other paying advertisers). I generally get about 500 click-throughs over course of 2 or 3 days following publication. That's a click-through rate of about 3.6%, about in line with average.

If you were to pay to advertise in my ezine, it would cost you $70 for a single classified based on my $5 CPM ($5 per every 1,000 subscribers) pricing formula. This is not an uncommon formula for pricing ezine advertising. You're therefore paying around 14 cents per click. That's not bad.

Other than that, what can you do? Well, you can choose to spend time rather than money. An obvious choice considering what I've just said is to start your OWN ezine.