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Of course, it is always up to you how much you choose to spend on your promotional and advertising efforts, and equally obviously, the more you spend, the quicker you are likely to see results.

However, the objective of this book is to walk you through 18 of the most effective viral traffic creation tactics that you can apply that will, at the same time, cost you little or nothing.

Nevertheless, not everything that I recommend is entirely free of cost, and you may therefore decide to apply only the free tactics to start with, until you start seeing some positive cash flow from your new product or service. At that point, you can then decide how to allocate your advertising budget most effectively.

The main attraction of viral marketing, however, is the fact that, once your message is out into the marketplace and starts to take on a life of its own, then it really will not cost you any more. At that point, all costs (direct or indirect) will fall on the customers who are passing the message on to their friends and acquaintances.

And the only additional cost that you may have to consider will only happen as a result of your viral marketing campaign becoming ultrasuccessful, in which case, you will have more than enough money coming in not to worry about it anyway!

That is, if your viral campaign becomes as successful as you would like it to, then you may have to pay your web host for additional bandwidth as more and more customers come to your site every day, but that will be a small price to pay for the extra business!

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“In the Marketplace products are ranked by their "productivity score". To preserve the integrity of the system we do not publish the formula for the score, or the score itself, but we can say that it is a function of these four factors:

Earned/Sale: Average net amount earned per affiliate per referred sale. Note that this is the net earned per actual sale, and so it is impacted by refunds, chargebacks, and sales taxes. Unfunded sales, such as returned checks, do not impact this number.

Future $: Average total rebill revenue earned by the affiliate due to sales from a site. Generally this equates to the average sum of all rebills.

Total $: The sum of all initial sales and rebills divided by the number of initial sales. It is the average total $ per sale, including all rebills that may come from that sale.

Earned/Sale: Average percentage commission earned per affiliate per referred sale. This number should only vary if the publisher has changed their payout percentage over time.

Referred: Fraction of publisher's total sales that are referred by affiliates.

Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher's products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.”

Now that you know the four most important factors about ClickBank’s marketplace, you will be able to choose the best products to promote.

After you find a good converting product, you need to create your hoplink (the link you will be promoting to earn sales commissions).

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Putting The Building Blocks In Place

As I have already suggested, being a successful affiliate marketer is synonymous with being a successful business person.

And, as with any other business, in order to be a successful affiliate marketer you need to spend some money on your business. Now, I know that you will probably have read or seen many books and special reports that will tell you that you do not need to spend money to be an affiliate marketer.

That is absolutely correct. If you just want to be an affiliate marketer, like everyone else, then do not spend any money.

However, you already know that 19 out of every 20 affiliate marketers will fail, and by choosing not to spend any money you are giving yourself an awfully good chance of becoming one of the ones who never make it.

You must take this business extremely seriously, and accept that any serious business, online or in the real world, needs some investment in order to stand any chance of achieving success.

So, going right back to the stage of creating your business plan, you must build a sensible budget into that plan.

Of course, it does not make sense to spend a lot of money when you first launch your affiliate marketing career, but there are some basic requirements that you must put in place.

By the way, on the subject of budgets, once you do start seeing some earnings from your affiliate marketing efforts come through the door, you should allocate as high a percentage of those earnings as you can afford for reinvestment back into your business.

Do not fall into the trap of spending all your affiliate earnings without any reinvestment into the business as this will only guarantee that you never really move away from first base.

But, returning to your initial situation, the first two things that I would recommend you should spend a little money on is your own domain name and a web hosting account where the web pages that you build will be hosted.

You will then need to get yourself an autoresponder account, as this is perhaps the most critical tool that you need for building your own online business. Because of the importance, I would recommend that you consider using a paid option for your autoresponder account, although it is possible to set up a free account if money is a critical issue for you.

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Online banks work hard to make their servers as secure as possible. They consult with experts in the security industry to help them fix any weak spots. One way they do this is to hire some computer-hacking consultants that try to find any areas that may make their banking system vulnerable to scammers. However there are some things you should do as well.

Use the Right Browser

First the online bank will normally require you to have a browser that supports 128-bit encryption. This is to insure the information is as safe leaving your computer as when it's on the bank's secure server. Most current versions of popular browsers such as Firefox or Internet Explorer will have this feature, so be sure you are running a current version. If you're setting up online banking access with your traditional bank they will normally provide you with a username and password at the bank or the online bank website. Be sure to follow their guidelines in choosing your usernames and passwords.

Password tips

When choosing your password, you can base it on something you know or like. It can be anything that no one would specifically be able to relate to you. For instance, it could be a line from a song. Another idea is to take the first letters of all the words and make a string of characters for your Internet banking password. Then, you could capitalize some of them, throw in some numbers, and you have a password that will be hard to guess but easy for you to remember.

Once you've chosen your password you should memorize it and destroy any pieces of paper it may be written down on. You should also change your online banking password on a frequent basis. Some banks will force you to change it on a regular basis. You should not share your password with anyone unless they share the account with you.

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The basic idea of working with either PayPal or a Merchant Account is that it enables you to collect online payments from your customers.

So, if you have a Premier or Business account with PayPal, that account allows you to accept payments by credit or debit card, whether the customer has a PayPal account themselves or not.

A Merchant Account will basically do the same thing, so it is reasonable to question what the differences are between the two services, and why you would choose one over the other as the payment gateway through which you collect monies from your customer.

The first and possibly most crucial difference is that a Merchant Account is a type of bank account, and that many Merchant Accounts still tend to be offered by ‘traditional’ banking groups, if such a thing still exists nowadays.

For example, one of the best known and widely respected of ‘traditional’ Merchant Account providers is WorldPay, who are a completely owned subsidiary division of one the UK’s biggest banking groups, the Royal Bank of Scotland Group.

Thus, a traditional Merchant Account arrangement is much closer to a bank account as most people would know it, rather than a ‘Person to Person’ (P2P) arrangement as is PayPal.

This has both advantages and disadvantages.

There are, for example, set up fees involved in establishing a traditional Merchant Account, and a far more stringent vetting process that needs to be gone through as compared to the simple, basic sign up process that is all PayPal require.

So, in this respect, a larger Merchant Account provider might be viewed as rather better suited to working with bigger businesses, rather than with the smaller business markets that PayPal were originally perceived to specialize in.

And, certainly until a few years ago, the dividing line between Merchant Accounts and a P2P provider would have been very much clearer that it perhaps is today.

Nowadays, indeed, the dividing lines between the two would be considerable more blurred, so that it is no longer genuinely the case that Merchant Accounts focus all of their efforts on attracting business from bigger clients with PayPal still looking for the smaller business customer.

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Despite all of these facts and figures, however, MySpace is still by far the most popular social networking site, and that is a situation that seems unlikely to change in the near future.

Now, all of the major community sites do emphasize that the main function is to provide a means for people from all over the world to network with one another.

It would therefore be fair to suggest that most of these sites have (as far as it is possible) tried to discourage and prevent people from viewing them as commercially orientated sites.

In other words, sites like MySpace and Facebook do not want their communities used by members promoting their products or services to other members. Despite the fact that it is owned by the Fox Corporation, even MySpace is no exception to this rule, and has gone to some lengths to prevent the site becoming a huge online auction or bazaar by another name.

Nevertheless, many smart online marketers and internet entrepreneurs have managed to promote their businesses, products and services through the MySpace site and community, and have made considerable amounts of money doing so too.

This being the case, many marketers are looking at doing the same with Facebook, and therefore we need to establish what similarities and differences there are between these two sites.

This will assist in establishing whether a similar business model to the one that is now all too commonly applied to MySpace will work with Facebook.

So, let us take a very quick look at how products and services are marketed on MySpace.

Effectively, and at its very simplest and most basic, when you sign up for a MySpace account you will then build your own 'space' which is a very simple mini-website that tells the world all about you.

So, in this 'space', you would probably include full details about yourself, your interests and hobbies, perhaps pictures, videos, musical and rock band preferences, and so on.

The nature of the MySpace social network is that you are then expected to go out into the community and find new friends who have similar interests to yours.