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Promote your website using Newsgroups

By Nowshade Kabir, Rusbiz.com

At present there are over 3.3 billion pages indexed by Google, and that definitely does not cover entire Internet. With so many competitors around, you sure have to use every conceivable method available to promote your website.

Newsgroups can be very powerful tools in your web promotion endeavor if you use them actively.

What is a Newsgroup?

A newsgroup is a message board on Internet where users come to discuss topics of mutual interest. Each newsgroup is dedicated to a particular subject of interest and consists of messages posted by participants. You can find several ongoing discussions surrounding various topics within a single newsgroup. These topics are call threads. As a user you can start a thread, post messages to a thread and make responds to other postings.

Before Internet era, way you know it now, back in eighties and early nineties people used to connect to electronic bulletin boards (bbs) through modems and post text messages for others to read and answer. Usenet Newsgroups was started as a collection of these bulletin boards. Along with Internet, Newsgroups have also started to grow rapidly. Thanks to Interface introduced by Deja News in 1995 use of Newsgroups became simple and convenient, which also gave enough impetus to this growth.

Today, Usenet discussion forums or Newsgroups indexed by Google comprise over 800 million messages, which is around a terabyte of information! It is calculated that over 10 million people have regular access to Newsgroups!

Each newsgroup is formed with a certain purpose. This is described in its charter at time it is started. Normally every Newsgroup has its own single subject. However there could be many Newsgroups dedicated to one subject.

There are tens of thousands of newsgroups on every subject you can possibly imagine. The subjects in Newsgroups are hierarchically structured. Some of them are moderated, means somebody controls postings, most don't.

How to use Newsgroups?

Since there are so many newsgroups, whatever your interest is you will most likely find a newsgroup which will suit you. Although, most email readers have built-in features to subscribe Newsgroups most convenient way to read newsgroups today is to use 'Google Search'. Once you are on search page of Google, Click on Groups from menu. This will take you to Groups search page with a directory of Newsgroups under headline 'Post and read comments in Usenet discussion forums'. The most common subdirectories for businesses are located in alt, biz and misc. For example: If you are in import and export business you might try alt.business.imort-export, which has several groups within it.

Run a search using a keyword related to your online business that you would like to promote from groups search page of Google. The result will appear chronologically, most recent one being at top. Check out most relevant Newsgroups from results. If your search produces a very big list of results, try advanced search option. Try reducing time frame of postings. By default Google searches within all messages posted from 1981.

What exactly is ClickBank you ask ?

Well, first and foremost, ClickBank is an e-commerce provider. That means they handle online financial transactions for clients, called "vendors". ClickBank has about 40,000 clients, but only 5340 or so of them are of any value to you as an Affiliate Reseller.

That's because only about 5340 vendors have set themselves up to allow other people (Affiliates) to sell their products in exchange for a commission. The other 34,660 vendors just use ClickBank to process their online transactions for them, without offering an affiliate opportunity.

I am not sure why a vendor would not accept affiliates, as it is like opening a few thousand franchises for free, but some vendors nonetheless choose not to do so.

These 5340 vendors that do allow affiliates represent approximately 11,400 products and services upon which affiliates can earn commissions of 1% to 75% on.

Most are in 50% range....pretty exciting!! These products, (or most of them), are found within an area of ClickBank website called "Marketplace".

Now, you could spend a heck of a lot of time browsing through categories trying to locate a certain product, (if you have time to kill.)

But...if you want to find what you want, when you want, (and want to pass on same courtesy to your visitors), you would need some type of search box. 1stPromotion has ONLY true Clickbank Affiliate Marketplace Search Engine and Search Engine Plug-In suite.

Want Instant Details? Click Here: http://hop.clickbank.net/?theo160/hithog

Now, why did I say most of these products, not all are in Affiliate Marketplace???

Well, if an item is new to ClickBank, it will not show in Marketplace until it has had a valid Affiliate sale. This means at least one copy of product must be sold by an affiliate, and not vendor, to qualify for entry to Affiliate Marketplace. It may take up to 30 days after this happens to appear in Marketplace.

The Marketplace is actually updated once every week.

If a product or service in Marketplace has not had a valid Affiliate sale in more than 30 days, that product will fall out of Marketplace, but will go back in on it's next valid sale.

If you would like to promote any one product, "hot sellers" and most marketed are top results in Browse Marketplace section of ClickBank.

BUT...Don't think for a moment that it implies that they are best products, or even best value, in many cases it just means these products are marketed more vigorously.

Since they are marketed vigorously, chances are your visitor has seen them advertised dozens of times by other sites and marketers, and probably have literally hundreds of cookies set to make sure that someone else gets paid in event of sale, not you.

We'll have more in a later edition on why you should NOT just stick to popular items, and why top affiliates avoid them almost entirely.

When you are credited by ClickBank for an affiliate sale of a product (any of over 11,400 in case of 1stPromotion Integrated Income System ) it is added to your other commissions on account at ClickBank until it reaches minimum you establish for a cheque to be mailed to you.

ClickBank sends cheques out every 2 weeks, and I know for a fact we have never had a late cheque in 3 years. You can set your clock by ClickBank's prompt payments.

As I said earlier, ClickBank is an online distribution centre for over 11,400 digital products and services that are delivered via web (via web pages, files, or email). If they cannot be delivered via web, ClickBank does not handle them. Every product sold by these vendors can be promoted through ClickBank network of over 150,000 marketers (affiliates).