Prolink Wireless is putting up it’s Top Level Domain Name, Prolink.net for sale on ebay.

While the bidding starts at $5,000 dollars the buy it now price has been set at $25,000.

If you are one of the many companies that uses the name Prolink for either a product or company name this is a great opportunity to purchase this coveted domain name at a bargain price.

Here is the link: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150393681046

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

The final step in the process of having a successful and profitable niche blog is the management of your site.

Here I’m talking about management in terms of keeping your site running, monitoring what’s working and what’s not, and monitoring the success of your site so you know how much effort to commit to it on a continual basis.

Here are some of the elements involved in the management area of a successful blog.

1. You need to manage and track your search engine statistics. Here I mean two things. 1. is the doings of your search competition and 2 is the rankings and traffic from various pages of your site.

In 1. You need to be always checking up on your search competition. Just by knowing what sites link to your competitor site can allow you a way to gain new backlinks. You contact the same people and get the same links PLUS keep doing all the good SEO you’re already doing, you can steal their spot.

in 2. You need to monitor your own search rankings to see what search terms are bringing you traffic. At this point you can either choose to focus more of your content on those terms, giving readers coming from those terms more to look at and more opportunities to get pushed to your affiliate link OR you can look harder at the monetization of those pages. This might include testing different affiliate link positionings, changing the text, and more.

Following on from that, something else that needs to be tracked on your blog, is how successful your content is at converting visitors to sales.

This has traditionally been tough on a blogs because the way they are set doesn’t generally allow for any form of split testing. However, a new blogging software called Firepow has made this possible. What you can do is test which content your audience responds best to. You can use variations of two different posts, have them alternate for each new user to the blog, and see which version of the post generated the most affiliate link clicks.

Optimizing your content like this may be the easiest way to increase your bottom line. After all think about this: If you want to double your profits from a site, you can either double your site traffic, or you can double your conversion rate… what’s easier? In a lot of cases, it’s doubling your conversion rate.

Firepow Software

Combined with all the elements we’ve talked about in previous articles, managing your blog will put the profit icing on your blogging/mini site cake. I trust that you’ve found this series informative and helpful.

The next article in this series will look at how to drive traffic to your blog or mini site - the element of online marketing that most people get stuck at.

Here we’ll look at the primary ways of driving quality traffic to your niche site. Keep in mind that the phrase QUALITY traffic is important - we only the want the visitors who might buy our products and make us money - we don’t want freebie seekers in this business model.

The first and best way to generate traffic is to do as I’ve described in the previous article, which is to produce content based on long tail keywords from your niche. After optimizing your page well for this term, and using the in built pinging fucntion to notify other websites of your new content - you can be ranking and getting traffic for uncompetitive terms within the first few days of your site’s existence.

After this, there are many ways to approach your traffic generation.

1. Article Marketing: This is essentially (though often misunderstood) the process of having articles you’ve written, published on websites other than your own, for the purpose of including a link back to your site and funneling traffic from their site to yours. You can do this with article directories or with other blogs and websites by contacting the site author. Either way, the extra exposure from these sites can drive through important relevant visitors to your pages.

2. Ongoing Keyword research and SEO: The reason I believe in having a big focus on SEO is that the people who have a specific problem and are looking for a solution, tend to gravitate toward a search engine. Yes there are millions of web viewers who don’t go near a search engine but they can be harder to target and can represent not as high a quality traffic. In other words they don’t tend to make you as much money.

Continually finding new keywords that represent relevant traffic for your products, and continually creating content to target those visitors is about as smart as you can be with ongoing traffic generation.

3. Link Building: This is both for the purpose of boosting your search engine rankings and increasing exposure to your website. You have probably heard that links back to your site from relevant websites indicate your site is more trust worthy and worthy of better SE rankings. At the same time, a link on a relevant website, whether in a piece of content on a sidebar, can increase visitors to your website. You should make it a point to continually do activities that motivate similar sites in your niche to link to you - or even if not in your niche, site’s that could send you relevant visitors.

4. Using Social Networks: Using the myriad social networks like Digg, Mysapce, Facebook, Stumbleupon etc can be another great way to increase traffic to your website. Just by submitting all the posts you make to your blog to site’s like Digg and Stumbleupon, you can earn yourself extra backlinks, and the potential to have your content seen and then shared by new members of your target audience. As is becoming clear, almost EVERYONE online hangs out at some social network for some reason, and if you can find where your target market is hanging out and leverage that, your traffic can increase exponentially.

Finally, remember that when trying to generate traffic to your blog, you should consider your niche before deciding which methods to utilize. As I’ve said before, using a social network might be great, but certain niches might be too technically unadvanced to know about social networks, and they only use Google. Some niches might be more easily approached by use of visual media like video rather than article content. The bottom line of traffic generation is where are my target market hanging out, and how can I get my site in front of them in a way that contributes value to their lives.

I hope you’ve found this traffic generation article helpful. Next we’ll look at the management of a successful blog.

In the first article in this series we looked at the first step to creating a successful blog or mini site namely, the selection of a truly profitable niche.

Once your niche is selected, you obviously need to create a website to capitalize on it.

Blogs in particular have become such a popular choice for niche marketers because of their extreme ease of use, ease in maintaining, and ease in updating. Not to mention that the structure of a blog is generally by nature, search engine friendly. AND furthermore, where it isn’t, there is always a third party plugin to make it so.

There are many ways to create a successful blog, and the one you choose should reflect an understanding of your target market. What we’ll look at here is an example of one such method, that focuses on the generation of free traffic, and the promotion of an affiliate program for monetization.

The first thing you need to do is create a blog that’s visually or aesthetically sound. A visually sound blog, other than just looking pretty, is arranged in a way that maximizes all the content you create, by maintaining your readers attention, and drawing the most attention to your affiliate program.

There are a few ways you want to do this:

1. Choose a blog theme with a predominantly white background and with black text. Simple advice, but often ignored. Black on white is the easiest for the eyes to read. Other colour schemes can quickly tire the eyes and make it hard to maintain concentration.

2. Choose a clean and neat theme. You don’t want too much going on. It should be very clear where your content is located, very clear where your sidebar and navigation is located, where your other categories can be viewed and so forth. If a reader comes from a search engine, they should know exactly where they have to click to get the information they want. Generally I say the less options the better in terms of other features on your blog.

3. There are certain pages you absolutely want to have on your site. These are a Privacy Policy page, an About Us page, and a Contact us page. Google in particular looks at these things as indicators of a serious, quality, non spammy site. Furthermore, you want to have an archives page (easily achieved by the SRG Clean Archives plugin if you use Wordpress), so as not to have your archives taking up valuable room in your blog sidebar.

There are more factors but for the sake of this article not being 9000 words, we’ll move on.

Once you have an aesthetically pleasing blog, you need some reader pleasing content.

We’re going to assume here that you have a product selected. Of course the next step after picking your niche (sometimes these tasks are one and the same) is to select a product that you’ll promote to the niche. This is where you’ll earn your cash.

So once you’ve got a product selected, and the base of a good blog created as above, your job is to create some content that the people in your niche will find valuable and use that content to drive your website’s visitors to the merchant’s page and earn an affiliate commission.

At this point, you should have your niche’s keywords researched - by that I mean you should have some idea of what might be a good place to attack the niche from. Ideally you’d have some keyphrase related to your niche that are uncompetitive in terms of the number of pages optimized for them in the search engines.

Where you’d ideally start your content creation is by writing an article on this uncompetitive term, posting it on your site and getting it ranked in the search engines. From here, you can develop as much content on search phrases from your niche, as you desire (remember you got those phrases from a tool like the Wordtracker keyword tool) in order to increase traffic to your site.

Some factors we didn’t get to mention in this article are things like On page optimization, making your pages of content rank well in the search engines - and monetization - the art of getting the highest percentage of visitors to your site actually making you money. But for a basic overview, I think we’ve done alright.

In the next article we’ll look at driving traffic to your website.

This will be the first article of a 3 part series on the big question what makes a successful (as defined by profitability) blog or mini site. I believe there are 4 components and the series will contain 1 article on each of them.

Let’s get started.

The first key to the success of a blog or mini site is that it has to target a group of people (a niche) who are hungry for information of a specific nature. In other words, I’m talking about the selection of your niche.

The group of people that your blog or mini site targets has to be a group of people who have problems. Problems in the sense that they are looking for a solution to something, looking to improve something. Furthermore, in a great niche, that SOMETHING, is something that causes pain. Financial pain, physical pain, emotional pain, some sort of pain, for the simple reason that people who have pain are the people who will want to buy solutions to that pain, and hopefully from your website.

If that sounds a bit sick, trying to exploit people with pain, it’s not. It’s called marketing. You’ve had marketers doing it to you your whole life and you probably never even knew about it, why can’t you do it too? And what’s more, you’re actually going to provide these people with a real solution, so you’re being helpful!

Anyhow moving on.

So you’re looking for a group of people with a problem, but that’s not all.

Your next concern has to be whether there are enough of these people searching for solutions to their problems on the internet. How many is enough you ask? It’s a good question. With certain kinds of sites, all you need is 10 visitors to your site a day and you can turn a nice monthly profit. Other niches and products that you promote you might need thousands per day. It all depends on what you sell, and who to, AND how much commission you make when you sell to them.

The things you should do are look at the search volume, as indicated by a tool like Wordtracker. Here you’re simply looking at how many searches per day a particular keyphrase gets in the search engines. Then after that, you want to look at whether there are other sites or blogs that are competing in the same niche.

Contrary to what alot of people think, NO competition isn’t necessarily a good thing. NO competition could and often does mean that it’s not a profitable niche. What you actually want is SOME competition, but CRAPPY competition that you can DESTROY by making a better site, providing better content and in a better way.

The final piece of the puzzle of finding a good niche, is whether the niche has a quality product for you to promote. You need something to sell to these people, that is high quality, has great marketing material (sales letter etc, so it will convert your traffic well) and pays a decent commission.

This is of course assuming you’re looking at the affiliate marketing model of making money with your blog - which I suggest if you’re looking to retire from your job and earn a full time passive income, you SHOULD be. There are other ways to make money where you might think about some different factors in your niche selection.

So if you can combine all of the above factors when selecting your niche, you’ll be giving yourself and your new blog the best possible chance of success. I hope you’ve found this valuable.

How To Setup A Profitable Blog Or Mini Site Part 2

Vince Tan is at it again.

In case the name Vince Tan is not yet ringing any bells with you, this is the guy that pulled off one of the biggest firesales of 2007, doing $69,000 in sales in a mere 7 days.

.out of nowhere.

Yes, he came out of nowhere and racked up the kind of sales that some never accomplish after years of being online.

He proved that it you WANT it you can do it. In fact, Vince became quite the inspiration for many a marketer who never thought this kind of fast online success to be possible.

So, here’s why we’re talking about this now, in 2008. you see, Vince is going to do it again, this time shooting for 6 or even SEVEN figures with NO out of pocket expenses!

Vince has made it his personal goal to show that ANYONE that wants to accomplish this kind of success online can do it, regardless of how much money they have OR don’t have to start with.

Vince’s firesale will go live on 18th November, BUT for now, you stand a chance to win the complete firesale package plus some other extra stuff worth $1,500 (or more!) by going to the site below and guessing the total value of the firesale package! And also a $47 instant gift waiting for you there if you join now.

Remember, that’s 100+ top IM products that are currently selling in the market Today!

Of course I’ve already put in my guess

Biggest Firesale

Vince has already managed to get over 100 Top Marketers to join forces on this, again, without spending any of his own money, so you really should follow this closely, and be on the lookout for the official launch on November 18th, 2008.

Biggest Firesale

In the olden days of the Internet, domain name registration was handled by Network Solutions. However, after a while, the government decided that it wasn’t fair for one company to have sole control over the domain name market. Therefore, it opened up the business to other companies. Since then hundreds of domain name companies, ranging from sole proprietorships to corporate enterprises have capitalized on a market that generates millions in revenue each year. So, for webmasters, this means there’s no shortage of companies to choose from when they register their domain names.

Yet, what happens if they register with one domain name company, but decide later they want it to be operated by another company? Fortunately, they can get their wish through the process of domain name transferring. This is when a webmaster gets another registrar to handle their domain name. All payments are forwarded to the new registrar, as the old registrar is no longer in the picture, (at least when it comes to the domain name). If the registrar is handling a webmaster’s hosting, they still need to make the necessary payments to make sure their website stays in tact.

The actual process involved with a domain name transfer will depend on the registrar a webmaster is working with. For instance, if they charge a payment for domain name transfers, this fee must be received before anything can be done officially. Otherwise, the process begins as soon as a webmaster makes a request to do so. Some domain name registrars will require a webmaster to send a notarized letter informing their intent to transfer. Others may allow the request to be done online. Once the registrar authorizes the domain name transfer, it will take 1 to 7 business days for the process to be completed.

Sometimes a domain name may not be transferable. This could be for a variety of reasons such as legal issues with the domain name itself or the original domain name registrar. An example of the former could be trademark problems. For the latter such legal scenarios that could cause problems include bankruptcy and/or issues with scamming. There is also a possibility that a domain name registrar simply refuses to transfer the domain name.

How can a person prevent these types of problems? The best solution involves reading any fine print the original domain name registrar offers. A person should also check with the Better Business Bureau to make sure the domain name registrar doesn’t have any outstanding legal issues associated with it.

In conclusion, if a person wants to switch domain name companies, there is the option of doing a domain name transfer. If it is successful, the domain name will work as it originally did, with the only difference being who is managing it. However, if a domain name cannot be transferred, a webmaster must stick with the original registrar or consider a URL redirect service.

With a URL redirect service, the original domain name becomes masked by a new domain name. It is not as good as an official domain name transfer, but it is still better than nothing if transferring is not an option.

A domain name consists of three levels. The first level is the word or phrase that makes up the initial domain name. The second part of the domain name is the extension. Examples of common extensions include .com, .net or .org. The third portion of the domain name, called a third level domain name is an optional part. Like the first level domain name, it consists of a word or phrase to describe whatever webpage it is pointing to. However, unlike the first level domain name, a third level domain name cannot access a webpage by itself; it must contain the first level domain as well as the extension in its syntax.

Third level domain names are often used by free web hosting companies to help create distinction among the websites of their customers. If third level domain names weren’t used, customers would have not be able to access their website in a user-friendly way. Some third level domains may have the first level domain word or phrase first. An example is Geocities, where a person would have to include ‘Geocities.com’ before the third level domain name. Other third level domain names may have the first level domain name last. This is the case with Netfirms, where ‘Netfirms.com’ comes after the third level domain word or phrase.

For customers third level domains come at no extra cost. This is in contrast to getting a regular domain name which can range from $6.50 to $35 per year. Additionally, it may take time before the domain name is active. This can be up to 7 days, especially if one is transferring a domain name. Conversely, third level domain names can be setup instantaneously.

However, third level domains are far from perfect. Since they require the first level domain name as part of their syntax, they can be quite cumbersome for a website visitor to remember. A person can pretty much forget about getting traffic if they promote a third level domain name in various forms of offline media, such as in circulars or on business cards. In these situations it definitely behooves a webmaster to go on invest in a first level domain name of their own.

So, does this mean third level domain names aren’t worth anything to webmasters? Well, if a webmaster uses hyperlink marketing, they can still find value in a third level domain name. What is hyperlink marketing? It is simply when a word or phrase is linked to a URL rather than the URL itself. It is commonly used in emails, viral e-books and on websites themselves. A potential visitor never even sees the third level domain name, since it is masked by a hyperlinked word or phrase. And hopefully, they will like the site so much they will bookmark it, rather than trying to remember the full URL.

In conclusion, third level domain names offer affordability to both web hosting companies and their customers. They also offer convenience since there’s no waiting time associated with their setup. However, if they are used it’s best that they are hidden in hyperlinks, since most website visitors would prefer to type in first level domain names.